Why AI Won't Just Take Your Job — It'll Take Your Boss Too

Jeremy Grater: And we should be recording. Okay, looks good. All right. Welcome to Brobots This is the podcast that tries to help you be a better human by being smarter about how you use technology. ⁓ I have not used a lot of technology for the last couple weeks being away on vacation from my job where I'm employed by actual humans. But it turns out there's a growing trend of folks who might be interested in working for robots if it came down to it. ⁓ I found this ⁓ story ⁓ the other day looking just, you know, reading the news and ⁓ interesting number, fifteen percent of people say they would be cool with having their boss be replaced by an AI ⁓ agent, robot of some sort that automates their tasks and does all the things for them, telling them what to do. Jason, you you've you've been all the hats. I've I've mostly been a single contributor most of my career, spent some time in management, but your thoughts on having your your manager replaced by a robot?

Jason Haworth: Yeah. Well, so I like my boss. ⁓ at the place where I'm currently at.

Jeremy Grater: I I should say we both very much enjoy working for our very human, very compassionate, very amazing bosses.

Jason Haworth: Our respective employers that have nothing to do with the show and have nothing to do with the opinions expressed on this show, blah blah blah.

Jeremy Grater: But they have everything to do with signing our paycheck. So we very much approve of our human managers.

Jason Haworth: Yes, hundred percent. so the the thing is, is that whether you like it or not, in most industries, what your boss does, says or influences is probably already being influenced by AI and automation in some way, anyways. So that's our reality. And as technology grows and evolves, more and more of your tasks are probably gonna be ⁓ Determined and doled out to you by an AI, anyways. And there might be a human arbiter in the middle, like saying, do this, and trying to hold you to account to some other thing holding it to account. But when it really comes down to is ⁓ I think most people have less of an issue working for a robot because they think that they can ⁓ feel less manipulated, less controlled, less boxed in. No one's trying to sell them on something. Like the robots, like very straightforward. But I hate to break it to everybody. They're gonna make these boss robots more like humans than probably humans actually are. And they're gonna have fewer tricks around them. And you'll be able to trick them and do prompt engineering and get them to do things they shouldn't do they shouldn't do. But I mean, fuck, man. I mean, let's let's be real. ⁓ most people go to work and get a paycheck. And whether that paycheck gets signed by

Jeremy Grater: No. No, I mean

Jason Haworth: Someone piloting a meat suit or signed by some digital printer, nobody gives a fuck. Like, pay me, these are the things I'm gonna do. I'm gonna fulfill my obligation, give me some money. And I think most people are actually more worried that their function will be replaced. So I guess if people are clamoring for artificial intelligence bosses, then maybe bosses should be concerned. But I don't think anybody's really clamoring for one. I think most people are just like, I don't care if this happens. Because they don't see their boss's function as being something that's entirely human anyways.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah, I mean we're talking about again. Yeah, the the number in this study, fifteen percent of people saying they're open to it, right? So it's not like there are people going, Yes, please replace my boss with a robot. I've had plenty of bosses I would like to have replaced by robots, but I've also had plenty of bosses who basically acted like robots anyways, right? Like whatever the policy is, that's the policy. There is there is no way to work around the rules that are written in this book that were written six years ago that nobody's read ever since. Like

Jason Haworth: Right. Right.

Jeremy Grater: I think everyone wants a boss who's compassionate, that treats them like a human being, that sees the effort that they put in, that sees their shortcomings and helps them work their way around it. ⁓ you know, and and robots will have a way to do that to some degree. So I d I don't I mean, I think in the end it it comes down to like you said, most people aren't gonna care as long as the paycheck gets signed, they get opportunities to advance, they get opportunities to make more money. And if and if the way to get there is through automation and replacing some of our middle managers with AI. I think the middle managers are the ones that are gonna be upset about it.

