Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #153
AI can't do your job as well as you, but can it do it well enough?
The GenAI fans among us will tell you that you won’t lose your job to AI, but you will lose it to someone who uses AI to do it better.
I don’t believe that. I think that’s an excellent way of marketing AI tools to users, but I’ve also been around enough to know what will happen when CEOs start making staffing decisions.
Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I’ll share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and important information about privacy, security, and legal tech.
You can find out all about me here - Mike McBride Online.
I’m going to go ahead and predict that this is only the beginning:
TikTok is laying off hundreds of people and replacing their jobs with AI.
Mostly, I want you to read this part of that story:
Most of the workers who lost their jobs were involved in checking and moderating content on TikTok. These employees were responsible for ensuring that videos followed TikTok's community guidelines. However, ByteDance is now automating this process. The company says it found that about 80% of the content that violates its guidelines can be removed automatically by AI systems.
The AI that is moderating content gets about 80% of it. There’s no mention of how many false positives it gets. The rationale, publicly, is that this will make it faster.
The non-public rationale is, “Why pay 700 people in Malaysia a salary when the AI tool will do a good enough job?”
Now consider that Anthropic is testing Computer Use, a tool that will take some instructions and control a computer to accomplish that task without a user. In the demo, the AI searched for the proper information in the company systems and used that to fill out and submit a customer request form.
Imagine how quickly it can reply to an RFP.
Oh, is that your job? This tool might take away the drudgery of filling out the RFP, but how good would it need to be before your boss decided it was cheaper and never needed time off? So, what work justifies your salary?
Of course, the promise is that by eliminating this “drudgery” (and it’s always the word every one of them uses), you can focus on much higher tasks and more interesting work.
Again, I ask. How many people in any large company are setting up a high-level strategy? It’s not many. The rest of us do the necessary tasks. How many of those tasks can be automated?
Most importantly, remember that the same people who will lay off thousands just to bump the stock price will decide when the AI is good enough to replace you.
As I saw someone say recently, when AI can drive a car or navigate a spaceship, why can’t it do your job without you? (Because even those make massive mistakes and kill people? That hasn’t stopped anyone from continuing to build them.)
That will be the reality of labor in the next 10 years. We have no plan to deal with that change, and we aren’t even acknowledging the possibility that it’s coming.
Of course, it’s also possible that five years from now, we’ll laugh about how we thought this AI thing could accomplish all of that when it couldn’t even correct basic facts.
Because it still doesn’t always get basic facts correct.
Careers and the Workplace
This is worth a listen - Career B*tches Podcast - Build a Network.
It’s an underated skill in a world that worships super-wealthy founders - Competent Leaders Know The Limits of Their Expertise
I’ve always argued that if one member of your team is remote, or even in another office location, you need to manage like the team is remote, similar to this - How to do hybrid work right
Artificial Intelligence
We’ve heard a lot about the new models' ability to solve complex problems, but Apple has a different opinion: Apple exposes major AI weaknesses.
Speaking of weaknesses - How AI reduces the world to stereotypes.
Technologist Bruce Schneier on security, society and why we need 'public AI' models. - I agree that we don’t know much about AI mistakes and struggle to know when it happens and what to do about it. As long as it makes mistakes, there are things we can’t allow an AI assistant to do on our behalf. Will that stop companies from doing it anyway?
AI Companies Are Not Meeting EU AI Act Standards. - Uh-oh.
This is important work - Women in AI: Dr. Rebecca Portnoff is protecting children from harmful deepfakes.
Mental Health in the Workplace
Linked - Time to Talk About Emotional Labor
Words about your workplace's great culture ring hollow when team members regularly find themselves putting up with jerks. That's not a great culture. That's extra emotional labor—labor that likely doesn't come close to matching what they are paid.
We don't talk about this in terms of emotional labor. We talk about being resilient, staying composed, etc. We don't talk about how exhausting it is to know that every day at work, someone is likely to yell at you, let alone know that when it happens, there will be no solution to prevent it from happening again. If they take the time to complain and ask for a solution, they'll be told it's "just part of the job."
We should reconsider the tales of all-nighters, working from vacations, and extraordinary efforts to get eDiscovery work done in time. Instead of wearing them like badges of honor, we should think of them as exploitation. What else would you call the expectation that you are available to respond 24/7, and when you sacrifice much of your personal and family life to meet that expectation, you are rewarded with a 2% raise at the end of the year?
Because as long as that is the job, mental health is going to be an issue.
Go ahead and take that break - The Power of Breaks for Mental Wellbeing
Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech
Linked - You Can't Make Friends With The Rockstars
That seems to be what happens in the tech journalism space. We have a list of people who've created successful companies and made a ton of money doing it, and everyone is supposed to assume that they are so bright they can do it over and over again. Then we are surprised when Elon buys Twitter and runs it into the ground or when Meta can't find a market for the Metaverse. Microsoft spends billions upon billions of dollars on AI without any hope of making a profit for years while conducting rounds of layoffs to offset those costs. We assume they know what they're doing because they've succeeded in other markets before, and the press doesn't challenge them when they say provably false things.
How is AI going to affect law firms? - 58% of Inhousers ‘Expect Reduced Reliance’ On Law Firms. That could be a problem.
Also, on the topic of lawyers and AI:
They do suck, and they are a hurdle to working from home that businesses should also be angry about. - Broadband data caps suck. Now you can help get rid of them.
Finally, I was slightly surprised by this - Is End-User Cybersecurity Training Useless? Spoiler Alert: It’s Not!
That’s all, folks. If you found something interesting in this week’s newsletter, please share it with your friends. It’s the best way to help support the effort I put in each week to share this with you.