[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 : 606 points
Date : 2025-05-30 13:38 UTC (1 days 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
| threeseed wrote:
| Internet only became a fad once it was already large and had
| tens of millions of users.
|
| I remember the pre-Web days of Usenet and BBS and no one
| thought those were trendy.
|
| AI is far more akin to crypto.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Lots of people talk about crypto yet almost no one uses it.
|
| Pretty much everyone I know uses AI for something.
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| Unload timing on the washer/dryer matters.
|
| Leave things wet in the washer too long and they smell
| like mold and you have to run it again. Leave them in the
| dryer too long and they are all wrinkled, and you have to
| run it again (at least for a little while).
|
| I grew up watching everyone in my family do this,
| sometimes multiple times for the same load. That's why I
| set timers and remove stuff promptly.
|
| The dishwasher I agree, and it's usually best to leave
| them in there at least for a little while once it's done.
| However, not unloading it means dirty dishes start to
| stack up on the counter or in the sink, so it still
| creates a problem.
|
| As far as "load, start, unload" goes. We covered unload,
| but load is also an issue where some people do have
| issues. They load the dishwasher wrong and things don't
| get clear, or they start it wrong and are left with spots
| all over everything. Washing machines can be overloaded,
| or unbalanced. Washing machines and dryers can also be
| started wrong, the settings need to match the garments
| being washed. Some clothes are forgiving, others are not.
| There is still human error in the mix.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| > Leave things wet in the washer too long and they smell
| like mold and you have to run it again. Leave them in the
| dryer too long and they are all wrinkled, and you have to
| run it again (at least for a little while).
|
| Not a problem for the two-in-one washer/dryers for the
| mildew issue, and for the wrinkles, most dryers have a
| cycle to keep running them intermittently after the cycle
| finishes for hours to mitigate most of the wrinkling
| issues. You've got a much much longer window before
| wrinkles are an issue with that setup.
| 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.
| Hilift wrote:
| Self-driving cars are required to beep when in reverse. In both
| San Francisco and San Diego homes near Waymo charging
| facilities are a nuisance. The neighbors hate the beeping, and
| they operate late hours, and use things like shop vac cleaners
| that are loud. Whoever thought of this hates self driving cars
| and people. There is no way this can work in mixed urban areas.
| 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%.
| const_cast wrote:
| Labor force participation rate has increased pretty
| drastically since 1950. I'd imagine due to better
| medicine and treatments that allow people to work when
| they otherwise wouldn't.
|
| But, 62% is very high. Keep in mind that number takes
| into account not only the elderly and disable, but also
| children.
|
| Pretty much everyone who can work is working. We don't
| want children to be working, that's bad. We should all be
| on the same page about that.
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| People hunted large mammals to extinction long before
| modern society, so tragedy of the commons is nature in
| general. We know other predators do it as well, not just
| humans.
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| The grand potential of short sighted profits with no
| concern for society nor other humans, yes.
| codr7 wrote:
| I would say anyone who sees that happening is in denial,
| because all the proof out there points in the opposite
| direction.
| 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.
| 9x39 wrote:
| Shouldn't we be able to find at least one pilot or
| prototype with a lasting success story to build off of
| before concluding we need to do it on a huge scale?
| 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.
| 9x39 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.
|
| But if you have to be trained in the use of a variety of
| 'smart' tools - that sounds like engineering to know what
| tool to deploy and how.
|
| It's also incredibly optimistic about future tools - what
| smart tool fixes leaky faucets, hauls and installs water
| heaters, unclogs or replaces sewer mains, runs new pipes,
| does all this work and more to code, etc? There are cool
| tools and power tools and cool power tools out there, but
| vibe plumbing by the unskilled just fills someone's house
| with water or worse...
|
| > 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.
|
| Takeout culture is popular among GenZ, and we're more
| likely to see walk-up orders with online order ahead than
| a facsimile of table service.
|
| Why would cheap restaurants buy robots and allow a dining
| room to go unmanned and risk walkoffs instead of just
| skipping the whole make-believe service aspect and run it
| like a pay-at-counter cafeteria? You're probably right
| that waiters will disappear outside of high-margin fine
| dining as labor costs squeeze margins until restaurants
| crack and reorganize.
|
| >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.
|
| Do-anything-like-a-human robots might crack that, but
| today it's still sci-fi. Humans are going to haul things
| from A to B for a bit longer, I think. I bet we see
| drive-up and delivery groceries win via lights-out
| warehouses well before "I, Robot" shelf stockers.
| 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.
| pesus wrote:
| I've seen robot waiters at one restaurant in SF as well,
| and I wouldn't be surprised if there were more. They'll
| most likely be here on a large scale faster than we
| think.
| ido wrote:
| It's more a dishwasher level of automation than 3CPO-
| when you order they enter your table number and the
| kitchen staff puts the prepared dishes in the shelves in
| the robot, which the drives to your table. Once it gets
| there you take the dishes from the robot.
|
| Tech-wise this could have existed 30 years ago (maybe
| going around the restaurant would have been more
| challenging than today but it's a fixed path and the
| robots don't leave the restaurant).
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores
|
| They've already replaced part of that job at one of the
| grocery stores that I go to, there's a robot that checks
| the level of stock on the shelves,
| https://www.simberobotics.com/store-intelligence/tally.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| >or a waiter serving food at a restaurant
|
| I've seen this already at a pizza place. Order from a QR
| code menu and a robot shows up 20-25 minutes later at
| your table with your pizza. Wait staff still watched the
| thing go around.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Wouldn't you have struggled to imagine most of what LLMs
| can now do 5 years ago?
| 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?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Look, human cognition is obviously better than machine
| cognition, and nobody has ever made a poor argument or
| decision.
|
| End of conversation.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Surely the modern history of decision making has been to
| move as much of it as possible away from humans and to
| algorithms, even "dumb" ones?
| 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
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| >It'll be like the movie Elysium.
|
| The rich were able to insulate themselves in space which
| is much harder to get to than some place on Earth. If the
| rich want to turtle up on some island because that's the
| only place they're safe, that's probably a better outcome
| for us all. They lose a lot of ability to influence
| because they simply can't be somewhere in person.
|
| It also relies heavily on a security force (or military)
| being complicit, but they have to give those people a
| better life than average to make it worth it. Even those
| dumb MAGA idiots won't settle for moldy bread and leaky
| roofs. That requires more and more resources, capital,
| and land to sustain and grow it, which then takes more
| security to secure it. "Some rich dude controlling
| everything" has an exponential curve of security
| requirements and resources. This even comes down to how
| much land they need to be able to farm and feed their
| security guys.
|
| All this assuming your personal detail and larger
| security force actually likes you enough, because if
| society has broken down to this point, they can just kill
| the boss and take over.
| skydhash wrote:
| And this is assuming that they won't destroy each other.
| Any society have conflicts and I failed to see a bunch of
| ultrarich not have any.
| 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...
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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...
|
| That is exactly what blue collar economy used to be though:
| people making and fixing stuff for each other. White collar
| jobs is a new thing.
| 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.
| dagw wrote:
| _Management will cut down your team's headcount and
| outsource even more to India ,Vietnam and Philippines_
|
| Management did all that at companies I've worked for for
| years before 'AI'. The big change is that the teams in
| India won't 200 developers, but 20 developers handholding
| an AI.
| 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.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is my bet. Similar to Moores law. Where it plateaus
| is anybody's guess...
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The worst case for such a cycle is generating new jobs in
| reverse engineers. Although in practice with what we have
| seen with machinists it tends to just accelerate existing
| trends towards outsourcing to countries who haven't had the
| 'entry level collapse'.
|
| We've already eliminated certain junior level domains
| essentially by design. There aren't any 'barber-surgeons'
| with only two years of training for good reason. Instead we
| have surgery integrated it into a more lengthy and
| complicated educational path to become what we now would
| consider a 'proper' surgeon.
|
| I think the answer is that if the 'junior' is uneconomical
| or otherwise unacceptable be prepared to pay more for the
| alternative, one way or another.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| As a senior software engineer code monkey this is my
| greatest hope!
| 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.
| absurdo wrote:
| Basically if anyone has an iota of sensibility you should
| have never taken sama, Zuckerberg, Gates, or anyone else of
| that sort at face value. When they tell you they're doing
| things for the good of humanity, look at what the other hand
| is up to.
| 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
| alluro2 wrote:
| Given the current mechanics evident in the society -
| declining education, healthcare and rising cost of living,
| homelessness and exploding economic inequality - who is "we",
| trying to maximise living standards, and what movement do you
| see leading towards such an outcome?
| 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.
| geraneum wrote:
| I believe he's talking to money, to investors. He does it
| through Axios, CNN, BBC, etc. Their company is not
| sustainable at this rate. None of the LLM service
| providers are. They need money for now and that's why
| they talk like this.
|
| 50% of a group of workers losing their jobs to this tech
| is not a worrisome future for him. It's a pitch!
| 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!
| pdfernhout wrote:
| We already have that "defeated underclass" courtesy of a
| century of mainstream schooling (according to NYS Teacher of
| the Year John Taylor Gatto): "The Underground History of
| American Education -- A conspiracy against ourselves"
| https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/10/john-taylor-gatto/the-
| cu... "As soon as you break free of the orbit of received
| wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the
| nature of things, government schools and those private
| schools which imitate the government model have to make most
| children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The
| problem stems from the structure of our economy and social
| organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens
| and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would
| require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates --
| these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not
| conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances
| make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs
| of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It
| is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-
| maintaining social mechanisms that only require human
| architects to get launched. I'll bring this down to earth.
| Try to see that an intricately subordinated
| industrial/commercial system has only limited use for
| hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and
| critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based
| economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have
| or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any
| number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully,
| but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own.
| Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral
| fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the
| world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua,
| Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more
| school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as
| time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire
| school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve
| weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like
| work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate
| outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets,
| painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people,
| handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a
| thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except
| corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things.
| Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul
| of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control
| the dangerous products of imagination which can never be
| safely tolerated by a centralized command system...."
|
| In 2010, I put together a list of alternatives here to
| address the rise of AI and Robotics and its effect on jobs:
| https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
| "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery"
| mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes
| the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that
| improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary
| social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of
| the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four
| major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic
| income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies,
| and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be
| used in combination to address what, even as far back as
| 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs
| link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because
| of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to
| capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as
| is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some
| newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the
| output of voluntary social networks such as for digital
| content production (like represented by this document). It is
| suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our
| economic theories and practices to adjust to these new
| realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and
| society."
| 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.
| tim333 wrote:
| It's like all the farmers soil shoveling jobs were stolen by
| tractors. People moved on to more interesting things.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| In all previous such revolutions, humans were freed to do
| more productive work while the cost of goods came down. But
| that doesn't mean the same is true this time. Now the
| revolution does not make physical tasks easier (like
| ploughing or spinning thread) but intellectual labor. This
| time, there are no jobs to go to, since those jobs are also
| done by AI.
| 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.
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| No, it's the same in the US, too. I don't know what these
| mythical companies are where people are saying 50% of the
| workforce does nothing, but I've never seen such a place.
| Everywhere I've ever worked had way more projects to get done
| than people available to do them. Everyone was working at
| capacity.
| xg15 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._
|
| Note that AI wipes out the jobs, but not the tasks themselves.
| So if that's true, as a consumer, expect _more_ sleepwalked,
| half-assed products, just created by AI.
| habosa wrote:
| I think it's actually going to save those people. They can vibe
| code themselves just enough output to survive where before they
| did next to nothing. In relative terms, they'll get a much much
| higher productivity boost from AI than the already high-
| performing Staff engineer.
|
| Management will be thrilled.
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| May I ask what exactly AI provides that's worth so much
| to you?
|
| Because I wouldn't miss it at all if it disappeared
| tomorrow, and I'm pretty sure the society would be better
| off without it.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Sure! You asked for it, here's my speech:
|
| I'm a software engineer so for work I use it daily. It
| doesn't "do my job" but it makes my job vastly more
| enjoyable. Need unit tests? Done. Want a prototype of an
| idea that you can refine? Here. Shell script? Boom.
| Somewhat complicated SQL query? Here ya go. Working with
| some framework you haven't used before? Just having a
| conversation with AI about what I'm trying to do is so
| much better than sorting through often poorly written
| documentation. It's like talking to another engineer who
| just recently worked on that same kind of problem...
| except for almost any problem you encounter. My
| productivity is higher. More than that, I find myself
| much more willing to take on bigger, harder problems
| because I know there's powerful resources to answer just
| about any question I could have. It just makes me enjoy
| the job more.
|
| In my personal life, I use it to cut through the noise
| that in recent year has begun to overwhelm the signal on
| the internet. Give me a salmon recipe. This used to be
| the sort of thing you'd put into Google and get great
| results. Now first result is some ad-stuffed website that
| is 90% fluff piece and a recipe hidden at the bottom.
| Just give me the fricken recipe! AI does that.
|
| The other day I was trying to figure out whether a
| designer-made piece of furniture was authentic despite
| missing tags. Had a back and forth with ChatGPT, sharing
| photos, describing the build quality, telling it what the
| store owner had told me. Incredible depth of knowledge
| about an obscure piece of furniture.
|
| I also use the image generation all the time. For
| instance, for the piece of furniture I talked about, I
| took a picture of my apartment, and the furniture, and
| asked it to put the furniture into my space, allowing me
| to visualize it before purchase.
|
| It's a frickin super power! I cannot even begin to
| understand how people are still skeptical about the
| transformative power of this stuff. It kind of feels like
| people are standing outside the library of Alexandria,
| debating whether it's providing any value, when they
| haven't even properly gone inside.
|
| Yes, there are flaws. I'm sure there's people reading
| this about to tell me it made them put glue on their
| salad or whatever. But what we have is already so deeply
| useful to me. Could I have done all of this through old
| fashioned search? Mastered Photoshop and put the
| furniture into my apartment on my own? Of course! But the
| _immediacy_ here is the game changer.
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| I'm not trying to make a point, just curious -- what's
| stopping you from spending more money on AI? You could be
| using more API tokens, more Claude Code and whatever
| else.
| whynotminot wrote:
| I have a ChatGPT subscription, and work has one of those
| "all the models" kind of subscriptions. So I have access
| to pretty much most of the mainline models -- don't feel
| the need to pay more.
|
| But if the business model collapsed and they had to raise
| prices, or work cheaped out and stopped paying for our
| access, then yeah, I'd step up and spend the money to
| keep it.
| 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.
| lexandstuff wrote:
| I've never had a job like that. My job has always involved
| helping my company, not just figure out how to build something,
| but what to build. We typically collaborate on a few ideas and
| then go away, let them percolate in our brains, before coming
| back with some new ideas to try. The whole point of the Agile
| Manifesto is that we don't know what to build in the first
| place.
|
| Sometimes my boss has asked me to do something that in the long
| run will cost the company dearly. Luckily for him, I am happy
| to push back, because I can understand what we're trying to
| achieve and help figure the best option for the company based
| on my experience, intuition and the data I have available.
|
| There's so much more to working with a team than: "Here is a
| very specific task, please execute it exactly as the spec
| says". We want ideas, we want opinions, we want bursts of
| creative inspiration, we want pushback, we want people to share
| their experiences, their intuition, the vibe they get, etc.
|
| We don't want AI agents that do exactly what we say; we want
| teams of people with different skill sets who understand the
| problem and can interpret task through the lens of their skill
| set and experience, because a single person doesn't have all
| the answers.
|
| I think your ex-boss Mike will very soon find himself trapped
| in local minima of innovation, with only his own understanding
| of the world, and a sycophantic yes-man AI employee that will
| always do exactly as he says. The fact that AI mostly doesn't
| work is only part of the problem.
| 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.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| And the journalist cited what research or evidence, precisely,
| in his rebuttal?
| 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...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Worse yet, AI has been consuming Scott Adams quotes as part
| of its training...
|
| "The reality is that women are treated differently by
| society for exactly the same reason that children and the
| mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just
| easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-
| year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You
| don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches
| you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's
| only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least
| resistance. You save your energy for more important
| battles." -Scott Adams
|
| "Women define themselves by their relationships and men
| define themselves by whom they are helping. Women believe
| value is created by sacrifice. If you are willing to give
| up your favorite activities to be with her, she will trust
| you. If being with her is too easy for you, she will not
| trust you." -Scott Adams
|
| "Nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people.
| That's a hate group." -Scott Adams
|
| "Based on the current way things are going, the best advice
| I would give to White people is to get the hell away from
| Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to
| go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this. This
| can't be fixed." -Scott Adams
|
| "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black Americas
| because it doesn't seem like it pays off. ... The only
| outcome is that I get called a racist." -Scott Adams
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >Worse yet
|
| Should have been 'better still'.
| 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
| DonHopkins wrote:
| LGR - Afterlife - PC Game Review
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azFNwF6fa0
|
| Afterlife (video game)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife_(video_game)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted
| as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes
|
| The data does not support this. The businesses with the
| highest market caps are the ones with the highest earnings.
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/
|
| Sort by # of employees and you get a list of companies with
| lower market caps.
| versteegen wrote:
| If you sort by number of employees you get companies
| where those employees aren't in R&D divisions.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Their comment reads to me as if businesses hire employees
| (regardless of the work they do, since we are discussing
| employees that don't do anything) because investors
| consider employees as R&D (even useless ones).
|
| Either way, there is no data I have seen to suggest
| market cap correlates with number of employees. The
| strongest correlation I see is to net income (aka
| profit), and after that would be growing revenues and/or
| market share.
| trade2play wrote:
| Google/Facebooks earnings are so high they can afford to
| be wildly wasteful with headcount and still be market
| leaders
| Ekaros wrote:
| Those two are perfect examples of burning insane amounts
| of money and still showing profits beyond that... Whole
| metaverse investment. And all the products that Google
| has abandoned. Even returning all the payments like
| Stadia...
| 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.
| 0xpgm wrote:
| It's about to change to doing more with less headcount and
| higher AI spend
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Automation is just one form of "face a sufficiently
| competitive marketplace such that the company can no longer
| tolerate the dead-weight loss of their egos".
| 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."
| osigurdson wrote:
| It is almost like once a company gets rolling, there is
| sufficient momentum to keep it going even if many layers
| aren't doing very much. The company becomes a kind of meta-
| economic zone where nothing really matters. Politics /
| fights emerge between departments / layers but has nothing
| to do with making a better product / service. This can go
| on for decades if the moat is large enough.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The first mistake is thinking that contribution must be in
| the form of output instead of ingestion. Of course meetings
| aren't often the most efficient form of doing so. More being
| forced to listen (at least officially) so there isn't an
| excuse.
| icedchai wrote:
| This is true, but generally speaking there should be more
| people "producing" than "ingesting." This is often not the
| case. Most meetings are useless, and this has become much
| worse in modern times. Example: agile "scrum" and its daily
| stand ups, which inevitably turn into status reports.
|
| At some point in the 2000's, every manager decided they
| needed weekly 1:1's, resulting in even more meetings. Many
| of these are entirely ineffective. As one boss told me,
| "I've been told I need to have 1:1's, so I'm having them!"
| I literally sat next to him and talked every day, but it
| was a good time to go for coffee...
| 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.
| jsnider3 wrote:
| Netflix's value comes from being convenient and compatible
| with the copyright system in a way sharing videos P2P
| definitely isn't.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| And their increasingly restrictive usage policies are
| basically testing how important the 'convenient' piece is.
| disambiguation wrote:
| I'm not advocating for p2p, but rather drawing attention to
| the word "value" and what it means to create it. For
| example, would netflix as a piece of software hold any
| value if the company were to suddenly lose all its
| copyrights and IP licenses? Whereas something like an
| operating system or excel has standalone utility, netflix
| is only as valuable as its IP. The software isn't designed
| to create value, but instead to fully utilize the value of
| a piece of property. It's an important distinction to keep
| in mind especially when designing such software. Now
| consider that in the streaming world there isn't just
| netflix, but prime, Hulu, HBO, etc. Etc.
|
| The parent comment was complaining about certain employees
| contributions to "real value" or lack thereof. My question
| is, how do you ascertain the value of work in this context
| where the software isn't what's valuable but the IP is, and
| further how do justify working on a product thats already a
| solved problem and still refer to it as "creating 'real'
| value"?
| paulcole wrote:
| Just curious, did you put yourself in the superfluous category
| either time?
| idkwhattocallme wrote:
| Ultimately (and sadly) yes. While I never habitually or
| intentionally attended meetings to just look busy, I did work
| on something I knew had a long shot of creating value for the
| business. I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was
| more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted. I
| left both on my own accord seeing the writing on the wall.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more
| disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted.
|
| You said you were at large companies, so this is a hard
| call to make. A lot of large companies work on lots of
| small products knowing they probably won't work, but one of
| them _might_ , so it's still worth it to try. It's
| essentially the VC model.
| 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.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| HCOL wasn't the driver though. It is abundance of
| investment and desire to hire. If the titans could collude
| to pay engineer half as much, they would. They tried.
| 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.
| LPisGood wrote:
| As someone who entered the workforce just after this, I
| feel like I missed the peak. A ton if those people got
| boatloads of money, great stock options, and many years of
| experience that they can continue to leverage for excellent
| positions.
| idkwhattocallme wrote:
| Don't worry, there is always another bubble on the
| horizon
| trade2play wrote:
| I joined in 2018.
|
| Honestly it was 10 years too late. The big innovations of
| the 2010 era were maturing. I've spent my career
| maintaining and tweaking those, which does next to zero
| for your career development. It's boring and bloated. On
| the bright side I've made a lot of money and have no
| issues getting jobs so far.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| there's always interesting work out there. It just
| doesn't always align with ethical values, good salary, or
| work life balance. There's always a trade off.
|
| For example think of space x, Waymo, parts of US national
| defense, and the sciences (cancer research, climate
| science - analyzing satellite images, etc). They are
| doing novel work that's certainly not boring!
|
| I think you're probably referring to excitement and
| cutting edge in consumer products? I agree that has been
| stale for a while.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think my career started in 2008? That was a great time
| to start for the purpose of learning, but a terrible one
| for compensation. Basically nobody knew what they were
| doing, and software wasn't the ticket to free money that
| it became later yet.
| dustingetz wrote:
| data engineering was free money for nothing at all circa
| 2014, they got paid about 1.5x a fullstack application
| developer for .5x the work because frontend/ui work was
| considered soft, unworthy
| 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.
| 0xpgm wrote:
| What is the difference between treating CS as an
| engineering discipline vs a branch of applied math?
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| (According to this guy apparently) low level vs
| algorithms focus. CE or CS basically.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > The labor protections are basically ignored (you will
| be expected to work off the clock hours in any white
| collar role),
|
| I happen to have a sibling in consulting who was seconded
| from London to New York for a year, doing the same work
| for the same company, and she found the work hours in NY
| to be _ludicrously_ long (and not for a significant
| productivity gain: more required time-at-desk). So there
| are varying levels of "expected to work off the clock
| hours".
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| > free healthcare
|
| I pay over 40% effective tax rate. Healthcare is far from
| free.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| But your health problems won't bankrupt you or make you
| homeless I presume.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| The vast majority of Americans, who carry health
| insurance, also will not be bankrupted by health
| problems. Though they will earn far greater amounts of
| money for their families by working in the US compared to
| the UK.
| ponector wrote:
| I've seen recently an open position for senior dev with
| 60k salary and hybrid 3 days per week in London. Insane!
| alephnerd wrote:
| Yep. And costs are truly insane in Greater London. Bay
| Area level housing prices and Boston level goods prices,
| but Mississippi or Alabama level salaries.
|
| But that's my point - salaries are factored based on
| labor market demands and comparative performance of your
| macroeconomy (UK high finance and law salaries are
| comparable with the US), not CoL.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Boston level goods prices
|
| I've never been to Boston. Why are the prices high there?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I mean, seeing an open position does not equal that
| position ever being filled. It can also likely be a fake
| position, trying to create the "we are growing and
| hiring!" impression, or mandated by law to be there, but
| made artificially worse, because they have someone
| internally, that they want to move to the position.
| 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_...
| lamename wrote:
| I disagree. Your data doesnt make the grandparent's
| assertion false. Cost of living != per capita or median
| income. Factoring in sensible retirement, expensive
| housing, inflation, etc, I think the $120k figure may not
| be perfect, but is close enough to reality.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Since when "minimum wage" means "sensible retirement" ?
|
| More like it means ending up with government-provided
| bare minimum handouts to not have you starve (assuming
| you somehow manage to stay on minimum wage all your
| life).
| lamename wrote:
| We agree, minimum wage doesnt mean that. And in a large
| metro area, that's why $120k is closer to min wage than a
| good standard of lliving and building retirement.
| tekla wrote:
| Absolutely absurd. I lived in NYC making well less than
| that for years and was perfectly comfortable.
|
| The "min wage" of HN seems to be "living better than 98%
| of everyone else"
| lamename wrote:
| Adjusted for inflation? Without (crippling) debt accrual
| and adequate emergency fund, retirement, etc? Did you
| have children or childcare expenses? These all knock on
| that total compensation quickly these days, which is the
| main argument in this particular thread of replies.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| Correct, I mean in the sense of "living a standard of
| life that my parents and friends parents (all of very,
| very modest means) had 20 years ago when I was a
| teenager."
|
| I mean a real wage associated with standards of living
| that one took for granted as "normal" when I was young.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| It actually is basically minimum wage for major metros.
|
| If I took a job for ~100k in Washington, I'd live worse
| than I did as a PhD student in Sweden. It would basically
| suck. I'm not sure ~120k would make things that
| different.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| Yep exactly. I mean "maintaining a basic material
| standard of living that even non 'high-earners' had
| twenty years ago"
|
| The erosion of the standard of living in the US (and the
| West more broadly) is not something to be ignored in any
| discussion of wages.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Yeah 120k is the maximum I have earned over 20 years in the
| industry. I started off circa. 40k maybe that's 70k adj for
| inflation. Not in US.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's always going to be difficult to compare countries.
| Things like healthcare, housing, childcare, schooling,
| taxes and literally every single thing are going to
| differ.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| The arbitrage is when you are young and healthy get that
| US salary and save then retreat home in your 40s and 50s.
| Stay healthy of course.
| adaptbrian wrote:
| Lots of tech folks get burnt out without knowing it. If
| you're tired all the time drastically alter your diet, it
| could change your life for the better.
| foobiekr wrote:
| To what?
| 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.
| hluska wrote:
| You can't support having a good enough relationship with
| coworkers from outside of your country that you can
| relate cheerful anecdotes about them?
| 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.
| bradlys wrote:
| Which is exactly what has happened. Anyone in the
| industry for 15 years can easily see this.
| 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.
| catigula wrote:
| Putting aside economic incentives, which the wealthy were
| eager to reap, the vast majority of the technical labor
| force in this country came and still comes from (outside
| of SF) a specific race and we have huge incentives that
| literally everyone reading this has brushed up against,
| whether in support or against, to alter that racial
| makeup.
|
| Obviously the only real solution to creating an
| artificial labor shortage is looking externally from the
| existing labor force. Simply randomly hiring underserved
| groups didn't really make sense because they weren't
| participants.
|
| Where I work, we have two main goals when I'm involved in
| the technical hiring process: hire the cheapest labor and
| try to increase diversity. I'm not necessarily against
| either, but those are our goals.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Careerists: What does this term mean?
| TexanFeller wrote:
| People more concerned about getting a promotion than they
| are taking pride in doing quality work that makes a
| difference. Corporate rubrics for promotion have little
| to do with doing great work and careerists focus heavily
| on playing these stupid games set up by HR execs.
| 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...)
| andrekandre wrote:
| > nothing ever happens here that helps the workers and
| whatever rights we have now are slowly dwindling
|
| its almost as if we need a 'workers party' or
| something... though i'd imagine first-past-the-post in
| the u.s makes that difficult.
