I’m suss about this paper when it makes this claim:
“where AI is more likely to
automate, rather than augment , human labor.”
Where is AI currently automating human labor? Not Software Engineering. Or - what’s the difference between AI that augments me so I can do the job of three people and AI that “automates human labor”
It’s just engineers getting high on their own supply. All the hype men for the software are software engineers (or adjacent.)
Frankly, any time I see research indicating software engineering is at a high risk of being automated, I outright dismiss it as pseudo science. It ain’t happening with current tech.
The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if they aren't properly attested to.
This study feels pretty weak. Software as a occupation is collapsing, but it's not due to AI. Articles and "studies" like this are just a smoke screen to keep your eye off the ball.
> Some examples of these highly exposed jobs include customer service representatives, accountants and software developers.
We seem to be in this illogical (delusional?) era where we are being told that AI is 'replacing' people in certain sectors or types of work (under the guise that AI is better or will soon be better than humans in these roles) yet those same areas seem to be getting worse?
- Customer service seems worse than ever as humans are replaced with "AI" that doesn't actually help customers more than 'website chatbots' did 20 years ago.
- Accounting was a field that was desperate for qualified humans before AI. My attempts to use AI for pretty much anything accounting related has had abysmal results.
- The general consensus around software development seems to be that while AI is lowering the barrier of entry to "producing code", the rate of production of tech debt and code that no one "owns" (understands) has exploded with yet-to-be-seen consequences.
Every day when I am out in the city, I am amazed by how many jobs we have NOT managed to replace with AI yet.
For example, cashiers. There are still many people spending their lives dragging items over a scanner, reading a number from a screen, holding out their hand for the customer to put money in, and then sorting the coins into boxes.
Short-term, discrete numbers like these are interesting to look at, but they don't really tell us much about the long-term trajectory. In parallel: [1].
It emphasizes "AI adoption linked to 13% decline," which implies causation. The study itself only claims "evidence consistent with the hypothesis."
The article also largely highlights job loss for young workers, while only briefly mentioning cases where AI complements workers.
The study's preliminary status -- it is not peer reviewed -- is noted but only once and at end. If the article was more balanced it would have noted this at the beginning.
Articles on the same subject by the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs are more balance and less alarmist.
I can think of a handful of people I work with who could be replaced by LLM. The hallucinations would be less frequent than the screw-ups the current humans make.
It could at least consolidate 5 of those people into 1 with increased efficiency.
That I agree with. The problem with the assertion that AI took all these jobs is that the normalised point from which they took for assessing job losses is right at the peak of epic programmer hiring.
> I can’t think of a single job that modern AI could easily replace.
I agree its a popular excuse, however unlike the blockchain craze there’s legitimate use cases of productivity improvements with AI.
And if you can (in some cases) substantially increase productivity, then logically you can reduce team size and be as productive with less.
With the right prompting, you can cut a copywriting team in half easily.
My business has one copywriter/strategist, who I’ve automated the writing part by collecting transcripts and brand guidelines from client meetings. Now she can focus on much higher quality edits, work with other parts of the strategy pipeline, and ultimately more clients than before.
I can easily imagine a corp with 100 junior copywriters quickly reducing headcount
Thinly veiled economic propaganda aside, I am dealing with a different AI mess everyday. Technical debt is exploding everywhere I turn. There is an ever larger part of me these days that wishes I could just call the bluff all at once and let all the companies in question learn the inevitable lessons here the hard way.
The worst thing for me would be just needing to get a job like I had before being a dev, the stakes are so much grander for all the companies. It's only really existential for the side of this that isn't me/us. I've been working since I was 15, I can figure it out. I'll be more happy cutting veggies in a kitchen than every single CEO out there when all is said and done!
I see a worrisome trend. On one hand, many of my proto-boomer friends are suffering from age-ism , and memes claim that over-50-year-olds are unemployable. Not 100% fidelity, but there's some truth.
Then I hear about a lot of youngsters struggling to find work, and see articles like this.
Well, who's left? Is there a sweet spot at like 31 that are just cleaning up?
CEOs citing savings from AI should be able to show higher profits soon. The fact that they’re not means those tall tales are coming home to roost soon.
As I see it, it's really the lack of "capitalists" willpower to be actually capitalist.
We can't call it incompetence because neither those whom we have come to know as capitalists nor their advisors are incompetent, which means they quite literally do not want to offset any decline in jobs or (job creation) that can be linked to progress.
That's not strange. A "capitalist" wants market participation to grow, infinitely, which is possible. Who we came to know as capitalists don't care about the markets, actual market growth or market participation. They only care about the growth of the value of the markets, "however" that happens.
