After Firing More Than 300 People, EA CEO Says That AI Is the Future of the Company

Shouldn't be up to private companies to set up and run UBI. Governments should do that.
& the governments get the money from where? employees? they're all obviously being made redundant by ai/robots. so either the money comes from taxing the same corporations making the products, or governments simply print it, thereby reducing its value & therefore having to increase ubi payments in a never-ending spiral...

if your population is left with no way in which to contribute to your economy, & the only way you can maintain a consumer culture is to subsidize the entire process from end to end, i'm not sure it any longer serves any purpose for those subsidizing it. it becomes purely kabuki capitalism...
 
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Future of the company? More like the reason they go out of business. In 10 years you will be able to ask AI to make you a complete game to your liking. So unless laws catch up with AI, AI is going to put all these greedy motherfuckers out of business.
 
Look, EA's output hasn't been stellar for a while. This won't change that and probably won't make them worse either.

However, it's the trend and not only in this industry but all around. The CEO of Fiverr said so not that long ago and advised employees to learn new tools (he also said his own job was at risk). I take his opinion in high regard because he has first hand knowledge about work trends (given that their platform facilitates hiring freelancers) and he would be able to see if demand is decreasing.

AI, as any other tool, will produce results aligned with the skill it's used. It's hard to understand how these tools can be used but believe me, they can be used. If you are not using them yet, my suggestion would be to start learning and looking into ways to integrate them into your workflow. It's free, there is no reason not do it. Even if you are skeptic about AI replacing a big chunk of jobs or even your particular job, it doesn't hurt to learn and if replacement does happen, the most valuable employees will be the ones that can use those tools.
 
I was tempted to post the video of the guy bathing in sewage whilst in a gimp suit as an allegory of current EA.
I won't subject any of you to that.
 
Humans are capable of original thought and ideas, AI can't create like that, it needs input.
AI can do pretty much the same thing human can.
And btw - human also need inputs, every mental process start with a stimuli. And if you think about autonomous operation - generative AI was made explicictly to be so, they work as a human artist on a job - provide picture when asked, it's a choice by their creators (because no one really care about random picture from AI).
There are also fully autnomous AI, in CCTV for example. Even for generative AI I bet there are some AI that constatntly monitor news, summarize them, make an analysis and provide signals for trading (there were robots for that way before AI and gAI should certainly improve quality).

The full glass example was just to show the lacking ability of AI and how it clearly only has the ability to pull from what's been put into it.
And while there may be some examples that are similar when it comes to a level of misunderstanding, it's not the same. A human could easily create this image.
It's all depends on prior knowledge and education. Humans has a wider, more diverse range of concepts with more complex structure. But it's a matter of education and prior knowledge - as AI continue to evolve it will learn more and more concepts and more complex structures of them. And btw - AI can now picture full glass.

And again - it was proven that if human ever see only a half-filled glass, it would also treat it as only possible choice. It's how human brain operates. And asking some poor kid from the jungles of Africa to picture full glass of wine will yield you nothing as he will have no concepts of neither glass nor wine.

Sure there are lots of examples where humans just iterate on existing ideas, but those ideas had to come from somewhere. AI can't do that.
Your other example of using AI to streamline searches or workloads isn't a creative process.
This ideas where created by the same iteration search or by some pure chance.
You can't create something from nothing, humans can't even create a ~random~ bullshit as human brain are very weak with random, all they create are some cliche distribution that percieved one but not random in reality.
Same with creation - you just blend things you already know, and those come either from real-world or from other similary created concepts, until you find someone workable that will be an original (really no so) new concept.

Take a look at rogue-like for example. It comes from Rogue - one of the first roleplaying videogames. It comes from times when concept of "game death" being not so serious was yet to be invented/take a mass traction, so it follows table games rules, and those follows real roleplay aka playing a role as if it was real. And in reality if you die - it's an end. Nothing original here and in games it add novelty just because everyone forgotten about that and in games everyone got used to non-penalty deaths that realism was pushed to sidelines.
 