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Employment-based immigration policy just isn't
| controversial outside of very specific bubbles. Everyone
| who's considered the problem seriously, left and right,
| realizes that the H1B system is bad a point-based system
| is the way to go, which is why it's been part of every
| immigration reform proposal for over a decade with
| essentially no controversy. If this were the only aspect
| of immigration issues, or if people felt it was important
| enough to pull it out of broad immigration reform, it
| would pass in a heartbeat.
| catigula wrote:
| My understanding is that Bernie Sanders used to say that
| mass immigration was a "Koch brothers thing" and his tune
| on this has since changed to align with "progressive"
| ideas, but I might be mistaken.
|
| I already know that the right-wing supports h1bs, Trump
| himself said so.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Even in his most immigration-skeptical era
| (https://www.computerworld.com/article/1367869/bernie-
| sanders...), Sanders always acknowledged that some
| companies genuinely need a skilled immigration program to
| hire the global best and brightest. And note his line
| about "offshore outsourcing companies"; the issue's
| become even less controversial now that the balance of
| H1B sponsors is shifting towards large American tech
| companies who genuinely pay market rate.
| catigula wrote:
| I don't really think that is what's being discussed here.
|
| Even literal Nazis were exempted from immigration
| controls on the basis of extreme merit.
| bradlys wrote:
| What if tech roles at big tech roles actually paid more
| like the same prestigious firms in finance in nyc?
|
| People in tech are so quick to shoot themselves in the
| foot.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| The job of the high paid people in finance at prestigious
| firms is to look nice in an expensive suit. Know many
| people in tech with those qualifications?
| bradlys wrote:
| I'd be good at it but I won't get hired cause I didn't go
| to the right boarding school.
|
| Tech has its barriers too. Most people I've met in tech
| come from relatively rich families. (Families where
| spending $70k+/yr on college is not a major concern for
| multiple kids - that's not normal middle class at all
| even for the US)
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Not sure what you're aiming to get out of this
| comparison. Software engineers make quite a bit more at
| prestigious tech companies than they do at prestigious
| finance firms in NYC, and prestigious finance firms in
| NYC extensively recruit people from outside the US. Even
| if you want to compare engineers in tech to bankers in
| finance, I'm not sure Goldman is paying all that much
| better than OpenAI these days.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Why do people think Goldman pays software developers so
| well? They do not. They pay whatever is required compared
| to their competition (mostly other ibanks). There is a
| _tiny_ sliver (less than 5%) of the dev staff who work in
| front office and are called "Strats". (Some other banks
| have "Strats" [Morgan?] or put you into a quant team to
| pay you more [JPM/UBS/etc].) They make about 25-50% more
| money compared to vanilla software devs in the IT
| division.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Regarding the first sentence, it is already true for
| software developers. You can (and probably will) make
| more money at FAANG compared to global ibanks in NYC.
| gosub100 wrote:
| He recently addressed Congress and brought up the abuse
| of H1B such as for entry level accounting positions. The
| program was to meet shortages for highly skilled
| positions. Now its being abused to cheat new grads out of
| jobs and depress wages
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >Trump himself said so
|
| TACO Trump himself said he'd reveal his health care plan
| in two weeks, many many years ago, many many times. But
| then he chickened out again and again and again and again
| and again. So that the buk buk buk are you talking about?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Japan will let everyone that can get a job in (and is
| willing to do the immigration process for them). This
| seems like a perfectly fair way to do things. If you
| don't have a job, and can't find a new one in 3-6 months,
| you have to leave again.
|
| Don't understand why other countries make it harder.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Can you give more details here? I don't fully understand
| your post.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Japan (the country) doesn't do this. You still need a
| company to sponsor you and not every company can.
| jajko wrote:
| Switzerland is the same. By far the best implemented
| immigration policies in whole Europe, if only Germany and
| France egos would step down a notch, acknowledge their
| mistakes and take an inspiration from clearly way more
| successful neighbour. They have 3x more immigration than
| next country and it just works, long term.
|
| EU would flourish economically and there would be no room
| for ultra conservative right to gain any real foothold
| (which is 95% just failed immigration topic just like
| Brexit was).
|
| Alas, we are where we are, they slowly backpedal but its
| too little too late, as usually. I blame Merkel for half
| of EU woes, she really was a horrible leader of otherwise
| very powerful nation made much weaker and less resilient
| due to her flawed policies and lack of grokking where
| world is heading to.
|
| Btw she _still_ acknowledges nothing and keeps thinking
| how great she was. Also a nuclear physicist who turned
| off all existing nuclear plants too early so Germany has
| to import massive amount of electricity from coal burning
| plants. You can 't make it up.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Does Switzerland not take any refugees?
| jajko wrote:
| Yes, some, but those are very different from economical
| migrants and their numbers compared to those migrants are
| small
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I saw a report recently about the political left in
| Denmark, who are basically one of the the only
| progressive movements in countries that understood what
| it takes to maintain support, and hence Denmark has had
| much less of a rise in support for far right parties than
| other countries in the world. Here's an article,
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/magazine/denmark-
| immigrat....
|
| Basically, progressives in Denmark have argued for very
| strict immigration rules, the essential argument being
| that Denmark has an expensive social welfare state, and
| to get the populace to support the high taxes needed to
| pay for this, you can't just let anyone in who shows up
| on your doorstep.
|
| The American left could learn a ton of lessons from this.
| I may loath Greg Abbott for lots of reasons, but I
| largely support what he did bussing migrants to NYC and
| other liberal cities. Many people in these cities wanted
| to bask in the feelings of moral superiority by being
| "sanctuary cities", but public sentiment changed
| drastically when they actually had to start bearing a
| large portion of the cost of a flood of migrants.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Is there a reason social benefits must be available to
| immigrants? It seems like those could result be tied to
| citizenship or something like a minimum amount of
| lifetime taxes someone most have paid.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I think the problems are more complex and much harder to
| fix and more depressing. The actual policies by the
| Democratic party have been "pro-worker". Biden was
| strongly pro-union. I am hard pressed to think of any
| policy by the Biden administration that was focused on
| racial issues. However, it seems like the perception of
| the Democratic party is largely mixed in with leftists
| who don't even like the party.
|
| I think the real problem is that the median voter is
| either unable to, has no time to or no interest to
| understand basic economics and second-order consequences.
| We see this on both sides of the aisle. Policies like
| caps on credit card interest rates, rent control or no
| tax on tips are very, very popular while also being
| obviously bad after thinking about it for just 1 minute.
|
| This is compounded by there being relatively little
| discussion of policies like that. They get reported on
| but not discussed and analyzed. This takes us back to
| your point about the perception of the Democratic party.
| The media (probably because the median voter prefers it)
| will instead discuss issues that are more emotionally
| relatable, like the border being "overwhelmed", trans
| athletes, etc. which makes it less likely to get people
| to think about economic policy.
|
| This causes a preference for simple policies that seem to
| aim straight for the goal. Rent too high? Prohibit higher
| rent! Credit card fees too high? Prohibit high fees!
| Immigrants lower wages? Have fewer immigrant!
|
| Telling the median voter that H1-B visa holders are
| lowering wages due to the high friction of changing
| sponsors and that the solution is to loosen the visa
| restrictions is gonna go over well with much of the
| electorate. Even only the portion of initial problem
| statement will likely reach most voters in the form of
| "H1-B visas lower wages". Someone who will simply take
| that simplified issue and run with cutting down further
| on immigration will be much more likely to succeed with
| how public opinion is currently formed.
|
| All this stuff is why I love learning about policy and
| absolutely loath politics.
| DenisM wrote:
| I've read some analysis than many swing voters supported
| Trump because they were unhappy with the economic
| situation, not due to culture wars. In their minds, and
| words, Trump may change at least something while
| democrats will certainly change nothing. Whatever pro-
| labor policies Biden had they didn't move the needle.
|
| What do you think of that?
| c0redump wrote:
| I mostly agree with you, but i think there's something
| you got wrong. The democrat establishment didn't abdicate
| their pro-labor position for reasons of racial equity-
| this was only ever a cover story.
|
| The real reason is that they are totally beholden to
| powerful business interests that benefit from mass
| immigration, and the ensuing suppression of American
| labor movements. The racial equity bit is just the line
| that they feed to their voters.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I agree with all of that. I've seen employers treat
| workers with H1B visas as slaves, basically. Local
| employees had a pretty decent work-life balance, but H1B
| employees got calls at 8PM on a Friday night to add a
| feature. And why not? What were they going to do quit
| (and have, what is it, something like 48 hours to get out
| of the country)?
|
| I felt enormous sympathy for my coworkers here with that
| visa. Their lives sucked because there was little
| downside for sociopathic managers to make them suck.
|
| Most frustrating was when they were doing the same kind
| of work I was doing, like writing Python web services and
| whatnot. We absolutely _could_ hire local employees to do
| those things. They weren 't building quantum computers or
| something. Crappy employers gamed the system to get
| below-market-rate-salary employees and work them like
| rented mules. It was infuriating.
| lokar wrote:
| It sucks that people are treated that way.
|
| While working at Google I worked with many many amazing
| H1B (and other kinds) visa holders. I did 3 interviews a
| week, sat on hiring committees (reading 10-15 packets a
| week) and had a pretty good gauge of what we could find.
|
| There was just no way I could see that we could replace
| these people with Americans. And they got paid top dollar
| and had the same wlb as everyone else (you could not
| generally tell what someone's status was).
| kstrauser wrote:
| I fully, completely support the idea of visa programs
| running like that. If you want to pay top dollar for
| someone with unique skills to move here and help build
| our economy, I am fully behind this.
|
| But wanna use it as a way to undercut American jobs with
| 80-hour-a-week laborers, as I've personally witnessed?
| Nah.
|
| My criticisms against the H1B program are completely
| against the companies who abuse it. By all means, please
| do use it to bring in world-class scientists,
| researchers, and engineers!
| guestbest wrote:
| If the foreign candidates were so much superior than
| locally born candidates as you explained, why not just
| open a campus in that country and thus save the best
| employees from having to uproot from their native
| culture?
| lokar wrote:
| Good question. In many cases they did. The Zurich office
| has people from all over Europe.
|
| But, for existing teams they wanted (reasonably) to avoid
| splitting between locations. So you need someone local.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I think the real reason for hiring locally is both that
| communication works better, and that the higher ups don't
| want to give the impression that their jobs could also be
| outsourced.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Time zones can be a real issue even with remote work.
| There are of course also arguments for in-person
| collaboration.
| c0redump wrote:
| This was true up until pretty recently. CS has come to be
| seen as a "prestigious" degree, and SWE as a
| "prestigious" career. Lots of kids who, 10 years ago,
| would have studied law, medicine, finance, or hard
| sciences, are studying CS. At my alma mater, CS is the
| largest major by a huge margin. The result of all this is
| there is a massive supply of smart and capable American
| citizens with formal training trying to break in to the
| job market, with limited success, due in no small part to
| the labor oversupply caused by immigration.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jamesfobrien_tech-jobs-
| have-d...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| In context of tech, H1B is great for the money people in
| the US and India. It suppresses wages in both countries
| and is a powerful plum for employee "loyalty". There's a
| whole industry of companies stoking the pipeline of cheap
| labor and corrupting the hiring process.
|
| In big dollar markets, the program is used more for
| special skills. But when a big bank or government
| contractor needs marginally skilled people onshore, they
| open an office in Nowhere, Arizona, and have a hard time
| finding J2EE developers. So some company from New Jersey
| will appear and provide a steady stream of workers making
| $25/hr.
|
| The calculus is that more H1=less offshore.
|
| The smart move would be to just let skilled workers from
| India, China, etc with a visa that doesn't tie them to an
| employer. That would end the abusive labor practices and
| probably reduce the number of lower end workers or the
| incentive to deny entry level employment to US nationals.
| rightbyte wrote:
| How does H1B suppress wages in India?
| Aeolun wrote:
| All those people skilled enough to get hired in the US
| (for massive increase in wages) don't try to get similar
| positions in India, thus, nobody has to compete to pay
| for them.
| antithesizer wrote:
| Because it surpresses wages in the US, so Indian
| employers do not need to offer as much compensation to
| keep local workers who are considering emigrating.
| senderista wrote:
| H1-B also makes CS masters programs a cash cow for US
| schools.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I mean, aren't 3 out of 8 humans from India or China? If
| the company is big enough to appeal to a global applicant
| pool its a bit expected.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's presumably (from context) a company campus in the US
| that they're taking about. I wouldn't expect 3 of 8
| legally authorized to work in the US people to be Chinese
| or Indian combined.
|
| Other than a few international visitors, I'd expect the
| makeup to look like the domestic tech worker demographics
| rather than like the global population demographics.
| bradlys wrote:
| Also, anyone who has worked in these companies also know
| it's much larger than 3 out of 8... comical to act like
| it's only 3/8.
| senderista wrote:
| I estimate AWS engineering is maybe 80% Indian and
| another 10% Chinese. Less at higher levels though.
| bradlys wrote:
| It always blows my mind that 75% of H1B admittance is
| Indian. Then you live in SFBA for 10 years and it's not
| really a surprise anymore.
| c0redump wrote:
| Certain suburbs of Seattle (Redmond, bothell) are pretty
| much entirely Indian
| apex3stoker wrote:
| I think most software companies hire from computer
| science graduates from US colleges. It's likely that
| international students makes up a large percentage of
| these graduates.
| therealpygon wrote:
| My opinion is that off-shore teams are also going to be
| some of the jobs more easily replaced, because many of
| these are highly standardized with instructions due to the
| turnover they have. I wouldn't be surprised if these
| outsourcing companies are already working toward that end.
| They are definitely automating and/or able to collect
| significant training data from the various tools they
| require their employees to use for customers.
| underlipton wrote:
| We all get 5 conspiracy theories before we advance from
| "understandably suspicious, given the complexity of the
| modern world" to "reliable tinfoil purchasers", and one of
| mine is that the prevalence of Indian execs and, to a
| lesser extent, Indian and Chinese workers in tech is a
| backdoor concession to countries who could open a
| demographic can of whoop-ass on us if they really wanted
| to. We let them bleed off the ambitious intellectuals who
| could become a political issue for their elite, and ours
| get convenient scapegoats for why businesses can't hire,
| train, and pay domestic workers well. As far as top men are
| concerned, it's a good deal.
|
| Nadella ascending to the leadership of Micro"I Can't
| Believe It's Not Considered A State-Sponsored Defense
| Corp"soft is what got my mildly xenophobic (sorry) gears
| turning.
| hluska wrote:
| Edited:
|
| Actually disregard, this isn't worth it, but I don't
| grant any freebies.
| underlipton wrote:
| Well, now I'm curious.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce
| couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty
| hard to engage with.
|
| I hear this argument where I live for various reasons, but
| surely it only ever comes down to wages and/or conditions?
|
| If the company paid a competitive rate (ie higher), locals
| would apply. Surely blaming a lack of local interest is
| rarely going to be due to anything other than pay or
| conditions?
| catigula wrote:
| The company having access to the global labor force is
| the problem we're explicitly discussing. This isn't seen
| as something desirable by US workers.
| lanstin wrote:
| I was born in NC, and I mostly have experienced the large
| amount of immigration as a positive. Most of the people I
| grew up were virulently anti-intellectuals, mocking math
| and science learning, and most of them have gone on to be
| realtors and business folks, bankers even. All the people
| I've met from China or South Asia (the two demographics I
| work most closely worth) value learning and science and
| math - not as some "lets have STEM summer camps" but when
| they meet some new 8 year old will ask them to solve some
| math problems (like precisely 1 of my kids' dozens of
| relatives).
|
| I enjoy meeting the very smart people from all sorts of
| backgrounds - they share the values of education and hard
| work that my parents emphasized, and they have an
| appreciation for what we enjoy as software engineers; US
| born folks tend to have a bit of entitlement, and want
| success without hard work.
|
| I interview a fair number of people, and truly first rate
| minds are a limited resource - there's just so many in
| each city (and not everyone will want to or be able to
| move for a career). Even with "off-shoring" one finds
| after hiring in a given city for a while, it gets harder,
| and the efficient thing to do is to open a branch in a
| new city.
|
| I don't know, perhaps the realtors from my class get more
| money than many scientists or engineers, and certainly
| more than my peers in India (whose salaries have gone
| from 10% of mine to about 40% of mine in the past decade
| or two), but the point is the real love of solving novel
| problems - in an industry where success leads to many
| novel problems.
|
| Hard work, interesting problems, and building things that
| actual people use - these are the core value prop for
| software engineering as a career; the money is pretty new
| and not the core; finding people who share that
| perspective is priceless. Enough money to provide a good
| start to your children and help your family is good, but
| never the heart of the matter.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Any immigrants should read these threads carefully. If
| you're pro-union you're going to get screwed by your fellow
| man. Don't empower a union unless you want to be kicked out
| of the country.
|
| According to these people, politicians like you here and
| labour doesn't. If that's true, do you want to empower
| labour to kick you out?
| VonTum wrote:
| What a weird crabs-in-a-bucket argument against unions.
| "Don't empower yourself and the rest of your colleagues
| because they might get powerful enough to kick you out"?
|
| The whole reason H1Bs were invented is to disempower the
| existing workforce. Not reaching for a (long overdue)
| tool of power for tech workers is playing right into
| their hand.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The colleagues are all screaming to kick you out. Someone
| would have to be mentally differently abled to want to
| lend their voice to the chorus of people asking to kick
| them out.
|
| You can call it what you want to legitimize it but these
| people want immigrants out and empowering them means
| immigrants get kicked out.
|
| If you want to get kicked out as an immigrant definitely
| support them.
| catigula wrote:
| The funny thing is that you're not wrong and this is yet
| another feather in the cap of "foreign labor are literal
| scabs" argument.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The history of unions and the past of the AFLCIO is
| filled with successful lobbying to prevent immigrants
| from becoming American. They're not going to stop
| suddenly today.
|
| Knowing one's enemy is key to fighting them.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| It's also worth noting that it's almost entirely native
| born Americans that are pushing back against nepotism.
| Extreme nepotism is still the norm (an expectation even) in
| most South and East Asian cultures. And it's quite readily
| acknowledged if you speak to newer hires who haven't
| realized yet that it is best kept quiet.
|
| It's a hard truth for many Americans to swallow, but it is
| the truth nonetheless.
|
| Not to say there isn't an incredible amount of merit... but
| the historical impact of rampant nepotism in the US is
| widely acknowledged, and this newer manifestation should be
| acknowledged just the same.
| icedchai wrote:
| I worked at a small company with more PMs than developers. It
| was incredible how much bull it created.
| boogieknite wrote:
| first job out of college i was one of these pms. luckily i
| figured it out quickly and would spend maybe 2 hours a day
| working, 6 hours a day teaching myself to program. i cant
| believe that job existed and they gave it to me. one of my
| teammates was moved to HR and he was distraught over how he
| actually had work to do
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| I'm realizing that 100% of all product managers I have ever
| worked with were just ZIRP-PMs.
|
| I have never once worked with a product manager who I could
| describe as "worth their weight in gold".
|
| Not saying they don't exist, but they're probably even rarer
| than you think.
| aswegs8 wrote:
| How are TPMs optional? In my experience they provide more
| value than PMs that don't understand technology.
| cavisne wrote:
| My theory for these PM's is its basically a cheap way to take
| potential entrepreneurs off the market. Its hard to predict
| if a startup will succeed but one genre of success is having
| a Type A "fake it till you make it" non technical cofounder
| who can keep raising long enough to get product market fit.
|
| These types all go to the same schools and do really well,
| interview the same, and value the prestige of working in big
| tech. So it's pretty easy to identify them and offer them a
| great career path and take them off the market.
|
| Technical founders are way trickier to identify as they can
| be dropouts, interview poorly, not value the prestige etc.
| 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_.
| alvah wrote:
| Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation
| of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of
| the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything
| productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the
| business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals
| would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are
| obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency
| keeping people employed, so why would an AI revolution on
| it's own create some kind of massive Schumpeterian shockwave?
| ryandrake wrote:
| People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a
| fact, but do you really think these companies just have
| half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems
| absurd, and I honestly don't believe it.
|
| Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do
| than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization
| problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done
| because they ended up below the cut line, and we just
| didn't have enough people to do them.
|
| I don't know where all these companies are that have half
| their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never
| worked at one.
|
| What's more likely? 1. Companies are (for reasons unknown)
| hiring all these people and not having them do anything
| useful, or 2. These people actually do useful things, but
| HN commenters don't understand those jobs and simply
| conclude they're doing nothing?
| trade2play wrote:
| All of the big software companies are like the parent
| describes, in most of their divisions.
|
| Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger
| scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or
| don't care. That's the reason why they're bloated.
| alvah wrote:
| Have you heard of Twitter? 80-90% reduction in numbers,
| visible effects to the user (resulting from the headcount
| cuts, not the politics of the owner)? Pretty much zero.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| That's a difficult example. I don't think anyone would
| reasonably expect the engineering artifact twitter.com to
| break. But the business artifact did break. At least to a
| reasonable degree. The Ad revenue is still down (both
| business news and the ads I'm experiencing are from less
| well resourced brands). And yes, that has to do with
| "answering emails with poop emojis" and "laying off
| content checkers"
| ozim wrote:
| Bad part is all those guys attending meetings start feeling
| important. They start feeling like they are doing the job.
|
| I've seen those guys it is painful to watch.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| I don't doubt there's a lot of knowledge workers who aren't
| adding value.
|
| I'm worried about the shrinking number of opportunities for
| juniors.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree with this, but I still think that offshoring is much
| more responsible for this than AI.
|
| I have _definitely_ seen real world examples where adding
| junior hires at ~$100k+ is being completely forgone when you
| can get equivalent output from someone making $40k offshore.
| matthest wrote:
| Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous
| employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic?
|
| Because they don't _have_ to do that. They could just operate
| at max efficiency all the time.
|
| Instead, they spread the wealth a bit by having bullshit jobs,
| even if the existence of these jobs is dependent on the market
| cycle.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| > Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire
| superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually
| fantastic?
|
| I do.
|
| It's much more important that people live a dignified life
| and be able to feed their families than "increasing
| shareholder value" or whatever.
|
| I'm a person that would be hypothetically supportive of
| something like DOGE cuts, but I'd rather have people earning
| a living even with Soviet-style make work jobs than
| unemployed. I don't desire to live in a cutthroat
| "competitive" society where only "talent" can live a
| dignified life. I don't know if that's "wealth distribution"
| or socialism or whatever; I don't really care, nor make claim
| it's some airtight political philosophy.
| leflambeur wrote:
| tech bros think not only that that system is good, but that
| they'd be the winners
| andrekandre wrote:
| > It's much more important that people live a dignified
| life and be able to feed their families than "increasing
| shareholder value" or whatever.
|
| its just my intuition, but talking to many people around
| me, i get the feeling like this is why people on both
| "left" and "right" are in a lot of ways (for lack of a
| better word) irate at the system as a whole... if thats
| true, i doubt ai will improve the situation for either...
| 827a wrote:
| Half of everyone at most large companies could be retired with
| no significant impact to the company's ability to generate
| revenue. The problem has always been figuring out which half.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Agree, but two questions:
|
| First, is AI really a better scapegoat? "Reducing headcount due
| to end of ZIRP" maybe doesn't sound great, but "replacing
| employees with AI" sounds a whole lot worse from a PR
| perspective (to me anyway).
|
| Second, are companies actually using AI as the scapegoat? I
| haven't followed it too closely, but I could imagine that
| layoffs don't say anything about AI at all, and it's mostly
| media and FUD inventing the correlation.
| ledauphin wrote:
| the one does actually sound worse because... it's actually
| worse. it clarifies that the companies themselves were
| playing games with people's livelihoods because of the
| potential for profit.
|
| whereas "AI" is intuitively an external force; it's much
| harder to assign blame to company leadership.
| daxfohl wrote:
| I'd read the first as adjusting to market demand, not
| playing with people's lives. If if were construed as
| playing with lives, that could apply to basically any
| investment.
| leflambeur wrote:
| isn't the scapegoat he or she who gets sacrificed? I think
| engineers are that
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Turns out 50% of white collar jobs are just daycare for adults.
| ivape wrote:
| I've said this many times, that the abundance and wealth of the
| tech industry basically provided vast amounts of Universal
| Basic Income to a variety of roles (all of agile is _one_
| example). We 're at a critical moment where we actually have to
| look at cost-cutting on this UBI.
| federiconafria wrote:
| "my VP more headcount and therefore more clout"
|
| This had me thinking, how are they going to get "clout", by
| comparing AI spending?
| 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.
| kayamon wrote:
| Bitcoin was $2000 dollars each in 2017. Now in 2025 it's
| $104,000. It's set to keep countering global inflation until
| 2140.
|
| It ain't done yet.
| 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.
| fny wrote:
| I think you're under the impression that I am not a
| software engineer. I already know C, and I've even
| shipped a very small, popular, security sensitive open
| source library in C, so I am certainly proficient enough
| to rewrite Python into Rust for performance purposes
| without hiring a Rust engineer or write shaders to help
| debug models in Blender.
|
| My point is that LLMs make it 10x easier to adapt and
| transition to new languages, so whatever moat someone had
| by being a "Rust developer" is now significantly erased.
| Anyone with solid systems programming experience could
| switch from C/C++ to Rust with the help of an LLM and be
| proficient in a week or two's time. By proficient, I mean
| able to ship valuable features. Sure they'll have to
| leveraging an LLM to help smooth out understanding new
| features like borrow checking, but they'll surely be able
| to deliver given how already circumspect the Rust
| compiler is.
|
| I agree fundamentals matter and good mentorship matters!
| However, good developers will be able to do a lot more
| diverse tasks which means _more supply of talent across
| every language ecosystem._
|
| For example, I don't feel compelled at all to hire a
| Svelte/Vue/React developer specifically anymore: any
| decent frontend developer can race forward with the help
| of an LLM.
| 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.
| kttjoppl wrote:
| How are you going to ship a tool you don't understand? What
| are you going to do when it breaks? How are you going to
| debug issues in a language you don't understand? How do you
| know the code the LLM generated is correct?
|
| LLMs absolutely help me pick up new skills faster, but if
| you can't have a discussion about Rust and Svelte, no, you
| didn't learn them. I'm making a lot of progress learning
| deep learning and ChatGPT has been critical for me to do
| so. But I still have to read books, research papers, and my
| framework's documentation. And it's still taking a long
| time. If I hadn't read the books, I wouldn't know what
| question to ask or how to evaluate if ChatGPT is completely
| off base (which happens all the time).
| 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.
| stefan_ wrote:
| I don't understand, no one ever needed an LLM to automate air
| traffic controllers. 1980s tech could do that just fine. The
| reason they continue to exist is essentially cultural. Fell
| into a local maximum trap and now the entire industry and
| governance is incapable of lifting itself out of it and instead
| come up with stuff like "standardized phrases for the voice
| coms that we have inexplicably made crucial to the entire
| system" while riding cultural cliches like "the pilot must be
| in control" as they continue manual flight into big rocks.
| lexandstuff wrote:
| Re the last sentence, is the answer that more people will die
| in aviation disasters?
| 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?
| rglover wrote:
| Social media. Especially in SV, the embarrassment of
| failing publicly having been given so much money is far too
| painful psychologically.
|
| Spinning that to say you're a "visionary" for replacing
| expensive employees with AI (even when it's clear we're not
| there yet) is risky, but a good enough smoke screen to
| distract the average bear from poking holes in your
| financials.
| 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.
| geraneum wrote:
| "A populace modeling exponential change". Yeah, that's
| just word salad.
| margalabargala wrote:
| We can agree to disagree. After all, even you were able
| to figure out what I meant :-)
| geraneum wrote:
| disagree on what? You have not put forward a coherent
| statement. I had to fix your sentence. ;)
| margalabargala wrote:
| I understand that complex sentences can sometimes be
| difficult to parse for median Americans or non-native
| speakers, but we disagree on whether what I said was word
| salad prior to you rewording it by explicitly enumerating
| the implied indirect object. As you demonstrated, context
| clues were ample to determine meaning.
| geraneum wrote:
| Since I can't reply under you answer for some reason I
| put it here.
|
| We can have a constructive discussion instead. My problem
| was not actually parsing what you said. I'm questioning
| the assumption if populace collectively modeling
| exponential change is really meaningful. You can, for
| example, describe how does it look like when populace can
| model change exponentially. Is there any relevant
| literature on this subject that I can look into? Does
| this phenomenon have a name?
| 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.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| As a developer that uses LLMs, I haven't seen any evidence
| that LLMs or "AI" more broadly are improving exponentially,
| but I see a lot of people applying a near-religious belief
| that this is happening or will happen because... actually,
| I don't know? because Moore's Law was a thing, maybe?
|
| In my experience, for practical usage LLMs aren't even
| improving linearly at this point as I personally see Claude
| 3.7 and 4.0 as regressions from 3.5. They might score
| better on artificial benchmarks but I find them less likely
| to produce useful work.
| drewcon wrote:
| 5 years ago commercial image gen produced hallucinatory
| dream like blobs.
|
| 2 years ago it was cool but unreliable.
|
| Today I just did an entire "photo shoot" in Midjourney.
