A model of this story appeared in the NCS Business Nightcap e-newsletter. To get it in your inbox, enroll for free here.
New York
NCS
—
Every few weeks, the Earth cries out for a synthetic intelligence scare on a frequency heard solely by tech CEOs. And lo, like a rain cloud over a parched valley, right here comes Amazon boss Andy Jassy to bathe us with fresh fear and dread.
In a memo despatched to staff titled “Some thoughts on Generative AI,” Jassy spent 1,200 phrases largely rattling off examples of Amazon’s AI progress. It is making Alexa, its private assistant software program, “meaningfully smarter,” and turning its customer support chatbot into “an even better experience.” (How, and by what measure? He didn’t say. But “you get the idea,” he wrote.)
Then in a textbook instance of burying the lede, he bought to the level round paragraph 15: We’re nearly actually going to change some Amazon workers with AI “agents.”
When? “In the next few years.”
How many jobs are we speaking about? “It’s hard to know… we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
Where are all these so-called brokers? “Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast.”
Fast! Soon! We count on! They’re coming!
To be clear: I’m not saying Jassy is mendacity. But he’s clearly invoking AI to put a contemporary spin on a method as outdated as time: Keep workers working by making them afraid of losing their jobs.
The sentiment echoes an identical however extra dramatic assertion by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who informed NCS and Axios that AI may wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs someday in the subsequent 5 years. (Why half? And why 5 years? Eh, why not… Amodei’s motive is to make his core expertise appear both inevitable and scary-powerful.)
Not all tech CEOs agree, to be clear. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Google Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis — each main gamers in the AI area — have pushed back on Amodei’s apocalyptic take.
It’s necessary to keep a pair of issues in thoughts once we get these semiannual bursts of AI fearmongering from the very individuals who stand to revenue from advancing the expertise.
One: Automation and machine studying have been round for a long time, and sure, that has had (and continues to have) an influence on the labor market. But the concept that generative AI, specifically, goes to usher in some sort of doom-slash-utopia belongs in the realm of science fiction.
Large language fashions that energy superior AI chatbots might be spectacular sidekicks and sounding boards, to ensure. They are additionally hallucinating more — not much less — the bigger they develop into. And they’ve just about run out of the sort of human-grade knowledge engineers want to prepare the fashions.
Two: Notice that Jassy’s word to employees didn’t say AI was coming for his job, or his fellow executives’ jobs. Kinda looks like he would possibly need to evaluate what present AI is nice at — producing OK-sounding memos, synthesizing info and (perhaps) fixing strategic puzzles. And then think about what AI remains to be actually unhealthy at — bodily lifting issues and transferring them round.
Three: It’s curious to see Big Tech recycling the identical language about “flexibility” and “efficiency” that got here with actually each different office tech innovation of the final 30+ years. Email, Slack, Teams, Zoom, Plorfen, Globz. (OK I made the final two up.)
To be clear, these issues aren’t inherently unhealthy. They did give us flexibility that proved important throughout the 2020 lockdowns. But additionally they gave us the flexibility to be on-line in perpetuity, all day and night time, seven days per week.
Incidentally, Microsoft, an organization that’s earmarked $80 billion in AI spending for the 12 months, simply launched a report about how these improvements have — fairly than liberate workplace workers from drudgery — really trapped us in an “infinite workday.”
The report discovered the typical workplace employee utilizing Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint and different merchandise more and more spend their days getting interrupted each two minutes by a gathering, an e mail or a chat notification throughout a normal eight-hour shift. That’s 275 pings a day, my colleague Anna Cooban notes.
The common worker receives 117 emails a day, and despatched or obtained 58 instantaneous messages exterior of their core working hours — a bounce of 15% from final 12 months.
Part of Microsoft’s resolution for this “broken system,” it ought to be famous, consists of re-orienting jobs round — wait for it — AI brokers.