People actually think an elite which has replaced most of its human labour needs will pay them to sit around and exist 🤦‍♀️
 
People actually think an elite which has replaced most of its human labour needs will pay them to sit around and exist 🤦‍♀️
I'm thinking the alternative, that the elite couldn't care less whether we live or die, is simply too terrifying to even consider...
 
AI can do pretty much the same thing human can.
And btw - human also need inputs, every mental process start with a stimuli. And if you think about autonomous operation - generative AI was made explicictly to be so, they work as a human artist on a job - provide picture when asked, it's a choice by their creators (because no one really care about random picture from AI).
There are also fully autnomous AI, in CCTV for example. Even for generative AI I bet there are some AI that constatntly monitor news, summarize them, make an analysis and provide signals for trading (there were robots for that way before AI and gAI should certainly improve quality).


It's all depends on prior knowledge and education. Humans has a wider, more diverse range of concepts with more complex structure. But it's a matter of education and prior knowledge - as AI continue to evolve it will learn more and more concepts and more complex structures of them. And btw - AI can now picture full glass.

And again - it was proven that if human ever see only a half-filled glass, it would also treat it as only possible choice. It's how human brain operates. And asking some poor kid from the jungles of Africa to picture full glass of wine will yield you nothing as he will have no concepts of neither glass nor wine.


This ideas where created by the same iteration search or by some pure chance.
You can't create something from nothing, humans can't even create a ~random~ bullshit as human brain are very weak with random, all they create are some cliche distribution that percieved one but not random in reality.
Same with creation - you just blend things you already know, and those come either from real-world or from other similary created concepts, until you find someone workable that will be an original (really no so) new concept.

Take a look at rogue-like for example. It comes from Rogue - one of the first roleplaying videogames. It comes from times when concept of "game death" being not so serious was yet to be invented/take a mass traction, so it follows table games rules, and those follows real roleplay aka playing a role as if it was real. And in reality if you die - it's an end. Nothing original here and in games it add novelty just because everyone forgotten about that and in games everyone got used to non-penalty deaths that realism was pushed to sidelines.
Similar to anything in human life which tech/inventions have replaced or reduced human workers, AI is no different.

It's just that AI has been a crazy buzzword and it can replace all the whiny creative types, whereas tech for 100s of years have replaced people whether it's cars over horse buggy dudes, streaming over video stores, assembly lines vs had crafted stuff or PC programs reducing paper pushing admin departments from 50 people to 5.

Nobody ever said AI will be like Skynet 100% taking over the world. But it'll make things more efficient. Keeping a job is easy. Just prove to bosses youre the awesomest employee that can outdo AI, or even better be the AI expert at work who knows how to get the most out of it. AI isn't making shit 24/7 by itself. Someone has to be there. Just be those guys and not the numbnut paper pusher replaced by SAP.
 
Nobody ever said AI will be like Skynet 100% taking over the world. But it'll make things more efficient. Keeping a job is easy. Just prove to bosses youre the awesomest employee that can outdo AI, or even better be the AI expert at work who knows how to get the most out of it. AI isn't making shit 24/7 by itself. Someone has to be there. Just be those guys and not the numbnut paper pusher replaced by SAP.
Rise of IT create a lot of jobs of translating from business people language to IT language. Same will be with AI as AI still can't comprehend what does "create button that do stuff" means.

Excellent. Replace the CEO.
CEO jobs is decision making, communication, negotiation and presentation. AI is weak with high-level of decision making and simply can't do the rest as they are person-to-person communication skills.
 
Look, EA's output hasn't been stellar for a while. This won't change that and probably won't make them worse either.

However, it's the trend and not only in this industry but all around. The CEO of Fiverr said so not that long ago and advised employees to learn new tools (he also said his own job was at risk). I take his opinion in high regard because he has first hand knowledge about work trends (given that their platform facilitates hiring freelancers) and he would be able to see if demand is decreasing.