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think you missed the point. AI is dismissed by idiots
| because they are looking at its state _now_ , not what it
| will be in future. The same was true in the pandemic.
| 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.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| Yeah, for this analogy to work, we'd have to see AI causing a
| small but consistently doubling amount of lost jobs.
| 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.
| tim333 wrote:
| I remember scientists, especially epidemiologists being quite
| accurate. I guess the key is to not even have a political
| angle but instead some knowledge of what you are talking
| about.
| qgin wrote:
| This is the exact thing I've expressed as well.
|
| This moment feels exactly to me like that moment when we were
| going to "shut down for two weeks" and the majority of people
| seemed to think that would be the end of it.
|
| It was clear where the trend was going, but exponentials always
| seem ridiculous on an intuitive level.
| deadbabe wrote:
| It goes both ways. Once the exponential growth of COVID
| started, I heard wildly outrageous predictions of what was
| going to happen next, none of which ever really came to
| fruition.
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Ah, so a straddle.
| 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).
| j_w wrote:
| Re: running out of data
|
| LLM bulls will say that they are going to generate
| synthetic data that is better than the real data.
| barchar wrote:
| It's been able to sustain 90s era revenue growth rates, not
| 90s era income growth rates no?
| ls612 wrote:
| I think all of the dot com boom companies other than the
| shovel sellers like MS and Cisco were not profitable in
| the 90s? Not even future behemoths like Amazon.
| hollerith wrote:
| Amazon would've been profitable if it weren't investing
| so much in growth. Also, eBay, Yahoo!, AOL, Priceline,
| Cisco Systems, E*TRADE and DoubleClick became profitable
| in the 90s according to DeepSeek.
| 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.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Not the biggest fan of crypto companies, but YC probably did
| well because of Coinbase.
| barchar wrote:
| It's not really enough to predict the outcome, you need
| something concrete to actually bet on, and you need to time
| things right (particularly for the pessimistic bet).
|
| For any bet that involves purchasing bits of profits you you
| could be right and lose money because because the government
| generally won't allow the entire economy to implode.
|
| By the time a bubble pops literally everyone knows they're in a
| bubble, knowing something is a bubble doesn't make it
| irrational to jump on the bandwagon.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop.
| HARD. You can't get more diametrically opposed than that.
|
| The answer (as always) lies somewhere in the middle. Expert
| software developers who embrace the tech whole heartedly while
| understanding its' limitations are now in an absolute golden
| era of being able to do things they never could have dreamed of
| before. I have no doubt we will see the first unicorns made of
| "single pizza" size teams here shortly.
| 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.
| digianarchist wrote:
| I saw a tweet the other day that stated AI will cure all
| diseases within 5-10 years. The tweet cites scientists and CEOs
| but only lists CEOs of AI companies.
|
| https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1927843826183589960
| 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?
| crims0n wrote:
| You may be onto something... sell strategic decisions by an AI
| cohort as a service, insure against the inevitable duds,
| profit.
| 0x5f3759df-i wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT to be a CEO and decide if everyone should work
| in office 5 days a week:
|
| " Final Thought (as a CEO):
|
| I wouldn't force a full return unless data showed a clear
| business case. Culture, performance, and employee sentiment
| would all guide the decision. I'd rather lead with
| transparency, flexibility, and trust than mandates that could
| backfire.
|
| Would you like a sample policy memo I'd send to employees in
| this scenario?"
|
| A better, more reasonable CEO than the one I have. So I'm
| looking forward to AI taking that white collar job especially.
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| Sure, but no one has found a good metric for actually
| quantifying quality for surgeons. You can't look at just
| the rate of positive outcomes because often the best
| surgeons take on the worst cases that others won't even
| attempt. And we simply don't have enough reliable data to
| make proper metric adjustments based on individual patient
| attributes.
| 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
| abletonlive wrote:
| I spent a lot of time arguing the barrier to entry for
| starting one is lower than ever. But if your only options
| are employee or being destitute, I will again point right
| to -> cynicism.
| 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.
| abletonlive wrote:
| A lot of python in a monorepo. Mono repos have an
| advantage right now because the LLM can pretty much look
| through the entire repo. But I'm also applying LLM to
| eliminate a lot of roles that are obsolete, not just
| using it to code.
|
| Thanks for sharing your perspective with ACTUAL details
| unlike most people that have gotten bad results.
|
| Sadly hardware programming is probably going to lag or
| never be figured out because there's just not enough info
| to train on. This might change in the future when/if
| reasoning models get better but there's no guarantee of
| that.
|
| > which is now based on o4
|
| based on o4 or is o4, those are two different things.
| augment says this:
| https://support.augmentcode.com/articles/5949245054-what-
| mod... Augment uses many models,
| including ones that we train ourselves. Each interaction
| you have with Augment will touch multiple models. Our
| perspective is that the choice of models is an
| implementation detail, and the user does not need to stay
| current with the latest developments in the world of AI
| models to fully take advantage of our platform.
|
| Which IMO is....a cop out, a terrible take, and
| just...slimey. I would not trust a company like this with
| my money. For all you know they are running your prompts
| against a shitty open source model running on a 3090 in
| their closet. The lack of transparency here is
| concerning.
|
| You might be getting bad results for a few reasons:
| - your prompts are not specific enough - your
| context is poisoned. how strategically are you providing
| context to the prompt? a good trick is to give the llm an
| existing file as an example to how you want it to produce
| the output and tell it "Do X in the style of Y.file".
| Don't forget with the latest models and huge context
| windows you could very well provide entire subdirectories
| into context (although I would recommend being pretty
| targeted still) - the model/tool you're using sucks
| - you work in a problem domain that LLMs are genuinely
| bad at
|
| Note: your company is paying a subscription to a service
| that isn't allowing you to bring your own keys. they have
| an incentive to optimize and make sure you're not costing
| them a lot of money. This could lead to worse results.
|
| see here for Cline team's perspective on this topic: http
| s://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1kymhkt/clin.
| ..
|
| I suggest this as the bare minimum for the HN community
| when discussing their bad results with LLMs and coding:
| - what is your problem domain - show us your
| favorite prompt - what model and tools are you
| using? - are you using it as a chat or an agent?
| - are you bringing your own keys or using a service?
| - what did you supply in context when you got the bad
| result? - how did you supply context? copy paste?
| file locations? attachments? - what prompt did you
| use when you got the bad result?
|
| I'm genuinely surprised when someone complaining about
| LLM results provides even 2 of those things in their
| comment.
|
| Most of the cynics would not provide even half of this
| because it'd be embarrassing and reveal that they have no
| idea what they are talking about.
| rini17 wrote:
| But how is AI supposed to replace anyone when you have
| either to get lucky or to correctly set up all these
| things you write about first? Who will do all that and
| who will pay for it?
| abletonlive wrote:
| So your critique of AI is that it can't read your mind
| and figure out what to do?
|
| > But how is AI supposed to replace anyone when you have
| either to get lucky or to correctly set up all these
| things you write about first? Who will do all that and
| who will pay for it?
|
| I mean....i'm doing it and getting paid for it so...
| rini17 wrote:
| Yes, because AGI is advertised(or reviled) as such. That
| you plug it in and it figures everything else out itself.
| No need for training and management like for humans.
|
| In other words, did the AI actually replace you in this
| case? Do you expect it to? Because people clearly expect
| it, then we have such discussions as this.
| abletonlive wrote:
| You are incredibly foolish to get hung up on marketing
| promises and ignoring llm capabilities that are a reality
| and useful _right now_
|
| good luck with that
| tdeck wrote:
| I've noticed that when people use the term
| "democratization" in business speak, it makes sense to
| replace it with "commodification" 99% of the time.
| 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).
| sarchertech wrote:
| > 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
|
| That doesn't fit my experience at all. The applied math vs
| engineering continuum is mostly dependent on whether a CS
| program at a given school came out of the engineering
| department or the math apartment. I haven't noticed any
| shift on that spectrum coming from CS departments except
| that people are more likely to start out programming in
| higher level languages where they are more insulated from
| the hardware.
|
| That's the same across countries though. I certainly
| haven't noticed that Indian or Eastern European CS grads
| have a better understanding of the OS or the underlying
| hardware.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I certainly haven't noticed that Indian or Eastern
| European CS grads have a better understanding of the OS
| or the underlying hardware.
|
| Absolutely, but that's if they are exposed to these
| concepts, and that's become less the case beyond maybe a
| single OS class.
|
| > except that people are more likely to start out
| programming in higher level languages where they are more
| insulated from the hardware
|
| I feel that's part of the issue, but also, CS programs in
| the US are increasingly making computer architecture an
| optional class. And network specific classes have always
| been optional.
|
| ---------
|
| Mind you, I am biased towards Cybersecurity, DevOps, DBs,
| and HPC because that is the industry I've worked on for
| over a decade now, and it legitimately has become
| difficult hiring new grads in the US with a "NAND-to-
| Tetris" mindset because curriculums have moved away from
| that aside from a couple top programs.
| lokar wrote:
| Where I have worked new grads (and interns) were explicitly
| negative.
|
| This is part of why some companies have minimum terminal
| levels (often 5/Sr) before which a failure to improve means
| getting fired.
| 0xpgm wrote:
| Isn't that every new employee? The first few months you are
| not expected to be firing on all cylinders as you catch up
| and adjust to company norms
|
| An intern is much more valuable than AI in the sense that
| everyone makes micro decisions that contribute to the
| business. An Intern can remember what they heard in a meeting
| a month ago or some important water-cooler conversation and
| incorporate that in their work. AI cannot do that
| 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.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| I would be worried about the eventual influence of
| advertising and profits over correctness
| sarchertech wrote:
| If AI improves to the point that an intern doesn't need
| to check its work, you don't need the intern.
|
| You don't need managers, or CEOs. You don't even need
| VCs.
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| You've eloquently expressed exactly the same disconnect: as
| long as we think the purpose of internships is to write the
| same kind of code that interns write today, sure, AI
| probably makes the whole thing less efficient.
|
| But if the purpose of an internship is to learn how to work
| in a company, while producing some benefit for the company,
| I think everything gets better. Just like we don't measure
| today's terms by words per minute typed, I don't think
| we'll measure tomorrow's interns by Lines of code that hand
| - written.
|
| So much of the doom here comes from a thought process that
| goes "we want the same outcomes as today, but the
| environment is changing, therefore our precious outcomes
| are at risk."
| 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.
| sibeliuss wrote:
| It's worth reminding folks that one doesn't _need_ a formal
| education to get by. I did terrible in school and never
| went to college and years later have reached a certain
| expertise (which included many fortunate moments along the
| way).
|
| What I had growing up though were interests in things, and
| that has carried me quite far. I worry much more about the
| addictive infinite immersive quality of video games and
| other kinds of scrolling, and by extension the elimination
| of free time through wasted time.
| 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.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Possibly also because they don't observe added value of
| the additional schooling.
|
| Also because US salaries are sky high compared to their
| European counterparts, so I could understand if the extra
| salary wasn't worth the risk that they might not have
| that much extra productivity.
|
| I've certainly worked with advanced degree people who
| didn't seem to be very far along on the productivity
| curve, but I assume it's like that for everything
| everywhere.
| yardie wrote:
| Graduate school assistant in the US pay such shit wages
| compared to Europe that you would be eligible for food
| stamps. Opportunity cost is better spent getting your
| bachelors degree, finding employment, and then using that
| salary to pay for grad school or have your employer pay
| for it. I've worked in Europe with just my bac+3. I also
| had 3-4 years of applied work experience that a fresh-
| faced MSc holder was just starting to acquire.
| 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
| government enforces the rules 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 of
| 2025 being produced abroad now due to the obscene costs
| of production in California caused mostly by the unions
| there. Like 350 $ per hour for a guy to push a button on
| a smoke machine, because only a union man is allowed to
| do it. Or that it costs more to move across a Cali studio
| parking lot than to film a scene in the UK. Letting
| unions bleed companies dry is only gonna result them
| moving all jobs that can be moved abroad.
| yardie wrote:
| Almost every Hollywood movie you see,that wasn't filmed
| in LA, was basically a taxpayer backed project. Look at
| any film with international locations and in the film
| credits you'll see a lots of state-backed, loans, grants,
| and tax credits. Large part of the film crew and cast are
| flown out to those locations. And if you think LA was
| expensive, location pay is even more so. So production is
| flying out the most expensive parts of the crew to save a
| few dollars on craft service?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yet. You can't _yet_. Humanoids and VR are approaching
| the point quite rapidly where a teleoperated or even
| autonomous robot will be a better and cheaper tradesman
| than Joe down the road. Joe can't work 24 hours a day.
| Joe realises that, so he'll rent a robot and outsource
| part of his business, and will normalise the idea as
| quickly as LLMs have become normal. Joe will do very
| well, until someone comes along with an economy of scale
| and eats his breakfast.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| All the _Joes_ I know would spend serious time hunting
| these robots.
|
| IMO, real actual people don't want to live in the world
| you described. Hell, they don't wanna live in this one!
| The "elites" have failed us. Their vision of the future
| is a dystopian nightmare. If the only reason to exist is
| to make 25 people at the top richer than gods? _What is
| the fucking point of living?_
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> If the only reason to exist is to make 25 people at
| the top richer than gods?_
|
| You just described most medieval societies.
|
| It's been done before, and those 25 people are hoping to
| make it happen again.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Hoping is the wrong word. They're trying harder than
| ever.
| sabarn01 wrote:
| I have been in Union shops before working in tech. In
| some places they are fine in others its where your worst
| employee on your team goes to make everyone else less
| effective.
| neilv wrote:
| I agree that interns are pretty much over in tech. Except
| maybe for an established company do do as a semester/summer
| trial/goodwill period, for students near graduation. You
| usually won't get work output worth the mentoring cost, but
| you might identify a great potential hire, and be on their
| shortlist.
|
| Startups are less enlightened than that about "interns".
|
| Literally today, in a startup job posting, to a top CS
| department, they're looking for "interns" to _bring_ (not
| learn) hot experience developing AI agents, to this startup,
| for... $20 /hour, and get called an intern.
|
| It's also normal for these startup job posts to be looking
| for experienced professional-grade skills in things like
| React, Python, PG, Redis, etc., and still calling the person
| an intern, with a locally unlivable part-time wage.
|
| Those startups should stop pretending they're teaching
| "interns" valuable job skills, admit that they desperately
| need cheap labor for their "ideas person" startup leadership,
| to do things they can't do, and cut the "intern" in as a
| founding engineer with meaningful equity. Or, if you can't
| afford to pay a livable and plausibly competitive startup
| wage, maybe they're technical cofounders.
| xpe wrote:
| I personally care a lot about people, but if I was running a
| publicly traded for-profit, I would have a lot of constraints
| about how to care for them. (A good place to start, by the
| way, is not bullshitting people about the financial
| realities.)
|
| Employees are lucky when incentives align and employers treat
| them well. This cannot be expected or assumed.
|
| A lot of people want a different kind of world. If we want
| it, we're gonna have to build it. Think about what you can
| do. Have you considered running for office?
|
| I don't think it is helpful for people to play into the
| victim narrative. It is better to support each other and
| organize.
| 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
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| Consider that there are no humans in existence that fulfill
| your requirements, not to mention $20/mo ones
| dylan604 wrote:
| why would i consider that when there absolutely are humans
| that can do that. your dollar value is just ridiculous. if
| you're a hot shit dev that no longer needs junior devs,
| then if you spend 15 minutes refactoring the AI output,
| then you're underwater on that $20/mo value
| 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 :-(
| aianus wrote:
| Interns make $75k+ in tech in the US. It's definitely not
| unpaid. In fact my school would not give course credit for
| internships if they were unpaid.
| 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.
| phatfish wrote:
| Yup, apart from a few companies at the cutting edge the most
| difficult problems to solve in a work environment are not
| technical.
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is basically what happened after 2008. The entry level
| jobs college grads did basically disappeared and didn't really
| come back for many years. So we kind of lost half a generation.
| Those who missed out are the ones who weren't able to buy a
| house or start a family and are now in their 40s, destined to
| be permanent renters who can never retire.
|
| The same thing will happen to Gen Z because of AI.
|
| In both cases, the net effect of this (and the desired outcome)
| is to suppress wages. Not only of entry-level job but every
| job. The tech sector is going to spend the next decade clawing
| back the high costs of tech people from the last 15-20 years.
|
| The hubris here is that we've had a unprecedented boom such
| that many in the workforce have never experienced a recession,
| what I'd call "children of summer" (to borrow a George RR
| Martin'ism). People have fallen into the trap of the myth of
| meritocracy. Too many people thing that those who are living
| paycheck to paycheck (or are outright unhoused) are somehow at
| fault when spiralling housing costs, limited opportunities and
| stagnant real wages are pretty much responsible for everything.
|
| All of this is a giant wealth transfer to the richest 0.01% who
| are already insanely wealthy. I'm convinced we're beyond the
| point where we can solve the problems of runaway capitalism
| with electoral politics. This only ends in tyranny of a
| permanent underclass or revolution.
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| imo comparing entry-level people with ai is very short sighted,
| I was smarter than every dumb dinosaur at my first job, I was
| so eager to learn and proactive and positive... i probably was
| very lucky too but my point is i don't believe this whole thing
| that a junior is worse than ai, i'd rather say the contrary
| sauercrowd wrote:
| "intern" and "entry level" are proxies for complexity with
| these comparisons, not actual seniority. We'll keep hiring
| interns and entry level positions, they'll just do other
| things.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Companies reducing young hires because of AI are doing it
| backward. Returns on AI will be accelerated by early-career
| staff because they are already eagerly using AI in daily life,
| and have the least attachment to how jobs are done now.
|
| You're probably not going to transform your company by issuing
| Claude licenses to comfortable middle-aged career professionals
| who are emotionally attached to their personal definition of
| competency.
|
| Companies should be grabbing the kids who just used AI to cheat
| their way through senior year, because that sort of
| opportunistic short-cutting is exactly what companies want to
| do with AI in their business.
| sarchertech wrote:
| If the AI can write code to a level that doesn't need an
| experienced person to check the output, you don't need tech
| companies at all.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| >Not that I'm saying AI is a god-send, but new grads and entry-
| level roles are kind of screwed.
|
| A company that I know of is having a L3 hiring freeze also and
| some people are downgraded from L4 to L3 or L5 to L4 also..
| Getting more work for less cost.
| uludag wrote:
| I thought the whole idea of automation though was to lower the
| skill requirement. Everyone compares AI to the industrial
| revolution and the shift from artisan work to factory work. If
| this analogy were to hold true, then what employers should
| actually be wanting is more junior devs, maybe even non-devs,
| hired at a much cheaper wage. A senior dev may be able to
| outperform a junior by a lot, but assuming the AI is good
| enough, four juniors or like 10 non-devs should be able to
| outperform a senior.
|
| This obviously not being the case shows that we're not in a AI
| driven fundamental paradigm shift, but rather run of the mill
| cost cutting measures. Like suppose a tech bubble pops and
| there are mass layoffs (like the Dotcom bubble). Obviously
| people will loose their jobs. AI hype merchants will almost
| definitely try to push the narrative that these losses are from
| AI advancements in an effort to retain funding.
| 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.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy/
|
| Robot run iron mine that sells iron ore to a robot run steel
| mill that sells steel plate to a robot run heavy truck
| manufacturer that sells heavy trucks to robot run iron mines,
| etc etc.
|
| The material handling of heavy industry is already heavily
| automated, almost by definition. You just need to take out
| the last few people.
| c0redump wrote:
| Except that robotics technology is completely different
| from LLMs? Comments of this flavor are such a tell that the
| commenter has absolutely no idea what they're talking
| about.
| 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
| Hilift wrote:
| > Without well paid middle classes, who is buying all the fancy
| goods and services?
|
| People charging on their credit cards. Consumers are adding $2
| billion in new debt every day.
|
| "Total household debt increased by $167 billion to reach $18.20
| trillion in the first quarter"
|
| https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Without well paid middle classes, who is buying all the fancy
| goods and services?
|
| Rich people buying even fancier goods and services. You already
| see this in the auto industry. Why build a great $20,000 car
| for the masses when you can make the same revenue selling
| $80,000 cars to rich people (and at higher margins)? This
| doesn't work of course when you have a reasonably egalitarian
| society with reasonable wealth inequality. But the capitalists
| have figured out how to make 75% of us into willing slaves for
| the rest. A bonus of this is that a good portion of that 75%
| can be convinced to go into lifelong debt to "afford" those
| things they wish they could actually buy, further entrenching
| the servitude.
| 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
| (including by DOGE well connected to PLTR) with the money
| redirected toward the Grand Unification Project using PLTR
| Foundry (with AI) platform.
| chris_armstrong wrote:
| The wildest claims are those of increased labor productivity and
| economic growth: if they were true, our energy consumption would
| be increasing wildly beyond our current capacity to add more
| (dwarfing the increase from AI itself).
|
| Productivity doesn't increase on its own; economists struggle to
| separate it from improved processes or more efficient machinery
| (the "multi factor productivity fudge"). Increased efficiency in
| production means both more efficient energy use AND being able to
| use a lot more of it for the same input of labour.
| smeeger wrote:
| if being redundant would lead to mass layoffs then half of white
| collar workers would have been laid off decades ago. and white
| collar people will fiddle with rules and regulations to make
| their ever more bloated redundancy even more brazen with the
| addition of AI... and then later when AI has the ability to
| replace blue collar workers it will do so immediately and swiftly
| while the white collar people get all the money. its happened a
| thousand times before and will happen again.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| The main culprit behind the hype of the AI revolution is a lack
| of understanding of its true nature and capabilities. We should
| know better, Eliza demonstrated decades ago how easily we can be
| fooled by language, this is different and more useful but we rely
| so much on language fluency and knowledge retrieval as a proxy
| for intelligence that we are fooled again.
|
| I am not saying this is a nothing burger, the tech can be applied
| to many domains and improve productivity, but it does not think,
| not even a little, and scaling won't make that magically happen.
|
| Anyone paying attention should understand this fact by now.
|
| There is no intelligence explosion in sight, what we'll see
| during the next few years is a gradual and limited increase in
| automation, not a paradigm change, but the continuation of a
| process that started with the industrial revolution.
| gcanyon wrote:
| ...everyone here saying "someday AI will <fill in the blank> but
| not today" while failing to acknowledge that for a lot of things
| "someday" is 2026, and for an even larger number of things it's
| 2027, and we can't even predict whether or not in 2028 AI will
| handle nearly all things...
| causal wrote:
| The problem is that it's hard to pin down any job that's been
| eliminated by AI even after years of having LLMs. I'm sure it
| will happen. It just seems like the trajectory of intelligence
| defies any simple formula.
| gcanyon wrote:
| There's definitely an element of what we saw in the '90s --
| software didn't always make people faster, it made the
| quality of their output better (wysiwyg page layout, better
| database tools/validation, spell check in email, etc. etc.).
|
| But we're going to get to a point where "the quality goes up"
| means the quality exceeds what I can do in a reasonable time
| frame, and then what I can do in any time frame...
| sfblah wrote:
| I literally am in the process of firing someone who we no
| longer need because of efficiencies tied to GenAI. I work at
| a top-10 tech company. So, there you go. That's one job.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Huge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since the
| advent of computers. If you look at the work performed by office
| workers in the 1960s and compared it to what people today do it'd
| be almost unrecognizable.
|
| They spent huge amounts of time on things that software either
| does automatically or makes 1,000x faster. But by and large that
| actually created more white collar jobs because those
| capabilities meant more was getting done which meant new tasks
| needed to be performed.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I don't like this argument because 1) it doesn't address the
| social consequences of rapid onset and large scale unemployment
| and 2) there is no law of nature that a job lost here creates a
| new job there.
|
| On the first point, unemployment during the Great Depression
| was "only" 30%. And those people were eventually able to find
| other jobs. Here, we are talking about permanent unemployment
| for even larger numbers of people.
|
| The Luddites were right. Machines did take their jobs. Those
| individuals who invested significantly in their craft were
| permanently disadvantaged. And those who fought against it were
| executed.
|
| And on point 2, to be precise, a lack of jobs doesn't mean a
| lack of problems. There are a ton of things society needs to
| have accomplished, and in a perfect world the guy who was
| automated out of packing Amazon boxes could open a daycare for
| low income parents. We just don't have economic models to
| enable most of those things, and that's only going to get
| worse.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I'll preface this by saying I agree with most of what you
| said.
|
| It'll be a slow burn, though. The projection of rapid,
| sustained large-scale unemployment assumes that the
| technology rapidly ascends to _replace_ a large portion of
| the population at once. AI is not currently on a path to
| replacing a generalized workforce. Call center agents, maybe.
|
| Second, simply "being better at $THING" doesn't mean a
| technology will be adopted, let alone quickly. If that were
| the case, we'd all have Dvorak keyboards and commuter rail
| would be ubiquitous.
|
| Third, the mass unemployment situation requires economic
| conditions where _not_ leveraging a presumably exploitable
| underclass of unemployed persons is somehow the most
| profitable choice for the captains of industry. They are
| exploitable because this is not a welfare state, and our
| economic safety net is tissue-paper thin. We can, therefore,
| assume their labor can be had at far less than its real
| worth, and thus _someone_ will find a way to turn a profit
| off it. Possibly the Silicon Valley douchebags who caused the
| problem in the first place.
| t-writescode wrote:
| > > it doesn't address the social consequences of rapid
| onset and large scale unemployment
|
| > It'll be a slow burn, though.
|
| Have you been watching the current developer market?
|
| It's really, really rough out here for unemployed software
| developers.
| ccorcos wrote:
| What makes you so concerned about rapid onset of we haven't
| seen any significant change in the (USA) unemployment rate?
|
| And there are some laws of nature that are relevant such as
| supply-demand economics. Technology often makes things
| cheaper which unlocks more demand. For example, I'm sure many
| small businesses would love to build custom software to help
| them operate but it's too expensive.
| DenisM wrote:
| It's an interesting argument, thanks.
|
| A good analogy would be web development transition from c
| to java to php to Wordpress. I feel like it did make web
| sites creation for small business more accessible. OTOH a
| parallel trend was also mass-scale production of industry-
| specific platforms, such as Yahoo Shopping.
|
| It's not clear to me which trend won in the end.
| ccorcos wrote:
| It's possible that both are true. "Why" questions tend to
| be mathematically overdetermined. There are many correct
| explanations (equations) and fewer variables than
| equations.
| anthomtb wrote:
| > Huge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since
| the advent of computers
|
| One of which was the occupation of being a computer!
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| Anecdotal, but AI was what enabled me to learn French, when I
| was doing that. Before LLMs, I would've had to pay a lot more
| money to get the class time I'd need, but the availability of
| Google Translate and DeepL meant that some meaningful, casual
| learning was within reach. I could reasonably study, try to
| figure things out, and have questions for the teachers the two
| or three times a week I had lessons.
|
| Nowadays I'm learning my parents' tongue (Cantonese) and
| Mandarin. It's just comical how badly the LLMs do sometimes. I
| swear they roll a natural 1 on a d20 and then just randomly
| drop a phrase. Or at least that's my head canon. They're just
| playing DnD on the side.
