The problem is not that Ai could replace humans; the problem is that executives think they can.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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One of the first things drilled into me in journalism was "Smith thinks" should be recast to "Smith said he thinks."
The C-suite is likely well aware of limitations, but shareholders like to hear about the hot new thing.
The thing is, the idea isn't wrong. Automating complex tasks is a bitch, but the repetitive tasks that turn any job into a grind are prime candidates. The larger issue is instead of letting employees spend more time doing fulfilling activities because of increased efficiency, companies tend to do layoffs.
the repetitive tasks that turn any job into a grind are prime candidates
The problem is, this varies from person to person. My team divvies (or did, I quit not too long ago) up tasks based on what different people enjoy doing more, and no executive would have any clue which repeating tasks are repetitive (in a derogatory way), and which ones are just us doing our job. I like doing network traffic analysis. My coworker likes container hardening. Both of those could be automated, but that would remove something we enjoy from each of our respective jobs.
A big move in recent AI company rhetoric is that AI will "do analyses", and people will "make decisions", but how on earth are you going to keep up the technical understanding needed to make a decision, without doing the analyses?
An AI saying, "I think this is malicious, what do you want to do?" isn't a real decision if the person answering can't verify or repudiate the analysis.
Perhaps I should have said "tedious" sted "repetitive."
Most jobs are by their nature repetitive, as how else does one acquire domain expertise? Seeing something for the first time and having question marks appear in a thought bubble is wildly different from having seen similar situations hundreds of times, solving the issue immediately and going about your day.
Some of these tasks are enjoyable -- I didn't get out of page design by choice, and by then I'd conservatively produced well above 10,000 pages -- but others are not. For me, the benchmark is "Am I actually using my brain to solve a problem, or is this just using time that could otherwise be spent doing so?"
The latter tasks are the ones I was referring to. No sane person buys a tablet of 2,000 Flushes and then proceeds to flush the toilet 2,000 times in rapid succession.
I nominate this comment as Quote of The Year.
So.. if Duolingo is just AI now, why would anyone pay for Duolingo? Just ask the AI for language lessons yourself.
That's a U-Turn
>claims to care deeply about its employees
>replaces some employees with bots
Duolingo is talking out of both sides of their mouth.
Crazy, given the company name!
Darn I was about to start using it to learn French. Any suggestions?
Come to france :)
My wife would not be happy if I did that
I've heard good things about Pimsleur
all language learning is just down to exposure and repetition, so just consume as much french media as you can and get some flashcard app to memorize vocabulary.