I feel much much smaller version of it already happened. Many many customer facing processes in companies (from customer support to lost & found departments) almost all automated to a point if you are outside of the norm you are screwed. Time you are going to spent is higher than the value you are going to get most of the time.

For the very same reason these companies are very anti-diversity. Because everything designed for a majority of you are minority in terms of your style of living (which many minorities are) then you are going to struggle, happens to me all the time, and one of the reasons I actually moved out of the US to country that I feel more included).

For many companies, even those breathlessly professing DEI, it boils down to “you can be any color you want as long as you operate exactly as our computers and processes expect you to. Any deviation will be harshly dealt with.”

This is why I keep spreading the word, at every opportunity, that people need to stop looking at their phones as their primary choice of personal entertainment devices. No. There's now a societal need to have a particular device that serves a particular purpose using particular software, all of which attached to a phone number. You need it for the same reason you need a Dress or Suit for an interview. Putting your real self in that device is a mistake, for the same reason that Not-Acting-Like-Yourself when you're demanded to be in a Dress or Suit is rule #1 of being an Adult.

Which means you need a 2nd phone. The Real Phone where you do shit you like, and the "Performative Person" Shit-Phone you use at work, install the bank and show the cops.

Society demands you operate in one particular way, and it's way easier to pretend you do and then not touching this pretense unless strictly necessary. Yes, it may seem unfair to have to spend 72 bucks on a second phone. But it was unfair to spend those same dollars on a Dress or Suit and no one came to my side despite all the complaining.

You may be even enlightened enough to realize the real phone doesn't even have to be a phone. Few already have, and their numbers grow.

This is already happening. Most companies are using AI screeners for hiring now. They reject qualified people all the time.

Have you ever successfully appealed a failed HR screen?

IME the reality of the modern world that there's little genuine appeal or reconsideration anymore. There is some sort of process but it's Byzantine and if we're talking the government, expensive.

I guess everyone has had different lives but between humans and algorithms I take the algorithm every time.

What I'm saying is that pre-AI, at least a human would skim it, and maybe see something that caught their eye that wasn't on the keywords list. Or if it were an internal referral that used to guarantee at least a call with a recruiter or HM.

I'd still trust ChatGPT over the median recruiter.

And ChatGPT has the benefit of being able to do 10-100x as many screens as with a human. Even if it's grossly wrong half the time I'm ahead on volume.

I don't think humans would skim stuff... Frankly I've always used a tool that preskimmed resumes. Even before AI. You can't expect a HR person getting 10k resumes a day to skim everyone or even look at 10% of them. Even 20+ years ago 80% of resumes went right into the trash bin before I even opening it.

Having been through an hiring cycle recently and prior to AI, the entire process has been pretty broken for a long time, but AI is definitely breaking it (and a whole lot of other things) in new and novel ways.

The only reliable and high quality signal is a positive referral, but those are gated by your personal network, which may not be well developed.

> The only reliable and high quality signal is a positive referral, but those are gated by your personal network

That has pretty much always been the case, but what I've seen lately is even the referrals get put into the AI and then rejected before they're even looked at.

Time for hidden prompt injections in cv?

This is how the surveillance state has operated (especially internationally) for quite some time, before AI even hit.

AI arguably gives the best opportunity for fully-audited public institutions where no decision is made outside of agreed-upon laws and the context of the crime can be fully explored without scarcity of time and legal resources.

As always, technology's morality comes down to who owns it and how they use it.

It speaks to changes here that this is so upvoted. Several years ago, I wrote something very similar. It was downvoted into oblivion.

What is old made new. Franz Kafka passed away June 2nd 1924.

Is it wrong? Individuals were absolutely getting dehumanized in Kafka's time, but also since then are becoming ever increasingly more so, so it makes sense to speak of it continuing to happen and get worse. It is not binary.

"Individuals were absolutely getting dehumanized ... since then are becoming ever increasingly more so" - do you mind backing this up? I and everyone I know has it a whole lot easier than a couple generations prior.

I don't know a single person working the fields, doing dangerous work in a factory, working a coal mine, etc. Of course, I am fortunate enough to be in this position.

Power is continuing to squeeze people as much as it can, and life is very unaffordable and getting worse for most, but I think we still have it a whole lot better than a century ago (by and large).

You may be talking past each other. You're talking mostly about quality of life. That is different from being (de)humanized.

Dehumanizing is treating other humans as not, or not fully, human. For example, the term "human resources" is dehumanizing because it puts humans on the same level as other resources. If you're treating humans like you'd treat, I don't know, lithium or the ocean, you're dehumanizing them.

The more humans are treated as numbers on spreadsheets and other forms of computation, the more humans are dehumanized.

So both can be true: we're more dehumanized than in 1900, but while that does impact quality of life negatively, the overall quality of life may still be better than back then.

The question should be whether and how we can have both: overall quality of life without being dehumanized.

