[HN Gopher] Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages...
___________________________________________________________________
Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say
economists
Author : pseudolus
Score : 307 points
Date : 2025-04-29 10:08 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| jruohonen wrote:
| The results are basically what Acemoglu and others have also been
| saying; e.g.,
|
| https://economics.mit.edu/news/daron-acemoglu-what-do-we-kno...
| davidkl wrote:
| That person apparently didn't talk to copy writers,
| photographers, content creators and authors.
| sct202 wrote:
| Or customer service. My last few online store issues have been
| fully chatbot when they used to be half chatbot for intake and
| half person.
| thehoff wrote:
| Same, after a little back and forth it became obvious I was
| not talking to a real person.
| Drakim wrote:
| I like to get the chatbot to promise me massive discounts
| just to get whoever is reading the logs to sweat a little.
| sph wrote:
| I have survived until today using the shibboleth "let me
| speak to a human" [1] The day this doesn't work any more, is
| the day I stop paying for that service. We should make a list
| of companies that still have actual customer service.
|
| 1: https://xkcd.com/806/ - from an era when the worst that
| could happen was having to speak with incompetent, but still
| human, tech support.
| xnorswap wrote:
| It no longer works for virgin media (UK cable monopoly).
|
| I got myself into a loop where no matter what I did, there
| was no human in the loop.
|
| Even the "threaten to cancel" trick didn't work, still just
| chatbots / automated services.
|
| Thankfully more and more of the UK is getting FTTH. Sadly
| for me I accidentally misunderstood the coverage checker
| when I last moved house.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > is the day I stop paying for that service.
|
| You're acting like it's not the companies that are
| monopolies that implement these systems first.
| rspoerri wrote:
| > Many of these occupations have been described as being
| vulnerable to AI: accountants, customer support specialists,
| financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists,
| journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals,
| office clerks, software developers, and teachers.
| windex wrote:
| Right now AI's impact is the equivalent of giving the ancient
| Egyptians a couple of computer chips. People will eventually
| figure out what they are, but until then it will only be used as
| combs, paperweights, pendants etc.
|
| I would say the use cases are only coming into view.
| cess11 wrote:
| '"The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast,"
| Humlum told The Register. "Most workers in the exposed
| occupations have now adopted these chatbots. Employers are also
| shifting gears and actively encouraging it. But then when we look
| at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle."'
|
| So, as of yet, according to these researchers, the main effect is
| that of a data pump, certain corporations get a deep insight into
| people's and other corporation's inner life.
| piva00 wrote:
| I was discussing with a colleague the past months, my view on
| how and why all these AI tools are being _shoved down our
| throats_ (just look at Google 's Gemini push into all
| enterprise tools, it's like Google+ for B2B) before there are
| clear cut use-cases you can point to and say "yes, this would
| have been much harder to do without LLM/AI" is because...
| Training data is the most valuable asset, all these tools are
| just data collection machines with some bonus features that
| make them look somewhat useful.
|
| I'm not saying that I think LLMs are useless, far from it, I
| use them when I think it's a good fit for the research I'm
| doing, the code I need to generate, etc., but the way it's
| being pushed from a marketing perspective tells me that
| companies making these tools _need_ people to use them to
| create a data moat.
|
| Extremely annoying to be getting these pop-ups to "use our
| incredible Intelligence(tm)" at every turn, it's grating on me
| so much that I've actively started to use them less, and try to
| disable every new "Intelligence(tm)" feature that shows up in a
| tool I use.
| Macha wrote:
| It seems very simple cause and effect from a economic
| standpoint. Hype about AI is very high, so investors ask
| boards what they're doing about AI and using it, because they
| think AI will disrupt investments that don't.
|
| The boards in turn instruct the CEOs to "adopt AI" and so you
| get all the normal processes about deciding what/if/when to
| do stuff get short circuited and so you get AI features that
| no one asked for or mandates for employees to adopt AI with
| very shallow KPIs to claim success.
|
| The hype really distorts both sides of the conversation. You
| get the boosters for which any use of AI is a win, no matter
| how inconsequential the results, and then you get things like
| the original article which indicate it hasn't caused job
| losses yet as a sign that it hasn't changed anything. And
| while it might disprove the hype (especially the "AI is going
| to replace all mental labour in $SHORT_TIMEFRAME" hype), it
| really doesn't indicate that it won't replace anything.
|
| Like when has a technology making the customer support
| experience worse for users or employees ever stopped it's
| rollout if there's cost savings to be had?
|
| I think this why AI is so complicated for me. I've used it,
| and I can see some gains. But it's on the order of when IDE
| auto complete went from substring matches of single methods
| to when it could autocomplete chains of method calls based on
| types. The agent stuff fails on anything but the most bite
| size work when I've tried it.
|
| Clearly some people seem it as something more transformative
| than that. There's other times when people have seen
| something transformative and it's just been so clearly
| nothing of value (NFTs for example) that it's easy to ignore
| the hype train. The reason AI is challenging for me is it's
| clearly not nothing, but also it's so far away from the
| vision that others have that it's not clear how realistic
| that is.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| LLMs have mesmerized us, because, they are able to
| communicate meaning to us.
|
| Fundamentally, we (the recipient of llm output) are
| generating the meaning from the words given. ie, llms are
| great when the recipient of their output is a human.
|
| But, when their recipient is a machine, the model breaks
| down, because, machine to machine requires deterministic
| interactions. this is the weakness I see - regardless of
| all the hype about llm agents. fundamentally, the llms are
| not deterministic machines.
|
| LLMs lack a fundamental human capability of deterministic
| symbolization - which is to create NEW symbols with
| associated rules which can deterministically model worlds
| we interact with. They have a long way to go on this.
| namaria wrote:
| Bingo. Especially with the 'coding assistants', these
| companies are getting great insight into how software
| features are described and built, and how software is
| architected across the board.
|
| It's very telling that we see "we won't use your data for
| _training_ " sometimes and opt-outs but never "we won't
| _collect_ your data ". 'Training' being at best ill defined.
| cess11 wrote:
| Most likely they can identify very good software
| developers, or at least acquire this ability in the short
| term. That information has immediate value.
| pseudolus wrote:
| Link to abstract and the underlying paper "Large Language Models,
| Small Labor Market Effects":
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
| raincole wrote:
| > We examine the labor market effects of AI chatbots using two
| large-scale adoption surveys (late 2023 and 2024) covering 11
| exposed occupations (25,000 workers, 7,000 workplaces), linked to
| matched employer-employee data in Denmark.
|
| It sounds like they didn't ask those who got laid off.
| causal wrote:
| Yeah this is like counting horses a few years after the
| automobile was invented.
| fhd2 wrote:
| > The economists found for example that "AI chatbots have created
| new job tasks for 8.4 percent of workers, including some who do
| not use the tools themselves."
|
| For me, the most interesting takeaway. It's easy to think about a
| task, break it down into parts, some of which can be automated,
| and count the savings. But it's more difficult to take into
| account any secondary consequences from the automation. Sometimes
| you save nothing because the bottleneck was already something
| else. Sometimes I guess you end up causing more work down the
| line by saving a bit of time at an earlier stage.
|
| This can make automation a bit of a tragedy of the commons
| situation: It would be better for everyone collectively to not
| automate certain things, but it's better for some individually,
| so it happens.
| chii wrote:
| > you end up causing more work down the line by saving a bit of
| time at an earlier stage
|
| in this case, the total cost would've gone up, and thus,
| eventually the stakeholder (aka, the person who pays) is going
| to not want to pay when the "old" way was
| cheaper/faster/better.
|
| > It would be better for everyone collectively to not automate
| certain things, but it's better for some individually, so it
| happens.
|
| not really, as long as the precondition i mentioned above (the
| total cost dropping) is true.
| fhd2 wrote:
| That's probably true as long as the workers generally
| cooperate.
|
| But there's also adversarial situations. Hiring would be one
| example: Companies use automated CV triaging tools that make
| it harder to get through to a human, and candidates auto
| generate CVs and cover letters and even auto apply to
| increase their chance to get to a human. Everybody would
| probably be better off if neither side attempted to automate.
| Yet for the individuals involved, it saves them time, so they
| do it.
| chii wrote:
| Right, so it's like advertising when the market is already
| saturated (see coca cola vs pepsi advertising).
| BrtByte wrote:
| Short-term gains for individuals can gradually hollow out
| systems that, ironically, worked better when they were a little
| messy and human
| rspoerri wrote:
| All the jobs (11) they looked at are at least medium level
| complexity and task delegating. They are the ones giving out
| time-consuming, low level jobs to cheap labour (assistants etc.)
| . They can save time and money by directly doing it using AI
| assistants instead of waiting to have an assistant available.
|
| I am 100% convinced that Ai will and already has destroyed lots
| of Jobs. We will likely encounter world order disrupting changes
| in the coming decades when computer get another 1000 times faster
| and powerful in the coming 10 years.
|
| The jobs described might get lost (obsolete or replaced) as well
| in the longer term if AI gets better than them. For example just
| now another article was mentioned in HN: "Gen Z grads say their
| college degrees were a waste of time and money as AI infiltrates
| the workplace" which would make teachers obsolete.
| roenxi wrote:
| Based on the speed most companies operate at - no surprises here.
| The internet also didn't have most of its impact in the first
| decade. And as is fairly well understood, most of the current
| generation of AI models are a bit dicey in practice. There isn't
| much of a question that this early phase where AI is likely to
| create new jobs and opportunities. The real question is what
| happens when AI is reliably intellectually superior to humans in
| all domains and it has been proven to everyone's satisfaction,
| which is still some uncertain time away.
|
| It is like expecting cars to replace horses before anyone starts
| investing in the road network and getting international petroleum
| supply chains set up - large capital investment is an
| understatement when talking about how long it takes to bring in
| transformative tech and bed it in optimally. Nonetheless, time
| passed and workhorses are rare beasts.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Does the same follow for The Metaverse, or for Blockchain?
| throw310822 wrote:
| My absolutely unqualified opinion is that blockchain will
| survive but won't find much uses apart from those it already
| has; while the metaverse- or vr usage and contents- will have
| an explosive growth at some point, especially when mixed with
| AI generated and rendered worlds- which will be lifelike and
| almost infinitely flexible. Which btw, is also a great way to
| spend your time when your job has been replaced by another AI
| and you have little money for anything else.
| roenxi wrote:
| If they end up going somewhere? Absolutely, we haven't seen
| anything out of the crypto universe yet compared to what'll
| start to happen when the tech is a century old and well
| understood by the bankers.
| asadotzler wrote:
| At the end of the massive investment period, about a trillion
| dollars of broadband, fiber and cellular build out between 1998
| and 2008, that infrastructure had already added a trillion back
| to the economy and would add that much nearly every year after.
| LLM AI is nearing 10 years of massive investment, approaching
| $1T. Where are the trillions in returns. And what amazing
| economy-wide impacting infrastructure will that trillion in AI
| investment leave us with when the bubble pops and these AI
| companies are sold for parts and scrap and the not-AI companies
| boosting AI all pull back? When the dot com boom collapsed, we
| still got value from all that investment that continues to lead
| the global economy today. What will LLMs leave us with?
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| My primary worry since the start has been not that it would
| "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire
| sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated,
| the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting"
| and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure
| supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a
| job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipes out the
| economic value a system.
|
| This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news, does
| kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the audience
| still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Why is this a worry? Sounds wonderful
| jspdown wrote:
| I'm a bit worried about the social impacts.
|
| When a sector collapses and become irrelevant, all its
| workers no longer need to be employed. Some will no longer
| have any useful qualifications and won't be able to find
| another job. They will have to go back to training and find a
| different activity.
|
| It's fine if it's an isolated event. Much worse when the
| event is repeated in many sectors almost simultaneously.
| twoodfin wrote:
| As others in this thread have pointed out, this is
| basically what happened in the relatively short period of
| 1995 to 2015 with the rise of global wireless internet
| telecommunications & software platforms.
|
| Many, many industries and jobs transformed or were
| relegated to much smaller niches.
|
| Overall it was great.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| Man 1995, what a world that was. Seemed like a lot less
| stress.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> They will have to go back to training_
|
| Why? When we've seen a sector collapse, the new jobs that
| rush in to fill the void are new, never seen before, and
| thus don't have training. You just jump in and figure
| things out along the way like everyone else.
|
| The problem, though, is that people usually seek out jobs
| that they like. When that collapses they are left reeling
| and aren't apt to want to embrace something new. That
| mental hurdle is hard to overcome.
| throwaway35364 wrote:
| What if no jobs, or fewer jobs than before, rush in to
| fill the void this time? You only need so many prompt
| engineers when each one can replace hundreds of
| traditional workers.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> What if no jobs, or fewer jobs than before, rush in to
| fill the void this time?_
|
| That means either:
|
| 1. The capitalists failed to redeploy capital after the
| collapse.
|
| 2. We entered into some kind of post-capitalism future.
|
| To explore further, which one are you imagining?
| saturn8601 wrote:
| The capitalists are failing to redeploy capital _today_.
| Thats why they have been dumping it into assets for
| years. They have too much capital and dwindling things
| they can do with it. AI will skyrocket their capital
| reserves. There is a poor mechanism for equalizing this
| since the Nixon years.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Good thing that we have AI tools that are tireless teachers
| thehappypm wrote:
| Are you sure suggesting google search is in decline? The latest
| Google earnings call suggests it's still growing
| hgomersall wrote:
| We're in the phase of yanking hard on the enshittification
| handle. Of course that increases profits whilst sufficient
| users can't or won't move, but it devalues the product for
| users. It's in decline insomuch as it's got notably worse.
| Zanfa wrote:
| Google Search is distinct from Google's expansive ad network.
| Google search is now garbage, but their ads are everywhere
| are more profitable than ever.
| Jensson wrote:
| Most Google ads comes from Google search, its a
| misconception Google derives most of their profits from
| third party ads that is just a minor part of Googles
| revenue.
| philipov wrote:
| You are talking past each other. They say "Google search
| sucks now" and you retort with "But people still use it."
| Both things can be true at the same time.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| You misunderstand. Making organic search results shittier
| will drive up ad revenue as people click on sponsored
| links in the search results page instead.
|
| Not a sustainable strategy in the long term though.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| On Google's earnings call - within the last couple of weeks
| - they explicitly stated that their stronger-than-expected
| growth in the quarter was due to a large unexpected
| increase in search revenues[0]. That's a distinct line-item
| from their ads business.
|
| >Google's core search and advertising business grew almost
| 10 per cent to $50.7bn in the quarter, surpassing estimates
| for between 8 per cent and 9 per cent.[0]
|
| The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to
| get outdated, and users are returning to their search
| product. Their results, particularly the Gemini overview
| box, are (usually) useful at the moment. Their key
| differentiator over generative chatbots is that they have
| reliable & sourced results instantly in their overview.
| Just concise information about the thing you searched for,
| instantly, with links to sources.
|
| [0] https://www.ft.com/content/168e9ba3-e2ff-4c63-97a3-8d7c
| 78802...
| Zanfa wrote:
| > The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting
| to get outdated
|
| Quite the opposite. It's never been more true. I'm not
| saying using LLMs for search is better, but as it stands
| right now, SEO spammers have beat Google, since whatever
| you search for, the majority of results are AI slop.
|
| Their increased revenue probably comes down to the fact
| that they no longer show any search results in the first
| screenful at all for mobile and they've worked hard to
| make ads indistinguishable from real results at a quick
| glance for the average user. And it's not like there
| exists a better alternative. Search in general sucks due
| to SEO.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > Quite the opposite. It's never been more true. I'm not
| saying using LLMs for search is better, but as it stands
| right now, SEO spammers have beat Google, since whatever
| you search for, the majority of results is AI slop.
|
| It's actually sadder than that. Google appear to have
| realised that they make more money if they serve up ad
| infested scrapes of Stack Overflow rather than the
| original site. (And they're right, at least in the short
| term).
