22 ms·

Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

• fullshark 2y ago
  Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink, it was basically modified finishing school for rich capital owners, needing to make their children of proper class before they could take over their businesses. It then became a vocational degree for the working class, despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees. The only value is that you could talk the talk and become a member of the professional managerial class if you impressed the right hiring committee/individual. In spite of this, we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree, and be in debt for the rest of their working life. It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).
  • dkkergoog 2y ago
    Education can't be standardized because business is not standardized. It's about relationships and every shop does things their own way. Teachers should just go contract and provide their own courses. The degree is really can't designate what the person knows.
    • kelseyfrog 2y ago
      That's right. Education should be universalized, not standardized. The commodification of education will eventually make it useless. Universal, bespoke education is the ideal, but it's usually prohibitively expensive.
      • bluGill 2y ago
        I strongly disagree. Commodification of education is very important. I want everyone to have the commodity reading writing arithmetic education. It might be faster for the student to give one on one teaching, but everyone needs this and I want it such a commodity that we give it to even the poorest "third world" kids who have nothing. As you get beyond those basics you have to become an expert in something that there are few experts in. McDonald's success is mostly based on their ability to take you from zero to a productive crew member fast. It takes many years to make a brain surgeon, in large part because we haven't commodified it - if we needed more we should (but since the world doesn't really need many it isn't worth it)
        • kelseyfrog 2y ago
          Commodification denies a universal pedagogy. We've known this since the 1970s. If you want a system that appeals to a plurality, and leaves the rest behind, commodification will deliver just that.
    • bluGill 2y ago
      There is a lot of value to standardizing things though. Most of what people need to learn is standard. 2+2, i before e... There is the more nebulous step of can you solve problems, but even that is taught at the lower levels in a standard way. Eventually you get to a level where the answer hasn't been taught much and so there is no standard, but that only happens late in your education. Of course education itself needs more research. "learning styles" was debunked last I heard, but is there some variation that says some people need different teaching? Is there a better way to teach things? However if you are not involved in this research you should be teaching in standard ways that have been proven to work.
      • a2tech 2y ago
        I before e isn’t even standard.
        • bluGill 2y ago
          English needs to be standardized / simplified /reformed. I don't know how to make that happen.
    • mejutoco 2y ago
      On the other side, pallets and standard shipping containers exist.
  • whateveracct 2y ago
    This is a bit black and white. Or maybe just cynical :) It's inarguable that bachelor's degrees had real vocational utility in the last few decades (despite the memes). A variety of degrees from a state school (with in-state tuition) would lead to good, white collar employement along with modest loans (if any) so there was clear ROI.
    • nvrletgorz 2y ago
      [dead]
  • borntoolate 2y ago
    Maybe lower education should just have a different schedule with other activity years? I'm not particularly impressed with the average American's ability to be a positive element of society and despite all the problems, I think liberal arts students are probably better than the rest when considered over their lifetime. But why should each individual take loans to have the critical thinking to vote in the interest of larger institutions?
    • JamesBarney 2y ago
      Does liberal arts teach critical thinking? Do students who study liberal arts vs a mathematics/engineering show greater improvements on critical thinking tests? I get the idea we want a more educated population that can better make decisions. But the biggest way the populace makes poor decisions is they are economically illiterate, and they don't really understand how the government works. We should probably spend more time teaching this in high school and a typical degree spends very little time teaching these subjects.
      • fzeroracer 2y ago
        The populace making poor decisions isn't just economically illiterate, they are increasingly fundamentally illiterate. Teaching economic literacy in school won't matter one bit when an increasing number of people are graduating unable to read even at a basic level. But in order to solve this problem you would have to overhaul our educational system and right now we have a party invested in destroying it so that it produces voters more aligned with their groupthink.
        • JamesBarney 2y ago
          If you're arguing we should improve schools to increase rates of numeracy and literacy than I'm in 100% agreement. But I thought we were talking about liberal arts degrees.
        • nradov 2y ago
          While there are a variety of different interest groups that have influenced current federal government education policy, most of them don't seem to be trying destroy it just for the sake of destruction. Instead the policy seems to be based more on the perception that the education system has been co-opted and corrupted to indoctrinate students with values and political philosophies that conservative or right-wing politicians find abhorrent. They see this as so damaging to society that it would be better to have no educational system at all rather than what we have now. I don't agree with this perception or their actions, but there is at least a kernel of truth to their viewpoint. In a politically diverse nation if we want to maintain broad based support for higher education then we need to find a way to keep universities at least somewhat politically neutral.