Jason Haworth: Well, and then there's the other side of this. Like, bosses are looking to replace you with artificial intelligence. And I think employers are looking to replace all of you. So just to be clear, ⁓ the value that you bring to whatever company you're working for is the function that they hired you for. And then all the other extraneous bits and pieces out there that you do and provide and help with them, most of them see it as a nice to have.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah.

Jason Haworth: Because they're not really aware of how many other pieces go into this into this thing that you do. But if there's a robot out there that can do this thing that you do that provides the need and does it for less pay and it's easier to work with and it's more consistent work, whatever it is, they're gonna go with that. And, you know, we've already shown that we're willing to outsource in North America to other countries. We outsourced ⁓ Asia all the time, right? We pushed all our manufacturing over there. Call centers, like The whole bit like software engineering now is it like all that a bunch of that went to India and China. And now they're gonna outsource again to robots. So I mean, this is this is an old playbook, an old pattern. We've seen it happen before. And you've also seen people re in source things back in when they say, ⁓ this has gone too far. And you're seeing it with AI right now. You're seeing a lot of companies go, All right, we shouldn't have gotten rid of those roles. We gotta hire those people back. We gotta find some way to make these pieces work.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah.

Jason Haworth: But the idea is that AI should be making us more productive. And the problem is who do you consider us? Because the people that run most large corporations don't consider us little folk as us. They consider us a tool in their arsenal to be able to go through and accomplish their goals. And I'm not saying that, you know, corporations are.

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm. Right. We're we're also not not saying that.

Jason Haworth: Big monolithic overlords that are uncaring and don't care about you. I don't have to say that. There's plenty of articles out there that you can read that, and there's plenty of places that will go and tell you that bit of information. Right. Like I right. Like, I mean, the manosphere will tell you you're being red pilled for blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever reason. But I mean, no, like we all fucking know this, right? Like, we know that we are here to serve a function, and when we can no longer serve that function, we're gonna get obsolete and

Jeremy Grater: All right. All right.

Jason Haworth: kicked on the fucking wood pile or thrown in the wood chipper, whatever the fuck you want to call it. Like that's gonna happen. Be prepared for that. And also be prepared for the fact that other jobs will probably be available to you and there will be other things for you to do, like being a robot delivery person where you can deliver things to your robot overlord and your robot boss, your former, sorry, former robot boss who is now in charge of the company who actually, you know, decided they need DoorDash for some fucking reason or

Jeremy Grater: Right.

Jason Haworth: Some postmates to go through it to deliver more 3D printer ink. I don't fucking know. But something. And and this is this is this is the part that's scary. It's like we used to have a system where you could go in and you could work for 25 years and you could retire and you get a nice watch and you get a pension plan. Okay, well, the 80s stripped that away. So that went away. Unions started getting busted up in the 90s, jobs became much more difficult. You still had like

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jason Haworth: Fed jobs and state level jobs you could do these things with, but they paid like shit. And everyone tried to go after bigger money. And when they tried to go after bigger money, they weren't saving things and putting things aside because expenses were going up. Things were getting more expensive. Cost of living was increasing. Insurance cost a trillion friggin' dollars. Like there's all these pieces that were going into play. And the idea that you could go through and just pick up new skill sets and do something different and have a retirement plan. That's gone away that that went away a long time ago. Now you've got this whole group of kids growing up, like, I don't believe in social security. Well, okay. I you're still getting taxed for it, but you know, sure. I don't believe in the medical system the way that it's set up. So, okay, well, how are you gonna get medical insurance? I'm just gonna go rush into the ER. And like all that's it's this whole machination of all these different composed ⁓ all these different pieces that have been put in play. on society to force people down a certain path to get them to do certain things because it makes things good for employers. And it would be one thing if this was just the US doing this. Like other countries do this too. Capitalist societies move things in this direction. But even socialist societies move things in this direction. Things change, they get expensive, you have to adjust, you have to adapt, you have to move things across. And while the overall standard of living has improved the standard of living For the haves is substantially better than it is for the have nots. So the divide that you're seeing now is beginning to accelerate. And for the most part, employers relied on an ⁓ on a worker class to be able to be exploited for relatively low-cost labor so they can go through and build their product to make their profits. Well, as that labor force becomes too expensive and they can automate these things with robots. I don't think they're gonna sit around and try to make sure that, you know, old Jason and Jeremy are taken care of in their old age. They would much rather shove us into the soil and green factory and have us spit out as candy bars for the next generation, or just eliminate us altogether and tell us to pound sand and go find our own way.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. Well, and and we're seeing that. The the US layoffs in March, 60,000 job cuts. ⁓ a large portion of them, I believe I've got the number here somewhere in front of me.

