7 ms·

Goldman Sachs Predicts 300M Jobs Will Be Lost or Degraded by AI

48 points by saeedjabbar 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
uptownfunk 4y ago
Unproductive fear mongering.
alismayilov 4y ago
I follow Goldman Sachs multiple years and their predictions are always changing. I remember in 2020 after March crash they had this prediction (https://fortune.com/2020/03/20/coronavirus-economic-predictions-goldman-sachs-recession-gdp-2q-2020/ https://fortune.com/2020/03/20/coronavirus-economic-predicti...) which in reality completely opposite happened. There were multiple other similar cases that their prediction was wrong and after sometime they just changed their prediction.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Still, a useful data point, inasmuch as we now know something that won't happen.
- suddenclarity 4y ago
  Few people could probably predict the amount of spending from governments all over the world. What would've happened if they just shut everyone down? Their prediction doesn't sound far fetched. Now the government's went on a spending spree and we got massive inflation instead.
- lupire 4y ago
  The only motivation GS has for announcing something is to drum up counterparties to bet against.
runeks 4y ago
And how many will be created?
grumpyprole 4y ago
If there is a job that requires generating bullsh*t, then definitely it is at risk. Otherwise, no.
- skitout 4y ago
  I started a project where a guide with art history background was writing the content... no we use GPT4 for 80% of it. A lot of job are at risk. Most of them no because of full automation, but because less people will be required because of productivity increases "thanks to" AI. And many more job will become boring. The problem is this productivity gain will hurt a lot of people, and there are probably/possibly only a small minority of people that will fully benefit from it
  - grumpyprole 4y ago
    You will have to proof read anything it writes and you should also fact check it, otherwise you are taking a risk. However, this is very difficult to do if GPT4 is unable to provide references or citations, or any provenance at all. The human with the art history background at least has some credentials, whereby the output can be trusted, to some degree and explained if necessary.
    - fauxpause_ 4y ago
      If you have a model that can read text and extract its meaning; and a model that can generate text, the work required to create a model that can generate text and then query for other texts that support its claims is not very hard. This is, imo, such an obviously near term capability that its not worth bringing up as a limitation.
      - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
        > If you have a model that can read text and extract its meaning That model doesn't exist. We have models that can read text and then probabilistically create a summary that's the most likely to match the original. But none of these models "extract meaning" in a way that can be used for fact checking purposes in the way you describe. What you're describing is basically a world model, and while there's a few folks claiming these LLMs are showing the glimmers of building world models, it's mostly speculation.
meindnoch 4y ago
Goldman Sachs prediction reporting will likely be among them.
- aldanor 4y ago
  Perhaps it's been replaced by AI already...
anonzzzies 4y ago
I have worked with deps around the world of JPM, GS and others and others and there are not many places I have seen where there are so many replaceable and basically not really employable people. They could’ve been replaced with some code 10 years ago; now it’s only easier. Not necessarily AI but AI won’t make it better for them. These are very large numbers who are only there to pump the number of employees under their managers or some other lame metric. Of course it does not mean they will do anything about it.
- jselysianeagle 4y ago
  I'm assuming by "deps" you really meant "devs", and if so, I'd have to agree. I worked in the investment banking world for some years in a back office IT role and there were mini armies of devs there doing the most mundane, basic CRUD style work for years on end getting paid cushy 6-fig salaries. Not FAANG level, but solid nonetheless. I would not at all be surprised if these large firms hired consultants from places like McKinsey to come by and analyze the work their IT staff is involved in to see how tools like GPT-4 could be leveraged to "streamline" (aka reduce the headcount of) these orgs, and then dramatically restructured them based on their findings. The only thing keeping many of these folks around is the political clout of their managers and department heads.
  - lupire 4y ago
    > The only thing keeping many of these folks around is the political clout of their managers and department heads. People love saying that, but why wouldn't an exec take a multi-$million bonus to cut that dead weight? Or Private equity buy it out to gut it and resell it?
    - anonzzzies 4y ago
      That happens as well, but a little while later the ‘organigram’ under these managers will be the same size or larger as, for some reason, more people under you means more money. And every manager has the same thing, so this happens at every level; I know managers only in title who have 2 persons under them and that entire ‘team’ does exactly nothing outside looking busy and taking pay. That way that ‘manager’ who was supposed to be a leaf in the tree and not a manager, makes more than the people under them, so win for them and the managers above them can boast both more people and more teams, so they get a nicer title and make more. At banks.
vsareto 4y ago