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| The classic example is the 50's/60's photograph of an entire
| floor of a tall office building replaced by single spreadsheet.
| This passed without comment.
| joshdavham wrote:
| This type of hype is pretty perplexing to me.
|
| Supposing that you are trying to increase AI adoption among
| white-collar workers, why try to scare the shit out them in the
| process? Or is he moreso trying to sell to the C-suite?
| taormina wrote:
| He's selling exclusively to the C-suite. Why would he care
| about the white collar workers? He wouldn't be trying to put
| them all out of work if he cares
| chr15m wrote:
| Because it creates FOMO which creates sales.
| globalnode wrote:
| i really liked this article, it puts into perspective how great
| claims require great proof, and so far all we've heard are great
| claims. i love ml tech but i just dont trust it to replace a
| human completely. sure it can augment roles but thats not the
| vision we're being sold.
| osigurdson wrote:
| The real value is going to be in areas that neither machines nor
| humans could do previously.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Historically, people have been pretty good at predicting the
| effects of new technologies on existing jobs. But quite bad at
| predicting the new jobs / careers / industries that are
| eventually created with those technologies.
|
| This is why free market economies create more wealth over time
| than centrally planned economies: the free market allows more
| people to try seemingly crazy ideas, and is faster to recognize
| good ideas and reallocate resources toward them.
|
| In the absence of reliable prediction, quick reaction is what
| wins.
|
| Anyway, even if AI does end up "destroying" tons of existing
| white collar jobs, that does not necessarily imply mass
| unemployment. But it's such a common inference that it has its
| own pejorative: Luddite.
|
| And the flip side of Ludddism is what we see from AI boosters
| now: invoking a massive impact on current jobs as a shorthand to
| create the impression of massive capability. It's a form of
| marketing, as the CNN piece says.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| So, we are doomed to work forever, just maybe different jobs?
| absurdo wrote:
| Basically yeah. You live in a world of layered servitude and,
| short of a financial windfall that hoists you up for some
| time, you're basically guaranteed to work your entire life,
| and grow old, frail and poor. This isn't a joke, it's reality
| for many people that's hidden from us to keep us deluded.
| Similar to my other mini-rant, I don't have any valid answers
| to the problem at hand. Just acknowledging how fucked things
| are for humanity.
| aianus wrote:
| No, it's quite easy to make $1mm in a rich country and move
| to a poorer country and chill if you so desire.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It's not _that_ easy, as in, you can make the money but
| the logistics of moving and living in another country are
| always harder than expected, both culturally and
| bureaucratically.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| >logistics of moving and living in another country are
| always harder than expected, both culturally and
| bureaucratically.
|
| You know what's hard? Moving from a poor "shithole" to a
| wealthy country, with expensive accommodation, where a
| month of rent is something you'd save up months for.
|
| Knowing and displaying (faking really) 'correct' cultural
| status signifiers to secure a good job. And all the
| associated stress, etc.
|
| Moving the other direction to a low-cost-of-living or
| poor shithole country is extremely easy in comparison
| with a fat stack of resources.
|
| You literally don't have to worry about _anything_ in the
| least.
| eastbound wrote:
| Apart from the tax office suing you in oblivion because
| the startup you've founded is now worth 10x its revenue,
| so you need to pay 40% CGT with only 1/10th the income
| (at least that's the French exit tax).
|
| So basically once you are rich, you have to choose to
| leave most of it on the table to go to a poor country.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > make $1mm in a rich country and move to a poorer
| country and chill if you so desire
|
| i wonder if such trends are good for said poorer country
| (e.g real estate costs) in the long run?
| lurk2 wrote:
| > No, it's quite easy to make $1mm in a rich country and
| move to a poorer country and chill if you so desire.
|
| On an aggregate level this is true and contrary to the
| prevailing sentiment of doomer skepticism, the developed
| world is usually still the best place to do it. On an
| individual level, a lot of things can go wrong between
| here and a million dollars.
| ta12653421 wrote:
| ++1
|
| Fun fact what most people ignore: There have been around
| ~7000 people on Mount Everest - while the US alone has
| around 300.000 / 350.000 people earning more than 1
| million USD a year.
|
| So - its clear: Is more easier to become an "income-
| millionaire" than to climb Mount Everest! :-)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Of course. I mean this has never not been the case unless you
| are independently wealthy. Work always expands, that's why
| it's a fallacy to think that if we just had more productivity
| gains that we'd work half the time; no, there are always new
| things to do tomorrow that were not possible yesterday.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Just like the Red Queen.
|
| You have to always keep on moving just to stay in the same
| place.
| tw04 wrote:
| But also it potentially means mass unemployment and we have
| literally no plan in place if that happens beyond complete
| societal collapse.
|
| Even if you think all the naysayers are "luddites", do you
| really think it's a great idea to have no backup plan beyond
| "whupps we all die or just go back to the Stone Age"?
| ccorcos wrote:
| > do you really think it's a great idea to have no backup
| plan
|
| What makes you think people haven't made back up plans?
|
| Or are you saying government needs to do it for us?
| argomo wrote:
| Ah yes the old "let's make individuals responsible for
| solving societal problems" bit. Nevermind that the state is
| sometimes the only entity capable of addressing the
| situation at scale.
| ccorcos wrote:
| Yes, I believe individuals should take responsibility for
| themselves and their future prosperity. We all know what
| happens when you don't...
|
| History has shown us quite clearly what happens if
| governments, and not individuals, are responsible for
| finding employment.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| I fail to understand what it is you are suggesting a 20
| something year old is supposed to do to prepare their
| backup plan.
|
| They should all just find a way be set for life within
| the next 3 years, is this your proposal ?
| ccorcos wrote:
| You're supposed to learn skills that others are willing
| to pay you for.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| You are a responding in a thread about what to do in the
| event of AI replacing most humans at skills others are
| willing to pay for, so clearly, this is a 0 value answer.
| ccorcos wrote:
| I guess I don't buy into the premise. Aren't there some
| things you'd prefer to pay a human for than a robot?
|
| I don't think this 3 year timeline is realistic and
| pondering what we're going to do in 20 years is
| unpredictable.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| That is literally part of the deal of not living in a
| literal dictatorship. It is your responsibility to solve
| societal problems. I mean, geeze what did they teach in
| civic classes in your generation?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| So if you believe that it is your individual
| responsibility to solve societal problems, and assuming
| you believe in the possibility of human-driven mitigation
| of climate change: presumably you individually are
| solving that, by devoting your life to it? Or do you not
| _really_ mean it 's your individual responsibility?
| ccorcos wrote:
| People have freedom to choose their responsibilities.
| Some choose to work on solving society's problems, others
| don't.
|
| What's a better alternative?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| We actually have many backup plans. The most effective ones
| will be the new business plans that unlock investment which
| is what creates new jobs. But behind that are a large set of
| government policies and services that help people who have
| lost work. And behind that are private resources like
| charities, nonprofits, even friends and family.
|
| People don't want society to collapse. So if you think it's
| something that people can prevent, feel comforted that
| everyone is trying to prevent it.
| alluro2 wrote:
| Compared to 30-40 years ago, I believe many in the US would
| argue that society has already collapsed to a significant
| extent, with regards to healthcare, education, housing,
| cost of life, homelessness levels etc.
|
| If these mechanisms you mention are in place and
| functioning, why is there, for example, such large growth
| of the economic inequality gap?
| nopinsight wrote:
| My thesis is that this could lead to a booming market for
| "pink-collar" service jobs. A significant latent demand exists
| for more and better services in developed countries.
|
| For instance, upper-middle-class and middle-class individuals
| in countries like India and Thailand often have access to
| better services in restaurants, hotels, and households compared
| to their counterparts in rich nations.
|
| Elderly care and health services are two particularly important
| sectors where society could benefit from allocating a larger
| workforce.
|
| Many others will have roles to play building, maintaining, and
| supervising _robots_. Despite rapid advances, they will not be
| as dexterous, reliable, and generally capable as adult humans
| for many years to come. (See: Moravec 's paradox).
| digdugdirk wrote:
| More people need to understand the actual history of the
| luddites. The real issue was the usage of mechanized equipment
| to overwhelm an entire sector of the economy of the day -
| destroying the labor value of a vast swath of craftspeople and
| knocking them down a peg on the social ladder.
|
| Those people who were able to get work were now subject to a
| much more dangerous workplace and forced into a more rigid
| legalized employer/employee structure, which was a relatively
| new "corporate innovation" in the grand scheme of things. This,
| of course, allowed/required the state to be on the hook for
| enforcement of the workplace contract, and you can bet that
| both public and private police forces were used to enforce that
| contract with violence.
|
| Certainly something to think about for all the users on this
| message board who are undoubtedly more highly skilled
| craftspeople than most, and would never be caught up in a mass
| economic displacement driven by the introduction of a new
| technological innovation.
|
| At the very least, it's worth a skim through the Wikipedia
| article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
| csomar wrote:
| I think the takeaway is that interest rates have to be
| maintained relatively high as the ZIRP era has showed that it
| breaks the free market. There is a reason why the Trump wants
| to lower the interest rate.
|
| Sure it is painful but a ZIRP economy doesn't listen to the end
| consumers. No reason to innovate and create crazy ideas if you
| have plenty of income.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| When steam engines came along, an awful lot of people argued
| that being able to pump water from mines faster, while
| inarguably useful, would not have any broad economical impact.
| Only madmen saw the Newcomen engine and thought "ah,
| railways!". Those madmen became extraordinarily wealthy. Vast
| categories of work were eliminated, others were created.
|
| I think this situation is very similar in terms of the
| underestimation of scope of application, however differs in the
| availability of new job categories - but then that may be me
| underestimating new categories which are as yet as unforeseen
| as stokers and train conductors once were.
| qgin wrote:
| I often see people say "AI can't do ALL of my job, so that means
| my job is safe.
|
| But what this means at scale, over time, is that if AI can do 80%
| of your job, AI will do 80% of your job. The remaining 20% human-
| work part will be consolidated and become the full time job of
| 20% of the original headcount while the remaining 80% of the
| people get fired.
|
| AI does not need to do 100% of any job (as that job is defined
| today ) to still result in large scale labor reconfigurations.
| Jobs will be redefined and generally shrunk down to what still
| legitimately needs human work to get it done.
|
| As an employee, any efficiency gains you get from AI belong to
| the company, not you.
| sram1337 wrote:
| ...or your job goes from commanding a $200k/yr salary to
| $60k/yr. Hopefully that's enough to pay your mortgage.
| tdeck wrote:
| Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different
| way, because here's how I see it.
|
| If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't
| it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if
| these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the
| end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and
| fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in
| innovative products and improvements to existing products. And
| we'd expect that to be in a way that would be obvious to
| customers and users, not just in the form of some blog post or
| earnings call.
|
| For cost center work, this would lead to layoffs right away,
| sure. But companies that make and sell software should be
| capitalizing on this, and only laying people off when they get to
| the point of "we just don't know what to do with all this extra
| productivity, we're all out of ideas!". I haven't seen _one
| single_ company in this situation. So that makes me think that
| these decisions are hype-driven short term thinking.
| CMCDragonkai wrote:
| It's cause there are still bottlenecks. AI is definitely
| boosting productivity in specific areas, but the total system
| output is bottlenecked. I think we will see these bottlenecks
| get rerouted or refactored in the coming years.
| tdeck wrote:
| What do you think the main bottlenecks are right now?
| kergonath wrote:
| Quality control, for one. The state of commercial software
| is appalling. Writing code itself is not enough to get a
| useable piece of software.
|
| LLMs are also not very useful for long term strategy or to
| come up with novel features or combinations of features.
| They also are not great at maintaining existing code,
| particularly without comprehensive test suites. They are
| good at coming up with tests for boiler plate code, but not
| really for high-level features.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Considering how software is increasingly made out of
| seperate components and services, integration testing can
| become pretty damn difficult. So quite often, the public
| release is the first serious integration test.
|
| From my experience, this stuff is rarely introduced to
| save developers from typing in the code for their logic.
| Actual reasons I observe:
|
| 1. SaaS sales/marketing pushing their offerings on
| decision makers - software being a pop culture, this
| works pretty well. It can be hard for internal staff to
| push back on What Everyone Is Using (TM). Even if it
| makes little to no sense.
|
| 2. Outsourcing liability, maintenance, and general
| "having to think about it". Can be entirely valid, but
| often it indeed comes from an "I don't want to think of
| it" kind of place.
|
| I don't see this stuff slowing down GenAI or not, mainly
| because it has usually little to do with saving time or
| money.
| CMCDragonkai wrote:
| Informational complexity bottlenecks. So many things are
| shackled to human decision making loops. If we were truly
| serious, we would unshackle everything and let it run wild.
| Would be chaotic, but chaos create strange attractors.
| esperent wrote:
| > It's cause there are still bottlenecks
|
| How do you know this? What are the bottlenecks?
| _heimdall wrote:
| > AI is definitely boosting productivity in specific areas
|
| What makes you so sure of the productivity boost when we
| aren't seeing a change in output?
| jayd16 wrote:
| We'll take cheaper over faster but is that the case? If it's
| not cheaper or faster what is the point?
| AznHisoka wrote:
| "we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and
| fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in
| innovative products and improvements to existing products."
|
| Shipping features faster != innovation or improvements to
| existing products
| tdeck wrote:
| Granting that those don't fully overlap, is that relevant to
| the point? I'm not seeing either.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Because theyre just pushing out stuff that nobody mighy
| even need or want to buy. Because its not even necessarily
| leading to more revenue. Software companies arent
| factories. More stuff doesnt mean more $$$ made
| ngruhn wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think it does. Even if customers don't
| want all that extra stuff and will never use it, it sells
| better.
| switchbak wrote:
| Our jobs are full of a lot more than just writing code. In
| my case it seems like it's helping to accelerate a portion
| of the dev cycle, but that's a fairly smart portion, say
| 20%, and even a big impact on that just gets dominated by
| the other phases that haven't been accelerated.
|
| I'm not as bullish as some are on the impact of AI, but it
| does feel nice when you can deliver something in a fraction
| of the time it used to take. For me, it's more useful as a
| research and idea exploration tool, less so about writing
| code. Part of that is that I'm in Scala land, so it just
| tends to not work as well as a more mainstream language.
|
| We haven't used it to help the product management and
| solution exploration side, which seems to be a big
| constraint on our execution.
| epgui wrote:
| And?
| ccorcos wrote:
| AI tools seem to be most useful for little things. Fixing a
| little bug, making a little change. But those things aren't
| always very visible or really move the needle.
|
| It may help you build a real product feature quicker, but AI is
| not necessarily doing the research and product design which is
| probably the bottleneck for seeing real impact.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| If they're fixing all the little bugs that should give
| everyone much more time to think about product design and do
| the research.
| ccorcos wrote:
| Assuming a well functioning business, yes.
| jajko wrote:
| Or a lot of small fixes all over the place. Yet in reality
| we dont see this anywhere, not sure what exactly that
| means.
|
| Maybe overall complexity creeping up rolls over any small
| gains, or devs are becoming more lazy and just copy paste
| llms output without a serious look at it?
|
| My company didnt even adapt or allow use of llms in any way
| for anything so far (private client data security is more
| important than any productivity gains, which anyway seems
| questionable when looking around.. and serious data
| breaches can end up with fines in hundreds of millions
| ballpark easily).
| ccorcos wrote:
| It's also possible that all of these gains fixing bugs
| are simply improving infrastructure and stability rather
| than finding new customers and opening up new markets.
|
| Having worked on software infrastructure, it's a
| thankless job. You're most heroic work has little
| visibility and the result is that nothing catastrophic
| happened.
|
| So maybe products will have better reliability and fewer
| bugs? And we all know there's crappy software that makes
| tons of money, so there isn't necessarily a strong
| correlation.
| wcfrobert wrote:
| If AI makes everyone 10x engineers, you can 2x the productive
| output while reducing headcount by 5x.
|
| Luckily software companies are not ball bearings factories.
| tikhonj wrote:
| unluckily, too many corporate managers seem to think they are
| :/
| danenania wrote:
| > If AI makes everyone 10x engineers, you can 2x the
| productive output while reducing headcount by 5x.
|
| Why wouldn't you just 10x the productive output instead?
| wcfrobert wrote:
| I don't think it would be trivial to increase demand by 10x
| (or even 2x) that quickly. Eventually, a publicly traded
| company will get a bad quarter, at which point it's much
| easier to just reduce the number of employees. In both
| scenarios, there's no need for any new-hire.
| danenania wrote:
| I think there's _always_ demand for more software and
| more features. Have you ever seen a team without a huge
| backlog? The demand is effectively infinite.
| bjt12345 wrote:
| The problem seems to be two-fold.
|
| Firstly, the capex is currently too high for all but the few.
|
| This is a rather obvious statement, sure. But the impact is a
| lot of companies "have tried language models and they didn't
| work", and the capex is laughable.
|
| Secondly, there's a corporate paralysis over AI.
|
| I received a panicky policy statement written in legalaise
| forbidding employees from using LLMs in any form. Written both
| out of a panic regarding intellectual property leaking but also
| a panic about how to manage and control staff moving forward.
|
| I think a lot of corporates still clutch at this view that AI
| will push the workforce costs down and are secretly wasting a
| lot money failing at this.
|
| The waste is extraordinary, but it's other peoples money (it's
| actually the shareholders money) and it's seen as being all for
| a good cause and not something to discuss after it's gone. I
| can never get it discussed.
|
| Meanwhile, at a grass roots level, I see AI is being embraced
| and is improving productivity, every second IT worker is using
| it, it's just that because of this corporate panicking and
| mismanagement, it's value is not yet measured.
| tdeck wrote:
| This is a good reminder that every org is different. However
| some companies like Microsoft are aggressively pushing AI
| tools internally, to a degree that is almost cringe.
| bjt12345 wrote:
| But this is often a mixture of these two things.
|
| The tools are often cringe because the capex was laughable.
| E.g. one solution, the trial was done using public LLMs and
| then they switched over to an internally built LLM which is
| terrible.
|
| Or, secondly, the process is often cringe because the
| corporate aims are laughable.
|
| I've had an argument with a manager making a multi-million
| dollar investment in a zero coding solution that we ended
| up throwing in the bin years later.
|
| They argued that they are going with this bad product
| because "they don't want to have to manage a team of
| developers".
|
| They responded "this product costs millions of dollars, how
| dare you?"
|
| How dare me indeed...
|
| They promptly left the company but it took 5 years before
| it was finally canned, and plenty of people wasted 5 years
| of their career on a dead-end product.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I don't want to shill for LLMs-for-devs, but I think this
| is excellent corporate strategy by Microsoft. They are dog-
| fooding LLMs-for-devs. In a sense, this is R&D using real
| world tests. It is a product manager's dream.
|
| The Google web-based office productivity suite is similar.
| I heard a rumor that at some point Google senior mgmt said
| that nearly all employees (excluding accounting) must use
| Google Docs. I am sure that they fixed a huge number of
| bugs plus added missing/blocking feature, which made the
| product much more competitive vs MSFT Office. Fifteen years
| ago, Google Docs was a curiosity -- an experiment for just
| how complex web apps could become. Today, Google Docs is
| the premiere choice for _new_ small businesses. It is
| cheaper than MSFT Office, and "good enough".
| singron wrote:
| Google docs has gotten a little better in that time, but
| it's honestly surprisingly unchanged. I think what really
| changed is that we all stopped wanting to layout docs for
| printing and became happier with the simpler feature set
| (along with collaboration and distribution).
| bawolff wrote:
| > Firstly, the capex is currently too high for all but the
| few.
|
| > This is a rather obvious statement,
|
| Nobody is saying companies have to make LLMs themselves.
|
| SASS is a thing.
| bjt12345 wrote:
| By SAAS I assume you mean public LLMs, the problem is the
| hand-wringing occurring over intellectual property leaking
| from the company. Companies are actually writing policies
| banning their use.
|
| In regards to Private LLMs, the situation has become
| disappointing in the 6 months.
|
| I can only think of Mistral as being a genuine vendor.
|
| But given the limitations in context window size, fine
| tuning is still necessary, and even that requires capex
| that I rarely see.
|
| But my comment comes from the fact that I heard from
| several sources, smart people say "we tried language models
| at work and it failed".
|
| However in my discussion with them, they have no concept of
| the size of the datacentres used by the webscalers.
| singron wrote:
| It's not clear to me that fine-tuning is even capex. If
| you fine tune new models regularly, that's opex. If you
| mean literally just the GPUs, you would presumably just
| rent them right? (Either from cloud providers for small
| runs or the likes of sfcompute for large runs) Or do you
| imagine 24/7 training?
| grumpymuppet wrote:
| The problem with this sort of analysis is that it's incremental
| and balanced across a large institution usually.
|
| I think the reality is less like a switch and more like there
| are just certain jobs that get easier and you just need fewer
| people overall.
|
| And you DO see companies laying off people in large numbers
| fairly regularly.
| simonsarris wrote:
| > And you DO see companies laying off people in large numbers
| fairly regularly.
|
| Sure but, so far, too regularly to be AI-gains-driven (at
| least in software). We have some data on software job
| postings and the job apocalypse, and corresponding layoffs,
| coincided with the end of ultra-low interest rates. If AI had
| a recent effect this year or last, its quite tiny in
| comparison.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr
|
| so one can argue more is to come, but its hard to see how its
| had a real effect on jobs/layoffs thus far.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| Layoffs happen because cash is scarce. In fact, cash is so
| scarce for anything that's not "AI" that it's basically
| nonexistent for startup fundraising purposes.
| ivape wrote:
| Companies are not accepting that their entire business will
| mostly go away. They are mostly frogs boiling in water, that's
| why they are kinda just incorporating these little chat bots
| and LLMs into their business, but the truth of the matter is
| it's all going away and it's impossible to believe. Take
| something like JIRA, it's entirely laughable because a simple
| LLM can handle entire project management with freaking voice
| with zero programming. They just don't believe that's the
| reality, we're talking about Kodak moment.
|
| Worker productivity is secondary to business destruction, which
| is the primary event we're really waiting for.
| nradov wrote:
| That's silly. You still need a way to track and prioritize
| tasks even if you use voice input. Jira may be replaced with
| something better, built around an LLM from the ground up. But
| the basic project management requirements will never go away.
| ivape wrote:
| Yes, that's quite easy. I say "Hey reorganize the tasks
| like-so, prioritize this, like so", and if I _really_ need
| to, I can go ahead and hook up some function calls but I
| suspect this will be unnecessary with a few more LLM
| iterations (if even that). You can keep running from how
| powerful these LLMs are, but I 'll just sit and wait for
| the business/startup apocalypse (which is coming). Jira
| will not be replaced by something better, it'll be replaced
| by some weekend project a high schooler makes. The very
| fact that it's valued at over a billion dollars in the
| market is just going to be a profound rug pull soon enough.
|
| So let me keep it real, I am shorting Atlassian over the
| next 5 years. Asana is another, there's plenty of startup
| IPOs that need to be shorted to the ground basically.
| hooverd wrote:
| What sort of assurances can I get from that weekend
| project? I think we're going to build even more obscene
| towers of complexity as nobody knows how anything works
| anymore, because they choose not to.
| ivape wrote:
| What assurances do you get from the internals of an LLM?
| ofjcihen wrote:
| I think in your rush to respond you may have accidentally
| made a solid point against your argument.
| ivape wrote:
| No not really. The people that are behind the LLMs don't
| really know why it keeps getting better with more compute
| and data, they are literally just trying shit. Yet, the
| world has seen just how useful the thing is. We don't
| have any assurances from the damn thing, yet it's the
| most useful thing we ever made (at least software-wise).
| bdangubic wrote:
| this is a choice to make though... smart teams will know
| how everything works...
| petersellers wrote:
| If replacing Jira is really as easy as you claim, then it
| would have happened by now. At the very least, we'd be
| getting hit by a deluge of HN posts and articles about
| how to spin up your very own project management
| application with an LLM.
|
| I think that this sentiment, along with all of the hype
| around AI in general, is failing to grasp a lot of the
| complexity around software creation. I'm not just talking
| about writing the code for a new application - I'm
| talking about maintaining that application, ensuring that
| it executes reliably and correctly, thinking about the
| features and UX required to make it as frictionless as
| possible (and voice input isn't the solution there, I'm
| very confident of that).
| ivape wrote:
| You are not understanding what I am saying. I am saying
| its the calm before the storm before everyone realizes
| they are paying a bunch of startups for literally no
| comparative value given AI. First the agile people are
| going to get fired, then the devs are just going to go
| "oh yeah I just manage everything in my LLM".
|
| I'll be here in a year, we can have this exact discussion
| again.
| petersellers wrote:
| I understand what you are saying, I just don't agree with
| it.
|
| "AI" is not going to wholesale replace software
| development anytime soon, and certainly not within a
| year's time because of the reasons I mentioned. The way
| you worded your post made it sound like you believed that
| capability was already here - nevertheless, whether you
| think it's here now or will be here in a year, both
| estimates are way off IMO.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > I'll be here in a year
|
| Me too. Mostly so I can laugh though.
| subpixel wrote:
| I agree with you to a point.
|
| In smaller businesses some roles won't need to be hired
| anymore.
|
| Meanwhile in big corps, some roles may transition from
| being the source of presumed expertise to being one neck
| to choke.
|
| I'd love it not to be true, but the truth is Jira is to
| projects what Slack/Teams are to messaging. When
| everybody is a project manager Jira gets paid more, not
| less.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| If there was only one consequence, and that consequence
| is Jira and Atlassian being destroyed, then I am all for
| it!
|
| Realistically though, they might incorporate that high
| schooler's software into Jira, to make it even more
| bloated and they will sell it to your employer soon
| enough! Then team lead Chris will enter your birthday and
| your vacation days in it too, to enable it to also do
| vacation planning, without asking you. Next thing is,
| that Atlassian sells you out and you receive unsolicited
| AI calls for your holiday planning.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > Take something like JIRA, it's entirely laughable because a
| simple LLM can handle entire project management with freaking
| voice with zero programming
|
| When I used a not-so-simple LLM to make it act as a text
| adventure game it could barely keep track of the items in my
| inventory, so TBH i am a little bit skeptical that an LLM can
| handle entire project management - even without voice.
|
| Perhaps it might be able to use tools/MCP/RPC to call out to
| real project management software and pretend to be your
| accountant/manager/whoever, but i wouldn't call that the LLM
| itself doing the project management task - and someone would
| need to write that project management software.
| ivape wrote:
| There are innovative ways to accomplish the consistency you
| seek for the example application you mentioned. They are
| coming a lot sooner than you think, but hey this thread is
| a bit of a poker game before the flop, I'm just placing my
| bet - you can call the bluff.
|
| We just have to wait for the cards to flip, and that's
| happening on a quadratic curve (some say exponential).
| kraig911 wrote:
| Effort in this equation isn't measured in man hours saved but
| dollars saved. We all know this is BS and isn't going to
| manifest this way. It's tantamount for giving framers a nailgun
| versus a hammer. We'll still be climbing the same rafters and
| doing the same work.
| topspin wrote:
| "shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output?"
|
| No.
|
| The bottleneck isn't intellectual productivity. The bottleneck
| is a legion of other things; regulation, IP law, marketing,
| etc. The executive email writers and meeting attenders have a
| swarm of business considerations ricocheting around in their
| heads in eternal battle with each other. It takes a lot of
| supposedly brilliant thinking to safely monetize all the
| things, and many of the factors involved are not manifest in
| written form anywhere, often for legal reasons.
|
| One place where AI is being disruptive is research: where
| researchers are applying models in novel ways and making
| legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields. Another
| is art "creatives": graphic artists in particular. They're
| early victims and likely to be fully supplanted in the near
| future. A _little_ further on and it 'll be writers, actors,
| etc.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Maybe this means that LLMs are ultimately good for _small_
| buisness. If large buisness is constrained by being large and
| LLMs are equally accesible to 5 people or 100 then surely
| what we will see is increased productivity in small
| companies?
| topspin wrote:
| My direct experience has been that even _very_ small tech
| businesses contend with IP issues as well. And they don 't
| have the means to either risk or deliberately instigate a
| fight.
| bawolff wrote:
| Even still, in theory this should free up more money to hire
| more lawyers, markerters, etc. The effect should still be
| there presuming the market isn't saturated with new ideas .