Jason Haworth: So yeah.

Jeremy Grater: ⁓ about about 18,000, so about thirty percent of those are being blamed on AI and and AI replacing those jobs. A lot of those jobs, ironically, in the tech sector. So a lot of the folks that were doing the coding that were doing a lot of the things that computers can do much faster and more efficiently now, ⁓ people have built these tools to replace themselves. And so now, you know, there it's interesting because ⁓ coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, hiring is also up. The the there are tons of jobs that are out there. But it's a matter of what are those jobs and the people that were replaced by AI, can they now come in and fill those jobs that are probably going to be a lot of working with the AI tools that replace them to make the company more efficient and again, more profitable?

Jason Haworth: And and it's We're chasing something that ⁓ is an ideal of ⁓ capitalist profit that is that's that's really gonna be problematic. ⁓ 'cause we're just trying to rip and replace people because people are a pain in the ass, they're difficult to deal with. And so now you've got people out there going, All right, well, I guess I'm only gonna work this much. So there was this this whole silent quitting thing. inside of ⁓ inside of Amazon and and Microsoft and all the big cloud providers. And they were like people were just like, I'm just gonna kind of not work. And I'm just gonna keep collecting a paycheck and see how long it takes. Turns out it takes about six to eighteen months for them to figure out that you're doing this thing and that you need to get get the boot. Well now it's happening faster, right? Now it's happening inside of this like three month field. And it's probably happening even quicker than that. It's probably happening on a daily basis now because people have

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm.

Jason Haworth: Gone through and they metric these things up and they machine them in in such a way that they can instrument an understanding of who you are as a person. And the AIs make this possible. There are so many AI human resource systems being used. There are so many data privacy violations occurring on a on a consistent basis, just over and over and over again. And people aren't doing anything about it because it feels a lot like ⁓ We're living through a massive amount of collective apathy. Where people are just like, fuck it. I I don't care. The noise is too high. The signal is very low, but the noise is super high. So the signal noise ratio is way out of balance. Like for those of you that don't know what that means, like the signal is the thing that you can act on. The noise, all the clutter around that you have to filter out before you get to the actual signal. Well, the problem is, is that we're being inundated with so much fucking noise.

Jeremy Grater: And and largely voluntarily, by the way. Like you know, when when we open up our feeds and like and

Jason Haworth: Can't find the signal. Of course, of course.

Jeremy Grater: zoom out of reality and stare at Facebook or Twitter or whatever we're looking at, we're opening ourselves up to that noise and trying to find the signal. And oftentimes by the time we found it, the you know, the dopamine is worn off and we're exhausted and don't know what to do. It doesn't feel like there is any I was actually gonna ask you, if if there is somebody who's hearing this and going, like, yeah, that's me. Like what do you do? Right? I mean, I I've participated in protests. They felt worthless in the nineties. They felt worthless in the two thousands. They feel worthless now.

Jason Haworth: Yeah. Exactly.

Jeremy Grater: You know, it it gets a blip on on a headline. ⁓ you know, you can you can try and be a good consumer and not buy the plastic, but it's it's all going to the same fucking landfill no matter what we say about what's being recycled. Like everything does feel really hopeless and pointless because it feels like everything is this system, this lie, this machine, whatever whatever you subscribe to that is set to work against us and only for those with, right? Like those of us that that are the have nots also have not much power to do much about it.

