is AI gonna take our jobs?

interesting article in CNN Business: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/business/self-service-kiosks-mcdonalds-shake-shack/index.html

It's particularly notable because it's essentially an admission against interest seeing as CNN Business caters to capital and not labor.

McDonald’s touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers. Instead, something surprising happened...

touchscreen kiosks have added extra work for kitchen staff and pushed customers to order more food than they do at the cash register...

“In theory, kiosks should help save on labor, but in reality, restaurants have added complexity due to mobile ordering and delivery, and the labor saved from kiosks is often reallocated for these efforts,” said RJ Hottovy, an analyst who covers the restaurant and retail industries at data analytics firm Placer.ai.

And in some cases, kiosks have even been a flop. Bowling ally chain Bowlero added kiosks in lanes for customers to order food and drinks, but they went unused because staff and customers weren’t fully trained on using them.

Even some of the benefits of kiosks touted by chains — they upsell customers by suggesting menu items and speed up orders — don’t always play out. A recent study from Temple University researchers found that, when a line forms behind customers using kiosks, they experience more stress when placing their orders and purchase less food. And some customers take longer to order tapping around on kiosks and paying than they do telling a cashier they’d like to order a burger and fries. Not to mention the kiosks can malfunction or break down.

“If kiosks really improved speed of service, order accuracy, and upsell, they’d be rolled out more extensively across the industry than they are today,” Hottovy said...

California this year raised the minimum wage for the state’s fast food sector workers by $4 to $20. It raised a familiar refrain that those workers would be replaced by technology, such as self-service kiosks.

But the quick-service and fast-casual segments of the restaurant industry continue to grow. Staffing levels were nearly 150,000 jobs, or 3%, above pre-pandemic levels, according to the latest Labor Department data.
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Sure, that's not our industry. But it's easy to imagine some parallels. For example, my biggest client is Christie's auction house. They only produce videos for their top auction lots, a small fraction of their total offerings. If it became cheaper and faster to produce videos, they might make videos for a larger share of their lots.

It's also wild to realize that if California had panicked and canceled its minimum wage hike in the face of job-loss predictions, it would have left 20% of fast food workers' current wages on the table...
 
Humans win again... The article does raise interesting points. We as a race are not really ready for all of this technology throughout our lives. Too many options of choice paralyzes people. I can also see the anxiety of an older person using the kiosk (slowly) and the young whipper-snapper eye rolling and fidgeting behind them. The older person might not even return to the restaurant if the experience is bad enough.

Leads me to believe this current round of tech enhancements (AI, Self Driving etc...) will go hand in hand with unintended consequences. Largely because their motivations are profit or tech driven rather than demand driven. Like this kiosk thing. Or electric cars being much heavier than ICE cars and ruining roads/concrete. The march forward is relentless but maybe time to slow it down a bit?
 
It's not just AI but information technology of every kind. I renewed my license plate registration online but the tab was not mailed. Expecting to visit a DMV office was happily not required because a DMV kiosk inside the local supermarket was able to reprint my registration and the tab, for a fee. Those are clerks not needed and ROI for the IT.
 
Ive not readctje thread.

Over the years ive worked with forest holidays.

Now paul takes stills.

This is hos stills fed into ai to make some movements

Oretty nuts. And some licensing issues too!

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In a way what's going on with AI is effecting how I take photographs. People are associating my photos with AI, because they look too stock photoish.
 
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More AI skepticism from capitalists. Article from NYT: https://archive.ph/Z7U7Z

"Will A.I. Be a Bust? A Wall Street Skeptic Rings the Alarm...​

Mr. Covello, the head of stock research at Goldman Sachs, has become Wall Street’s leading A.I. skeptic. Three months ago, he jolted markets with a research paper that challenged whether businesses would see a sufficient return on what by some estimates could be $1 trillion in A.I. spending in the coming years. He said generative artificial intelligence, which can summarize text and write software code, made so many mistakes that it was questionable whether it would ever reliably solve complex problems.

The Goldman paper landed days after a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture firm, raised similar questions in a blog post about A.I. Their skepticism marked a turning point for A.I.-related stocks, leading to a reassessment of Wall Street’s hottest trade...

To create A.I. businesses, experts predicted, $1 trillion would be spent on data centers, utilities and applications. Mr. Covello thought those costs made it impossible for the industry to inexpensively solve real-world problems, which is what internet companies did decades ago.

As a member of Goldman’s working group on A.I., he reviewed a service that used generative A.I. to automatically update analysts’ spreadsheets with companies’ financial results. He said it saved his analysts about 20 minutes of time per company but cost six times as much money...

Mr. Covello challenged the notion that the costs of A.I. would decline, noting that costs have risen for some sophisticated technologies like the machines that make semiconductors. He also criticized A.I.’s capabilities.

“Overbuilding things the world doesn’t have use for, or is not ready for, typically ends badly,” he said...

