Job Seekers Doubt AI's Promised Productivity Gains 42
Despite significant enterprise AI hype, most job seekers remain unconvinced of its benefits, with 69% doubting its ability to enhance work performance and 62% skeptical it reduces workloads. The findings come from a study conducted by Resume Genius. The Register reports: Consistent with the majority opinion that AI in the workplace has failed to impress, only 34 percent of respondents said they were worried about being replaced by a bot, while just 30 percent think AI will increase competition for jobs or harm salaries. Broken down by generation (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z job seekers all responded), the results are largely the same, with even Gen Z workers skeptical of the latest "next big thing" in enterprise tech. In short, Resume Genius's findings align with other recent studies suggesting enterprise AI's hype has not lived up to its marketing promises.
So of course it's not going to reduce workloads (Score:4, Informative)
You need a massively growing economy with lots of competition in order to keep up with automation and technological unemployment. You need entire new markets that just don't exist anymore.
Seriously if you actually dig into the history of the last two industrial revolutions you will find there was a ton of unemployment that went on for years and years. You don't really get that though in the two or three paragraphs your high school history book covers the industrial revolutions with. It took wars and decades of new technology to get us back to full employment. There's a reason why life used to be called nasty brutish and short...
Re:So of course it's not going to reduce workloads (Score:5, Funny)
Did you ever think that maybe one day in the not-so-distant future you could have your very own LLM trained on your /. posts? Then you'll finally have the free time to take up gardening, yoga, or standing by the side of the road yelling at passing Tesla drivers that their cars are emitting rubber particles from their tires. Just imagine the amazing possibilities it could open up.
According to my haters (Score:2)
And why would I need to yell at Tesla drivers? The panels are so poorly fitted they can hear a gnat fart from a mile away in that cab.
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Predictably, rsilvergun charges in with a hot take about how evil automobiles and electric streetlights are because they put most farriers and lamplighters out of work.
And goddammit, this is a repeat from earlier today [slashdot.org].
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Well, he's not wrong but the lack of concrete actions to discuss in reaction to this knowledge kinda makes him look like an annoying doomsayer.
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He is wrong in general. Not all bosses are abusive assholes. When you get large-scale unemployment due to technological changes, that's because you have massive improvements in efficiencies, and this results in the economic growth he says is required. He underspecified and is probably just wrong about needing "lots of competition" to handle the unemployment. Thomas Hobbes said that life was "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" before any central government was formed, and thus there was basicall
So would you keep someone employed (Score:2)
As for "underspecifying", JFC go read this: https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
And that's *before* Machine Learning & LLMs.
Or JFC just google "unemployment during the industrial revolution" and fucking *read*.
Life didn't get any less nasty, brutish and short until about the 1950s. Like I've said before, we used two World Wars to get us out of the mess we were in economically leading into the 1900s. That jump started
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Less "JFC"ing and more thinking, please. Pointing to some random article on the same general topic does not support your claim that "You need a massively growing economy with lots of competition in order to keep up with automation and technological unemployment." Ranting does not support your claim that "Life didn't get any less nasty, brutish and short until about the 1950s." Hobbes certainly thought it had gotten better 300 years earlier. We don't care how often you have said something before because
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Not all bosses are abusive assholes
Capitalism is extracting the excess value from other people's labor without the ownership class doing commensurate work. Management is just a tiered proxy for this. So, although many bosses can be "nice" and have better soft skills to acclimate their underlings to the situation with more ease... the system itself is still one of exploitation. There were slavers who were much less brutal than others, perhaps even "kind" in a sense, but in the end there is no ethical master. The problem to examine is the syst
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You are very deeply wrong. Communism has always been an exploitative system that fails anyway. At least in the US, we just celebrated a holiday [forbes.com] about how much more successful a capitalist system is than a communist one.
I don't discuss concrete actions (Score:2)
So instead I'm guiding people into thinking through things on their own. Hoping they can overcome what they were taught during their "4 to 14" years (google it if you don't know).