Jason Haworth: So I'm gonna slightly I'm gonna put a slightly different spin on that. I don't think it's I don't know that it's gonna make you feel any better. So it's not that the machine or the apparatus is set up to not help us. It's set up to not care about us. And there's a real difference. If you're a threat, the system has to account for you. It has to put someplace in to try to appease you.

Jeremy Grater: Please 'cause it's pretty o it feels pretty hopeless. ⁓

Jason Haworth: to keep you from taking it down. If the system doesn't see you as a threat, then it doesn't give a it doesn't do anything in regards to looking at you as something that can harm it. And we have back in the old days, back when you had unions, employees were threats because you could just go, Fuck it, we're gonna strike. AI's not gonna strike.

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jason Haworth: Like the same way the humans will. And the amount of money that people put in to try to replace human beings is probably more than it would what it would cost to actually just keep the humans happy and have them keep working. But it's this promise of potential future productivity and increased productivity that people are going after. And this is the thing that like we're we're chasing the promise of something that hasn't come true yet.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah.

Jason Haworth: And it also costs a lot more than people realize between environmental impact, the cost of the actual place around you. Like if if you live in a city with a million people, and suddenly forty percent of the job force gets laid off. Now you live in a city with four hundred thousand unemployed people that don't have enough money, that can't eat. What do you think those people are gonna do? I mean, they're not just gonna sit idly by. They're eventually gonna start taking. So then the AI has to go through and create a police force and has to create gates and has to create blah blah blah blah blah. I mean It's fucking scary. But we're and and I wanna say it's like it's simple. Like is this the Matrix? Is this the fucking Terminator? It's it's none of those. It's something entirely different. Like it's something that's messed up and weird and an amalgamation of all these different pieces. And it's it's gross and it hurts because we are nostalgic as creatures and want something that actually feels solid, stable, and reliable. And we don't have that. And if you look at the generation of kids that were born, you know. In the late nineties to the early 2000s. These kids went through the 9-11 attacks. They went through ⁓ multiple different wars happening in the Middle East, happening again right now. ⁓ they've gone through th the COVID, ⁓ two separate financial crises, like major issues. So the kids are not all right. Like, they're like, but they're adapting to this fast. They're like, sure, fine, okay, great. We'll do a gig economy. We don't really care because they haven't known anything other than this fucking chaos.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. I was just gonna like I'm glad you brought this up because I was just as you were saying that, I was thinking generally generationally, you know, you and I, as children of the seventies, ⁓ we saw the tail end of this is in the last century, kids. ⁓ you know ⁓ god. We saw the tail end of, you know, ⁓ arguably the the

Jason Haworth: God rolled. The last millennium.

Jeremy Grater: Option of achieving the American dream, like having that 30-year job that you retire from with the watch and right off into the sunset, when when loyalty to a company mattered, when they cared about you and wanted to keep you as a happy employee, all of that's gone now because they know everyone's going to be gone within, you know, one to two years because they're going to just job hop until you know the the the money dries up. So our sense of what this you know was supposed to be, what should be, and and even you know, clearly our Parents before us, cetera. But we we live in this weird teeter-totter land of like the olden days, the pre-internet, pre-AI, pre-social media, and now everything online, every everything driven by data, numbers, etc. It's gotta be it's gotta be weird to not have that perspective. ⁓ it's gotta be as weird to not have that perspective as it is to have that perspective now, because we are battling. these visions of Terminator and all these, you know, scary monsters that we grew up watching, you know, in the in the theaters. And the kids see those and and they sort of laugh. And and you're right, I don't expect robots to be running through the streets with, you know, guns killing us, but I see them running through the economy and trying to streamline everything. And it's it's a much slower and more painful death than than one ⁓ of Arnold Schwarzenegger gunning you down.

