Disclaimer: I don’t have any understanding when it comes to finance/economics other than what I’ve experienced/read. However, it does seem hard to argue the fact that economics/finance are so divorced from reality that they ought to be viewed the same as the national debt.
I’m sure there are others in the same boat, but I’m still having trouble getting past the absurdity and ominous nature of everything happening in the corporate world right now. Almost every single conversation is boiled down to “just ask Claude” and it’s being used to slow down existing workflows to a comical degree. Who knows maybe this will self-correct over time, but it’s certainly a choice at the moment.
I’m not trying to be a doomer I’m really not, but these people live in a different reality than you and I. I used to listen to Ed Zitron’s podcast and tuned in to any number of his appearances on other shows to sort of shield myself from all the noise that encompasses this age of tech, but I’m slowly coming to the realization that the economics/financial picture of the situation seems entirely inconsequential. I’m hoping this is just my lack of knowledge when it comes to finance/econ, but fuck if I know. Maybe this post will make me look like a dumbass in a year or so (I hope it does).
I feel like all of us in corporate are all assets in a bet from the most evil people on the planet to see if they will be able to replace huge swaths of the population with a “good enough” solution that will slowly be de-valued and phased out of the workforce akin to IT jobs in the early/mid 2010s.
This shit really blows and I feel like LLM companies are going to come out on top, primarily because Claude has proven that it can generate passable output at lightning speed and that is more than enough to please C suites.
One of the higher ups pointed ChatGPT at our GitHub and asked it to find things for us to do. They then sent us the resulting four pages of incoherent consultant speak it extruded and asked us to address the issues.
I’m pretty sure one of the reasons LLMs are catching on with bosses is because they’re used to throwing gobs of money at real people to produce this sort of work-adjacent bullshit and so the ability to automate it is an actual innovation in their minds.
The sequel to Office Space in which Lumbergh fired all of his employees, and then uses his signature passive aggressive tone to ask ChatGPT to give him stuff like TPS reports. Milton gets ready to burn it all down for a second time.
Cory Doctorow used the metaphor of a toddler sitting in the back seat with a toy steering wheel to suggest we let billionaires play with LLMs while quietly airgapping them away from anything that society actually requires to function. If management could be contented with a sycophantic algorithm churning out nonsense reports while someone who drew the short straw occasionally goes in and reassures them that their instructions are being followed, that could be the best solution.
That makes me think of the “are ya winning, son?” meme, but the son is a CEO who contributes nothing to society, and the dad periodically checks up on him to give encouragement and to see if the latest LLM is still keeping him entertained and safely away from society.
They probably wouldn’t even notice if we were sneaky enough about it!