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Something else will get expensive in the meantime, e.g. it
| doesn't matter how much you earn, landlords will always
| increase rent to the limit because a living space is a
| basic necessity
| bawolff wrote:
| No, landlords will increase rent as much as they can
| because they like money (they call it capitalism for a
| reason). This is true of all goods, both essential and
| non-essential. All businesses follow the rule of supply
| and demand when setting prices or quickly go out of
| business.
|
| In the scenario being discussed - if a bunch of companies
| hired a whole bunch of lawyers, markerters, etc that
| might make salaries go up due to increased demand (but
| probably not super high amoung as tech isnt the only
| industry in the world). That still first requires
| companies to be hiring more of these types of people for
| that effect to happen, so we should still see some of the
| increased output even if there is a limiting factor. We
| would also notice the salaray of those professions going
| up, which so far hasn't happened.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| you say no for no reason. read what I wrote again
| bawolff wrote:
| Perhaps you could more clearly articulate your point if
| you think i am missing it.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| >A little further on and it'll be writers, actors, etc.
|
| The tech is going to have to be absolutely flawless,
| otherwise the uncanny-valley nature of AI "actors" in a movie
| will be as annoying as when the audio and video aren't
| perfectly synced in a stream. At least that's how I see it..
| Izkata wrote:
| This was made a little over a week ago: https://www.reddit.
| com/r/IndiaTech/comments/1ksjcsr/this_vid...
|
| For most of them I'm not seeing any of those issues.
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| I get what you mean, but the last year has been a story
| of sudden limits and ceilings of capability. The (damned
| impressive) video you post is a bunch of extremely brief
| snippets strung together. I'm not yet sure we can move
| substantially beyond that to something transformative or
| pervasively destructive.
|
| A couple years ago, we thought the trend was without
| limits - a five second video would turn into a five
| minute video, and keep going from there. But now I wonder
| if perhaps there are built in limits to how far things
| can go without having a data center with a billion Nvidia
| cards and a dozen nuclear reactors serving them power.
|
| Again, I don't know the limits, but we've seen in the
| last year some sudden walls pop up that change our sense
| of the trajectory down to something less "the future is
| just ten months away."
| genewitch wrote:
| Approximately 1 second was how long AI could hold it
| together. If you had a lot of free time you could extend
| that out a bit, but it'll mess something up. So generally
| people who make them will run it slow-motion. This is the
| first clip I've seen with it at full speed.
|
| The quick cuts thing is a huge turnoff so if they have a
| 15 second clip later on, I missed it.
|
| When I say "1second" I mean that's what I was doing with
| automatic1111 a couple years ago. And every video I've
| seen is the same 30-60 generated frames...
| meander_water wrote:
| I wonder if this is going to change the ad/marketing
| industry. People generally put up with shitty ads, and
| these will be much cheaper to produce. I dread what's
| coming next.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| There might be a reason it is a series of 3 second clips
| csomar wrote:
| > where researchers are applying models in novel ways and
| making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other
| fields.
|
| Can you give an example, say in Medicine, where AI made a
| significant advancement? That is we are talking neural
| networks and up (ie: LLM) and not some local optimization.
| pkroll wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849
|
| "Our study suggests that LLMs have achieved superhuman
| performance on general medical diagnostic and management
| reasoning"
| squigz wrote:
| This isn't really applying LLMs to research in novel
| ways.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > One place where AI is being disruptive is research: where
| researchers are applying models in novel ways and making
| legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields.
|
| Great point. The perfect example: (From Wiki):
| > In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded
| the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research
| contributions for protein structure prediction.
|
| AFAIK: They are talking about DeepMind AlphaFold.
|
| Related: (Also from Wiki): > Isomorphic
| Labs Limited is a London-based company which uses artificial
| intelligence for drug discovery. Isomorphic Labs was founded
| by Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| I think AlphaFold is where current AI terminology starts
| breaking down. Because in some real sense, AlphaFold is
| primarily a statistical model - yes, it's interesting that
| they developed it using ML techniques, but from the use
| standpoint it's little different than perturbation based
| black boxes that were used before that for 20 years.
|
| Yes, it's an example of ML used in science (other examples
| include NN based force fields for molecule dynamics
| simulations and meteorological models) - but a biologist or
| meteorologist usually cares little how the software package
| they are using works (excluding the knowledge of different
| limitation of numerical vs statistical models).
|
| The whole thing "but look AI in science" seem to me like
| Motte-and-bailey argument to imply the use of AGI-like MLLM
| agents that perform independent research - currently a much
| less successful approach.
| vhcr wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
| immibis wrote:
| Yeah, but also AI now means LLMs and they're not LLMs.
| pera wrote:
| Bullshit: Chatbots are not failing to demonstrate a tangible
| increase in companies' output because of regulations and IP
| law, they are failing because they are still not good for the
| job.
|
| LLMs only exist because the companies developing them are so
| ridiculously powerful that can completely ignore the rule of
| law, or if necessary even change it (as they are currently
| trying to do here in Europe).
|
| Remember we are talking about a technology created by
| torrenting 82 TB of pirated books, and that's just one single
| example.
|
| "Steal all the users, steal all the music" and then lawyer
| up, as Eric Schmidt said at Stanford a few months ago.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| The things you mention in the legion of other things are
| actually things LLMs do better than intellectual
| productivity. They can spew entire libraries of marketing bs,
| summarize decades of legal precedents and fill out mountains
| of red tape checklists.
|
| They have trouble with debugging obvious bugs though.
| Teever wrote:
| Maybe in some industries and for some companies and their
| products but not all.
|
| Like let's take operating systems as an example. If there are
| great productivity gains from LLMs while aren't companies
| like Apple, Google and MS shipping operating systems with
| vastly less bugs and cleaning up backlogged user feature
| requests?
| godelski wrote:
| > shipping features and fixes faster than ever before
|
| Meanwhile Apple duplicated my gf's contract, creating duplicate
| birthdays on my calendar. It couldn't find duplicates despite
| matching name, nickname, phone number, birthdays, and that both
| contacts were associated with her Apple account. I manually
| merged and ended up with 3 copies of her birthday in my
| calendar...
|
| Seriously, this shit can be solved with a regex...
|
| The number of issues like these I see is growing exponentially,
| not decreasing. I don't think it's AI though, because it
| started before that. I think these companies are just
| overfitting whatever silly metrics they have decided are best
| econ wrote:
| The days of hating on idea men seem over.
|
| I don't get it either. You hire someone in the hope for ROI.
| Some things work some kinda don't. Now people will be n times
| more productive therefore you should hire fewer people??
|
| That would mean you have no ideas. It says nothing about the
| potential.
| bawolff wrote:
| Reistically its because layoffs have a high reputational cost.
| AI provides an excuse that lets companies do lay offs without
| suffering the reputation hit. In essence AI hype makes layoffs
| cheaper.
|
| Doesnt really matter if AI actually works or not.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I would dispute, that there is no reputation cost, when you
| replace human work with LLMs.
| bawolff wrote:
| Sure, i don't think its none, just less.
|
| It also matters a bit where the reputation cost hits.
| Layoffs can spook investors because it makes it look like
| the company is doing poorly. If the reputation hit for ai
| is to non-investors, then it probably matters less.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Most significant technology takes almost a generation to be
| fully adopted. I think it is unlikely we are seeing the full
| effect of LLM's at the moment.
|
| Content producers are blocking scrapers of their sites to
| prevent AI companies from using their content. I would not
| assume that AI is either inevitable or on a easy path to
| adoption. AI certainly isn't very useful if what it "knows" is
| out of date.
| asadotzler wrote:
| In 10 years with the same amount of money and time that's
| been pumped into AI, still a financial black hole, we had the
| entire broadband internet build out completed and the
| internet was responsible for adding a trillion dollars a year
| to the global economy.
| autobodie wrote:
| No, we would see profits increase, and we have been seeing
| profits increase.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Regarding the impact of LLMs on non-programming tasks, check
| out this one:
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/4f20fbb9-a10f-4a08-9a13-efa1b55dd...
| > The bank [Goldman Sachs] now has 11,000 engineers among its
| 46,000 employees, according to [CEO David] Solomon, and is
| using AI to help draft public filing documents. >
| The work of drafting an S1 -- the initial registration
| prospectus for an IPO -- might have taken a six-person team two
| weeks to complete, but it can now be 95 per cent done by AI in
| minutes, said Solomon. > "The last 5 per cent now
| matters because the rest is now a commodity," he said.
|
| In my eyes, that is major. Junior ibankers are not cheap --
| they make about 150K USD per year minimum (total comp).
| fourside wrote:
| This is certainly interesting and I don't want to readily
| dismiss it, but I sometimes question how reliable these CEO
| anecdotes are. There's a lot of pressure to show Wallstreet
| that you're at the forefront of the AI revolution. It doesn't
| mean no company is achieving great results but that it's hard
| to separate the real anecdotes from the hype.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Claims by companies with an interest in AI without supporting
| documentation are just that, claims, and probably more PR and
| marketing than anything.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I will never understand this argument. If you have a super
| tool, that can magically double your output, why would you
| suddenly double your output publicly? So that you now work
| twice essentially for the same money? You use it to work less,
| your output stays static or marginally improves - that's smart
| play.
|
| Note: I'm talking about your run of the mill SE waggie work,
| not startups where your food is based on your output.
| conradkay wrote:
| That only works if you're one of very few people with the
| tool. Otherwise the rest of your team is now 2x as productive
| as you.
| wiseowise wrote:
| That's assuming they were as productive as me in the first
| place.
| imtringued wrote:
| How would you know? What if they are following your
| strategy and are hiding their "power level"?
| wiseowise wrote:
| If they were hiding their "power level" and maintaining
| my or pre my "power level", what incentive do they have
| to suddenly double it if they were hiding it in the first
| place?
| casualscience wrote:
| In big companies, this is a bit slower due to the need to
| migrate entrenched systems and org charts into newer workflows,
| but I think you are seeing more productivity there too. Where
| this is much more obvious is in indie games and software where
| small agile teams can adopt new ways of working quickly...
|
| E.g. look at the indie games count on steam by year:
| https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492
| bojan wrote:
| The number of critically acclaimed games remains the same
| though. So for now we're getting quantity, but not the
| quality.
| hansmayer wrote:
| Well, it sort of evens out. You see the developers are pushed
| to use the AI to generate a lot of LoC-Slop, but then they have
| to fix all the bugs, security issues and hallucinated packages
| that were thrown in by the magic-machines. But at least some
| deluded MBA can BS about being "AI-first".
| acrooks wrote:
| I wonder if some of this output will take a while to be visible
| en masse.
|
| For example, I founded a SaaS company late last year which has
| been growing very quickly. We are track to pass $1M ARR before
| the company's first birthday. We are fully bootstrapped, 100%
| founder owned. There are 2 of us. And we feel confident we
| could keep up this pace of growth for quite a while without
| hiring or taking capital. (Of course, there's an argument that
| we could accelerate our growth rate with more cash/human
| resources)
|
| Early in my career, at different companies, we often solved
| capacity problems by hiring. But my cofounder and I have been
| able to turn to AI to help with this, and we keep finding
| double digit percentage productivity improvements without
| investing much upfront time. I don't think this would have been
| remotely possible when I started my career, or even just a few
| years ago when AI hadn't really started to take off.
|
| So my theory as to why it doesn't appear to be "painfully
| obvious": you've never heard of most of the businesses getting
| the most value out of this technology, because they're all too
| small. On average, the companies we know about are large. It's
| very difficult for them to reinvent themselves on a dime to
| adapt to new technology - it takes a long time to steer a ship
| - so it will take a while. But small businesses like mine can
| change how we work today and realize the results tomorrow.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Curious, if you don't mind mentioning what AIs you're using
| (besides the obvious Claude, etc) and what for to augment
| your reach?
| diego_moita wrote:
| That is a smart question.
|
| In 1987 the economist Robert Solow said "You can see the
| computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics".
|
| We should remark he said this long before the internet, web and
| mobile, so probably the remark needs an update.
|
| However, I think it cuts through the salesmen hype. Anytime we
| see these kinds of claims we should reply "show me the
| numbers". I'll wait until economists make these big claims,
| will not trust CEOs and salesmen.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > so probably the remark needs an update
|
| Only if you want to add "internet, web, and mobile" before
| "age". Otherwise it doesn't need any change.
|
| But that phrase is about the productivity statistics, not
| about computers or actual productivity.
| zkry wrote:
| I find that this is on point. I've seen a lot of charts on the
| AI-hype side of things showing exponential growth of AI agent
| fleets being used for software development (starting in 2026 of
| course). Take this article for example:
| https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer
|
| Ok, so by 2027 we should be having fleets of autonomous AI
| agents swarming around every bug report and solving it x times
| faster than a human. Cool, so I guess by 2028 buggy software
| will be a thing of the past (for those companies that fully
| adopt AI of course). I'm so excited for a future where IT
| projects stop going overtime and overbudget and deliver more
| value than expected. Can you blame us for thinking this is too
| good to be true?
| vharish wrote:
| Overall, the amount of code that's being deployed to production
| has definitely increased.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| This is like asking if tariffs are so bad, why don't you notice
| large price swings in your local grocer right now?
|
| In complex systems, you can't necessarily perceive the result
| of large internal changes, especially not with the tiny amount
| of vibes sampling you're basing this on.
|
| You really don't have the pulse on how fast the average company
| is shipping new code changes, and I don't see why you think you
| would know that. Shipping new public end-use features isn't
| even a good signal, it's a downstream product and a small
| fraction of software written.
|
| It's like thinking you are picking up a vibe related to changes
| in how many immigrants are coming into the country month to
| month when you walk around the mall.
| mNovak wrote:
| I mean, if a mega corp like Google or Amazon had plus/minus 10%
| of their headcount, as a lay observer I don't think I'd really
| be able to detect the difference in output either.
|
| That doesn't mean it isn't a real productivity gain, but it
| might be spread across enough domains (bugs, features, internal
| tools, experiments) to not be immediately or "painfully
| obvious".
|
| It'll probably get more obvious if we start to see uniquely
| productive small teams seeing success. A sort of "vibe-code
| wonder".
| antithesizer wrote:
| Before enterprise AI systems are allowed to spread their wings,
| first they need to support existing processes. Once they're
| able to generate the same customer-facing results relatively
| autonomously, then they'll have the opportunity to improve
| those results. So the first place to look for their impact is,
| I'd wager, cost-cutting. So watch those quarterly earnings
| reports.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Productivity results in increased profit, not necessarily
| output. They don't need to innovate, make new products, or
| improve things. They just need to make their shit cheaper so
| their profit margin is higher. If you can just keep churning
| out more money, there is no need to improve anything.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I don't think extra productivity in software development ever
| reflected in established companies building things faster.
|
| The more likely scenario is that if those tools make developer
| so much more productive, we would see a large surge in new
| companies, with 1 to 3 developers creating things that were
| deemed too hard for them to do.
|
| But it's still possible that we didn't give people enough time
| yet.
| whstl wrote:
| Any boost of productivity in the coding part is quickly
| absorbed by other inefficiencies in the software-making
| process, unfortunately.
|
| AI also helps immensely in creating those other inefficiencies.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| https://github.com/arthurcolle/mlx.erl
| simonsarris wrote:
| I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP
| was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of
| layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a
| canard for the huge thing that already happened.
|
| just look at this:
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr
|
| In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and
| still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 levels. It may
| never. (Pre-pandemic job postings indexed to 100, its at 61 for
| software)
|
| Maybe AI is having an effect on IT jobs though, look at the
| unique inflection near the start of 2025:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOv
|
| For another point of comparison, construction and nursing job
| postings are higher than they were pre-pandemic (about 120 and
| 116 respectively, where pre-pandemic was indexed to 100. Banking
| jobs still hover around 100.)
|
| I feel like this is almost going to become lost history because
| the AI hype is so self-insistent. People a decade from now will
| think Elon slashed Twitter's employee count by 90% because of
| some AI initiative, and not because he simply thought he could
| run a lot leaner. We're on year 3-4 of a lot of other companies
| wondering the same thing. Maybe AI will play into that
| eventually. But so far companies have needed no such crutch for
| reducing headcount.
| leflambeur wrote:
| It's simply the old Capital vs Labor struggle. CEOs and VCs all
| sing in the same choir, and for the past 3 years the tune is
| "be leaner".
|
| p.s.: I'm a big fan of yours on Twitter.
| godelski wrote:
| > the tune is "be leaner".
|
| Seems like they're happy to start cutting limbs to lose
| weight. It's hard to keep cutting fat if you've been
| aggressively cutting fat for so long. If the last CEO did
| their job there shouldn't be much fat left
| leflambeur wrote:
| yet this will continue until it grounds to a halt.
|
| It's amazing and cringy the level of parroting performed by
| executives. Independent thought is very rare amongst
| business "leaders".
| godelski wrote:
| Let's make the laptops thinner. This way we can clean the
| oil off of the keyboard, putting it on the screen.
|
| At this point I'm not sure it's lack of independent
| thought so much as lack of thought. I'm even beginning to
| question if people even use the products they work on.
| Shouldn't there be more pressure from engineers at this
| point? Is it yes men from top to bottom? Even CEOs seem
| to be yes men in response to share holders but that's
| like being a yes man to the wind.
|
| When I bring this stuff up I'm called negative, a
| perfectionist, or told I'm out of touch with customers
| and or understand "value". Idk, maybe they're right. But
| I'm an engineer. My job is to find problems and fix them.
| I'm not negative, I'm trying to make the product better.
| And they're right, I don't understand value. I'm an
| engineer, it's not my job to make up a number about how
| valuable some bug fix is or isn't. What is this, "Whose
| Line Is It Anyways?" If you want made up dollar values go
| ask the business monkeys, I'm a code monkey
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I'm an engineer, it's not my job to make up a number
| about how valuable some bug fix is or isn't.
|
| So you think all bugs are equally important to fix?
| godelski wrote:
| No, of course not. That would be laughably absurd. So do
| you think I'm trolling or you're misunderstanding?
| Because who isn't familiar with triage?
|
| Do you think every bug's monetary value is perfectly
| aligned with user impact? Certainly that isn't true. If
| it were we'd be much better at security and would be more
| concerned with data privacy. There's no perfect metric
| for anything, and it would similarly be naive to think
| you could place a dollar value on everything, let alone
| accurately. That's what I'm talking about.
|
| My main concern as an engineer is making the best product
| I can.
|
| The main concern of the manager is to make the best
| business.
|
| Don't get confused and think those are the same things.
| Hopefully they align, but they don't always.
| chii wrote:
| > If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat
| left
|
| funny how that fat analogy works...because the head (brain)
| has a lot more fat content than muscles/limbs.
| godelski wrote:
| I never thought to extend the analogy like that, but I
| like it. It's showing. I mean look how people think my
| comments imply I don't know what triage is. Not knowing
| that would be counter to everything I'm saying, which is
| that a lot of these value numbers are poor guestimates at
| best. Happens every time I bring this up. It's absurd to
| think we could measure everything in terms of money. Even
| economists will tell you that's silly
| saubeidl wrote:
| Except Labor in Tech is unique in that it has zero class
| consciousness and often actively roots for their exploiters.
|
| If we were to unionize, we could force this machine to a halt
| and shift the balance of power back in our favor.
|
| But we don't, because many of us have been brainwashed to
| believe we're on the same side as the ones trying to squeeze
| us.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| >If we were to unionize
|
| Last time it was tried the union coerced everyone to root
| for their exploiters. People that unionize aren't magically
| different.
| le-mark wrote:
| What "last time" are you referring to specifically?
| salawat wrote:
| I am also curious.
| digitcatphd wrote:
| As of now yes. But we are still in day 0.1 of GenAI. Do you
| think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and
| 100x cheaper? There will be a turning point but it's not
| happened yet.
| nradov wrote:
| 10x better by what metric? Progress on LLMs has been amazing
| but already appears to be slowing down.
| jaggederest wrote:
| All these folks are once again seeing the first 1/4 of a
| sigmoid curve and extrapolating to infinity.
| drodgers wrote:
| No doubt from me that it's a sigmoid, but how high is the
| plateau? That's also hard to know from early in the
| process, but it would be surprising if there's not a fair
| bit of progress left to go.
|
| Human brains seem like an existence proof for what's
| possible, but it would be surprising if humans also
| represent the farthest physical limits of what's
| technologically possible without the constraints of
| biology (hip size, energy budget etc).
| leoedin wrote:
| Biological muscles are proof that you can make incredibly
| small and forceful actuators. But the state of robotics
| is nowhere near them, because the fundamental
| construction of every robotic actuator is completely
| different.
|
| We've been building actuators for 100s of years and we
| still haven't got anything comparable to a muscle. And
| even if you build a better hydraulic ram or brushless
| motor driven linear actuator you will still never achieve
| the same kind of behaviour, because the technologies are
| fundamentally different.
|
| I don't know where the ceiling of LLM performance will
| be, but as the building blocks are fundamentally
| different to those of biological computers, it seems
| unlikely that the limits will be in any way linked to
| those of the human brain. In much the same way the best
| hydraulic ram has completely different qualities to a
| human arm. In some dimensions it's many orders of
| magnitudes better, but in others it's much much worse.
| lazide wrote:
| Biological muscles come with a lot of baggage, very
| constrained operating environments, and limited
| endurance.
|
| It's not just that 'we don't know how to build them',
| it's that the actuators aren't a standalone part - and we
| don't know how to build (or maintain/run in industrial
| enviroments!) the 'other stuff' economically either.
| audunw wrote:
| I don't think it's hard to know. We're already seeing
| several signs of being near the plateau in terms of
| capabilities. Most big breakthrough these days seems to
| be in areas where we haven't spent the effort in training
| and model engineering. Like recent improvements in video
| generation. So of course we could get improvements in
| areas where we haven't tried to use ML yet.
|
| For text generation, it seems like the fast progress was
| mainly due to feeding the models exponentially more data
| and exponentially more compute power. But we know that
| the growth in data is over. The growth in compute has a
| shifted from a steep curve (just buy more chips) to a
| slow curve (have to make exponentially more factories if
| we want exponentially more chips)
|
| Im sure we will have big improvements in efficiency. Im
| sure nearly everyone will use good LLMs to support them
| in their work, and they may even be able to do all they
| need to do on-device. But that doesn't make the models
| significantly smarter.
| jaggederest wrote:
| The wonderful thing about a sigmoid is that, just as it
| seems like it's going exponential, it goes back to
| linear. So I'd guess we're not going to see 1000x from
| here - I could be wrong, but I think the low hanging
| fruit has been picked. I would be surprised in 10 years
| if AI were 100x better than it is now (per watt, maybe,
| since energy devoted to computing is essentially the
| limiting factor)
|
| The thing about the latter 1/3rd of a sigmoid curve is,
| you're still making good progress, it's just not easy any
| more. The returns have begun to diminish, and I do think
| you could argue that's already happening for LLMs.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Human brains are easy to do, just run evolution for
| neural networks.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Progress so far has been half and half technique and
| brute force. Overall technique has now settled for a few
| years, so that's mostly in the tweaking phase. Brute
| force doesn't scale by itself _and_ semiconductors have
| been running into a wall for the last few years. Those
| (plus stagnating outcomes) seem decent reasons to suspect
| the plateau is neigh.
| elif wrote:
| with autonomous vehicles, the narrative of imperceptibly
| slow incremental change about chasing 9's is still the
| zeitgeist despite an actual 10x improvement in homicidality
| compared to humans already existing.
|
| There is a lag in how humans are reacting to AI which is
| probably a reflexive aspect of human nature. There are so
| many strategies being employed to minimize progress in a
| technology which 3 years ago did not exist and now
| represents a frontier of countless individual disciplines.
| intended wrote:
| This is my favorite thing to point out from the day we
| started talking about autonomous vehicles on tech sites.
|
| If you took a Tesla or a Waymo and dropped into into a
| tier 2 city in India, it will stop moving.
|
| Driving data is cultural data, not data about pure
| physics.
|
| You will never get to full self driving, even with more
| processing power, because the underlying assumptions are
| incorrect. Doing more of the same thing, will not achieve
| the stated goal of full self driving.
|
| You would need to have something like networked driving,
| or government supported networks of driving information,
| to deal with the cultural factor.
|
| Same with GenAI - the tooling factor will not magically
| solve the people, process, power and economic factors.
| binoct wrote:
| One of my favorite things to question about autonomous
| driving is the goalposts. What do you mean the "stated
| goal of full self driving", which is unachievable? Any
| vehicle, anywhere in the world, in any conditions? That
| seems an absurd goal that ignores the very real value in
| having vehicles that do not require drivers and are safer
| than humans but are limited to certain regions.
|
| Absolutely driving is cultural (all things people do are
| cultural) but given 10's of millions of miles driven by
| Waymo, clearly it has managed the cultural factor in the
| places they have been deployed. Modern autonomous driving
| is about how people drive far more than the rules of the
| road, even on the highly regulated streets of western
| countries. Absolutely the constraints of driving in
| Chennai are different, but what is fundamentally
| different? What leads to an impossible leap in processing
| power to operate there?