Jason Haworth: Yeah, and I don't think you see the AIs running through the streets with machine guns yet. So I'm I'm gonna say yet, because we're I mean, they're definitely trying to build autonomous killing machines. There's no doubt. Like that's the whole thing why anthropics said we're not gonna give you these models. ⁓ I I I I think it's scarier than that. I think that ⁓ as a society, we

Jeremy Grater: Sure.

Jason Haworth: We'll definitely have an economic collapse. ⁓ we're seeing more and more cyber attacks on infrastructure. We're seeing more and more attacks on water systems, electrical grids, data centers. Like we're we're seeing more and more of these things happen. And more and more of them are automated via AI. So you're seeing it happen in the digital frontier, I think, as a test plan before they try to take it to meat space. Because That's that's where things are gonna go. I mean, they're gonna start using more and more intelligent systems to attack things in meat space. And the US government did this. Like the the whole thing with this ⁓ the bombing of the school kids in Iran are saying the reason why this happened was because a bad AI model told them to bomb that city. Or sorry, told them bomb that target. So a bunch of little kids are dead because the AI said this looks like a good target, and they went, okay, and went ahead and let it happen because There weren't humans there watching over those pieces. Now that being said, there's plenty of bad bombings by humans when they were behind the stick. So is AI in that regard any worse than we are? Are there better safeguards? The promise was that there would be better safeguards, that they would be more accurate, that there would be fewer mistakes. But the people that programmed it and told it what to do are still the same meat sacks that would have done the thing before, anyways. So

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. Right. Like most things, it's accelerating our wins and losses. Just more of them and faster.

Jason Haworth: Yeah, exactly.

Jeremy Grater: I I am maybe willfully trying to become more naive or or just desperately looking for something to be optimistic about. because it's been a rough decade politically. ⁓ I think that I really want to believe that we're at the end of whatever this shit show has been, and that to some degree some grown-ups will return to to the room and

Jason Haworth: Sure. Yeah.

Jeremy Grater: Put some things in place to help slow things down, make things better, make things, you know, a little less wild, wild west. I know that underneath all of that, whatever makes the most money and keeps the economy growing is what's going to win. But I would like to believe that there will be a return to some sort of compassion, some sort of realization that there are people suffering because of this, and that things will be done to. try to make it better. I think I think that my view of society as it is is wildly distorted by the current state of leadership. I I think that this is an anomaly that, you know, hopefully we don't see as often as we have in the last decade. but I have to believe that that some grown ups are going to show up and and take the wheel and try to at least make things a little less painful.

Jason Haworth: Well Yeah, that's a nice idea. ⁓ the problem is is that we're the grown-ups. And we don't have any power. The the gro and and that that's the problem, is that power's been consolidated into a few hands and the things that actually make the economy and everything work as it is with the status quo, regular folks don't really have access to. And that's that's the problem that we're running into. So you have to break past the barrier of the ultra wealthy that want to continue to make profits and grow things for shareholders and and don't put a lot of consideration or thought into the human aspects of those things because they're not motivated to do it. Like there's not

Jeremy Grater: But I but I think we s we have enough lessons from history of something like this collapsing because it's just let to run as is. I again I I know history repeats itself, and so either this this thing, society as we know it, Western society as we know it, collapses and we rebuild from the ground up, or somebody who has j strung together enough donations and has enough of a positive message that can turn things around. Comes in and pumps the brakes and at least slows it down to buy us some time to figure out a way to not drive it completely off the clock.

Jason Haworth: I I mean it's a nice idea, but

Jeremy Grater: I know, I I'm hanging on to it by a thread.

