There were already too few people for the tasks before this round of layoffs. The working order has been "do more with less, use AI" for over a year.
Every MS FTE whom I knew enough to have that kind of conversation with was stretched thin to the breaking point. Now half their team is gone, and the show must go on apparently. It does not seem viable to me, not even with AI.
Finally! A friend was an in-house reseacher at some car manufacturer, whose job is to usability tests car prototypes, including in real traffic.
She was telling me about one study in particular to try a new touch screen built behind the handbrake, pretty much at 5 o'clock behind the driver. I'm sure she's not the only one sharing usability reports about how dangerous touchscreens are while driving, but marketing needed to advertise one more screen than the competition... This was 5 years ago. Took them a while to pivot, but i guess better late than never.
There is a local taxicab provider here which uses a liveried fleet. All their cars have a customer-facing touchscreen mounted on the rear of the front passenger seat.
You would not believe the number of drivers who attempt to tamper directly with this screen, from their own seat, including while the vehicle is in operation. I have, at least once, terminated a ride early because of how unsafely the driver acted. There is never any reason for them to be interfering with a passenger control.
But drivers gonna drive, and more than a few are simply control freaks.
anecdata n=1: LLMs lack understanding of context, stakeholder sensitivities and nuance in word usage, to write reports with the required depth and at the quality bar I need. Maybe it is faster at generating BS reports with no substance, but I can still write my reports much better and much faster than LLMs so far, probably because the reports are merely the artefact of solving a complex problem.
Easier said than done these days. We had a coop managing out drinking water with local government support. Being a coop excluded them from grants and eventually the board burnt out and gave up. Local government now operates the thing - you'd think they'd be accountable to voters but they can only get grant money with strings attached. They can repair a few pipes only if they install chlorination that no one wants and will add more maintenance costs because of pressure from health and safety - the provider must guarantee water is safe at the end point so boiling water, which everyone does here, is no longer acceptable apparently. There isn't a big enough population that increasing the cost of water would make a difference.
All that to say, voters here do care about utilities, and the coop solution worked for about 25 years iirc but it can't work in today's "one solution fits all" regulatory context anymore, at least where i live. Things are far from that simple in practice.
> The field of AI research has a reputation for disregarding the value of other fields [...] It’s likely that, being unaware of much of the research in psychology on cognitive biases or how a psychic’s con works
Is the reputation warranted? Just a US thing? Or maybe the question is "since when did this change"? because in the mid 2000s in france at least, llm research was led by cognitive psychology professors who dabble in programming or had partnerships with a nearby technical university.
I am not based in the US, nor in France, so I can't say what the situation is there. I was only pointing out that quote to GP.
My experience isn't much, since I am neither doing AI nor cognitive science but I have seen cognitive scientists do cool stuff with AI as a means to study cognitive science, and I have seen CS researchers involving themselves into the world of AI with varying success.
I would not be as emphatic as the author of the article but I would say that a good portion of AI research lost the focus on what is intelligence and instead just aimed at getting computers to perform various tasks. Which is completely fine until these researchers start claiming that they have produced intelligent machines (a manifestation of the Dunning Kruger effect).
oh interesting, how do you define older here though?
I'm a bit skeptical because i read a similar comment about answering calls immediately vs. letting it go to the answering machine already being such a divide.
Makes me feel old for thinking anyone offended by my taking hours if not days to respond to a non urgent text is welcome to go be someone else's friend.
I don't think I'd handle a wearing a watch anymore, smart or not.
For waking up, something not technological but working 99% of the time for me: pets (or kids) though you'd want other reasons as well to have those beyond waking you up early in the morning...
Most of my life I've had cats or dogs and their internal clock is amazingly on time. They are actually smart and try different things if you don't wake up at first, adapting to their owner. They include waking mechanisms such as sound, touch, light pain, emotional rewards and possibly guilt tripping/punishment to keep you accountable if you fail to wake up. Birds can work too but I wouldn't recommend keeping a rooster in your bedroom for an alarm unless you're blaring-alarms-levels of hard to wake up and don't have neighbours or a partner, these guys don't have an indoor voice.
Point is you're then forced to care for the pet, wether it wakes you to go out, get food or get cuddles and bob's your uncle: your chances of picking up your phone and doomscrolling first thing in the morning are much lowered.
The opposite can also be true, you know it is a bad work situation and you are going to burn out but you can't afford to leave. Not that you want to stay, you don't even want that promotion anymore but that you can't go elsewhere. Besides, if alternative employers are equally bad anyway, you may as well burn out in a familiar place and not take on the extra stress of onboarding in a new role.
I burn out at a 6 figures flexible job, while my friends burn out at minimum wage jobs where they have to report bathroom breaks by the minute. How can I complain about my burnout-inducing work conditions?
