Support NeoGAF

[RetroGamingUK]

I've been reading a lot about this following recent layoffs at my workplaces.

Apart from management the vast majority of the layoffs have been women in the finance, HR sales and procurement departments. Meanwhile our engineers (all male) have been completely unaffected.

After world war 2 there was a sudden increase of women in the workplace (largely secretarial work).

My question is… is AI about to send them all back to the kitchen?

AI poses a greater threat to women in the workforce, but why? ILO study reveals alarming gender gap predictions - The Economic Times

An ILO study reveals women are three times more likely than men to lose jobs to AI, especially in clerical and administrative roles. As generative AI spreads across industries, high-income countries face growing gender disparities. The report urges policymakers to adopt inclusive strategies to...

m.economictimes.com

Women three times more likely to have job taken by AI than men

A new UN-led report found that women's jobs in high-income countries are more likely to be replaced or touched by artificial intelligence than their male peers.

www.euronews.com

 

[Draugoth]

AI is going to send everyone to the streets,

Considering CEOs and shareholders want AI advanced enough so they can replace all humans, I would be more inclined to join the feminists agaisnt a common enemy.

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

My question is… is AI about to send them all back to the kitchen?

 

[TheChadOfGaming]

Its gonna be like the matrix, all the AI will need massive amounts of energy to maintain

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

Its gonna be like the matrix, all the AI will need massive amounts of energy to maintain

So you're saying I might be able to get a job as a human battery while living inside a vide game? Good thing the machines don't understand thermodynamics very well.

 

[ForAcademicPurposes]

No.

 

[Madflavor]

What makes you think Men in general will be immune to this? Everyone is going to be effected.

 

[ReBurn]

I think it's going to disproportionately affect women in the US, but not because they're women. It's because in the US more women are going to college than men and AI is going to make a whole lot of college degrees even more worthless than they are today.

New and recent grads typically do work that could relatively easily be replaced with AI that exists today. So nobody is going to hire them without also being skilled in using AI to do the thing they studied in college and most colleges aren't embracing AI because it's also a threat to higher education and the worthless degree industry.

Everyone used to think that it was going to be the trades and blue collar jobs that robotics and AI would replace, but reality is turning out to be much different. Instead of investing in that masters degree people should be investing in more certifications and micro education, because the ability to do things well is rapidly becoming more important than a college degree.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

AI is going to send everyone to the streets,

Considering CEOs and shareholders want AI advanced enough so they can replace all humans, I would be more inclined to join the feminists agaisnt a common enemy.

I still think it's a long way before robots replace tradesmen and construction workers.

AR goggles with built in AI could lower the skill requirement and drive down wages though.

I think most office jobs are gone in 10-15 years though.

 

[Draugoth]

I still think it's a long way before robots replace tradesmen and construction workers.

AR goggles with built in AI could lower the skill requirement and drive down wages though.

I think most office jobs are gone in 10-15 years though.

The biggest issue is that Generative AI is not as productive as companies sell it, it's biggest applications so far is in surveillance and sycophantics for the masses. If it becomes profitable it will be another story, but so far the economics don't hold up.

 

[Zathalus]

No, generative AI has been completely overhyped.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

No, generative AI has been completely overhyped.

Tell that to all our staff we replaced with agents.

 

[diffusionx]

The modern managerial system was created as a result of American hegemony and the need for a mass bureaucracy in both public and private sectors to maintain empire. If the system can no longer exist, then yes people will revert to traditional roles.

BUT, I am not convinced the mass layoffs we have seen this year in the tech sector are a result of AI. It's largely a correction to massive overhiring in 2020-2022.

 

[Draugoth]

Tell that to all our staff we replaced with agents.

No, generative AI has been completely overhyped.

Not exactly the same as Generative AI, Agentic AI is mostly scripted workflows in the backend, a new version of a technology called expert systems, which is from the 80's.

 

[Zathalus]

Tell that to all our staff we replaced with agents.

It's a tool, but expecting it to lay off most of the workforce is nonsense. Especially when so few companies actually make profit off it.

 

[Draugoth]

It's a tool

I call even that debatable, considering how big of a privacy nightmare they are.

Even companies forbid their employees of using it due to security, IP breaching potential.

 

[methane47]

 

[ReBurn]

No, generative AI has been completely overhyped.

Generative AI isn't the threat to jobs. Agentic AI is. Over the next couple of years you'll be seeing more and more instances of AI agents backed by reasoning models driving a reduction in new job postings because companies won't need new people to do basic tasks. This is going to devastate entry level work in white collar fields.

 

[JimmyRustler]

I don't think AI is going to replace anyone, only make people working more efficient. Call me crazy but I somehow see companies who overuse AI utterly failing because no one will want to work with them.

The transition to heavy AI usage will either be gradual and take a long ass time (companies only replace workers who exist naturally due to old age) or not happen at all.

Why do I think that? Precisely because of all the fear mongering. I don't buy it anymore. When evry billionaire and their mother starts to send out warnings, you know something is not right. Why are those people so adamant to warn everyone? They don't give a shit about you.

