4 ms·

> It's not hard to find accounts of people who say they're 2x, 3x, 5x more efficient in their work now Yet labor markets are strong, with record low unemployme

> It's not hard to find accounts of people who say they're 2x, 3x, 5x more efficient in their work now Yet labor markets are strong, with record low unemployment across the board. I wonder if the anecdata or the real data are right. Offshoring was not motivated by technology. It's not technology that harms people, it's other people being greedy.

flakeoil 3y ago
> Yet labor markets are strong, with record low unemployment across the board. I wonder if the anecdata or the real data are right. You have to give it more time. Even if this would lead to less employees needed, it will take a few years before the effects will be seen. It's a quite slow process: 1. A sufficiently large part of the work force has to learn it and start using it in an efficient manner. 2. It has to be noticed, measured and evaluated as being more efficient by management. 3. Management has to decide to lay off people instead of being happy with the improved efficiencies and possibly higher profits. 4. Lay-offs take time. From step 3 to actually taking action can take time, and from the actual notice to the person being in the job seeking market also often takes many months.
- versteegen 3y ago
  Those are only the first steps. Companies with a relatively inflexible amount of programming that they need doing might lay off staff, but it'll have neglible net effect while other companies want more work done faster. How much unmet need for software is there in the world? Probably an enormous amount. It's pretty easy to think of software you wished existed or wished had an extra ten thousand hours of improvements put into it. It could take decades before efficiency gains translate into reducing numbers of programmers in employment. ... Edit: I mean competent programmers in employment. Easy to imagine that when there are more highly productive programmers around there will be less need for the ones that are less so.
  - namaria 3y ago
    Historically, when a resource becomes cheaper, its demand increases. AI, as a type of software, can, like software, make human labor more productive. I.e. it's output become cheaper. Efficiency gains don't create unemployment, they create economic growth. Corporate greed creates unemployment. McKinsey has created much pain. Are we defining Corporations as forms of AI? If not, AI (as software) causes the economy to grow and employment to increase.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > Efficiency gains don't create unemployment, they create economic growth. Stated as a blanket rule, this is simply untrue. As is its opposite. Reality is much more nuanced than that. For instance, even if things become less expensive, how much would that matter to people who have no income?
      - namaria 3y ago
        No, literally. That's a basic tenet of economics. Where does economic growth come from? Productivity gains. What are productivity gains? Better efficiency in using factors of production.
ineedasername 3y ago
Labor markets were strong for long periods of the off shoring process, but countless people were displaced, many of whom didn’t have the ability to retrain to equivalently paid jobs. My comment upthread details that aspect of things. Also offshoring was absolutely driven by technological advances. Commercial grade network speeds made some of it possible, and even more of it simply more convenient, cheaper, and w/ less friction than it would have taken earlier. As one small example one of my projects at my first job out of college was for a small publishing company. It was a jack-of-all trades job but this project had me working on digitizing the back catalog. They had decades of prior publications, books, journals that were print-only. They paid significant (comparatively) fees to get the most in demand of the back catalog’s abstracts transcribed by a US firm, and even more money for whole articles or books that were really popular. However advances in the speed of scanning technology and OCR accuracy meant that costs went down. In particular better tools for things like human-assisted OCR meant that we could offshore the scanning of the entire back catalog to a firm in India where those tools could be used by people with less domain knowledge and non-native fluency in English to achieve similar results. I oversaw coordinating the technical details of the deal, implementing parts of the in house database for the results, and the integration with the digital platforms of the day. None of that was impossible with prior tech, but tech advances both lowered the cost and friction of doing it from half a world away. Separately you can look at advances is shipping & logistics technology, some even decades prior to the digital revolution, that made offshoring of manufacturing a viable economic option. Just one part of that was containerized shipping & its massive growth in the 60’s and 70’s paving the way for significant globalization >= the 80’s. All of that required technical advances.
- namaria 3y ago
  Yes and all that throughout decades of strong long term growth leading to current historically low unemployment rates. And your point is that this is all going to change abruptly 'because AI'? Or what?
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    I think we are passing each other by in addressing different core points. (which i'll specify more clearly below, I may not have done so as explicitly as I thought) I am not arguing with a claim that AI will forever result in a net-negative of jobs. I'm not certain how this will play out, but you & I probably agree (my apologies if I read too much into your comment) that things will likely, as with past technological disruptions, level out, new different jobs created, likely no need for long term anxiety or panic on a macroscopic level. Going back to the publishing company I worked for, innovations going on elsewhere in the field meant that costs for publications, and even very high quality publications, dropped so significantly that lots of places that couldn't previously afford such things could now do so. More publishing meant more jobs for designers, copywriters, marketing folks to determine their strategic use, etc... lots and lots of new jobs. On to what I intended as my main point: I was addressing the claim by the article's authors that worrying about this process amounted to moral panic, forgetting the history of past innovations, etc. I strongly disagree. The changes to required skills will mean that not everyone qualified for the old jobs will easily transition to new ones. Some never will, and a portion of those won't do so because it's not a realistic possibility for them [1]. I saw the publishing revolution evolve over more than a decade. It came for different jobs at different time. The people in the pathway of that have plenty of reason be anxious or panic a bit about the-- at minimum-- upheaval of their lives or if they're really unfortunate lasting economic difficulties. [1] This is for (at least) two main reasons: 1) Age. Plenty of people in the twilight of their working years may be able to reskill and find other jobs, but plenty won't. Maybe some won't have the aptitude for it, some won't have the economic ability to take time off from receiving a paycheck to do so, and so on. And even if they do, they're starting off fresh in a new line of work without job experience in it, so they're at the bottom of the pay ladder, entry level work. Ageism is also a thing. A 62 year old person with 40 decades of pre-digital expertise typesetting & related skills loses their job. They spend 6 months or longer paying to learn new skills in digital equivalents. They try to get a job and they are A) competing against a mass of younger people that are "native" to this technology and B) having their resumes reviewed by people that see a candidate with little direct experience in the required tech who might very well be quitting into retirement just as they're starting to become most useful after learning the job. 2) Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to look back at these shifts and say "well they should have seen the way the industry was moving and made changes earlier". But that ignores the fact that such dramatic shifts are often not obvious in the moment. At the very beginning of such things-- even before hand when the tech is invented but not adopted-- there will be people saying "X is dying!". And then for years people hear that message while very little changes By the time a decent fraction of things have shifted enough that maybe the future is a little clearer people have also heard "X is dying!" for so long that it's just noise and they become hardened against the message. Some will manage, some won't, some will get trapped in the "age" scenario I detailed. In short: Society probably doesn't need to panic about this, especially when taking a long term view. But individual industries and people in specific types of jobs are, contrary to the general point by the article's author, quite justified in having a little bit of "OMG we're f'ed!". In fact it is exactly those people doing that right now who will-- by virtue of their fear and panic-- be most likely to take steps early in these shifts to reposition themselves either by business pivot or job skills to weather the change. If you're a copywriter in advertising & marketing right now and you feel comfortable, if you're going about your daily work and you're not panicking at least a little bit, that's a problem. LLM's may only (right now) turn out mediocre results so those sorts of tasks but lets face it: A majority of ads, marketing, and other writing churned out by humans today is also mediocre and uninspired. The people in those fields that are quite reasonable panicking right now are the ones who will either A) Improve their throughput productivity to be one of the few remaining workers churning out a larger amount of the same mediocre work or B) Using the output of these new tools to bootstrap the process of generating a bunch of mediocre options and then using human-level intelligence to sort through the results and polish on up into something much better than mediocre.

