[HN Gopher] The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI h...
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The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype machine
Author : lwo32k
Score : 181 points
Date : 2025-05-30 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| DrillShopper wrote:
| I look forward to the day where executive overpromises and
| engineering underdeliveries bring about another AI winter so the
| useful techniques can continue without the stench of the "AI"
| association and so the grifters go bankrupt.
| sevensor wrote:
| The implosion of this AI bubble is going to have a stupendous
| blast radius. It's never been harder to distinguish AI from
| "things people do with computers" more generally. The whole
| industry is implicated, complicit, and likely to suffer when AI
| winter arrives. Dotcom bust didn't just hit people who were
| working for pets.com.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Just like the internet was a fad, right?
| DrillShopper wrote:
| More like the dot-com bubble
| monero-xmr wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_auto...
|
| It wasn't just Elon. The hype train on self driving cars was
| extreme only a few years ago, pre-LLM. Self driving cars exist
| sort of, in a few cities. Quibble all you want but it appears to
| me that "uber driver" is still a popular widespread job, let
| alone truck driver, bus driver, and "car owner" itself.
|
| I really wish the AI ceos would actually make my life useful. For
| example, why am I still doing the dishes, laundry, cleaning my
| house, paying for landscaping, painters, and on and on? In terms
| of white collar work I'm paying my fucking lawyers more than
| ever. Why don't they solve an actual problem
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > In terms of white collar work I'm paying my fucking lawyers
| more than ever. Why don't they solve an actual problem
|
| Rule 0 is that you never put your angel investors out of work
| if you want to keep riding on the gravy train
| Philpax wrote:
| Because textual data is plentiful and easy to model, and
| physical data is not. This will change - there are now several
| companies working on humanoid robots and the models to power
| them - but it is a fundamentally different set of problems with
| different constraints.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > I really wish the AI ceos would actually make my life useful.
|
| TBH, I do think that AI can deliver on the hype of making tools
| with genuinely novel functionality. I can think of a dozen
| ideas off the top of my head just for the most-used apps on my
| phone (photos, music, messages, email, browsing). It's just
| going to take a few years to identify how to best integrate
| them into products without just chucking a text prompt at
| people and generating stuff.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Bureaucracy and regulation is the main issue there though.
|
| Like in Europe where you're forced to pay a notary to start a
| business - it's not really even necessary, nevermind something
| that couldn't be automated, but it's just but of the
| establishment propping up bureaucrats.
|
| Whereas LLMs and generative models in art and coding for
| example, help to avoid loads of bureaucracy in having to sort
| out contracts, or even hire someone full-time with payroll,
| etc.
| jellicle wrote:
| We are going to have an ever-increasing supply of stories
| along the lines of "used a LLM to write a contract; contract
| gave away the company to the counterparty; now trying to get
| a court to dissolve the contract".
|
| Sure you'll have destroyed the company, but at least you'll
| have avoided bureaucracy.
| dosinga wrote:
| > Like in Europe
|
| Like in the US you have a choice of which jurisdiction you
| want to start your company. Not all require a notary
| xxs wrote:
| >Like in Europe where you're forced to pay a notary to start
| a business
|
| Do you have a specific country in mind, as the statement is
| not true for quite a lot of EU member states... and likely
| untrue for most of the European countries.
| edent wrote:
| Buy a dishwasher - they're cheap, work really well, and don't
| use much energy / water.
|
| Same as a washing machine / drier. Chuck the clothes in, press
| a button, done.
|
| There are Roomba style lawnmowers for your grass cutting.
|
| I'll grant you painting a house and plumbing a toilet aren't
| there yet!
| al_borland wrote:
| With the laundry machine and dishwasher, it still requires
| effort. A human needs to collect the dirty stuff, put it into
| the machine properly, decide when it should run, load the
| soap, select a cycle type, start it, monitor the machine to
| know when it's done, empty the machine, and put the stuff
| away properly, thus starting the human side of the process
| again.
|
| It's less work than it used to be, but remove the human who
| does all that and the dirty dishes and clothes will still
| pile up. It's not like we have Rosie, from The Jetsons,
| handling all those things (yet). How long before the average
| person has robot servants at home? Until that day, we are
| effectively project managers for all the machines in our
| homes.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| > A human needs to collect the dirty stuff, put it into the
| machine properly, decide when it should run, load the soap,
| select a cycle type, start it, monitor the machine to know
| when it's done, empty the machine, and put the stuff away
| properly, thus starting the human side of the process
| again.
|
| The really modern stuff is pretty much as simple as "load,
| start, unload" - you can buy combo washing machines that
| wash and dry your clothes, auto dispense detergent, etc.
| It's not folding or putting away your clothes, and you
| still need to maintain it (clean the filter, add detergent
| occasionally, etc)... but you're chipping away at what is
| left for a human to do. Who cares when it's done? You
| unload it when you feel like it, just like every
| dishwasher.
| ghaff wrote:
| My understanding is combo machines aren't ideal. But
| running a load of laundry in a couple separate machines
| is pretty low effort.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| You know what I want? A LM that navigates customer support
| phone trees for me.
|
| If you want to waste my time with an automated nonsense we
| should at least even the playing field.
|
| This is feasible with today's technology.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I don't understand how any business leader can be excited about
| humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who's going to
| buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up,
| consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could
| you be excited for that?
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| I guess the idea is that the people left working will be made
| _so_ productive and wealthy thanks to the miracle of AI that
| they can more than make up the difference with extravagant
| consumption.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I too plan to buy 100.000 liters of yogurt each day once AI
| has transported me into the socioeconomic strata of the 0.1%
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| My many robots will be busy building glorious mansions out
| of yogurt cups.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Or, as per a _Love, Death, and Robots_ short film, the
| new superintelligence will be inextricable from yogurt...
| darth_avocado wrote:
| If you want to see what that looks like, just look at the
| economy of India. Do we really want that?
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Certainly not what I want, but it looks like we could be
| headed there. And the "industry leaders" seem cool with it,
| to judge by their politics.
| munksbeer wrote:
| The economy of India is trending in the opposite direction
| to this narrative. More and more people lifted out of
| poverty as they modernise.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| The comment wasn't on the trend or where things are going
| and the historical progress the country has made. The
| comment was on the current state of the economy. The fact
| that wealth concentration creates its own unique
| challenges. If as many people were unemployed and in
| poverty (or in the low income bracket) in the US or any
| other developed nation, the living conditions would have
| been drastically deteriorated. The consumer market would
| have shrunk to the point where most people couldn't
| afford to buy chips and soda.
| munksbeer wrote:
| The point is, I don't see that happening. The reverse is
| happening in the world. The percentage of people in
| poverty globally is decreasing each year.
|
| I still fail to see why people think we're going to
| innovate ourselves into global poverty, it makes no
| sense.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Poverty is decreasing because innovation is creating more
| jobs. Everything hinges on the fact that people can earn
| a living and spend their money to generate more jobs. If
| AI replaces those jobs you're going the other way.
| const_cast wrote:
| Right, every economic system we've thought up relies on
| the assumption that everyone works. Or, close to
| everyone. Capitalism is just as much about consumption as
| it is production.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Close to everyone doesn't work today. The labor force
| participation rate is only about 62%.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'd been thinking modern day Russia, but I admit to being
| ignorant of a lot of countries outside the U.S.
| al_borland wrote:
| A single rich person can only much door dash. Scaling a
| customer base needs to be done horizontally.
| keybored wrote:
| We have consumer capitalism now. Before we didn't. There's no
| reason it can't be replaced.
|
| Sure there can be rich people who are radical enough to push
| for another phase of capitalism.
|
| That's a kind of a capitalism which is worse for workers and
| consumers. With even more power in the hands of capitalists.
| thmsths wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons: no one being able to buy stuff is a
| problem for everyone, but being able to save just a bit more by
| getting rid of your workforce is a huge advantage for your
| business.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| ... in the interim, of course.
| bckr wrote:
| "tragedy of the commons" is treated as a Theory of Human
| Nature when it's really a religious principle underlying how
| we operate our society.
| johnbenoe wrote:
| You ever thought there's more to life than work lol. Maybe
| humans can approach a new standard of living...
| codr7 wrote:
| Excellent choice of words there: new standard.
|
| I'm sure we are, but it doesn't look like an improvement for
| most people.
| johnbenoe wrote:
| Not yet at least, but there's no stopping this kind of
| efficiency jump. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in denial.
| myko wrote:
| Maybe, but aren't LLM companies burning cash? The
| efficiency gains I see from LLMs typically come from
| agents which perform circular prompts on themselves until
| they reach some desired outcome (or give up until a human
| can prod them along).
|
| It seems like we'll need to generate a lot more power to
| support these efficiency gains at scale, and unless that
| is coming from renewables (and even if it is) that cost
| may outweigh the gains for a long time.
| johnbenoe wrote:
| They're burning cash at a high rate because of the grand
| potential, and they are of course keeping some things
| behind closed doors.
|
| I also respect the operative analysis, but the
| strategical, long-term thinking, is that this will come
| and it will only speed up everything else.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I'm yet to be convinced that if majority of the humans are
| out of work, the government will be able to take care of them
| and allow them to "pursue their calling". Hunger games is a
| more believable outcome to me.
| rfrey wrote:
| The most powerful nation on earth isn't even willing to
| extend basic health care to the masses, nevermind freeing
| them to pursue a higher calling than enriching billionaires.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| If someone is going to suggest UBI, I wish they could explain
| to me how Reservations have failed so hard in the U.S.. I
| think that would be a cautionary tale.
| duderific wrote:
| Decades and decades of mistreatment are not going to be
| remedied by some modest handouts. That doesn't mean that
| UBI as a whole could never work.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > If no one has a job, who's going to buy your stuff?
|
| All the people employed by the government and blue collar
| workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market
| workers, etc?
|
| It's easy to _imagine_ a world in which there are way less
| white collar workers and everything else is pretty much the
| same.
|
| It's also easy to _imagine_ a world in which you sell less
| stuff but your margins increase, and overall you 're better
| off, even if everybody else has less widgets.
|
| It's also easy to _imagine_ a world in which you 're able to
| cut more workers than everyone else, and on aggregate, barely
| anyone is impacted, but your margins go up.
|
| There's tons of other scenarios, including the most cited one -
| that technology thus far has always led to more jobs, not less.
|
| They're probably believing any combination of these concepts.
|
| It's not guaranteed that if there's 5% less white-collar
| workers per year for a few decades that we're all going to
| starve to death.
|
| In the future, if trends continue, there's going to be way less
| workers - since there's going to be a huge portion of the
| population that's old and retired.
|
| You can lose x% of the work force every year and keep
| unemployment stable...
|
| A large portion of the population wants a lot more people to be
| able to not work and get entitlements...
|
| It's pretty easy to see how a lot of people can think this
| could lead to something good, even if you think all those
| things are bad.
|
| Two people can see the same painting in a museum, one finds it
| beautiful, and the other finds it completely uninteresting.
|
| It's almost like asking - how can someone want the Red team to
| win when I want the Blue team to win?
| munksbeer wrote:
| >It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less
| stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're better
| off, even if everybody else has less widgets.
|
| History seems to show this doesn't happen. The trend is not
| linear, but the trend is that we live better lives each
| century than the previous century, as our technology
| increases.
|
| Maybe it will be different this time though.
| ryandrake wrote:
| "Technology increases" have not made my life better than my
| boomer parents' and they will probably not make the next
| generation's lives better than ours. Big things like
| housing costs, education costs, healthcare costs are not
| being driven down by technology, quite the opposite.
|
| Yes, the lives of "people selling stuff" will likely get
| better and better in the future, through technology, but
| the wellbeing of normal people seems to have peaked at
| around the year 2000 or so.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I think that's mostly myth, and a very very deeply
| ingrained myth. That's why probably hundreds of people
| already feel the rage boiling up inside of them right now
| after reading my first sentence.
|
| But it is myth. It has always been in the interest of the
| rulers and the old to try to imprint on the serfs and on
| the young how much better they have it.
|
| Many of us, maybe even most of us, would be able to have
| fulfilling lives in a different age. Of course, it depends
| on what you value in life. But the proof is in the pudding,
| humanity is rapidly being extinguished in industrial
| society right now all over the world.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > All the people employed by the government and blue collar
| workers
|
| If people don't have jobs, government doesn't have taxes to
| employ other people. If CEOs are salivating at the thought of
| replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think
| next step of AI augmented with robotics won't replace blue
| collar workers as well.
| trealira wrote:
| > If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white
| collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI
| augmented with robotics won't replace blue collar workers
| as well.
|
| Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for
| longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue
| collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it
| replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your
| pipes, or a waiter serving food at a restaurant, or someone
| who restocks shelves at grocery stores, that kind of thing.
| Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I
| imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a
| human face.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes
| to your house and fixes your pipes, or a waiter serving
| food at a restaurant, or someone who restocks shelves at
| grocery stores, that kind of thing.
