AI makes an appearance at my union meeting
I had an interesting experience this week. Not all union meetings are interesting, even if they are useful. Yesterday was a pleasant exception where it was both useful and interesting. For the first time, I witnessed AI coming up as a topic of conversation. There is no secret that people fear losing their jobs due to AI automation, and sure enough I saw proof of it to the extent that the union may consider adding some clauses around protecting jobs from AI.
How is it at your workplace? Where I work, this year I witnessed a very strong push to use AI. Messaging around using AI at town halls, messaging around using AI in team meetings, articles on the intranet site, IT events around how to craft good prompts, etc. I would not be surprised if they tied some leaders' bonuses to how much they can get their teams to use AI. This part is quite annoying to me, not to mention deceitful. If I were a leader I'd straight up tell my team about it. I am not a leader - leaders are not part of the union to begin with.
The whole thing made me also think about how my colleagues use AI. It really is a mixed bag. I see everything from the person who runs a 2-line email through AI five times to finetune every word, to myself who only reach for AI when I am stuck and it's just much faster than a search engine/forums/videos to solve my issues (for example needing a script in a programming language I am not familiar with).
I have AI fatigue but also use it constantly. I use it to work (software) because it shines there and makes me a lot faster. I use it personally to help me think of ideas, which I always feel a little guilty about.
My job definitely had the big push for AI adoption, but we're small enough that it was mostly just urging everyone to do it. Nothing specific. We're a startup, so it's practically due diligence to squeeze every new idea for value.
I'm definitely scared of losing my job to AI.
I feel guilty using it outside work, so I limit my use quite a bit.
Sucks to have that worry about AI taking your job. I hope it won't happen.
From my end, I don't think my job is threatened. There is too much work that is either an exception or needs a human touch. AI could automate a few things in my job. I guess a day may come when they may say "instead of 5 people on this team, we could make it work with 4 + AI", but I don't think it's anytime soon. Generally, even with all the AI encouragement, the organizations needs more people, not fewer.
It's being pushed very aggressively at my job (software). There's metrics on adoption and usage rates under each manager, which don't seem to be plugged into the IC performance review process but may be a part of the manager performance review.
I'm just now starting to find it useful, but it's nowhere near the panacea that the AI companies are trying to sell it as. I find the inline code completion stuff worse-than-useless (plain old LSP completion is far more useful) but command-line chats where it can edit files and run commands on my behalf are useful in limited circumstances.
My team's codebase is large and sprawling (over 300 repositories of varying size and importance) so there's a lot of cases where AI just can't understand what things are doing. When I'm doing something that has a lot of prior art (major dependency upgrades, for example), it's been relatively useful, but still requires a lot of guidance from me.
Thankfully my organization seems to be through the worst of it already.
Last year every time I went to a conference, every presenter thought they were being original and hilarious by having AI write something for them. 90% of team building exercises are still obviously AI generated. Thankfully there are only a few people who have full access for now, so I'm not saturated with AI emails and messages yet. Technically I'm pilot testing copilot integration with MS office... But I also technically haven't used it yet!
I have come to tell you it's pretty terrible. 90% of the time I ask it to do something, it can't do shit. Even when I don't ask it to perform an action and just throw a normal prompt at it, it does terribly, whereas normal copilot actually works pretty well.