this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
697 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

65023 readers
5449 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

The overall goal is to cut the agency’s budget by fifty percent. Shedd suggested using AI to analyze contracts for redundancies, root out fraud, and facilitate a reduction in the federal workforce by automating much of their work.

I am bullish on AI in the long run.

I am skeptical that given the state of affairs in 2025, you can reasonably automate half of the federal government, via AI or any other means.

I also don't think that the way to do this is to lay off half of the federal workforce and then, after the fact, see what can be automated. If you look at the private sector automating things, it tends to hedge its bets. Take self-service point-of-sale kiosks. We didn't just see companies simply lay off all cashiers. Instead, we saw them brought in as an option, then had the company look at what worked and what didn't work -- and some of those were really bad at first -- and then increase the rate of deployment once it had confidence in the solution and a handle on the issues that came with them.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, but you and much of the business world have intelligence and strategy. Elon is the guy who thinks he can just pay some Chinese gamer to play a game for him, then pretend he did it himself; that's his version of "brilliant strategist."

It's no wonder he can't figure out how to automate anything safely or correctly, because he doesn't actually understand how to do anything himself, and he can't just pay some Chinese rando to do it for him.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I worked as a consultant for a long time. I learned that anyone who starts a question with "Why don't we just..." generally doesn't understand the problem.

[–] Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 4 points 8 hours ago

"Why don't we just..."

"All you need to do is..."