Agreed - treating humans as "human resources" is dehumanizing. And the most extreme is treating them as resources to be exhausted and discarded. That is exactly how coal miners or even laundry washers were treated in the past. You literally worked yourself into an early grave. That's a fate far worse than some HR lady treating you like a number - at least you're still alive.

Fundamentally it's up to you to find people that respect you (employers, friends, partners), and to find reward and meaning in your life. BigCorp is always going to treat you like disposable shit, and that's nothing new.

I think the quality of life would depend a lot on where you lived. Working a farm? Hard but rewarding (I presume). Nobility? Probably very nice. Working a dangerous machine in a sweaty factory? Probably pretty shitty - as evidenced by the fact that many people fought and died to improve their working conditions.

Certainly tech seems to be on a mission to try to ruin people's lives, addicting them and stealing their attention and drive. This is true, but also pretty easy to avoid once to see the game.

I'm saying that we ought to try to keep a sense of perspective here. Yes, you may be treated as an automaton or a number on a spreadsheet. But on average, you are probably in a much better position than most people through the last few hundred years.

Being better off materially yet more “dehumanized” are not mutually exclusive.

Social bonds and connections are integral to human flourishing yet are rapidly degrading and being replaced by digital pacifiers.

Being human is not equivalent to having money.

> but I think we still have it a whole lot better than a century ago (by and large).

Worse, they won't even give you the dignity of a claim to contribution to society. Then the lack of contribution is weaponized against you.

It's also not a bad thing to keep pointing out something that is wrong if it keeps happening. The alternative is just silently deciding to accept it as normal and fine, which is clearly worse!

But the technology that outputs decisions can also output reasoning that justifies such decisions.

When a judge or a jury outputs a decision THEY are also a black box and you can only evaluate said decisions on reasoning THEY also output.

I’m not taking a side here. I’m just saying this reasoning is flawed.

It’s a black box in the sense that we know the process used by LLMs to “reason” is very different than how humans reason and make decisions.

The whole point of “jury of your peers” is that your guilt or innocence is being decided by people with common life experience to you and thus the possibility of empathy and judging you fairly.

We only know it’s different. But we don’t know how it reasons or how humans reason. Just because it is different doesn’t make his black box argument valid. It remains invalid despite your new irrelevant point.

Ignore the fluff. Focus on the logic and stay rational. The black box argument is not at all valid.

We know other humans reason something like us because we know how we ourselves reason through the most direct experience possible and know that our fellow humans are very similar to us.

We know the LLM can be similar because we train it on data from us as well. We also know the LLM can be different, but we also know humans are different too.

Examples like psychopaths tells us how different humans can be. It’s all black boxes.

This is dumb.

The way a psychopath’s brain works will be far more similar to another human brain than an LLM will.

No, your reasoning is flawed: a judge or a jury is voted, appointed or selected through a process which is the result of centuries civilization, norms and legislation. As corrupt it might be in some cases, it is expression of mankind.

They are not a black box, they passed rigourous examinations and they stick to principles enshrined in constitutions and laws.

Technology, or better, the productization of it, is instead the result of the interest of very few powerful individuals or corporations and aggressive product market fit iterations.

The bullish discourse around the PMF loop says that this is good because it is better at solving people's problems. But after a few decades it is obvious there's a gigantic risk the process actually exploits people's problems instead of actually solving them.

The system doesn't stick to principles enshrined in the constitution and law. Often or usually it does. Certainly not always. Theoretically there are other humans to force them to when they stray but that's gated behind 10s of thousands to appeal and is up against a system designed first to protect itself.

It also ignores the reality of going to a jury. Yes you have the right to trial by jury. But the price to exercise that right is to risk an much much more severe punishment, a lot of money, and a lot of time.

There's also tremendous upside here. Think getting a letter from your landlord withholding $2,000. Upload it to JudgeGPT for your jurisdiction and instantaneously find out it's legal.

Your argument is just additional validations upon a stated fact that a jury and a judge is still a black box. Your retort is factual but illogical because it does not invalidate my point.

All humans are black boxes and the black box argument is completely invalid just like your statement. In fact your statement illustrates the downfall of human intuition. You could not logically invalidate my point so you descended into side channels that’s not far off from “hallucinations.”

Judges and juries are expressions of society and accountable to it. They're not a black box.

Late-stage capitalist tech products left unchecked exploit human problems for profit.

If you cannot see the difference and the flaw in your argument I am afraid you're too far gone.

Unless you can read minds they are a black box. They are only expressions of society because the inputs and outputs into these people are from society and similar to society. But the same can be said of LLMs. Your reasoning is irrational.

I don't have to agree with everything someone says to agree with one of the points someone is making. This point happens to be a good one, independent on my views of anything else that he (or his organization) might say

His words on this topic make a hell of a lot more sense than any of the people running technology companies. And many politicians, too.

AI has nothing to do with technology, the questions are 100% psychological not technological. It's fundamental shifts in deep degrees of how humans have worked for centuries. Most of which the church has been the centre of.