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| > What do you mean the "stated goal of full self
| driving", which is unachievable? Any vehicle, anywhere in
| the world, in any conditions? That seems an absurd goal
| that ignores the very real value in having vehicles that
| do not require drivers and are safer than humans but are
| limited to certain regions.
|
| I definitely recall reading some thinkpieces along the
| lines of "In the year 203X, there will be no more human
| drivers in America!" which was and still is clearly
| absurd. Just about any stupidly high goalpost you can
| think of has been uttered by someone in the world early
| on.
|
| Anyway, I'd be interested in a breakdown on reliability
| figures in urban vs. suburban vs. rural environments, if
| there is such a thing, and not just the shallow take of
| "everything outside cities is trivial!" I sometimes see.
| Waymo is very heavily skewed toward (a short list of)
| cities, so I'd question whether that's just a matter of
| policy, or whether there are distinct challenges outside
| of them. Self-driving cars that only work in cities would
| be useful to people living there, but they wouldn't
| displace the majority of human driving-miles like some
| want them to.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I mean, even assuming the technical challenges to self-
| driving can be solved, it is obvious that there will
| still be human drivers because some humans enjoy driving,
| just as there are still people who enjoy riding horses
| even after cars replaced horses for normal transport
| purposes. Although as with horses, it is possible that
| human driving will be seen as secondary and limited to
| minor roads in the future.
| intended wrote:
| I'd apprecite that we dont hurry past the acknowledgement
| that self driving will be a cultural artifact. Its been
| championed as a purely technical one, and pointing this
| out has been unpopular since day 1, because it didn't gel
| with the zeitgeist.
|
| As others will attest, when adherence to driving rules is
| spotty, behavior is highly variable and unpredictable.
| You need to have a degree of straight up agression, if
| you want to be able to handle an auto driver who is
| cheating the laws of physics.
|
| Another example of something thats obvious based on
| crimes in India; people can and will come up to your car
| during a traffic jam, tap your chassis to make it sound
| like there was an impact, and then snatch your phone from
| the dashboard when you roll your window down to find out
| what happened.
|
| This is simply to illustrate and contrast how pared down
| technical intuitions of "driving" are, when it comes to
| self driving discussions.
|
| This is why I think level 5 is simply not happening,
| unless we redefine what self driving is, or the approach
| to achieving it. I feel theres more to be had from a
| centralized traffic orchestration network that
| supplements autonomous traffic, rather than trying to
| solve it onboard the vehicle.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Why couldn't an autonomous vehicle adapt to different
| cultures? American driving culture has specific qualities
| and elements to learn, same with India or any other
| country.
|
| Do you really think Waymos in SF operate solely on
| physics? There are volumes of data on driver behavior,
| when to pass, change lanes, react to aggressive drivers,
| etc.
| intended wrote:
| Because this statement, unfortunately, ends up moving the
| underlying goal posts about what self driving IS.
|
| And the point that I am making, is that this view was
| never baked into the original vision of self driving,
| resulting in predictions of a velocity that was simply
| impossible.
|
| Physical reality does not have vibes, and is more
| amenable to prediction, than human behavior. Or Cow
| behavior, or wildlife if I were to include some other
| places.
| huntertwo wrote:
| Marketers gonna market. But if we ignore the semantics of
| what full self driving actually means for a minute, there
| is still a lot of possibilities for self driving in the
| future. It takes longer than we perceive initially
| because we don't have insight into the nuances needed to
| achieve these things. It's like when you plan a software
| project, you think it's going to take less time than it
| does because you don't have a detailed view until you're
| already in the weeds.
| intended wrote:
| To quote someone else, if my grandmother had wheels, she
| would be a bicycle.
|
| This is a semantic discussion, because it is about what
| people mean when they talk about self driving.
|
| Just ditching the meaning is unfair, because goddamit,
| the self driving dream was awesome. I am hoping to be
| proved wrong, but not because we moved our definition.
|
| Carve a separate category out, which articulates the
| updated assumptions. Redefining it is a cop out and dare
| I say it, unbecoming of the original ambition.
|
| Networked Autonomous vehicles?
| huntertwo wrote:
| Yeah exactly. It's kind of absurd to take the position
| that it's impossible to have "full self driving" because
| Indian driving is different than American driving. You
| can just change the model you're using. You can have the
| model learn on the fly. There are so many possibilities.
| yusina wrote:
| > You would need to have something like networked
| driving, or government supported networks of driving
| information, to deal with the cultural factor.
|
| Or _actual_ intelligence. That observes its surroundings
| and learns what 's going on. That can solve generic
| problems. Which is the definition of intelligence. One of
| the obvious proofs that what everybody is calling "AI" is
| fundamentally not intelligent, so it's a blatant
| misnomer.
| gwicks56 wrote:
| "If you took a Tesla or a Waymo and dropped into into a
| tier 2 city in India, it will stop moving."
|
| Lol. If you dropped the average westerner into Chennai,
| they would either: a) stop moving b) kill someone
| yusina wrote:
| > a technology which 3 years ago did not exist
|
| Decades of machine learning research would like to have a
| word.
| nothercastle wrote:
| I think they will be 10-100x cheaper id be really surprised
| if we even doubled the quality though
| makeitdouble wrote:
| How does it work if they get 10x better in 10 years ?
| Everything else will have already moved on and the actual
| technology shift will come from elsewhere.
|
| Basically, what if GenAI is the Minitel and what we want is
| the internet.
| directevolve wrote:
| We're already heading toward the sigmoid plateau. The GPT 3
| to 4 shift was massive. Nothing since had touched that. I
| could easily go back to the models I was using 1-2 years ago
| with little impact on my work.
|
| I don't use RAG, and have no doubt the infrastructure for
| integrating AI into a large codebase has improved. But the
| base model powering the whole operation seems stuck.
| threeseed wrote:
| > I don't use RAG, and have no doubt the infrastructure for
| integrating AI into a large codebase has improved
|
| It really hasn't.
|
| The problem is that a GenAI system needs to not only
| understand the large codebase but also the latest stable
| version of every transitive dependency it depends on. Which
| is typically in the order of hundreds or thousands.
|
| Having it build a component with 10 year old, deprecated,
| CVE-riddled libraries is of limited use especially when
| libraries tend to be upgraded in interconnected waves. And
| so that component will likely not even work anyway.
|
| I was assured that MCP was going to solve all of this but
| nope.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| How did you think MCP was going to solve the issue of a
| large number of outdated dependencies?
| threeseed wrote:
| Those large number of outdated dependencies are in the
| LLM "index" which can't be rapidly refreshed because of
| the training costs.
|
| MCP would allow it to instead get this information at
| run-time from language servers, dependency repositories
| etc. But it hasn't proven to be effective.
| chrsw wrote:
| > I could easily go back to the models I was using 1-2
| years ago with little impact on my work.
|
| I can't. GPT-4 was useless for me for software development.
| Claude 4 is not.
| directevolve wrote:
| Interesting, what type of dev work do you do? Performance
| does vary widely across languages and domains.
| chrsw wrote:
| Embedded software for robotics.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x
| better and 100x cheaper?
|
| why don't you bring it up then.
|
| > There will be a turning point but it's not happened yet.
|
| do you know something that rest of us don't ?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Frankly, we don't know. That "turning point" that seemed so
| close for many tech, never came for some of them. Think
| 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing. Or
| self-driving, that is "just around the corner" for a decade
| now. And still is probably a decade away. Only time will tell
| if GenAI/LLMs are color TV or 3D TV.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over
| manufacturing.
|
| 3D printing is making huge progress in heavy industries.
| It's not sexy and does not make headlines but it absolutely
| is happening. It won't replace traditional manufacturing at
| huge scales (either large pieces or very high throughput).
| But it's bringing costs way down for fiddly parts or
| replacements. It is also affecting designs, which can be
| made simpler by using complex pieces that cannot be
| produced otherwise. It is not taking over, because it is
| not a silver bullet, but it is now indispensable in several
| industries.
| godelski wrote:
| You're misunderstanding the parent's complaint and
| frankly the complaints with AI. Certainly 3D printing is
| powerful and hasn't changed things. But you forgot that
| 30 years ago people were saying there would be one in
| every house because a printer can print a printer and how
| this would revolutionize everything because you could
| just print anything at home.
|
| The same thing with AI. You'd be blind or lying if you
| said it hasn't advanced a lot. People aren't denying
| that. But people are fed up being constantly being
| promised the moon and getting a cheap plastic replica
| instead.
|
| The tech is rapidly advancing and doing good. But it just
| can't keep up with the bubble of hype. That's the
| problem. The hype, not the tech.
|
| Frankly, the hype harms the tech too. We can't solve
| problems with the tech if we're just throwing most of our
| money at vaporware. I'm upset with the hype BECAUSE I
| like the tech.
|
| So don't confuse the difference. Make sure you understand
| what you're arguing against. Because it sounds like we
| should be on the same team, not arguing against one
| another. That just helps the people selling vaporware
| threeseed wrote:
| How are we in 0.1 of GenAI ? It's been developed for nearly a
| decade now.
|
| And each successive model that has been released has done
| nothing to fundamentally change the use cases that the
| technology can be applied to i.e. those which are tolerant of
| a large percentage of incoherent mistakes. Which isn't all
| that many.
|
| So you can keep your 10x better and 100x cheaper models
| because they are of limited usefulness let alone being a
| turning point for anything.
| Flemlo wrote:
| A decade?
|
| The explosion of funding, awareness etc only happened after
| gpt-3 launch
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| Funding is behind the curve. Social networks existed in
| 2003 and Facebook became a billion dollar company a
| decade later. AI horror fantasies from the 90's still
| haven't come true. There is no god, there is no Skynet.
| imtringued wrote:
| That was five years ago not yesterday.
| Flemlo wrote:
| I didn't say yesterday.
|
| Nonetheless it took openai til Nov 2022 for 1 Million
| users.
|
| The overall awareness and breakthrough was probably not
| at 2020.
| godelski wrote:
| Yet we're what? 5 years into "AI will replace programmers in
| 6 months"?
|
| 10 years into "we'll have self driving cars next year"
|
| We're 10 years into "it's just completely obvious that within
| 5 years deep learning is going to replace radiologists"
|
| Moravec's paradox strikes again and again. But this time it's
| different and it's completely obvious now, right?
| tsunamifury wrote:
| It's hilarious how absurdly wrong you are here. Both of
| those things have happened and you don't even know it.
| croes wrote:
| Where did it happen?
|
| They try it, but it's not reliable
| godelski wrote:
| I named 3 things...
|
| You're going to have to specify which 2 you think
| happened
| seanhunter wrote:
| I consulted a radiologist more than 5 years after Hinton
| said that it was completely obvious that radiologists
| would be replaced by AI in 5 years. I strongly suspect
| they were not an AI.
|
| Why do I think this?
|
| 1) They smelled slightly funny. 2) They got the diagnosis
| wrong.
|
| OK maybe #2 is a red herring. But I stand by the other
| reason.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I know a radiologist and talk a decent bit about AI usage
| in the field. Every radiologist today is making heavy use
| of AI. They pre screen everything and from what I
| understand it has led to massive productivity gains. It
| hasnt led to job losses yet but theres so much money on
| the line it really feels to me like we're just waiting
| for the straw that broke the camels back. No one wants to
| be the first to fully get rid of radiologists but once
| one hospital does the rest will quickly follow suit.
| lazide wrote:
| One word - liability.
| fulafel wrote:
| The quote appears to be "We should stop training
| radiologists now, it's just completely obvious within
| five years deep learning is going to do better than
| radiologists."
|
| So there's some room for interpretation, the weaker
| interpretation is less radical (that AI could beat humans
| in radiology tasks in 5 years).
| hengheng wrote:
| I have a fusion reactor to sell to you.
| laserlight wrote:
| Some people are ahead of you by 3.5 years [0]:
|
| > Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024, and
| has a long-term goal of delivering electricity for 1 cent
| per kilowatt-hour. (!)
|
| [0] https://blog.samaltman.com/helion
| antonvs wrote:
| You're missing the big picture. Helion can still make
| their goal. Once they have a working fusion reactor they
| can use the energy to build a time machine.
| laserlight wrote:
| Of course, silly me. I should put more practice time into
| 4D chess.
| alphager wrote:
| We're halfway into 2025 and you're cutting a goal they
| should have reached by 2024. Did they reach that goal?
| laserlight wrote:
| They didn't reach that goal. Why would they bother
| reaching an easier goal when they could shoot for a
| bigger one? /s Their new goal is to build a fusion plant
| by 2028 [0].
|
| [0] https://observer.com/2025/01/sam-altman-nuclear-
| fusion-start...
| apwell23 wrote:
| did you by any chance send money to nigerian prince ?
| jjani wrote:
| > Yet we're what? 5 years into "AI will replace programmers
| in 6 months"?
|
| Realistically, we're 2.5 years into it at most.
| hansmayer wrote:
| No, the hype cycle started around 2019, slowly at first.
| The technology this is built with is more like 20 years
| old, so no, we are not 2.5 years at most really.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| we're 2.5 years into the current hype trend, no way was
| this mainstream until at least 2022
| godelski wrote:
| GPT3 dropped in 2020. That's when it hit mainstream
| roenxi wrote:
| As far as I've seen we appear to already have self driving
| vehicles, the main barriers are legal and regulatory
| concerns rather than the tech. If a company wanted to put a
| car on the road that beetles around by itself there aren't
| any crazy technical challenges to doing that - the issue is
| even if it was safer than a human driver the company would
| have a lot of liability problems.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > the main barriers are legal and regulatory concerns
| rather than the tech
|
| they have failed in sfo, phoenix and other cities that
| rolled red carpet for them
| roenxi wrote:
| Pretty solid evidence that self driving cars already
| exist though.
| pydry wrote:
| I remember one reason phoenix was chosen as a trial
| location coz it was supposed to be one of the easiest
| places to drive.
|
| It's pretty damning that it failed there.
| jkestner wrote:
| Yeah, it's a big grid with wide streets. Did it fail
| there? If so I imagine it's just due to lack of business
| --there are almost no taxis in Phoenix. Mostly just from
| the airport.
| laserlight wrote:
| When people say "we'll have self-driving cars next year",
| I understand that self-driving cars will be widespread in
| the developed world and accessible to those who pay a
| premium. Given the status quo, I find it pointless to
| discuss the semantics of whether they exist or not.
| godelski wrote:
| Especially considering it would be weird to say "we'll
| have <something> next year" when we've technically had it
| for decades.
|
| And more specifically, I'm referencing Elon where the
| context is that its going to be a software push into
| Teslas that people already own
| godelski wrote:
| As prototypes, yes. But that's like pointing to Japanese
| robots in the 80's and expecting robot butlers any day
| now. Or maybe Boston dynamics 10 years ago. Or when
| OpenAI was into robotics.
|
| There's a big gap between seeing something work in the
| lab and being ready for real world use. I know we do this
| in software, but that's a very abnormal thing (and
| honestly, maybe not the best)
| xnx wrote:
| Waymo is doing 250k paid rides/week.
| antonvs wrote:
| You're confusing "exist" with "viable".
|
| When someone talks about "having" self-driving cars next
| year, they're not talking about what are essentially
| pilot programs.
| roenxi wrote:
| I don't think that is a reasonable generalisation. A lot
| of people would have been talking about the first person
| to take a real trip in a car that drives itself. A record
| that is in the past.
|
| Not to mention that HN gets really tetchy about achieving
| specifically SAE Level 6 when in practice some pretty
| basic driver assist tools are probably closer to what
| people meant. It reminds me of a gentlemen I ran into who
| was convinced that the OpenAI DoTA bot with a >99% win
| rate couldn't really be said to be playing the game. If
| someone can take their hands off the wheel for 10 minutes
| we're there in a common language sense; the human in the
| car isn't actively in control.
| FabHK wrote:
| Good point. On the "exist" interpretation, we've "had"
| flying cars for several decades.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| This is just not true, Waymo, MobilEye, Tesla and Chinese
| companies are not bottlenecked by regulations but by high
| failure rate and / or economics.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| What? If that stuff works, no liability will have to be
| executed. How can you state that it works and claim
| liability problems at the same time?
| risyachka wrote:
| They are only self-driving in a very controlled
| environments of few very good mapped out cities with good
| roads in good weather.
|
| And it took what like 2 decades to get there. So no, we
| don't have self-driving even close. Those examples look
| more like hard-coded solution for custom test cases.
| tim333 wrote:
| Four years into people mocking "we'll have self driving
| cars next year" while they are on the street daily driving
| around SF.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm quoting Elon.
|
| I don't care about SF. I care about what I can but as a
| typical American. Not as an enthusiast in one of the most
| technologically advanced cities on the planet
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| They're in other cities too...
| godelski wrote:
| Other cities still isn't available to average American.
|
| You read the words but missed their meaning
| xorcist wrote:
| They are self driving the same way a tram or subway can
| be self driving. They traffic a tightly bounded
| designated area. They're not competing with human
| drivers. Still a marvel of human engineering, just quite
| expensive compared with other forms of public transport.
| It just doesn't compete in the same space and likely
| never will.
| tim333 wrote:
| They are literally competing with human uber drivers in
| the area they operate and also having a much lower crash
| and injury rate.
|
| I admit they don't operate everywhere - only certain
| routes. Still they are undoubtedly cars that drive
| themselves.
|
| I imagine it'll be the same with AGI. We'll have robots /
| AIs that are much smarter than the average human and
| people will be saying they don't count because humans win
| X Factor or something.
| hansmayer wrote:
| How are they competing, if their routes are limited?
| mediaman wrote:
| The cotton gin processed short fiber cotton, but not long
| fiber cotton.
|
| Did the cotton gin therefore not compete with human
| labor?
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Self-driving vehicles can only exist in cities of extreme
| wealth like SF. Try running them in Philadelphia and see
| what happens.
| hansvm wrote:
| They're driving, but not well in my (limited)
| interactions with them. I had a waymo run me completely
| out of my lane a couple months ago as it interpreted 2
| lanes of left turn as an extra wide lane instead (or,
| worse, changed lanes during the turn without a blinker or
| checking its sensors, though that seems unlikely).
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yes, but ...
|
| The argument that self-driving cars should be allowed on
| public roads as long as they are statistically as safe as
| human drivers (on average) seems valid, but of course
| none of these cars have AGI... they perform well in the
| anticipated simulator conditions in which they were
| trained (as long as they have the necessary sensors, e.g.
| Waymo's lidar, to read the environment in reliable
| fashion), but will not perform well in
| emergency/unanticipated conditions they were not trained
| on. Even outside of emergencies, Waymos still sometimes
| need to "phone home" for remote assistance in knowing
| what to do.
|
| So, yes, they are out there, perhaps as safe on average
| as a human (I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the
| stats), but I'd not personally be comfortable riding in
| one since I'm not senile, drunk, teenager, hothead,
| distracted (using phone while driving), etc - not part of
| the class that are dragging the human safety stats down.
| I'd also not trust a Tesla where penny pinching, or just
| arrogant stupidity, has resulted in a sensor-poor design
| liable to failure modes like running into parked trucks.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| In my lens, as long as companies don't want to be held
| liable for an accident, the shouldn't be on roads. They
| need to be extremely confident to the point of putting
| their money where their mouths are. That's true "safety".
|
| That's the main difference with a human driver. If I take
| an Uber and we crash, that driver is liable. Waymo would
| fight tooth and nail to blame anything else.
| oblio wrote:
| Mercedes is doing this for specific places and
| conditions.
| jkestner wrote:
| I'd not personally be comfortable riding in one since I'm
| not senile, drunk, teenager, hothead, distracted (using
| phone while driving), etc - not part of the class that
| are dragging the human safety stats down.
|
| The challenge is that most people think they're better
| than average drivers.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I'm not sure what the "challenge" is there, but certainly
| true in terms of human psychology.
|
| My point was that if you are part of one of these
| accident-prone groups, you are certainly worse than
| average, and are probably safer (both for yourself, and
| everyone around you) in a Waymo. However, if you are an
| intelligent non-impaired experienced driver, then maybe
| not, and almost certainly not if we're talking about
| emergency and dangerous situations which is where it
| really matters.
| YokoZar wrote:
| How can you know if you're a good driver in an emergency
| situation? We don't exactly get a lot of practice.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, you don't know how well any specific driver is
| going to react in an emergency situation, and some are
| going to be far worse than others (e.g. panicking, or not
| thinking quickly enough), but the human has the advantage
| of general intelligence and therefore NOT having to rely
| on having had practice at the specific circumstance they
| find themselves in.
|
| A recent example - a few weeks ago I was following
| another car in making a turn down a side road, when
| suddenly that car stops dead (for no externally apparent
| reason), and starts backing up fast about to hit me. I
| immediately hit my horn and prepare to back up myself to
| get out of the way, since it was obvious to me - as a
| human - that they didn't realize I was there, and without
| intervention would hit me.
|
| Driving away I watch the car in my rear view mirror and
| see it pull a U-turn to get back out of the side road,
| making it apparent why they had stopped before. I learned
| something, but of course the driverless car is incapable
| of learning, and certainly has no theory of mind, and
| would behave same as last time - good or bad - if
| something similar happened again.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I basically agree with you, and I think the thing that is
| missing from a bunch of responses that disagree is that it
| seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a brick
| wall in terms of the benefits of scaling. That is, most
| folks were pretty astounded by the gains you could get from
| just stuffing more training data into these models, but
| like someone who argues a 15 year old will be 50 feet tall
| based on the last 5 years' growth rate, people who are
| still arguing that past growth rates will continue apace
| don't seem to be honest (or aware) to me.
|
| I'm not at all saying that it's impossible some improvement
| will be discovered in the future that allows AI progress to
| continue at a breakneck speed, but I am saying that the
| "progress will only accelerate" conclusion, based primarily
| on the progress since 2017 or so, is faulty reasoning.
| godelski wrote:
| > it seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a
| brick wall in terms of the benefits of scaling
|
| What's annoying is plenty of us (researchers) predicted
| this and got laughed at. Now that it's happening, it's
| just quiet.
|
| I don't know about the rest, but I spoke up because I
| didn't want to hit a brick wall, I want to keep going! I
| still want to keep going! But if accurate predictions
| (with good explanations) aren't a reason to shift
| resource allocation then we just keep making the same
| mistake over and over. We let the conmen come in and
| people who get too excited by success that they get blind
| to pitfalls.
|
| And hey, I'm not saying give _me_ money. This account is
| (mostly) anonymous. There 's plenty of people that made
| accurate predictions and tried working in other
| directions but never got funding to test how methods
| scale up. We say there's no alternatives but there's been
| nothing else that's been given a tenth of the effort.
| Apples and oranges...
| antonvs wrote:
| > What's annoying is plenty of us (researchers) predicted
| this and got laughed at. Now that it's happening, it's
| just quiet.
|
| You need to model the business world and management more
| like a flock of sheep being herded by forces that mostly
| don't have to do with what _actually_ is going to happen
| in future. It makes a lot more sense.
| cgio wrote:
| Practically no one is herded by what is actually going to
| happen, hardly even by what is expected to happen.
| Business pretends that it is driven by expectations, but
| is mostly driven by the past, as in financial statements.
| What is the bonus we can get _this_ year? There is of
| course the strategic thinking, I don 't want to discount
| that part of business, but it is not the thing that will
| drive most of these, AI as a cost saving measure,
| decisions. This is the unimaginative part of AI
| application and as such relegated to the unimaginative
| managers.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
| when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
|
| It's all a big hype bubble and not only is no one in the
| industry willing to pop it, they actively defend against
| popping a bubble that is clearly rupturing on its own.
| It's endemic of how modern businesses no longer care
| about a proper 10 year portfolio and more about how to
| make the next quarter look good.
|
| There's just no skin in the game, and everyone's
| ransacking before the inevitable fire instead of figuring
| out how to prevent the fire to begin with.
| godelski wrote:
| > mostly don't have to do with what actually is going to
| happen
|
| Yet I'm talking about what _did_ happen.
|
| I'm saying we should have memory. Look at predictions
| people make. Reward accurate ones, don't reward failures.
| Right now we reward whoever makes the craziest
| predictions. It hasn't always been this way, so we should
| go back to less crazy
| brrt wrote:
| Sure, you were right.
|
| But if you had been wrong and we would now have had
| superintelligence, the upside for its owners would
| presumably be great.
|
| ... Or at least that's the hypothesis. As a matter of
| fact intelligence is only somewhat useful in the real
| world :-)
| generic92034 wrote:
| I am not sure the owners would keep being that in case of
| real superintelligence, though.
| oblio wrote:
| > What's annoying is plenty of us (researchers) predicted
| this and got laughed at. Now that it's happening, it's
| just quiet.
|
| Those people always do that. Shouting about
| cryptocurrencies and NFTs from the rooftops 3-4 years
| ago, now completely gone.
|
| I suspect they're the same people, basically get rich
| quick schemers.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I dont see any wall. Gemini 2.5 and o3/o4 are incredible
| improvements. Gen AI is miles ahead of where it was a
| year ago which was miles ahead of where it was 2 years
| ago.
| asadotzler wrote:
| The improvements have less to do with scaling than adding
| new techniques like better fine tuning and reinforcement
| learning. The infinite scaling we were promised, that
| only required more content and more compute to reach god
| tier has indeed hit a wall.
| dismalaf wrote:
| The actual LLM part isn't much better than a year ago.
| What's better is that they've added additional logic and
| made it possible to intertwine traditional, expert-system
| style AI plus the power of the internet to augment LLMs
| so that they're actually useful.
|
| This is an improvement for sure, but LLMs themselves are
| definitely hitting a wall. It was predicted that scaling
| alone would allow them to reach AGI level.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I basically agree with you also, but I have a somewhat
| contrarian view of scaling -> brick wall. I feel like
| applications of powerful local models is stagnating,
| perhaps because Apple has not done a good job so far with
| Apple Intelligence.
|
| A year ago I expected a golden age of local model
| intelligence integrated into most software tools, and
| more powerful commercial tools like Google Jules to be
| something used perhaps 2 or 3 times a week for specific
| difficult tasks.
|
| That said, my view of the future is probably now wrong, I
| am just saying what I expected.
| hansmayer wrote:
| 100% this. I always argue that groundbreaking technologies
| are _clearly_ groundbreaking from the start. It is almost a
| bit like a film, if you have to struggle to get into it in
| the first few minutes, you may as well spare yourself
| watching the rest.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Over ten years for the we'll have self driving car spiel
| croes wrote:
| If not when.
| solumunus wrote:
| I use LLM's daily and live them but at the current rate of
| progress it's just not really something worth worrying about.
| Those that are hysterical about AI seem to think LLM's are
| getting exponentially better when in fact diminishing returns
| are hitting hard. Could some new innovation change that? It's
| possible but it's not inevitable or at least not necessarily
| imminent.
| kbelder wrote:
| I agree that the core models are only going to see slow
| progression from here on out, until something revolutionary
| happens... which might be a year from now, or maybe twenty
| years. Who knows.
|
| But we are going to see a huge explosion in how those
| models are integrated into the rest of the tech ecosystem.
| Things that a current model could do right now, if only
| your car/watch/videogame/heart monitor/stuffed animal had a
| good working interface into an AI.
|
| Not necessarily looking forward to that, but that's where
| the growth will come.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| Remember when RPA was going to replace everyone?
| AvAn12 wrote:
| Or low-code / no-code?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| There's a lot of "when" people are betting on, and not a lot
| of action to back it. If "when" is 20 years, then I still got
| plenty career ahead of me before I need to worry about that.
| xnx wrote:
| > 5 years into "AI will replace programmers in 6 months"?
|
| Programmers that don't use AI will get replaced by those that
| do. (no just by mandate, but by performance)
|
| > 10 years into "we'll have self driving cars next year"
|
| They're here now. Waymo does 250K paid rides/week.
| bawolff wrote:
| Honestly, if anything i think AI is going to reverse the trend.
| Someone is going to have to be hired to clean up after them.
| tempodox wrote:
| _If_ anyone will actually bother with cleaning up.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Thats the impression I got. Things overall get just worse in
| quality because people rely too much on low wages and copy
| pasting LLM answers
| autobodie wrote:
| Get worse for who? The ruling class will simply never care
| how bad things get for working people if things are getting
| better for the ruling class.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| I meant just regular products as example if I login to
| bitpanda on browser the parts that would hold the
| translation hold the keys for translations instead. Just
| countless examples and many security issues as well.
|
| Regarding class struggle I think class division always
| existed but we the mass have all the tools to improve our
| situation.
| shswkna wrote:
| The central problem with this statement is that we expect
| others to care, but we do not expect this from ourselves.
|
| We have agency. Whether we are brainwashed or not. If we
| cared about ourselves, then we don't need another class,
| or race, or whatever _other_ grouping to do this for us.
| hattmall wrote:
| I think that's true in software development. A lot of the
| focus is on coding because that's really the domain of the
| people interested in AI, because ultimately they ARE
| software. But the killer app isn't software, it's anything
| where the operation is formulaic, but the formula can be
| tedious to figure out, but once you know it you can confirm
| that it's correct by working backwards. Software has far
| too many variables, not least of which is the end user. On
| the other hand things like accounting, finance, and
| engineering are far more suitable for trained models and
| back testing for conformity.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I think they said that about outsourcing software dev jobs.
| The reality is somewhere in the middle. extreme cases will
| need cleanup but overall it's here to stay, maybe with more
| babysitting.
| godelski wrote:
| I think the reality is Lemon Market Economics. We'll
| sacrifice quality for price. People want better quality but
| the truth is that it's a very information asymmetric game
| and it's really hard to tell quality. If it wasn't, we
| could all just rely on Amazon reviews and tech reviewers.
| But without informed consumers, price is all that matters
| even if it creates a market nobody wants.
| jameslk wrote:
| Keynes suggested that by 2030, we'd be working 15 hour
| workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure. Instead,
| we chose consumption, and helicopter money gave us bullshit
| jobs so we could keep buying more bullshit. This is fairly
| evident by the fact when the helicopter money runs out, all the
| bullshit jobs get cut.
|
| AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more
| bullshit jobs and consumption, not more leisure.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Keynes was talking about work in every sense,including house
| chore. We're well below 15 hours of house chores by now, so
| that part became true.