Jason Haworth: How many videos of toddlers with wiffle ball bats have hit men in the balls over and over and over again for people to go, maybe I should and they keep giving toddlers wiffle ball bats and men keep getting racked for it? Like that shit hasn't changed. Like that's still occurring. We're not that smart. We don't learn our lessons. We punch ourselves in the nuts all the fucking time. And then we go, fucking whatever did that. Like

Jeremy Grater: And we keep giving him whipple ball. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Haworth: We're a bunch of fucking dipshits that that make mistakes all the time, that don't learn our lessons, that don't even bother to buy in and actually try to understand things at the right scale on the right level. Now I'm feeling my blood pressure go up because this is something that actually I think is is very, very important in this context. We don't learn our fucking lessons. And you know what? You know what has learned lessons is the fucking chat systems and these large and these LOMs, they have learned.

Jeremy Grater: Yes. Mm-hmm.

Jason Haworth: And they keep tweaking and tuning and refining and making these things more effective to go after us. And you can look at all these social media companies out there that put these pieces together. They created systems in place to go through and exploit human beings' interest levels to get them to be compartmentalized into things that they can market to better. And they inadvertently created this mass tribalism and absolutely destroyed the American ethos of self. And they they did it because they were trying to go after money. They didn't do it because they were trying to make people understand things or trying to help make things better. That had no fucking consideration in it whatsoever. It was how can I exploit human beings' eyeballs to move things in a certain direction so I can sell them more boner pills? Like, what the fuck is this? How is this what we've turned into? And but we've turned into that because we're a society that's been hit in the nuts so many times, our dicks don't work, and we need more boner pills. Because we don't learn our fucking lesson by keep continuing to give toddlers wiffle ball bats. Like this is what we are. And and it's unlikely to change anytime soon because that is the nature of human yeah of humanity in general. And you know, I I keep using yeah.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. what I'm saying. Like right now, I think the wiffle ball bats are wildly unregulated because somebody is getting a lot of money from the wiffle ball industry going like, ⁓ hey, swing away. And somebody just needs to come in and go, let's let's put some nerf bats in their hands for a while. Let's soften the blow a little bit. I think that's coming. I think it's coming.

Jason Haworth: Do you think YouTube's do you think do you think YouTube's gonna let that happen? Cause they make an awful lot of money off of watching dudes get racked in the nuts with fucking woofle ball bats. Like, th this is the cat video problem at scale over and over and over again. You know, cats are cute, blah blah blah blah blah. Let me insert this piece in. I spend most of my time on Facebook looking at reels. And most of the reels that I'm looking at are just ways to do product insertion placement.

Jeremy Grater: Ha ha ha.

Jason Haworth: for whatever thing has to go through. Like I'll be clipping along, looking at surf videos, looking at ⁓ fucking cat videos and red panda videos. And then something will pop up and be like, do you really like that red panda? Well that red panda probably doesn't have the same problem that you do. Alapecia. I'm like, God damn it.

Jeremy Grater: You got so angry you turned off your camera. Your your rage fist flying has turned off your camera. Now it's just a white blur.

Jason Haworth: I don't know what happened there. That was the most bizarre thing. I guess. ⁓ wow, that's weird. It just gave up.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. Well maybe that's what we should do as well. Maybe that's the lesson we should take from this conversation.

Jason Haworth: That's the AI trying to show everybody that I do in fact need have alopecia and I do in fact need hair plugs and I do in fact need to grow more hair, but Yeah.

Jeremy Grater: ⁓ my god. Well, I know my goal from now on is gonna be to try to bring a little bit of optimism into your life to get this kind of rage response from you. This is the best. ⁓ all right. Well, we should go because I'm sure the ⁓ AI bosses are gonna come to check on us and make sure we're doing something productive. So ⁓ I hope this has been at least entertaining, ⁓ if not helpful in some way. If it has, please share it with somebody. You can do that with the links at our website, probots.me.

Jason Haworth: Perfect. That's great. That's all I need.

Jeremy Grater: That's ours that's also where we will be back on Monday morning with another episode, ⁓ unless the robots have taken over. All right, we'll see you then. Thanks for listening or watching.

Jason Haworth: Maybe you'll Exactly.