AI, as any other tool, will produce results aligned with the skill it's used. It's hard to understand how these tools can be used but believe me, they can be used. If you are not using them yet, my suggestion would be to start learning and looking into ways to integrate them into your workflow. It's free, there is no reason not do it. Even if you are skeptic about AI replacing a big chunk of jobs or even your particular job, it doesn't hurt to learn and if replacement does happen, the most valuable employees will be the ones that can use those tools.
These bolded snippets I can agree with. Anyone with actual tech insight into AI will tell you its not some "miracle" replacement for skilled and competent workers. That's ill-informed at best. Right now, its just going through a hype cycle among a very specific subset of people who think they've stumbled over "the ultimate solution".

As a tool, it will most likely get integrated into many workflows. It'll become hazardous for a given business if some c-suite, board of directors or management gets the weird idea that it can act as a total substitution for their workforce.
 
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it's not about AI, it's all about money, as usual, if CEO can be replaced by AI, they will use AI, i left EA years ago, along with UBI, and won't comeback soon or maybe later.
all they care is money while forgot great games made by human years ago. meh meh meh
 
These bolded snippets I can agree with. Anyone with actual tech insight into AI will tell you its not some "miracle" replacement for skilled and competent workers. That's ill-informed at best. Right now, its just going through a hype cycle among a very specific subset of people who think they've stumbled over "the ultimate solution".

As a tool, it will most likely get integrated into many workflows. It'll become hazardous for a given business if some c-suite, board of directors or management gets the weird idea that it can act as a total substitution for their workforce.

Of course right now it can't substitute it completely but as it is right now it can support downsizing in many aspects and development continues.
 
AI can do pretty much the same thing human can.
And btw - human also need inputs, every mental process start with a stimuli. And if you think about autonomous operation - generative AI was made explicictly to be so, they work as a human artist on a job - provide picture when asked, it's a choice by their creators (because no one really care about random picture from AI).
There are also fully autnomous AI, in CCTV for example.
Right but humans build those inputs into a coherent set of interrelated ideas. Each artist will have a specific set of preferences, tastes and life experiences and will interpret those through a framework that allows them to make sense, i.e a story. To replicate this you would need A.I agents that can reason and come to conclusions about how the world works and what that means for them. When we're at that point I think we'll be very close to AGI.
 
So the deal with AI in many industries is that it will lead to run away entropy in competency and institutional knowledge.

Why? At this stage of the game, business hire and train existing people experienced in the position (let's say coding) to work with ai as a tool. The ai is a power multiplier where one dev can do the job of 10 devs. That sucks... but that's progress. Full stop. No amount of moralizing from me, you, whoever changes that.

Here's where the problems really start. Businesses, ever wanting to reduce cost, will begin to hire people exclusively good with the ai program and not the skillset the program is meant to help. Why? They are a fraction of the salary and it will be a boom market for those candidates. Using the example above, 5 years/10 years down the road candidates don't need to know coding on a proficient level they just need to know the ai program and how to work with it.

And that's when entropy kicks in, All because a very valuable tool has now become a crutch and the employers want college grads with no formal training and understanding in the skill set to save on salaries. There is fewer and fewer fall back of the institutional knowledge and veteran experiences with an over reliance on interfacing and working with the ai program.

It's going to be hilarious.
 
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People actually think an elite which has replaced most of its human labour needs will pay them to sit around and exist 🤦‍♀️
Yes. It's called government regulations.

We kind of have it in Europe already. UBI would just streamline it to make it less of a pain in the ass for both citizens and governments.
 
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(...)