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Can you give an example of an everyday person search that
| generates a majority of AI slop?
|
| If anything my frustration with google search comes from
| it being much harder to find niche technical information,
| because it seems google has turned the knobs hard towards
| "Treat search queries like they are coming from the
| average user, so show them what they are probably looking
| for over what they are actually looking for."
| Zanfa wrote:
| Basically any product comparison or review for example.
| yreg wrote:
| Let's try "samsung fridge review". The top results are a
| reddit thread, consumer reports article, Best Buy
| listing, Quora thread and some YouTube videos by actual
| humans.
|
| Where is this slop you speak of?
| izabera wrote:
| This is anecdotal but here's a random thing I searched
| for yesterday https://i.imgur.com/XBr0D17.jpeg
| nottorp wrote:
| I've all but given up on google search and have Gemini find
| me the links instead.
|
| Not because the LLM is better, but because the search is
| close to unusable.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| The line goes up, democracy is fine, the future will be good.
| Disregard reality
| cornholio wrote:
| Probably the first significant hit are going to be drivers,
| delivery men, truckers etc. a demographic of 5 million jobs in
| US and double that in EU, with ripple effects costing other
| millions of jobs in industries such as roadside diners and
| hotels.
|
| The general tone of this study seems to be "It's 1995, and this
| thing called the Internet has not made TV obsolete"; same for
| the Acemoglu piece linked elsewhere in the. Well, no, it
| doesn't work like that, it first comes for your Blockbuster,
| your local shops and newspaper and so on, and transforms those
| middle class jobs vulnerable to automation into minimum wages
| in some Amazon warehouse. Similarly, AI won't come for lawyers
| and programmers first, even if some fear it.
|
| The overarching theme is that the benefits of automation flow
| to those who have the bleeding edge technological capital.
| Historically, labor has managed to close the gap, especially
| trough public education; it remains to be seen if this process
| can continue, since eventually we're bound to hit the
| "hardware" limits of our wetware, whereas automation continues
| to accelerate.
|
| So at some point, if the economic paradigm is not changed,
| human capital loses and the owners of the technological capital
| transition into feudal lords.
| pydry wrote:
| Given that the world is fast deglobalizing there will be a
| flood of factory work being reshored in the next 10 years.
|
| There's also going to be a shrinkage in the workforce caused
| by demographics (not enough kids to replace existing
| workers).
|
| At the same time education costs have been artificially
| skyrocketed.
|
| Personally the only scenario I see mass unemployment
| happening is under a "Russia-in-the-90s" style collapse
| caused by an industrial rugpull (supply chains being cut off
| way before we are capable of domestically substituting them)
| and/or the continuation of policies designed to make wealth
| inequality even worse.
| cornholio wrote:
| The world is not deglobalizing, US is.
| clarionbell wrote:
| The world is deglobalizing. EU has been cutting off from
| Russia since the war started, and forcing medical
| industries to reshore since covid. At the same time it
| has begun drive to remilitarize itself. This means more
| heavy industry and all of it local.
|
| There is brewing conflict across continents. India and
| Pakistan, Red sea region, South China sea. The list goes
| on and on. It's time to accept it. The world has moved
| on.
| ringeryless wrote:
| navel gazing will be shown to be a reactionary empty
| step, as all current global issues require more global
| cooperation to solve, not less.
|
| the individual phenomena you describe are indeed detritus
| of this failed reaction to an increasing awareness of all
| humans of our common conditions under disparate nation
| states.
|
| nationalism is broken by the realization that everyone
| everywhere is paying roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of their income
| in taxes, however what you receive for that taxation
| varies. your nation state should have to compete with
| other nation states to retain you.
|
| the nativist movement is wrongful in the usa for the
| reason that none of the folks crying about foreigners is
| actually native american,
|
| but it's globally in error for not presenting the truth:
| humans are all your relatives, and they are assets, not
| liabilities: attracting immigration is a good thing, but
| hey feel free to recycle tired murdoch media talking
| points that have made us nothing but trouble for 40
| years.
| octopoc wrote:
| Allow me to refer you to Chesterton's Fence:
|
| > There exists in such a case a certain institution or
| law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or
| gate erected across a road. The more modern type of
| reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the
| use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more
| intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If
| you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you
| clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come
| back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may
| allow you to destroy it.' [1]
|
| The problem with anti-border extremism is that it ignores
| the huge success national borders have had since pre-
| recorded history in building social cohesion, community,
| and more generally high-trust societies. All those things
| are precious, they are worth making sacrifices for, they
| are things small town America has only recently lost, and
| still remembers, and wants back. Maybe you haven't
| experienced those things, not like these people you so
| casually dismiss have.
| smallnix wrote:
| > Global connectedness is holding steady at a record high
| level based on the latest data available in early 2025,
| highlighting the resilience of international flows in the
| face of geopolitical tensions and uncertainty.
|
| https://www.dhl.com/global-en/microsites/core/global-
| connect...
|
| Source for counter argument?
| voidspark wrote:
| Source for counter argument is in the page that you just
| linked here. You have cherry picked one sentence.
| boredtofears wrote:
| "Nothing to see here, folks! Keep shipping your stuff
| internationally!"
| munksbeer wrote:
| > The world is deglobalizing.
|
| We have had thousands of years of globalising. The trend
| has always been towards a more connected world. I
| strongly suspect the current Trump movement (and to an
| extent brexit depending on which brexit version you chose
| to listen to) will be blips in that continued trend. That
| is because it doesn't make sense for there to be 200
| countries all experts in microchip manufacturing and
| banana growing.
| clarionbell wrote:
| But doesn't make sense to be dependent on your enemies
| either.
| pydry wrote:
| >We have had thousands of years of globalising.
|
| It happens in cycles. Globalization has followed
| deglobalization before and vice versa. It's never been
| one straight line upward.
|
| >That is because it doesn't make sense for there to be
| 200 countries all experts in microchip manufacturing and
| banana growing.
|
| It'll break down into blocs, not 200 individual
| countries.
|
| Ask Estonia why they buy overpriced LNG from America and
| Qatar rather than cheap gas from their next door
| neighbor.
|
| If you think the inability to source high end microchips
| from anywhere apart from Taiwan is going to prevent a
| future conflict (the Milton Friedman(tm) golden arches
| theory) then I'm afraid I've got bad news.
| munksbeer wrote:
| >It's never been one straight line upward.
|
| Agree, but I never said it was.
|
| >If you think the inability to source high end microchips
| from anywhere apart from Taiwan is going to prevent a
| future conflict (the Milton Friedman(tm) golden arches
| theory) then I'm afraid I've got bad news.
|
| Why are you saying that? Again, I didn't suggest that.
| pydry wrote:
| Much of the globalized system is dependent upon US
| institutions which currently dont have a substitute.
|
| BRICs have been trying to substitute for some of them and
| have made some nonzero progress but theyre still far, far
| away from stuff like a reserve currency.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Yeah you need a global navy that can assure the safe
| passage of thousands of ships daily. Now, how do you
| ensure that said navy will protect your interests?
| Nothing is free.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Generative AI has failed to automate anything at all so far.
|
| (Racist memes and furry pornography doesn't count.)
| jcelerier wrote:
| Yeah no, I'm seeing more and more shitty ai generated ads,
| shop logos, interior design & graphics for instance in
| barber shops, fast food places etc.
|
| The sandwich shop next to my work has a music playlist
| which is 100% ai generated repetitive slop.
|
| Do you think they'll be paying graphic designers, musicians
| etc. for now on when something certainly shittier than what
| a good artist does, but also much better than what a poor
| one is able to achieve, can be used in five minutes for
| free?
| dgfitz wrote:
| > Do you think they'll be paying graphic designers,
| musicians etc. for now on
|
| People generating these things weren't ever going to be
| customers of those skillsets. Your examples are small
| business owners basically fucking around because they
| can, because it's free.
|
| Most barber shops just play the radio, or "spring" for
| satellite radio, for example. AI generated music might
| actively lose them customers.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| That's not automation, that's replacing a product with a
| cheaper and shittier version.
| ringeryless wrote:
| LLMs are the least deterministic means you could possibly
| ever have for automation.
|
| What you are truly seeking is high level specifications for
| automation systems, which is a flawed concept to the degree
| that the particulars of a system may require knowledgeable
| decisions made on a lower level.
|
| However, CAD/CAM, and infrastructure as code are true
| amplifiers of human power.
|
| LLMs destroy the notion of direct coupling or having any
| layered specifications or actual levels involved at all, you
| try to prompt a machine trained in trying to ascertain
| important datapoints for a given model itself, when the
| correct model is built up with human specifications and
| intention at every level.
|
| Wrongful roads lead to erratic destinations, when it turns
| out that you actually have some intentions you wish to
| implement IRL
| pixl97 wrote:
| If you want to get to a destination you use google maps.
|
| If you want to reach the actual destination because
| conditions changed (there is a wreck in front of you) you
| need a system to identify changes that occur in a chaotic
| world and can pick from an undefined/unbounded list of
| actions.
| cornholio wrote:
| If you give the same subject to two different journalists,
| or even the same one under different "temperature"
| settings, say, he had lunch or not, or he's in different
| moods, the outputs and approaches to the subject will be
| completely different, totally nondeterministic.
|
| But that doesn't mean the article they wrote in each of
| those scenarios in not useful and economically valuable
| enough for them to maintain a job.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think that drivers are probably pretty late in cycle. Many
| environments they operate in are somewhat complicated. Even
| if you do a lot to make automation possible. Say with garbage
| move to containers that can simply be lifted either by crane
| or forks. Still places were those containers are might need
| lot of individual training to navigate to.
|
| Similar thing goes to delivery. Moving single pallet to store
| or replacing carpets or whatever. Lot of complexity if you do
| not offload it to receiver.
|
| More regular the environment is easier it is to automate. A
| shelving in store in my mind might be simpler than all
| environments where vehicles need to operate in.
|
| And I think we know first to go. Average or below average
| "creative" professionals. Copywriter, artists and so on.
| bambax wrote:
| > _This is what happened to Google Search_
|
| This is completely untrue. Google Search still works,
| wonderfully. It works even better than other attempts at search
| by the same Google. For example, there are many videos that you
| will NEVER find on Youtube search that come up as the first
| results on Google Search. Same for maps: it's much easier to
| find businesses on Google Search than on maps. And it's even
| more true for non-google websites; searching Stack Overflow
| questions on SO itself is an exercice in frustration. Etc.
| weatherlite wrote:
| Yeah I agree. But this is a strong perception and why Google
| stock is quite cheap (people are afraid Search is dying). I
| think Search has its place for years to come (while it will
| evolve as well with AI) and that Google is going to be pretty
| much unbeatable unless it is broken up.
| benterix wrote:
| GenAI is like plastic surgery for people who want to look
| better - looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't
| show it's plastic surgery.
|
| Resume filtering by AI can work well on the first line (if
| implemented well). However, once we get to the the real
| interview rounds and I see the CV is full of AI slop, it
| immediately suggests the candidate will have a loose attitude
| to checking the work generated by LLMs. This is a problem
| already.
| noja wrote:
| > looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't show
| it's plastic surgery.
|
| I think the plastic surgery users disagree here: it seems
| like visible plastic surgery has become a look, a status
| symbol.
| oytis wrote:
| What's the alternative here? Apart from well-known, but not so
| useful useful advice to have a ton of friends who can hire you
| or be so famous as to not need an introduction.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-
| sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is
| actually superfluous_
|
| "Like all 'magic' in Tolkien, [spiritual] power is an
| expression of the primacy of the Unseen over the Seen and in a
| sense as a result such spiritual power does not effect or
| perform but rather reveals: the true, Unseen nature of the
| world is revealed by the exertion of a supernatural being and
| that revelation reshapes physical reality (the Seen) which is
| necessarily less real and less fundamental than the Unseen"
| [1].
|
| The writing and receiving of resumes has been superfluous for
| decades. Generative AI is just revealing that truth.
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-
| proved...
| Garlef wrote:
| Interesting: At first I was objecting in my mind ("Clearly,
| the magic - LLMs - can create effect instead of only
| revealing it.") but upon further reflecting on this, maybe
| you're right:
|
| First, LLMs are a distillation of our cultural knowledge. As
| such they can only reveal our knowledge to us.
|
| Second, they are limited even more so by the users knowledge.
| I found that you can barely escape your "zone of proximal
| development" when interacting with an LLM.
|
| (There's even something to be said about prompt engineering
| in the context of what the article is talking about: It is
| 'dark magic' and 'craft-magic' - some of the full potential
| power of the LLM is made available to the user by binding
| some selected fraction of that power locally through a
| conjuration of sorts. And that fraction is a product of the
| craftsmanship of the person who produced the prompt).
| mjburgess wrote:
| My view has been something of a middle ground. It's not
| exactly that it reveals relevant domains of activity are
| merely performative, but its a kind of "accelerationism of
| the almost performative". So it pushes these almost-
| performative systems into a death spiral of pure
| uselessness.
|
| In this sense, I have rarely seen AI have negative impacts.
| Insofar as an LLM can generate a dozen lines of code, it
| forces developers to engage in less "performative copy-
| paste of stackoverflow/code-docs/examples/etc." and engage
| the mind in what those lines should be. Even if, this
| engagement of the mind, is a prompt.
| vacuity wrote:
| I find most software development performative, and I
| believe LLMs will only further that end. I suppose this
| is a radical view.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Yeah man, I'm not so sure about that. My father made good
| money writing resumes in his college years studying for his
| MFA. Same for my mother. Neither of them were under the
| illusion that writing/receiving resumes was important or
| needed. Nor were the workers or managers. The only people who
| were confused about it were capitalists who needed some way
| to avoid losing their sanity under the weight of how
| unnecessary they were in the scheme of things.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Resume-sending is a great example: if everyone's blasting out
| AI-generated applications and companies are using AI to filter
| them, the whole "application" process collapses into
| meaningless busywork
| osigurdson wrote:
| input -> ai expand -> ai compress -> input'
|
| Where input' is a distorted version of input. This is the new
| reality.
|
| We should start to be less impressed volume of text and
| instead focus on density of information.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| No, the whole process is _revealed_ to be meaningless
| busywork. But that step has been taken for a long time, as
| soon as automated systems and barely qualified hacks were
| employed to filter applications. I mean, they 're trying to
| solve a hard and real problem, but those solutions are just
| bad at it.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Doesn't this assume that a resume has no actual relation to
| reality?
| Attrecomet wrote:
| The technical information on the cv/resume is, in my
| opinion, at most half of the process. And that's assuming
| that the person is honest, and already has the cv-only
| knowledge of exactly how much to overstate and brag about
| their ability and to get through screens.
|
| Presenting soft skills is entirely random, anyway, so the
| only marker you can have on a cv is "the person is able
| to write whatever we deem well-written [$LANGUAGE] for
| our profession and knows exactly which meaningless
| phrases to include that we want to see".
|
| So I guess I was a bit strong on the low information
| content, but you better have a very, very strong resume
| if you don't know the unspoken rules of phrasing,
| formatting and bragging that are required to get through
| to an actual interview. For those of us stuck in the
| masses, this means we get better results by adding
| information that we basically only get by already being
| part of the in-group, not by any technical or even
| interpersonal expertise.
|
| Edit: If I constrain my argument to CVs only, I think my
| statement holds: They test an ability to send in
| acceptably written text, and apart from that, literally
| only in-group markers.
| mprovost wrote:
| For some applications it feels like half the signal of
| whether you're qualified is whether the CV is set in
| Computer Modern, ie was produced via LaTeX.
| blitzar wrote:
| > the whole "application" process collapses into meaningless
| busywork
|
| Always was.
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| Im not sure this is a great example... yes the infrastructure
| of posting and applying to jobs has to go, but the cost of
| recruitment in this world would actually be much higher... you
| likely need _more people_ and _more resources_ to recruit a
| single employee.
|
| In other words, there is a lot more spam in the world.
| Efficiencies in hiring that implicitly existed until today may
| no longer exist because anyone and their mother can generate a
| professional-looking cover letter or personal web page or w/e.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| I'm not sure that is actually a bad thing. Being a competent
| employee and writing a professional-looking resume are two
| almost entirely distinct skill sets held together only by
| "professional-looking" being a rather costly marker of being
| in the in-group for your profession.
| belter wrote:
| I had similar thoughts, but then remembered companies still
| burn billions on Google Ads, sure that humans...and not
| bots...click them, and thinking that in 2025 most people browse
| without ad-blockers.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Most people do browse without ad blockers, otherwise the
| entire DR ads industry would have collapsed years ago.
|
| Note also that ad blockers are much less prevalent on mobile.
| theshackleford wrote:
| People will pay for what works. I consult for a number of
| ecommerce companies and I assure you they get a return on
| their spend.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Making dumb processes dumber to the point of failure is
| actually a feature.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Until we solve the hallucination problem google search still
| has a place of power as something that doesn't hallucinate.
|
| And even if we solve this problem of hallucination, the ai
| agents still need a platform to do search.
|
| If I was Google I'd simply cut off public api access to the
| search engine.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >google search still has a place of power as something that
| doesn't hallucinate.
|
| Google search is fraught with it's own list of problems and
| crappy results. Acting like it's infallible is certainly an
| interesting position.
|
| >If I was Google I'd simply cut off public api access to the
| search engine.
|
| The convicted monopolist Google? Yea, that will go very well
| for them.
| voidspark wrote:
| LLMs are already grounding their results in Google searches
| with citations. They have been doing that for a year already.
| Optional with all the big models from OpenAI, Google, xAI
| asadotzler wrote:
| And yet they still hallucinate and offer dead links. I've
| gotten wrong answers to simple historical event and people
| questions with sources that are entirely fabricated and
| referencing a dead link to an irrelevant site. Google
| results don't do that. This is why I use LLM's to help me
| come up with better searches that I perform and tune
| myself. That's valuable, the wordsmithing they can do given
| their solid word and word part statistics.
| voidspark wrote:
| Is that using the state of the art reasoning models with
| Google search enabled?
|
| OpenAI o3
|
| Gemini 2.5 Pro
|
| Grok 3
|
| Anything below that is obsolete or dumbed down to reduce
| cost
|
| I doubt this feature is actually broken and returning
| hallucinated links
|
| https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding
| lukeschlather wrote:
| People talk about LLM hallucinations as if they're a new
| problem, but content mill blog posts existed 15 years ago,
| and they read like LLM bullshit back then, and they still
| exist. Clicking through to Google search results typically
| results in lower-quality information than just asking Gemini
| 2.5 pro. (which can give you the same links formatted in a
| more legible fashion if you need to verify.)
|
| What people call "AI slop" existed before AI and AI where I
| control the prompt is getting to be better than what you will
| find on those sorts of websites.
| lysecret wrote:
| Funny you call it value I call it inefficiency.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news,
| does kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the
| audience still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline.
|
| Well their Search revenue actually went up last quarter, as all
| quarters. Overall traffic might be a bit down (they don't
| release that data so we can't be sure) but not revenue. While I
| do take tons of queries to LLMs now, the kind of queries Google
| actually makes a lot of money on (searching flights,
| restaurants etc) I don't go to an LLM for - either because of
| habit or because of fear these things are still hallucinating.
| If Search was starting to die I'd expect to see it in the
| latest quarter earnings but it isn't happening.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| In the specific case of resume-sending, the decline of the
| entire sector is a good thing. Nothing but make-work.
| jofzar wrote:
| Not replacing jobs yet.
|
| Seen a whole lot of gen AI deflecting customer questions which
| would have been previously tickets. That is a reduced ticket
| volume that would have been taken by a junior support engineer.
|
| We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1
| support engineer. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to
| the level 0 IT support.
| Clubber wrote:
| Perhaps briefly. Companies tried this with offshoring support.
| Some really took a hit and had to bring it back. Some didn't
| though, so it's not all or nothing in the medium term. In the
| short term, most of the execs will buy into the hype and try
| it. I suspect the lower quality companies will use it, but the
| companies whose value is in their reputation for quality will
| continue to use people.
| oytis wrote:
| I mean, if it really works in the end, we just redefine levels
| humans need to deal with. There are lots of problems with AI,
| but I can't see one here.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. It's not about a sudden "mass firing" event -
| it's more like a slow erosion of entry-level roles
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1
| support engineer.
|
| And this trend isn't new; a lot of investments into e.g.
| customer support is to need less support staff, for example
| through better self-service websites _, chatbots /
| conversational interfaces / phone menus (these go back
| decades), or to reduce expenses by outsourcing call center work
| to low-wage countries. AI is another iteration, but gut feeling
| says they will need a lot of training/priming/coaching to not
| end up doing something other than their intended task (like
| Meta's AIs ending up having erotic chats with minors).
|
| _ One of my projects was to replace the "contact" page of a
| power company with a wizard - basically, get the customers to
| check for known outages first, then check their own fuse boxes
| etc, before calling customer support.
| FilosofumRex wrote:
| Those types of jobs are mostly in India & Philippines, not the
| US or Denmark, so let them deal with it.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| I have had AI support agents deflect my questions, but not
| resolve them. It is more companies ending customer support
| under the guise of automation than AI obsoleting the support
| workers.