|
| These are three totally different jobs requiring
| different kinds of skills, but they will all be replaced
| with automation.
|
| 1. Plumber is a skilled trade, but the "skilled" parts
| will eventually be replaced with 'smart' tools. You'll
| still need to hire a minimum wage person to actually go
| into each unique home and find the plumbing, but the
| tools will do all the work and will not require an
| expensive tradesman's skills to work.
|
| 2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with
| kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house"
| cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a
| slow cultural shift towards ordering food through
| technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food
| out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food
| and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going
| bye-bye.
|
| 3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this
| with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a
| destination will be solved very soon, and there are
| probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
| trealira wrote:
| > 1. Plumber is a skilled trade, but the "skilled" parts
| will eventually be replaced with 'smart' tools. You'll
| still need to hire a minimum wage person to actually go
| into each unique home and find the plumbing, but the
| tools will do all the work and will not require an
| expensive tradesman's skills to work.
|
| I'm not a plumber, but my background knowledge was that
| pipes can be really diverse and it could take different
| tools and strategies to fix the same problem for
| different pipes, right? My thought was that "robotic
| plumber" would be impossible for the same reasons it's
| hard to make a robot that can make a sandwich in any type
| of house. But even with a human worker that uses advanced
| robotic tools, I would think some amount of baseline
| knowledge of pipes would always be necessary for the
| reasons I outlined.
|
| > 2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with
| kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house"
| cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a
| slow cultural shift towards ordering food through
| technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food
| out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food
| and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going
| bye-bye.
|
| That's true. I forgot about fast-food kiosks. And the
| other person showed me a link to some robotic waiters,
| which I didn't know about. Seems kind of depressing, but
| you're right.
|
| > 3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating
| this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into
| a destination will be solved very soon, and there are
| probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
|
| The way I imagine it, to automate it, you'd have to have
| some sort of 3D design software to choose where all the
| items would go, and customize it in the case of those
| special display stands for certain products, and then
| choose where in the backroom or something for it to move
| the products to, and all that doesn't seem to save much
| labor over just doing it yourself, except the physical
| labor component. Maybe I just lack imagination.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > a waiter serving food at a restaurant
|
| I have already eaten at three restaurants that have
| replaced the vast majority of their service staff with
| robots, and they're fine at that. Do I think they're
| better than a human? No, personally, but they're "good
| enough".
| ben_w wrote:
| > or a waiter serving food at a restaurant,
|
| Over the last few years, I've seen a few in use here in
| Berlin: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/robot-waiter-
| for-sale.html
|
| > or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores
|
| For physical retail, or home delivery?
|
| People are working on this for traditional stores, but I
| can't tell which news stories are real and which are hype
| -- after around a decade of Musk promising FSD within a
| year or so, I know not to simply trust press releases
| even when they have a video of the thing apparently
| working.
|
| For home delivery, this is mostly kinda solved:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
|
| > Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter,
| I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay
| for a human face.
|
| Sure... if they have the money.
|
| But can we make an economy where all the stuff is free,
| and we're "working" n-hours a day smiling at bad jokes
| and manners of people we don't like, so we can earn money
| to spend to convince someone else who doesn't like us to
| spend m-hours a day smiling at our bad jokes and manners?
| trealira wrote:
| > Over the last few years, I've seen a few in use here in
| Berlin: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/robot-waiter-
| for-sale.html
|
| Wow. I genuinely didn't think robotic waiters would ever
| exist anytime soon.
|
| > For physical retail, or home delivery?
|
| I was thinking for physical retail. Thanks for the video
| link.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, it's as though "middle class" was a brief miracle of
| our age. Serfs and nobility is the more probably human
| condition.
|
| Hey, is there a good board game in there somewhere? _Serfs
| and Nobles(tm)_
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| ML models don't make fully informed decisions and will not
| until AGI is created. They can make biased guesses at best
| and have no means of self-directed inquiry to integrate new
| information with an understanding of its meaning. People
| employed in a decision making capacity are safe, whether
| that's managing people or building a bridge from a
| collection of parts and construction equipment.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| Has anyone made a fully informed decision?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > All the people employed by the government and blue collar
| workers?
|
| You forgot the born-wealthy.
|
| I feel increasingly like a rube for having not made my little
| entrepreneurial side-gigs focused strictly on the ultra-
| wealthy. I used to sell tube amplifier kits, for example, so
| you and I could have a really high-end audio experience with
| a very modest outlay of cash (maybe $300). Instead I should
| have sold the same amps but completed for $10K. (There is no
| upper bounds for audio equipment though -- I guess we all
| know.)
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is the real answer. Eventually, when 95% of us have no
| jobs because AI and robotics are doing everything, then the
| rich will just buy and sell from each other. The other 7
| billion people are not economically relevant and will just
| barely participate in the economy. It'll be like the movie
| Elysium.
|
| I briefly did a startup that was kind of a side-project of
| a guy whose main business was building yachts. Why was he
| OK with a market that just consisted of rich people?
| "Because rich people have the money!"
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > This is the real answer. Eventually, when 95% of us
| have no jobs because AI and robotics are doing
| everything, then the rich will just buy and sell from
| each other
|
| My prediction is that the poor will reinvent the
| guillotine
| neutronicus wrote:
| There are also blue- and pink-collar industries that we all
| tacitly agree are crazy understaffed right now because of
| brutal work conditions and low pay (health care, child care,
| K-12, elder care), with low quality-of-service a concern
| across the board, and with many job functions that seem very
| difficult to replace with AI (assuming liability for
| preventing children and elderly adults from physically
| injuring themselves and others).
|
| If you, a CEO, eliminate a bunch of white-collar workers,
| presumably you drive your former employees into all these
| jobs they weren't willing to do before, and hey, you make
| more profits, your kids and aging parents are better-taken-
| care-of.
|
| Seems like winning in the fundamental game of society -
| maneuvering everyone else into being your domestic servants.
| const_cast wrote:
| Right, but the elephant in the room is that despite those
| industries being constantly understaffed and labor being in
| extreme demand, they're underpaid. It seems nobody gives a
| flying fuck about the free market when it comes to the
| labor market, which is arguably the most important market.
|
| So, flooding those industries with more warm bodies
| probably won't help anything. I imagine it would make the
| already fucked labor relations even more fucked.
| neutronicus wrote:
| It would be bad for compensation in the field(s) but the
| actual working conditions might improve, just by dint of
| having enough people to do all the work expected.
| spamizbad wrote:
| > All the people employed by the government and blue collar
| workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market
| workers, etc?
|
| I can tell you for many of those professions their customers
| are the same white collar workers. The blue collar economy
| isn't plumbers simply fixing the toilets of the HVAC guy,
| while the HVAC guy cools the home of the electrician,
| while...
| ben_w wrote:
| Game theory/Nash equilibrium/Prisoner's Dilemma, and the
| turkey's perspective in the problem of induction.
|
| So far, for any given automation, each actor gets to cut their
| own costs to their benefit -- and if they do this smarter than
| anyone else, they win the market for a bit.
|
| Every day the turkey lives, they get a bit more evidence the
| farmer is an endless source of free food that only wants the
| best for them.
|
| It's easy to fool oneself that the economics are eternal with
| reference to e.g. Jevons paradox.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > turkey's perspective in the problem of induction...
|
| Had to look that up:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
| abracadaniel wrote:
| My long term fear with AI is that by replacing entry level
| jobs, it breaks the path to train senior level employees. It
| could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat from
| it, but could lead to massive collapse as no one is left with
| any understanding of how existing systems work, or how to
| design replacements.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Juniors and offshore teams will probably be the most
| severely impacted. If a senior dev is already breaking off
| smaller tightly scoped tasks and fixing up the results,
| that loop can be accomplished much more quickly by
| iterating with a LLM. Especially if you have to wait a
| business day for someone in India to even start on the task
| when a LLM is spitting out a similar quality PR in minutes.
|
| Ironically a friend of mine noticed that the team in India
| they work with is now largely pushing AI-generated code...
| At that point you just need management to cut out the
| middleman.
| teitoklien wrote:
| lol, what it's soon going to lead to is unfortunately the
| very opposite of what you're thinking.
|
| Management will cut down your team's headcount and
| outsource even more to India ,Vietnam and Philippines.
|
| A CFO looks at balance sheet not operations context, even
| if you're idea is better the opposite of what you think
| is likely going to happen very soon.
| lurkshark wrote:
| I'm actually worried we've gotten a kickstart on that
| process already. Anecdotally it seems like entry level
| developer jobs are harder to come by today than a decade
| ago. Without the free-money growth we were seeing for a
| long time it seems like companies are more incentivized to
| only hire senior developers at the loss of the greater good
| that comes with hiring and mentoring junior developers.
|
| Caveat that this is anecdotal, not sure if there are
| numbers on this.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| This isn't AI-specific, though; businesses decided that it
| was everyone else's responsibility to train their employees
| over a decade ago.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| If it takes a few decades, they may actually automate all
| but the most impressive among senior positions though.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I agree with your worry.
|
| That said, the first thing that jumps to my mind is cars.
| Back when they were first introduced you had to be a
| mechanically inclined person to own one and deal with it.
| Today, people just buy them and hire the very small number
| of experts (relative to the population of drivers) to deal
| with any issues. Same with smartphones. The majority of
| users have no idea how they really work. If it stop working
| they seek out an expert.
|
| ATM, AI just seems like another level of that. JS/Python
| programmers don't need to know bits and bytes and memory
| allocation. Vibe coders won't need to know what JS/Python
| programmers need to know.
|
| Maybe there won't be enough experts to keep it all going
| though.
| scarlehoff wrote:
| This is what I fear as well: some companies might adopt a
| "sustainable" approach to AI, but others will dynamite the
| entry path to their companies. Of course, if your only goal
| is to sell a unicorn and be out after three years, who
| cares... but serious companies with lifelong employees that
| adopt the AI-first strategy are in for a surprise (looking
| at you, Microsoft).
| xp84 wrote:
| > It could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat
| from it, but could lead to massive collapse
|
| When you consider how this interacts with the population
| collapse (which is inevitable now everywhere outside of
| some African countries) this seems even worse. In 20 years,
| we will have far fewer people under age 60 than we have
| now, and among that smaller cohort, the percentage of
| people at any given age who have useful levels of
| experience will be less because they may not be able to
| even begin meaningful careers.
|
| Best case scenario, people who have gotten 5 or more years
| of experience by now (college grads of 2020) may scrape by
| indefinitely. They'll be about 47 then and have no one to
| hire that's more qualified than AI. Not necessarily
| _because_ AI is so great; rather, how will there be someone
| with 20 years of experience when we simply don 't hire any
| junior people this year?
|
| Worst case, AI overtakes the Class of 2020 and moves up the
| experience-equivalence ladder faster than 1 year per year,
| so it starts taking out the classes of 2015, 2010, etc.
| spacemadness wrote:
| And we as humans figured all this out and still do nothing
| with this knowledge. We fight as hard as we can against
| collective wisdom.
| roenxi wrote:
| You're being confused by the numbers. We aren't trying to
| maximise consumer spending, the point is to maximise living
| standards. If the market equilibrium price of all goods was $0
| consumer spending would be $0 and living standards would be off
| the charts. It'd be a great outcome.
|
| It just happens that up to this point there have been things
| that couldn't be done by capital. Now we're entering a world
| where there isn't such a thing and it is unclear what that
| implies for the job market. But people not having jobs is
| hardly a bad thing as long as it isn't forced by stupid policy,
| ideally nobody has to work.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| In theory. In reality, how are the benefits of all this
| efficiency going to be distributed to the people who aren't
| working? I sure don't see any calls for higher taxes and more
| wealth redistribution.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The source article is an analysis of an interview
| (https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-
| unempl...) where the CEO of Anthropic called for higher
| taxes and more wealth redistribution.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| I'm sure the Republican liches in the Senate have some
| views on that which kill it out of the gate
| ikrenji wrote:
| Let's face it ~ almost all work will be automated in the
| next 50 years. Either capitalism dies or humanity dies
| untrust wrote:
| Another question: If AI is going to eat up everyone's jobs, how
| will any business be safe from a new competitor showing up and
| unseating them off their throne? I don't think that the low
| level peons would be the only ones at stake as a company could
| be easily outcompeted as well since AI could conceivably
| outperform or replace any existing product anyways.
|
| I guess funding for processing power and physical machinery to
| run the AI backing a product would be the biggest barrier to
| entry?
| layer8 wrote:
| Institutional knowledge is key here. Third parties can't
| replicate it quickly just by using AI.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Luckily we are firing all those people so they will be
| available for new roles.
|
| This feels a lot like the dot boom/dot bust era where a lot
| of new companies are going to sprout up from the ashes of
| all this disruption.
