DOGE is the dry run for AI in the corporate sector
Not pretending to be the only one who predicted this, but as I'm not an X or Facebook, I don't know who else has characterized Musk's DOGE as a dry run for a much larger displacement of human white collar workers in a couple of years. I was a Telegram user up until a few hours ago, but have decided to unplug from that social outlet. Lots of funny memes, but a time sink and massive distraction. I've done six month breaks from it in the past only to see an improvement in quality of life. Still, like a dog to his vomit, so too the sinner to social media.
This MSN article provides more details on the current alpha test run of the other Great Replacement.
Speaking about GSA’s broader plans, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently installed as the director of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), GSA’s IT division, said at an all-hands meeting last month that the agency is pushing for an “AI-first strategy.” In the meeting, a recording of which I obtained, Shedd said that “as we decrease [the] overall size of the federal government, as you all know, there’s still a ton of programs that need to exist, which is a huge opportunity for technology and automation to come in full force.” He suggested that “coding agents” could be provided across the government—a reference to AI programs that can write and possibly deploy code in place of a human. Moreover, Shedd said, AI could “run analysis on contracts,” and software could be used to “automate” GSA’s “finance functions.”
C-level executives are watching all of this very closely to see how they can rack up massive bonuses by doing their own house cleaning when the time comes. Thing with executive performance bonuses is that they are tied to stock performance and as humans are the consumers of all businesses currently existing today, the executive payouts will be followed immediately by a total collapse as cash dries up. Poor people do not buy consumer goods, just essential ones. Timing here is everything for the C-level who wants to get his taste before it all goes to pieces.
Keep in mind that as of January, there have been something like 2500 CEOs who have exited their positions in the span of two years. This is a very high number and suggests that many see a combination of various conditions being unfavorable to their leadership. Or that the challenges are simply too daunting. AI, weak markets, crumbling middle class, ever present inflation, eye watering public and private debt...
Unemployed people do not buy goods and services in a consumer economy. Unemployed people also do not pay income taxes and quickly stop contributing to state and local taxes. There will be no government in a position to handle demands on the entitlement system from millions of unemployed people as AI advances.
That said, Musk has oversold AI's present day ability to do sophisticated work. Those of us who use it every day for technical work already know this. It's invaluable, but it's also highly flawed. One example: I asked a reasoning LLM last night to summarize the content of this blog. It was very flattering, but not accurate. I daily sift through AI responses that require the ability to judge, refine and reject and in the end, I still do most of the work.
LLMs are at this point a much better version of StackOverflow for IT professionals. Will they become something more in the future? I plan to write on this topic very soon. I see LLMs as a much better search engine, one that collates data from official documentation, source code repositories, books and so on. Its code snippets are ultimately distilled from thousands of lines of code "borrowed" from the sum total of human knowledge, at least as it is found in the public domain. The LLM doesn't reason about the code or any particular problem presented to it although the newer ones are starting to do this. Even here though, there is 100% reliance from what I can tell on human data sources. Does A not work? Well, have you tried B, where B is a the synthesis of various other sources pulled from SO and forums?
Shedd goes on to say:
And also, if we could do that, we’d be doing it already.” Using AI creates “a very high risk of flagging false positives,” the employee said, “and I don’t see anything being considered to serve as a check against that.” A help page for early users of the GSA chat tool notes concerns including “hallucination”—an industry term for AI confidently presenting false information as true—“biased responses or perpetuated stereotypes,” and “privacy issues,” and instructs employees not to enter personally identifiable information or sensitive unclassified information. How any of those warnings will be enforced was not specified
From colleagues, I've learned that AI rollouts using corporate-specific LLMs – that is, LLMs designed and built in-house for a specific organization – have had less than stellar results in terms of accuracy and productivity. Musk's chat bot is not up to the task. I would love to be able to query an LLM about business-specific information in our vast documentation systems.
Musk also oversold the extent of fraud and waste at Social Security. The GAO has an office devoted just to tracking this, related to SSN payouts (and its affiliated programs), and has come up with 71 billion USD in misallocated funds, a far cry from Musk's claim of 700 billion USD sent to vampire payees. Musk has made ridiculous claims for decades and has amassed incredible wealth as a reward, with millions of people in America believing him to be a genius on the level of Tesla and Newton. He's a businessman who rose rapidly through dubious practices. People love the guy, warts and all, and have venerated him in a way that no CEO or politician has ever been, treating him like an oracle with a direct connection to higher powers.
Musk and Trump are two peas in a pod. I suspect Musk has rubbed off on Trump though, leading the president to become even bolder. His wild eye claims of a new American golden age, where we will soon have so much money that we won't be able to spend it all (he said this very recently to a reporter) sounds unhinged. The Republick is upwards of 40 trillion USD in the hole and there is no way to physically pay back the amount ever. Lutnick today claimed that tariffs will cancel out the debt and enable the abolition of the federal income tax. Nope, not unless they plan to do a sovereign default. Whatever the Trump administration is huffing, it's supplied by Musk.
When Trump's blitzkrieg of the federal bureaucracy began, I figured judges would put the kibosh on it. This is happening. Today a judge decided to order the reinstatement of thousands of federal works who were laid off while in a probationary period. In democracy, there is no ability to fix anything because judges have supreme power, negating anything they want while remaining unelected and impervious to any outside force. The useless Congress talks about impeachment of judges, but these are not going to succeed. There are so many poison apples in the judiciary at the federal level and the forces of progress know how to shop them to get instant decisions striking down actions meant to save what is left of the Republick. Impeaching all or even a few of them is not in the cards.
Much of the decline of the U.S. can be traced to judges. The most potent forces in democracy and completely shielded from accountability and wholly able to thwart the two other branches of government. A single judge doesn't worry about having to form coalitions like in Congress to get laws passed. If he doesn't like something, he just strikes it down and doesn't even have to provide citations from extant case law. That sort of efficiency is completely lacking in representative democracy. We still struggle to get rid of daylight savings time, which most people who've thought about it hate. It is not widely used in the rest of the world. In America, if it's unhealthy, even poisonous, or in some way lowers the quality of human life, it will remain around forever because someone is making a profit off it. That tartrazine and other harmful substances like fluoride are still widely used in the food supply is a good example of how it works.
The power of judges is not limited to the federal level, but to lower courts as well, where they have unlimited power to order fathers to sit by while their sons are castrated by insane women. A few decades ago, there was a small section of American society who expressed dismay at the power of jurists to radically alter everything about our lives. That group has died out.
Thomas Shedd is a pioneer in the forests of the wild, felling trees and clearing space for new roads to a brave new world.