| autobodie wrote:
| Source? Keynes was a serious economist, not a charlitan
| futurist.
| itishappy wrote:
| John Maynard Keynes (1930) - Economic Possibilities for
| our Grandchildren
|
| > For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in
| us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to
| be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than
| is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have
| small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we
| shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to
| make what work there is still to be done to be as widely
| shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour
| week may put off the problem for a great while. For three
| hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in
| most of us!
|
| http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
|
| https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-
| content/uploads/files/cont...
| itishappy wrote:
| We've got 10 whole hours left over for "actual" work!
|
| (Quotes because I personally have a significantly harder
| time doing bloody housework...)
| leoedin wrote:
| Clearly you don't have children!
| tim333 wrote:
| I was thinking it's a function of the social setting.
| Single bloke 1h/week. Couple 5h/week. With kids
| continuous. Or some such.
| leoedin wrote:
| I imagine standards have also shifted. It just wouldn't
| have been possible to wash a child's clothes after one
| wear before the invention of the washing machine. People
| also had far less clothing that they could have even
| needed to wash.
| antonvs wrote:
| Life pro tip: teach your children to do chores.
| LeonB wrote:
| Washing machines created a revolution where we could now
| expend 1/10th of the human labour to wash the same amount
| of clothes as before. We now have more than 10 times as
| much clothes to wash.
|
| I don't know if it's induced demand, revealed preference or
| Jevon's paradox, maybe all 3.
| tim333 wrote:
| I saw some research once that the hours women spend doing
| housework hasn't changed. I think because human nature,
| not anything to do with the tech.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > We now have more than 10 times as much clothes to wash.
|
| OK, but I doubt we're washing 10 times as much clothes,
| unless are people wearing them for one hour between
| washes...
| autobodie wrote:
| Keynes lived in a time when the working class was organized
| and exerting its power over its destiny.
|
| We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably
| brainwashed and manipulated.
| eastbound wrote:
| It is very possible that foreign powers use AI to generate
| social media content in mass for propaganda. If anything,
| the internet up to 2015 seemed open for discussion and
| swaying by real people's opinion (and mockery of the elite
| classes), while manipulation and manufactured consent
| became the norm after 2017.
| rusk wrote:
| This is a pre-/post- Snowden & Schrems, which challenged
| the primary economic model of the internet as a
| surveillance machine.
|
| All the free money dried up and the happy clapping Barney
| the Dinosaur Internet was no more!
| kergonath wrote:
| > It is very possible that foreign powers use AI to
| generate social media content in mass for propaganda.
|
| No need for AI. Troll farms are well documented and were
| in action before transformers could string two sentences
| together.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Italian party Lega (in the government coalition) has been
| using deep fakes for some time now. It's not only
| ridiculous, it's absolutely offensive to the people they
| mock - von Der leyen, other Italian politicians... -
| genewitch wrote:
| Queen Ursula deserves to be mocked.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Even from an angle that destabilizes the EU and so
| directly benefits Russia?
| eastbound wrote:
| Yes. She's not an elected representative. And she's been
| utterly ineffective at threatening Russia with her soft
| stance (Yes, in war, strong words are weak actions). Her
| place is back in Hunger Games, starving everybody for the
| greater good of the elite class.
| kergonath wrote:
| He was extrapolating, as well. Going from children in the
| mines to the welfare state in a generation was quite
| something. Unfortunately, progress slowed down
| significantly for many reasons but I don't think we should
| really blame Keynes for this.
|
| > We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably
| brainwashed and manipulated.
|
| I think it has always been that way. Looking through
| history, there are many examples of turkeys voting for
| Christmas and propaganda is an old invention. I don't think
| there is anything special right now. And to be fair to the
| working class, it's not hard to see how they could feel
| abandoned. It's also broader than the working class. The
| middle class is getting squeezed as well. The only winners
| are the oligarchs.
| ireadmevs wrote:
| There's no middle class. You either have to work for a
| living or you don't.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| While you're not wrong in what differentiates those with
| wealth to those without, I think ignores a lot of nuance.
|
| Does one have savings? Can they afford to spend time with
| their children outside of working day to day? Do they
| have the ability to take reasonable risks without
| chancing financial ruin in pursuit of better
| opportunities?
|
| These are things we typically attribute to someone in the
| middle class. I worry that boiling down these discussions
| to "you work and they don't" misses a lot of opportunity
| for tangible improvement to quality of life for large
| number of people.
| hobs wrote:
| It doesn't - its a battle cry for the working classes (ie
| anyone who actually works) to realize they are being
| exploited by those that simply do not.
|
| If you have an actual job and an income constrained by
| your work output, you could be middle class, but you
| could also recognize that you are getting absolutely
| ruined by the billionaire class (no matter what your
| level of working wealth)
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm really not convinced that I and my CEO share a common
| class interest against the billionaires, and I'm not
| particularly interested in standing together to demand
| that both of us need to be paid more.
| dagw wrote:
| _You either have to work for a living or you don't_
|
| The words 'have to' are doing a lot of work in that
| statement. Some people 'have to' work to literally put
| food on the table, other people 'have to' work to able to
| making payments on their new yacht. The world is full of
| people who could probably live out the rest of their
| lives without working any more, but doing so would
| require drastic lifestyle changes they're not willing to
| make.
|
| I personally think the metric should be something along
| the lines of how long would it take from losing all your
| income until you're homeless.
| dgfitz wrote:
| The sentence works without those two words. "You either
| work for a living or you don't."
|
| Now what?
| dagw wrote:
| Now it comes down to how you define 'for a living'. You
| still need to differentiate between people who work to
| survive, people who work to finance their aspirational
| lifestyle, and people who have all the money they could
| possibly need and still work because they either see it
| as a calling or they just seem to like working.
| Considering all these people in the same 'class' is far
| too simplistic.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _I personally think the metric should be something
| along the lines of how long would it take from losing all
| your income until you 're homeless._
|
| _What_ income? Income from job, or from capital? A
| _huge_ difference. Also a lot harder to lose the latter,
| gross incompetence or a revolution, while the former is
| much easier.
| dagw wrote:
| Yea, should have been clearer. Income from work (or
| unemployment benefits) in this case. Someone who works to
| essentially supplement their income, but could live off
| their capital, is in a very different position than
| someone for whom work is their only source of income or
| wealth.
| larrled wrote:
| "from losing all your income until you're homeless."
|
| I'm willing to bet you haven't lived long enough to know
| that's a more or less a proxy for old age. :) That aside,
| even homeless people acquire possessions over time. If
| you have a lot of homeless in your neighborhood, try to
| observe that. In my area, many homeless have semi
| functional motor homes. Are they legit homeless, or are
| they "homeless oligarchs"? I can watch any of the
| hundreds of YouTube channels devoted to "van life." Is a
| 20 year old who skipped college which their family could
| have afforded, and is instead living in an $80k van and
| getting money from streaming a "legit homeless"? The
| world is not so black and white it will turn out in the
| long run.
| nradov wrote:
| Many of those semi-functional motorhomes are actually
| owned by a particular type of slumlord (vanlord) who rent
| them out to homeless people.
|
| https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-to-crack-down-on-
| rv-re...
| mantas wrote:
| Homeless or loose current house? Downsizing and/or moving
| to cheaper places could go a long way. Yet loosing
| current level of housing is what most people think want
| to avoid.
| FabHK wrote:
| > progress slowed down significantly for many reasons
|
| I think progress (in the sense of economic growth) was
| roughly in line with what Keynes expected. What he didn't
| expect is that people, instead of getting 10x the living
| standard with 1/3 the working hours, rather wanted to
| have 30x the living standard with the same working hours.
| Ray20 wrote:
| It's not really clear where he got this from.
|
| Throughout human history, starting with the spread of
| agriculture, increased labor efficiency has always led to
| people consuming more, not to them working less.
|
| Moreover, throughout the 20th century, we saw several
| periods in different countries when wages rose very
| rapidly - and this always led to a temporary average
| increase in hours worked. Because when a worker is told
| "I'll pay you 50% more" - the answer is usually not
| "Cool, I can work 30% less", but "Now I'm willing to work
| 50% more to get 2x of the pay".
| hoseyor wrote:
| He also lived in a time when the intense importance and
| function of a moral and cultural framework for society was
| taken for granted. He would have never imagined the level
| of social and moral degeneration of today.
|
| I will not go into specifics because the authoritarians
| still disagree and think everything is fine with
| degenerative debauchery and try to abuse anyone even just
| pointing to failing systems, but it all does seem like
| civilization ending developments regardless of whether it
| leads to the rise of another civilization, e.g., the Asian
| Era, i.e., China, India, Russia, Japan, et al.
|
| Ironically, I don't see the US surviving this transitional
| phase, especially considering it essentially does not even
| really exist anymore at its core. Would any of the founders
| of America approve of any of America today? The forefathers
| of India, China, Russia, and maybe Japan would clearly
| approve of their countries and cultures. America is a
| hollowed out husk with a facade of red, white, and blue
| pomp and circumstance that is even fading, where America
| means both everything and nothing as a manipulative slogan
| to enrich the few, a massive private equity raid on
| America.
|
| When you think of the Asian countries, you also think of
| distinct and unique cultures that all have their advantages
| and disadvantages, the true differences that make them true
| diversity that makes humanity so wonderful. In America you
| have none of that. You have a decimated culture that is
| jumbled with all kinds of muddled and polluted cultures
| from all over the place, all equally confused and
| bewildered about what they are and why they feel so lost
| only chasing dollars and shiny objects to further enrich
| the ever smaller group of con artist psychopathic
| narcissists at the top, a kind of worst form of aristocracy
| that humanity has yet ever produced, lacking any kind of
| sense of noblesse oblige, which does not even extend to
| simply not betraying your own people.
| komali2 wrote:
| That a capitalist society might achieve a 15 hour
| workweek if it maintained a "non debauched culture" and
| "culture homogeneity" is an extraordinary claim I've
| never seen a scrap of evidence for. Can you support this
| extraordinary claim?
|
| That there's any cultural "degenerative debauchery" is an
| extraordinary claim. Can you back up this claim with
| evidence?
|
| "Decimated," "muddled," and "polluted" imply you have an
| objective analysis framework for culture. Typically
| people who study culture avoid moralizing like this
| because one very quickly ends up looking very foolish.
| What do you know that the anthropologists and
| sociologists don't, to where you use these terms so
| freely?
|
| If I seem aggressive, it's because I'm quite tired of
| vague handwaving around "degeneracy" and identity
| politics. Too often these conversations are completely
| presumptive.
| chucksmash wrote:
| > That there's any cultural "degenerative debauchery" is
| an extraordinary claim. Can you back up this claim with
| evidence?
|
| What's the sense in asking for examples? If one person
| sees ubiquitous cultural decay and the other says "this
| is fine," I think the difference is down to worldview.
| And for a pessimist and an optimist to cite examples at
| one another is unlikely to change the other's worldview.
|
| If a pessimist said, "the opioid crisis is deadlier than
| the crack epidemic and nobody cares," would that change
| the optimist's mind?
|
| If a pessimist said, "the rate of suicide has increased
| by 30% since the year 2000," would that change the
| optimist's mind?
|
| If a pessimist said, "corporate profits, wealth
| inequality, household debt, and homelessness are all at
| record highs," ...?
|
| And coming from the other side, all these things can be
| Steven Pinker'd if you want to feel like "yes there are
| real problems but actually things are better than ever."
|
| There was a book that said something about "you will
| recognize them by their fruit." If these problems are the
| fruit born of our culture, it's worth asking how we got
| here instead of dismissing it with "What do you know that
| the anthropologists and sociologists don't?"
| mlinhares wrote:
| Oh the prized Asian magic, more civilized, less mixed,
| the magical place.
|
| Capitalism arrives for everyone, Asia is just late for
| the party. Once it eventually financializes everything,
| the same will happen to it. Capitalism eventually eats
| itself, doesn't matter the language or how many centuries
| your people might have.
| 1776smithadam wrote:
| Keynes didn't anticipate social media
| pif wrote:
| > Keynes lived in a time when the working class ...
|
| Keynes lived in a time when the working class could not buy
| cheap from China... and complain that everybody else was
| doing the same!
| SarahC_ wrote:
| "Bullshit jobs" are the rubbish required to keep the
| paperwork tidy, assessed and filed. No company pays someone
| to do -nothing-.
|
| AI isn't going to generate those jobs, it's going to automate
| them.
|
| ALL our bullshit jobs are going away, and those people will
| be unemployed.
| tim333 wrote:
| I foresee programers replaced by AI and the people who
| programed becoming pointy haired bosses to the AI.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I for see that when people only employ AI for
| programming, it quickly hits the point where they train
| on their own (usually wrong) code and it spirals into an
| implosion.
|
| When kids stop learning to code for real, who writes GCC
| v38?
|
| This whole LLM is just the next bitcoin/nft. People had a
| lot of video cards and wanted to find a new use for them.
| In my small brain it's so obvious.
| tim333 wrote:
| LLMs maybe but there will be other algorithms.
| dgfitz wrote:
| For sure, same point though.
| nhod wrote:
| i dunno, i have gotten tons of real work done with LLM's.
| i just had o3 edit a contract and swap out pieces of it
| to make it work with SOW's instead of embed the terms
| directly in the contract. i used to have to do that
| myself and have a lawyer review it. (i've been working
| with contracts for 30 years, i know enough now to know
| most basic contract law even though IANAL.) i've vibe
| coded a whole bunch of little things i would never have
| done myself or hired someone to do. i have had them
| extract data in seconds that would have taken forever.
| there is without question real utility in LLM's and they
| are also without question getting better very fast.
|
| to compare that to NFT's is pretty disingenuous. i don't
| know anyone who has ever accomplished anything with an
| NFT. (i'm happy to be wrong about that, and i have yet to
| find a single example).
| dgfitz wrote:
| There is without question value to LLMs, I absolutely
| agree.
|
| Trying to make them more than they are is the issue I
| have. Let them be great at crunching words, I'm all about
| that.
|
| Pretending that OpenAI is worth billions of dollars is a
| joke, when I can get 90% of the value the provide for
| free, on my own mediocre hardware.
| hansmayer wrote:
| Ha-ha, this is very funny :) Say, have you ever tried
| seriously using the AI-tools for programming? Because if
| you do, and still believe this, I may have a
| bridge/Eiffel Tower/railroad to sell you.
| tim333 wrote:
| I tried and they weren't that good. I'm gazing into the
| future a little.
| vidarh wrote:
| The majority of my code over theast few months has been
| written by LLMs. Including systems I rely on for my
| business daily.
|
| Maybe consider it's not all on the AI tools if they work
| for others but not for you.
| hansmayer wrote:
| Sure man, maybe also share that bit with your clients and
| see how excited they'll be to learn their vital code or
| infrastructure may be designed by a stochastical system
| (*reliable a solid number of times).
| vidarh wrote:
| My clients are perfectly happy about that, because they
| care about the results, not FUD. They know the quality of
| what I deliver from first-hand experience.
|
| Human-written code also needs reviews, and is also
| frequently broken until subjected to testing, iteration,
| and reviews, and so our processes are built around proper
| qa, and proper reviews, and then the original source does
| not matter much.
|
| It's however a lot easier to force an LLM into a
| straighjacket of enforced linters, enforced test-suite
| runs, enforced sanity checks, enforced processes at a
| level that human developers would quit over, and so as we
| build out the harness around the AI code generation,
| we're seeing the quality of that code increase a lot
| faster than the quality delivered by human developers. It
| still doesn't beat a good senior developer, but it does
| often deliver code that handles tasks I could never hand
| to my juniors.
|
| (In fact, the harness I'm forcing my AI generated code
| through was written about 95%+ by an LLM, iteratively,
| with its own code being forced through the verification
| steps with every new iteration after the first 100 lines
| of code or so)
| hansmayer wrote:
| So to summarise - the quality of code you generated with
| LLM is increasing a lot faster, but somehow never
| reaching senior level. How is that a lot faster? I mean
| if it never reaches the (fairly modest) goal. But that's
| not the end of it. Your mid-junior LLMs are also
| enforcing quality gates and harnesses on the rest of your
| LLM-mid-juniors. If only there was some proof for that,
| like a project demo, so it could at least look
| believable...
| vidarh wrote:
| It's a lot faster compared to new developers who still
| cost magnitudes more from day 1. It's not cost effective
| to hand every task to someone senior. I still have
| juniors on teams because in the long term we still need
| actual people who need a path to becoming senior devs,
| but in financial terms they are now a drain.
|
| You can feel free not to believe it, as I have no plans
| to open up my tooling anytime soon - though partly
| because I'm considering turning it into a service. In the
| meantime these tools are significantly improving the
| margins for my consulting, and the velocity increases
| steadily as every time we run into a problem we make the
| tooling revise its own system prompt or add additional
| checks to the harness it runs to avoid it next time.
|
| A lot of it is very simple. E.g a lot of these tools can
| produce broken edits. They'll usually realise and fix
| them, but adding an edit tool that forces the code
| through syntax checks / linters for example saved a lot
| of pain. As does forcing regular test and coverage runs,
| not just on builds.
|
| For one of my projects I now let this tooling edit
| without asking permission, and just answer yes/no to
| whether it can commit once it's ready. If no, I'll tell
| it why and review again when it thinks it's fixed things,
| but a majority of commit requests are now accepted on the
| first try.
|
| For the same project I'm now also experimenting with
| asking the assistant to come up with a todo list of
| enhancements for it based on a high level goal, then work
| through it, with me just giving minor comments on the
| proposed list.
|
| I'm vaguely tempted to let this assistant reload it's own
| modified code when tests pass and leave it to work on
| itself for a a while and see what comes of it. But I'd
| need to sandbox it first. It's already tried (and was
| stopped by a permissions check) to figure out how to
| restart itself to enable new functionality it had
| written, so it "understands" when it is working on
| itself.
|
| But, by all means, you can choose to just treat this as
| fiction if it makes you feel better.
| hansmayer wrote:
| No, I am not disputing whatever productivity gains you
| seem to be getting. I was just curious if it LLMs feeding
| data into each other can work that well, knowing how long
| it took OpenAI to make ChatGPT properly count the number
| of "R"s in the word "strawberry". There is this effect
| called "Habsburg AI". I reckon the syntax-check and
| linting stuff is straightforward, as it adds a
| deterministic element to it, but what do you do about the
| more tricky stuff like dreamt up functions and code
| packages? Unsafe practices like sensitive exposing data
| in cleartext, Linux commands which are downright the
| opposite of what was prompted, etc? That comes up a fair
| amount of times and I am not sure that LLMs are going to
| self-correct here, without human input.
| antonvs wrote:
| > "Bullshit jobs" are the rubbish required to keep the
| paperwork tidy, assessed and filed.
|
| It's also the jobs that involve keeping people happy
| somehow, which may not be "productive" in the most direct
| sense.
|
| One class of people that needs to be kept happy are
| managers. What makes managers happy is not always what is
| actually most productive. What makes managers happy is
| their _perception_ of what 's most productive, or having
| their ideas about how to solve some problem addressed.
|
| This does, in fact, result in companies paying people to do
| nothing _useful_. People get paid to do things that satisfy
| a need that managers have perceived.
| r0s wrote:
| AI is going to 10x the amount of bullshit, fully automating
| the process.
|
| NONE of the bullshit jobs are going away, there will simply
| be bigger, more numerous bullshit.
| davedx wrote:
| Some countries are still trending in that direction:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/icelan.
| ..
|
| Policy matters
| tim333 wrote:
| I think something Keynes got wrong there and much AI job
| discussion ignores is people like working, subject to the job
| being fun. Look at the richest people with no need to work -
| Musk, Buffett etc. Still working away, often well past
| retirement age with no need for the money. Keynes himself,
| wealth and probably with tenure working away on his theories.
| In the UK you can quite easily do nothing by going on
| disability allowance and doing nothing and many do but they
| are not happy.
|
| There can be a certain snobbishness with academics where they
| are like of course I enjoy working away on my theories of
| employment but the unwashed masses do crap jobs where they'd
| rather sit on their arses watching reality TV. But it isn't
| really like that. Usually.
| navane wrote:
| Meanwhile your examples for happy working are all
| billionaires who do w/e tf they want, and your example of
| sad non working are disabled people.
| trinix912 wrote:
| The reality of most people is that they need to work to
| financially sustain themselves. Yes, there are people who
| just like what they do and work regardless, but I think we
| shouldn't discount the majority which would drop their jobs
| or at least work less hours had it not been out of the need
| for money.
| tim333 wrote:
| Although in democracies we've largely selected that
| system. I've been to socialist places - Cuba and Albania
| before communism collapsed where a lot of people didn't
| do much but were still housed and fed (not very well -
| ration books) but no one seems to want to vote that stuff
| in.
| trinix912 wrote:
| The thing about those systems is you'd have to forgo the
| entire notion about private property and wealth as we
| currently know it for it to work out. Even then, there
| would be people who wouldn't want to work/contribute and
| the majority who would contribute the bare minimum (like
| you're saying). The percentage of people who'd work
| because they like it wouldn't be much higher than it is
| now. Or it might be even lower, as money wouldn't be as
| much of a factor in one's life.
| hx8 wrote:
| It seems like a democratic system could both maintain
| private property and make sure all of their citizens have
| basic needs are satisifed (food, housing, education,
| medical). I don't see how these two are mutually
| exclusive, unless you take a hardline that taxation is
| theft.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think more people take a _soft_ line. Taxation isn 't
| theft, but too much taxation _is_ theft.
|
| I don't know that I've ever heard this rationally
| articulated. I think it's a "gut feel" that at least some
| people have.
|
| If taxes take 10% of what you make, you aren't _happy_
| about it, but most of us are OK with it. If taxes take
| 90% of what you make, that feels different. It feels like
| the government thinks it all belongs to them, whereas at
| 10%, it feels like "the principle is that it all belongs
| to you, but we have to take some tax to keep everything
| running".
|
| So I think the way this plays out in practice is, the
| amount of taxes needed to supply everyones' basic needs
| is across the threshold in many peoples' minds. (The
| threshold of "fairness" or "reasonable" or some such,
| though it's more of a gut feel than a rational position.)
| Ray20 wrote:
| >food, housing, education, medical
|
| Literally unlimited needs, term "basic" does not apply to
| them.
| ptero wrote:
| While they didn't do much at work and could coast
| forever, they still had to show up and sit out the hours.
| And this does seem to correlate highly with ration books.
| Which are also not amazon-fulfilled, but require going to
| a store, waiting in line, worring that the rations would
| run out, yada yada.
|
| I'll take capitalism with all its warts over that workers
| paradise any day.
| sotix wrote:
| How did you visit Albania before communism collapsed? I
| thought it was closed off from the world.
| tim333 wrote:
| Well it was in the middle period when some communism
| collapsed but Albania was communist still. They did
| tourist day trips from Corfu to raise some hard currency.
| It's only about a mile from Albania at the closest point.
| timacles wrote:
| What percentage of people would you say like working for
| fun? Would you really claim they make up a significant
| portion of society?
|
| Even myself, work a job that I enjoy building things that
| I'm good at, that is almost stress free, and after 10-15
| years find that I would much rather spend time with my
| family or even spend a day doing nothing rather than spend
| another hour doing work for other people. the work never
| stops coming and the meaninglessness is stronger than ever.
| tim333 wrote:
| Well - I guess you are maybe typical in quite liking the
| work but wanting to do less hours? I saw some research
| that hunter gatherers work about 20 hours a week - maybe
| that's an optimum.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| A lot of people like the work they do, but they also like
| the things they do when they aren't working - more.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think a _lot_ of people would work fewer hours and
| probably retire earlier if money were absolutely not in
| the equation. That said, it 's also true that there are a
| lot of things you realistically can't do on your own--
| especially outside of software.
| seydor wrote:
| Most of the people are leisuring af work (for keynes era
| standards) and also getting paid for it
| ccorcos wrote:
| If you work 15 hours/week then presumably someone who chose
| to work 45 hours/week would make 3x more money.
|
| This creates supply-demand pressure for goods and services.
| Anything with limited supply such as living in the nice part
| of town will price out anyone working 15 hours/week.
|
| And so society finds an equilibrium...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Keynes suggested that by 2030, we'd be working 15 hour
| workweeks_
|
| Most people with a modest retirement account could retire in
| their forties to working 15-hour workweeks somewhere in rural
| America.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| The trade is you need to live in VHCOL city to earn enough
| and have a high savings rate. Avoid spending it all on
| VHCOL real estate.
|
| And then after living at the center of everything for 15-20
| years be mentally prepared to move to "nowhere", possibly
| before your kids head off to college.
|
| Most cannot meet all those conditions and end up on the
| hedonic treadmill.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you need to live in VHCOL city to earn enough and have
| a high savings rate_
|
| Yes to the latter, no to the former. The states with the
| highest savings rates are Connecticut, New Jersey,
| Minnesota, Massachussetts and Maryland [1]. Only
| Massachussetts is a top-five COL state [2].
|
| > _then after living at the center of everything for
| 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to "nowhere"_
|
| This is the real hurdle. Ultimately, however, it's a
| choice. One chooses to work harder to access a scarce
| resource out of preference, not necessity.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_
| savings...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_
| savings...
| gosub100 wrote:
| > Instead, we chose consumption
|
| instead, corporations chose to consume _us_
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| Not to undercut your point - because you're largely correct -
| but this is my reality. I have a decent-paying job in which I
| work roughly 15 hrs a week. Sometimes more when work scales
| up.
|
| That said, I'm not what you'd call a high-earning person (I
| earn < 100k) I simply live within my means and do my best to
| curb lifestyle creep. In this way, Keynes' vision is a
| reality, but it's a mindset and we also have to know when
| enough wealth is enough.
| oblio wrote:
| You're lucky. Most companies don't accept that. Frequently,
| even when they have part time arrangements, the incentives
| are such that middle managers are incentivized to squeeze
| you (including squeezing you out), despite company policies
| and HR mandates.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| I am lucky. I work for a very small consultancy (3 people
| plus occassional contractors) and am paid a fraction of
| our net income.
|
| The arrangement was arrived at because the irregular
| income schedule makes an hourly wage or a salary a poor
| option for everyone involved. I'm grateful to work for a
| company where the owners value not only my time and worth
| but also value a similar work routine themselves.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Which is a shame because I bet most knowledge workers
| aren't putting in more than three or fours hours of solid
| work. The rest of the time they are just keeping a seat
| warm.
| ghaff wrote:
| 40 hours/week is of course just an established norm for a
| lot of people and companies. But two 20 hour/week folks
| tend to cost more than one 40 hour/week person for all
| sorts of reasons.
| babuloseo wrote:
| source?
