To think Morrisons should be boycotted over their AI adoption?

[RobynRB]

Today Morrisons announced 200 head office redundancies due to AI adoption. I say we should boycott them as a warning to other supermarkets and companies not to go down this route. I know we are told this is inevitable and everyone just seems to be rolling over and let it happen, but we should at least try and the only weapon we really have is voting with our pounds (while we still have them).
Because honestly if you believe that we're all going to be sitting around spending free money while AI does all the work you need your head looking at.

Tech improves, basic jobs become redundant. It's on people to upskill to stay employable. I certainly won't boycott a company for making a rational commercial decision.

I always felt Morrisons was the supermarket of nobody's choice. I think most people would only use it if it was on their doorstep and others were miles away. If there was a mozza alongside a branch of the other five big shops then nobody would choose to exclusively use it.

So yeah I'll happily boycott it.

I keep thinking about all the instances where workers using/being replaced by AI have made massive fuck-ups. Like the lawyers who use AI-produced evidence which includes fabricated information and mess up their cases. The police who banned those Israeli supporters based on a fake incident given to them by AI. Amazon sacked a bunch of workers last year, replaced them with AI and then the AI fucked up and their servers went down.

AI makes horrendous mistakes. We know it does. We know that making mistakes can't be programmed out of it. So it seems like a massive error to be handing over all these jobs to it.

This isn't Luddite thinking and fear of progress, this is genuine concern that 'progress' is actually deliberately introducing random but severe incompetence into vital systems.

@noblegiraffe absolutely this. Humans make mistakes, but the key difference is they can also be held to account for them.

Ironically you are completely wrong about what Knut was trying to achieve

Ironically you are completely incorrect to attempt to use the word ironically here. He was trying to hold back the tide. He drowned. The end.

Did AI tell you that?

Unless you're prepared to eventually boycott a huge percentage of companies, it's pointless.

We should boycott Waitrose for their shitty HR practices.

I think Morrisons, who have been teetering on the brink for years, will be just the beginning.

Worrying.

It won’t be long before the AI systems there take over the dalek compost bin hoovers they have in stores. They may become hostile.

wrong

troll :)

Buhbye 😘

Sorry but the train has very, very much left the station.

As a starter you'd need to change bank accounts and maybe... stash your money under your bed (as there are no non-AI banks now). Banks were the first adopters of AI and it's throughout the entire banking industry, doing calculations of how much you owe, making calculations on trades - everything. All of them have made redundancies of people who once would have done these types of calculations manually or written the codes and algorithms that control transactions. These are done by AI now.

You'd need to stop using your computer. Stop using social media, WhatsApp, any system - most source code is now written by AI robots. All tech firms are re-sizing and reducing their engineering workforce as so much can be done by AI now.

Don't take medicine. The pharmaceutical industry is a huge adopter of AI which is massive in terms of accelerating the development of new drugs.

Every company that operates needs to be audited. And all the auditors use AI - the big 4 have also announced huge redundancies and their grad programs have more or less ground to a halt. Once upon a time we used to have generations of trainee accountants going and writing company statements... now done by AI. All AI.

The only thing we can do is push the government to legislate and plan for what everyone does now given this has happened, much as the printing press put a generation of scribes and illustrators out of work but on a much bigger scale.

Or we could just go back to our own hunting and gathering.

It's actually pretty easy to put some basic controls into AI systems to stop them hallucinating. The examples you cite are where people are using the free download-on-your-mobile type versions.

Every bank now uses proper, tested, enterprise-grade AI for major decision making. Every accountancy firm. Every law firm. You're hearing about rookie errors - the reality is the proper professional versions of these systems have a close to zero error rate. Wayyyy better than humans.

I know it sucks for the humans! But this is just facts I'm stating, not my opinion.

In your field.

I can assure you that is not the case for many, many fields, where already huge impact is being made. Check out the impact on accountancy for example, or tax advisory. Previously solid, white-collar, lifetime jobs. Now hugely shrinking industry.

Of course YABU. These jobs aren't needed now. Who Morrisons choose to hire or fire is there business. If it makes the goods cheaper, I'm all for that.

There is a question about what we, or the government could or should do about the inevitable economic shift.

The obvious one would be to train people to do the stuff AI can't. We'll always need roles like civil engineers, nurses, doctors, people to look after relationships, artists, creators, people to build things. We've spent many years training kids to be good at following instructions and we need them to be able to think creatively.

The other is our tax system will need an overhaul. What AI is doing is putting a lot of money in the hands of very few people and very few companies. So where once we had a valuable company like, say, General Electric - where they had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of employees. Now we have a company like Palantir, making many times what GE ever made, and with only a few thousand employees and vast profits going into the pockets of shareholders.

So we need to think about how we tax these companies and also what we do about shareholding and getting UK taxpayers invested into this wealth so we can get a slice of the profits.

These are all problems for government.

Legislating to stop or hold back AI won't work and would make the UK uncompetitive globally.

I think it's inevitable that many companies will replace humans with AI whenever they can. I hate having to communicate with a chat bot instead of a real person. You only have to look at co pilot to see how AI can crunch numbers much more efficiently than a human can put them through spreadsheets and doesn't need a human to interpret them.

The "evil" shareholders. You do realise your pension is invested in shares. You can go buy some shares as well. And yeah they own the company

The chatbots will get better. There are pilots out there for bots which are indiscernible from an actual human and better in the sense that they won't get bored, they are infinitely patient and polite. You'll be able to select what accent you want them to have, whether you want to speak to a male or female persona. It's just a matter of a few years.

Do you shop at supermarkets or independent traders?

As a tax advisor, I’m not sure it is actually shrinking. I think it will, but we are recruiting heavily, struggling to find candidate, busier than ever and there are huge recruitment drives at AI backed new start up firms…

Nah i like Morrisons:

-They are one of very few places I can find trousers slim enough for my kids

-They have the little kiddy shopping trolleys

Nope, complete elimination of hallucinations is mathematically impossible.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4059383/openai-admits-ai-hallucinations-are-mathematically-inevitable-not-just-engineering-flaws.html#:~:text=In%20a%20landmark%20study%2C%20OpenAI,fundamental%20statistical%20and%20computational%20limits.&text=OpenAI%2C%20the%20creator%20of%20ChatGPT,when%20trained%20on%20perfect%20data.