The actual report doesn't say lost or degraded, but rather 'exposed to automation', and right after that statement, they also mention the historical trend of automation has been moving people around: >The good news is that worker displacement from automation has historically been offset by creation of new jobs, and the emergence of new occupations following technological innovations accounts for the vast majority of long-run employment growth. This article is a misrepresentation of Goldman's analysis.
- kranke155 4y ago
  Can anyone here provide evidence of automation moving jobs to equal quality or higher quality employment? Because what I’ve seen and read does not confirm this, in fact it disproves it. I can find multiple reports showing de industrialisation of the US economy happened mostly due to automation.
beardyw 4y ago
It highlights our preposterous assumption that in order to live everyone must have a "job". Why? If people become destitute then some others will gain even more wealth than they need. Is that a great way for humanity to behave?
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  Because someone has to grow the corn and shovel the coal and they don’t want to get the same stuff as someone who just wanks and watches TV
  - beardyw 4y ago
    True. So the very wealthy, some manual workers (the middle class) and the destitute.
bradwood 4y ago
Doesn't sound that much in global terms compared to the global population. And does it account for all the new jobs that will be created along the way? When I started out there was nothing like a DevOps engineer, social media influencer or Deliveroo driver... The point being that this happens all the time and is a natural consequence of progress and evolution.
Communitivity 4y ago
I expect jobs to be lost, but new jobs to be created. For example, prompt engineers. There is already a job board for prompt engineers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35436168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35436168). I've been told they can make around $300k. I wouldn't be surprised to see the quant developers among the hardest hit by AI automation, maybe 10 quants replaced by one high-skill quant who can write the necessary prompts.
- rnk 4y ago
  Yeah, but how many people who write professionally will have their career prospects significantly reduced. Many fewer writers for press releases, real estate, general PR to reporter stuff. Just like there aren't many travel agents. That will be millions lost.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  Eh we've heard that song before but it rarely turns out to be true. Rust belt cities didn't transform with new kinds of jobs and industries. They just crumbled and fell apart. Absent coordinated action by government to reorient economies as these new technologies take over, I fully expect wealth inequality to only get worse and for more and more white collar folks to be left behind. That's just wealth concentrating capitalism in action, which is inevitable when left to its own devices.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    They are saying new jobs will show up. Not that they will be available for those displaced or even in America. Just that jobs will show up. "Jobs" is often callous or disingenuous because when they say it, they know it's not how people generally use it.
    - kranke155 4y ago
      This is a common fiction trope that’s never been demonstrated in reality as far as I know. Everyone uses the bank tellers example and ignores multiple reports showing the leading cause of de industrialisation in the US was automation, followed by “free trade”. It’s all nonsense unless you show evidence, and the evidence points to the contrary. What we have is a move of society towards “service” jobs, but service jobs exist in two different spheres - high wage (IT) and low wage (Starbucks). Having lived in the UK under a so called post industrial society, de industrialisation did exactly what people like Vaclav Smil say it does - it creates a society with no middle class.
mihaic 4y ago
The one good thing I see out of the coming AI cambrian explosion is that it'll hit the bracket of top 10% to 1% earners the hardest, while those above and bellow are safer. This bracket has been in recent decades the enforcers of the status quo, helping widen the wealth gap all over the developed world. Maybe once they get a taste of what everyone is going through they might change sides and actually align with the general population on these issues.
- _manifold 4y ago
  > The one good thing I see out of the coming AI cambrian explosion is that it'll hit the bracket of top 10% to 1% earners the hardest, while those above and bellow are safer. What are you basing this on? Perhaps I'm missing your exact meaning of "AI cambrian explosion" but right now I think it's arguable that artists and writers are the most threatened by this wave of generative AI - neither of which are usually considered top paying positions.
  - mihaic 4y ago
    I'm mostly trying to extrapolate from current code and text generation abilities, so I know any prediction has a high chance of striking out. Legal professionals that work on boilerplate could see simple contract generation being taken away from them for instance, and even run-of-the-mill developers could see themselves competing against much cheaper app/website generators. Even if you can beat the AI, you might be forced to make your rates more competitive since the new baseline solution anyone can get for $10 would be a lot better than before.
    - worrycue 4y ago
      > Legal professionals that work on boilerplate could see simple contract generation being taken away from them for instance, and even run-of-the-mill developers could see themselves competing against much cheaper app/website generators. I don’t think people will use AI in its current (hallucinating) state if there is money or lives on the line.

