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.
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.
That might be a perspective thing. I can think of three people in my life who have used AI at any point, and two of the three used it for diffusion models right when Stable Diffusion was first released.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Sounds like Google Duplex, but I guess they never expanded the tech beyond restaurant reservations.
But on my Pixel now, on some phone trees it shows a UI with numbers and choices, and even predicts ahead for the other choices so you aren't forced to wait. Very handy!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
>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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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".
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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).
Often people will say "AI will never do X, or at least it will take decades", and then it does X, and it turns out you can cheat a lot to get X done really easily.
I'm old enough to remember when X was "play chess at top level", followed by 19 years of X = "play Go at top level". Irregardless of what you think of GenAI, the script writers of I, Robot chose X = "compose music and draw pictures".
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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?
> 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.)
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!"
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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...
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.
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.
So, prostitution? Bartender? There are still jobs now that require human interaction, but unless interacting with another human is the job itself, then, yes, those jobs are going. McDonalds already has kiosks for ordering. Yo Sushi has beer taps at your table. Young men are walking around having relationships with cute anime girls who listen and validate them (and how are they ever going to deal with an actual human female who has her own needs??). Others on HN are saying AI isn't good enough for this or that, but have you ever tried dealing with a real person in a call center, or a minimum wage employee at the job center, or a sales person at a cheap cosmetics counter. So sure, there are jobs at Chanel, or Audi, or Michelin starred restaurants, for the rich who can not only afford such luxury but enjoy lauding it over the rest of us, but for the rest of us there's Johnny Cab if we even have any way of paying for a ride in one.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Thanks for saying it out loud. I meet a lot of people like you that think the same way as part of my job and they aren't willing to say it out loud.
It's about protecting your work, even if an LLM can do it better.
The only way an LLM can devalue your work is if it can do it better than you. And I don't just mean quality, I mean as a function of cost/quality/time.
Anyway, we can be enemies I don't care - I've been getting rid of roles that aren't useful anymore as much as I can. I do care that it affects them personally but I do want them to be doing something more useful for us all whatever that may be.
Caring doesn't mean that you stop everything you're doing to address someone's needs. That's a pretty binary world if it was the case and maybe a convenient way to look at motives when you don't want nuance.
Caring about climate change doesn't mean you need to spend your entire life planting trees instead of doing what you're doing.
There's a "purpose of a system", but there's also a purpose which we want that system to serve, and which prompts us to correct the system should it deviate from the goals we set for it.
That is a simplistic idea that I am scared has spread far and wide.
A system is a tool, it does have a use/purpose in the simplistic sense. But how we use the tool is ultimately the crux of the issue, for we can use that hammer to build houses or tear them down, or to build concentration camps or use it simply to injure someone directly.
No, the purpose of a tool/system is generally determined by the guiding philosophy of the user or society. Unfortunately society has replaced its philosophy (at least in America) with the economic system of capitalism; i.e. capitalism for capitalisms sake.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Nah - those people have the bandwidth/time to justify their value in my experience. They are also usually the people managing the productive.
Its the people that are constantly working, and too busy to be seen, producing output and keeping the lights on who don't have time for the "games" who AI is going for. Their jobs are easier to define since they are productive and do "something" - so its easy to market AI products for these use cases. After all these people are usually not the people in charge of the purse strings in most organisations for better or worse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>Dilbert creator Scott Adams came to our attention last month for the first time since the mid to late '90s when a blog post surfaced where he said, among other things, 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."
>Now, he's managed to provoke yet another internet maelstorm of derision by popping up on message boards to harangue his critics and defend himself. That's not news in and of itself, but what really makes it special is how he's doing it: by leaving comments on Metafilter and Reddit under the pseudonym PlannedChaos where he speaks about himself in the third person and attacks his critics while pretending that he is not Scott Adams, but rather just a big, big fan of the cartoonist.
>And what makes it really, really special is the level of spectacular ego and hilarious self-congratulation suddenly on display in the comments when you realize they were written by Scott Adams' number one fan... Scott Adams. [...]
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!
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.
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.
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...
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".
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.
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."
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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"?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Former President Obama (of the US) calls this a "false choice". Can you be both focused on the next promotion and providing lots of value in your current role? I think the answer is yes. Of course, there are people whom seem to produce nothing, but get promoted... in the case of software engineers, they are mostly promoted on the principle of "competance" -- You are a good software dev... so now your run this team (regardless if they are a good manager!).