CEO jobs is decision making, communication, negotiation and presentation. AI is weak with high-level of decision making and simply can't do the rest as they are person-to-person communication skills.
That's cute. CEOs and management are not exempt from this either. Sounds like it doesn't bother you as long as it conveniently circumvents that particular organizational layer. How odd. I guess, when it reaches that high it suddenly becomes "weak". Tough love, honey, we're all affected by this. Even you.

Also, the insinuation that there's no decision making, communication etc. etc. happening below that layer is quite hysterical.

Of course right now it can't substitute it completely but as it is right now it can support downsizing in many aspects and development continues.
It won't make for a substition of competent and skilled human work in the future either. I was under that impression about AI fright initially ("its going to take ALL our jobs!"), but that has shifted once you get to learn additional insight into its development. It will be a continuous and iterative improvement process where human interaction will be required to tweak it through engineering. Heck, high dependence on it might even become a drawback in some instances. As of right now, some people are caught up in a science ficiton-like hype because some AI vendors sold them a greasy sales pitch about it being the ultimate solution to their business woes.

Its certainly going to be useful in getting a "second opinion or view" on issues, but its not going to be a replacement for the more tech savvy crowd of people. Plus, its built by human hands. It will be prone to error one way or another.
 
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If you think these two are close to being the same you shouldnt be talking about this
They are not the same no, but they are quite related. Asset generation via AI is kinda the natural conclusion of procedural generation, which culminated in NMS in the mid 2010s.
 
The guy has gone through life looking like an AI generated image of an 80's movie antagonist

IbTQB7o.jpeg


He always looks like he's about to bulldoze the teenage rec center and build luxury condos
LOL

why he look like Paradox from deadpool x wolverine, even same hairstyle it's wild lol.
what-s-up-with-mr-paradox-in-deadpool-wolverine-and-is-he-in-the-comics.jpg
 
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That's cute. CEOs and management are not exempt from this either. Sounds like it doesn't bother you as long as it conveniently circumvents that particular organizational layer. How odd. I guess, when it reaches that high it suddenly becomes "weak". Tough love, honey, we're all affected by this. Even you.

Also, the insinuation that there's no decision making, communication etc. etc. happening below that layer is quite hysterical.


It won't make for a substition of competent and skilled human work in the future either. I was under that impression about AI fright initially ("its going to take ALL our jobs!"), but that has shifted once you get to learn additional insight into its development. It will be a continuous and iterative improvement process where human interaction will be required to tweak it through engineering. Heck, high dependence on it might even become a drawback in some instances. As of right now, some people are caught up in a science ficiton-like hype because some AI vendors sold them a greasy sales pitch about it being the ultimate solution to their business woes.

Its certainly going to be useful in getting a "second opinion or view" on issues, but its not going to be a replacement for the more tech savvy crowd of people. Plus, its built by human hands. It will be prone to error one way or another.

If you judge it from the current state of the technology, yes. However, it isn't static. 10 years ago I would have said the same about AI taking on the activities that can do today but here we are.

Stuff is evolving rapidly and maybe not in 10 years but why not 50?
 
Right but humans build those inputs into a coherent set of interrelated ideas. Each artist will have a specific set of preferences, tastes and life experiences and will interpret those through a framework that allows them to make sense, i.e a story. To replicate this you would need A.I agents that can reason and come to conclusions about how the world works and what that means for them. When we're at that point I think we'll be very close to AGI.
There are already reasoning modules being added to AI. The reasoning itself is actually quite simple, neocortex (just another set of layers in AI) gather up to 4 different results of what to do and than do the usual NN stuff of choice what the best of these results in current circumstances. You don't even need self-awareness for that, it often make things only worse.
And same as humans, each AI reflects data that on which it was trained.