48 points by saeedjabbar 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

uptownfunk 4y ago

Unproductive fear mongering.

alismayilov 4y ago

I follow Goldman Sachs multiple years and their predictions are always changing. I remember in 2020 after March crash they had this prediction (https://fortune.com/2020/03/20/coronavirus-economic-predictions-goldman-sachs-recession-gdp-2q-2020/ https://fortune.com/2020/03/20/coronavirus-economic-predicti...) which in reality completely opposite happened. There were multiple other similar cases that their prediction was wrong and after sometime they just changed their prediction.

tuatoru 4y ago
Still, a useful data point, inasmuch as we now know something that won't happen.
suddenclarity 4y ago
Few people could probably predict the amount of spending from governments all over the world. What would've happened if they just shut everyone down? Their prediction doesn't sound far fetched. Now the government's went on a spending spree and we got massive inflation instead.
lupire 4y ago
The only motivation GS has for announcing something is to drum up counterparties to bet against.

runeks 4y ago

And how many will be created?

grumpyprole 4y ago

If there is a job that requires generating bullsh*t, then definitely it is at risk. Otherwise, no.

skitout 4y ago
I started a project where a guide with art history background was writing the content... no we use GPT4 for 80% of it. A lot of job are at risk. Most of them no because of full automation, but because less people will be required because of productivity increases "thanks to" AI. And many more job will become boring. The problem is this productivity gain will hurt a lot of people, and there are probably/possibly only a small minority of people that will fully benefit from it
- grumpyprole 4y ago
  You will have to proof read anything it writes and you should also fact check it, otherwise you are taking a risk. However, this is very difficult to do if GPT4 is unable to provide references or citations, or any provenance at all. The human with the art history background at least has some credentials, whereby the output can be trusted, to some degree and explained if necessary.
  - fauxpause_ 4y ago
    If you have a model that can read text and extract its meaning; and a model that can generate text, the work required to create a model that can generate text and then query for other texts that support its claims is not very hard. This is, imo, such an obviously near term capability that its not worth bringing up as a limitation.
    - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      > If you have a model that can read text and extract its meaning That model doesn't exist. We have models that can read text and then probabilistically create a summary that's the most likely to match the original. But none of these models "extract meaning" in a way that can be used for fact checking purposes in the way you describe. What you're describing is basically a world model, and while there's a few folks claiming these LLMs are showing the glimmers of building world models, it's mostly speculation.

meindnoch 4y ago

Goldman Sachs prediction reporting will likely be among them.

aldanor 4y ago
Perhaps it's been replaced by AI already...

anonzzzies 4y ago

I have worked with deps around the world of JPM, GS and others and others and there are not many places I have seen where there are so many replaceable and basically not really employable people. They could’ve been replaced with some code 10 years ago; now it’s only easier. Not necessarily AI but AI won’t make it better for them. These are very large numbers who are only there to pump the number of employees under their managers or some other lame metric. Of course it does not mean they will do anything about it.

jselysianeagle 4y ago
I'm assuming by "deps" you really meant "devs", and if so, I'd have to agree. I worked in the investment banking world for some years in a back office IT role and there were mini armies of devs there doing the most mundane, basic CRUD style work for years on end getting paid cushy 6-fig salaries. Not FAANG level, but solid nonetheless. I would not at all be surprised if these large firms hired consultants from places like McKinsey to come by and analyze the work their IT staff is involved in to see how tools like GPT-4 could be leveraged to "streamline" (aka reduce the headcount of) these orgs, and then dramatically restructured them based on their findings. The only thing keeping many of these folks around is the political clout of their managers and department heads.
- lupire 4y ago
  > The only thing keeping many of these folks around is the political clout of their managers and department heads. People love saying that, but why wouldn't an exec take a multi-$million bonus to cut that dead weight? Or Private equity buy it out to gut it and resell it?
  - anonzzzies 4y ago
    That happens as well, but a little while later the ‘organigram’ under these managers will be the same size or larger as, for some reason, more people under you means more money. And every manager has the same thing, so this happens at every level; I know managers only in title who have 2 persons under them and that entire ‘team’ does exactly nothing outside looking busy and taking pay. That way that ‘manager’ who was supposed to be a leaf in the tree and not a manager, makes more than the people under them, so win for them and the managers above them can boast both more people and more teams, so they get a nicer title and make more. At banks.

