by spwa4 | 2026-03-10 10:32:19+00:00
There is a long history of people blaming AI for not being able something totally unfair and me and I do believe quite a lot of probably somewhat older ML practitioners are seriously tired of that constantly happening. Amazon is prioritizing investment into data center expansion over paying employees. And ML ... is present in the building, and about as involved in the firings as the cleaning staff is, only people are scared of AI and so it gets blamed for everything. The firings are driven by imho misguided financial engineering, and it sure as hell is not being being done by ML.

But what is reported? Management firing people? ML. Engineering screwing up the uptime? ML. Someone screws up their job? ML.

Don't you know? ML is killing people in Iran today. Not mullahs. Not the military. ML. Obviously that's where the responsibility lies ...

Usually blaming ML is like suddenly coming up with conspiracy theories like here, or impossible suddenly added requirements, and usually utterly ridiculous ones (like criticizing Deep Blue for not being able to play poker, yes I realize I'm old, but it's a bit like criticizing the very best competition canoe on the planet for it's disappointing spaceflight capabilities)

Like here: large blast radius AI-assisted outages ... we've all written software, and we all know the problem here: THEIR TESTS SUCK. Probably because they fired all the good SREs for insisting software teams spend time on tests, or demanding integration test failures are fixed before shipping the software.

By the way: I'd like to point out that in most/all industries where jobs are lost on a large scale the situation is like the Amazon situation: ML is not even remotely involved. So while I get the criticism, it doesn't work like that. The Auto industry first got blasted with very traditional engineering, which worked and depended on very old style mathematics. What's happening in factory automation is 99.9% 3d geometry (to the point that ML, is actually a simplification of the problem). Then the auto industry got blasted with what every industry got blasted with: stuck in demand-limited markets. Every car company can easily build 10x more cars next year, but there's no point: nobody will buy them. So the only thing worth doing for these companies is to produce cheaper ... and that means getting rid of people (when end-to-end taxes on income in Europe are 60-85% and actually rising). With only a few exceptions, these companies find ML too expensive for projects.

So while I understand "we're defending our jobs", it's misguided ... the big job losses in the west have nothing to do with ML. MAYBE those are coming, but large job losses have been predicted in the last 50 AI "revolutions". 49 times that was wrong. And the actual problem is really a return to 99.9% of history: when it comes to doing what is needed to keep society going 10%, maybe even 1% of people can do it. That means you need something for the other 90% or 99% to do.

The solution is the only thing that has helped in the past: having the government put on huge public works. From building the pyramids to the Sagrada Familia (and yes, wars. But let's please not do that), or ridiculous engineering projects like Europe and America's rail networks. So fix it. I don't know: build a large cathedral in Washington or something. Hell, hire people to make sure it has a depiction of the last supper where every square micrometer of the painting was designed by an AI with 1000-member engineering team, so people can spend their entire life looking at the painting with a microscope and find new details every day. Let's do something "great", in the sense of an enormous effort. Fly 100 missions to Alpha Centauri. Fix the demand-limited issue the economy has. "Do more with more". And stop blaming ML. Hell, I'm currently in an old European city filled with 200-year old buildings. Quaint. Cool. Except ... not really. 90% of these buildings suck. Can we just rebuild 95% of ... all European capitals? Every building that is way too old and has no reason whatsoever to be preserved other than it's currently slightly cheaper ... can we please just rebuild them better? Do stuff like that.