Mr. Covello predicts that the A.I. boom will lose steam when the companies that are adopting the technology cut spending after their profits dip. He doesn’t think that will set off another dot-com recession..."
 
ahalpert said:
As a member of Goldman’s working group on A.I., he reviewed a service that used generative A.I. to automatically update analysts’ spreadsheets with companies’ financial results. He said it saved his analysts about 20 minutes of time per company but cost six times as much money...
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Exactly. "They" are building this stuff on the hopes of grandeur while the reality now is that all of the work product needs to be checked. It will improve but will you risk being accused of accounting fraud because you decided to let AI handling your quarterly statements?

A look back to the dot com era is interesting. Yes the internet did fulfill a lot of the promise. But, what was ushered in was this freemium or 'hidden data grab in exchange access to our product' business model. I would say this gives a lot of service but can be seen as a negative too. What is behind the curtain with AI that the companies are not telling us? They know it is expensive and we learned through the dot com days, they are not our friends either.
 
ChatGPT wrote this little jewel of a script for me. It lets my WiFi network pc's all sleep and then wakes them when one needs to access a shared network resource.

I have Resolve installed on (3) network pc's. I can share files across them, and even use them to split a rendering job and distribute it in parts so that they are all rendering at the same time, then concatenate the parts into a single file.

My newest pc has the NVIDIA RTX 4090 which renders 8K 60/fps faster than realtime but if the video makes extensive use of AI Ofx effects such as Ultra NR, then it will slow down considerably, hence leveraging all three pcs cuts the render time in 1/3rd.

Code: 
# Define the log file path
$logFile = "C:\Users\trope\Documents\logfile.tx"

# Log the start of the script
Add-Content $logFile "Script started at $(Get-Date)"

function Send-WakeOnLan {
    param (
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
        [string]$MacAddress,

        [Parameter(Mandatory = $false)]
        [string]$BroadcastAddress = "255.255.255.255",

        [Parameter(Mandatory = $false)]
        [int]$Port = 9
    )

    try {
        # Convert MAC address to byte array
        $MacAddressBytes = $MacAddress -replace '[:-]', '' -split '(?<=\G..)(?!$)' | ForEach-Object { [Convert]::ToByte($_, 16) }
        $MagicPacket = [byte[]](,0xFF * 6 + $MacAddressBytes * 16)

        # Send the magic packet
        $UdpClient = New-Object System.Net.Sockets.UdpClient
        $UdpClient.Connect($BroadcastAddress, $Port)
        [void]$UdpClient.Send($MagicPacket, $MagicPacket.Length)
        $UdpClient.Close()

        # Log the successful sending of the magic packet
        Add-Content $logFile "Magic packet sent to ${MacAddress} on ${BroadcastAddress}:${Port} at $(Get-Date)"
    } catch {
        # Log any errors encountered during the process
        Add-Content $logFile "Error: $_ at $(Get-Date)"
    }
}

# Call the function with your specific MAC address
Send-WakeOnLan -MacAddress "40-A3-CC-73-45-B5"
 
lol, I remember creating a render farm in Compressor via Ethernet back in the day, I thought I was so slick.

still took forever though, the computers were from the Ice Age
 
Bassman2003 said:
Exactly. "They" are building this stuff on the hopes of grandeur while the reality now is that all of the work product needs to be checked. It will improve but will you risk being accused of accounting fraud because you decided to let AI handling your quarterly statements?

A look back to the dot com era is interesting. Yes the internet did fulfill a lot of the promise. But, what was ushered in was this freemium or 'hidden data grab in exchange access to our product' business model. I would say this gives a lot of service but can be seen as a negative too. What is behind the curtain with AI that the companies are not telling us? They know it is expensive and we learned through the dot com days, they are not our friends either.
Click to expand...
I gravitate towards middle-of-the-road predictions. I mean, that's where most outcomes lie on the bell curve of probability, right? So what's crazy to me is the AI boosters predicting that generative AI will take over everything in short order. That is a maximalist prediction if I ever heard one.

Some of them say things like AI is already so "intelligent" that all we need to do is add GPUs to the server or add data to its dataset and it will achieve AGI (advanced general intelligence -- humanlike intelligence (in other words, actual intelligence) where it can learn new things on its own). That's such a misguided interpretation of how intelligence functions and how generative AI functions.

And obviously there is a massive financial incentive for stockholders to make predictions like that.

On the other hand, I don't think generative AI will be a total flop. And just because it isn't actually intelligent or can't handle every task doesn't mean it won't put us in specific out of work. But I'm increasingly optimistic that it won't.

It was funny -- I filmed a conference on "Art & Tech" at Christie's recently. The keynote speaker was Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple. He came in at the end of a day of predictions about how AI would take over the world. He didn't know what anyone else had said before him because he just showed up at the end. But then. he was asked about AI and he said it was artificial, for sure, but it wasn't actually intelligent. Then he waxed poetic about the nature of intelligence and why computers can't function like the human mind. Everyone in the room smiled and nodded but I could tell that his skepticism and nuance was going in one ear and out the other.
 
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