| asadotzler wrote:
| We saw that happening before LLM bots with pre-LLM chatbots,
| FAQs, support wizards, and even redirects to site-specific or
| web-wide search. If you save more money avoiding human support
| costs than you lose from dissatisfied customers, it's a win.
| Same for outsourcing support to low-wage countries. Same for
| LLM chatbots. It's not some seismic event, it's a gradual move
| from high quality bespoke output to low quality mass
| production, same as it ever was.
| mg wrote:
| One thing nobody seems to discuss is:
|
| In the future, we will do a lot more.
|
| In other terms: There will be a lot more work. So even if robots
| do 80% of it, if we do 10x more - the amount of work we need
| humans to do will double.
|
| We will write more software, build more houses, build more cars,
| planes and everything down the supply chain to make these things.
|
| When you look at planet earth, it is basically empty. While rent
| in big cities is high. But nobody needs to _sleep_ in a big city.
| We just do so because getting in and out of it is cumbersome and
| building houses outside the city is expensive.
|
| When robots build those houses and drive us into town in the
| morning (while we work in the car) that will change. I have done
| a few calculations, how much more mobility we could achieve with
| the existing road infrastructure if we use electric autonomous
| buses, and it is staggering.
|
| Another way to look at it: Currently, most matter of planet earth
| has not been transformed to infrastructure used by humans. As
| work becomes cheaper, more and more of it will. There is almost
| infinitely much to do.
| 10729287 wrote:
| I like that some places are empty.
| mg wrote:
| Would you be ok if instead of 97% of earth being empty 94% is
| empty and your rent is cut in half? Another plus point of the
| future: An electric autonomous bus is at your disposal every
| 5 minutes, bringing you to whatever nice lonely place you
| wish.
| WillAdams wrote:
| How will this 3% be selected?
|
| Which of the few remaining wild creatures will be
| displaced?
|
| https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-
| releases/catastrophic-73...
| tgv wrote:
| I've got no idea what you're going on about, but 97% of the
| Earth isn't empty in any useful sense. For starters, almost
| 70% is ocean. There are also large parts which are
| otherwise uninhabitable, and large parts which have
| agricultural use. Buses don't go to uninhabited places,
| since that's costs too much. Every five minutes is a
| frequency which no form of public transport can afford.
| mg wrote:
| The nature of technological progress is that it makes
| formerly uninhabitable areas inhabitable.
|
| Costs of buses are mostly the driver. Which will go away.
| The rest is mostly building and maintaining them. Which
| will be done by robots. The rest is energy. The sun sends
| more energy to earth in an hour than humans use in a
| year.
| tgv wrote:
| I've done a quick check on the financial statement 2023
| of the Amsterdam public transport company, and personnel
| (which is absolutely not just drivers) is 1/3 of the
| total.
|
| And use of solar energy is absolutely unrelated to
| doubling the living areal. That can, and should, be done
| anyway.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Rents, or any living costs going down? But everything is
| based on "stocks only go up".
| WillAdams wrote:
| For my part, I would like for there still to be wild and quiet
| places to go to when I need time away from my fellow man, and I
| don't envision a world paved over for modern infrastructure as
| desirable, but rather the stuff of nightmares such as the movie
| _Silent Running_ envisioned.
|
| That said, the fact that I can't find an opensource LLM front-
| end which will accept a folder full of images to run a prompt
| on sequentially, then return the results in aggregate is
| incredibly frustrating.
| pydry wrote:
| Planet earth is still resource constrained. This is easy to
| forget when skills availability is more frequently the
| bottleneck and you live in a society that for the time being
| has fairly easy access to raw materials.
| patapong wrote:
| I agree! People will become more productive, meaning fewer
| people can do more work. That said, I hope this does not result
| in the production of evermore things at the cost of nature!
|
| I think we are at a crossroads as to what this will result in,
| however. In one case, the benefits will accrue at the top, with
| corporations earning greater profits while employing less
| people, leaving a large part of the population without jobs.
|
| In the second case, we manage to capture these benefits, and
| confer them not just on the corporations but also the public
| good. People could work less, leaving more time for community
| enhancing activities. There are also many areas where society
| is currently underserved which could benefit from freed up
| workforce, such as schooling, elderly care, house building and
| maintenance etc etc.
|
| I hope we can work toward the latter rather than the former.
| jspdown wrote:
| > That said, I hope this does not result in the production of
| evermore things at the cost of nature!
|
| It will for sure! Just today the impact is collosal.
|
| As an example, people used to read technical documentation,
| now, they ask LLMs. Which replaces a simple static file by
| 50k matrix multiplication.
| poisonborz wrote:
| ...and saves humongous amounts of time in the process.
| Documentations are rarely a good read (however sad, I like
| good docs), and we should waste less engineering time
| reading them.
| ringeryless wrote:
| the earth is not the property of humans, nor is any of it
| empty until you show zero ecosystem or wildlife or plants
| there.
|
| for sure, we are doing our best to eradicate the conditions
| that make earth habitable, however i suggest that the first
| needed change is for computer screen humans to realize that
| other life forms exist. this requires stepping outside and
| questioning human hubris, so it might be a big leap, but i am
| fairly confident that you will discover that absolutely none
| of our planet is empty.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| Yes, lets extract even more resources from the Earth when we're
| already staring down the barrel of long term environmental
| issues.
| paulsutter wrote:
| I spend much more time coding now that I can code 5x faster
|
| Demand for software has high elasticity
| WillAdams wrote:
| Have any of these economists ever tried to scrape by as an entry-
| level graphic designer/illustrator?
|
| Apparently not, since the sort of specific work which one used to
| find for this has all but vanished --- every AI-generated image
| one sees represents an instance where someone who might have
| contracted for an image did not (ditto for stock images, but
| that's a different conversation).
| mattlondon wrote:
| It looks like the writing is on the wall too for other menial
| and low-value creative jobs too - so basic music and videos - I
| fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI
| generated within the next year or two. see Google Veo - they
| have the tech already and they have YouTube already and they
| have the ad network already ...
|
| Instead of uploading your video ad you already created, you'll
| just enter a description or two and the AI will auto-generate
| the video ads in thousands of iterations to target every
| demographic.
|
| Google is going to run away with this with their ecosystem -
| OpenAI etc al can't compete with this sort of thing.
| nottorp wrote:
| > fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI
| generated within the next year or two
|
| And on the other end we'll have "AI" ad blockers, hopefully.
| They can watch each other.
| lambdaba wrote:
| People will develop an eye for how AI-generated looks and
| that will make human creativity stand out even more. I'm
| expecting more creativity and less cookie-cutter content, I
| think AI generated content is actually the end of it.
| pllbnk wrote:
| Given that the goal of generative AI is to generate content
| that is virtually indistinguishable from expert creative
| people, I think it's one of these scenarios:
|
| 1. If the goal is achieved, which is highly unlikely, then
| we get very very close to AGI and all bets are off.
|
| 2. If the goal is not achieved and we stay in this uncanny
| valley territory (not at the bottom of it but not being
| able to climb out either), then eventually in a few years'
| time we should see a return to many fragmented almost
| indie-like platforms offering bespoke human-made content.
| The only way to hope to achieve the acceptable quality will
| be to favor it instead of scale as the content will have to
| be somehow verified by actual human beings.
| Topfi wrote:
| > If the goal is achieved, which is highly unlikely, then
| we get very very close to AGI and all bets are off.
|
| Question on two fronts:
|
| 1. Why do you think, considering the current rate of
| progress think it is very unlikely that LLM output
| becomes indistinguishable from expert creatives?
| Especially considering a lot of tells people claim to see
| are easily alleviated by prompting.
|
| 2. Why do you think a model whose output reaches that
| goal would rise in any way to what we'd consider AGI?
|
| Personally, I feel the opposite. The output is likely to
| reach that level in the coming years, yet AGI is still
| far away from being reached once that has happened.
| pllbnk wrote:
| Interesting thoughts, to which I partially agree.
|
| 1. The progress is there but it's been slowing down yet
| the downsides have largely remained.
|
| 1.1. With the LLMs, while thanks to the larger context
| window (mostly achieved via hardware, not software), the
| models can keep track of the longer conversations better,
| the hallucinations are as bad as ever; I use them eagerly
| yet I haven't felt any significant improvements to the
| outputs in a long time. Anecdotally, a couple days ago I
| decided to try my luck and vibe-code a primitive
| messaging library and it led me in the wrong path even
| though I was challenging it along the way; it was so
| convincing that I wouldn't have noticed hadn't my
| colleague told me there was a better way. Granted, the
| colleague is extremely smart, but LLM should have told me
| what was the right approach because I was specifically
| questioning it.
|
| 1.2. The image generation has also barely improved. The
| biggest improvement during the past year has been with
| 4o, which can be largely attributed to move from
| diffusion to autoregression but it's far from perfect and
| still suffers from hallucinations even more than LLMs.
|
| 1.3. I don't think video models are even worth discussing
| because you just can't get a decent video if you can't
| get a decent still in the first place.
|
| 2. That's speculation, of course. Let me explain my
| thought process. A truly expert level AI should be able
| to avoid mistakes and create novel writings or research
| just by the human asking it to do it. In order to
| validate the research, it can also invent the experiments
| that need to be done by humans. But if it can do all
| this, then it could/should find the way to build a better
| AI, which after an iteration or two should lead to AGI.
| So, it's basically a genius that, upon human request, can
| break itself out of the confines.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| This eye will be a driving force for improving ai until it
| becomes in parity with real non generated pictures.
| mattlondon wrote:
| People already know what the ads are and what is content,
| but yet the advertisers keep on paying for ads on videos so
| they must be working.
|
| It feels to me that the SOTA video models today are pretty
| damn good already, let alone in another 12 months when SOTA
| will no doubt have moved on significantly.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >People will develop an eye for how AI-generated looks
|
| People will _think_ they have an eye for AI-generated
| content, and miss all the AI that doesn 't register. If
| anything it would benefit the whole industry to keep some
| stuff looking "AI" so people build a false model of what
| "AI" looks like.
|
| This is like the ChatGPT image gen of last year, which
| purposely put a distinct style on generated images (that
| shiny plasticy look). Then everyone had an "eye for AI"
| after seeing all those. But in the meantime, purpose made
| image generators without the injected prompts were creating
| indistinguishable images.
|
| It is almost certain that every single person here has laid
| eyes on an image already, probably in an ad, that didn't
| set off any triggers.
| jelder wrote:
| I miss the old internet, when every article didn't have a goofy
| image at the top just for "optimization." With the exception of
| photography in reporting, it's all a waste of time and
| bandwidth.
|
| Most if it wasn't bespoke assets created by humans but stock
| art picked by if lucky, a professional photo editor, but more
| often the author themselves.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Probably not, economists generally stay in school straight to
| becoming professors or they'll go into finance right after
| school.
|
| That said I don't think entry level illustration jobs can be
| around if software can do their job better than they do. Just
| like we don't have a lot of calculators anymore, technological
| replacement is bound to occur in society, AI or not.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| AI I different. It impacts everything directly. It's like the
| computer in boost. It's like trains taking over horses but
| for every job out there.
|
| Well at least that's the potential.
| lolinder wrote:
| > every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance
| where someone who might have contracted for an image did not
|
| This is not at all true. Some percentage of AI generated images
| might have become a contract, but that percentage is
| vanishingly small.
|
| Most AI generated images you see out there are just shared
| casually between friends. Another sizable chunk are useless
| filler in a casual blog post and the author would otherwise
| have gone without, used public domain images, or illegally
| copied an image.
|
| A very very small percentage of them are used in a specific
| subset of SEO posts whose authors actually might have cared
| enough to get a professional illustrator a few years ago but
| don't care enough to avoid AI artifacts today. That sliver
| probably represents most of the work that used to exist for a
| freelance illustrator, but it's a vanishingly small percentage
| of AI generated images.
| TheRealQueequeg wrote:
| > That sliver probably represents most of the work that used
| to exist for a freelance illustrator, but it's a vanishingly
| small percentage of AI generated images.
|
| I prefer to get my illegally copied images from only the most
| humanely trained LLM instead of illegally copying them myself
| like some neanderthal or, heaven forbid, asking a human to
| make something. Such a though is revolting; humans breathe so
| loud and sweat so much and are so icky. Hold on - my wife
| just texted me. "Hey chat gipity, what is my wife asking
| about now?" /s
| probably_wrong wrote:
| There is more to entry-level illustrators than SEO posts. In
| my daily life I've witnessed a bakery, an aspiring writer of
| children's books, and two University departments go for self-
| made AI pictures instead of hiring an illustrator. Those jobs
| would have definitely gone to a local illustrator.
| asadotzler wrote:
| I've seen the same more times that I can count, having been
| in that business decades ago. Then it was clip art and bad
| illustrator work, no different than what you're seeing
| today with AI -- and to a trained professional, the delta
| between the two "home made" approaches and professional
| ones is clearly evident. We'll look at the AI slop in 10
| years the way we look at clip art from 1995.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Yeah, I saw a investment app that was filled with obviously AI
| generated images. One of the more recommended choices in my
| country.
|
| It feels very short-sighted from the company side because I
| nope'd right out of there. They didn't make me feel any trust
| for the company at all.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| I don't know. Even with these tools, I don't want to be doing
| this work.
|
| I'd still hire an entry level graphic designer. I would just
| expect them to use these tools and 2x-5x their output. That's
| the only changing I'm sensing.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Also pay them less, because they don't need to be as skilled
| anymore since ai is covering it.
| surement wrote:
| > Have any of these economists ever tried to scrape by as an
| entry-level graphic designer/illustrator?
|
| "Equip yourself with skills that other people are willing to
| pay for." -Thomas Sowell
| pixl97 wrote:
| The general thought works good until it doesn't.
| surement wrote:
| It definitely always works. If your skills become obsolete
| then it's time to find new ones or stop working.
| user9999999999 wrote:
| It shouldn't. Its propaganda spread by VCs and ai 'thought
| leaders' who are finally seeing a glimmer of their fantastical
| imagination coming to life (it isn't)
| it_citizen wrote:
| No opinion on the topic but "say economists" doesn't inspire
| trust
| kurtis_reed wrote:
| Thank you
| poulpy123 wrote:
| LMAO it's too early and too small to see anything yet
| solfox wrote:
| Extrapolating from my current experience with AI-assisted work:
| AI just makes work more meaningful. My output has increased 10x,
| allowing me to focus on ideas and impact rather than repetitive
| tasks. Now apply that to entire industries and whole divisions of
| labor: manual data entry, customer support triage, etc. Will
| people be out of those jobs? Most certainly. But it gives all of
| us a chance to level up--to focus on more meaningful labor.
|
| As a father, my forward-thinking vision for my kids is that
| creativity will rule the day. The most successful will be those
| with the best ideas and most inspiring vision.
| begueradj wrote:
| What about technical debts related to the generated code?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| First off, is there any? That's making an assumption, one
| which can just as easily be attributed to human-written code.
| Nobody writes debt-free code, that's why you have many checks
| and reviews before things go to production - ideally.
|
| Second, in theory, future generations of AI tools will be
| able to review previous generations and improve upon the
| code. If it needs to, anyway.
|
| But yeah, tech debt isn't unique to AIs, and I haven't seen
| anything conclusive that AIs generate more tech debt than
| regular people - but please share if you've got sources of
| the opposite.
|
| (disclaimer, I'm very skeptical about AI to generate code
| myself, but I will admit to use it for boring tasks like unit
| test outlines)
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > Second, in theory, future generations of AI tools will be
| able to review previous generations and improve upon the
| code. If it needs to, anyway.
|
| Is that what's going to happen? These are still LLMs.
| There's nothing in the future generations that guarantees
| those changes would be better, if not flat out regressions.
| Humans can't even agree on what good code looks like, as
| its very subjective and context heavy with the skills of
| the team.
|
| Likely, you ask gpt-6 to improve your code and it just
| makes up piddly architecture changes that don't
| fundamentally improve anything.
| happymellon wrote:
| Presumably as a father they are thinking about ways for their
| children to be employed.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| If it actually works like that, it'll be just like all labor-
| saving innovations, going back to the loom and printing press
| and the like; people _will_ lose their job, but it 'll be local
| / individual tragedies, the large scale economic impact will
| likely be positive.
|
| It'd still suck to lose your job / vocation though, and some of
| those won't be able to find a new job.
| solfox wrote:
| Honestly, much of work under capitalism is meaningless (see:
| The Office). The optimistic take is that many of those same
| paper-pushing roles could evolve into far more meaningful
| work--with the right training and opportunity (also AI).
|
| When the car was invented, entire industries tied to horses
| collapsed. But those that evolved, leveled up: Blacksmiths
| became auto mechanics and metalworkers, etc.
|
| As a creatively minded person with entrepreneurial instincts,
| I'll admit: my predictions are a bit self-serving. But I
| believe it anyway--the future of work is entrepreneurial.
| It's creative.
| throwaway35364 wrote:
| > The optimistic take is that many of those same paper-
| pushing roles could evolve into far more meaningful work--
| with the right training and opportunity (also AI).
|
| There already isn't enough meaningful work for everyone. We
| see people with the "right training" failing to find a job.
| AI is already making things worse by eliminating meaningful
| jobs -- art, writing, music production are no longer viable
| career paths.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >the future of work is entrepreneurial. It's creative.
|
| How is this the conclusion you've come to when the sectors
| impacted most heavily by AI thus far have been graphic
| design, videography, photography, and creative writing?