flakeoil 3y ago

> Yet labor markets are strong, with record low unemployment across the board. I wonder if the anecdata or the real data are right. You have to give it more time. Even if this would lead to less employees needed, it will take a few years before the effects will be seen. It's a quite slow process: 1. A sufficiently large part of the work force has to learn it and start using it in an efficient manner. 2. It has to be noticed, measured and evaluated as being more efficient by management. 3. Management has to decide to lay off people instead of being happy with the improved efficiencies and possibly higher profits. 4. Lay-offs take time. From step 3 to actually taking action can take time, and from the actual notice to the person being in the job seeking market also often takes many months.

versteegen 3y ago
Those are only the first steps. Companies with a relatively inflexible amount of programming that they need doing might lay off staff, but it'll have neglible net effect while other companies want more work done faster. How much unmet need for software is there in the world? Probably an enormous amount. It's pretty easy to think of software you wished existed or wished had an extra ten thousand hours of improvements put into it. It could take decades before efficiency gains translate into reducing numbers of programmers in employment. ... Edit: I mean competent programmers in employment. Easy to imagine that when there are more highly productive programmers around there will be less need for the ones that are less so.
- namaria 3y ago
  Historically, when a resource becomes cheaper, its demand increases. AI, as a type of software, can, like software, make human labor more productive. I.e. it's output become cheaper. Efficiency gains don't create unemployment, they create economic growth. Corporate greed creates unemployment. McKinsey has created much pain. Are we defining Corporations as forms of AI? If not, AI (as software) causes the economy to grow and employment to increase.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Efficiency gains don't create unemployment, they create economic growth. Stated as a blanket rule, this is simply untrue. As is its opposite. Reality is much more nuanced than that. For instance, even if things become less expensive, how much would that matter to people who have no income?
    - namaria 3y ago
      No, literally. That's a basic tenet of economics. Where does economic growth come from? Productivity gains. What are productivity gains? Better efficiency in using factors of production.