| floatrock wrote:
| Also: network effects, inertia, cornering the market enough
| to make incumbents uneconomical, regulatory capture...
|
| AI certainly will increase competition in some areas, but
| there are countless examples where being the best at
| something doesn't make you the leader.
| zhobbs wrote:
| Yeah this will likely lead to margin compression. The best
| companies will be fine though, as brand and existing
| distribution is a huge moat.
| azemetre wrote:
| "Best" is carrying a lot of wait. More accurate to say the
| monopolistic companies that engage in regulatory capture
| will be fine.
| jrs235 wrote:
| Empowering the current US President to demand more
| bribes.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The beginning of the AI Wars?
| anvandare wrote:
| A cancerous cell does not care that it is (indirectly) killing
| the lifeform that it is a part of. It just does what it does
| without a thought.
|
| And if it could think, it would probably be very proud of the
| quarter (hour) figures that it could present. The Number has
| gone up, time for a reward.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Business leaders in AI are _not_ excited and agree with your
| concerns. That's what the source article is about - the CEO of
| AI lab Anthropic said he sees major social problems coming
| soon. The problem is that the information environment is
| twisted in knots. The author, like many commentators,
| characterizes your concerns as "optimism" and "hype", because
| she doesn't think AI will actually have these large impacts.
| spacemadness wrote:
| I think he says this just to hype up how powerful of a force
| AI is which helps these CEOs bottom line eventually.
| Cynically "we've created something so powerful it will
| eliminate jobs and cause strife" gets those investors excited
| for more.
| geraneum wrote:
| They are. The audience of this talk is not normal people.
| He's excited and is targeting a specific group in his
| messaging. The author is a person like majority.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean. The audience of this talk
| is Axios, a large news website targeting the general
| public.
| leeroihe wrote:
| They want an omnipresent, lobotomized and defeated underclass
| who only exists to "respond" to the ai to continue to improve
| it. This is basically what alexander wang from Scale AI
| explained at a recent talk which was frankly terrifying.
|
| Your UBI will be controlled by the government, you will have
| even less agency than you currently have and a hyper elite will
| control the thinking machines. But don't worry, the elite and
| the government are looking out for your best interest!
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That's a very pessimistic view. People can borrow money against
| their property, then later they can borrow money against their
| diploma and professional certificates (and nobody should be
| allowed to work without being certified, that's dangerous).
| Then later I think it's time for banks to start offering
| consumers the reproductive right of mortgaging their children,
| either born or unborn.
| keybored wrote:
| > If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making
| technology is getting so good it's going to ruin the global
| economy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that person is either
| lying or fully detached from reality.
|
| Exactly. These people are growth-seekers first, domain experts
| second.
|
| Yet I saw progressive[1] outlets reacting to this as a neutral
| reporting. So it apparently takes a "legacy media" outlet to wake
| people out of their AI stupor.
|
| [1] American news outlets that lean social-democratic
| sevensor wrote:
| What AI is going to wipe out is white collar jobs where people
| sleepwalk through the working day and carelessly half ass every
| task. In 2025, we can get LLMs to do that for us. Unfortunately,
| the kind of executive who thinks AI is a legitimate replacement
| for actual work does not recognize the difference. I expect to
| see the more credulous CEOs dynamiting their companies as a
| result. Whether the rest of us can survive this remains to be
| seen. The CEOs will be fine, of course.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Consulting companies like the Big 4 where this happens most are
| bigger/stronger than ever (primarily due to AI related
| consulting). Try again.
| sevensor wrote:
| What makes you think productive work is what consulting
| companies are selling? They're there for laundering
| accountability. When you bring in consultants to roll out
| your corporate AI strategy, and it all falls apart in a few
| years, you can say, "we were following best practices, nobody
| could have anticipated X," where X is whatever failure mode
| ultimately tanks the AI strategy.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| you hire consultants so you can cut staff and quality, but
| the CEOs were already going to do that.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Do you think that it's possible in principle to have a
| better or worse corporate AI strategy? I do, and because I
| do, it seems clear that companies paying top dollar are
| doing so because they expect a better one. There's no
| reason to pay KPMG's rates if all you need is a fall guy.
|
| Most criticisms I see of management consulting seem to come
| from the perspective, which I get the sense you subscribe
| to, that management strategy is broadly fake so there's no
| underlying _thing_ for the consultants to do better or
| worse on. I don 't think that's right, but I'm never sure
| how to bridge the gap. It'd be like someone telling me that
| software architecture is fake and only code is real.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Given that "design patterns" as a concept basically
| doesn't exist outside of Java and a few other languages
| no one actually uses, I'm apt to believe that "software
| architecture is fake and only code is real".
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Design patterns (as in commonly re-used designs that
| solve commonly encountered problems) exist in every
| language used enough to have commonly encountered
| problems. Gang-of-Four style named design patterns are
| mostly a Java thing, and repeatedly lead to the terrible
| outcome of (hopefully junior) developers trying to find a
| problem to use the design pattern they just learned about
| on.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| The fall guy market is very sensitive to credentials. I
| hired Joey Blows from Juice-My-AI just hasn't that CYA
| shield of appoval.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I'm willing to believe that one can be better or worse at
| management, and that in principle somebody could coach
| you on how to get better.
|
| That said, how would we measure if our KPMG engagement
| worked or not? There's no control group company, so any
| comparison will have to be statistical or vibes-based. If
| there is a large enough sample size this can work: I'm
| sure there is somebody out there that can prove
| management consulting works for dentist practices in mid-
| size US cities or whatever, though any well-connected
| group that discovers this information can probably make
| more money by just doing a rollup of them. This actually
| seems to be happening in many industries of this kind.
| Why consult on how to be a more profitable auto repair
| business when you can do a leveraged buyout of 30 of
| them, make them all more profitabl, and pocket that
| insight yourself? I can understand if you're an poorly-
| connected individual and short on capital, but the big
| consulting firms are made up entirely of well-connected
| people who rub elbows with rich people all day.
|
| Fundamentally, there will never be enough data to prove
| that IBM engaging McKinsey on AI in 2025 will have made
| any difference in IBM's bottom line. There's only one IBM
| and only one 2025!
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| I think this is the kind of logic you wind up with when you
| start with the assumption that the Big 4 tell the truth about
| absolutely everything all the time
| airstrike wrote:
| Consulting companies don't sell productive advice. They sell
| management insurance.
| johnbenoe wrote:
| Yea
| psadauskas wrote:
| AIs are great at generating bullshit, so if your job involves
| generating bullshit, you're probably on the chopping block.
|
| I just wish that instead of getting more efficient at
| generating bullshit, we could just eliminate the bullshit.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Some of the best applications of LLMs I've seen are for
| reducing bullshit. My goal for creating AI products is to let
| us act more like humans and less like oxen. I know it's
| idealistic, but I need to act with some goal.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _AIs are great at generating bullshit, so if your job
| involves generating bullshit, you 're probably on the
| chopping block._
|
| That covers majority of sales, advertising and marketing
| work. Unfortunately, replacing people with AI there will only
| make things worse for everyone.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| There's a connection to the return to office mandates here: the
| managers who don't see how anyone can work at home are the ones
| who've never done anything but yap in the office for a living,
| so they don't understand how sitting somewhere quiet and just
| _thinking_ counts as work or delivers value for the company. It
| 's a critical failure to appreciate that different people do
| different things for the business.
| Jubijub wrote:
| That is a hugely simplistic take that tells me you never
| managed people out coordinated work across many people. I
| mean I a more productive individually at home too, so are
| probably all my folks in the team. But we don't always work
| independently from each others, by which point having some
| days in common is a massive booster
| cjs_ac wrote:
| There is a spectrum: at one extremity is mandatory in-
| office presence every day; at the other is a fully-remote
| business. For any given individual, and for any given team,
| the approach needs to be placed on that spectrum according
| to what it is that that individual or team does. I'm not
| arguing in favour of any position on that spectrum; I'm
| arguing against blanket mandates that don't involve any
| consideration for what individuals in the business do.
| const_cast wrote:
| > What AI is going to wipe out is white collar jobs where
| people sleepwalk through the working day and carelessly half
| ass every task.
|
| The only reason this existed in the first place is because
| measuring performance is extremely difficult, and becomes more
| difficult the more complex a person's job is.
|
| AI won't fix that. So even if you eliminate 50% of your
| employees, you won't be eliminating the bottom 50%. At worst,
| and probably what happens on average, your choices are about as
| good as random choice. So you end up with the same proportion
| of shitty workers as you had before. At worst worst, you
| actively select the poorest workers because you have some
| shitty metrics, which happens more often than we'd all like to
| think.
| leeroihe wrote:
| I don't really care what kind of work it is - you are my enemy
| if it's your objective to create a machine that will
| systematically devalue my work and kick me to the curb without
| really caring about it. Explicitly in a "pure" bs capitalistic
| way that "well you'll just figure something out, not my
| problem". I say this as someone who's a big proponent of
| capitalism and has owned a business.
|
| It's a perversion of the free market and isn't good for anyone.
| abletonlive wrote:
| Thanks for saying it out loud. I meet a lot of people like
| you that think the same way as part of my job and they aren't
| willing to say it out loud.
|
| It's about protecting your work, even if an LLM can do it
| better.
|
| The only way an LLM can devalue your work is if it can do it
| better than you. And I don't _just_ mean quality, I mean as a
| function of cost /quality/time.
|
| Anyway, we can be enemies I don't care - I've been getting
| rid of roles that aren't useful anymore as much as I can. I
| do care that it affects them personally but I do want them to
| be doing something more useful for us all whatever that may
| be.
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| lol "I do care, but not enough to actually care"
| abletonlive wrote:
| Caring doesn't mean that you stop everything you're doing
| to address someone's needs. That's a pretty binary world
| if it was the case and maybe a convenient way to look at
| motives when you don't want nuance.
|
| Caring about climate change doesn't mean you need to
| spend your entire life planting trees instead of doing
| what you're doing.
| xanthor wrote:
| So you think the free market should serve social ends?
| geraneum wrote:
| > It's a perversion of the free market
|
| We can, together, overcome such challenges when we accept
| that "The purpose of a system is what it does".
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There's a "purpose of a system", but there's also a purpose
| which we want that system to serve, and which prompts us to
| correct the system should it deviate from the goals we set
| for it.
| richardw wrote:
| CEO's will be fine until their customers disappear. Are the
| AI's going to click ads and buy iPhones?
| einpoklum wrote:
| I haven't worked in the US; and - have not yet worked in a
| company where such employees exist. Some are slower, some are
| fast or more efficient or productive - but they're all,
| everyone, under the pressure of too many tasks assigned to
| them, and it's always obvious that more personnel is needed but
| budget (supposedly) precludes it.
|
| So, what you're describing is a mythical situation for me. But
| - US corporations are fabulously rich, or perhaps I should say
| highly-valued, and there are lots of investors to throw money
| at things I guess, so maybe that actually happens.
| whynotminot wrote:
| There's a hype machine for sure.
|
| But the last few paragraphs of the piece kind of give away the
| game -- the author is an AI skeptic judging only the current
| products rather than taking in the scope of how far they've come
| in such a short time frame. I don't have much use for this short
| sighted analysis. It's just not very intelligent and shows a
| stubborn lack of imagination.
|
| It reminds me of that quote "it is difficult to get a man to
| understand something, when his salary depends on his not
| understanding it."
|
| People like this have banked their futures on AI not working out.
| codr7 wrote:
| The opposite is more true imo.
|
| It's the AI hype squad that are banking their future on AI
| magically turning into AGI; because, you know, it surprised us
| once.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Not really -- even if AGI doesn't work and these models don't
| get any better, there's still enormous value to be mined just
| from harnessing the existing state of the art.
|
| Or these guys pivot and go back to building CRUD apps.
| They're either at the front of something revolutionary... or
| not... and they'll go back to other lucrative big tech jobs.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Is there enormous value? AI is burning cash at an
| extraordinary rate on the promise that it will be an
| enormous value. But if it plateaus, then all the servers,
| GPUs, data centers, power and cooling and other
| infrastructure will have to be paid for out of revenue.
| Will customers be willing to pay the actual costs of
| running this stuff.
| whynotminot wrote:
| I don't know if what they've built and are building in
| the future will justify the level of investment. I'm not
| an economist or a VC. It's hard to fathom the huge sums
| being so casually thrown around.
|
| All I can tell you is that for what I use AI for now in
| both my personal and professional life, I would pay a lot
| of money (way more than I already am) to keep just the
| _current_ capabilities I already have access to today.
| asadotzler wrote:
| They've so far spent about what the world spent to build
| out almost all of the broadband internet, the fiber, cable,
| cellular, etc. If AI companies stop now, about 10 years
| after they got going, does their effort give us trillions
| of dollars being added to the economy each year from today
| forward, like we got for every year after the 10 years of
| internet build out between 1998 and 2008? I'm not seeing
| it. If they stop now, that's a trillion dollars in the
| dumper because no one can afford to operate the existing
| tech without a continual influx of investor cash that may
| never pay off.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Using the Upton Sinclair quote in this context is a sign of not
| understanding the quote. The original quote means that you
| ignore gross injustices of your employer in order to stay
| employed.