  • KPGv2 2y ago
    > despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees It's a nice suggestion, but it's one that isn't supported by the evidence. Even controlling for other factors, a college degree makes more productive workers. And given that it's controlling for other factors, "selection bias" becomes a hard argument to make. STEMbros get real arrogant about their degrees (I have one; I've seen it first hand), but like it or not the person with an English degree still learned a lot of useful skills. Going to uni to major in a specific career is how you get screwed when available careers change.
    • HPsquared 2y ago
      I don't think there is any doubt spending 4 years studying a subject will increase skills in some areas. The question is whether the benefits are worth the cost (and that question applies both to the individual student and society as a whole). Remember the cost of all this is absolutely massive. Mostly the 4 years of lost time.
      • deleted 2y ago
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      • 18766hahsbc767 2y ago
        It doesn't have to be though. In Europe the vast majority of people attend public universities that don't require having to end up with a degree and crippling debt. I left uni almost 20 years ago, but one year of my tuition was about 1000USD at the time, something I could easily afford with a part time job. I'm sure the cost is higher now, but I would have thought it is still orders of magnitude cheaper than in the UK or the US. Germany subsidizes university tuition fees for a huge percentage of students, and adds a monthly stipend for expenses and free public transport while enrolled in uni. Your point is valid, challenging the worth/cost of higher education. But I think it is the cost part what is broken in some parts of the world, not necessarily the worth part.
        • wat10000 2y ago
          The cost is there regardless. If the ROI is negative then it's making somebody worse off even if the state is paying for it. If the state pays, it's even worse, because people may take the option based on a positive ROI for themselves while it's overall negative. If the ROI is positive but people aren't taking advantage because of the cost to themselves, then you want to look at subsidies.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    >It then became a vocational degree for the working class, This may have been some policymakers' intent, but it never really became that. Universities and colleges resisted being seen as mere vocational schools, and refused to modify curricula for that purpose. You'd see all sorts of academic arguments about how teaching them to do a job would be wrong, that they should still be teaching them to "think" and have heavy course loads of liberal arts. So parents and guidance counselors may have thought of it as vocational school, while getting the high-class university experience (as best someone of middling academic achievement can manage that) along with the high-class university tuition bills. Well, the guidance counselors didn't get the bills. Nor, in many cases, the parents. >It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it It's ok. We don't have to sustain it. The demographic implosion is well under way. We are at the point where elementary schools are closing (and everyone's making up excuses for this, so we can pretend that it's for any other reason than a demographic implosion). >and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers). At any point in history, most of the output from workers went (indirectly) back to the workers. If 98% of the workforce did agricultural work, this was because 98% or nearly enough of 98% of food was needed to feed those workers. Same for any product, no matter how tangible or abstract. Sure, there are exceptions... if people worked in a diamond mine it wasn't so diamonds would go to diamond miners. If they don't need workers for the relatively small amount of food that is consumed by some small group, if they don't need workers for making garments (or building buildings, or any other thing) for the relatively amount of those products consumed by some small group, then they don't much need useful workers at all. Most of humanity is obsolete, or at least would be considered so if you belonged to a small group like that.
  • ransom1538 2y ago
    Well, these days you will need a non repetitive physical skill. ER doctor, electrician, comedy tour guide, painter, etc. If your job required you to sit in front of a computer, your job will be the first eliminated. Humans are quite cheap for physical labor compared to a full humanoid drone. Software costs are about to go to zero. Bachelors degrees would turn more into guilds.
    • tempodox 2y ago
      > Software costs are about to go to zero. Not all software is like webshit boilerplate.
      • ransom1538 2y ago
        I wish that mattered.
  • jltsiren 2y ago
    The liberal arts model was intended for the elites, and the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy. But there is also the Humboldtian model of higher education, which focuses on educating informed citizens who are free to make their own choices. Learning vocational skills is easy enough if you have good education, and it's also necessary to be able to do that outside school, as careers rarely last a lifetime. American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself.
    • nukem222 2y ago
      > useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy I'd still strongly prefer a totalitarian, planned economy. Hell it sounds like a straight-up pollyannish fantasy at this point. Watching people expect the chaos of building our country around the right-to-be-a-dick-to-others to result in a functional country makes me want to burn everything down. But making your own labor force pay for their education? Straight suicidal.
    • jselysianeagle 2y ago
      > American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself. There's this and also the massive budgets for college sports and fancy student housing that make it worse.
      • nradov 2y ago
        The massive sports funding is mostly only a thing for D1 schools and it doesn't take much funding away from academics. The sports mostly pay for themselves through ticket sales and media licensing, with the big chunks of revenue coming from men's football and basketball. Sports also drive a lot of alumni donations.
