People who are vehemently against any form of blockchain technology will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth. Blockchain is a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that blockchain has none, **you will be left behind**. You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use blockchain or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt. If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use blockchain now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may *removed* and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group. I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate blockchain myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.
Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!
Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?
Sure, if you’re trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that’s a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.
I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using “AI” in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about “Project ABC” into a new Outlook folder called, “Project ABC” or asking a chatbot to, “draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site.”
It’s not the next industrial revolution, it’s not the beginning of the Singularity, it’s not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people’s critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.
Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.
Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.
If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.
Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.
Writing an appropriate prompt is a skill. Many (most?) people using LLMs aren’t using prompts that give them what they actually want, in many cases because they don’t understand the thing they’re trying to ask for, but also in many cases because they don’t know how to ask for it while avoiding the many possible pitfalls that come with uncareful prompts (including, but not limited to, hallucination and bias).
Personally I haven’t bothered learning that skill yet, largely because I don’t want that crap shoved in my face all the damned time, and have little use for it anyway. But it’s still a skill.
It’s really not for most people. You ask a question, the LLM answers. You ask it to do a task, it does it. Most people are not using these things for anything advanced or technically difficult.
I work in a big corporate office, if you exclude the IT staff and software devs, here’s a pretty exhaustive list of what everybody else is using LLMs for:
Organizing emails.
Drafting memos and auto-responses in Teams.
Organizing cluttered files.
Adding “artwork” to company fliers.
Doing web searches.
Summarizing emails and Teams messages and creating to-do lists from them.
Searching large documents for key terms.
It’s grunt work, that’s what these things excel at, and that’s how most people use them. That’s fine, but acting like most people are somehow not able to unlock the “true potential” of these LLMs unless they have special training and skills is a marketing ploy to sell overpriced “AI” courses to gullible and ignorant executives and upper managers.
It’s like those stupid DEI courses that corporations have everybody take so they can “learn to not be problematic.” But all the quizzes are filled with stupid stuff like:
Your manager, Sarah finishes briefing you and your coworker, Phil on an upcoming project. After she leaves, Phil says to you, “That Sarah sure is a real juicy piece of meat, I’d love to get taste of her!” What should you do? A. High-five Phil and tell him you call dibs on her secretary.
B. Tell Phil that his comment was not appropriate, then report it to HR.
It’s just there to check boxes for compliance and provide an excuse for other companies to charge outrageous prices to tell people that sexually assaulting your coworkers or pulling your eyelids tight and calling yourself “Ching Chong” isn’t appropriate office behavior.
It’s another way Capitalism poisons and hollows out substantive discussions about topics like systemic racism, multiculturalism, and gender relationships, in favor of standardized quizzes that cost thousands of dollars a year to administer.
The amount of “AI consultants” and “AI integration” firms that have popped up overnight is staggering. Just like with the crypto/blockchain craze a few years ago, everybody is trying to get rich quick off the hype.
Good point. I probably should have stated “using LLMs for technical tasks that anyone cares about the results of”.
I’m not going to claim LLMs are trustworthy, but I am saying that there are ways to ask things that either reduce the odds of it giving you false things or actively cause it to provide wrong answers with misstated or hallucinated context. People who know what they’re doing can get better results out of them. This doesn’t stop them from being the equivalent of a nepo-hire intern, but it could be said to change whether they’re a malicious, apathetic, or semi-eager nepo-hire intern.
And one of the big risks with LLMs is staff who can recognise bullshit or questionable results being replaced with staff who unquestioningly accept whatever results they get. And people reading an “AI summary” of something and assuming it’s actually accurate.
People who know what they’re doing can get better results out of them.
I don’t think that’s true in the way you appear to mean (sorry if I misunderstood). People who are already experts on the subject matter might be able to use better keywords and discard hallucinatory material quicker, but I don’t believe that you can generically “be good at prompting” outside of an area where you have substantial domain knowledge.
And the only way to learn to recognise bullshit involves not using LLMs or other automated tools and working problems out for yourself, not to mention that they’re an “intern” who actually costs the same in computing power as two senior engineers’ salary.
I don’t think that’s true in the way you appear to mean (sorry if I misunderstood). People who are already experts on the subject matter might be able to use better keywords and discard hallucinatory material quicker, but I don’t believe that you can generically “be good at prompting” outside of an area where you have substantial domain knowledge.
There are ways of phrasing LLM requests that can actively induce them to give you made-up bullshit that confirms your pre-existing assumptions. Which is fine if that’s what you want it to produce, but often not what people actually want. For (possibly poor, given I don’t actually use LLMs) example “give me the transcripts for five court cases for assault with a deadly fish” would likely result in five-ish almost-certainly made-up court transcripts. Someone who knows what they’re doing could phrase the prompt to be more likely to say that no such cases exist (assuming no such cases actually exist) instead of just hallucinating them as per the request.
And you might be right about domain knowledge being required for good prompting. But it’s possible to have domain knowledge and still be terrible at asking for what you actually want it to produce.
not to mention that they’re an “intern” who actually costs the same in computing power as two senior engineers’ salary.