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, for starters people probably want health insurance
| in the US which often starts at some percentage of full-
| time. Various other benefits. Then two people are
| probably just more overhead to manage than one. Though
| they may offer more flexibility.
| raincom wrote:
| Now one has to work 60 hours to afford housing(rent/mortgage)
| and insurance (health, home, automotive). Yes, food is cheap
| if one can cook.
| csomar wrote:
| Elon Musk experiment is the worst anchor that can be used for
| comparison since the dude destabilized Twitter (re-branding,
| random layoffs, etc...). I'd be more interested in companies
| that went leaner but did it in a sane manner. The Internet user
| base grew between 2022 and now but Twitter might have lost
| users in that time period and certainly didn't make any new
| innovations beyond trying to charge its users more and
| confusing them.
| e40 wrote:
| Also section 174's amortization of software development had a
| big role.
| jki275 wrote:
| That's about to get repealed it looks like.
| latchkey wrote:
| TACO
| immibis wrote:
| For those unaware, the "TACO trade" is when Wall Street
| investors trade based on the principle that "Trump Always
| Chickens Out". For example, buying in a tariff-induced
| dip on the principle that he'll probably repeal the
| tariffs.
|
| Now that someone's said to Trump's face that Wall Street
| thinks he always chickens out, he may or may not stop
| doing it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Now that someone 's said to Trump's face that Wall
| Street thinks he always chickens out, he may or may not
| stop doing it_
|
| The point is he's powerless not to. The alternative is
| allowing a bond rout to trigger a bank collapse, probably
| in rural America. He didn't do the prep that produces
| actual leverage. (Xi did.)
| lazide wrote:
| Never assume a narcissist will take the sane way out when
| their game blows up in their face.
| harmmonica wrote:
| Can you expand on "probably in rural America"? Do you
| just mean that those smaller community banks are more at
| risk if rates rise? If so, because they issue more
| variable rate debt? Or is there something else?
|
| edit: grammar
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Do you just mean that those smaller community banks
| are more at risk if rates rise? If so, because they issue
| more variable rate debt? Or is there something else?_
|
| Current issue is community banks have 3x the commercial
| real estate exposure of other banks [1]. They're also
| less liquid and have a lower ROA. So in cases where the
| shock comes from outside the financial sector, they tend
| to be the first we worry about.
|
| [1] https://www.fdic.gov/quarterly-banking-profile _33%
| vs 11% of total assets_
| darepublic wrote:
| Don't look a gift taco in the mouth
| esaym wrote:
| This
| latchkey wrote:
| And the reason why I said it is because 174 is part of
| Trump's Cut^3 bill from 2017. DOE 174.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| I agree, R&D change is what triggered 2022 tech layoffs.
| Coders used to be free, all this play with Metaverse and such
| was on public dime. As soon as a company had to spend real
| money, it all came crashing down.
| rbultje wrote:
| This is a weird take. Employees are supposed to be business
| expenses, that's the core idea of running a business:
| profit = revenue - expenses, where expenses are personnel /
| materials, and pay taxes over profit. Since the R&D change,
| businesses can't fully expense employees and need to pay
| (business) taxes over their salaries. Employees - of course
| - still pay personal taxes also (as was always the case).
| e40 wrote:
| Yeah, free is a bit of a odd take. ! ZIRP + section 174
| was a huge simultaneous blow to tech.
|
| I would add one more: me too-ism from CEOs following Musk
| after the twitter reductions. I think many tech CEOs
| (e.g., Zuck) hate their workforce with a passion and used
| the layoff culture to unwind things and bring their
| workforce to heel (you might be less vocal in this sort
| of environment... think of the activists that used to
| work at Google).
| lozenge wrote:
| Macroeconomic policy always changes, recessions come and go,
| but it's not a permanent change in the way e-commerce or AI is.
| gmerc wrote:
| The flaw with the Zirp narrative that companies managed to
| raise more money than ever before the moment they had a
| somewhat believable narrative instead of the
| crypto/web3/metaverse nonsense.
| xorcist wrote:
| > because he simply thought he could run a lot leaner
|
| Because he suddenly had to pay interest on that gigantic loan
| he (and his business associates) took to buy Twitter.
|
| It may not be the only reason for everything that happened, but
| it sure is simple and has some very good explanatory powers.
| huntertwo wrote:
| Other companies have different reasons to cut costs, but the
| incentive is still there.
| xorcist wrote:
| Stocks are valued against the risk free interest, or so the
| saying goes.
|
| Doubling interest rate from .1% to .2% does a lot for your
| DCF models, and in this case we went from zero (or in some
| cases negative) to several percentage units. Of course
| stock prices tanked. That's what any schoolbook will tell
| you, and that's what any investor will expect.
|
| Companies thus have to start turning dials and adjust
| parameters to make number go up again.
| perrygeo wrote:
| Such an important point, I've seen and suspected the end of
| ZIRP being a much much greater influence on white collar work
| than we suspect. AI is going to take all the negative press but
| the flow of capital is ultimately what determines how the
| business works, which determines what software gets built.
| Conway's law 101. The white collar bloodbath is more of a
| haircut to shed waste accumulated during the excesses of ZIRP.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| ZIRP and then the final gasp of COVID bubble over hiring.
|
| At least in my professional circles the number of late
| 2020-mid 2022 job switchers was immense. Like 10 years of
| switches condensed into 18-24 months.
|
| Further lot of experiences and anecdotes talking to people
| who saw their company/org/team double or triple in size when
| comparing back to 2019.
|
| Despite some waves of mag7 layoffs we are still I think
| digesting what was essentially an overhiring bubble.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Is it negative press for AI, or is it convincing some
| investors that it's actually causing a tectonic shift in the
| workforce and economy? It could be positive in some sense.
| Though ultimately negative, because the outcomes are unlikely
| to reflect a continuation of the perceived impact or
| imaginary progress of the technology.
| fallingknife wrote:
| ZIRP had little to do with it. Tech is less levered than any
| other major industry. What happened is that growth expectations
| for large tech companies were way out of line with reality and
| finally came back down to earth when the market finally
| realized that the big tech cos are actually mature profitable
| companies and not just big startups. The fact that this
| happened at the same time ZIRP ended is a coincidence.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This is so cool. Had no idea FRED had data like this. They have
| everything.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| give trump a few more years, and that probably will change.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Why would you interpret data cut off at 2020 so that you're
| just looking at a covid phenomenon? The buttons don't seem to
| do anything on that site, but why not consider 2010-2025?
|
| That said, the vibe has definitely shifted. I started working
| in software in uni ~2009 and every job I've had, I'd applied
| for <10 positions and got a couple offers. Now, I barely get
| responses despite 10x the skills and experience I had back
| then.
|
| Though I don't think AI has anything to do with it, probably
| more the explosion of cheap software labor on the global
| market, and you have to compete with the whole world for a job
| in your own city.
|
| Kinda feels like some major part of the gravy train is up.
| lbotos wrote:
| It looks like that specific graph only starts in 2020...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Why not just find one that starts in 2022 then. It would
| look even more dire.
| oblio wrote:
| > People a decade from now will think Elon slashed Twitter's
| employee count by 90% because of some AI initiative, and not
| because he simply thought he could run a lot leaner.
|
| That part is so overblown. Twitter was still trying to hit
| moonshots. X is basically in "keep the lights on" mode as Musk
| doesn't need more. Yeah, if Google decides it doesn't want to
| grow anymore, it can probably cut it's workforce by 90%. And it
| will be as irrelevant as IBM in maximum 10 years.
| aikinai wrote:
| What moonshots has Twitter gone for in the last decade?
| Feature velocity is also higher since the acquisition.
| oblio wrote:
| "Moonshots" was probably a bad term. Twitter devs used to
| be very active in open source, in Scala, actors, etc in
| particular. Fairly sure that's all dead. From most reports
| the majority of current Twitter devs are basically visa-
| shackled to the company.
| nova22033 wrote:
| What happened to X, the payment app?
| leptons wrote:
| What's happening now is similar to what happened during the
| 2000's "dot-com bubble burst". Having barely survived that
| time, I saw this one coming and people told me I was crazy when
| I told them to hold on to their jobs and quit job-hopping,
| because the job-hopper is very often the first one to get laid
| off.
|
| In 2000 I was moved cities and I had a job lined-up at a
| company that was run by my friends, I had about 15 good friends
| working at the company including the CEO, and I was guaranteed
| the job in software development at the company. The interview
| was supposed to be just a formality. So I moved, and went in to
| see the CEO, and he told me he could not hire me, the funding
| was cut and there was a hiring freeze. I was devastated. Now
| what? Well I had to freelance and live on whatever I could
| scrape together, which was a few hundred bucks a month, _if I
| was lucky_. Fortunately the place I moved into was a big house
| with my friends who worked at said company, and since my rent
| was so low at the time, they covered me for a couple of years.
| I did eventually get some freelance work from the company, but
| things did not really recover until about 2004 when I finally
| got a full-time programming job, after 4 very difficult years.
|
| So many tech companies over-hired during covid, there was a
| gigantic bubble happening with FAANG and every other tech
| company at the time. The crash in tech jobs was inevitable.
|
| I feel bad for people who got left out in the cold this time, I
| know what they are going through.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Those are some great friends. Aside from job hoppers, I
| noticed there are a lot of company loyalists getting canned
| too though (i.e worked at MSFT 10 years)
| leptons wrote:
| It's not exactly the same this time around, the dot-com
| bubble was a bit different, but both then and now were
| preceded by huge hiring bubbles and valuations that were
| stupid. Now it's a little different 25 years later, tech
| has advanced and AI means cutting the fat out of a lot of
| companies, even Microsoft.
|
| AI is somewhat creating a similar bubble now, because
| investors still have money, and the current AI efforts are
| way over-hyped. 6.5 billion paid to aquihire Jony Ive is a
| symptom of that.
| intalentive wrote:
| Yes. Tech is clearly a beneficiary of the Cantillon Effect.
| rglover wrote:
| IMO this is dead on. AI is a hell of a scapegoat for companies
| that want to save face and pretend that their success wasn't
| because of cheap money being pumped into them. And in a world
| addicted to status games, that's a gift from the heavens.
| jt2190 wrote:
| It's a shame that this is the top comment because it's backward
| looking ("here's why white-collar workers lost their jobs in
| the last year") instead of looking forward and noticing that
| even if interest rates are reduced back to zero these jobs will
| not be performed by humans ever again. THAT is the message
| here. These workers need to retrain and move on.
| SR2Z wrote:
| > even if interest rates are reduced back to zero these jobs
| will not be performed by humans ever again
|
| It's not like companies laid off whole functions. These jobs
| will continue to be performed by humans - ZIRP just changes
| the number of humans and how much they get paid.
|
| > These workers need to retrain and move on.
|
| They only need to "retrain" insofar as they keep up with the
| current standards and practices. Software engineers are not
| going anywhere.
| niuzeta wrote:
| FRED continues to amaze me with the kind of data they have
| availab.e
| brfox wrote:
| That's from Indeed. And, Indeed has fewer job postings
| overall [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUS]. Should
| we normalize the software jobs with the total number of
| Indeed postings? Is Indeed getting less popular or more
| popular over this time period? Data is complicated
| simonsarris wrote:
| Look at that graph again. It's indexed to 100 in Feb 1,
| 2020. It's now at 106. In other words, after all the
| pandemic madness, the total number of job postings on
| indeed is slightly larger than it was before, not smaller.
|
| But for software, it's a lot smaller.
| randomname4325 wrote:
| Only way to know for sure you're safe from replacement is if your
| job is a necessary part of something generating revenue and your
| not easily replaceable. Otherwise you should assume the company
| won't hesitate to replace you. It's just business.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Yeah I thought that too. Then they laid me off anyway.
| snackernews wrote:
| Anyone who thinks an executive considers them necessary or
| irreplaceable in the current environment is fooling themselves.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| > if your job is a necessary part of something generating
| revenue and your not easily replaceable.
|
| First part of this statement is clearly false. People on the
| phone in a tech support company are very much necessary to
| generate revenue, people tending to field were very much
| necessary to extract the value of the fields. Draftsmen before
| CAD were absolutely necessary etc.
|
| Yet technology replaced them, or is in the process of doing so.
|
| So then, your statement simplifies to "if you want to be safe
| for replacement have a job that's hard to replace" which isn't
| very useful anymore.
| econ wrote:
| There use to be a cookie factory here that had up to 12 people
| sitting there all day doing nothing. If the machines broke down
| it really took all of them to clean up. This pattern will be
| rediscovered.
| topherPedersen wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I think us software developers are going to
| become even more powerful, in demand, and valuable.
| ghm2180 wrote:
| I wonder when the investors and investors in the early printing
| press or steam engine or excel spreadsheet was invented did they
| think of the ways -- soul crushing homework(books), rapid and
| cruel colonization(steam engines and trains), innovative project
| management(excel) -- there tech would be used?
|
| The demand for these products was not where it was intended at
| the time probably. Perhaps the answer to its biggest effect lies
| in how it will free up human potential and time.
|
| If AI can do that -- and that is a big if -- then how and what
| would you do with that time? Well ofc, more activity, different
| ways to spend time, implying new kinds of jobs.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| The trouble with looking at past examples of new tech and
| automation is that those were all verticals - the displaced
| worker could move to a different, maybe newly created, work
| area left intact by the change.
|
| Where AI will be different (when we get there - LLMs are not
| AGI) is that it is a general human-replacement technology
| meaning there will be no place to run ... They may change the
| job landscape, but the new jobs (e.g. supervising AIs) will
| ALSO be done by AI.
|
| I don't buy this "AGI by 2027" timeline though - LLMs and LLM-
| based agents are just missing so many basic capabilities
| compared to a human (e.g. ability to learn continually and
| incrementally). It seems that RL, test-time compute (cf tree
| search) and agentic application, have given a temporary second
| wind to LLMs which were otherwise topping out in terms of
| capability, but IMO we are already seeing the limits of this
| too - superhuman math and coding ability (on smaller scope
| tasks) do not translate into GENERAL intelligence since they
| are not based on general mechanism - they are based on vertical
| pre-training in these (atypical in terms of general use case)
| areas where there is a clean reward signal for RL to work well.
|
| It seems that this crazy "we're responsibly warning you that
| we're going to destroy the job market!" spiel is perhaps
| because these CEOs realize there is a limited window of
| opportunity here to try to get widespread AI adoption (and/or
| more investment) before the limitations become more obvious.
| Maybe they are just looking for an exit, or perhaps they are
| hoping that AI adoption will be sticky even if it proves to be
| a lot less capable that what they are promising it will be.
| infinitebit wrote:
| I am SO thankful to see a news outlet take what tech CEOs say
| with a grain of salt re: AI. I feel like so many have just been
| breathlessly repeating anything they say without even an
| acknowledgement that there might be, you know, _some_ incentive
| for them to stretch the truth.
|
| (ftr i'm not even taking a side re: will AI take all the jobs.
| even if they do, the reporting on this subject by MSM has been
| abysmal)
| infinitebit wrote:
| So glad to see a MSM outlet take the words of an AI ceo with even
| a single grain of salt. I've been really disappointed with the
| way so many publications have just been breathlessly repeating
| what is essentially a sales pitch.
|
| (ftr i'm not even taking a side re: is AI going to take all the
| jobs. regardless of what happens the fact remains that the
| reporting has been absolute sh*t on this. i guess "the
| singularity is here" gets more clicks than "sales person makes
| sales pitch")
| absurdo wrote:
| HN does the same. We don't really have a platform on the
| internet for good discussions so we mostly get regurgitated
| talking points and a lot of flags/downvotes if it's deemed a
| serious enough issue (f.e. pandemic) that taking a contrary
| stance is strictly forbidden.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Case in point ^
| brokegrammer wrote:
| We don't need AI to wipe out entry-level office jobs. David
| Graeber wrote about this in Bullshit Jobs. But now that we have
| AI, it's a good excuse to wipe out those jobs for good, just like
| Elon did after he acquired Twitter. After that, we can blame AI
| for the deed.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| The productivity gains in activities will be countered by the
| same gains in counter activities. Everything is going to become
| more sophisticated, but bullshit will remain.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I've thought a lot about this. I think this is exactly what is
| happening. I've seen this first hand.
|
| A lot of the BS jobs are being killed off. Do some non-bs jobs
| get burn up in the fire along the way, yes. But it's only the
| beginning.
| rule2025 wrote:
| The real "white-collar massacre" is not caused by AI, but you
| have no irreplaceable, or the value created by hiring you is not
| higher than using AI. Businesses will not hesitate to use AI, you
| can't say that companies are ruthless, but that's the pursuit of
| efficiency. Just as horse-drawn carriages were replaced by cars
| and coachmen lost their jobs, you can't say it's a problem with
| cars.
|
| History is always strikingly similar, the AI revolution is the
| fifth industrial revolution, and it is wise to embrace AI and
| collaborate with AI as soon as possible.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| There's a popular saying, e.g. used by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang,
| that "AI won't replace you - a human using AI will replace
| you", which may be temporarily true while AI isn't very
| capable, but the AI CEOs are claiming AGI will be here in 2
| years, and explicitly saying that it will be a "drop-in
| replacement remote worker". Obviously one of these is wrong -
| it's either just a tool to be learnt and used, or it is in fact
| a drop-in replacement for a human.
|
| One can argue about the timeline and technology (maybe not LLM
| based), but it does seem that human-level AGI will be here
| relatively soon - next 10 or 20 years, perhaps, if not 2. When
| this does happen, history is unlikely to be a good predictor of
| what to expect... AGI may create new jobs as well as detstroy
| old ones, but what's different is that AGI will also be doing
| those new jobs! AGI isn't automating one industry, or creating
| a technology like computers that can help automate any industry
| - AGI is a technology that will replace the need for human
| workers in any capacity, starting with all jobs that can be
| conducted without a physical presence.
| notyouraibot wrote:
| The hype around AI replacing software engineers is truly
| delusional. Yes they are very good at solving known problems,
| writing for loops and boilerplate code but introduce a little bit
| of complexity and creativity and it all fails. There have been
| countless tasks that I have given to AI, to which it simply
| concluded its not possible and suggested me to use several
| external libraries to get it done, after a little bit of manual
| digging, I was able to achieve that same task without any
| libraries and I'm not even a seasoned engineer.
| jatora wrote:
| While I agree that the current 'bloodbath' narrative is all hype,
| I'm honestly confused by a lot of the sentiment i see on here
| towards AI. Namely the dismissal of continual improvement and the
| rampant whistling past the graveyard attitude of what is coming.
|
| It is confusing because many of the dismissals come from
| programmers, who are unequivocally the prime beneficiaries of
| genAI capability as it stands.
|
| I work as a marketing engineer at a ~1B company and the amount of
| gains I have been able to provide as an individual are absolutely
| multiplied by genAI.
|
| One theory I have is that maybe it is a failing of prompt ability
| that is causing the doubt. Prompting, fundamentally, is querying
| vector space for a result - and there is a skill to it. There is
| a gross lack of tooling to assist in this which I attribute to a
| lack of awareness of this fact. The vast majority of genAI users
| dont have any sort of prompt library or methodology to speak of
| beyond a set of usual habits that work well for them.
|
| Regardless, the common notion that AI has only marginally
| improved since GPT-4 is criminally naive. The notion that we have
| hit a wall has merit, of course, but you cannot ignore the fact
| that we just got accurate 1M context in a SOTA model with gemini
| 2.5pro. For free. Mere months ago. This is a leap. If you have
| not experienced that as a leap then you are using LLM's
| incorrectly.
|
| You cannot sleep on context. Context (and proper utilization of
| it) is literally what shores up 90% of the deficiencies I see
| complained about.
|
| AI forgets libraries and syntax? Load in the current syntax. Deep
| research it. AI keeps making mistakes? Inform it of those
| mistakes and keep those stored in your project for use in every
| prompt.
|
| I consistently make 200k+ token queries of code and context and
| receive highly accurate results.
|
| I build 10-20k loc tools in hours for fun. Are they production
| ready? No. Do they accomplish highly complex tasks for niche use
| cases? Yes.
|
| The empowerment of the single developer who is good at
| manipulating AI AND an experienced dev/engineer is absolutely
| incredible.
|
| Deep research alone has netted my company tens of millions in
| pipeline, and I just pretend it's me. Because that's the other
| part that maybe many aren't realizing - its right under your nose
| - constantly.
|
| The efficiency gains in marketing are hilariously large. There
| are countless ways to avoid 'AI slop', and it involves, again,
| leveraging context and good research, and a good eye to steer
| things.
|
| I post this mostly because I'm sad for all of the developers who
| have not experienced this. I see it as a failure of effort (based
| on some variant of emotional bias or arrogance), not a lack of
| skill or intellect. The writing on the wall is so crystal clear.
| sfblah wrote:
| You're right, of course. Most of this thread is some sort of
| weird motivated reasoning by people who are terrified of the
| reality of what lies ahead. I work at a top-10 tech company.
| We've stopped hiring junior talent, and it's 100% because of
| AI. I'm something like 2x more productive since using AI. We're
| now deploying agentic AI systems to further reduce headcount.
| The actual bloodbath will happen when there's any kind of
| financial pressure on the company (a recession).
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| losing jobs is the biggest predictable hazard of AI but far from
| the biggest
|
| however there seems to be a big disconnect on this site and
| others
|
| If you believe AGI is possible and that AI can be smarter than
| humans in all tasks, naturally you can imagine many outcomes far
| more substantial than job loss.
|
| However many people don't believe AGI is possible, thus will
| never consider those possibilities
|
| I fear many will deny the probability that AGI could be achieved
| in the near future, thus leaving themselves and others unprepared
| for the consequences. There are so many potential bad outcomes
| that could be avoided merely if more smart people realized the
| possibility of AGI and ASI, and would thus rationally devote
| their cognitive abilities to ensuring that the potential
| emergence of smarter than human intelligences goes well.
| theawakened wrote:
| I've said this before and I'll say it again: The idea that 'AI'
| will EVER take over any programmers job is ridiculous. These
| idiots think they are going to create AGI, it's never going to
| happen, not with this race of people. There is far too much
| ignorance in humanity. AI will never be able to be any better
| than it's source, humanity. It's a soon-to-be realization for
| these billionaire talking heads. Nothing can rise higher than
| it's source. Even if they cover every square foot of land with
| data centers, it'll never work like they expect it to. The AI
| bubble will burst so hard the entire world will quake. I give it
| 5 years max.
| hansmayer wrote:
| It's so good to see the non-expert types are finally starting to
| see the whole hype for what it really is -> the long tail of last
| 20 years of incremental ML development, and not some
| revolutionary tech. We did not need to have this much hype around
| web 1.0 which was immediately adopted due to being obviously,
| well, revolutionary.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Yes, the dot-com bubble never happened.
| hansmayer wrote:
| We're talking technology adoption here, no need to sidetrack
| (although I would argue, the bubble of technology sector
| burning 200B to produce 10B in revenue will be so much more
| painful). Back in the day everyone was running to do
| something on the web, commercial or not, be it out of
| enthusiasm, greed, noble aspirations, art or even criminal
| (warez, anyone?). I won't even mention the iPhone moment
| here. Compare that to five years into GenAI hype, where is
| the massive adoption and thousands of applications or at
| least a single important breakthrough? Where is the AGI some
| of these "leaders" have been promising to arrive in 2025?
| Chumming along with Tesla's robotaxis?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Right - adoption was slower than people expected at the
| time, but it _did_ happen, and a lot of the stuff that got
| thrown at the wall back then did eventually stick.
|
| We are absolutely in a hype and market bubble around AI
| right now - and like the dot com bubble, the growth came
| not in 2000, but years later. It turns out it takes time
| for a new technology to percolate through society, and I
| use the "mom metric" as a bellwether - if your/my mother is
| using the tech, you'd better believe it has achieved market
| penetration.
|
| Until 2011 my mum was absolutely not interested in the web.
| Now she does most of her shopping on it, and spends her
| days boomerposting.
|
| She recently decided to start paying for ChatGPT.
|
| Sure, it's a fuzzy thing, but I think the adoption cycle
| this time around will be faster, as the access to the tech
| is already in peoples' hands, and there are plenty of folks
| who are already finding useful applications for genai.
|
| Robotaxis, whether they end up dominated by Tesla or waymo
| or someone else entirely, are inarguably here, and the
| adoption rates (the USA is not the only market in the
| world) are ramping significantly this year.
|
| I'm not sure I get your point about smartphones? They're in
| practically every pocket on the planet, now, they're not
| some niche thing.
| hansmayer wrote:
| Well, both the web1.0 and the smartphones were major
| inflection points in technological development. I argue
| that the GenAI is not. Steve Jobs did not need to shove
| the AppStore down anybodys throat, the way Gemini and
| other crap are being shoved right now. The growth
| happened organically and exponentially, because everyone
| instantly saw value in those products. It happened
| through early adopters and the late majority. Here we
| have neither. Where are the thousands, well even hundreds
| of applications that the end users actually want to use?
| Your mum, based on your description fits more into the
| category of laggards, and that category never determines
| anything about a product/technology impact.
| K0balt wrote:
| The "bloodbath" will be slow but is quite likely to be
| significant.
|
| AI / GP robotic labor will not penetrate the market so much in
| existing companies, which will have huge inertial buffers, but
| more in new companies that arise in specific segments where the
| technology proves most useful.
|
| The layoffs will come not as companies replace workers with AI,
| but as AI companies displace non-AI companies in the market,
| followed by panicked restructuring and layoffs in those companies
| as they try to react, probably mostly unsuccessfully.
|
| Existing companies don't have the luxury of buying market share
| with investor money, they have to make a profit. A tech darling
| AI startup powered by unicorn farts and inference can burn
| through billions of SoftBank money buying market share.
| xpe wrote:
| I find this plausible. Is the data starting to show this?
| K0balt wrote:
| There might be some, but I think it's still early.
|
| For the moment, AI is enabling a bunch of stuff that was too
| expensive or time consuming to do before (flooding the
| commons with shiny garbage and pedantic text to drive
| "engagement".
|
| Despite the hype, It's going to be 2-3 years before AI
| application really fall into stride, and 3-7 before general
| purpose robotics really get up to speed.
| veunes wrote:
| If the product can't speak for itself, scare people into
| believing it will soon
| jona777than wrote:
| There will likely be more jobs because of AI. With more
| "knowledge", comes more responsibility. Spam folders only exist
| because of automated emails. That classification process is more
| work. We may find there are more needs to meet as AI advances,
| not less.
|
| The fallacy is in the statement "AI will replace jobs." This
| shirks responsibility, which immediately diminishes credibility.
| If jobs are replaced or removed, that's a choice we as humans
| have made, for better or worse.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Many people are unable to find jobs because they are too old.
|
| Even older people prefer to hire younger people.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Okay? What does that have to do with anything?
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| There is an AI bloodbath that is adding to supply of labor in all
| low hanging fields that aren't yet being decimated by AI.
| franczesko wrote:
| AI bubble burst will come first.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| don't think that the white collar layoffs of the last 3-4 years
| are due to AI. The tech layoffs of 2022 are explained in part by
| the impact of 2017 tax reform. Before 2022, the research and
| development expenses could be written off taxes as a tax credit
| in the same year. It's a dollar to dollar reduction of tax
| liability. Tech companies classify a lot of their work as R&D. So
| those overpaid Facebook coders are essentially public charges!
| Somebody up thread said that programmers are disproportionately
| highly compensated in the US. They are, because it's not
| companies who pay for them, it's taxpayers, indirectly. Starting
| 2022, the deal became a bit less sweet. R&D expenses had to be
| amortized over 5 years. What happened next is a collusion in
| response to Great Resignation. Several large tech companies
| conspired to have layoffs at the same time as a salary
| compression move. The AI statements are mostly a scare tactic to
| put pressure on employees. For some industries and applications
| AI is revolutionary, but for coding it's good at autocomplete and
| not much else.
| nova22033 wrote:
| Does anyone have any experience with using AI tools on a massive
| legacy code base?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > To be clear, Amodei didn't cite any research or evidence for
| that 50%
|
| This reminds me the "Walter White" meme "I am the documentation".
| When the CEO of a company that makes LLM says something like
| that, "I perk up and listen" (to quote the article).
|
| When a doctor says "water in my village is bad quality, it gives
| diarrhea to 30% of the villagers", I don't need a fancy study
| from some university. The doctor "is the documentation". So if
| the Anthropic/ChatGPT/LLaMa/etc. (mixing companies and products,
| it's ok though) say that "so-and-so", they see the integrations,
| enhancements, compliments, companies ordering _more_
| subscriptions, etc.
|
| In my current company (high volume, low profit margin) they told
| us "go all in on AI". They see that (e.g. with Notion-like-tools)
| if you enable the "AI", that thing can save _a lot_ of time on
| "Confluence-like" tasks. So, paying $20-$30-$40 per person, per
| month, and that thing improving the productivity/output of an FTE
| by 20%-30% is a massive win.
|
| So yes, we keep the ones we got (because mass firings, ministry
| of 'labour', unions, bad marketing, etc.). Headcount will
| organically be reduced (retirements, getting a new job, etc.)
| combined with minimizing new hires, and boom! savings!!
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| The white collar bloodbath is the jobs that could have been
| automated pre AI but weren't due to organizational inertia,
| corporate freedom building and an unwillingness to invest.
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