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Anybody younger than 75 grew up mostly in a Marxist environment, Vietnam war protests, hippie movement, etc.
In my college, most teachers and student associations representatives were official members of the Marxist-Leninist party which you could vote for in the elections back then.
Technology often doesn't decrease work loads. (Score:5, Insightful)
It increases productivity. Your pay stays the same or less (inflation will mean you're taking a pay cut anyway). So you're doing more while getting paid the same, which is also a pay cut. We are currently living in a Black Mirror/Twilight Zone episode.
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Of course it's trickle-up. It was always trickle-up. Whoever thought the gains of this would go to the proles was high or selling something.
Horse-grade for either case.
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Only the dullest of the proles ever believed that nonsense.
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The last US election nicely demonstrated that there are a _lot_ of dull proles that do believe this kind of nonsense.
Re:Technology often doesn't decrease work loads. (Score:5, Interesting)
The last US election nicely demonstrated that there are a _lot_ of dull proles that do believe this kind of nonsense.
What the last US election proves is there are a lot of people hell-bent on punishing the others. So much so that they don't mind suffering themselves, so long as they know it causes problems for the others. Maybe basing our entire society on punishment and profit isn't working out so well for the middle class, but hey man, the uber-rich get to take advantage of it, so why stop now?
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Well. That is basically the preparation stages of a civil war. Obviously, people that want to punish others because they are others are not good people.
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Indeed. And these days, that increase usually makes one already far too rich asshole even richer, but gives nothing back to society.
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Also all your competitors are using AI as well and have the same operating margins, more or less. If they use AI and cut staff but you use AI and keep staffing consistent at the same margins, you crush them in terms of speed of development, bug fixes, feature implementation, etc.
If I can get 2x the value for a d
No fucking shit (Score:2)
AI isn't used to boost productivity, silly (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what Sam Altman and Satya Nadella say to trick people into not seeing the true purpose of AI and taking a pitchfork to them.
The true purpose of AI is to replace expensive human workers by cheap machine slave labor, even if it means enshittifying the entire society in the process.
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Long ago, I used to work for a business my dad owned. When it was slow, he would joke that he wanted me to go dig a hole and then fill it back up (or, alternatively, to stand on my head in the corner). When a machine can completely replace a human task, but we have the human keep doing that job so that they "have a job," it's really tantamount to just having someone dig a hole and fill it back up. I get your desire to "protect jobs," but it's not a good way to do it. If the computer can replace a job, let i
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The problem under our current system is that when a job is automated away, the only two options are dig/fill a pointless hole, or let the jobless starve. Not every worker will be re-trainable for a new job that isn't hole-related, and eventually all human jobs will be hole jobs. You can't morally allow unchecked automation while ignoring that both the hole-job and starvation "solutions" suck.
It's been counterproductive for me (Score:2)
I've been spending way too much time playing around with ChatGPT and Suno to make AI generated songs. If I had all that time back... actually, scratch that, I probably still would've found something else to waste my time on. Like getting a 3D printer so I can curse at it after it botches a 20 hour print job. That sounds fun.
Took about 15 years to figure out (Score:4, Insightful)
...how to make the web profitable. Early co's relied on investment money. The recent AI boom looks to be following a similar curve. I'm not claiming it's "not helpful" for certain tasks, only that it's not reimbursing the vast investment money that has been dumped into it so far.
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. I'm not claiming it's "not helpful" for certain tasks
I am. I've yet to find anything that it does with any degree of reliability that it does faster or better than the alternatives. For many of the tasks I've seen people use it for or I've seen people advocate its use for, I'd take it a step farther and call it "harmful".
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How are they gonna get practice if they can't make a living on "regular" art? Most great artists needed roughly 2 decades of experience before hitting their stride.