I highly recommend that journalists and economists dig a bit more radically honest into the matter. There'd be more value in that, more blog posts, more articles, more discussions on all platforms, and thus more participation.
I mean it's a scapegoat vs straw man vs actual culprit kind of situation ... isn't it?
Slow down people. Let's stop jumping to biases and see what we have here.
Note upfront: I'm not suggesting AI is not having an impact. That would be foolish. But I will say there's *a lot* less to the conclusion of this study, simply because the data is questionable. It's not that they did anything wrong per se. I won't say that here because it'll end up a HN cluster fuck. Cluster fuck aside, the caveats and associated doubt are enough to say, "Don't bet the farm on this study." Great bander for the bar? Sure.
It's an interesting study but I've seen it called "absolute proof" and other type things. Don't be fooled, it's not that.
> "This study uses data from ADP, the largest payroll processing firm in America. The company provides payroll services for firms employing over 25 million workers in the US. We use this information to track employment changes for workers in occupations measured as more or less exposed to artificial intelligence"
a) I'm calling this out because I've seen posts on LinkedIn saying it was a sample of 25M. Nope! ADP simply does payroll for that many.
b) The size of the US workforce is ~165M, making ADP's coverage ~15% of the workforce.
c) Do the business ADP server come from particular industries, are of a particular size, in particular geographic locations? etc.? It's not only about the size of the sample - which we'll get to shortly - but the nature of the companies - which we'll also get to shortly.
> "We make several sample restrictions for our main analysis sample."
d) It's great that they say this, but it should raise an eyebrow.
> "We include only workers employed by firms that use ADP’s payroll product to maintain worker earnings records. We also exclude employees classified by firms as part-time from the analysis and subset to people between the age of 18 and 70."
e) Translation: we did a slight bit of pruning (read: cherry-picking).
> "The set of firms using payroll services changes over time as companies join or leave ADP’s platform. We maintain a consistent set of firms across our main sample period by keeping only companies that have employee earnings records for each month from January 2021 through July 2025."
f) Translation: More cherry-picking.
> "In addition, ADP observes job titles for about 70% of workers in its system. We exclude workers who do not have a recorded job title."
g) Translation: More cherry-picking.
> "After these restrictions we have records on between 3.5 and 5 million workers each month for our main analysis sample, though we consider robustness to alternative analyses such as allowing for firms to enter and leave the sample."
h) 3.5M to 5.0M feels like a large enough sample... if it wasn't so "restricted." Furthermore, there's no explanation on the 1.5M delta, and how adding or removing that much impacts the analysis.
i) And they considered that why? And did what they did why? It's a significant assumpt that gets nothing more than a hand wave?
> "While the ADP data include millions of workers in each month, the distribution of firms using ADP services does not exactly match the distribution of firms across the broader US economy."
j) Translation: as mentioned above ADP !== a representation of the broader economy.
> "Further details on differences in firm composition can be f...
65 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 66.6 ms ] thread“where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment , human labor.”
Where is AI currently automating human labor? Not Software Engineering. Or - what’s the difference between AI that augments me so I can do the job of three people and AI that “automates human labor”
Was good while it lasted though.
Frankly, any time I see research indicating software engineering is at a high risk of being automated, I outright dismiss it as pseudo science. It ain’t happening with current tech.
What I bet is happening under the covers is reprioritization of work, offshoring or both.
https://esborogardius.substack.com/p/if-ai-doesnt-fire-you-i...
We seem to be in this illogical (delusional?) era where we are being told that AI is 'replacing' people in certain sectors or types of work (under the guise that AI is better or will soon be better than humans in these roles) yet those same areas seem to be getting worse?
- Customer service seems worse than ever as humans are replaced with "AI" that doesn't actually help customers more than 'website chatbots' did 20 years ago.
- Accounting was a field that was desperate for qualified humans before AI. My attempts to use AI for pretty much anything accounting related has had abysmal results.
- The general consensus around software development seems to be that while AI is lowering the barrier of entry to "producing code", the rate of production of tech debt and code that no one "owns" (understands) has exploded with yet-to-be-seen consequences.
For example, cashiers. There are still many people spending their lives dragging items over a scanner, reading a number from a screen, holding out their hand for the customer to put money in, and then sorting the coins into boxes.
How hard can it be to automate that?
[1] "Nvidia Forecasts Decelerating Growth After Two-Year AI Boom" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053175>
It emphasizes "AI adoption linked to 13% decline," which implies causation. The study itself only claims "evidence consistent with the hypothesis."
The article also largely highlights job loss for young workers, while only briefly mentioning cases where AI complements workers.
