[HN Gopher] Why didn't AI "join the workforce" in 2025?
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Why didn't AI "join the workforce" in 2025?
Author : zdw
Score : 41 points
Date : 2026-01-05 22:10 UTC (50 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (calnewport.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (calnewport.com)
| dandelionv1bes wrote:
| The response to the Sal Khan op-ed resonated with me, along with
| other parts of this article. Something I've been digging more
| into is some of the figures around proposed job losses from AI. I
| think I even posted a simulation paper last week.
|
| After posting that, I came across numerous papers which critique
| Frey & Osborne's approach, who are some of the forefathers for
| the AI job losses figures we see banded around commonly these
| days. One such paper is here but i can dig out others:
| https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_...
|
| It has made me very cautious around bold statements on AI - and I
| was already at the cautious end.
| Retric wrote:
| Job losses aren't directly tied to productivity, in the short
| term it's all about expectations. Many companies are laying
| people off and then trying to get staff back when it doesn't
| work. How much of this is hype and how much is sustained is
| difficult to determine right now.
| matt3210 wrote:
| A previous company I worked for is San Francisco was very anti
| remote, but they announced on linked in that they are ok with
| remote engineers suddenly. It seems it's still a workers market
| at least in SF. I'd AI could do it or even reduced head count I
| don't think that would be the case.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Pretty ironic that he complains about Kahn citing someone who
| told him AI agents are capable of replacing 80% of call center
| employees, right after quoting _Gary Marcus_ of all people,
| claiming LLMs will never live up to the hype.
|
| If you want to focus on what AI agents are actually capable of
| today, the last person I'd pay any attention to is Marcus, who
| has been wrong about nearly everything related to AI for years,
| and does nothing but double down.
| Jonovono wrote:
| What has he been wrong about? He was way ahead of predicting
| the scaling limitations, llm not making it to agi.
| verdverm wrote:
| What scaling limitations, Gemini 3 shows us that is not over
| yet, and little brother flash is a hyper sparse, 1T parameter
| model (aiui) that is both fast and good
| jcastro wrote:
| > In one example I cite in my article, ChatGPT Agent spends
| fourteen minutes futilely trying to select a value from a drop-
| down menu on a real estate website
|
| Man dude, don't automate toil add an API to the website.It's
| supposed to have one!
| stvltvs wrote:
| It probably has one that the web form is already using, but if
| agentic AI requires specialized APIs, it's going to be a while
| before reality meets the hype.
| edfletcher_t137 wrote:
| > But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I'm hoping
| 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI
| might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present
| capabilities.
|
| > So, this is how I'm thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the
| predictions. I'm done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by
| vibes. The impacts of the technologies that already exist are
| already more than enough to concern us for now...
|
| SPOT ON, let us all take inspiration. "The impacts of the
| technologies that already exist are already more than enough to
| concern us for now"!
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Cal Newport looked in the wrong places. He has no visibility into
| the usage of ChatGPT to do homework. The collapse of Chegg should
| tell you, with no other public information, that if 30% of
| students were already cheating somehow, somewhat weakly, they are
| now doing super-powerful cheating, and surely more than 30% of
| students at this stage.
|
| It's also kind of stupid to hand wave away, programming.
| Programmers are where all the early adopters of software are.
| He's merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities.
| Programmers, I'm sure, were also the first to use Google and
| smartphones. "It doesn't work for me" is missing the critical
| word "yet" at the end, and really, is it saying much that
| forecasts about adoption in the metric, "years until when Cal
| Newport's arbitrary criteria of what agent and adoption means
| meets some threshold only inside Cal Newport's head" is hard to
| do?
|
| There are 700m active monthlies for ChatGPT. It has joined the
| workforce! It just isn't being paid the salaries.
| bpavuk wrote:
| read it again. he criticizes the hype built around 2025 as the
| Year X for agents. many were thinking that "we'll carry PCs in
| our pockets" when Windows Mobile-powered devices came out. many
| predicted 2003 as the Year X for what we now call smartphones.
|
| no, it was 2008, with the iPhone launch.
| lukev wrote:
| Wow, homework is an insane example of a "workforce."
|
| Homework is in some ways the opposite of actual economic labor.
| Students _pay_ to attend school, and homework is
| (theoretically) part of that education; something designed to
| help students learn more effectively. They are most certainly
| not paid for it.
|
| Having a LLM do that "work" is economically insane. The desired
| learning does not happen, and the labor of grading and giving
| feedback is entirely wasted.