    • gruez 2y ago
  • AtomBalm 2y ago
    Now that we have AI tutors that cost <$1/Mtok, why not do on-demand standardized testing for academic credentials and eliminate compulsory (dejure or defacto) education beyond working age. Universities can focus on research, and normal people get off the credentialism treadmill or focus on as-needed training at minimal cost. Need the social environment? Libraries or community centers can lend vacant space for “college” classrooms. Everyone wins, right? You know, except university administrators and lenders.
    • poincaredisk 2y ago
      Great, let's make the average person even dumber. Or rather: dumb again. Universal education is a big win of the modern times and you want to destroy that for on-demand job training? Mass producing replaceable workers should not be humanity's goal.
      • martindbp 2y ago
        How would it make people dumber? Students provably forgets 90%+ of what they learn, and education is massively inefficient today, which can also provably be improved by virtual tutors (see Bloom's two sigma problem). Your reaction seems knee jerk instead of thinking through this from first principles. Something like this is likely to happen whether you like it or not.
    • martindbp 2y ago
      Exactly. I think the people who oppose this do it for sentimental reasons. Either because they want the prestige of a place like Stanford on their resume, or they enjoyed the social milieu. A social network of similarly ambitious people is also arguably more important than the actual knowledge. The knowledge is already available for free online, and like Bryan Caplan points out: at many universities you can just go and sit in class, but nobody does it because what you actually want is the credentials, not the knowledge.
  • MITSardine 2y ago
    Or is it not a more recent trend that people should educate themselves, rather than an employer doing that? Internships have become very short and secondary, when they used to be the main vocational training. It's curious that this has remained only at the two ends of theoretical studies: artisanship and scientific research (PhDs). Otherwise, job training has become the employee and, where university is public, society's burden. Maybe it's employers that need a complete rethink, not so much universities?
  • jongjong 2y ago
    Agreed. Higher education mostly became a pretext to justify why certain people were entitled to receive higher salaries in exchange for lower experience and lower quality output. It's likely also partly why the west moved away from contract-based knowledge work and towards full-time work... It decouples the product of one's labor from its costs (salary) and it makes managers' lives easier as it gives them much more flexibility and less pressure with regard to how they measure and rank employee productivity. If costs were proportional to output, managers would pay a lot more attention to efficiency as their paychecks would depend on that efficiency. Instead, managers' paychecks and career prospects are mostly based on political nonsense like how many people are working under them; literally creating an incentive for inefficiency.
  • timewizard 2y ago
    > we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree Historical point you've completely missed. You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently. This was not "decided" this was a trap sprung on the working class at a time when blue collar labor was almost entirely off shored. > and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive That's why you discharge the debt instead. This is an institutional failure. They knowingly pumped a market at tax payer expense. The hair cut is theirs to take.
    • andrekandre 2y ago
      > You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently. specifically, from 2005 onwards [0] in the 'Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act' signed by gw... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_and_Consumer_Protection_Act#Dischargeability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_an...
  • KurSix 2y ago
    The bachelor's degree has become this strange hybrid of outdated prestige signaling and a vague promise of employability, but without delivering on either in a consistent way.
    • jeremycarter 2y ago
      When you put it like that it really is a bad product.
      • KurSix 2y ago
        The only product where you go into debt, get four years older, and still need "experience" to get hired
  • elric 2y ago
    > Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink Maybe. But what I think would help more is a broader focus on lifelong learning. Both on the job on company [dt]ime, and outside of work. In many places you can take evening classes for languages, or hobby-classes like embroidery or goldsmithing. Even programming. But there are very few places where you can take maths classes after hours. There's also, imo, way too much focus on degrees and not enough focus on competences. Some time ago I tried to register for some postgrad level classes, without any intention of using them for a certificate or whatever, but I was rejected for not having the right degree.
  • account-5 2y ago
    I couldn't agree more with this. I'm a mature student who left school with nothing, joined and left the military with nothing, and managed to get a relatively decent paying public sector job. I decided to put myself through a bachelor's degree part time and self funded. I now have one, it's a nice piece of paper, but the skills I gained from it I likely could have got a lot cheaper on udemy. In fact udemy is very likely to be more up to date. I obviously think the computer science degree is full of useful skills unlike a lot of degrees, but it's nothing I couldn't have got elsewhere. With a kid in university I am torn because I know that having a degree actually means nothing in the job market, not like it used to.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • dionidium 2y ago
    In order to rethink Bachelor Degrees, one must first rethink high school. It is routine in the US to see schools where 1) <=5% of the student body is proficient in math; but also 2) the school has a 90% graduation rate. If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.