|
| It was never used in the sense of denigrating potential
| competitors in order to stay employed.
|
| > People like this have banked their futures on AI not working
| out.
|
| If "AI" succeeds, which is unlikely, what is _your_
| recommendation to journalists? Should they learn how to code?
| Should they become prostitutes for the 1%?
|
| Perhaps the only option would be to make arrangements with the
| Mafia like dock workers to protect their jobs. At least it
| works: Dock workers have self confidence and do not constantly
| talk about replacing themselves. /s
| whynotminot wrote:
| I think the quote makes perfect sense in this context,
| regardless of the prior application.
|
| As to my recommendation to what they do -- I dunno man. I'm a
| software engineer. I don't know what _I_ am going to do yet.
| But I'm sure as shit not burying my head in the sand.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Even if you apply the quote in a different sense, which
| would take away all its pithiness, you are still
| presupposing that "AI" will turn out to be a success.
|
| The gross injustices in the original quote were already a
| fact, which makes the quote so powerful.
| whynotminot wrote:
| AI as is, is already a success, which is why I find it so
| baffling that people continue to write pieces like this.
|
| We don't need AGI for there to be large displacement of
| human labor. What's here is already good enough to
| replace many of us.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I previously worked at a company called Recharge Payments,
| directly supporting the CTO, Mike--a genuinely great person, and
| someone learning to program. Mike would assign me small tasks,
| essentially making me his personal AI assistant. Now, I approach
| everything I do from his perspective. It's clear that over time,
| he'll increasingly rely on AI, asking employees less frequently.
| Eventually, it'll become so efficient to turn to AI that he'll
| rarely need to ask employees anything at all.
| golol wrote:
| > To be clear, Amodei didn't cite any research or evidence for
| that 50% estimate.
|
| I truly belive these types of paper don't deserve to be valued so
| much.
| righthand wrote:
| Yes we live in a world where no "experts" are required to
| provide any evidence or truth, but media outlets will gladly
| publish every false word and idea. For the same reason these
| Ceos want to wipe their workforce for more money, not a
| functioning society.
| airstrike wrote:
| The attention economy is ruining society.
| idkwhattocallme wrote:
| I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP.
| I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers
| attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team
| to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were
| literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the
| company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't
| going to hurt the skyrocketing stock. Plus hiring someone gave my
| VP more headcount and therefore more clout. The market only
| valued company growth, not efficiency. But the market always
| capitulates to value (over time). When that happens all those
| overlay hires will get axed. Both companies have since laid off
| 10K+. AI was the scapegoat. But really, a lot of the knowledge
| worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross
| functional meetings because our calendars were literally too
| full to attend.
|
| Some managers read Dilbert and think it's intended as advice.
| trhway wrote:
| AI has been also consuming Dilbert as part of its training...
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| To the contrary - they were providing value to the VP who
| benefitted from inflated headcount. That's "real value", it's
| just a rogue agent is misaligned with the company's goals.
|
| And AI cannot provide that kind of value. Will a VP in charge
| of 100 AI agents be respected as much as a VP in charge of 100
| employees?
|
| At the end of the day, we're all just monkeys throwing bones in
| the air in front of a monolith we constructed. But we're not
| going to stop throwing bones in the air!
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| We really oughta work on setting up systems that don't waste
| time on things like this. Might be hard, but probably would
| be worth the effort.
| idkwhattocallme wrote:
| True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday
| (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would
| rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show
| profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on
| your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to
| shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being
| respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their
| directs were like Nobles in a feudal kingdom constantly
| quibbling/battling for territory. There were alliances with
| others and full on takeouts at points. One VP described it as
| Game of Thrones. Not sure how this all changes when your
| kingdom is a bunch of AI agents that presumably anyone can
| operate.
| myko wrote:
| Not so fun in real life but I kind of like this as a video
| game concept
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted
| as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes
|
| Then why are all the most valuable businesses the ones with
| the highest profits?
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/
|
| Sort by # of employees and you get a list of companies with
| lower market caps.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "Hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more
| clout"
|
| Which is the sole reason automation will not make most people
| obsolete until the VP level themselves are automated.
| dlivingston wrote:
| No, not if the metric by which VPs get clout changes.
| thfuran wrote:
| The more cloud spend the better. Take 10% of it as a bonus?
| monkeyelite wrote:
| That metric is evaluated deep in the human psyche.
| icedchai wrote:
| I've worked at smaller companies where half the people in the
| meetings were just there because they had nothing else to do.
| Lots of "I'm a fly on the wall" and "I'll be a note taker"
| types. Most of them contributed nothing.
| xp84 wrote:
| My friend's company (he was VP of Software & IT at a non-tech
| company) had a habit of meetings with no particular agenda
| and no decisions that needed making. Just meeting because it
| was on the calendar, discussing any random thing someone
| wanted to blab about. Not how my friend ran his team but that
| was how the rest did.
|
| Then they had some disappointing results due to their bad
| decision-making elsewhere in the company, and they turned to
| my friend and said "Let's lay off some of your guys."
| disambiguation wrote:
| > But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces"
| weren't providing real value anyway.
|
| I think quotes around "real value" would be appropriate as
| well. Consider all the great engineering it took to create
| Netflix, valued at $500b - which achieves what SFTP does for
| free.
| paulcole wrote:
| Just curious, did you put yourself in the superfluous category
| either time?
| mlsu wrote:
| I suspect that these "AI layoffs" are really "interest rate"
| layoffs in disguise.
|
| Software was truly truly insane for a bit there. Straight out
| of college, no-name CS degree, making $120, $150k (back when
| $120k really meant $120k)? The music had to stop on that one.
| catigula wrote:
| That really only happened in HCOL areas.
| xp84 wrote:
| Sure, but there was a massive concentration of such people
| in those areas.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Yeah, my spiciest take is that Jr. Dev salaries really
| started getting silly during the 2nd half of the 2010s. It
| was ultimately supply (too little) and demand (too much)
| pushing them upward, but it was a huge signal we were in a
| bubble.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| The irony now is that 120k is basically minimum wage for
| major metros (and in most cases that excludes home
| ownership).
|
| Of course, that growth in wages in this sector was a
| contributing factor to home/rental price increases as the
| "market" could bear higher prices.
| alephnerd wrote:
| CoL in London or Dublin is comparable to much of the US,
| but new grad salaries are in the $30-50k range.
|
| The issue is salary expectations in the US are much higher
| than those in much of Western Europe despite having similar
| CoL.
|
| And $120k for a new grad is only a tech specific thing.
| Even new grad management consultants earn $80-100k base,
| and lower for other non-software roles and industries.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> but new grad salaries are in the $30-50k range_
|
| But in UK an Ireland they get free healthcare, paid
| vacation, sick leave and labor protections, no?
| alephnerd wrote:
| The labor protections are basically ignored (you will be
| expected to work off the clock hours in any white collar
| role), and the free healthcare portion gets paid out of
| employer's pockets via taxes so it comes out the same as
| a $70-80k base (and associated taxes) would in much of
| the US.
|
| There's a reason you don't see new grad hiring in France
| (where they actually try to enforce work hours), and they
| have a subsequently high youth unemployment rate.
|
| Though even these new grad roles are at risk to move to
| CEE, where their administrations are giving massive tax
| holidays on the tune of $10-20k per employee if you
| invest enough.
|
| And the skills gap I mentioned about CS in the US exists
| in Weatern Europe as well. CEE, Israel, and India are the
| only large tech hubs that still treat CS as an
| engineering disciple instead of as only a form of applied
| math.
| ponector wrote:
| I've seen recently an open position for senior dev with
| 60k salary and hybrid 3 days per week in London. Insane!
| rcpt wrote:
| Maybe the EU is different but in the US there's no
| software engineering union. Our wages are purely what the
| market dictates.
|
| Think they're too high? You're free to start a company
| and pay less.
| rekenaut wrote:
| I feel that saying "120k is basically minimum wage for
| major metros" is absurd. As of 2022, there are only three
| metro areas in the US that have a per capita income greater
| than $120,000 [1] (Bay Area and Southwest Connecticut).
| Anywhere else in the US, 120k is doing pretty well for
| yourself, compared to the rest of the population. The
| average American working full time earns $60k [2]. I'm sure
| it's not a comfortable wage in some places, but "basically
| minimum wage" just seems ignorant.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_met
| ropol...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Un
| ited_...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used
| during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product
| managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers
| are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs
| during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and
| meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were
| in tech that are having trouble getting hired now are in people
| who were in those "adjacent" roles - think agile coaches, TPMs,
| etc. (but I have a ton of sympathy for these folks - many of
| them worked hard for years and built their skills - but these
| roles were always somewhat "optional").
|
| I'd also highlight that beyond over-hiring being responsible
| for the downturn in tech employment, I think offshoring is
| _way_ more responsible for the reduction in tech than AI when
| it comes to US jobs. Video conferencing tech didn 't get really
| good and ubiquitous (especially for folks working from home)
| until the late teens, and since then I've seen an explosion of
| offshore contractors. With so many folks working remotely
| anyway, what does it matter if your coworker is in the same
| city or a different continent, as long as there is at least
| some daily time overlap (which is also why I've seen a ton of
| offshoring to Latin America and Europe over places like India).
| catigula wrote:
| Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is
| that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene
| amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India
| and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this
| workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is
| pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and
| accounting analyst positions.
|
| Both sides of the aisle retreated from domestic labor
| protection for their own different reasons so the US labor
| force got clobbered.
| gedy wrote:
| I was working at a SoCal company a couple years ago (where
| I'm from), and we had a _lot_ of Chinese and Indian folks.
| I remember cracking up when one of the Indian fellows
| pulled me aside and asked me where I was from, because I
| sounded so different with my accent and lingo. He thought I
| was from some small European country, lol.
| catigula wrote:
| Just to note interpersonally I find pretty much any group
| to be great on average but being a participant of US
| labor and sympathetic to other US laborers this is
| clearly not something I can support.
| tcdent wrote:
| The language I use being from southern California has, on
| more than one occasion, sparked conversation about it.
|
| Sorry, dude, it's like, all I know.
| yobbo wrote:
| > The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce
| couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads
|
| One theory is that the benefit they might be providing over
| domestic "grads" is lack of prerequisites for promotion
| above certain levels (language, cultural fit, and so on).
| For managers, this means the prestige of increased
| headcount without the various "burdens" of managing
| "careerists". For example, less plausible competition for
| career-ladder jobs which can then be reserved for favoured
| individuals. Just a theory.
| boredatoms wrote:
| I think that would backfire as the intrinsic culture of
| the company changes as it absorbs more people. Verticals
| would form from new hires who did manage to get promoted
| catigula wrote:
| It's also not correct to view people as atomized
| individuals. People band together on shared culture and
| oftentimes ethnicity.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| I will admit that this is the most plausible explanation
| of this phenomenon that explains the benefit to managers
| I have read on this issue so far.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I am VERY pro-immigration. I do have concerns about the H1B
| program though. IMO it's not great for both immigrant
| workers, as well as non-immigrant workers because it
| creates a class of workers for whom it's harder to change
| employers which weakens their negotiation position. If this
| is the case for enough of the workforce it artificially
| depresses wages for everyone. I want to see a reform that
| makes it much easier for H1B workers to change employers.
| bdangubic wrote:
| amen! that will never happen though, nothing ever happens
| here that helps the workers and whatever rights we have
| now are slowly dwindling (immigrants or otherwise...)
| catigula wrote:
| I want to use you as a bit of a sounding board, so don't
| take this as negative feedback.
|
| The problem is that the left, which was historically pro-
| labor, abdicated this position for racial reasons, and
| the right was always about maximizing the economic zone.
| absurdo wrote:
| > I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally
| from, mostly, India and China.
|
| First time?
| icedchai wrote:
| I worked at a small company with more PMs than developers. It
| was incredible how much bull it created.
| lukev wrote:
| Whenever I think about AI and labor, I can't help thinking
| about David Graeber's [Bullshit
| Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs).
|
| And there's multiple confounding factors at play.
|
| Yes, lots of jobs are bullshit, so maybe AI is a plausible
| excuse to downside and gain efficiency.
|
| But also the dynamic that causes the existence of bullshit jobs
| hasn't gone away. In fact, assuming AI does actually provide
| meaningful automation or productivity improvemenet, it might
| well be the case that the ratio of bullshit jobs _increases_.