|
| Students use ChatGPT for it because of perverse incentives of
| the educational system. It has no bearing on economic
| production of value.
| bpavuk wrote:
| a stellar piece, Cal, as always. short and straight to the point.
|
| I believe that Codex and the likes took off (in comparison to
| e.g. "AI" browsers) because the bottleneck there was not
| reasoning about code, it was about typing and processing walls of
| text. for a human, the interface of e.g. Google Calendar is +-
| intuitive. for a LLM, any graphical experience is an absolute
| hellscape from performance standpoint.
|
| CLI tools, which LLMs love to use, output text and only text, not
| images, not audio, not videos. LLMs excel at text, hence they are
| confined to what text can do. yes, multimodal is a thing, but you
| lose a lot of information and/or context window space + speed.
|
| LLMs are a flawed technology for general, true agents. 99% of the
| time, outside code, you need eyes and ears. we have only created
| a self-writing paper yet.
| observationist wrote:
| I've seen organizations where 300 of 500 people could effectively
| be replaced by AI, just by having some of the the remaining 200
| orchestrate and manage automation workflows that are trivially
| within the capabilities of current frontier models.
|
| There's a whole lot of bullshit jobs and work that will get
| increasingly and opaquely automated by AI. You won't see jobs go
| away unless or until organizations deliberately set out to reduce
| staff. People will use AI throughout the course of their days to
| get a couple of "hours" of tasks done in a few minutes, here and
| there, throughout the week. I've already seen reports and
| projects and writing that clearly comes from AI in my own
| workplace. Right now, very few people know how to recognize and
| assess the difference between human and AI output, and even fewer
| how to calibrate work assignments.
|
| Spreadsheet AIs are fantastic, reports and charting have just hit
| their stride, and a whole lot of people are going to appear to be
| very productive without putting a whole lot of effort into it.
| And then one day, when sufficiently knowledgable and aware people
| make it into management, all sorts of jobs are going to go
| quietly away, until everything is automated, because it doesn't
| make sense to pay a human 6 figures what an AI can do for 3
| figures in a year.
|
| I'd love to see every manager in the world start charting the
| Pareto curves for their workplaces, in alongside actual hours
| worked per employee - work output is going to be very wonky, and
| the lazy, clever, and ambitious people are all going to be using
| AI very heavily.
|
| Similar to this guy:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11850241
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/tm8m...
|
| Part of the problem is that people don't know how to measure work
| effectively to begin with, let alone in the context of AI
| chatbots that can effectively do better work than anyone a
| significant portion of the adult population of the planet.
|
| The teams that fully embrace it, use the tools openly and
| transparently, and are able to effectively contrast good and poor
| use of the tools, will take off.
| milancurcic wrote:
| > The industry had reason to be optimistic that 2025 would prove
| pivotal. In previous years, AI agents like Claude Code and
| OpenAI's Codex had become impressively adept at tackling multi-
| step computer programming problems.
|
| Both of these agents launched mid-2025.
| bpavuk wrote:
| don't forget Aider from 2023
| evil-olive wrote:
| > But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I'm hoping
| 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI
| might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present
| capabilities.
|
| yes, 100%
|
| I think that way too often, discussions of the _current_ state of
| tech get derailed by talking about _predictions_ of future
| improvements.
|
| hypothetical thought experiment:
|
| I set a New Year's resolution for myself of drinking less
| alcohol.
|
| on New Year's Eve, I get pulled over for driving drunk.
|
| the officer wants to give me a sobriety test. I respond that I
| have _projected_ my alcohol consumption will have decreased 80%
| YoY by Q2 2026.
|
| the officer is going to smile and nod...and then _insist_ on
| giving me the sobriety test.
|
| compare this with a non-hypothetical anecdote:
|
| I was talking with a friend about the environmental impacts of
| AI, and mentioned the methane turbines in Memphis [0] that are
| being used to power Elon Musk's MechaHitler slash CSAM generator.
|
| the friend says "oh, but they're working on building nuclear
| power plants for AI datacenters".
|
| and that's technically true...but it misses the broader point.
|
| if someone lives downwind of that data center, and they have a
| kid who develops asthma, you can try to tell them "oh in 5 years
| it'll be nuclear powered". and your prediction might be
| correct...but their kid still has asthma.
|
| 0: https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
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(page generated 2026-01-05 23:00 UTC)