Comment Junk "science" at its worst. (Score 4, Insightful) 56
Paid "research" by a company that would benefit from the result? Check.
Questionable self selection of data sources ("We focus only on conversations in the United States to align with occupation and work activity information from O*NET.", "Note that Copilot-Thumbs may not be representative of overall task success, as some types of users may be more likely to provide feedback, or some types of tasks may be more likely to elicit feedback from users.")? Check.
Oversimplification? Whoo boy, they are killing it on this one. An economist is described as "Compile, analyze, and report data to explain economic phenomena and forecast market trends, applying mathematical models and statistical techniques.", which is simplified to "Forecast economic, political, or social trends.", which is simplified to "Analyze market or industry conditions.", which is simplified to "Analyze market or industry conditions." Check.
Using the thing being studied in the study ("we use a GPT-4o-based LLM classification pipeline to identify all intermediate work activities (IWAs)"? Where's Kramer? Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you would like to see? Check.
Conclusions that defy basic logic. "Passenger Attendants" scores high on can be done by AI. Flight Attendants who bring you drinks and evacuate you in an emergency are going to be replaced by AI? Or maybe redcaps, the AI is going to carry your bag to the plane or train? Or maybe the sleeper car attendant on the train who makes your bed. Check.
Is AI taking some jobs? Probably. Is it taking most of them? No way. The tech economic bubble burst. Too many tech things have reached saturation, there's no more up and to the right for them. Companies predictably have gone into cost cutting mode as a result, and the stock isn't being juiced by 10x growth. So they are selling an AI snow job to cover up that the core businesses have reached saturation and aren't going to generate 10x results anymore. Tech is in for a hard time in the near future, not because of AI, but because people have as much social media, streaming, etc as they want, and everyone now has it. In fact many are fed up and giving up parts of it, because they have learned it's garbage. There's no new people to feed into most of the systems anymore.