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >The most successful will be those with the best ideas and most
| inspiring vision.
|
| This has never been the truth of the world, and I doubt AI will
| make it come to fruition. The most successful people are by and
| large those with powerful connections, and/or access to
| capital. There are millions of smart, inspired people alive
| right now who will never rise above the middle class. Meanwhile
| kids born in select zip codes will continue to skate by
| unburdened by the same economic turmoil most people face.
| asadotzler wrote:
| I keep seeing these "my output is 10X with LLMs" but I'm not
| seeing any increase in quality or decrease in price for any of
| the very many tech products I've updated or upgraded in the
| last couple of years.
|
| We're coming up in 3 years of ChatGPT and well over a year
| since I started seeing the proliferation of these 10X claims,
| and yet LLM users seem to be bearing none of the fruit one
| might expect from a 10X increase in productivity.
|
| I'm beginning to think that this 10X thing is overstated.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I'm starting to think most jobs are performative. Hiring is just
| managers wanting more people in the office to celebrate their
| birthdays.
|
| And any important jobs won't be replaced because managers are too
| lazy and risk averse to try AI.
|
| We may never see job displacement from AI. Did you know bank
| teller jobs actually increased in the decades following the roll
| out of ATMs.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You should take time to learn what those jobs are for. You'd be
| surprised what it takes to keep a business running past any
| reasonable level of scale.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I've worked 10+ of those jobs, guy.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Not convinced. A lot of jobs have tons of slack until
| something goes wrong.
|
| But even then, I'm not saying all are equally vital, I'm
| just saying that the statement, "most jobs are
| performative" doesn't even come close to being supported by
| "I've worked 10 performative jobs".
| nirui wrote:
| There are few problems in this research, first:
|
| > _AI chatbots_ have had no significant impact on earnings or
| recorded hours in any occupation
|
| But _Generative AI_ is not just _AI chatbots_. There are ones
| that generate sounds /music, ones that generates imagines etc.
|
| Another thing is, the research only looked Denmark, a nation with
| fairly healthy altitude towards work-life-balance, not a nation
| that gives proud to people who work their own ass off.
|
| And the research also don't cover the effect of AI generated
| product: if music or painting can be created by an AI within just
| 1 minute based on prompt typed in by a 5 year old, then your
| expected value for "art work" will decrease, and you'll not pay
| the same price when you're buying from a human artist.
| causal wrote:
| That last point is especially important.
| asadotzler wrote:
| For that last point, as a graphic designer competing with the
| first generation of digital printmaking and graphic design
| tools, I experienced the opposite. DIY people and companies are
| DIY people and companies. The ones that would have paid a real
| designer continued to do so, and my rates even went up because
| I offered something that stuck out even from the growing mass
| of garbage design from the amateurs with PageMaker or
| Illustrator. I adopted the same tools and my game was elevated
| far more than the non-professionals with those tools further
| separating my high value from the low value producers. It also
| gave me a few years of advantage over other professionals who
| still worked on a drawing table with pen and paper.
| decimalenough wrote:
| I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make
| this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist,
| junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for
| advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc),
| where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for
| the recipient, seem to be severely at risk.
|
| Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would
| have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent.
| And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to
| the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-
| hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I
| would have to pay someone to figure out.
| soared wrote:
| Similairly, while not perfect I use AI to help redesign my
| landscaping by uploading a picture of my yard and having it
| come up with different options.
|
| Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it
| if I really needed new tires or not.
|
| Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what
| was going on.
|
| Potentially all situations where I would've paid (or paid more
| than I already was) a local laborer for that advice. Or at a
| minimum spent much more time googling for the info.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| So in the coming few years on the question whether or not to
| change your tires, a suggestions for shops in your area will
| come with a recommendation to change them. Do you think you
| would trust the outcome?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Why do you think that's not a problem today when you ask a
| car mechanic?
| redwall_hp wrote:
| My mechanic takes a video of a tire tread depth gauge
| being inserted into each wheel and reports the values,
| when doing the initial inspection and tests before every
| oil change.
|
| It's something that can be empirically measured instead
| of visually guessed at by a human or magic eight-ball.
| Using a tool that costs only a few dollars, no less, like
| the pressure gauge you should already keep in your
| glovebox.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I am hoping that there will always be premium paid options
| for LLMs, and thus the onus would be on the user whether or
| not they want biased answers.
|
| These will likely be cell-phone-plan level expensive, but
| the value prop would still be excellent.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| God forbid people attempt to facilitate legitimate
| commerce!
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and
| asked it if I really needed new tires or not.
|
| You can use a penny and your eyeballs to assess this, and all
| it costs is $0.01
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I find it easily hallucinates this stuff. It's
| understanding of a picture is decidedly worse then its
| understanding of words. Be careful here about asking if it
| needs a tire change it is likely giving you an answer that
| only looks real.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It's also something so trivial to determine yourself.
|
| It blows my mind the degree that people are offloading
| any critical thinking to AI
| tbrownaw wrote:
| There's a reason that people have to be told to not just
| believe everything they read on the Internet. And there's
| a reason some people still do that anyway.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I agree with you, my post was about _not_ using AI to
| check tread depth and relying on a penny and your own
| eyesight instead, illustrated here:
| https://www.bridgestonetire.com/learn/maintenance/how-to-
| che...
| giobox wrote:
| You don't even need the penny most of the time, given most
| car tires have tread wear bars in the tread gaps you can
| just look at now.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Once they have you hooked they'll start jacking up the
| prices.
| msp26 wrote:
| It's a race to the bottom for pricing. They can't do shit.
| Even if the American companies colluded to stop competing
| and raise prices, Chinese providers will undermine that.
|
| There is no moat. Most of these AI APIs and products are
| interchangeable.
| asadotzler wrote:
| OK, so they won't raise prices, they'll simply EOL their
| too expensive to maintain services and users won't feel
| the impact on their wallets, they'll just lose their tool
| and historical data and what ever else of theirs was
| actually the property of the company.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| For the tire you can also use a penny. If you stick the penny
| in the tread with Liconln's head down and his hair isn't
| covered, then you need new tires. No AI. ;)
| olyjohn wrote:
| You don't even need a penny, or have to remember where on
| the penny you're supposed to be looking... There are wear
| bars in the tread in every single tire. If the tire tread
| is flush with them, the tires are shot. Also there is a
| date code on the side, and if your tires are getting near
| 10 years old, it's probably a good time to replace them.
| kbelder wrote:
| Now I think this conversation will happen in my lifetime:
|
| Me: "Looks like your tire is a little low."
|
| Youth: "How can you tell, where's your phone?"
| gilbetron wrote:
| How do you know it was correct without being a tax expert? And
| consulting a tax expert would give you legal recourse if it was
| wrong.
| colinmorelli wrote:
| As for correctness, they mentioned the LLM citing links that
| the person can verify. So there is some protection at that
| level.
|
| But, also, the threshold of things we manage ourselves versus
| when we look to others is constantly moving as technology
| advances and things change. We're always making risk tradeoff
| decisions measuring the probability we get sued or some harm
| comes to us versus trusting that we can handle some tasks
| ourselves. For example, most people do not have attorneys
| review their lease agreements or job offers, unless they have
| a specific circumstance that warrants they do so.
|
| The line will move, as technology gives people the tools to
| become better at handling the more mundane things themselves.
| ryandrake wrote:
| If it's also returning links, wouldn't it be faster and
| more authoritative to just go read the official links and
| skip the LLM slop entirely?
| blendergeek wrote:
| No. The LLM in the story found the necessary links. In
| this case the LLM was a better search engine.
| krisoft wrote:
| Sure. But often you don't know how to find the
| information or what are the right technical terms for
| your problem.
|
| In a more general sense sometimes, but not always, it is
| easier to verify something than to come up with it at the
| first place.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| But if you dont know anything about programming a link to a
| library/etc is not so useful. Same if you dont know about
| tax law and it cities the tax code and how it should be
| understood (the code is correct but the interpretation is
| not)
| andy99 wrote:
| I think in many cases, chatbots may make information
| accessible to people who otherwise wouldn't have it, like in
| the OP's case. But I'm more sceptical it's replacing experts
| in specialize subjects that had been previously making a
| living at them. They would be serving different markets.
| decimalenough wrote:
| I was looking to compute how much I can retroactively claim
| this year for a deduction I did not claim earlier. The LLM
| response pointed me to the tax office's calculator for doing
| exactly this, and I already knew the values of all the inputs
| the calculator wanted. So, yes, I'm confident it's correct.
| colinmorelli wrote:
| This is the real value of AI that, I think, we're just starting
| to get into. It's less about automating workflows that are
| inherently unstructured (I think that we're likely to continue
| wanting humans for this for some time).
|
| It's more about automating workflows that are already
| procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering
| is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health,
| finance, etc).
|
| Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what
| types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs,
| your medical history, your preferences, etc. But gathering all
| of that information requires a mix of collecting medical
| records, talking to the patient, etc. Once that information is
| available, we can execute a fairly procedural plan to put
| together a diet that will likely work for you.
|
| These are cases that I believe LLMs are actually very well
| suited, if the solution can be designed in such a way as to
| limit hallucinations.
| dingnuts wrote:
| "Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship
| to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's
| bullshit[0].
|
| > Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what
| types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional
| needs
|
| No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are
| popular and real dietitians are expensive. and I would know,
| I've had to use one to help me manage an eating disorder!
|
| There is already so much bullshit in the diet space that
| adding AI bullshit (again, using the technical definition of
| bullshit here) only stands to increase the value of an
| interaction with a person with knowledge.
|
| And that's without getting into what happens when brand
| recommendations are baked into the training data.
|
| 0
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
| colinmorelli wrote:
| > "Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some
| relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a
| hallucination, it's bullshit[0].
|
| I understand your perspective, but the intention was to use
| a term we've all heard to reflect the thing we're all
| thinking about. Whether or not this is the right term to
| use for scenarios where the LLM emits incorrect information
| is not relevant to this post in particular.
|
| > No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets
| are popular and real dietitians are expensive.
|
| No, this is not why real dietitians are expensive. Real
| dietitians are expensive because they go through extensive
| training on a topic and are a licensed (and thus supply
| constrained) group. That doesn't mean they're operating
| without a grounding fact base.
|
| Dietitians are not making up nutritional evidence and
| guidance as they go. They're operating on studies that have
| been done over decades of time and millions of people to
| understand in general what foods are linked to what
| outcomes. Yes, the field evolves. Yes, it requires changes
| over time. But to suggest we "don't know" is inconsistent
| with the fact that we're able to teach dietitians how to
| construct diets in the first place.
|
| There are absolutely cases in which the confounding factors
| for a patient are unique enough such that novel human
| thought will be required to construct a reasonable diet
| plan or treatment pathway for someone. That will continue
| to be true in law, health, finances, etc. But there are
| also many, many cases where that is absolutely not the
| case, the presentation of the case is quite simple, and the
| next step actions are highly procedural.
|
| This is not the same as saying dietitians are useless, or
| physicians are useless, or attorneys are useless. It is to
| say that, due to the supply constraints of these
| professions, there are always going to be fundamental
| limits to the amount they can produce. But there is a
| credible argument to be made that if we can bolster their
| ability to deliver the common scenarios _much more
| effectively_ , we might be able to unlock some of the
| capacity to reach more people.
| jacamera wrote:
| Exactly! All LLMs do is "hallucinate". Sometimes the output
| happens to be right, same as a broken clock.
| colinmorelli wrote:
| I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd. Surely we
| all are aware that AI has always been probabilistic in
| nature. Very few people seem to go around talking about
| how their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but
| just sometimes happens to be right.
|
| Just like every other form of ML we've come up with, LLMs
| are imperfect. They get things wrong. This is more of an
| indictment of yeeting a pure AI chat interface in front
| of a consumer than it is an indictment of the underlying
| technology itself. LLMs are incredibly good at doing some
| things. They are less good at other things.
|
| There are ways to use them effectively, and there are bad
| ways to use them. Just like every other tool.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| I think a lot of problems will be solved by explicitly
| training on high quality content and probably injecting
| some expert knowledge in addition
| freejazz wrote:
| Yeah but that's not easy, which is why it wasn't done in
| any of the cases where it's needed.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The problem is they are being sold as everything
| solutions. Never write code / google search / talk to a
| lawyer / talk to a human / be lonely again, all here,
| under one roof. If LLM marketing was staying in its lane
| as a creator of convincing text we'd be fine.
| sanderjd wrote:
| This happens with every hype cycle. Some people fully buy
| into the most extreme of the hype, and other people
| reverse polarize against that. The first group ends up
| offsides because nothing is ever as good as the hype, but
| the second group often misses the forest for the trees.
|
| There's no shortcut to figuring out what the truth of
| what a new technology is actually useful for. It's very
| rarely the case that either "everything" or "nothing" is
| the truth.
| freejazz wrote:
| >I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd.
|
| It's not about it being perfect or not. It's about how
| they come about with the responses they do.
|
| >Very few people seem to go around talking about how
| their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but just
| sometimes happens to be right.
|
| Yeah, but no one is anthropomorphizing binary
| classifiers.
| henryaj wrote:
| You imply that, like a stopped clock, LLMs are only right
| occasionally and randomly. Which is just nonsense.
| habinero wrote:
| It's true, though. It strings together plausible words
| using a statistical model. If those words happen to mean
| something, it's by chance.
| kbelder wrote:
| Sure, but that chance might be 99.7%. 'Random' isn't a
| pejorative.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Although I get what you're saying, it's still true that
| if something is wrong randomly at any point, it is always
| "randomly wrong".
| mordymoop wrote:
| Same is true of humans fwiw.
| karpour wrote:
| I recently tried looking up something about local tax law in
| ChatGPT. It confidently told me a completely wrong rule.
| There are lots of sources for this, but since some probably
| unknowingly spread misinformation, ChatGPT just treated it as
| correct. Since I _always_ verify what ChatGPT spits out, it
| wasn 't a big deal for me, just a reminder that it's garbage
| in, garbage out.
| freehorse wrote:
| Yeah, I also find very often llms say sth wrong just
| because they found it in the internet. The problem is that
| we know to not trust a random website, but LLMs make wrong
| info more believable. So the problem in some sense is not
| exactly the LLM, as they pick up on wrong stuff people or
| "people" have written, but they are really bad at figuring
| these errors out and particularly good at covering them or
| backing them up.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Chatgpt isn't any good these days. Try switching to Claude
| or Gemini 2.5 pro.
| calmoo wrote:
| ChatGPT is still good. Try o3.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| I think this will be fixed by having LLM trained not on the
| whole internet but on well curated content. To me this
| feels like the internet in maybe 1993. You see the
| potential and it's useful. But a lot of work and
| experimentation has to be done to work out use cases.
|
| I think it's weird to reject AI based on its current form.
| mediaman wrote:
| Out of curiosity, did you try this in o3?
|
| O3's web research seems to have gotten much, much better
| than their earlier attempts at using the web, which I
| didn't like. It seems to browse in a much more human way
| (trying multiple searches, noticing inconsistencies,
| following up with more refined searches, etc).
|
| But I wonder how it would do in a case like yours where
| there is conflicting information and whether it picks up on
| variance in information it finds.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I just asked o3 how to fill out a form 8949 for a sale
| with an incorrect 1099-B basis not reported to the IRS.
| It said (with no caveats or hedging, and explicit
| acknowledgement that it understood the basis was not
| reported) that you should put the incorrect basis in
| column (e) with adjustments in (f) and (g), while the IRS
| instructions are clear (as much as IRS instructions can
| be...) that in this scenario you should put the correct
| basis directly in column (e).
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| It can't replace a human for support, it is not even close to
| replacing a junior developer. It can't replace any advice job
| because it lies instead of erroring.
|
| As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very
| convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it.
|
| Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what
| they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what
| they are developing. Very junior developers are hired mostly as
| an investment so they become productive and stay with the
| company. AI might help with some of this but doesn't really
| replace anyone in the process.
|
| For support, there is massive value in talking to another human
| and having them trying to solve your issue. LLMs don't feel
| much better than the hardcoded menu style auto support there
| already is.
|
| I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were
| overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs
| atrus wrote:
| > As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you
| very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from
| it.
|
| How exactly is this different from getting advice from
| someone who acts confidently knowledgeable? Diet advice is an
| especially egregious example, since I can have 40 different
| dieticians give me 72 different diet/meal plans with them
| saying 100% certainty that this is the correct one.
|
| It's bad enough the AI marketers push AI as some all knowing,
| correct oracle, but when the anti-ai people use that as the
| basis for their arguments, it's somehow more annoying.
|
| Trust but verify is still a good rule here, no matter the
| source, human or otherwise.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| If a junior developer lies about something important, they
| can be fired and you can try to find someone else who
| wouldn't do the same thing. At the very least you could
| warn the person not to lie again or they're gone. It's not
| clear that you can do the same thing with an LLM as they
| don't know they've lied.
| atrus wrote:
| You're falling into the mistake of "correct" or "lied"
| though. Being wrong _isn 't lying_.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Inventing answers is lying
|
| If I ask it how to accomplish a task with the C standard
| library and it tells me to use a function that doesn't
| exist in the C standard library, that's not just "wrong"
| that is a fabrication. It is a lie
| atrus wrote:
| Lying requires intent to deceive.
|
| If you ask me to remove whitespace from a string in
| Python and I mistakenly tell you use ".trim()" (the Java
| method, a mistake I've made annoyingly too much) instead
| of ".strip()", am I lying to you?
|
| It's not a lie. It's just wrong.
| Smeevy wrote:
| An LLM is not "just wrong" either. It's just bullshit.
|
| The bullshitter doesn't care about if what they say is
| true or false or right or wrong. They just put out more
| bullshit.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| You are correct that there is a difference between lying
| and making a mistake, however
|
| > Lying requires intent to deceive
|
| LLMs do have an intent to deceive, built in!
|
| They have been built to never admit they don't know an
| answer, so they will invent answers based on faulty
| premises
|
| I agree that for a human mixing up ".trim()" and
| ".strip()" is an honest mistake
|
| In the example I gave you are asking for a function that
| does not exist. If it _invents_ a function, because it is
| designed to never say "you are wrong that doesn't exist"
| or "I don't know the answer" that seems to qualify to me
| as "intent to deceive" because it is designed to invent
| something rather than give you a negative sounding answer
| sharemywin wrote:
| which is interesting because AI doesn't have intent and
| there is incapable of lying.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Of course it has intent. It was literally designed to
| never say "I don't know" and to instead give what ever
| string of words best fits the patter. That's intent. It
| was designed with the intent to deceive rather than to
| offer any confidence levels or caveats. That's lying.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| It's more like bullshitting which is inbetween the two.
| Basically, like that guy who always has some story to
| tell. He's not lying as such, he's just waffling.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| OK, perhaps lying is the wrong word but someone who
| repeatedly fabricated information would be treated the
| same as a liar in most contexts.
| tempfile wrote:
| Do people actually behave this way with you? If someone
| presents a plan confidently without explaining why, I tend
| to trust them less (even people like doctors, who just
| happen to start with a very high reputation). In my
| experience people are very forthcoming with things they
| don't know.
| atrus wrote:
| Someone can present a plan, explain that plan, and be
| completely wrong.
|
| People are forthcoming with things they know they don't
| know. It's the stuff that they don't know that they don't
| know that get them. And also the things they think they
| know, but are wrong about. This may come as a shock, but
| people do make mistakes.
| dml2135 wrote:
| And if someone presents a plan, explains that plan, and
| is completely wrong repeatedly and often, in a way that
| makes it seem like they don't even have any concept
| whatsoever of what they may have done wrong, wouldn't you
| start to consider at some point that maybe this person is
| not a reliable source of information?