| paulluuk wrote:
| Around the time when bitcoin started to get serious public
| attention, late 2017, I remember feeling super hyped about it and
| yet everyone told me that money spent on bitcoin was wasted
| money. I really believed that bitcoin, or at least cryptocurrency
| as a whole, would fundamentally change how banking and currencies
| would work. Now, almost 10 years later, I would say that it did
| not live up to my believe that it would "fundamentally" change
| currencies and banking. It made some minor changes, sure, but if
| it weren't for the value of bitcoin, it would still be a nerdy
| topic about as well known as perlin noise. Although I did make
| quite a lot of money from it, though I sold out way too soon.
|
| As a research engineer in the field of AI, I am again getting
| this feeling. People keep doubting that AI will have any kind of
| impact, and I'm absolutely certain that it will. A few years ago
| people said "AI art is terrible" and "LLMs are just autocomplete"
| or the famous "AI is just if-else". By now it should be pretty
| obvious to everyone in the tech community that AI, and LLMs in
| particular, are extremely useful and already have a huge impact
| on tech.
|
| Is it going to fulfill all the promises made by billionaire tech
| CEOs? No, of course not, at least not on the time scale that
| they're projecting. But they are incredibly useful tools that can
| enhance efficiency of almost any job that involves setting behind
| a computer. Even just something like copilot autocomplete or
| talking with an LLM about a refactor you're planning, is often
| incredibly useful. And the amount of "intelligence" that you can
| get from a model that can actually run on your laptop is also
| getting much better very quickly.
|
| The way I see it, either the AI hype will end up like
| cryptocurrency: forever a part of our world, but never quite
| lived up to it's promises, but I made a lot of money in the
| meantime. Or the AI hype will live up to it's promises, but
| likely over a much longer period of time, and we'll have to test
| whether we can live with that. Personally I'm all for a fully
| automated luxury communism model for government, but I don't see
| that happening in the "better dead than red" US. It might become
| reality in Europe though, who knows.
| paulluuk wrote:
| On a side note, I do worry about the energy consumption of AI.
| I'll admit that, like the silicon valley tech bros, there is a
| part of me that hopes that AI will allow researchers to invent
| a solution to that -- something like fusion or switching to
| quantum-computing AI models or whatever. But if that doesn't
| happen, it's probably the biggest problem related to AI. More
| so even than alignment, perhaps.
| layer8 wrote:
| > already have a huge impact on tech
|
| As a user, I haven't seen a huge impact yet on the tech I use.
| I'm curious what the coming years will bring, though.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Crypto is a really interesting point, because even the subset
| of people who have invested in it don't use it on a day to day
| basis. The entire valuation is based on speculative use cases.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Something can be useful and massively overhyped at the same
| time.
|
| LLMs are good productivity tools. I've been using it for
| coding, and it is massively helpful, really speeds things up.
| There's a few asterisks there though
|
| 1) I does generate bullshit, and this is an unavoidable part of
| what LLMs are. The ratio of bullshit seems to come down with
| reasoning layers above it, but they will always be there.
|
| 2) LLMs, for obvious reasons, tend to be more useful the more
| mainstream languages and libraries I am working with. The more
| obscure it is, the less useful it gets. It may have a chilling
| effect on technological advancement - new improved things are
| less used because LLMs are bad at them due to lack of available
| material, the new things shrivel and die on the vine without
| having a chance of organic growth.
|
| 3) The economics of it are super unclear. With the massive hype
| there's a lot of money slushing around AI, but those models
| seem obscenely expensive to create and even to run. It is very
| unclear how things will be when the appetite of losing money at
| this wanes.
|
| All that said, AI is multiple breakthroughs away of replacing
| humans, which does not mean they are not useful assistants. And
| increase in productivity can lead to lower demand for labor,
| which leads ro higher unemployment. Even modest unemployment
| rates can have grim societal effects.
|
| The world is always ending anyway.
| rvz wrote:
| > By now it should be pretty obvious to everyone in the tech
| community that AI, and LLMs in particular, are extremely useful
| and already have a huge impact on tech.
|
| Enough to cause the next financial crash, achieving a steady
| increase of 10% global unemployment in the next decade at
| worst,
|
| That is the _true_ definition of AGI.
| fny wrote:
| I think everyone is missing the bigger picture.
|
| This is not a matter of whether AI will replace humans whole
| sale. There are two more predominant effects:
|
| 1. You'll need fewer humans to do the same task. In other forms
| of automation, this has led to a decrease in employment. 2. The
| supply of capable humans increases dramatically. 3. Expertise is
| no longer a perfect moat.
|
| I've seen 2. My sister nearly flunked a coding class in college,
| but now she's writing small apps for her IT company.
|
| And for all of you who poo poo that as unsustainable. I became
| proficient in Rust in a week, and I picked up Svelte in a day.
| I've written a few shaders too! The code I've written is
| pristine. All those conversations about "should I learn X to be
| employed" are totally moot. Yes APL would be harder, but it's
| definitely doable. This is an example of 3.
|
| Overall, this will surely cause wage growth to slow and maybe
| decrease. In turn, job opportunities will dry up and unemployment
| might ensue.
|
| For those who still don't believe, air traffic controllers are a
| great thought experiment--they're paid quite nicely. What happens
| if you build tools so that you can train and employ 30% of the
| population instead of just 10%?
| BigJono wrote:
| > I became proficient in Rust in a week, and I picked up Svelte
| in a day. I've written a few shaders too! The code I've written
| is pristine. All those conversations about "should I learn X to
| be employed" are totally moot.
|
| fucking lmao
| fny wrote:
| My point is you learn X and your time to learn and ship Y is
| dramatically reduced.
|
| It would have taken me a month to write the GPU code I needed
| in Blender, and I had everything working in a week.
|
| And none of this was "vibed": I understand exactly what each
| line does.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| You did not and you are not proficient. LLMs and AI in
| general cater to your insecurities. An actual good human
| mentor will wipe the floor with your arrogance and you'll
| be better for it.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| It would have taken you a month and you would have been
| able to understand it 100x more.
|
| LLMs are great but what they really excel at is raising the
| rates of Dunning-Kruger in every industry they touch.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| Yes, this is definitely missing a /s, I hope.
|
| Please for the love of god tell me this is a joke.
| hooverd wrote:
| Can you talk about Rust without your friend computer?
| fny wrote:
| Of course not! But I can definitely ship useful tools, and I
| can could learn to talk the talk in a tenth of the time it
| would otherwise have taken.
|
| Which is my point, this is not about replacement, it's about
| reducing the need and increasing supply.
| MattSayar wrote:
| Can you talk about assembly without the internet?
|
| I fully understand your point and even agree with it to an
| extent. LLMs are just another layer of abstraction, like C is
| an abstraction for asm is an abstraction for binary is an
| abstraction for transistors... we all stand on the shoulders
| of giants. We write code to accomplish a task, not the other
| way around.
| hooverd wrote:
| I think friction is important to learning and expertise.
| LLMs are great tools if you view them as compression. I
| think calculators are a good example, people like to bring
| those up as a gotcha, but an alarming amount of people are
| now innumerate on basic receipt math or comprehending
| orders of magnitude.
| MattSayar wrote:
| It is absolutely essential that we still have experts who
| know the details. LLMs are just the tide that lifts all
| ships.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Can you talk about assembly without the internet?
|
| Yes.
|
| Can you not?
| ironman1478 wrote:
| "I became proficient in Rust in a week". How did you evaluate
| that if you weren't an expert in Rust to begin with? What does
| proficient mean to you? Also, are you advocating we get rid of
| air traffic controllers with AI? How would we train the AI?
| What model would you use? If you can't solve a safety critical
| problem from first principles, there is no way an AI should be
| in the loop. This makes no sense.
|
| Cynically, I'm happy we have this AI generated code. It's gonna
| create so much garbage and they'll have to pay good senior
| engineers more money to clean it all up.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| To your second point we're seeing a huge comeback of
| vulnerabilities that we're "mostly gone". Things like very
| basic RCEs and SQLi. This is a great thing for security
| workers as well.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| At least temporarily, it can be somewhat self-fulfilling, though.
| Companies believe it, think they'd better shed white-collar jobs
| to stay competitive. If enough companies believe that, white-
| collar jobs go down, even if AI is useless.
|
| Of course, in the medium term, those companies may find out that
| they _needed_ those people, and have to hire, and then have to
| re-train the new people, and suffer all the disruption that
| causes, and the companies that didn 't do that will be ahead of
| the game. (Or, they find out that they really _didn 't_ need all
| those people, even if AI is useless, and the companies that
| didn't get rid of them are stuck with a higher expense structure.
| We'll see.)
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I don't think we've seen a technology more over-hyped in the
| history of industrialized society. Cars, which did fully replace
| horses, was not even hyped this hard.
| spcebar wrote:
| Something is nagging me about the AI-human replacement
| conversation that I would love insight from people who know more
| about startup money than me. It seems like the AI revolution hit
| as interest rates went insane, and at the same time the AI that
| could write code was becoming available, the free VC money dried
| up, or at least changed. I feel like that's not usually a part of
| the conversation and I'm wondering if we would be having the same
| conversation if money for startups was thrown around (and more
| jobs were being created for SWEs) the way it was when interest
| rates were zero. I know next to nothing about this and would love
| to hear informed opinions.
| swyx wrote:
| its not part of the conversation because the influence here is
| tangential at best (1) and your sense of how much vc money is
| on the table at any given time is not good (2).
|
| 1a. most seed/A stage investing is acyclical because it is not
| really about timing for exits, people just always need dry
| powder
|
| 1b. tech advancement is definitely acyclical - alexnet,
| transformers, and gpt were all just done by very small teams
| without a lot of funding. gpt2->3 was funded by microsoft, not
| vc
|
| 2a. (i have advance knowledge of this bc i've previewed the
| keynote slides for ai.engineer) free vc money slowed in
| 2022-2023 but has not at all dried up and in fact reaccelerated
| in a very dramatic way. up 70% this yr
|
| 2b. "vc" is a tenous term when all biglabs are >>10b valuation
| and raising from softbank or sovereign wealth. its no longer
| vc, its about reallocating capital from publics to privates
| because the only good ai co's are private
| mjburgess wrote:
| I'm not seeing how you're replying to this comment. I'm not
| sure you've understood their point.
|
| The point is that there's a correlation between macroeconomic
| dynamics (ie., the price of credit increasing) and the "rise
| of AI". In ordinary times, absent AI, the macroeconomic
| dynamics would fully explain the economic shifts we're
| seeing.
|
| So the question is why do we event need to mention AI in our
| explanation of recent economic shifts?
|
| What phenomena, exactly, require positing AI disruption?
| munificent wrote:
| _> What phenomena, exactly, require positing AI
| disruption?_
|
| AI company CEOs trying to juice their stock evaluations?
| sfRattan wrote:
| > It seems like the AI revolution hit as interest rates went
| insane...
|
| > ...I'm wondering if we would be having the same conversation
| if money for startups was thrown around (and more jobs were
| being created for SWEs) the way it was when interest rates were
| zero.
|
| The end of free money probably has to do with why C-level types
| are salivating at AI tools as a cheaper potential replacement
| for some employees, but describing the interest rates returning
| to nonzero percentages as _going insane_ is really kind of a...
| wild take?
|
| The period of interest rates at or near zero was a historical
| anomaly [1]. And that policy clearly resulted in massive,
| systemic misallocation of investment at global scale.
|
| You're describing it as if that was the "normal?"
|
| [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-
| historical-c...
| michaeldoron wrote:
| Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools
| as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think
| of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases
| due to their initial low numbers.
|
| Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and
| not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a
| labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold,
| and giving an alternative, already circulated theory that AI
| companies CEOs are creating a false hype. The author even uses
| everyday language like "Yeaaahhh. So, this is kind of Anthropic's
| whole ~thing.~ ".
|
| Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this
| topic?
|
| They could have sketched the growth in foundation model
| capabilities vs. finite resources such as data, compute and
| hardware. They could have wrote about the current VC market and
| the need for companies to show results and not promises. They
| could have even wrote about the giant biotech industry, and its
| struggle with incorporating novel exciting drug discovery tools
| with slow moving FDA approvals. None of this was done here.
| bckr wrote:
| That's not what major news outlets are for. I'm not sure
| exactly what they're for.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Analysis == Opinion when it comes to mainstream news reporting.
| It's one guy's thinking on something.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I'm not seeing how comparing AI to a virus that killed millions
| and left tens of millions crippled is an effective way to
| support your argument.
| drewcon wrote:
| Humans are not familiar with exponential change so they have
| almost no ability to manage through exponential change.
|
| Its an apt comparison. The criticisms in the cnn article are
| already out date in many instances.
| const_cast wrote:
| Viruses spread and propagate themselves, often changing
| along the way. AI doesn't, and probably shouldn't. I think
| we've made a few movies on why that's a bad idea.