100% will not reduce workloads (Score:3)
If you become more productive, they will simply demand you to do more. Your workload will never decrease because if it does then they will simply fire people and then give you their work.
We have no idea what... (Score:3)
...future AI will be able to do. It's a long term research project.
There is a chance that it will allow us to solve previously intractable problems and accomplish great things.
Today's AI is only good for generating crap
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There is a chance that it will allow us to solve previously intractable problems and accomplish great things.
Indeed. As it happens, that chance is at or below 0%.
Of course, I'm talking about LLMs here as that seems to be what people mean when they say 'AI' these days. Other forms of AI have been and will continue to be incredibly useful.
Re:We have no idea what... (Score:4, Interesting)
...future AI will be able to do. It's a long term research project.
There is a chance that it will allow us to solve previously intractable problems and accomplish great things.
There is also a real risk it will never amount to anything beyond what we are seeing now. Many people assume AGI is within reach now, but that is just uninformed nonsense. LLMs, for example, cannot be fundamentally improved compared to what they do now. Hallucinations cannot be fixed, models cannot be fixed and while filters can prevent repetition of really bad results, they cannot capture variants and are hence mostly cosmetic and worthless.
There is also the little problem that a lot of what LLMs do is definitely illegal (giving personal information is illegal without explicite informed consent under the GDPR and wrong personal information handed out _must_ be corrected at request, _no_ exceptions), and the whole way the training data was acquired in a big piracy operation by most LLMs may well turn out to be illegal as well.
As to general AI approaches, nobody sane knows whether they can even work to generate AGI in this universe. Of course there are the physicalists, but they are essentially a religious splinter-group that replaces knowledge with belief and a false claim of that being "science". They have nothing beyond that unfounded belief. Like any religious group, really. And then there is the little problem that we only observe General Intelligence together with consciousness and free will. Maybe, just maybe these are critical components? If so, even if AGI is possible, the device generating it will actually be a person and probably will not be interested in working for you.
Today's AI is only good for generating crap
Mostly yes. It also can be used as a somewhat better search. But that is essentially it.
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...future AI will be able to do. It's a long term research project. There is a chance that it will allow us to solve previously intractable problems and accomplish great things. Today's AI is only good for generating crap
The chance that AI will solve the big problems, fix our world, take care of climate change, solve the constant need for war to generate profit, and all the other ills we've infected ourselves with, would require a MASSIVE shift of resources. Right now we're throwing billions, maybe trillions, of dollars away on making ever larger predictive text generators and thinking that somehow, some way, that will lead to computer god. I keep saying it, but no matter how many books you throw at a monkey, they'll never
Og works somewhat (Score:1)
Job applications is supposedly where it excels. As the application reader is AI as well.
Smal pieces of code can be generated fast. But might take time to debug or understand. Crappy AI from Microsoft does not put comments online but after the code.
Jaded (Score:3)
Gen Z and Millennials have lived through enough waves of the latest hot programming language, "killer app", hot technology, etc that they've become as jaded as Gen Xers. The internet has turned into a cesspool of scammers, thieves, manipulators and propagandists. Then there is the predictable degeneration of things like media. What starts off as "commercial free" always ends up with commercials, then you eventually pay for commercials.
Lots of productivity gains to be had (Score:2)
Unfortunately, it won't benefit the employee at all. It will all benefit the employer.
For a time anyway.
( You can't sell a widget to an AI script. You need people working making good money
if you want your business to continue being successful. )
The same lie about how technology would make it so we only had to work a few days a
week has been the carrot dangling from the stick for many, many years. They keep pre-
tending it will magically allow us to work a fraction of the time and thus give us back the
ability
Fact, AI replaces workers (Score:2)
It takes seconds with AI.
AI results are often better than junior engineers,
cost less,
complains less,
Doesn't get sick
I haven't hired a new junior for a few years. Ans if AI (artificial intelligence) fails, Fiverr offers the other AI (Actual Indians) for slave wages.