A version of this story has appeared in the CNN Business NightCap newsletter. Sign up for free to get it in your inbox here.
new york
CNN
–
Every few weeks, the Earth screams for the horror of artificial intelligence at a frequency only a high-tech CEO has heard. And Lo, like a rain cloud in a dry valley, Amazon boss Andy Jassy showers you with fresh fear and terror.
In a memo sent to an employee entitled “Some Thoughts on Generic AI,” Jassy spent 1,200 words rattling down Amazon's example of AI advancement. We've created Alexa, our personal assistant software, “meaningly smart enough” to turn our customer service chatbot into an “even better experience.” (How and on what scale? He didn't say. But “You get the idea,” he wrote.)
He then reached the point around paragraph 15 in an example of a textbook that fills the red. Almost certainly, we intend to replace some Amazon workers with AI “agents.”
when? “A few years to come.”
How many jobs are we talking about? “It's hard to know… I hope this will reduce the total workforce of businesses.
Where are all these so-called agents? “Many of these agents have not been built yet, but they're definitely coming and coming quickly.”
fast! Soon! We are looking forward to it! They're coming!
To be clear: I'm not saying Jussy is lying. But he clearly calls out AI and puts a modern spin on strategies as old as the era. They keep working, fearing that workers will lose their jobs.
Sentiment reflects a similar dramatic statement by humanity CEO Dario Amodei, who told CNN and Axios that AI could wipe out AI. half Of all entry-level white-collar jobs for the next five years. (Why half? And why five years? Yeahwhy… Amodei's motivation is to make his core technology look both inevitably scary. )
Not all tech CEOs agree. Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Google Deepmind's Demis Hassabis (the main player in the AI space) pushed back Amodei's apocalyptic take.
When we get these semi-annual bursts from people standing to benefit from advances in technology, it's important to have a few things in mind when we get these semi-annual bursts.
One: Automation and machine learning have been around for decades, and yes, it has (and continues to have) impact on the labour market. However, the idea that generative AI in particular is a pioneer of some sort of Doom-Slash-Topia belongs to the realm of science fiction.
The large language model that powers advanced AI chatbots is certainly an impressive sidekick and soundboard. They also hallucinate more of them the bigger they become. And they are running out of human-grade data needed to train the model.
2: Please note that Jassy's note to staff didn't say AI was coming His Work, or his companion Executive work. Hey, you might want to review what AI is good at today – create OK-Sounding memos, integrate information, and (probably) solve strategic puzzles. And consider what AI is still Really Bad – physically lifting things up and moving around.
Three: I'm curious to recycle the same language about “flexibility” and “efficiency” that comes with literally all other workplace innovations over the past 30 years. Email, Slack, Team, Zoom, Plorfen, Globz. (Okay, I made the last two.)
To be clear, they are not inherently bad. They are did Give us the flexibility that has proven essential during the 2020 lockdown. But they also gave us the flexibility to stay online forever, day and night, seven days a week.
Incidentally, Microsoft, a company that is allocated $80 billion in AI spending per year, has released a report on how these innovations actually locked us up on “endless work days” rather than freeing us from the confusion.
The report found that typical office workers spend increasingly interrupted days using Microsoft's outlook, teams, PowerPoint and other products Every 2 minutes Meetings, meetings during standard 8-hour shifts, emails, or chat notifications. My colleague Anna Koovan said it's 275 times more per day.
The average employee received 117 emails a day and sent or received 58 instant messages outside of core working hours. This is a 15% jump from last year.
You need to be aware of some of Microsoft's solutions to this “broken system.” This involves redirecting the orientation of the job around the Ai Ai agent.