 

[Vestal]

Generative AI isn't the threat to jobs. Agentic AI is. Over the next couple of years you'll be seeing more and more instances of AI agents backed by reasoning models driving a reduction in new job postings because companies won't need new people to do basic tasks. This is going to devastate entry level work in white collar fields.

Yup. This is inevitably what's next. Agents embedded in Corp Apps doing most of the base Admin work. After that it would be entire Corp software being built & maintained from the ground up by AI Agents.

Agent embeds are starting to happen, but not to the degree of autonomous control of an app. In the sector I am in (Identity) the industry is just now applying agents/llm to Role mining and Discovery. But still a lot of "smoke and mirrors" when it comes to getting hard details out of these Startups.

edit: Smoke and Mirrors as far as how they use our Data and protect it.

 

[Hookshot]

Email and computers got rid of the office clerks and the post room staff, the pandemic and working from home got rid of the office itself. Soon it will just be a CEO and some tech guys.

Not sure where the next gen of teens will work and fuck knows what the rest of us will be doing, I'm just going to try and hang on until retirement but that's decades away.

 

[Vestal]

Email and computers got rid of the office clerks and the post room staff, the pandemic and working from home got rid of the office itself. Soon it will just be a CEO and some tech guys.

Not sure where the next gen of teens will work and fuck knows what the rest of us will be doing, I'm just going to try and hang on until retirement but that's decades away.

If that were to happen a form of UBI would be required. If not, society itself would collapse.

 

[ReBurn]

Yup. This is inevitably what's next. Agents embedded in Corp Apps doing most of the base Admin work. After that it would be entire Corp software being built & maintained from the ground up by AI Agents.

Agent embeds are starting to happen, but not to the degree of autonomous control of an app. In the sector I am in (Identity) the industry is just now applying agents/llm to Role mining and Discovery. But still a lot of "smoke and mirrors" when it comes to getting hard details out of these Startups.

edit: Smoke and Mirrors as far as how they use our Data and protect it.

The main thing that will hold agentic AI back is going to be people wanting to keep humans in the loop to make sure it doesn't make mistakes. The thing is that those humans are going to be more likely than the agents to make mistakes. So there will be a period where people believe the AI agents are unreliable because the people who monitor them blame them for errors. As the technology advances the data is eventually going to show that even if they do make some mistakes the margin of error is going to be lower than when people do it.

The future of software systems isn't going to be graphical user interfaces that human employees use to do work. It's going to be programming interfaces that AI agents can interact with to do work that employees used to do by hand.

There's definitely a lot of smoke and mirrors out there. Every company is slapping "AI powered" slogans on their canned automated flows and calling it AI agents. But true AI agents are able to use reasoning models to simulate decision making much more effectively than a simple decision tree can. Once they have access to the systems they'll just be able to do the work.

 

[Vestal]

The main thing that will hold agentic AI back is going to be people wanting to keep humans in the loop to make sure it doesn't make mistakes. The thing is that those humans are going to be more likely than the agents to make mistakes. So there will be a period where people believe the AI agents are unreliable because the people who monitor them blame them for errors. As the technology advances the data is eventually going to show that even if they do make some mistakes the margin of error is going to be lower than when people do it.

The future of software systems isn't going to be graphical user interfaces that human employees use to do work. It's going to be programming interfaces that AI agents can interact with to do work that employees used to do by hand.

There's definitely a lot of smoke and mirrors out there. Every company is slapping "AI powered" slogans on their canned automated flows and calling it AI agents. But true AI agents are able to use reasoning models to simulate decision making much more effectively than a simple decision tree can. Once they have access to the systems they'll just be able to do the work.

The bolded "Everything is a Rest endpoint" lol

As far as your first point, I agree to an extent. As long as the agents employ a form of SDLC with human sign off for mission critical apps.

 

[bitbydeath]

The damage is already done, the cost of living sky-rocketed to account for women working and they're not undoing that.

It's no longer feasible to have just one person in a family working.

 

[Draugoth]

Email and computers got rid of the office clerks and the post room staff, the pandemic and working from home got rid of the office itself. Soon it will just be a CEO and some tech guys.

Not sure where the next gen of teens will work and fuck knows what the rest of us will be doing, I'm just going to try and hang on until retirement but that's decades away.

The shareholders could replace the CEO with an AI agent and save billions, they are about as safe as everyone else in this matter.

 

[taylor34]

AI isn't going to replace anything anytime soon except for jobs they were already trying to outsource overseas. Just look at the Mag7, they say they're using AI to cut headcount but what they're really doing is using AI as the scapegoat while hiring people on H1-b's and other visas. Nobody is losing their job to AI right now, they're losing them outsourcing and questionable visa policies.

Even if AI existed today which could replace humans, guess what we don't have? Power to actually drive that. So even if it existed today, you need 2 to 3 decades of power buildout just to support it. It's why it's not happening anytime soon. It's similar to if someone created the perfect car in the year 1890, well it wouldn't do much good until you got more oil refined, roads built, gas stations built, etc, and that's why horses were still used for quite a while.

 

[DaciaJC]

Tell that to all our staff we replaced with agents.

Agents, you say?

 

[Nocty]

in the tech world at least, the data shows us that vast majority of female held roles are in data entry, reception, technical management roles which will be the first to be hit by AI.