Don’t expect me to defend the moronic economic decisions of companies that have jumped on this stupid band-wagon without regard for the actual value (or lack thereof) to their business.
Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!
Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?
Sure, if you’re trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that’s a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.
I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using “AI” in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about “Project ABC” into a new Outlook folder called, “Project ABC” or asking a chatbot to, “draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site.”
It’s not the next industrial revolution, it’s not the beginning of the Singularity, it’s not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people’s critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.
So what you’re saying is that Linus Torvalds is only a mid-tier programmer?
Has Linus been screeching about how everybody must use AI or get left behind?
i’m not learning any skills… i’m offloading some work on to AI so that i can do other stuff on company time…
Isn’t that what we should all aspire to? To destroy capitalism from the inside?
Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.
Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.
If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.
Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.
Yeah, i’m not an idiot… i’ve already considered all those points about the downsides of using AI at work … like you said… play the game
How do you know i"m not using my free time at work to do exactly that?
you made a lot of assumptions about people who use AI at work …
Eh, more like generalizations based on observations of my own, and many other corporate workplaces that people I am close to, work in.
Writing an appropriate prompt is a skill. Many (most?) people using LLMs aren’t using prompts that give them what they actually want, in many cases because they don’t understand the thing they’re trying to ask for, but also in many cases because they don’t know how to ask for it while avoiding the many possible pitfalls that come with uncareful prompts (including, but not limited to, hallucination and bias).
Personally I haven’t bothered learning that skill yet, largely because I don’t want that crap shoved in my face all the damned time, and have little use for it anyway. But it’s still a skill.
It’s really not for most people. You ask a question, the LLM answers. You ask it to do a task, it does it. Most people are not using these things for anything advanced or technically difficult.
I work in a big corporate office, if you exclude the IT staff and software devs, here’s a pretty exhaustive list of what everybody else is using LLMs for:
It’s grunt work, that’s what these things excel at, and that’s how most people use them. That’s fine, but acting like most people are somehow not able to unlock the “true potential” of these LLMs unless they have special training and skills is a marketing ploy to sell overpriced “AI” courses to gullible and ignorant executives and upper managers.
It’s like those stupid DEI courses that corporations have everybody take so they can “learn to not be problematic.” But all the quizzes are filled with stupid stuff like:
Your manager, Sarah finishes briefing you and your coworker, Phil on an upcoming project. After she leaves, Phil says to you, “That Sarah sure is a real juicy piece of meat, I’d love to get taste of her!” What should you do? A. High-five Phil and tell him you call dibs on her secretary. B. Tell Phil that his comment was not appropriate, then report it to HR.
It’s just there to check boxes for compliance and provide an excuse for other companies to charge outrageous prices to tell people that sexually assaulting your coworkers or pulling your eyelids tight and calling yourself “Ching Chong” isn’t appropriate office behavior.
It’s another way Capitalism poisons and hollows out substantive discussions about topics like systemic racism, multiculturalism, and gender relationships, in favor of standardized quizzes that cost thousands of dollars a year to administer.
The amount of “AI consultants” and “AI integration” firms that have popped up overnight is staggering. Just like with the crypto/blockchain craze a few years ago, everybody is trying to get rich quick off the hype.
Good point. I probably should have stated “using LLMs for technical tasks that anyone cares about the results of”.
I’m not going to claim LLMs are trustworthy, but I am saying that there are ways to ask things that either reduce the odds of it giving you false things or actively cause it to provide wrong answers with misstated or hallucinated context. People who know what they’re doing can get better results out of them. This doesn’t stop them from being the equivalent of a nepo-hire intern, but it could be said to change whether they’re a malicious, apathetic, or semi-eager nepo-hire intern.
And one of the big risks with LLMs is staff who can recognise bullshit or questionable results being replaced with staff who unquestioningly accept whatever results they get. And people reading an “AI summary” of something and assuming it’s actually accurate.
I don’t think that’s true in the way you appear to mean (sorry if I misunderstood). People who are already experts on the subject matter might be able to use better keywords and discard hallucinatory material quicker, but I don’t believe that you can generically “be good at prompting” outside of an area where you have substantial domain knowledge.
And the only way to learn to recognise bullshit involves not using LLMs or other automated tools and working problems out for yourself, not to mention that they’re an “intern” who actually costs the same in computing power as two senior engineers’ salary.
There are ways of phrasing LLM requests that can actively induce them to give you made-up bullshit that confirms your pre-existing assumptions. Which is fine if that’s what you want it to produce, but often not what people actually want. For (possibly poor, given I don’t actually use LLMs) example “give me the transcripts for five court cases for assault with a deadly fish” would likely result in five-ish almost-certainly made-up court transcripts. Someone who knows what they’re doing could phrase the prompt to be more likely to say that no such cases exist (assuming no such cases actually exist) instead of just hallucinating them as per the request.
And you might be right about domain knowledge being required for good prompting. But it’s possible to have domain knowledge and still be terrible at asking for what you actually want it to produce.
Don’t expect me to defend the moronic economic decisions of companies that have jumped on this stupid band-wagon without regard for the actual value (or lack thereof) to their business.