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Immigration based on “I have someone willing to pay me to work” (and go through the immigration process) is essentially unlimited. Immigration based on “I’m a poor refugee, please help me” is nearly nonexistent (helps they’re an island).
Nah Japan rejects a lot of people even for work visas, also the requirements for maintaining the work visa can be extremely burdensome. You are underplaying the amount of bureaucratic hurdles that the average person will in fact face.
This nation has always taken in at least some percentage of less well off immigrants. It's against tradition to do otherwise. I don't see why we should render the second category non-existent, or why that is some inherent good that everyone should agree to be the case? Am I allowed to believe otherwise?
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.
What do you think caused the very high numbers of refugees in other European countries? I thought they were all supposed to be refugees from war and not economic refugees. In fact I thought economic refugees were just economic migrants and not something European countries let in under refugee rules.
The big difference that's been highly relevant recently (https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/un-criticises-restrict...) is the application of asylum rules to civil war. You only have a right to international asylum if you can't find refuge in your home country - but what does "can't" mean, precisely, when your country is split into multiple warring factions along hazy front lines? There's a lot of room for interpretation.
First, I assume you are talking about highly skilled immigration to Switzerland. Does Swiss immigration policy also apply to non-highly skilled immigration? (Leave aside refugees for this discussion.)
How does Switzerland keep local companies from hiring workers on low wages to compete against locals? How do they police it?
Because other countries are not Japan, and if, say, the US were to pursue a similar policy, they would receive over 200 million immigrant workers and near-zero employment among the native population in the first two years
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that all statistics show us that the economy was very strong, especially compared to other countries. We did the impossible and had a soft landing. However, we also learned that the public prefers unemployment over inflation, even if real wages go up. People see their wage increases as earned even if it's just a market adjustment.
Further, I'm very disappointed that the median voter doesn't seem to understand or care about the policies they vote for. Tariffs and deportations are recipes to cause more inflation, yet here we are.
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.
was the left ever truly anti-immigration? I genuinely ask. Because the last leftwing explicitly pro-union movement I can remember was the late 90s/2000s anti-globalists, the ones that used to protest the G7 summits and the like. But they were in favor of immigration, so it always seemed contradictory.
Anyway, it's not like the right doesn't have its own equally contradictory positions.
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.
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).
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think so. You can argue emmigration takes away supply in the labor side. Why would prices go down? Quite the contrary.
I don't think it necessarily raises salaries in India though, because that market seems to have a hard cap somewhere around 36k/year but it sure does opens up positions for newcomers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
This comment made me laugh. I have not seen the term "scab" since the late 1980s when there were a bunch of union strikes in my area. It is funny to see it applied to white collar (office) workers.
Edit: I found this funny quote describing a scab from the early 1900s:
> After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
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.
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
Perhaps the terminology differs between companies, but in my experience TPM means technical program manager. For large projects they were responsible for creating project Gantt charts, identify blockers early, and essentially "greasing the wheels" between disparate teams.
Again, IMO the good ones added a lot of value by making sure no balls got dropped, which is easy to do with large, multi-team projects. Most of them, though, did a lot of just "status checks" and meeting updates.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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”
Its hard to automate something that is hard to define, so I see the productive jobs/workers being punished by AI moreso than those jobs. Generally I see anecdotally:
- Value creators (i.e. the ones historically carrying companies with the 80%/20% rule) generally are the ones cautious and/or fearful of AI. The ones that carried most of the company. Their output is measurable and definable so able to be automated.
- The people in the jobs you mention in your post conversely are usually the ones most excited about AI. The ones in meetings all day, in the corporate machine. By definition their job is already not well defined anyway - IMV this is harder to automate. They are often there for other reasons other than "productive output" - e.g. compliance, nepotism, stakeholder management, etc.
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.
> 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.
I think the more optimistic interpretation would be that companies eliminating bullshit jobs would provide signal on which jobs aren’t bullshit, and then individuals and the job prep/education systems could align to this.
That’s very optimistic! I don’t fully agree with it, but I certainly know some very intelligent people that I wish were contributing more to the world than they do as a pawn in a game of corporate chess.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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,
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%?
> 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.
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.
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.
I realize I came across as harsh and I surely don't want to judge you personally on your skills as A) that's not necessary for my point to make sense and B) uncalled for. I'm sure you are a capable C developer and I'm sorry for being an asshole - but I am one so it's hard for me to pretend otherwise...
Being able to program in C is something I can also do, but it sure as heck does not make me proficient Rust developer if I cobble some shit from a LLM together and call it a day.