| geraneum wrote:
| > Humans are not familiar with exponential change
|
| Humans are. We have tools to measure exponential growth
| empirically. It was done for COVID (i.e. epidemiologists do
| that usually) and is done for economy and other aspects of
| our life. If there's to be exponential growth, we should be
| able to put it in numbers. "True me bro" is not a good
| measure.
|
| Edit: typo
| margalabargala wrote:
| There's individual persons modelling exponential change
| just fine, and then there's what happens when you apply
| to the populace at large.
|
| "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous
| animals and you know it."
| geraneum wrote:
| > when you apply to the populace at large
|
| What does this mean? What do you apply to populace at
| large? Do you mean a populace doesn't model the
| exponential change right?
| margalabargala wrote:
| Yep that's what I meant! Context clues did you well here.
| agarren wrote:
| > The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in
| many instances.
|
| Which ones, specifically? I'm genuinely curious. The ones
| about "[an] unfalsifiable disease-free utopia"? The one
| from a labor economist basically equating Amodei's high-
| unemployment/strong economy claims to pure fantasy? The
| fact that nothing Amodei said was cited or is substantiated
| in any meaningful way? Maybe the one where she points out
| that Amodei is fundamentally a sales guy, and that
| Anthropic is making the rounds saying scary stuff just
| after they released a new model - a techbro marketing push?
|
| I like anthropic. They make a great product. Shame about
| their CEO - just another techbro pumping his scheme.
| dingnuts wrote:
| especially when the world population is billions and at the
| beginning we were worried about double digit IFR.
|
| Yeah. Imagine if COVID had actually killed 10% of the world
| population. Killing millions sucks, but mosquitos regularly
| do that too, and so does tuberculosis, and we don't shut down
| everything. Could've been close to a billion. Or more.
| Could've been so much worse.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| > Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this
| topic?
|
| Not just this topic.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Why not use the promised exponential growth of home ownership
| that led to the catastrophic real estate bubble that burst in
| 2008 as an example?
|
| We are still dealing with the aftereffects, which led to the
| elimination of any working class representation in politics and
| suppression of real protests like Occupy Wall Street.
|
| When this bubble bursts, the IT industry will collapse for some
| years like in 2000.
| michaeldoron wrote:
| The growth of home ownership was an indicator of real estate
| investment, not of real world capabilities - once the value
| of real estate dropped and the bubble burst, those
| investments were worth less than before, causing the crisis.
| In contrast, the growth in this scenario is the capabilities
| of foundation models (and to a lesser extent, the
| technologies that stem out of these capabilities). This is
| not a promise or an investment, it's not an indication of
| speculative trust in this technology, it is a non-decreasing
| function indicating a real increase in performance.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this
| topic?"
|
| It's not CNN exlusive. Newsmedia that did not evolve towards
| clicks, riling up people, hatewatching and paid propaganda to
| the highest bidder went extinct a decade ago. This is what
| _did_ evolve.
| biophysboy wrote:
| This is outdated. Most of journalism has shifted to
| subscription models, offering a variety of products under one
| roof: articles, podcasts, newsletters, games, recipes,
| product reviews, etc.
| biophysboy wrote:
| Its an article reformulated from a daily newsletter.
| Newsletters take the form of a quick, casual follow up to
| current events (e.g. an Amodei interview). Its not intended to
| be exhaustive analysis.
|
| Besides the labor economist bit, it also makes the correct
| point that tech people regularly exaggerate and lie. A great
| example of this is biotech, a field I work in.
| leeroihe wrote:
| The best heuristic is what people are realizing happened with
| uncheck "skilled" immigration in places like canada (and soon
| the U.S.). Everyone was sold that we "need these workers"
| because nobody was willing to work and that they added to GDP.
| When in reality, there's now significant evidence that all
| these new arrivals did was put a net drain on welfare, devalue
| the labor of endemic citizens (regardless of race - in many
| cases affecting endemic minorities MORE) and in the end, just
| reduced cost while degrading companies who did this.
|
| We will wake up in 5 yrs to find we replaced people for a
| dependence on a handful of companies that serve llms and make
| inference chips. Its beyond dystopian.
| matteotom wrote:
| Can you provide more details about said "significant
| evidence"? This seems to be a pretty popular belief, despite
| being contrary to generally accepted economics, and I've yet
| to see good evidence for it.
| mjburgess wrote:
| You can pick and choose problems from history where folk belief
| was wrong: WW1 vs. Y2K.
|
| This isn't very informative. Indeed, engaging in this argument-
| by-analoguy betrays a lack of actual analysis, credible
| evidence and justification for a position. Arguing "by analogy"
| in this way, which picks and chooses an analogy, just restates
| your position -- it doesnt give anyone reasons to believe it.
| timr wrote:
| > I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of
| covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers.
|
| Uh, not to be petty, but the growth _was not_ exponential --
| neither in retrospect, nor given what was knowable at any point
| in time. About the most aggressive, correct thing you could've
| said at the time was "sigmoid growth", but even that was
| basically wrong.
|
| If that's your example, it's inadvertently an argument for the
| other side of the debate: people say lots of silly, unfounded
| things at Peak Hype that sound superficially correct and/or
| "smart", but fail to survive a round of critical reasoning. I
| have no doubt we'll look back on this period of time and find
| something similar.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of
| covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers.
|
| Compare: "Whenever I think of skeptics dismissing completely
| novel and unprecedented outcomes occurring by mechanisms we
| can't clearly identify or prove (will) exist... I think of
| skeptics who dismissed an outcome that had literally hundreds
| of well-studied historical precedents using proven processes."
|
| You're right that humans don't have a good intuition for non-
| linear growth, but that common thread doesn't heal over those
| other differences.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| > I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of
| covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers.
|
| But that didn't happen. All of the people like pg who drew
| these accelerating graphs were wrong.
|
| In fact, I think just about every commenter on COVID was wrong
| about what would happen in the early months regardless of
| political angle.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all
| intellectual tasks
|
| "Starting" is doing a hell of lot of work in that sentence. I'm
| starting to become a billionaire and Nobel Prize winner.
|
| Anyway, I agree with Mark Cuban's statement in the article. The
| most likely scenario is that we become more productive as AI
| complements humans. Yesterday I made this comment on another HN
| story:
|
| "Copilot told me it's there to do the "tedious and repetitive"
| parts so I can focus my energy on the "interesting" parts. That's
| great. They do the things every programmer hates having to do.
| I'm more productive in the best possible way.
|
| But ask it to do too much and it'll return error-ridden garbage
| filled with hallucinations, or just never finish the task. The
| economic case for further gains has diminished greatly while the
| cost of those gains rises."
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > I'm starting to become a billionaire
|
| Suggests you are accumulating money, not losing it. That I
| think is the point of the original comment: AI is getting
| better, not worse. (Or humans are getting worse? Ha ha, not ha
| ha.)
| bachmeier wrote:
| > That I think is the point of the original comment: AI is
| getting better, not worse.
|
| Well, in order to meet the standard of the quote "wipe out
| half of all entry-level office jobs ... sometime soon. Maybe
| in the next couple of years" we need more than just getting
| better. We need considerably better technology with a better
| cost structure to wipe out that many jobs. Saying we're
| starting on that task when the odds are no better than me
| becoming a billionaire within two years is what we used to
| call BS.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It it sustainable? I know when I program, it's sometimes nice
| to get to something that's easy, even if it's tedious and
| repetitive. It's like stopping to walk for a bit when you're on
| a run. You're still moving, but you can catch your breath and
| recharge.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Oh, I agree, but I'd say that it's probably easier to do
| those small things than it is to figure out a prompt to have
| Copilot do them. If it feels good, there's no reason not to
| do it yourself. I think we'd all agree that it's a joy to be
| able to tell Copilot to write out the scaffolding at the
| start of a new project.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Imagine you had a crystal ball that lets you look 10 years into
| the future, and you asked it about whether we underestimate or
| overestimate how many jobs AI will replace in the future.
|
| It flickers for a moment, then it either says
|
| "In 2025, mankind vastly underestimated the amount of jobs AI can
| do in 2035"
|
| or
|
| "In 2025, mankind vastly overestimated the amount of jobs AI can
| do in 2035"
|
| How would you use that information to invest in the stock market?
| elcapitan wrote:
| If I had a crystal ball that lets me look 10 years into the
| future and I wanted to invest in the stock market, I would ask
| it about the stock market.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm already assuming the first answer but nonetheless have
| absolutely no idea how I would use that to make a guess about
| the stock market.
|
| So it's index funds (as always) with me anyway.
| usersouzana wrote:
| Heads or tails, then proceed accordingly. You won't waste any
| more time analyzing it in hopes of getting it right.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| These are the moments that make millionaires. A majority of
| people believe that AI is going to thoroughly disrupt society.
| They've been primed to worry about an "AI apocalypse" by
| Hollywood for their entire lives. The prevailing counter-
| narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. You can't get more
| diametrically opposed than that. If you can correctly guess (or
| logically determine) which is correct, and bet all of your money
| on it, you can launch yourself into a whole other echelon of
| life.
|
| I've been a heavy user of AI ever since ChatGPT was released for
| free. I've been tracking its progress relative to the work done
| by humans at large. I've concluded that it's improvements over
| the last few years are not across-the-board changes, but benefit
| specific areas more than others. And unfortunately for AI hype
| believers, it happens to be areas such as art, which provide a
| big flashy "look at this!" demonstration of AI's power to people.
| But... try letting AI come up with a nuanced character for a
| novel, or design an amplifier circuit, or pick stocks, or do your
| taxes.
|
| I'm a bit worried about YCombinator. I like Hacker News. I'm a
| bit worried that YC has so much riding on AI startups. After
| machine learning, crypto, the post-Covid 19 healthcare bubble,
| fintech, NFTs, can they take another blow when the music stops?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop.
| HARD.
|
| Why is that the counter-narrative? Doesn't it seem more likely
| that it will contine to gradually improve, perhaps
| asymptotically, maybe be more specifically trained in the
| niches where it works well, and it will just become another
| tool that humans use?
|
| Maybe that's a flop compared to the hype?
| ls612 wrote:
| At the rate the hyperscalers are increasing capex anything
| less than 1990s internet era growth rates will not be pretty.
| So far its been able to sustain those growth rates at the big
| boy AI companies (look at OpenAI revenue over time) but will
| it continue? Are we near the end of major LLM advances or are
| we near the beginning? There are compelling arguments both
| ways (running out of data is IMO the most compelling bear
| argument).
| ryandrake wrote:
| I wouldn't worry too much about YCombinator. Although
| individual investors can get richer or poorer, "investors" as a
| class effectively have unlimited money. Collectively, they will
| always be looking for a place to put it so it keeps growing
| even more, so there will always be work for firms like
| YCombinator to sprinkle all that investment money around.
| rjurney wrote:
| Workers in denial are like lemmings, headed for the cliff... not
| putting myself above that. A moderate view indicates great
| disruption before new jobs replace the current round being lost.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making
| technology is getting so good it's going to ruin the global
| economy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that person is either
| lying or fully detached from reality.
|
| Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up."
|
| Silicon Valley and Redmond make desperate attempts to argue for
| their own continued relevance.
|
| For Silicon Valley VC, software running on computers cannot be
| just a tool. It has to cause "disruption". It has to be "eating
| the world". It has to be a source of "intelligence" that can
| replace people.
|
| If software and computers are just boring appliances, like
| yesterday's typewriters, calculators, radios, TVs, etc., then
| Silicon Valley VC may need to find a new line of work. Expect the
| endless media hype to continue.
|
| No doubt soda technology is very interesting. But people working
| at soda companies are not as self-absorbed, detached from reality
| and overfunded as people working for so-called "tech" companies.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| CEOs' jobs involve hyping their companies. It's up to us whether
| we believe.
|
| I'd love a journalist using Claude to debunk Dario: "but don't
| believe me, I'm just a journalist - we asked Dario's own product
| if he's lying through his teeth, and here's what it said:"
| geraneum wrote:
| I'd love a journalist that do their job. For example when
| someone like this CEO pulls a number out of their ass, maybe
| push them on how they arrived at this? Why does it displace
| 50%? Why 70? Why not 45?
| elktown wrote:
| Tech has a big problem of selective critical thinking due to a
| perpetual gold rush causing people to adopt a stockbroker
| mentality of not missing out on the next big thing - be it the
| next subfield like AI, the next cool tech that you can be an
| early adopter on etc. But yeah, nothing new under the sun; it's
| corruption.
| mjburgess wrote:
| In many spheres today "thought leadership" is a kind of
| marketing and sales activity. It is no wonder then that no one
| can think and no one can lead: either would be an fatal to
| healthy sales.
| leeroihe wrote:
| I used to be a big proponent of AI tools and llms, even built
| products around them. But to be honest, with all of the big AI
| ceos promising that they're going to "replace all white collar
| jobs" I can't see that they want what's best for the country or
| the american people. It's legitimately despicable and ghoulish
| that they just expect everyone to "adapt" to the downstream
| affects of their knowledge-machine lock-in.