That's cute. CEOs and management are not exempt from this either. Sounds like it doesn't bother you as long as it conveniently circumvents that particular organizational layer. How odd. I guess, when it reaches that high it suddenly becomes "weak". Tough love, honey, we're all affected by this. Even you.
They are much further down the road. And as barmens and waitresses hardly can be replaced by robots (they can, but it's really not the right feeling) so will management. The number will be reduced as with any other job, but the whole notion of sharing responsibility with other living persons and blame them for poor performance will stay.
As for me - I am not bothered by AI taking my position, I already changed work field twice. Also I got in touch with AI in late 00', way before it became popular, so I can always go to works as data scientist, ai architect or simply business ai analyst. Jobs to translate from "I want a button to do stuff" to something AI understands will always be in need (same as there are now a quite large layer in IT working as mediator between business and IT as they clearly talk in different languages).

Also, the insinuation that there's no decision making, communication etc. etc. happening below that layer is quite hysterical.
Junior jobs and they are at most risk has little decision making and meaningfull communication.
Senior jobs with their typical responsibilities much harder to replace - someone has to check AI results (AI makes mistakes too), do the job quickly and efficiently if AI can't, and do all sort of communications with higher-up, peers etc.
 
There are already reasoning modules being added to AI. The reasoning itself is actually quite simple, neocortex (just another set of layers in AI) gather up to 4 different results of what to do and than do the usual NN stuff of choice what the best of these results in current circumstances. You don't even need self-awareness for that, it often make things only worse.
And same as humans, each AI reflects data that on which it was trained.


They are much further down the road. And as barmens and waitresses hardly can be replaced by robots (they can, but it's really not the right feeling) so will management. The number will be reduced as with any other job, but the whole notion of sharing responsibility with other living persons and blame them for poor performance will stay.
As for me - I am not bothered by AI taking my position, I already changed work field twice. Also I got in touch with AI in late 00', way before it became popular, so I can always go to works as data scientist, ai architect or simply business ai analyst. Jobs to translate from "I want a button to do stuff" to something AI understands will always be in need (same as there are now a quite large layer in IT working as mediator between business and IT as they clearly talk in different languages).


Junior jobs and they are at most risk has little decision making and meaningfull communication.
Senior jobs with their typical responsibilities much harder to replace - someone has to check AI results (AI makes mistakes too), do the job quickly and efficiently if AI can't, and do all sort of communications with higher-up, peers etc.
People most fearful of tech taking over their jobs are ones most disposable. I have never once ever though AI or tech would replace my finance job no matter how good the enterprise systems are. You still need humans to analyze it all and also spot check for data integrity errors as the system is stupid and only goes on what it gets fed. It'll never fix itself being self aware like Terminator.

So they are freaking out they dont have skills to transfer to another role. Thats on them. Not society to bail out their limited skillset. If someone is a techie guy afraid of job loss, then brush up those skills and skew to learning AI stuff. Companies are eating that shit up. It's not like any other normie jobber is going to go after AI jobs. It's going to be teche guys who go after it. Not a bean counter guy like me, a coworker who is a sales rep, or a dude driving a forklift in the shipping bay. So learn some AI coding and change tech careers and they can still stay in the tech industry.

But I bet a lot of those media people pissed are traditional artsy guys who want to have fun spending a company's time and money drawing storyboards and uploading their stuff to deviantart and then drawing stuff in graphic artist programs. Well, just like ERP programs taking over all the boring admin stuff from the office staff, looks like AI is making some media jobs more efficient too. Comes around goes around and bus has now stopped there. My first job out of university had legions of old ladies processing orders by hand. Shit loads of orders came in by hand, fax, clipboard submissions etc.... Old school shit. My latest job is bigger than that company and our office has TWO people doing that stuff. Almost all orders are done through software and their job is to check for accuracy or fix mistakes and push it through. So it went from like 40 old ladies to 2.

The vast majority of jobs out there arent totally replaceable by tech, and the fact unemployment rates are very low shows AI and tech taking over jobs hasnt lead to Terminator takeovers where unemployment rates are 90% as everything is run by robots since no company bosses need to hire people anymore.