I can appreciate how "businesses" think this is a valuable, but - and this is often forgotten by salaried developers - as I am not a business owner I have neither the position nor the intention of doing any "business". I am in a position to do "engineering". Business is for someone else to worry about. Shipping "valuable features" is not something I care about. Shipping working and correct features is something I worry about. Perhaps modern developers should call themselves business analysts or something if they wish to stop engineering.
LLMs are souped up Stack Overflows and I can't believe my ears if I hear a fellow developer say someone on Stack Overflow ported some of their code to Rust on request and that this feature of SO now makes them a proficient Rust developer because they can vaguely follow the code and can now "ship" valuable features.
This is like being able to vaguely follow Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which is something any amateur can do, compared to being able to engage with it academically and rigorously. I deeply worry about the competence of the next generation - and thus my own safety - if they believe superficial understanding is equivalent to deep mastery.
Edit: interesting side note: I am writing this as a dyed in the wool generalist. Now ain't that something? I don't care if expertise dies off professionally, because I never was an "expert" in something. I always like using whatever works and all systems more or less feel equal to me yet I can also tell that this approach is deeply flawed. In many important ways deep mastery really matters and I was hoping the rest of society would keep that up and now they are all becoming generalists who don't know shit and it worries me..
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).
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
If that were happening right now, how would we know? COVID-19 cases were tracked imperfectly but pretty well; is there any equivalent for AI-related job losses?
Right, my point is that we don't have the data to make a similar exponential argument. We can't rule out the possibility that we're currently in the early stages of exponential growth based on direct measurement. If it is exponential, once it doubles enough times, it will show up in overall economic data.
We can also look at the tools, which have improved relatively quickly but don't appear to be improving exponentially. GPT-4 and GPT-4o came out about a year after their predecessors. Is GPT-4o a bigger leap that GPT-4 was? Are GPT-4.5 or 4.1 a bigger leap than GPT-4 was? I honestly don't know, but the general reception suggests otherwise. The biggest leaps recently seem to be making models that perform roughly as well as past ones but are much smaller. That has advantages from the standpoint of democratization and energy consumption, but those kinds of improvements seems to favor a situation where AI augments workers rather than replaces them.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
"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.
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.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 416 ms ] threadThat's the most charitable thing I can say, at least.
I remember the pre-Web days of Usenet and BBS and no one thought those were trendy.
AI is far more akin to crypto.
Pretty much everyone I know uses AI for something.
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
Rule 0 is that you never put your angel investors out of work if you want to keep riding on the gravy train
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.
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.
Sure you'll have destroyed the company, but at least you'll have avoided bureaucracy.
Like in the US you have a choice of which jurisdiction you want to start your company. Not all require a notary
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But on my Pixel now, on some phone trees it shows a UI with numbers and choices, and even predicts ahead for the other choices so you aren't forced to wait. Very handy!
I still fail to see why people think we're going to innovate ourselves into global poverty, it makes no sense.
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.
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.
I'm sure we are, but it doesn't look like an improvement for most people.
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.
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.
The worst it gets of course, the more each of us will feel capable of.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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).
Often people will say "AI will never do X, or at least it will take decades", and then it does X, and it turns out you can cheat a lot to get X done really easily.
I'm old enough to remember when X was "play chess at top level", followed by 19 years of X = "play Go at top level". Irregardless of what you think of GenAI, the script writers of I, Robot chose X = "compose music and draw pictures".
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.
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.
Wouldn't you have struggled to imagine most of what LLMs can now do 5 years ago?
Hey, is there a good board game in there somewhere? Serfs and Nobles™
End of conversation.
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?
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.)
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!"
My prediction is that the poor will reinvent the guillotine
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Had to look that up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
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.
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.
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.
Caveat that this is anecdotal, not sure if there are numbers on this.
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.
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.
This is my bet. Similar to Moores law. Where it plateaus is anybody’s guess…
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.
If there's a shortage, in the free market, humans will retrain.
This category is expansive enough to make fools of almost everyone on hn.
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.
I guess funding for processing power and physical machinery to run the AI backing a product would be the biggest barrier to entry?
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.
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.
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.
50% of a group of workers losing their jobs to this tech is not a worrisome future for him. It's a pitch!
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!
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...
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
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.
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!
I just wish that instead of getting more efficient at generating bullshit, we could just eliminate the bullshit.