| mcmcmc wrote:
| In the case of dieticians, investment advisors, and
| accountants they are usually licensed professionals who
| face consequences for misconduct. LLMs don't have
| malpractice insurance
| zo1 wrote:
| Good luck getting any of that to happen. All that does is
| raise the barrier for proof and consequence, because
| they've got accreditation and "licensing bodies" with
| their own opaque rules and processes. Accreditation makes
| it seem like these people are held to some amazing
| standard with harsh penalties if they don't comply, but
| really they just add layers of abstraction and places for
| incompetence, malice and power-tripping to hide.
|
| E.g. Next time a lawyer abandons your civil case and
| ghosts you after being clearly negligent and down-right
| bad in their representation. Good luck holding them
| accountable with any body without consequences.
| ta20240528 wrote:
| " since I can have 40 different dieticians give me 72
| different diet/meal plans with them saying 100% certainty
| that this is the correct one."
|
| Because, as Brad Pilon of intermittent fasting fashion
| repeatedly stresses, "All diets work."*
|
| * Once there is an energy deficit.
| catdog wrote:
| I would not say all of them but in general I agree, there
| is not one correct one but many correct ones.
| econ wrote:
| OT but funny: I see a YouTube video with a lot of before
| and after photos where the coach guarantees results in 60
| days. It was entirely focused on avoiding stress and
| strongly advised against caloric restriction. Something
| like sleeping is many times more important than exercise
| and exercise is many times more important than diet.
|
| From what I know dieticians don't design exercise plans.
| (If true) the LLM has better odds to figure it out.
| munksbeer wrote:
| > Trust but verify is still a good rule here
|
| I wouldn't have a clue how to verify most things that get
| thrown around these days. How can I verify climate science?
| I just have to trust the scientific consensus (and I do).
| But some people refuse to trust that consensus, and they
| think that by reading some convincing sounding alternative
| sources they've verified that the majority view on climate
| science is wrong.
|
| The same can apply for almost anything. How can I verify
| dietary studies? Just having the ability to read scientific
| studies and spot any flaws requires knowledge that only
| maybe 1 in 10000 people could do, if not worse than that.
| blackoil wrote:
| Ironic, but keep asking LLMs till you can connect it to
| your "known truth" knowledge. For many topics I spend
| ~15-60 mins on various topics asking for details,
| questioning any contradictory answers, verifying
| assumptions to get what feels right answer. I talked with
| them for topics varying from democracy-economy,
| irrational number proofs and understanding rainbows.
| franticgecko3 wrote:
| I agree with most of your points but this one
|
| >I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were
| overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs
|
| No way. NFTs did not make any headway in "the real world":
| their value proposition was that their cash value was
| speculative, like most other Blockchain technologies, and
| that understandably collapsed quickly and brilliantly. Right
| now developers are using LLMs and they have real tangible
| advantages. They are more successful than NFTs already.
|
| I'm a huge AI skeptic and I believe it's difficult to measure
| their usefulness while we're still in a hype bubble but I am
| using them every day, they don't write my prod code because
| they're too unreliable and sloppy, but for one shot scripts
| <100 lines they have saved me hours, and they've entirely
| replaced stack overflow for me. If the hype bubble burst
| today I'd still be using LLMs tomorrow. Cannot say the same
| for NFTs
| catdog wrote:
| LLMs are somewhat useful compared to NFTs and other
| blockchain bullshit which is nearly completely useless. It
| will be interesting what happens when the money from the
| investment bubble dries out and the real costs need to be
| paid by the users.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I trust cutting edge models now far more than the ones from a
| few years ago.
|
| People talk a lot of about false info and hallucinations,
| which the models do in fact do, but the examples of this have
| become more and more far flung for SOTA models. It seems that
| now in order to elicit bad information, you pretty much have
| to write out a carefully crafted trick question or ask about
| a topic so on the fringes of knowledge that it basically is
| only a handful of papers in the training set.
|
| However, asking "I am sensitive to sugar, make me a meal plan
| for the week targeting 2000cal/day and high protein with
| minimally processed foods" I would totally trust the output
| to be on equal footing with a run of the mill registered
| dietician.
|
| As for the junior developer thing, my company has already
| forgone paid software solutions in order to use software
| written by LLMs. We are not a tech company, just old school
| manufacturing.
| asadotzler wrote:
| I get wrong answers for basic things like how to fill out a
| government form or the relationship between two distant
| historical figures, things I'm actually working on directly
| and not some "trick" to get the machine to screw up. They
| get a lot right a lot of the time, but they're inherently
| untrustworthy because they sometimes get things subtly or
| catastrophically wrong and without some kind of consistent
| confidence scoring, there's no way to tell the difference
| without further research, and almost necessarily on some
| other tool because LLMs like to hold onto their lies and
| it's very difficult to convince them to discard a
| hallucination.
| steamrolled wrote:
| > It can't replace a human for support
|
| But it is replacing it. There's a rapidly-growing number of
| large, publicly-traded companies that replaced first-line
| support with LLMs. When I did my taxes, "talk to a person"
| was replaced with "talk to a chatbot". Airlines use them,
| telcos use them, social media platforms use them.
|
| I suspect what you're missing here is that LLMs here aren't
| replacing some Platonic ideal of CS. Even _bad_ customer
| support is very expensive. Chatbots are still a lot cheaper
| than hundreds of outsourced call center people following a
| rigid script. And frankly, they probably make fewer mistakes.
|
| > and it will blow up like NFTs
|
| We're probably in a valuation bubble, but it's pretty
| unlikely that the correct price is zero.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| > It can't replace a human for support
|
| It doesn't wholly replace the need for human support agents
| but if it can adequately handle a substantial number of
| tickets that's enough to reduce headcount.
|
| A huge percentage of problems raised in customer support are
| solved by otherwise accessible resources that the user hasn't
| found. And AI agents are sophisticated enough to actually
| action on a lot of issues that require action.
|
| The good news is that this means human agents can focus on
| the actually hard problems when they're not consumed by as
| much menial bullshit. The bad news for human agents is that
| with half the workload we'll probably hit an equilibrium with
| a lot fewer people in support.
| unquietwiki wrote:
| I already know of at least one company that's pivoted to
| using a mix of AI and off-shoring their support, as well as
| some other functions; that's underway, with results
| unclear, aside from layoffs that took place. There was also
| a brouhaha a year or two ago when a mental health advocacy
| tried using AI to replace their support team... did not go
| as planned when it suggested self-harm to some users.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| LLM is already very useful for a lot of tasks. NFT and most
| other crypto has never been useful for anything other than
| speculation.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| NFT:s never had any real value. It was just speculation
| hoping some bigger sucker will come after you.
|
| LLM:s create real value. I save a bunch of time coding with
| an LLM vs without one. Is it perfect? No, but it does not
| have to be for still creating a lot of value.
|
| Are some people hyping it up too much? Sure, an reality will
| set in but it wont blow up. It will rather be like the
| internet. 2000s and everyone thought "slap some internet on
| it and everything will be solved". They overestimated the
| (shorterm) value of the internet. But internet was still
| useful.
| asadotzler wrote:
| NFTs weren't a trillion dollar black hole that's yet to
| come close to providing value anywhere near that investment
| level. Come back when AI companies are actually profitable.
| Until then, LLM AI value is negative, and if the companies
| can't turn that around, they'll be as dead as NFTs and you
| won't even get the heavily subsidized company killing free
| of cheap features you think are solid.
| gokhan wrote:
| > I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were
| overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs
|
| Can't disagree more (on LLMs. NFTs are of course rubbish).
| I'm using them with all kinds of coding tasks with good
| success, and it's getting better every week. Also created a
| lot of documents using them, describing APIs, architecture,
| processes and many more.
|
| Lately working on creating an MCP for an internal mid-sized
| API of a task management suite that manages a couple hundred
| people. I wasn't sure about the promise of AI handling your
| own data until starting this project, now I'm pretty sure it
| will handle most of the personal computing tasks in the
| future.
| econ wrote:
| > It can't replace a human for support,
|
| It doesn't have to. It can replace having no support at all.
|
| It would be possible to run a helpdesk for a free product. It
| might suck but it could be great if you are stuck.
|
| Support call centers usually work in layers. Someone to pick
| up the phone who started 2 days ago and knows nothing. They
| forward the call to someone who managed to survive for 3
| weeks. Eventually you get to talk to someone who knows
| something but can't make decisions.
|
| It might take 45 minutes before you get to talk to only the
| first helper. Before you penetrate deep enough to get real
| support you might lose an hour or two. The LLM can answer
| instantly and do better than tortured minimum wage employees
| who know nothing.
|
| There may be large waves of similar questions if someone or
| something screwed up. The LLM can do that.
|
| The really exciting stuff will come where the LLM can
| instantly read your account history and has a good idea what
| you want to ask before you do. It can answer questions you
| didn't think to ask.
|
| This is specially great if you've had countless email
| exchanges with miles of text repeating the same thing over
| and over. The employee can't read 50 pages just to get up to
| speed on the issue, if they had the time you don't so you
| explain again for the 5th time that delivery should be on
| adress B not A and be on these days between these times
| unless it are type FOO orders.
|
| Stuff that would be obvious and easy if they made actual
| money.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| > As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you
| very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from
| it.
|
| Have you somehow managed to avoid the last several decades of
| human-sourced dieting advice?
| eqmvii wrote:
| Your tax example isn't far off from what's already possible
| with Google.
|
| The legal profession specifically saw the rise of computers,
| digitization of cases and records, and powerful search... it's
| never been easier to "self help" - yet people still hire
| lawyers.
| chgs wrote:
| I tend to use ai for the same things I'd have used Google for
| in 2005.
|
| Google is pretty much useless now as it changed into ann ad
| platform, and I suspect AI will go the same way soon enough.
| flmontpetit wrote:
| It seems like an obvious thing on the surface, but I've
| already noticed that when asked questions on LLM usage (eg
| building RAG pipelines and whatnot), ChatGPT will exclusively
| refer you to OpenAI products.
| erkt wrote:
| I just asked O3 for a software stack for deploying AI in a
| local application and it recommended llama over OpenAI API.
|
| It has always been easy to imagine how advertising could
| destroy the integrity of LLM's. I can guarantee that there
| will be companies unable to resist the temporary cash flows
| from it. Those models will destroy their reputation in no
| time.
| xyzal wrote:
| It's happening, though not with ads yet
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-
| poi...
| JoshTko wrote:
| My bet is that free versions of models will become
| sponsor aligned.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'm an AI pessimist, yet I don't see this happening (at
| least not without some major advancements in how LLMs
| work).
|
| One major problem is the payment mechanism. The nature of
| LLMs means you just can't really know or force it to spit
| out ad garbage in a predictable manor. That'll make it
| really tricky for an advertiser to want to invest in your
| LLM advertising (beyond being able to sell the fact that
| they are an AI ad service).
|
| Another is going to be regulations. How can you be sure
| to properly highlight "sponsored" content in the middle
| of an AI hallucination? These LLM companies run a very
| real risk of running a fowl of FTC rules.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| > The nature of LLMs means you just can't really know or
| force it to spit out ad garbage in a predictable manor.
|
| You certainly can with middleware on inference.
| rurp wrote:
| It matters a lot how much of the market they capture
| before then though. Oracle and Google are two companies
| that have spent years torching their reputation but they
| are still ubiquitous and wildly profitable.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would have
| cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent.
|
| That's like buying a wrench and changing your own spark plugs.
| Wrenches are not putting mechanics out of business.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Depends on how good the wrench is, if I can walk over to the
| wrench, kick it, say change my spark plugs now you fuck, and
| it does so instantly and for free and doesn't complain....
| conductr wrote:
| I'm a bit of a skeptic too and kind of agree on this. Also, the
| human employee displacement will be slow. It will start by not
| eliminating existing jobs but just eliminating the need for
| additional headcount, so it caps the growth of these labor
| markets. As it does that, the folks in the roles leveraging AI
| the most will start slowly stealing share of demand as they
| find more efficient and cheaper ways to perform the work.
| Meanwhile, core demand is shrinking as self service by
| customers is increasingly enabled. Then at some step pattern,
| perhaps the next global business cycle down turn, the headcount
| starts trending downward. This will repeat a handful of times,
| probably taking decades to be measured in aggregate by this
| type of study.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Not consulting a real tax advisor is probably going to cost you
| much more.
|
| I wouldn't be saving on tax advisors. Moreover, I would hire
| two different tax advisors, so I could cross check them.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Most people's (USA) taxes are not complex, and just require
| basic arithmetic to complete. Even topics like stock sales,
| IRA rollovers, HSAs, and rental income (which the vast
| majority of taxpayers don't have) are straightforward if you
| just read the instructions on the forms and follow them. In
| 30 years of paying taxes, I've only had a tax professional do
| it once: as an experiment after I already did them myself to
| see if there was any difference in the output. I paid a tax
| professional $400 and the forms he handed me back were
| identical to the ones I filled out myself.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| I'm one of those weird kids who liked doing those puzzles
| where you had to walk through a list of tricky instructions
| and end up with the right answers, so I'm pretty good at
| that sort of thing. I also have fairly simple finances: a
| regular W-2 job and a little side income that doesn't have
| taxes withdrawn. But last year the IRS sent me a $450 check
| and a note that said I'd made a mistake on my taxes and
| paid too much. Sadly, they didn't tell me what the mistake
| was, so I couldn't be sure to correct it this year.
|
| Technically, all you have to do is follow the written
| instructions. But there are a surprising number of maybes
| in those instructions. You hit a checkbox that asks whether
| you qualify for such-and-such deduction, and find yourself
| downloading yet another document full of conditions for
| qualification, which aren't always as clear-cut as you'd
| like. You can end up reading page after page to figure out
| whether you should check a single box, and that single box
| may require another series of forms.
|
| My small side income takes me from a one-page return to
| several pages, and next year I'm probably going to have to
| pay estimated taxes in advance because that non-taxed
| income leaves me owing at the end of the year more than
| some acceptable threshold that could result in fines. All
| because I make an extra 10% doing some evening freelancing.
|
| Most people's taxes _shouldn 't_ be complex, but in
| practice they're more complex than they should be.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't think it makes you weird, and taxes really aren't
| that much of a puzzle to put together, outside of the
| many deduction-related edge cases (which you can skip if
| you just take the standard deduction). My federal and
| state returns last year added up to 36 pages, _not_
| counting the attachments listing investment sales. Still,
| they 're pretty straightforward. I now at least use
| online software to do them, but that's only to save time
| filling out forms, not for the software's "expertise." I
| have no doubt I could do them by hand if I wanted to give
| myself more writing to do.
|
| If I can do this, most people can do a simple 2-page
| 1040EZ.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Ironically, your example is what you used to get from a Google
| search back when Google wasn't aggressively monetized and
| enshittified.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| I think this is an important point. It's easy to lose track
| of just how bad search has gotten over the years because the
| enshittification has been so gradual. The replacement of
| search by AI is capturing so many people's imaginations
| because it feels like the way google felt when it first came
| around.
|
| If AI replaces search, I do wonder how long before AI becomes
| just as enshittified as search did. You know
| google/OpenAI/etc will eventually need to make this stuff
| profitable. And subscriptions aren't currently doing that.
| dcchuck wrote:
| I actually paid for tax advice from one of those big companies
| (it was recommended - last time I will take that person's
| recommendations!). I was very disappointed in the service. It
| felt like the person I was speaking to on the phone would have
| been better of just echoing the request into AI. So I did just
| that as I waited on the line. I found the answer and the tax
| expert "confirmed" it.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| According to the article the Tax expert still has a job
| though.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The kind of person who wants to pay nothing for advice wasn't
| going to hire a lawyer or an accountant anyway.
|
| This fact is so simple and yet here we are having arguments
| about it. To me people are conflating an economic assessment -
| whose jobs are going to be impacted and how much - with an
| aspirational one - which of your acquaintances personally could
| be replaced by an AI, because that would satisfy a beef.
| boredtofears wrote:
| I thought the value of using a licensed tax agent is that if
| they give you advice that ends up being bad, they have an
| ethical/professional obligation to clean up their mess.
| mchusma wrote:
| Yeah, 2023 I would expect no effect. 2024 I think generally
| not, wasn't good or deployed enough. I think 2025 might be the
| first signs, it I still think there is a lot of plumbing and
| working with these things. 2026 though I expect to show an
| effect.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| 2024 was already madness for translators and graphic artists,
| according to my personal anecdata.
| asadotzler wrote:
| That's now what the AI boosters and shills were saying in
| 2021. Might be worth a refresher if you've got the time, but
| nearly every timeline that's been floated by any of the
| leadership in any of the OG LLM makers has been as
| hallucinated as the worst answers coming from their bots.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Here's why I don't think it matters , because the machine is
| paying for everyone's productivity boost, even your
| accountants. So maybe this tide will rise all boats. Time will
| tell.
|
| Your accountant also is probably saving hundreds of dollars in
| other areas using AI assistance.
|
| Personally I still think you should cross check with a
| professional.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to
| make this call."
|
| What call. Maybe some readers miss the (perhaps subtle)
| difference between "Generative AI is not ..." and "Generative
| Ai is not going to ..."
|
| Then first can be based on fact, e.g., what has happened so
| far. The second is based on pure speculation. No one knows what
| will happen in the future. HN is continually being flooded with
| speculation, marketing, hype.
|
| In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is is
| based on what has happened so far. There is no "call" being
| made. Only an examination of what has heppened so far. Facts
| not opinions.
| mac-attack wrote:
| > In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is
| is based on what has happened so far.
|
| _What happened in 2023 and 2024 actually_
|
| Nitpicky but it's worth noting that last year's AI
| capabilities are not the April 2025 AI capabilities and
| definitely won't be the December 2025 capabilities.
|
| It's using deprecated/replaced technology to make a
| statement, that is not forward projecting. I'm struggling to
| see the purpose. It's like announcing that the sun is still
| shining at 7pm, no?