| bawana wrote:
| When are going to get AI CEOs as a service?
| bawana wrote:
| When are we going to get AI CEOs as a service?
| CKMo wrote:
| There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being
| replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when
| they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI
| could probably do?
|
| Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the
| AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person.
| In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe
| have the capacity and potential to one day be competent, but the
| time and resource investment to make that happen is too much. I
| often find myself choosing to just use an AI for work I would
| have delegated to them, because I need it fast and I need it now.
| If I handed it off to them I would not get it fast, and I would
| need to also go through it with them in several back-and-forth
| feedback-review loops to get it to a state that's usable.
|
| Given they are human, this would push back delivery times by 2-3
| business days. Or... I can prompt and handhold an AI to get it
| done in 3 hours.
|
| Not that I'm saying AI is a god-send, but new grads and entry-
| level roles are kind of screwed.
| mjburgess wrote:
| This is always the case though. A factor of 50x productivity
| between expert and novice is small. Consider how long it take
| you to conduct foot surgery vs. a food surgeon -- close to a
| decade of medical school + medical experience -- just for a
| couple hours of work.
|
| There have never been that many businesses able to hire novices
| for this reason.
| pc86 wrote:
| This is a big part of why a _lot_ of developers ' first 1-3
| jobs are small mom & pop shops of varying levels of quality,
| almost none of which have "good" engineering cultures. Market
| rate for a new grad dev might be X, it's hard to find an
| entry level job at X but mom & pop business who needs 0.7 FTE
| developers is willing to pay 0.8X and even though the owner
| is batshit insane it's not a bad deal for the 22 and 23 year
| olds willing to do it.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Sure. I mean perhaps, LLMs will accelerate a return to a
| more medieval culture in tech where you "have to start at
| 12 to be any good". Personally, I think that's a good
| (enough) idea. By 22, I'd at least a decade of experience;
| my first job at 20 was as a contractor for a major
| national/multinational.
|
| Programming is a craft, and just like any other, the best
| time to learn it is when it's free to learn.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I think for a surgeon as an example, quality may be a better
| metric than time. I'll bet I could conduct an attempted foot
| surgery way faster than a foot surgeon, but they're likely to
| conduct _successful_ foot surgeries.
| abletonlive wrote:
| This is a big issue in the short term but in the long term I
| actually think AI is going to be a huge democratization of work
| and company building.
|
| I spend a lot of time encouraging people to not fight the tide
| and spend that time intentionally experimenting and seeing what
| you can do. LLMs are already useful and it's interesting to me
| that anybody is arguing it's just good for toy applications.
| This is a poisonous mindset and results in a potentially far
| worse outcome than over-hyping AI for an individual.
|
| I am wondering if I should actually quit a >500K a year job
| based around LLM applications and try to build something on my
| own with it right now.
|
| I am NOT someone that thinks I can just craft some fancy prompt
| and let an LLM agent build me a company, but I think it's a
| very powerful tool when used with great intention.
|
| The new grads and entry level people are scrappy. That's why
| startups before LLMs liked to hire them. (besides being cheap,
| they are just passionate and willing to make a sacrifice to
| prove their worth)
|
| The ones with a lot of creativity have an opportunity right now
| that many of us did not when we were in their shoes.
|
| In my opinion, it's important to be technically potent in this
| era, but it's now even more important to be _creative_ - and
| that 's just what so many people lack.
|
| Sitting in front of a chat prompt and coming up with an idea is
| hard for the majority of people that would rather be told what
| to do or what direction to take.
|
| My message to the entry-level folks that are in this weird time
| period. It's tough, and we can all acknowledge that - but don't
| let cynicism shackle you. Before LLMs, your greatest asset was
| fresh eyes and the lack of cynicism brought upon by years of
| industry. Don't throw away that advantage just because the job
| market is tough. You, just like everybody else, have a very
| powerful tool and opportunity right in front of you.
|
| The amount of people trying to convince you that it's just a
| sham and hype means that you have less competition to worry
| about. You're actually lucky there's a huge cohort of
| experienced people that have completely dismissed LLMs because
| they were too egotistical to spend meaningful time evaluating
| it and experimenting with it. LLM capabilities are still
| changing every 6 months-1 year. Anybody that has decided
| concretely that there is nothing to see here is misleading you.
|
| Even in the current state of LLM if the critics don't see the
| value and how powerful it is mostly a lack of imagination
| that's at play. I don't know how else to say it. If I'm already
| able to eliminate someone's role by using an LLM then it's
| already powerful enough in its current state. You can argue
| that those roles were not meaningful or important and I'd agree
| - but we as a society are spending trillions on those roles
| right now and would continue to do so if not for LLMs
| izabera wrote:
| what does "huge democratization of work" even mean? what
| world do you people live in? the current global unemployment
| rate on my planet is around 5% so that seems pretty
| democratised already?
| abletonlive wrote:
| What I mean by that is that you have even more power to
| start your own company or use LLMs to reduce the friction
| of doing something yourself instead of hiring someone else
| to do it for you.
|
| Just as the internet was a democratization of information,
| llms are a democratization of output.
|
| That may be in terms of production or art. There is
| _clearly_ a lower barrier for achieving both now compared
| to pre-llm. If you can 't see this then you don't just have
| your head stuck in the sand, you have it severed and
| blasted into another reality.
|
| The reason why you reacted in such a way is again, a lack
| of imagination. To you, "work" means "employment" and a
| means to a paycheck. But work is more than that. It is the
| output that matters, and whether that output benefits you
| or your employer is up to you. You now have more leverage
| than ever for making it benefit you because you're not
| paying that much time/money to ask an LLM to do it for you.
|
| Pre-llm, most for-hire work was only accessible to
| companies with a much bigger bank account than yours.
|
| There is an ungodly amount of white collar workers
| maintaining spreadsheets and doing bullshit jobs that LLMs
| can do just fine. And that's not to say all of those jobs
| have completely useless output, it's just that the amount
| of bodies it takes to produce that output is unreasonable.
|
| We are just getting started getting rid of them. But the
| best part of it is that you can do all of those bullshit
| jobs with an LLM for whatever idea you have in your pocket.
|
| For example, I don't need an army of junior engineers to
| write all my boilerplate for me. I might have a protege if
| I am looking to actually mentor someone and hire them for
| that reason, but I can easily also just use LLMs to make
| boilerplate and write unit tests for me at the same time.
| Previously I would have had to have 1 million dollars
| sitting around to fund the amount of output that I am able
| to produce with a $20 subscription to an LLM service.
|
| The junior engineer can also do this too, albeit in most
| cases less effectively.
|
| That's democratization of work.
|
| In your "5% unemployment" world you have many more
| gatekeepers and financial barriers.
| blibble wrote:
| > What I mean by that is that you have even more power to
| start your own company or use LLMs to reduce the friction
| of doing something yourself instead of hiring someone
| else to do it for you.
|
| > Previously I would have had to have 1 million dollars
| sitting around to fund the amount of output that I am
| able to produce with a $20 subscription to an LLM
| service.
|
| this sounds like the death of employment and the start of
| plutocracy
|
| not what I would call "democratisation"
| abletonlive wrote:
| > plutocracy
|
| Well, I've said enough about cynicism here so not much
| else I can offer you. Good luck with that! Didn't realize
| everybody loved being an employee so much
| blibble wrote:
| not everyone is capable of starting a business
|
| so, employee or destitute? tough choice
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Just curious what area you work in? Python or some kind
| of web service / Jscript? I'm sure the LLMs are
| reasonably good for that - or for updating .csv files
| (you mention spreadsheets).
|
| I write code to drive hardware, in an unusual programming
| style. The company pays for Augment (which is now based
| on o4, which is supposed to be really good?!?). It's
| great at me typing: print_debug( at which point it often
| guesses right as to which local variables or parameters I
| want to debug - but not always. And it can often get the
| loop iteration part correct if I need to, for example,
| loop through a vector. The couple of times I asked it to
| write a unit test? Sure, it got a the basic function call
| / lambda setup correct, but the test itself was useless.
| And a bunch of times, it brings back code I was
| experimenting with 3 months ago and never kept /
| committed, just because I'm at the same spot in the same
| file..
|
| I do believe that some people are having reasonable
| outcomes, but it's not "out of the box" - and it's faster
| for me to write the code I need to write than to try 25
| different prompt variations.
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| Interns and new grads have always been a net-negative
| productivity-wise in my experience, it's just that eventually
| (after a small number of months/years) they turn into extremely
| productive more-senior employees. And interns and new grads can
| use AI too. This feels like asking "Why hire junior programmers
| now that we have compilers? We don't need people to write
| boring assembly anymore." If AI was genuinely a big
| productivity enhancer, we would just convert that into more
| software/features/optimizations/etc, just like people have been
| doing with productivity improvements in computers and software
| for the last 75 years.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's a monetary issue at the end of the day.
|
| AI/ML and Offshoring/GCCs are both side effects of the fact
| that American new grad salaries in tech are now in the
| $110-140k range.
|
| At $70-80k the math for a new grad works out, but not at
| almost double that.
|
| Also, going remote first during COVID for extended periods
| proved that operations can work in a remote first manner, so
| at that point the argument was made that you can hire top
| talent at American new grad salaries abroad, and plenty of
| employees on visas were given the option to take a pay cut
| and "remigrate" to help start a GCC in their home country or
| get fired and try to find a job in 60 days around early-mid
| 2020.
|
| The skills aspect also played a role to a certain extent - by
| the late 2010s it was getting hard to find new grads who
| actually understood systems internals and OS/architecture
| concepts, so a lot of jobs adjacent to those ended up moving
| abroad to Israel, India, and Eastern Europe where
| universities still treat CS as engineering instead of an
| applied math disciple - I don't care if you can prove Dixon's
| factorization method using induction if you can't tell me how
| threading works or the rings in the Linux kernel.
|
| The Japan example mentioned above only works because Japanese
| salaries in Japan have remained extremely low and Japanese is
| not an extremely mainstream language (making it harder for
| Japanese firms to offshore en masse - though they have done
| so in plenty of industries where they used to hold a lead
| like Battery Chemistry).
| brookst wrote:
| I just can't agree with this argument at all.
|
| Today, you hire an intern and they need a lot of hand-holding,
| are often a net tax on the org, and they deliver a modest
| benefit.
|
| Tomorrow's interns will be accustomed to using AI, will need
| less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more.
| Their total impact will be much higher.
|
| The whole "entry level is screwed" view only works if you
| assume that companies _want_ all of the drawbacks of interns
| and entry level employees AND there is some finite amount of
| work to be done, so yeah, they can get those drawbacks more
| cheaply from AI instead.
|
| But I just don't see it. I would much rather have one entry
| level employee producing the work of six because they know how
| to use AI. Everywhere I've worked, from 1-person startup to the
| biggest tech companies, has had a huge surplus of work to be
| done. We all talk about ruthless prioritization because of that
| limit.
|
| So... why exactly is the entry level screwed?
| gerad wrote:
| They don't have the experience to tell bad AI responses from
| good ones.
| xp84 wrote:
| True, but this becomes less of an issue as AI improves,
| right? Which is the 'happier' direction to see a problem
| moving, as if AI doesn't improve, it threatens the jobs
| less.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to
| deliver more
|
| Well, maybe it'll be the other way around: Maybe they'll need
| more hand-holding since they're used to relying on AI instead
| of doing things themselves, and when faced with tasks they
| need to do, they will be less able.
|
| But, eh, what am I even talking about? The _senior_
| developers in a many companies need a lot of hand-holding
| that they aren't getting, write bad code, with poor
| practices, and teach the newbies how to get used to doing
| that. So that's why the entry-level people are screwed, AI or
| no.
| chongli wrote:
| _Tomorrow 's interns will be accustomed to using AI, will
| need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to
| deliver more._
|
| Maybe tomorrow's interns will be "AI experts" who need less
| hand-holding, but the day after that will be kids who used AI
| throughout elementary school and high school and know nothing
| at all, deferring to AI on every question, and have zero
| ability to tell right from wrong among the AI responses.
|
| I tutor a lot of high school students and this is my takeaway
| over the past few years: AI is absolutely laying waste to
| human capital. It's completely destroying students' ability
| to learn on their own. They are not getting an education
| anymore, they're outsourcing all their homework to the AI.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I mean, a lot of what you mentioned is an issue around
| critical thinking (and I'm not sure that's something that
| can be taught), which has always remained an issue in any
| job market, and to solve that deskilling via automation (AI
| or traditional) was used to remediate that gap.
|
| But if you deskill processes, it makes it harder to argue
| in favor of paying the same premium you did before.