I'm still waiting for all those self driving cars and 18 wheelers taking over like those articles before covid where all trucking and transportation guys will get fired as all shipping and receiving will be done by AI driven rigs.
 
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Yes. It's called government regulations.

We kind of have it in Europe already. UBI would just streamline it to make it less of a pain in the ass for both citizens and governments.
You exist in a time where the elite still benefits from a large human workforce.

We are discussing a time where that workforce will largely have been replaced and the people who made up that workforce are now surplus to requirements and only consume resources. I think you are dreaming if you think there is a future where that ex-workforce is kept around consuming resources just for the sake of it.

Your ostensible ability to vote and any other rights you currently enjoy are entirely contingent upon human labour having value and/or your ability to insist upon those rights with a credible threat of violence. A people which has been disarmed (already accomplished throughout most of the West) and no longer has any leverage via the value of their labour is not going to have a say in government policy.
 
We are discussing a time where that workforce will largely have been replaced and the people who made up that workforce are now surplus to requirements and only consume resources. I think you are dreaming if you think there is a future where that ex-workforce is kept around consuming resources just for the sake of it.
You can take a look at employee count dynamics of Microsoft or Google.. and those companies started to implement practical AI usage probably 5-7 years ago. They only expanded since then.
Like car drivers replace horse cab drivers only led to exponentially growth of former, even though they do work of latter much more efficient way. Or IT meant to reduce menial jobs grew so large that it's now have several times more capacity than the jobs that they helped eliminate.
It's really not that simple than "any stage of automatization will eliminate jobs and humans will have nothing to do". Efficiency (and automatization is about efficiency) open new opportunities that was omited before due to too high workload factor.
 
It's really not that simple than "any stage of automatization will eliminate jobs and humans will have nothing to do". Efficiency (and automatization is about efficiency) open new opportunities that was omited before due to too high workload factor.
I agree it isn't as simple as "any stage of automatization will eliminate jobs and humans will have nothing to do" and yes, historically automation has freed labour up to go do other things thus increasing our overall productivity. Often, the automation of menial but critical work freed up people who were perfectly capable of performing more complex tasks.

I don't think we can reasonably assume from that that if we keep automating more and more tasks (and more complex tasks) that there will always be something else useful for people to do, or that the people we are freeing up will be capable of doing that 'something else', or that AI won't be able to do that 'something else' better too.
 
You exist in a time where the elite still benefits from a large human workforce.

We are discussing a time where that workforce will largely have been replaced and the people who made up that workforce are now surplus to requirements and only consume resources. I think you are dreaming if you think there is a future where that ex-workforce is kept around consuming resources just for the sake of it.

Your ostensible ability to vote and any other rights you currently enjoy are entirely contingent upon human labour having value and/or your ability to insist upon those rights with a credible threat of violence. A people which has been disarmed (already accomplished throughout most of the West) and no longer has any leverage via the value of their labour is not going to have a say in government policy.
I'm just curious as to what exactly you expect will happen. Voting rights taken away for the jobless? Letting them starve to death? Mass murder campaign? Forced sterilization? And you expect the part of population with jobs to vote for this?
 
I'm just curious as to what exactly you expect will happen. Voting rights taken away for the jobless? Letting them starve to death? Mass murder campaign? Forced sterilization? And you expect the part of population with jobs to vote for this?
At best there will be heavy restrictions on reproduction until the surplus population is gone. At worst they will be killed off, either directly or via war. I don't expect there to be voting (in the sense we ostensibly do it now) in a scenario where human labour has negligible value and the elites (via the state) have a monopoly on violence. What reason would the elites have for caring what the remaining unarmed and very easily replaced workers think?

Your faith in democracy is nice, but it is not the default form of human existence. It was usually imposed upon the elites by violence, and is suffered -but only to an extent- because the public has leverage in the form of their labour being valuable. We (excluding the US currently, but they will keep trying) no longer possess the means to insist upon it through violence, which leaves only the value of our labour.
 
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