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I feel like model improvement is severely overstated by the
| benchmarks and the last release cycle basically made no
| difference to my use cases. If you gave me Claude 3.5 and
| 3.7 I couldn't really tell the difference. OpenAI models
| feel like they are regressing, and LLAMA 4 regressed even
| on benchmarks.
|
| And the hype was insane in 2023 already - it's useful to
| compare actual outcomes vs historic hype to gauge how
| credible the hype sellers are.
| kypro wrote:
| That's interesting. I think there's been some pretty
| significant improvements in the rate of hallucinations
| and accuracy of the models, especially when it comes to
| rule following. Perhaps the biggest improvement though is
| in the size of context windows which are huge compared to
| this time last year.
|
| Maybe progress over the last 2-3 months is hard to see,
| but progress over the last 6 is very clear.
| freejazz wrote:
| Well, it's a given that the sun is shining when it is out.
| Not so much with the AI.
| bredren wrote:
| > According to the study, "users report average time savings
| of just 2.8 percent of work hours" from using AI tools.
| That's a bit more than one hour per 40 hour work week.
|
| Could be data is lagging as sibling comment said but this
| seems wildly difficult to report on a number like this.
|
| It also doesn't take into account the benefits to colleagues
| of active users of LLMs (second order savings).
|
| My use of LLMs often means I'm saving other people time
| because I can work through issues without communications
| loops and task switching. I can ask about much more
| important, novel items of discussion.
|
| This is an important omission that lowers the paper's overall
| value and sets it up for headlines like this.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| The headline is about wages and jobs. It's very possible
| that AI could result in time savings of 50% of work hours
| in a week and still have no impact on wages or jobs.
|
| This is because the economy is not a static thing. If one
| variable changes (productivity), it's not a given that GDP
| will remain constant and jobs/wages will consequently be
| reduced. More likely is that all of the variables are
| always in flux, reacting and responding to changes in the
| market.
| bredren wrote:
| Very well, I acknowledge this point.
|
| However, the parent comment is about an examination of
| what has happened so far and facts that feed into the
| paper and its conclusions.
|
| I was focused on what I see as important gaps in
| measuring impact of AI, and its actual (if difficult to
| measure) impact right now.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| The paper analyzes facts re: wages and jobs, which I
| think are (comparatively) easy to measure as compared
| with productivity, and are also an area where people have
| concerns about the impact of AI.
|
| Mostly people aren't worried about productivity itself,
| which would be weird. "Oh no, AI is making us way more
| productive, and now we're getting too much stuff done and
| the economy is growing too much." The major concern is
| that the productivity is going to impact jobs and wages,
| and at least so far (according to this particular paper)
| that seems to not be happening.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Won't doing the same job in half the time lead to having
| to pay half the salary? Indirectly, I mean. You can now
| hire half the people or pay the same number of people
| half.
|
| Unless twice the work is suddenly required, which I
| doubt.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| No one knows, but if history is any guide, it is very
| unlikely.
|
| I would also be surprised if the twice the work was
| "suddenly" required, but would you be surprised if people
| buy more of something if it costs less? In the 1800s
| ordinary Americans typically owned only a few outfits.
| Coats were often passed down several generations. Today,
| ordinary Americans usually own dozens of outfits. Did
| Americans in the 1800s simply not like owning lots of
| clothing? Of course not. They would have liked to own
| more clothing, but demand was constrained by cost. As the
| price of clothing has gone down, demand for clothing has
| increased.
|
| With software, won't it be the same? If engineers are
| twice as productive as before, competitive pressure will
| push the price of software down. Custom software for
| businesses (for example) is very expensive now. If it
| were less expensive, maybe more businesses will purchase
| custom software. If my Fastmail subscription becomes
| cheaper, maybe I will have more money to spend on other
| software subscriptions. In this way, across the whole
| economy, it is very ordinary for productivity gains to
| not reduce employment or wages.
|
| Of course demand is not infinitely elastic (i.e. there is
| a limit on how many outfits a person will buy, no matter
| how cheap), but the effects of technological disruption
| on the economy are complex. Even if demand for one kind
| of labor is reduced, demand for other kinds of labor can
| increase. Even if we need less weavers, maybe we need
| more fashion designers, more cotton farmers, more
| truckers, more cardboard box factory workers, more
| logistics workers, and so on. Even if we need less
| programmers, maybe we need more data center
| administrators?
|
| No one knows what the future economy will look like, but
| so far the long term trends in economic history don't
| link technological innovations with decreased wages or
| unemployment.
| photonthug wrote:
| I am not an economist but isn't there increasing evidence
| that for many goods/services, supply/demand/cost are just
| not that closely related anymore? I feel like we've seen
| this repeatedly with greedflation and the post Covid
| "supply shocks" blamed long after they stop being
| relevant. Prices go up but don't come down because
| meaningful competition is simply not present anymore for
| large sectors. When it is present.. algorithmic price
| fixing can take the place of other kind of cabals.
|
| Outside of goods, there must be more schools than ever
| before, and more academics qualified to teach at them,
| but is it bringing down the cost of education?
| mfitton wrote:
| I think it's quite common that a company has way too many
| things that it could work on compared to what the amount
| of people they should reasonably hire can get done. And
| working on more things actually generates more work
| itself. The more products you have, or the more
| infrastructure capabilities you build out, the more
| possible work you can do.
|
| So you could work on more things with the same number of
| employees, make more money as a result, and either
| further increase the number of things you do, or if not,
| increase your revenue and hopefully profits per-employee.
| everdrive wrote:
| >Unless twice the work is suddenly required, which I
| doubt.
|
| I'm not sure why you doubt it. In a company, efficiency
| improvements never mean you don't have to do as much
| work. They always mean you just have more time in the day
| for extra work. It's part of the reason I really don't
| care at all about automation, LLMs, etc, at least from an
| efficiency perspective. (there's another case to be made
| for automated response, etc.) I hear people say that it
| opens them up to do more of the interesting work they
| care about, but in practice I've never seen this be true.
|
| It feels lot like when people in IT talk about how they
| are "always learning new things." Yes, that's true, but
| what you're learning is worthless: An updated UI for
| Defender, a new proprietary query language, branding
| hierarchies for tech company products, etc. It's all
| worthless knowledge.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > It's very possible that AI could save 50% of work hours
| in a week and still have no impact on wages or jobs.
|
| I like this sentence because it is grammatically and
| syntactically valid but has the same relationship to
| reality as say, the muttering of an incantation or spell
| has, in that it seeks to make the words come true by
| speaking them.
|
| Aside from simply hoping that, if somebody says it it
| could be true, "If everyone's hours got cut in half,
| employers would simply keep everyone and double wages" is
| up there with "It is very possible that if my car broke
| down I'd just fly a Pegasus to work"
| jaredklewis wrote:
| The cited statistics is in reference to time saved (as a
| percent of work hours), not a reduction in paid working
| hours.
|
| But more generally, my comment is not absurd; it's a
| pattern that has played itself out in economic history
| dozens of times.
|
| Despite the fact that modern textile and clothing
| machinery are easily 1000x more efficient than weaving
| cloth and sewing shirts by hand, the modern garment
| industry employs more people today than that of middle
| age Europe.
|
| Will AI be the same? I don't know, but it wouldn't be
| unusual if it was.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| That is the result of using fuel. In spite of efficiency
| gained, more work is possible; more work is demanded,
| too: a dress is not lasting a decade now, hopefully one
| season.
|
| More people are also available since the fields are
| producing by themselves, comparatively. Not to mention
| less of us die to epidemies, famines and swords.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > The cited statistics is in reference to time saved (as
| a percent of work hours), not a reduction in paid working
| hours.
|
| This makes sense. If everyone's current workloads were
| suddenly cut in half tomorrow, there would simply be
| enough demand to double their workloads. This makes sense
| across the board because much like clothing and textiles,
| demand for every product and service scales linearly with
| population.
|
| I was mistaken, you did not suggest that employers would
| gift workers money commensurate with productivity, you
| simply posit that demand is conceptually infinite and
| Jevons paradox means that no jobs ever get eliminated.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| Ugh, I didn't posit that demand is infinite, nor did I
| even mention Jevons paradox.
|
| In the the past 200 years we've seen colossal
| productivity gains from technology across every area of
| the economy. Over the same period, wages have increased
| and unemployment has remained stable. That's where my
| priors come from. I'll update them if we get data to the
| contrary, but the data we have so far (like this paper)
| mostly confirm them.
| jononor wrote:
| Doubling the wages is not going to happen... But it could
| be that output gets doubled, at the same personell cost
| (jobs*wages). Ref Jervons Paradox.
| datpuz wrote:
| IMO, if you're gaining a significant amount of productivity
| from LLMs in a technical field, it's because you were
| either very junior and lacked much of the basic knowledge
| required of your role, or you performed like you were.
| Arctic_fly wrote:
| Definitely not the case for coding. I'm a capable senior
| engineer, and I know many other very experienced senior
| engineers who are all benefitting immensely from AI, both
| in the code editor and chat interfaces.
|
| My company just redid our landing page. It would probably
| have taken a decent developer two weeks to build it out.
| Using AI to create the initial drafts, it took two days.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Sorry but this just definitely isn't true.
|
| I would (similarly insultingly) suggest that if you think
| this is true, you're spending time doing things more
| slowly that you could be doing more productively by using
| contemporary tools.
| grandmczeb wrote:
| IMO, if you haven't been getting a significant
| productivity boost from LLMs in a technical field, it's
| because you lack the basic brain plasticity to adapt to
| new tools, or feel so psychologically threatened by
| change that you act like you do.
| treis wrote:
| I disagree. Maybe there's savants out there that can
| write SQL, K8s auto scaling yaml, dockerfiles, React
| components, backend code, and a dozen other things. But
| for the rest of us LLMs are helpful for the things we
| wade into every so often.
|
| It's not miraculous but I feel like it saves me a couple
| hours a week from not going on wild goose chases. So
| maybe 5% of my time.
|
| I don't think any engineering org is going to notice 5%
| more output and layoff 1/20th of their engineers. I think
| for now most of the time saved is going back to the
| engineers.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > "Generative AI is not ..."
|
| But here's the thing - there is already plenty of documented
| proof of individuals losing their job to ChatGPT. This is an
| article from _2 years ago_ :
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-
| taki...
|
| Early on in a paradigm shift, when you have small moves, or
| people are still trying to figure out the tech, it's likely
| that individual moves are hard to distinguish from noise. So
| I'd argue that a broad-based, "just look at the averages"
| approach is simply the wrong approach to use at this point in
| the tech lifecycle.
|
| FWIW, I'd have to search for it, but there were economic
| analyses done that said it took _decades_ for the PC to have
| a positive impact on productivity. IMO, this is just another
| article about "economists using tools they don't really
| understand". For decades they told us globalization would be
| good for all countries, they just kinda forgot about the
| massive political instability it could cause.
|
| > In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is
| based on what has happened so far.
|
| Not true. The article specifically calls into question
| whether the massive spending on AI is worth it. AI is
| obviously an investment, so determine whether it's "worth
| it", you need to consider future outcomes.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > economic analyses done that said it took decades for the
| PC to have a positive impact on productivity
|
| I honestly think computers have a net negative productivity
| impact in many organizations. Maybe even "most".
| 7qW24A wrote:
| It's an interesting rabbit hole to go down. If you use
| the BLS's definition of productivity, then computers seem
| to be a net drag on productivity:
|
| https://usafacts.org/articles/what-is-labor-productivity-
| and...
|
| Even more surprising for me is that productivity growth
| _declined_ during the ZIRP era. How did we take all that
| free money and product _less_?
| Arctic_fly wrote:
| This is an excellent question. My very unscientific
| suspicion is that the decreases in average attention span
| and ability to concentrate zero out the theoretical
| possible increases in productivity that computers allow.
| exe34 wrote:
| > globalization would be good for all countries, they just
| kinda forgot about the massive political instability it
| could cause
|
| Could you say a few more words on this please? Are you
| referring to the rise of China?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Some resources:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/14/globalisati
| on-...
|
| https://business.columbia.edu/sites/default/files-
| efs/imce-u...
|
| But in my own words, while I think economists have always
| acknowledged there would be some "winners" and "losers"
| from globalization, I think there is widespread belief
| now that early globalization boosters misjudged how bad
| it would be for the "losers", they underestimated how
| much it would contribute to inequality, and they
| underestimated the destabilizing effect this would have
| on social and political systems.
|
| At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what the
| reality is for globalization's benefits if so many people
| are turned off by it that they want to "burn the whole
| thing down", as that's basically what's happening now.
| freehorse wrote:
| > And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing
| to the tax office website, including a link to the office's
| well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I
| thought I would have to pay someone to figure out.
|
| Sounds like reddit could also do a good job at this, though
| nobody said "reddit will replace your jobs". Maybe because not
| as many people actively use reddit as they use generative AI
| now, but I cannot imagine any other reason than that.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I don't trust what anyone says in this space because there is
| so much money to be made (by a fraction of people) if AI lives
| up to its promise, and money to be made to those who claim that
| AI is "bullshit".
|
| The only thing I can remotely trust is my own experience.
| Recently, I decided to have some business cards made, which I
| haven't done in probably 15 years. A few years ago, I would
| have either hired someone on Fiverr to design my business card
| or pay for a premade template. Instead, I told Sora to design
| me a business card, and it gave me a good design the first
| time; it even immediately updated it with my Instagram link
| when I asked it to.
|
| I'm sorry, but I fail to see how AI, as we now know it, doesn't
| take the wind out of the sails of certain kinds of jobs.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| But didn't we have business card template programs, and even
| free suggested business card designs from the companies that
| sell business cards, almost immediately after they opened for
| business on the internet?
| ravenstine wrote:
| That's missing the point, and is kind of like saying why
| bother paying someone to build you a house when there are
| DIY home building kits. (or why even buy a home when you
| can live in a van rent-free)
|
| The point is that _I_ would have paid for another human
| being 's time. Why? Because I am not a young man anymore,
| and have little desire to do everything myself at this
| point. But now, I don't have to pay for someone's time, and
| that surplus time doesn't necessarily transfer to something
| equivalent like magic.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| You do pay for it though. Compute isn't free.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Could I really have been more clear?
|
| I am _not_ talking about whether I have to pay more or
| less for anything. My problem is not _paying_. I _want_
| to pay so that I don 't have to make something myself or
| waste time fiddling with a free template.
|
| What I am proposing is that, in the current day, a human
| being is less likely to be at the other end of the
| transaction when I want to spend money to avoid
| sacrificing _my_ time.
|
| Sure, one can say that whomever is working for one of
| these AI companies benefits, but they would be outliers
| and AI is effectively homogenizing labor units in that
| case. Someone with creative talent isn't going to
| feasibly spin up a competitive AI business the way they
| could have started their own business selling their
| services directly.
| asadotzler wrote:
| For your amateur use case, maybe. For real professions in
| the real economy, the article you're commenting under
| disagrees.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > real professions in the real economy
|
| That's both pompous and bizarre. The "real" economy
| doesn't end at the walls of corporate offices. Far from
| it.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I use it everyday to an extent that I've come to depend on it.
|
| For copywriting, analyzing contracts, exploring my business
| domain, etc etc. Each of those tasks would have required me to
| consult with an expert a few years ago. Not anymore.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| "AI is all hype and is going to destroy the labor market"
| dismalaf wrote:
| Google (non-Gemini) has always been a great source for tax
| advice, at least here in Canada because, if nothing else, the
| government's website appears to leave all its pages available
| for indexing (even if it's impossible to navigate on its own).
| ericmcer wrote:
| This is a great point, I was just using it understand various
| DMV procedures. It is invaluable for navigating bureaucracy so
| if your job is to ingest and regurgitate a bunch of documents
| and procedures you may be highly at risk here.
|
| That is a great use for it too, rather than replacing artists
| we have personal advisors who can navigate almost any level of
| complex bureaucracy instantaneously. My girlfriend hates AI,
| like rails against it at any opportunity, but after spending a
| few hours on the DMV website I sat down and fed her questions
| into Claude and had answers in a few seconds. Instant convert.
| nzeid wrote:
| > Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior
| coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on
| X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where
| the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the
| recipient, seem to be severely at risk.
|
| These examples aren't wrong but you might be overstating their
| impact on the economy as a whole.
|
| E.g. the overwhelming majority of people do not pay solely for
| tax advice, or have a dietician, etc. Corporations already
| crippled their customer support so there's no remaining damage
| to be dealt.
|
| Your tax example won't move the needle on people who pay to
| have their taxes done in their entirety.
| m3047 wrote:
| The biggest harm today is people in training for "people
| interaction" specialties with a high degree of empathy /
| ability to read others: psychology, counseling, forensic
| interviewing. They pay a lot of money (or it's invested in
| them) to get trained and then have to do practical residency /
| internship: they need to do those interships NOW, and a
| significant proportion of the population that they'd otherwise
| interact with to do so is off faffing about with AI. The fact
| that anecdotally they can't seem to create "convincing" enough
| AIs to take the place of subjects is damning.
| empath75 wrote:
| This thought process sort of implies that there's a limited
| amount of work that's available to do, and once AI is doing all
| of it, that everyone else will just sit on their hands and stop
| using their brains to do stuff.
|
| Even if every job that exists today were currently automated
| _people would find other stuff to do_. There is always going to
| be more work to do that isn't economical for AIs to do for a
| variety of reasons.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get
| from a licensed tax agent
|
| But are those really the same? You're not paying the tax agent
| to give you the advice per se: even before Gemini, you could do
| your own research for free. You're really paying the tax agent
| to provide you advice _that you can trust_ without having to go
| to the extra steps of doing deep research.
|
| One of the most important bits of information I get from my tax
| agent is, "is this likely to get me audited if we do it?" It's
| going to be quite some time before I trust AI to answer that
| correctly.
| freedomben wrote:
| Also, frequently you're buying some protection by using the
| licensed agent. If they give you bad advice, there's a person
| to go to and in the most extreme cases, maybe file a lawsuit
| or insurance claim against.
| datpuz wrote:
| Nearly every job, even a lot of creative ones, require a degree
| of accuracy and consistency that gen AI just can't deliver.
| Until some major breakthrough is achieved, not many people
| doing real work are in danger.
| notahacker wrote:
| A friend of mine is working on a "RAG for tax advisers"
| startup. He's selling it to the _tax accountants_ , as a way
| for them to spot things they wouldn't otherwise have the time
| to review and generate more specialist tax advisory work.
| There's a lot more work they could do if only it's affordable
| to the businesses they advise (none of whom could do their own
| taxes even if they wanted to!)
|
| Jevons law in action: some pieces of work get lost, but lower
| cost of doing work generates more demand overall...
| jmull wrote:
| > ...where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored
| for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk
|
| I doubt it.
|
| Search already "obsoletes" these fields in the same way AI
| does. AI isn't really competing against experts here, but
| against search.
|
| It's also really not clear that AI has an overall advantage
| over dumb search in this area. AI can provide more
| focused/tailored results, but it costs more. Keep in mind that
| AI hasn't been enshittified yet like search. The
| enshittification is inevitable and will come fast and hard
| considering the cost of AI. That is, AI responses will be
| focused and tailored to better monetize you, not better serve
| you.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient
|
| If that's true, probably for the best that those jobs get
| replaced. Then again, the value may have been in the personal
| touch (pay to feel good about your decisions) rather than
| quality of directions.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| > including a link to the office's well-hidden official
| calculator
|
| So...all you needed was a decent search engine, which in the
| past would have been Google before it was completely
| enshittified.
| worik wrote:
| > So...all you needed was a decent search engine,
|
| Yes.
|
| "...all you need" A good search engine is a big ask. Google
| at its height was quite good. LLMs are shaping up to be very
| good search engines
|
| That would be enough, for me to be very pleased with them
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| Awfully early? We have "useful" LLMs for almost three years.
| Where is the productivity increase? Also, your example is not
| very relevant. 1) Would you pay the professional if you
| couldn't find the answer yourself? 2) If search engines were
| still useful (I'm assuming you googled first), wouldn't they be
| able to find the official calculator too?
| decimalenough wrote:
| LLMs have come a long way in those 3 years. The early ones
| were absolute garbage compared to what we have today.
|
| 1) Yes. I had in fact already booked the appointment, but
| decided to try asking Gemini for shits and giggles.
|
| 2) I did google, but I didn't know an official calculator
| existed, and the search results presented me with a morass of
| random links that I couldn't make heads or tails of.
| Remember, I'm _not_ a domain expert in this area.
| mmcnl wrote:
| But all those jobs have been at risk for a long time already,
| yet they still exist. There is so much "pre-AI" low-hanging
| fruit that is still there. So why is that? I don't have the
| answer, but clearly there is more to it than just technology.
| intellectronica wrote:
| "Life is awesome", said the frog, "the owners arranged a jacuzzi
| for me, it's warm and lovely in the water, not dangerous at all".
