I've heard of those famed supernovae that were visible with the naked eye in the middle ages, and I've always wished I could see one too in my lifetime.
I might just be lucky before I go nova myself.
You would need to add at least a couple of 0s for it to even begin to seem reasonable.
I'm not sure online sales were ever part of Walmart's core competencies; I suspect they contracted all that stuff out to third parties.
The reason I suspect that is that one of my relatives bought a product from Walmart.com and needed to return it, so she called the number listed on the front page of the Walmart.com web site (and dialled it correctly; I later double-checked the call record on her phone against the walmart.com web page), and the representative who answered put her on hold, then forwarded her to a scammer who tried to trick her into allowing him to TeamViewer in to her computer remotely. When she refused, he got increasingly abusive and eventually hung up on her.
So whomever Walmart was contracting for online support, they were at least bribable, and arguably criminal.
They don't need AI for that. Teams - and pretty much all Microsoft products - are honeypots designed to collect data.
Well, no so much "honeypots" in the case of products that employees are forced to use at their workplace: they're no honey needed to attract them and get them to give Microsoft data. If you disagree with Microsoft's privacy invasion, you lose your job.
That's the genius of Microsoft's particular brand of invasiveness: instead of convincing individual people their products are good enough to relinquish their privacy for (Facebook), or convincing a large part of the internet to let them sneak in their trackers (Google), Microsoft convinced the bean counters at most companies to install their spyware and ram it down the throats of people who need to make a living. Disgusting...
Anyway, the AI thing is just the turd on top of the shit cake.
They'd better be giving these refrigerators out for free, or at an insane discount that they plan to make up for via ad revenue. Otherwise, there's no reason for that feature to exist.
Everybody in society must [...]
Solutions starting with "everybody in society must" have a long and celebrated tradition of going immediately (and often horrifically) pear-shaped, as it inevitably turns out that most of everybody doesn't want to, and therefore won't, and in many cases, can't.
For examples, see the Soviet Union's Communism, China's Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge's agricultural collectivism, North Korea's juche, etc.
Because that is the level of our best AI - an intern.
... this year. And next year, the same logic will have us getting rid of all of the entry-level employees, and the year after that, the mid-level employees, and some years from now, all employees. Yay, progress?
So how long before the jokes all comedians tell all sound the same (same theme, same setup, same punchline)?
Comedians will do anything that works to get a laugh, but sourcing jokes from ChatGPT (or similar) is not an effective way to get a laugh. Comedy is based on surprise, and LLMs are based on summarizing old material, so there's a bit of a mismatch there.
This is a great time to remind ourselves that a LLM is just a fancy autocomplete engine.
Well, sure, in the same way a 747 is just a fancy mechanical bird. Which is to say, yes, but no.
What's gonna stop obesity among Americans isn't permanent standard time. It really, REALLY isn't that.
A good start would be making healthy food that isn't 1,000,000 calories per pound, and not made of fat and sugar mixed in unknown chemicals affordable. And taxing the living shit out of junk food. And getting people to stop eating supertanker-sized servings.
If it's the will of the person?
Because people aren't solitary islands whose deaths harm only themselves. Anyone who has lived on Earth for more than a few days has formed relationships with other people, and suicide is the murder of a person those people have a relationship with. Suicide harms everyone who interacts with or depends on that suicider for anything, in much the same way that the murder of that person would.
Being dead, after all, is just like being stupid, only people around you are bothered by it.
Yes, that is precisely the problem.
The question is simply, can an agentic LLM process do workload X for cheaper than a person? If yes, then the job is gone.
Typical AI shill answer (and the word "agentic" in the sentence is a dead giveaway too).
Wrong logic: a person's job should be gone if your "agentic" thing does the job cheaper AND at least as well.
As always, AI shills conveniently forget to factor in the quality of the work produced.
The reality of AI is, while it might be cheaper than real workers, it also enshittifies the entire world. And that's a fact.
Does it work without a Facebook account and 24/7 creepy corporate surveillance?
Oh...
The issue is: how many people did AI displace?
Hmm no: I trust a coal miner to produce better code than an AI vibe coder.
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. -- Emerson