The study's preliminary status -- it is not peer reviewed -- is noted but only once and at end. If the article was more balanced it would have noted this at the beginning.
Articles on the same subject by the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs are more balance and less alarmist.
I can’t think of a single job that modern AI could easily replace.
It could at least consolidate 5 of those people into 1 with increased efficiency.
That I agree with. The problem with the assertion that AI took all these jobs is that the normalised point from which they took for assessing job losses is right at the peak of epic programmer hiring.
> I can’t think of a single job that modern AI could easily replace.
That I am less sure of.
And if you can (in some cases) substantially increase productivity, then logically you can reduce team size and be as productive with less.
With the right prompting, you can cut a copywriting team in half easily.
My business has one copywriter/strategist, who I’ve automated the writing part by collecting transcripts and brand guidelines from client meetings. Now she can focus on much higher quality edits, work with other parts of the strategy pipeline, and ultimately more clients than before.
I can easily imagine a corp with 100 junior copywriters quickly reducing headcount
The worst thing for me would be just needing to get a job like I had before being a dev, the stakes are so much grander for all the companies. It's only really existential for the side of this that isn't me/us. I've been working since I was 15, I can figure it out. I'll be more happy cutting veggies in a kitchen than every single CEO out there when all is said and done!
But let's blame AI
Then I hear about a lot of youngsters struggling to find work, and see articles like this.
Well, who's left? Is there a sweet spot at like 31 that are just cleaning up?
We can't call it incompetence because neither those whom we have come to know as capitalists nor their advisors are incompetent, which means they quite literally do not want to offset any decline in jobs or (job creation) that can be linked to progress.
That's not strange. A "capitalist" wants market participation to grow, infinitely, which is possible. Who we came to know as capitalists don't care about the markets, actual market growth or market participation. They only care about the growth of the value of the markets, "however" that happens.
I highly recommend that journalists and economists dig a bit more radically honest into the matter. There'd be more value in that, more blog posts, more articles, more discussions on all platforms, and thus more participation.
I mean it's a scapegoat vs straw man vs actual culprit kind of situation ... isn't it?
Note upfront: I'm not suggesting AI is not having an impact. That would be foolish. But I will say there's *a lot* less to the conclusion of this study, simply because the data is questionable. It's not that they did anything wrong per se. I won't say that here because it'll end up a HN cluster fuck. Cluster fuck aside, the caveats and associated doubt are enough to say, "Don't bet the farm on this study." Great bander for the bar? Sure.
It's an interesting study but I've seen it called "absolute proof" and other type things. Don't be fooled, it's not that.
https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...
From the original study:
> "This study uses data from ADP, the largest payroll processing firm in America. The company provides payroll services for firms employing over 25 million workers in the US. We use this information to track employment changes for workers in occupations measured as more or less exposed to artificial intelligence"
a) I'm calling this out because I've seen posts on LinkedIn saying it was a sample of 25M. Nope! ADP simply does payroll for that many.
b) The size of the US workforce is ~165M, making ADP's coverage ~15% of the workforce.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191750/civilian-labor-fo...
c) Do the business ADP server come from particular industries, are of a particular size, in particular geographic locations? etc.? It's not only about the size of the sample - which we'll get to shortly - but the nature of the companies - which we'll also get to shortly.
> "We make several sample restrictions for our main analysis sample."
d) It's great that they say this, but it should raise an eyebrow.
> "We include only workers employed by firms that use ADP’s payroll product to maintain worker earnings records. We also exclude employees classified by firms as part-time from the analysis and subset to people between the age of 18 and 70."
e) Translation: we did a slight bit of pruning (read: cherry-picking).
> "The set of firms using payroll services changes over time as companies join or leave ADP’s platform. We maintain a consistent set of firms across our main sample period by keeping only companies that have employee earnings records for each month from January 2021 through July 2025."
f) Translation: More cherry-picking.
> "In addition, ADP observes job titles for about 70% of workers in its system. We exclude workers who do not have a recorded job title."
g) Translation: More cherry-picking.
> "After these restrictions we have records on between 3.5 and 5 million workers each month for our main analysis sample, though we consider robustness to alternative analyses such as allowing for firms to enter and leave the sample."
h) 3.5M to 5.0M feels like a large enough sample... if it wasn't so "restricted." Furthermore, there's no explanation on the 1.5M delta, and how adding or removing that much impacts the analysis.
i) And they considered that why? And did what they did why? It's a significant assumpt that gets nothing more than a hand wave?
> "While the ADP data include millions of workers in each month, the distribution of firms using ADP services does not exactly match the distribution of firms across the broader US economy."
j) Translation: as mentioned above ADP !== a representation of the broader economy.
> "Further details on differences in firm composition can be f...