Geordin Hill-Lewis won't grant Cape Town departmental management additional budget for salaries unless they implement AI

ToxicBunny said:
For me, the problem is that Management think its a universal "productivity multiplier" so everyone must do AI!

For those who know how to use it, or where it will be useful it can be a productivity multiplier, but for those who don't the productivity drain would likely outweigh any multiplication in other areass.
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Exactly right. I have numerous examples of this kind of thing that I've seen in corporate recently.

It's very easy for people doing bugger all to appear to be productive to senior management...
 
AlmightyBender said:
Sigh. This is the day the city I have lived in my whole life and loved enough that I have never considered moving dies. This is the worst idea I've heard in a long time. I grew up with Geordin and went to school and university with him and this is just sad and disappointing.
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ye, I hope its out of context because its a really dumb thing to push.

Only thing I can think of is that they currently have a massive staff burden (which is possible) and all the budgets are full. So anyone requesting more human resources needs to prove that they tries to solve the resource problem with AI first before requesting MORE budget for more resources. Its still a bad look but makes a bit more sense.

A rather sad counterpoint is that I was at a party a year ago and met a guy who claimed to be a data scientist with the DA. He said they had overhauled their department with AI agents already (for some time) and he used to work with 20 people and now he works with 3. Which shows what side of the "jobs for humans" they are on.
 
Pretty sure municipal and government employees are already being paid far too much, especially considering the state of the country. as for 'AI', it's a useful tool if you are competent enough to know what you are doing and will certainly save you time, but it's not anywhere near as good as people think.
 
konfab said:
Do you think data scientists reads a bunch of numbers and magically comes about a conclusion?
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Did I say there is no solid use case for these tools?

No.

I said - insisting that people use them when you have no good use case or measureable outcome is going to produce failure.

Crawling through large data sets, performing complex transforms on free-form data, incorporating multiple data streams into something sensible, ingesting massive signal sets to compare against known failure patterns for pre-emptive maintenance.... plenty of really valuable use cases, all of them freeing up time for more productive tasks.

"USE AI OR NO PAY" is the delusional approach to extracting value.
 
Nerfherder said:
he used to work with 20 people and now he works with 3. Which shows what side of the "jobs for humans" they are on
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Reminds me of so many of these AI conferences where the keynote will hammer on about how "it's not about replacement" only to have the next speaker brag about how much they saved through replacement.
 
rustypup said:
Did I say there is no solid use case for these tools?

No.

I said - insisting that people use them when you have no good use case or measureable outcome is going to produce failure.

Crawling through large data sets, performing complex transforms on free-form data, incorporating multiple data streams into something sensible, ingesting massive signal sets to compare against known failure patterns for pre-emptive maintenance.... plenty of really valuable use cases, all of them freeing up time for more productive tasks.

"USE AI OR NO PAY" is the delusional approach to extracting value.
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That isn't what he said.
He said if you want to hire more resources, you need to be showing you are trying to optimise existing resources by using AI.
 
AI can only produce any meaningful output if the query is within the scope of the training data. The **** that goes on in our Metros is probably well outside any sane training data.

On the other hand LLMs seem to consistently produce better output than our politicians, so maybe replacing them would be a good start.
 
Hellteddy said:
On a side note, anybody knows if CoCT/DA/Gordon has recieved any large "donations" recently?
This smells of "lobby'ing" too me.

Another thing, this oke HAS seen the unemployment numbers right? Don't know what he is thinking pushing "labor saving tools" while more than 1 in 3 don't have jobs.
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Yeah you might be on to something there, because of the recent approval of the data centres thing in CT
 
rustypup said:
He's met with CT ratepayers who would throw a hissy fit if rates went up?
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if so, Seems he can't imagine the outcome of the headline "CoCT Mayor replaces people with ai". Instead of milking overstretched ratepayers or replacing staff with ai, he should be "living within his means" there simply isn't the money for his pet projects, even if they will do the city good.
Imo a good mayor, at this time, would focus on keeping things working while looking at cost cutting(that doesn't come with mass layoffs) and using those cuts to drop rates instead.
 
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