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| This is just objectively false. My friend is a freelance copy
| writer and live in the freelance world. It is 100% replacing
| writing jobs, editing jobs, and design jobs.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| To be fair, those jobs were already pretty precarious.
|
| Ever since the explosion in popularity of the internet in the
| 2000's, anything journalism related has been in terminal
| decline. The arrival of the smartphones accelerated this
| process.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Since when? If they're writing online content then that was
| wiped out somewhat recently by Google changing their search
| algorithm and killing a huge amount of content based sites
| 6510 wrote:
| An LLM wouldn't intentionally confuse "didn't" with "isn't"
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| November 30th, 2022 is when ChatGPT burst into the world stage
| and upended what people thought AI was capable of doing. It's
| been less than three years since then. The technology is still
| imperfect but improving at an exponential rate.
|
| I know it's replaced marketing content writers in startups. I
| know it has augmented development in startups and reduced hiring
| needs.
|
| The effects as it gains capability will be mass unemployment.
| colinmorelli wrote:
| FYI: The actual study may not quite say what this article is
| suggesting. Unless I'm missing something, the study seems to
| focus on employee use of chat-based assistants, not on company-
| wide use of AI workflow solutions. The answers come from
| interviewing the employees themselves. There is an analysis of
| impacts on the labor market, but that is likely flawed if the
| companies are segmented based on employee use of chat assistants
| versus company-wide deployment of AI technology.
|
| In other words, this more likely answers the question "If
| customer support agents all use ChatGPT or some in-house
| equivalent, does the company need fewer customer support agents?"
| than it answers the question "If we deploy an AI agent for
| customers to interact with, can it reduce the volume of inquiries
| that make it to our customer service team and, thus, require
| fewer agents?"
| meltyness wrote:
| Also economists, during every bubble ever:
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| Economists are pr people. Of course they would say that.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I see Ai not replacing all workers but reducing head count. On a
| software team I could see a team of 8 reduced to a team of 4 with
| Ai. Especially in smaller, leaner companies.
|
| You already see attorneys using it to write briefs; often to
| hilarious effect. These are clearly the precursor though to a
| much reduced need to for Jr / associate level attorneys at firms.
| ajb wrote:
| A bold assumption, that it will continue not to.
|
| I have a 185 year old treatise on wood engraving. At the time, to
| reproduce any image required that it be engraved in wood or metal
| for the printer; the best wood engravers were not mere
| reproducers, as they used some artistry when reducing the image
| to black and white, to keep the impression from continuous tones.
| (And some, of course, were also original artists in their own
| right). The wood engraving profession was destroyed by the
| invention of photo-etching (there was a weird interval before the
| invention of photo etching, in which cameras existed but photos
| had to be engraved manually anyway for printing).
|
| Maybe all the wood engravers found employment; although I doubt
| it. But at this speed, there will be a lot of people who won't be
| able to retrain during employment and will either have to use up
| their savings while doing so, or have to take lower paid jobs.
| asadotzler wrote:
| As a graphic designer, my work didn't evaporate because Aldus
| shipped PageMaker. It didn't collapse when Office and the Web
| made clip art available to everyone. It didn't disappear when
| credit card, letterhead, and logo templates and generators came
| online. Every time a new tool allowed more DIY, the gulf
| between the low-effort stuff and my stuff grew and I was able
| to secure even more and better paying work. And using those
| tools early myself, I also gained advantage over my
| professional competition for various lengths of time.
|
| This is how engraving went too. It wasn't overnight. The tools
| were not distributed evenly and it was a good while before
| amateurs could produce anything like what the earlier
| professionals did.
|
| Because you can buy a microwave and pizza rolls doesn't make
| you a chef. Maybe in 100 years the tooling will make you as
| good as the chefs of our time, but by then they'll all be doing
| even better work and there are people who will pay for higher
| quality no matter how high the bar is raised for baseline
| quality so eliminating all work in a profession is rare.
| ajb wrote:
| I hope you are right
|
| I'm a little confused by your point here:
|
| >This is how engraving went too. It wasn't overnight. The
| tools were not distributed evenly and it was a good while
| before amateurs could produce anything like what the earlier
| professionals did.
|
| In the case of engraving, most engravers weren't the original
| artist. The artist would draw their illustration on a wood
| blank, and the engraver would convert it to a print block. So
| artists were not completely replaced by photographers, except
| for journalistic sketchers, but the entire process changed
| and eliminated the job of engraving. Sure, high end artist-
| engravers kept going, but jobbing engravers were out of luck.
|
| There are still a few artists who specialise in engraving.
| But the point here isn't whether a few of the most
| accomplished professionals will still be in demand, but what
| happens to the vast bulk of average people.
| tummler wrote:
| This is shameless "AI is not bad, we swear" propaganda. Study
| looked at 11 occupations, 25k workers, in Denmark, in 2023-2024.
| How this says anything of consequence for the world at large (or
| even just the US) with developments moving as fast as they are,
| in such an unstable economic environment, is beyond me. What I do
| know is that I have plenty of first-hand anecdotal evidence to
| the contrary.
| FilosofumRex wrote:
| Keep in mind this kind of drivel is produced by economists and
| the tail-end of CS, who are desperately trying to stay relevant
| in the emerging work place.
|
| The wise, will displace economists and consultants with LLMs, but
| the trend followers will hire them to prognostic about the future
| impact - such that the net affect could be zero.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The survey questions they asked are bad questions if you're
| attempting to answer the question about future labor state.
| However they didn't ask that, they asked existing employees how
| LLMs have changed their workplace.
|
| This is the wrong question.
|
| The question should be to hiring managers: Do you expect LLM
| based tools to increase or decrease your projected hiring of full
| time employees?
|
| LLM workflows are already *displacing* entry-level labor because
| people are reaching for copilot/windsurf/CGPT instead of hiring a
| contract developer, researcher, BD person. I'm watching this
| happen across management in US startups.
|
| It's displacing job growth in entry level positions across
| primary writing copy, admin tasks or research.
|
| You're not going to find it in statistics immediately because
| it's not a 1:1 replacement.
|
| Much like the 1971 labor-productivity separation that everyone
| scratched their head about (answer: labor was outsourced and
| capital kept all value gains), we will see another asymptote to
| that labor productivity graph based on displacement not
| replacement.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| These monkeys should look into the recent history of the music
| industry.
| nico wrote:
| Also in the news today:
|
| > Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI. The company is
| going to be 'AI-first,' says its CEO.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla...
|
| -
|
| And within that article:
|
| > von Ahn's email follows a similar memo Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke
| sent to employees and recently shared online. In that memo, Lutke
| said that before teams asked for more headcount or resources,
| they needed to show "why they cannot get what they want done
| using AI."
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| The report looks at "at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on
| 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in
| Denmark in 2023 and 2024."
|
| As with all other technologies the jobs it removes are not
| normally in country that introduces it but that they never happen
| elsewhere.
|
| For example, while the automated looms that the Luddites were
| protesting about didn't result in significant job losses in the
| UK. How much clothing manufacturing has been curtailed in Africa
| because of it and similar innovations since that have lead to
| cheap mass produced clothes making it uneconomic to produce
| there.
|
| As suggest by this report, Denmark and West will probably be make
| good elsewhere and be largely unaffected.
|
| However, places like India, Vietnam with large industries based
| on call centres and outsourced development servicing the West are
| likely to be more vulnerable.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| The study looks at 11 occupations in Denmark in 2023-24.
|
| Maybe instead look at the US in 2025. EU labor regulations make
| it much harder to fire employees. And 2023 was mainly a hype year
| for GenAI. Actual Enterprise adoption (not free vendor pilots)
| started taking off in the latter half of 2024.
|
| That said, a lot of CEOs seem to have taken the "lay off all the
| employees first, then figure out how to have AI (or low cost
| offshore labor) do the work second" approach.
| mlnj wrote:
| >"lay off all the employees first, then figure out how to have
| AI (or low cost offshore labor) do the work second"
|
| Case in point: Klarna.
|
| 2024: "Klarna is All in on AI, Plans to Slash Workforce in
| Half" https://www.cxtoday.com/crm/klarna-is-all-in-on-ai-plans-
| to-...
|
| 2025: "Klarna CEO "Tremendously Embarrassed" by Salesforce
| Fallout and Doubts AI Can Replace It"
| https://www.salesforceben.com/klarna-ceo-tremendously-embarr...
| m00dy wrote:
| Surprisingly, Denmark is one of the easiest countries in which
| to fire someone.
| Sammi wrote:
| Workers in denmark are almost all unionised and get
| unemployment benefits from their union. So it's pretty
| directly because of the unions that it becomes such a small
| issue for someone in denmark to be laid off.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 2025 US has some really big complicating factors that'd make
| assessing the job market impact really hard to gauge.
|
| For example, the mass layoffs of federal employees.
| mbesto wrote:
| When new technology that seemingly replaces human effort it often
| doesn't directly replace humans (e.g. businesses don't rush to
| immediately replace them with the technology). More often than
| not, these systems are put in place to help scale a business.
| We've seen this time and time again and AI seems to be no
| different.
|
| Anecdotal situation - I use ChatGPT daily to rewrite sentences in
| the client reports I write. I would have traditionally had a
| marketing person review these and rewrite them, but now AI does
| it.
| rincebrain wrote:
| n=small, but I've had multiple friends who did freelance
| technical writing and copyediting work tell me that the market
| died when genAI became easily available. Repeat clients no longer
| interested in their work, and all the new work postings not even
| really worth the cost even if you tried just handing back
| unmodified genAI output instantly.
|
| So I find this result improbable, at best, given that I
| personally know several people who had to scramble to find new
| ways of earning money when their opportunities dried up with very
| little warning.
| tmvphil wrote:
| It's seemed to me that all the productivity gains would be burned
| up by just making our jobs more and more BS, not be reducing
| hours worked, just like with previous technology. I expect more
| meetings, not less work.
| blitzar wrote:
| Its also doing no meaningful quantity of "work".
| sharemywin wrote:
| At what point would any one trust an AI to do a job versus just
| giving advice. even when you have it "write" code it's really
| just giving advice.
|
| even customer service bots are just nicer front ends for
| knowledge bases.
| wisty wrote:
| Tools can either increase or decrease employment.
|
| Imagine if a tool made content writers 10x as productive. You
| might hire more, not less, because they are now better value! You
| might eventually realise you spent too much, but this will come
| later.
|
| ADAIK no company I know of starts a shiny new initiative by
| firing, they start by hiring then cutting back once they have
| their systems in place or hit a ceiling. Even Amazon runs
| projects fat then makes them lean AFAIK.
|
| There's also pent up demand.
|
| You never expect a new labour saving device to cost jobs while
| the project managers are in the export building phase.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| AI can't replace jobs or hurt wages. AI doesn't make these
| decisions & wages have been suppressed for a very long time, well
| before general AI adoption. Managers make these decisions. Don't
| blame AI if you get laid off or if your wages aren't even keeping
| up with inflation, let alone your productivity. Blame your
| manager.
|
| Be wary of people trying to deflect the away from the managerial
| class for these issues.
| akshaybhalotia wrote:
| I humbly disagree. I've seen team members and sometimes entire
| teams being laid off because of AI. It's also not just layoffs,
| the hiring processes and demand have been affected as well.
|
| As an example, many companies have recently shifted their support
| to "AI first" models. As a result, even if the team or certain
| team members haven't been fired, the general trend of hiring for
| support is pretty much down (anecdotal).
|
| I agree that some automation is better for the humans to do their
| jobs better, but this isn't one of those. When you're looking for
| support, something has clearly went wrong. Speaking or typing to
| an AI which responds with random unrelated articles or "sorry I
| didn't quite get that" is just evading responsibility in the name
| of "progress", "development", "modernization", "futuristic",
| "technology", _< insert term of choice>_, etc.
| ponector wrote:
| AI is not hurting jobs in Denmark they said.
|
| Software development jobs there have bigger threat: outsourcing
| to cheaper locations.
|
| As well for teachers: it is hard to replace a person
| supervising kids with a chatbot.
| pc86 wrote:
| Has any serious person every suggested replacing teachers
| with chatbots? Seems like a non sequitur.
| ponector wrote:
| Usually teachers are paid poorly, so some of them are
| putting little effort into the job simply narrate
| book/slides for their class. If they are replaced with
| latest chatgpt it will be beneficial for everyone.
| johnfn wrote:
| How do you know that these layoffs are the result of AI, rather
| than AI being a convenient place to lay the blame? I've seen a
| number of companies go "AI first" and stop hiring or have
| layoffs (Salesforce comes to mind) but I suspect they would
| have been in a slump without AI entirely.
| danans wrote:
| > How do you know that these layoffs are the result of AI,
| rather than AI being a convenient place to lay the blame?
|
| Both of those can be true, because companies are placing bets
| that AI will replace a lot of human work (by layoffs and
| reduced hiring), while also using it in the short term as a
| reason to cut short term costs.
| geraneum wrote:
| > I humbly disagree
|
| Both your experience and what the article (research) says can
| be valid at the same time. That's how statistics works.
| 5cott0 wrote:
| In contrast to statements like the following from the dweebs
| sucking harry potter's farts out of the less-wrong bubble
|
| >Coding AIs increasingly look like autonomous agents rather than
| mere assistants: taking instructions via Slack or Teams and
| making substantial code changes on their own, sometimes saving
| hours or even days
|
| https://ai-2027.com/
| zelon88 wrote:
| > "My general conclusion is that any story that you want to tell
| about these tools being very transformative, needs to contend
| with the fact that at least two years after [the introduction of
| AI chatbots], they've not made a difference for economic
| outcomes."
|
| I'm someone who tries to avoid AI tools. But this paper is
| literally basing its whole assessment off of two things; wages
| and hours. This is a disingenuous assertion.
|
| Lets assume that I work 8 hours per day. If I am able to automate
| 1h of my day with AI, does that mean I get to go home 1 hour
| early? No. Does that mean I get an extra hour of pay? No.
|
| So the assertion that there has been no economic impact assumes
| that the AI is a separate agent that would normally be paid in
| wages for time. That is not the case.
|
| The AI is an augmentation for an existing human agent. It _has
| the potential to_ increase the efficiency of a human agent by n%.
| So we need to be measuring the impact that is has on
| effectiveness and efficiency. It will never _offset_ wages or
| hours. It will just increase the productivity for a given wage or
| number of hours.
| fajmccain wrote:
| AI scaring students away from the software field and
| simultaneously making it hard for new developers to learn
| (because its too temping to click a button rather than struggle
| for 30 minutes) could be balancing out some job losses as well
| partiallypro wrote:
| I think if we go into a sharp recession companies will use this
| as an excuse to replace workers with other workers that
| effectively use AI cutting down on overhead. It just seems
| obvious this will happen. I don't think it's the doom and gloom
| scenario, but many CEOs, etc are chomping at the bit.
| jandrese wrote:
| I think it's time for OpenAI to release an AI economist.
| dontreact wrote:
| I think the methods here are highly questionable, and appear to
| be based on self report from a small amount of employees in
| Denmark 1 year ago.
|
| The overall rate of participation in the labor work force is
| falling. I expect this trend to continue as AI makes the economy
| more and more dynamic and sets a higher and higher bar for
| participation.
|
| Overall GDP is rising while labor participation rate is falling.
| This clearly points to more productivity with fewer people
| participating. At this point one of the main factors is clearly
| technological advancement, and within that I believe if you were
| to make a survey of CEOS and ask what technological change has
| allowed them to get more done with fewer people, the resounding
| consensus would definitely be AI
| gigel82 wrote:
| It's not replacing jobs, but it's definitely the scarecrow
| invoked in layoff decisions across the tech industry. I suspect
| whatever metrics they use are simply too slow to measure the
| actual impact this is having in the job market.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Companies have been wanting to lay people off. Using AI as an
| excuse is a convenient way to turn a negative into a positive.
|
| Truth is, companies that don't need layoffs are pushing employees
| to use AI to supercharge their output.
|
| You don't grow a business by just cutting costs, you need to
| increase revenue. And increasing revenue means more work, which
| means it's better for existing employees to put out more with AI.
| jll29 wrote:
| Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and their
| inability to make good forecasts.
|
| Here's my own take:
|
| - It is far too early to tell.
|
| - The roll-out of ChatGPT caused a mind-set revolution. People
| now "get" what is possible already now, and it encourages
| conceiving and persuing new use cases on what people have seen.
|
| - I would not recommend any kinds to train to become a translator
| for sure; even before LLMs, people were paid penny amounts per
| word or line translated, and rates plummeted further due to tools
| that cache translations in previous versions of documents (SDL
| TRADOS etc.). The same decline not to be expected for
| interpreters.
|
| - Graphic designers that live from logo designs and similar works
| may suffer fewer requests.