vsareto 4y ago

The actual report doesn't say lost or degraded, but rather 'exposed to automation', and right after that statement, they also mention the historical trend of automation has been moving people around: >The good news is that worker displacement from automation has historically been offset by creation of new jobs, and the emergence of new occupations following technological innovations accounts for the vast majority of long-run employment growth. This article is a misrepresentation of Goldman's analysis.

kranke155 4y ago
Can anyone here provide evidence of automation moving jobs to equal quality or higher quality employment? Because what I’ve seen and read does not confirm this, in fact it disproves it. I can find multiple reports showing de industrialisation of the US economy happened mostly due to automation.

beardyw 4y ago

It highlights our preposterous assumption that in order to live everyone must have a "job". Why? If people become destitute then some others will gain even more wealth than they need. Is that a great way for humanity to behave?

MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Because someone has to grow the corn and shovel the coal and they don’t want to get the same stuff as someone who just wanks and watches TV
- beardyw 4y ago
  True. So the very wealthy, some manual workers (the middle class) and the destitute.

bradwood 4y ago

Doesn't sound that much in global terms compared to the global population. And does it account for all the new jobs that will be created along the way? When I started out there was nothing like a DevOps engineer, social media influencer or Deliveroo driver... The point being that this happens all the time and is a natural consequence of progress and evolution.

Communitivity 4y ago

I expect jobs to be lost, but new jobs to be created. For example, prompt engineers. There is already a job board for prompt engineers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35436168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35436168). I've been told they can make around $300k. I wouldn't be surprised to see the quant developers among the hardest hit by AI automation, maybe 10 quants replaced by one high-skill quant who can write the necessary prompts.

rnk 4y ago
Yeah, but how many people who write professionally will have their career prospects significantly reduced. Many fewer writers for press releases, real estate, general PR to reporter stuff. Just like there aren't many travel agents. That will be millions lost.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Eh we've heard that song before but it rarely turns out to be true. Rust belt cities didn't transform with new kinds of jobs and industries. They just crumbled and fell apart. Absent coordinated action by government to reorient economies as these new technologies take over, I fully expect wealth inequality to only get worse and for more and more white collar folks to be left behind. That's just wealth concentrating capitalism in action, which is inevitable when left to its own devices.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  They are saying new jobs will show up. Not that they will be available for those displaced or even in America. Just that jobs will show up. "Jobs" is often callous or disingenuous because when they say it, they know it's not how people generally use it.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    This is a common fiction trope that’s never been demonstrated in reality as far as I know. Everyone uses the bank tellers example and ignores multiple reports showing the leading cause of de industrialisation in the US was automation, followed by “free trade”. It’s all nonsense unless you show evidence, and the evidence points to the contrary. What we have is a move of society towards “service” jobs, but service jobs exist in two different spheres - high wage (IT) and low wage (Starbucks). Having lived in the UK under a so called post industrial society, de industrialisation did exactly what people like Vaclav Smil say it does - it creates a society with no middle class.

mihaic 4y ago

The one good thing I see out of the coming AI cambrian explosion is that it'll hit the bracket of top 10% to 1% earners the hardest, while those above and bellow are safer. This bracket has been in recent decades the enforcers of the status quo, helping widen the wealth gap all over the developed world. Maybe once they get a taste of what everyone is going through they might change sides and actually align with the general population on these issues.

_manifold 4y ago
> The one good thing I see out of the coming AI cambrian explosion is that it'll hit the bracket of top 10% to 1% earners the hardest, while those above and bellow are safer. What are you basing this on? Perhaps I'm missing your exact meaning of "AI cambrian explosion" but right now I think it's arguable that artists and writers are the most threatened by this wave of generative AI - neither of which are usually considered top paying positions.
- mihaic 4y ago
  I'm mostly trying to extrapolate from current code and text generation abilities, so I know any prediction has a high chance of striking out. Legal professionals that work on boilerplate could see simple contract generation being taken away from them for instance, and even run-of-the-mill developers could see themselves competing against much cheaper app/website generators. Even if you can beat the AI, you might be forced to make your rates more competitive since the new baseline solution anyone can get for $10 would be a lot better than before.
  - worrycue 4y ago
    > Legal professionals that work on boilerplate could see simple contract generation being taken away from them for instance, and even run-of-the-mill developers could see themselves competing against much cheaper app/website generators. I don’t think people will use AI in its current (hallucinating) state if there is money or lives on the line.