That covers majority of sales, advertising and marketing work. Unfortunately, replacing people with AI there will only make things worse for everyone.
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.
It's about protecting your work, even if an LLM can do it better.
The only way an LLM can devalue your work is if it can do it better than you. And I don't just mean quality, I mean as a function of cost/quality/time.
Anyway, we can be enemies I don't care - I've been getting rid of roles that aren't useful anymore as much as I can. I do care that it affects them personally but I do want them to be doing something more useful for us all whatever that may be.
Caring about climate change doesn't mean you need to spend your entire life planting trees instead of doing what you're doing.
We can, together, overcome such challenges when we accept that "The purpose of a system is what it does".
A system is a tool, it does have a use/purpose in the simplistic sense. But how we use the tool is ultimately the crux of the issue, for we can use that hammer to build houses or tear them down, or to build concentration camps or use it simply to injure someone directly.
No, the purpose of a tool/system is generally determined by the guiding philosophy of the user or society. Unfortunately society has replaced its philosophy (at least in America) with the economic system of capitalism; i.e. capitalism for capitalisms sake.
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.
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.
Management will be thrilled.
Its the people that are constantly working, and too busy to be seen, producing output and keeping the lights on who don't have time for the "games" who AI is going for. Their jobs are easier to define since they are productive and do "something" - so its easy to market AI products for these use cases. After all these people are usually not the people in charge of the purse strings in most organisations for better or worse.
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.
It's the AI hype squad that are banking their future on AI magically turning into AGI; because, you know, it surprised us once.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The gross injustices in the original quote were already a fact, which makes the quote so powerful.
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.
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.
I truly belive these types of paper don't deserve to be valued so much.
Some managers read Dilbert and think it's intended as advice.
"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
Should have been 'better still'.
I swear, folks: dennis_jeeves2 is not my sock puppet, the way Scott "plannedchaos" Adams is his own sock puppet and biggest fan.
Scott Adams Poses as His Own Fan on Message Boards to Defend Himself:
https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp...
>Dilbert creator Scott Adams came to our attention last month for the first time since the mid to late '90s when a blog post surfaced where he said, among other things, 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."
>Now, he's managed to provoke yet another internet maelstorm of derision by popping up on message boards to harangue his critics and defend himself. That's not news in and of itself, but what really makes it special is how he's doing it: by leaving comments on Metafilter and Reddit under the pseudonym PlannedChaos where he speaks about himself in the third person and attacks his critics while pretending that he is not Scott Adams, but rather just a big, big fan of the cartoonist.
>And what makes it really, really special is the level of spectacular ego and hilarious self-congratulation suddenly on display in the comments when you realize they were written by Scott Adams' number one fan... Scott Adams. [...]
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azFNwF6fa0
Afterlife (video game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife_(video_game)
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.
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.
Which is the sole reason automation will not make most people obsolete until the VP level themselves are automated.
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."
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...
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But in UK an Ireland they get free healthcare, paid vacation, sick leave and labor protections, no?
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.
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".
I pay over 40% effective tax rate. Healthcare is far from free.
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.
I’ve never been to Boston. Why are the prices high there?
Think they're too high? You're free to start a company and pay less.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
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).
The "min wage" of HN seems to be "living better than 98% of everyone else"
I mean a real wage associated with standards of living that one took for granted as "normal" when I was young.
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.
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.
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).
Both sides of the aisle retreated from domestic labor protection for their own different reasons so the US labor force got clobbered.
Sorry, dude, it's like, all I know.
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.
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.
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.
I already know that the right-wing supports h1bs, Trump himself said so.
Even literal Nazis were exempted from immigration controls on the basis of extreme merit.
People in tech are so quick to shoot themselves in the foot.
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)
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?
Don’t understand why other countries make it harder.
This nation has always taken in at least some percentage of less well off immigrants. It's against tradition to do otherwise. I don't see why we should render the second category non-existent, or why that is some inherent good that everyone should agree to be the case? Am I allowed to believe otherwise?
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.
How does Switzerland keep local companies from hiring workers on low wages to compete against locals? How do they police it?
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.
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.
What do you think of that?
Further, I'm very disappointed that the median voter doesn't seem to understand or care about the policies they vote for. Tariffs and deportations are recipes to cause more inflation, yet here we are.
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.
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.
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).
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!
But, for existing teams they wanted (reasonably) to avoid splitting between locations. So you need someone local.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jamesfobrien_tech-jobs-have-d...
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.
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.
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.