| aloknnikhil wrote:
| It's not that entry-level jobs / interns are irrelevant. It's
| more that entry-level has been redefined and it requires
| significant uplevelling in terms of skills necessary to do a
| job at that level. That's not necessarily a bad thing. As
| others have said here, I would be more willing to hand-off more
| complex tasks to interns / junior engineers because my
| expectation is they leverage AI to tackle it faster and learn
| in the process.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This is where the horrific disloyalty of both companies and
| employees, comes to bite us in the ass.
|
| The _whole idea_ of interns, is as _training_ positions. They
| are _supposed_ to be a net negative.
|
| The idea is that they will either remain at the company, after
| their internship, or move to another company, taking the
| priorities of their trainers, with them.
|
| But nowadays, with corporate HR, actively doing everything they
| can to screw over their employees, and employees, being so
| transient, that they can barely remember the name of their
| employer, the whole thing is kind of a worthless exercise.
|
| At my old company, we trained Japanese interns. They would
| often relocate to the US, for 2-year visas, and became very
| good engineers, upon returning to Japan. It was well worth it.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> At my old company, we trained Japanese interns. They would
| often relocate to the US, for 2-year visas, and became very
| good engineers,_
|
| Damn, I wish that was me. Having someone mentor you at the
| beginning of your career instead of having to self learn and
| fumble your way around never knowing if you're on the right
| track or not, is massive force multiplier that pays massive
| dividends over your career. It's like entering the stock
| market with 1 million $ capital vs 100 $. You're also less
| likely to build bad habits if nobody with experience teaches
| you early on.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yup. It was a standard part of their HR policy. They are
| all about long, _long_ -term employment.
|
| They are a marquee company, and get the best of the best,
| direct from top universities.
|
| Also, no one has less than a Master's, over there.
|
| We got damn good engineers as interns.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Also, no one has less than a Master's, over there._
|
| I feel this is pretty much the norm everywhere in Europe
| and Asia. No serious engineering company in Germany even
| looks at your resume it there's no MSc. degree listed,
| especially since education is mostly free for everyone so
| not having a degree is seen as a "you problem", but also
| it leads to degree inflation, where only PhD or post-docs
| get taken seriously for some high level positions. I
| don't remember ever seeing a senior manager/CTO without
| the "Dr." or even "Prof. Dr." title in the top German
| engineering companies.
|
| I think mostly the US has the concept of the cowboy self
| taught engineer who dropped out of college to build a
| trillion dollar empire in his parents garage.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I really think the loss of a mentor/apprentice type of
| experience is one of those baby-with-the-bath-water type of
| losses. There are definitely people with the personality
| types of they know everything and nothing can be learned
| from others, but for those of us who would much rather
| learn from those with more experience on the hows and whys
| of things rather than getting all of those paper cuts
| ourselves, working with mentors is definitely a much better
| way to grow.
| geraneum wrote:
| > horrific disloyalty of both companies and employees
|
| There's no such a thing as loyalty in employer-employee
| relationships. There's money, there's work and there's
| [collective] leverage. We need to learn a thing or two from
| blue collars.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> We need to learn a thing or two from blue collars._
|
| A majority of my friends are blue-collar.
|
| You might be surprised.
|
| Unions are adversarial, but the relationships can still be
| quite warm.
|
| I hear that German and Japanese unions are full-force
| stakeholders in their corporations, and the relationship is
| a lot more intricate.
|
| It's like a marriage. There's always elements of
| control/power play, but the idea is to maximize the
| benefits.
|
| It can be done. It has been done.
|
| It's just kind of lost, in tech.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> It's just kind of lost, in tech._
|
| Because you can't offshore your clogged toilet or broken
| HVAC issue to someone abroad for cheap on a whim like you
| can with certain cases in tech.
|
| You're dependent on a trained and licensed local showing
| up at your door, which gives him actual bargaining power,
| since he's only competing with the other locals to fix
| your issue and not with the entire planet in a race to
| the bottom.
|
| Unionization only works in favor of the workers in the
| cases when labor needs to be done on-site (since the
| nation enforces the laws of unions) and can't be easily
| moved over the internet to another jurisdiction where
| unions aren't a thing. See the US VFX industry as a
| brutal example.
|
| There are articles discussing how LA risks becoming the
| next Detroit with many of the successful blockbusters
| being produced abroad now due to the obscene costs of
| production in California.
| Loughla wrote:
| So what happens when you retire and have no replacement because
| you didn't invest in entry level humans?
|
| This feels like the ultimate pulling up the ladder after you
| type of move.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Are you honestly trying to tell us that the code you receive
| from an AI is not requiring any of your time to review and
| tweak and is 100% correct every time and ready to deploy into
| your code base with no changes what so ever? You my friend must
| be a steely eyed missile man of prompting
| diogolsq wrote:
| You're right that AI is fast and often more efficient than
| entry-level humans for certain tasks -- but I'd argue that what
| you're describing isn't delegation, it's just choosing to do
| the work yourself via a tool. Implementation costs are lower
| now, so you decide to do it on your own.
|
| Delegation, properly defined, involves transferring not just
| the task but the judgment and ownership of its outcome. The
| perfect delegation is when you delegate to someone because you
| trust them to make decisions the way you would -- or at least
| in a way you respect and understand.
|
| You can't fully delegate to AI -- and frankly, you shouldn't.
| AI requires prompting, interpretation, and post-processing.
| That's still you doing the thinking. The implementation cost is
| low, sure, but the decision-making cost still sits with you.
| That's not delegation; it's assisted execution.
|
| Humans, on the other hand, can be delegated to -- truly.
| Because over time, they internalize your goals, adapt to your
| context, and become accountable in a way AI never can.
|
| Many reasons why AI can't fill your shoes:
|
| 1. Shallow context - It lacks awareness of organizational
| norms, unspoken expectations, or domain-specific nuance that's
| not in the prompt or is not explicit in the code base.
|
| 2. No skin in the game - AI doesn't have a career, reputation,
| or consequences. A junior human, once trained and trusted,
| becomes not only faster but also independently responsible.
|
| Junior and Interns can also use AI tools.
| dasil003 wrote:
| You said exactly what I came here to say.
|
| Maybe some day AI will truly be able to think and reason in a
| way that can approximate a human, but we're still very far
| from that. And even when we do, the accountability problem
| means trusting AI is a huge risk.
|
| It's true that there are white collar jobs that don't require
| actual thinking, and those are vulnerable, but that's just
| the latest progression of computerization/automation that's
| been happening steadily for the last 70 years already.
|
| It's also true that AI will completely change the nature of
| software development, meaning that you won't be able to coast
| just on arcane syntax knowledge the way a lot of programmers
| have been able to so far. But the fundamental precision of
| logical thought and mapping it to a desirable human outcome
| will still be needed, the only change is how you arrive
| there. This actually benefits young people who are already
| becoming "AI native" and will be better equipped to leverage
| AI capabilities to the max.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack
| both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could
| probably do?
|
| 1. Because, generally, they don't.
|
| 2. Because an LLM is not a person, it's a chatbot.
|
| 3. "Hire an intern" is that US thing when people work without
| getting real wages, right?
|
| Grrr :-(
| baxtr wrote:
| I think it's the other way around.
|
| If LLMs continue to become more powerful, hiring more juniors
| who can use them will be a no-brainer.
| phailhaus wrote:
| I don't get this because someone has to work with the AI to get
| the job done. Those are the entry-level roles! The manager
| who's swamped with work sure as hell isn't going to do it.
| necheffa wrote:
| > Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack
| both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could
| probably do?
|
| AI can barely provide the code for a simple linked list without
| dropping NULL pointer dereferences every other line...
|
| Been interviewing new grads all week. I'd take a high
| performing new grad that can be mentored into the next
| generation of engineer any day.
|
| If you don't want to do constant hand holding with a "meh"
| candidate...why would you want to do constant hand holding with
| AI?
|
| > I often find myself choosing to just use an AI for work I
| would have delegated to them, because I need it fast and I need
| it now.
|
| Not sure what you are working on. I would never prioritize
| speed over quality - but I do work in a public safety context.
| I'm actually not even sure of the legality of using an AI for
| design work but we have a company policy that all design
| analysis must still be signed off on by a human engineer in
| full as if it were 100% their own.
|
| I certainly won't be signing my name on a document full of AI
| slop. Now an analysis done by a real human engineer with the
| aid of AI - sure, I'd walk through the same verification
| process I'd walk through for a traditional analysis document
| before signing my name on the cover sheet. And that is
| something a jr. can bring to me to verify.
| pedalpete wrote:
| We've been doing the exact opposite for some positions.
|
| I've been interviewing marketing people for the last few months
| (I have a marketing background from long ago), and the senior
| people were either way too expensive for our bootstrapped
| start-up, or not of the caliber we want in the company.
|
| At the same time, there are some amazing recent grads and even
| interns who can't get jobs.
|
| We've been hiring the younger group, and contracting for a few
| days a week with the more experienced people.
|
| Combine that with AI, and you've got a powerful combination.
| That's our theory anyway.
|
| It's worked pretty well with our engineers. We are a team of 4
| experienced engineers, though as CEO I don't really get to code
| anymore, and 1 exceptional intern. We've just hired our 2nd
| intern.
| Animats wrote:
| The real bloodbath will come when coordination between multiple
| AIs, in a company sense, starts working. Computers have much
| better I/O than humans. Once a corporate organization can be
| automated, it will be too fast for humans to participate. There
| will be no place for slow people.
|
| _" Move fast and break things"_ - Zuckerberg
|
| _" A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect
| plan executed next week."_ - George S. Patton
| catigula wrote:
| This doesn't even make sense. What corporations do you think
| will exist in this world?
|
| You're not going to sell me your SaaS when I can rent AIs to
| make faster cheaper IP that I actually own to my exact
| specifications.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| This is always the indicator I look for whether or not
| someone actually knows what they're talking about.
|
| If you can't extrapolate on your own thesis you can't be
| knowledgeable in the field.
|
| Good example was a guy on here who was convinced every
| company would be ran by one person because of AI. You'd wake
| up in the morning and decide which products your AI came up
| with while you slept would be profitable. The obvious next
| question is "then why are you even involved?"
| catigula wrote:
| I agree, I was actually leaving the question open-ended
| because I can't necessarily scale it all the way up, it's
| too complex. Why would they even rent me AIs when they can
| just be every company? Who is "they"?
|
| All that needs to be understood is that the narcissistic
| grandeur delusion that you will singularly be positioned to
| benefit from sweeping restructuring of how we understand
| labor must be forcibly divested from some people's brains.
|
| Only a very select few are positioned to benefit from this
| and even their benefit is only just mostly guaranteed
| rather than perfectly guaranteed.
| ck2 wrote:
| LLM is going to be used for oppression by every government, not
| just dictatorships but USA of course
|
| Think of it as an IQ test of how new technology is used
|
| Let me give you an easier example of such a test
|
| Let's say they suddenly develop nearly-free unlimited power, ie.
| fusion next year
|
| Do you think the world will become more peaceful or much more
| war?
|
| If you think peaceful, you fail, of course more war, it's all
| about oppression
|
| It's always about the few controlling the many
|
| The "freedom" you think you feel on a daily basis is an illusion
| quickly faded
| deadbabe wrote:
| Something I've come to realize in the software industry is: if
| you have more smart engineers than the competition, you win.
|
| If you don't snatch up the smartest engineers before your
| competition does: you lose.
|
| Therefore at a certain level of company, hiring is entirely
| dictated by what the competition is doing. If everyone is
| suddenly hiring, you better start doing it too. If no one is, you
| can relax, but you could also pull ahead if you decide to hire
| rapidly, but this will tip off competitors and they too will
| begin hiring.
|
| Whether or not you have any use for those engineers is
| irrelevant. So AI will have little impact on hiring trends in
| this market. The downturn we've seen in the past few years is
| mostly driven by the interest rate environment, not because AI is
| suddenly replacing engineers. An engineer using AI gives more
| advantage than removing an engineer, and hiring an engineer who
| will use AI is more advantageous than not hiring one at all.
|
| AI is just the new excuse for firing or not hiring people,
| previously it was RTO but that hype cycle has been squeezed for
| all it can be.
| ggm wrote:
| Without well paid middle classes, who is buying all the fancy
| goods and services?
|
| Money is just rationing. If you devalue the economy implicitly
| you accept that, and the consequences for society at large.
|
| Lenin's dictum: _A capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him
| with_ Comes to mind
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| I plugged those two quotes from Amodei into ChatGPT along with
| this prompt: "Pretend you are highly skeptical about the
| potential of AI, both in general and in its potential for
| replacing human workers the way Amodei predicts. Write a quick
| 800-word takedown of his predictions."
|
| I won't paste in the result here, since everyone here is capable
| of running this experiment themselves, but trust me when I say
| ChatGPT produced (in mere seconds, of course) an article every
| bit as substantive and well-written as the cited article. FWIW.
| trhway wrote:
| Read on about PLTR in recent days - all these government layoffs
| with the money redirected toward the Grand Unification Project
| using PLTR Foundry (with AI) platform.
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