ineedasername 3y ago

Labor markets were strong for long periods of the off shoring process, but countless people were displaced, many of whom didn’t have the ability to retrain to equivalently paid jobs. My comment upthread details that aspect of things. Also offshoring was absolutely driven by technological advances. Commercial grade network speeds made some of it possible, and even more of it simply more convenient, cheaper, and w/ less friction than it would have taken earlier. As one small example one of my projects at my first job out of college was for a small publishing company. It was a jack-of-all trades job but this project had me working on digitizing the back catalog. They had decades of prior publications, books, journals that were print-only. They paid significant (comparatively) fees to get the most in demand of the back catalog’s abstracts transcribed by a US firm, and even more money for whole articles or books that were really popular. However advances in the speed of scanning technology and OCR accuracy meant that costs went down. In particular better tools for things like human-assisted OCR meant that we could offshore the scanning of the entire back catalog to a firm in India where those tools could be used by people with less domain knowledge and non-native fluency in English to achieve similar results. I oversaw coordinating the technical details of the deal, implementing parts of the in house database for the results, and the integration with the digital platforms of the day. None of that was impossible with prior tech, but tech advances both lowered the cost and friction of doing it from half a world away. Separately you can look at advances is shipping & logistics technology, some even decades prior to the digital revolution, that made offshoring of manufacturing a viable economic option. Just one part of that was containerized shipping & its massive growth in the 60’s and 70’s paving the way for significant globalization >= the 80’s. All of that required technical advances.

namaria 3y ago
Yes and all that throughout decades of strong long term growth leading to current historically low unemployment rates. And your point is that this is all going to change abruptly 'because AI'? Or what?
- ineedasername 3y ago
  I think we are passing each other by in addressing different core points. (which i'll specify more clearly below, I may not have done so as explicitly as I thought) I am not arguing with a claim that AI will forever result in a net-negative of jobs. I'm not certain how this will play out, but you & I probably agree (my apologies if I read too much into your comment) that things will likely, as with past technological disruptions, level out, new different jobs created, likely no need for long term anxiety or panic on a macroscopic level. Going back to the publishing company I worked for, innovations going on elsewhere in the field meant that costs for publications, and even very high quality publications, dropped so significantly that lots of places that couldn't previously afford such things could now do so. More publishing meant more jobs for designers, copywriters, marketing folks to determine their strategic use, etc... lots and lots of new jobs. On to what I intended as my main point: I was addressing the claim by the article's authors that worrying about this process amounted to moral panic, forgetting the history of past innovations, etc. I strongly disagree. The changes to required skills will mean that not everyone qualified for the old jobs will easily transition to new ones. Some never will, and a portion of those won't do so because it's not a realistic possibility for them [1]. I saw the publishing revolution evolve over more than a decade. It came for different jobs at different time. The people in the pathway of that have plenty of reason be anxious or panic a bit about the-- at minimum-- upheaval of their lives or if they're really unfortunate lasting economic difficulties. [1] This is for (at least) two main reasons: 1) Age. Plenty of people in the twilight of their working years may be able to reskill and find other jobs, but plenty won't. Maybe some won't have the aptitude for it, some won't have the economic ability to take time off from receiving a paycheck to do so, and so on. And even if they do, they're starting off fresh in a new line of work without job experience in it, so they're at the bottom of the pay ladder, entry level work. Ageism is also a thing. A 62 year old person with 40 decades of pre-digital expertise typesetting & related skills loses their job. They spend 6 months or longer paying to learn new skills in digital equivalents. They try to get a job and they are A) competing against a mass of younger people that are "native" to this technology and B) having their resumes reviewed by people that see a candidate with little direct experience in the required tech who might very well be quitting into retirement just as they're starting to become most useful after learning the job. 2) Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to look back at these shifts and say "well they should have seen the way the industry was moving and made changes earlier". But that ignores the fact that such dramatic shifts are often not obvious in the moment. At the very beginning of such things-- even before hand when the tech is invented but not adopted-- there will be people saying "X is dying!". And then for years people hear that message while very little changes By the time a decent fraction of things have shifted enough that maybe the future is a little clearer people have also heard "X is dying!" for so long that it's just noise and they become hardened against the message. Some will manage, some won't, some will get trapped in the "age" scenario I detailed. In short: Society probably doesn't need to panic about this, especially when taking a long term view. But individual industries and people in specific types of jobs are, contrary to the general point by the article's author, quite justified in having a little bit of "OMG we're f'ed!". In fact it is exactly those people doing that right now who will-- by virtue of their fear and panic-- be most likely to take steps early in these shifts to reposition themselves either by business pivot or job skills to weather the change. If you're a copywriter in advertising & marketing right now and you feel comfortable, if you're going about your daily work and you're not panicking at least a little bit, that's a problem. LLM's may only (right now) turn out mediocre results so those sorts of tasks but lets face it: A majority of ads, marketing, and other writing churned out by humans today is also mediocre and uninspired. The people in those fields that are quite reasonable panicking right now are the ones who will either A) Improve their throughput productivity to be one of the few remaining workers churning out a larger amount of the same mediocre work or B) Using the output of these new tools to bootstrap the process of generating a bunch of mediocre options and then using human-level intelligence to sort through the results and polish on up into something much better than mediocre.