Actually disregard, this isn’t worth it, but I don’t grant any freebies.
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?
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.
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.
Knowing one’s enemy is key to fighting them.
Edit: I found this funny quote describing a scab from the early 1900s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London#Diatribe_about_sca...
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.
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.
Again, IMO the good ones added a lot of value by making sure no balls got dropped, which is easy to do with large, multi-team projects. Most of them, though, did a lot of just "status checks" and meeting updates.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- Value creators (i.e. the ones historically carrying companies with the 80%/20% rule) generally are the ones cautious and/or fearful of AI. The ones that carried most of the company. Their output is measurable and definable so able to be automated.
- The people in the jobs you mention in your post conversely are usually the ones most excited about AI. The ones in meetings all day, in the corporate machine. By definition their job is already not well defined anyway - IMV this is harder to automate. They are often there for other reasons other than "productive output" - e.g. compliance, nepotism, stakeholder management, etc.
I’ve seen those guys it is painful to watch.
I’m worried about the shrinking number of opportunities for juniors.
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.
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.
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.
That’s very optimistic! I don’t fully agree with it, but I certainly know some very intelligent people that I wish were contributing more to the world than they do as a pawn in a game of corporate chess.
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.
whereas "AI" is intuitively an external force; it's much harder to assign blame to company leadership.
This had me thinking, how are they going to get "clout", by comparing AI spending?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It ain't done yet.
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%?
fucking lmao
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.
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.
Being able to program in C is something I can also do, but it sure as heck does not make me proficient Rust developer if I cobble some shit from a LLM together and call it a day.
I can appreciate how "businesses" think this is a valuable, but - and this is often forgotten by salaried developers - as I am not a business owner I have neither the position nor the intention of doing any "business". I am in a position to do "engineering". Business is for someone else to worry about. Shipping "valuable features" is not something I care about. Shipping working and correct features is something I worry about. Perhaps modern developers should call themselves business analysts or something if they wish to stop engineering.
LLMs are souped up Stack Overflows and I can't believe my ears if I hear a fellow developer say someone on Stack Overflow ported some of their code to Rust on request and that this feature of SO now makes them a proficient Rust developer because they can vaguely follow the code and can now "ship" valuable features.
This is like being able to vaguely follow Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which is something any amateur can do, compared to being able to engage with it academically and rigorously. I deeply worry about the competence of the next generation - and thus my own safety - if they believe superficial understanding is equivalent to deep mastery.
Edit: interesting side note: I am writing this as a dyed in the wool generalist. Now ain't that something? I don't care if expertise dies off professionally, because I never was an "expert" in something. I always like using whatever works and all systems more or less feel equal to me yet I can also tell that this approach is deeply flawed. In many important ways deep mastery really matters and I was hoping the rest of society would keep that up and now they are all becoming generalists who don't know shit and it worries me..
LLMs are great but what they really excel at is raising the rates of Dunning-Kruger in every industry they touch.
Please for the love of god tell me this is a joke.
Which is my point, this is not about replacement, it's about reducing the need and increasing supply.
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).
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.
Yes.
Can you not?
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.
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.)
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
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?
AI company CEOs trying to juice their stock evaluations?
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.
> ...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...
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.
Its an apt comparison. The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.
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
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
What does this mean? What do you apply to populace at large? Do you mean a populace doesn’t model the exponential change right?
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?
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.
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.
2 years ago it was cool but unreliable.
Today I just did an entire “photo shoot” in Midjourney.
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.
Not just this topic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We can also look at the tools, which have improved relatively quickly but don't appear to be improving exponentially. GPT-4 and GPT-4o came out about a year after their predecessors. Is GPT-4o a bigger leap that GPT-4 was? Are GPT-4.5 or 4.1 a bigger leap than GPT-4 was? I honestly don't know, but the general reception suggests otherwise. The biggest leaps recently seem to be making models that perform roughly as well as past ones but are much smaller. That has advantages from the standpoint of democratization and energy consumption, but those kinds of improvements seems to favor a situation where AI augments workers rather than replaces them.
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.
Try revisiting their content from spring of 2020 (flatten the curve, wild death predictions, etc).
> I guess the key is to not even have a political angle
It’s a fantasy to imagine technical knowledge allows you to transcend the political and 2020 only reinforced that.
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.
"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."
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.)
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.
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?
So it's index funds (as always) with me anyway.
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?
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?
LLM bulls will say that they are going to generate synthetic data that is better than the real data.
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.
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.
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.
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1927843826183589960