|
| - Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer
| programs) will be replaced by LLMs.
|
| - LLMs are a basic technology that now will be embedded into
| various products, from email clients over word processors to
| workflow tools and chat clients. This will take 2-3 years, and it
| may reduce the number of people needed in an office with a
| secretarial/admin/"analyst" type background after that.
|
| - Industry is already working on the next-gen version of smarter
| tools for medics and lawyers. This is more of a 3-5 year
| development, but then again some early adopters started already
| 2-3 years ago. Once this is rolled out, there will be less demand
| for assitants-type jobs such as paralegals.
| voxl wrote:
| Name a better duo: software engineering hype cycles and anti-
| intellectualism
| 42lux wrote:
| We were the stochastic parrots all along.
| kubb wrote:
| And because we are very smart, so must be it.
| nearbuy wrote:
| Isn't your post anti-intellectual, since you're denigrating
| someone without justification just for referencing the work
| of a professor you disagree with?
| nradov wrote:
| Video VFX artists are already suffering from lower demand.
| sxg wrote:
| > Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and
| their inability to make good forecasts
|
| Do you mean Philip Tetlock? He wrote Superforecasting, which
| might be what you're referring to?
| meroes wrote:
| My dentist already uses something called OverJet(?) that reads
| X-rays for issues. They seem to trust it and it agreed with
| what they suspected on the X-rays. Personally, I've been
| misdiagnosed through X-rays by a medical doctor so even being
| an LLM skeptic, Im slightly favorable to AI in medicine.
|
| But I already trust my dentist. A new dentist _deferring_ to AI
| is scary, and obviously will happen.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| I had a misread X-ray once, and I can see how a machine could
| be better at spotting patterns than a tired technician, so
| I'm favorable too. I think I'd like a human to at least take
| a _glance_ at it, though.
|
| The mistake on mine was caught when a radiologist checked
| over the work of the weekend X-ray technician who missed a
| hairline crack. A second look is always good, and having one
| look be machine and the other human might be the best combo.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > A second look is always good, and having one look be
| machine and the other human might be the best combo
|
| For now I agree. 2-4 years from now it can be 20 ultra
| strong models each trained somewhat differently that
| converse on the X-ray and reach a conclusion. I don't think
| technicians will have much to add to the accuracy.
| NegativeK wrote:
| I regularly get to hear veterinarian rants. AI is being
| forced on them by the corporate owners in multiple fronts.
| The pattern goes:
|
| Why aren't you using the AI x-ray? Because it too often
| misdiagnoses things and I have to spend even more time double
| checking. And I still have to get a radiologist consult.
|
| Why are you frustrated that we swapped out the blood testing
| thingamabob with an AI machine? Because it takes 10 minutes
| to do what took me 30 seconds with a microscope and is STILL
| not doing the full job, despite bringing this up multiple
| times.
|
| Why aren't you relying more on the AI text to speech for
| medical notes? Because the AVMA said that a doctor has to
| review all notes. I do, and it makes shit up in literally
| every instance. So I write my own and label the transcription
| as AI instead of having to spend even more time correcting
| it.
|
| The best part is that the majority of vets (at least in this
| city) didn't do medical notes for pets. Best you'd often get
| when asking is a list of costs slapped together in the 48
| hours they had to respond. Now, they just use the AI notes
| without correcting them. We've gone from zero notes, so at
| least the next doctor knows to redo everything they need, to
| medical notes with very frequent significant technical flaws
| but potentially zero indication that it's different from a
| competent doctor's notes.
|
| This is the wrong direction, and it's not just new doctors.
| It's doctors who are short on time doing what they can with
| tools that promised what isn't being delivered. Or doctors
| being strong armed into using tools by the PE owners who paid
| for something without checking to see if it's a good idea. I
| honestly do believe that AI will get there, but this is a
| horrible way to do it. It causes harm.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| > Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer
| programs) will be replaced by LLMs.
|
| This is such a broad category that I think it's inaccurate to
| say that all editors will be automated, regardless of your
| outlook on LLMs in general. Editing and proofreading are pretty
| distinct roles; the latter is already easily automated, but the
| former can take on a number of roles more akin to a second
| writer who steers the first writer in the correct direction.
| Developmental editors take an active role in helping creatives
| flesh out a work of fiction, technical editors perform fact-
| checking and do rewrites for clarity, etc.
| empath75 wrote:
| > - Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not
| computer programs) will be replaced by LLMs.
|
| It has been a very, very long time since editors have been
| proof-reading prose for typos and grammar mistakes, and you
| don't need LLMs for that. Good editors do a lot more creative
| work than that, and LLMs are terrible at it.
| asadotzler wrote:
| We're ten years and a trillion dollars into this. When we were
| 10 years and $1T into the massive internet builout between 1998
| and 2008, that physical network had added over a trillion
| dollars to the economy and then about a trillion more every
| year after. How's the nearly ten years of LLM AI stacking up?
| DO we expect it'll add a trillion dollars a year to the economy
| in a couple years? I don't. Not even close. it'll still be a
| net drain industry, deeply in the red. That trillion dollars
| could have done some much good if spent on something more
| serious than man-child dreams about creating god computers.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| you're not going to see the firing but you're also not going to
| see the hiring
|
| watch out for headcount lacking in segments of the market
| qoez wrote:
| Chatbots probably won't be the final interface. But machine
| learning in general is a full on revolutionary tech (much clearer
| now than ten years ago) that hasn't been explored fully and will
| eventually be quite disruptive on the scale of computers on the
| economy probably. Though it likely won't take the form it's
| taking today (chatbots etc).
| nemo44x wrote:
| AI makes people more productive so that incentivizes me to hire
| more people, not less. In many cases anyhow.
|
| If each of my developers is 30% more productive that means we can
| ship 30% more functionally which means more budget to hire more
| developers. If you think you'll just pocket that surplus you have
| another thing coming.
| Eliezer wrote:
| Translators? Graphic artists? The omission of the most obviously
| impacted professions immediately identifies this as a cooked
| study, along with talking about LLMs as "chatbots". I wonder who
| paid for it.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| are graphic artists actually getting replaced by AI? If so that
| would surprise me for as impressive as AI image generation is,
| very little of what it does seems like it would replace a
| graphic artists.
| venantius wrote:
| It is possible for all of the following to be true: 1. This study
| is accurate 2. We are early in a major technological shift 3.
| Companies have allocated massive amounts of capital to this shift
| that may not represent a good investment 4. Assuming that the
| above three will remain true going forward is a bad idea
|
| The .com boom and bust is an apt reference point. The
| technological shift WAS real, and the value to be delivered
| ultimately WAS delivered...but not in 1999/2000.
|
| It may be we see a massive crash in valuations but AI still ends
| up the dominant driver of software value over the next 5-10
| years.
| hangonhn wrote:
| That's a repeating pattern with technologies. Most of the early
| investments don't pay off and the transformation does happen
| but also quite a bit later than people predicted. This was true
| of the steam engine, the telegraph, electricity, and the
| railroad. It actually tends to be the later stage investors who
| reap most of the reward because by then the lessons have been
| learned and solutions developed.
| asadotzler wrote:
| The dot com boom gave us $1T in physical broadband, fiber, and
| cellular networking that's added many many trillions to the
| economy since. What's LLM-based AI gonna leave us when its
| bubble pops? Will that AI infrastructure be outliving its
| creators and generating trillions for the economy when all the
| AI companies collapse and are sold off for parts and scrap?
| venantius wrote:
| Among other things the big tech companies are literally
| planning to build nuclear power plants off this so I think
| the infrastructure investments will likely be pretty good.
| Sammi wrote:
| People overestimate what can be done in the short term and
| underestimate what can be done in the long term.
| jhp123 wrote:
| The thing about AI is that it doesn't work, you can't build on
| top of it, and it won't get better.
|
| It doesn't work: even for the tiny slice of human work that is so
| well defined and easily assessed that it is sent out to
| freelancers on sites like Fiverr, AI mostly can't do it. We've
| had years to try this now, the lack of any compelling AI work is
| proof that it can't be done with current technology.
|
| You can't build on top of it: unlike foundational technologies
| like the internet, AI can only be used to build one product, a
| chatbot. The output of an AI is natural language and it's not
| reliable. How are you going to meaningfully process that output?
| The only computer system that can process natural language is an
| AI, so all you can do is feed one AI into another. And how do you
| assess accuracy? Again, your only tool is an AI, so your only
| option is to ask AI 2 if AI 1 is hallucinating, and AI 2 will
| happily hallucinate its own answer. It's like _The Cat in the Hat
| Comes Back_ , Cat E trying to clean up the mess Cat D made trying
| to clean up the mess Cat C made and so on.
|
| And it won't get any better. LLMs can't meaningfully assess their
| training data, they are statistical constructions. We've already
| squeezed about all we can from the training corpora we have, more
| GPUs and parameters won't make a meaningful difference. We've
| succeeded at creating a near-perfect statistical model of
| wikipedia and reddit and so on, it's just not very useful even if
| it is endlessly amusing for some people.
| bhelkey wrote:
| > [LLMs] won't get any better.
|
| Can you pinpoint the date which LLMs stagnated?
|
| More broadly, it appears to me that LLMs have improved up to
| and including this year.
|
| If you consider LLMs to not have improved in the last year, I
| can see your point. However, then one must consider ChatGPT
| 4.5, Claude 3.5, Deepseek, and Gemini 2.5 to not be
| improvements.
| jhp123 wrote:
| Sept 2024 was when OpenAI announced its new model - not an
| LLM but a "chain of thought" model built on LLMs. This
| represented a turn away from the "scale is all you need to
| reach AGI" idea by its top proponent.
| bhelkey wrote:
| If September 2024 marks the date in your mind stagnation
| was obvious, surely the last improvement must have come
| before?
|
| Whatever the case, there are open platforms that give users
| a chance to compare two anonymous LLMs and rank the models
| as a result [1].
|
| What I observe when I look for these rankings is that none
| of the top ranked models come from before your stagnation
| cut off date of September 2024 [2].
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04132
|
| [2] https://lmarena.ai/
| Pxtl wrote:
| Because it doesn't do anything useful.
| jalev wrote:
| The headline is a bit baity (in that the article is describing no
| job losses because there hasn't been any economic benefit to
| LLM/GenAI to justify it), but what if we re-ran the study in a
| country _without_ exceptionally strong unionisation
| participation? Would we see the same results?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| My biggest concern about AI is that it will make us better at
| things that we're already doing. Things that we would've stopped
| doing if we hadn't had such a slow introduction to their
| consequences, consequences that we're now accustomed to--but not
| adapted to. Frog in slowly warming water stuff like the troubling
| relationship between advertising and elections, or the lack of
| consent in our monetary systems.
|
| I'm worried the shock will not be abrupt enough to encourage a
| proper rethink.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| This is a completely meaningless study with no correlation at all
| to reality in the US in right now. The hockey stick started
| around 2/25. We are in a completely different world now for devs.
| emsign wrote:
| Oh, it's because it's not as useful and productive as the hype is
| trying to convince us of.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| How long until we can replace economists with AI? It would be
| hard to do worse that'll what we already have.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| New technology has replaced human jobs since the start of the
| Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. The replaced workforce have
| always moved to other jobs, often in entirely new professions.
|
| For all those 250 years most people have predicted that the
| _next_ new technology will make the replaced workforce
| permanently unemployed, despite the track record of that
| prediction. We constantly predict poverty and get prosperity.
|
| I kinda get why: The job loss is concrete reality while the newly
| created jobs are speculation.
|
| Still, I'm confident AI will continue the extremely strong trend.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Long before the industrial revolution. The ox-drawn plow was
| invented about 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia or India (my
| memory's poor, sorry) and it put a lot of workers with hoes out
| of work, while also growing prosperity and the number of people
| who gained work thanks to that increased prosperity and
| population growth it supported. It has always been this way and
| always will be.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| True.
|
| The _rate_ of improvement increased a lot at the Industrial
| Revolution, but the process has always been with us, to
| varying degree.
| specproc wrote:
| Work is gaseous, it expands to fill the available space.
| Ir0nMan wrote:
| Alternative 1915 headline: "The motorcar is not replacing jobs or
| hurting wages in horse and carriage industry, say economists".
| crabsand wrote:
| I believe LLMs will create more jobs than it eliminated by
| raising standards in various fields, including software
| development.
|
| We will have to get to 100% test coverage and document everything
| and add more bells and whistles to UI etc. The day to day
| activity may change but there will always be developers.
| asadotzler wrote:
| What I'm seeing is marked decrease in standards and quality
| everywhere I see LLMs (and diffusion models, any of the
| transformer-based stuff.)
|
| Sometimes that decrease in quality is matched by an increase in
| reach / access, and so the benefits can outweigh the costs.
| Think about language translation in web browsers and even smart
| spectacles, for example. Language translation has been around
| forever but generally limited to popular books or small-scale
| proprietary content because it was expensive to use mult-
| lingual humans to do that work.
|
| Now even my near-zero readership blog can be translated from
| English to Portuguese (or most other widely used languages) for
| a reader in Brazil with near-zero cost/effort for that user.
| The quality isn't as good as human translation, often losing
| nuance and style and sometimes even with blatant inaccuracies,
| but the increased access offered by language translation
| software makes the lower standard acceptable for lots of use
| cases.
|
| I wouldn't depend on machine translation for critical
| financial, healthcare, or legal use cases, though I might start
| there to get the gist, but for my day-to-day reading on the
| web, it's pretty amazing.
|
| Software at scale is different than individuals engaging in
| leisure activities. A loss of nuance and occasional
| catastrophic failures in a piece of software with hundreds of
| millions or billions of users could have devastating impacts.
| seydor wrote:
| Maybe it's transitory
| altairprime wrote:
| Economists can't figure out that skyrocketing corporate profits
| result in skyrocketing inflation for workers because their models
| don't let them consider that the majority of workers have given
| up the power to negotiate wages, so I certainly would not trust
| their determinations regarding the job market with respect to AI.
| Burying one's head in the sand makes everyone look A-OK and that
| perspective error skews their entire field's work.
| jmacd wrote:
| I am currently dealing with a relatively complex legal agreement.
| It's about 30 pages. I have a lawyer working on it who I consider
| the best in the country for this domain.
|
| I was able to pre-process the agreement, clearly understand most
| of the major issues, and come up with a proposed set of redlines
| all relatively easily. I then waited for his redlines and then
| responded asking questions about a handful of things he had
| missed.
|
| I value a lawyer being willing to take responsibility for their
| edits, and he also has a lot of domain specific transactional
| knowledge that no LLM will have, but I easily saved 10 hours of
| time so far on this document.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| maybe not directly, but you can't argue that this new wave of AI
| is allowing job applications to SPAM openings at an unprecedented
| rate which makes it much harder for real humans to be seen...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Still much too early to tell. Give it another couple of years.
| tough wrote:
| Let's be honest here, to all the productivity enjoyors, you're
| not gaining any -hours- or producitvity gains onto your company
| just by using AI unless your profit also increases
|
| the rest is fugazi
| tunesmith wrote:
| I think the effects are more indirect. For instance, GenAI can
| enable Google to serve summarized content (rather than just
| search results) that users find useful, which then cuts in to the
| margins of companies that manually generate that content. Those
| companies lose revenue, and lay off head count, inhibiting their
| ability to generate that custom content. So they start using
| GenAI instead.
|
| At no point did that company choose to pivot to GenAI to cut
| costs and reduce headcount. It's more reactive than that.
| doomnuts wrote:
| Remember when economists didn't see the 2088 crash coming, even
| though a 5th grader could see it was mathematically impossible
| not to.
|
| Either mathematics sucks or economists suck. Real hard choice.
| Animats wrote:
| Data is from late 2023 and 2024. Year-old data. ChatGPT was
| released in late November, 2023.
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| This line of worry has never panned out. There are two points:
|
| 1) AI/automation will replace jobs. This is 100% certain in some
| cases. Look at the industrial revolution.
|
| 2) AI/automation will increase unemployment. This has never
| happened and it's doubtful it will ever happen.
|
| The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be
| helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years
| after the industrial revolution started, we still have single-
| digit unemployment.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > 2) AI/automation will increase unemployment. This has never
| happened and it's doubtful it will ever happen.
|
| > The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be
| helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years
| after the industrial revolution started, we still have single-
| digit unemployment.
|
| Horses, for thousand of years, were very useful to humans. Even
| with the various technological advances through that time their
| "unemployment" was very low. Until the invention and perfection
| of internal combustion engines.
|
| To say that it is doubtful that it will ever happen to us is
| basically saying that human cognitive and/or physical
| capabilities are without bounds and that there is some reason
| that with our unbounded cognitive capabilities we will never be
| able to create a machine that could replicate those
| capabilities. That is a ridiculous claim.
| layer8 wrote:
| You forgot "in a cost-effective manner", and also market
| acceptance. You may eventually be right, but it's a very long
| way off.
| carabiner wrote:
| "When the anecdotes don't match the data, it's usually the
| anecdotes that are correct" - Jeff Bezos
| IcyWindows wrote:
| Microsoft is pushing for replacing at least a percentage of each
| team: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-
| index/202...
| aerhardt wrote:
| They are saying that and yet on one of the last earnings calls
| the VP of Sales admitted that they are shifting the weight of
| their sales force from peddling Copilot to traditional money-
| makers like migrations or updates. This could merely speak to
| Copilot being a dogshit product, but that never really stopped
| Microsoft from trying, so it could also signal a certain
| shaking belief in Enterprise AI being _that_ revolutionary.
| lpolovets wrote:
| This feels premature -- we've only had great AI capabilities for
| a little while, and jobs are not replaced overnight.
|
| This reminds me of some early stage startup pitches. During a
| pitch, I might ask: "what do you think about competitor XYZ?" And
| sometimes the answer is "we don't think highly of them, we have
| never even seen them in a single deal we've competed for!" But
| that's almost a statistical tautology: if you both have .001%
| market share and you're doubling or tripling annually, the chance
| that you're going to compete for the same customers is tiny. That
| doesn't mean you can just dismiss that competitor. Same thing
| with the article above dismissing AI as a threat to jobs so
| quickly.
|
| To give a concrete example of a job disappearing: I run a small
| deep tech VC fund. When I raised the fund in early '24, my plan
| was to hire one investor and one researcher. I hired a great
| investor, but given all of the AI progress I'm now 80% sure I
| won't hire a researcher. ChatGPT is good enough for research. I
| might end up adding a different role in the near future, but this
| is a research job that likely disappeared because of AI.
| fluorinerocket wrote:
| It's ok guys, the experts have spoken!
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