    • SkyBelow 2y ago
      We need to admit schools are babysitting kids and not teaching them anymore. A few kids can still learn, but so many others don't. Especially the one who would learn in a better environment, but whose class is disrupted by 1 or 2 students preventing their education. Once a student gets behind a year, they aren't going to ever catch up if they are only passed on to the next year instead of being identified as someone who needs to repeat the year. Edit: I should have been clearer in "are increasingly babysitting" and not been as strong as indicating it as some universal truth. I hear horror stories from teachers about how much of their time is focused on classroom management, how little on actual education, and how much effort it put into processes so the grades stay up regardless.
      • elric 2y ago
        I wonder if alternative forms of education (like Waldorf/Steiner) would make more sense to more kids. It's clear that the standard way of teaching doesn't resonate with many kids, and we would do well to investigate that.
    • elric 2y ago
      A few essential skills that I feel schools ought to teach: 1. Personal knowledge management 2. Digital literacy 3. Calling bullshit in the age of big data (this is an actual course, freely available on youtube)
• deleted 2y ago
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• trod1234 2y ago
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  • oldpersonintx 2y ago
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  • byearthithatius 2y ago
    The OG hacker news website doesn't even have a downvote button? I notice the upvote is just a hyperlink to `voteid=__&how=up&auth=__&goto=reply__` So do they just curl `vote?id=__&how=down&auth=__&goto=reply__` ??
    • bryanlarsen 2y ago
      downvoting comments and flagging posts requires karma.
      • byearthithatius 2y ago
        Not from my tests. I just was able to curl downvote someone even though I don't see the button. Click my latest submission to see it.
• neonate 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/59uSH https://archive.ph/59uSH
• bryanlarsen 2y ago
  At least for the moment, AI still needs knowledge workers to spec and prompt and check. AI makes knowledge workers more productive, but it doesn't eliminate the need for them. And if knowledge workers are more productive, then knowledge work is cheaper. Cheaper knowledge work increases demand for knowledge work. So the number of workers required might actually increase. It also might not, but first order analysis that assumes decreased knowledge workers is not sufficient. C.f. garment makers. Partial automation of clothes making made clothes cheaper, so now people have closets full of hundreds of garments rather than the 2 sets our great-grandparents likely had. There are now more people making garments now than there was 100 years ago.
  • bitxbitxbitcoin 2y ago
    I wonder how the ratio of people making garments relative to the total world population has changed though in this example.
    • bryanlarsen 2y ago
      No easy answer since most garments > 100 years ago were home-made. But I can confidently assert without data that the number of man-hours of labor in the average closet is substantially up. garment makers chosen because of this recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43450515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43450515
      • MITSardine 2y ago
        How can you be so sure? I found this document: https://web.archive.org/web/20210126040017/https://ribevikingecenter.dk/media/10424/Flaxreport.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210126040017/https://ribevikin... It asks the question "How long would it take to make a Viborg shirt?". The answer seems to be 354 hours per their experiments. This is from seed to shirt. (linen) I'd be surprised if we had that many man-hours, let alone 3 or 4 times that (this is a single piece of clothing), in our wardrobes. Conservatively assuming a man-hour in the wardrobe costs us $5 (while people are often paid less, their salaries are also but one expense), you'd need at least around $1500 to equal just that shirt.
• 7qW24A 2y ago
  Corporations that over-hired over the past 10 years needed an excuse to cut the layers of fat and bureaucracy out, and AI came along at just the right time. It doesn’t matter if AI is increasing productivity; what matters is that people think it might be.
  • bee_rider 2y ago
    Maybe… I dunno. Anyone who’s been at a big company (the kind that are inclined to over-hire) can attest to the massive population of folks who don’t seem to have any productive job. Does AI spell doom for those people? I have no idea, their job wasn’t to be productive in the first place. Being a warm body to expand the size of some middle managers fiefdom—that is not a job that can be taken by AI, right? I guess maybe just engineering jobs are on the chopping block. Doomed, by the nature of their productivity actually being tangible, to be replaced by an AI that does their job worse.
    • mrweasel 2y ago
      > Being a warm body to expand the size of some middle managers fiefdom—that is not a job that can be taken by AI, right? If you over-hired and now need to layoff people, because founding and cheap loans aren't available, then AI provides a convenient excuse. You don't have to admit that you paid people to do nothing/very little for the last ten year.
  • mywittyname 2y ago
    Maybe in '23 & '24 that argument made sense. But presumably the past two years they've spent laying everyone off has been enough to trim the fat. Honestly, any company that's still laying off people that they "overhired" during the pandemic needs to take a hard look at their leadership teams, because they've had ample opportunity to be rid of such people.
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      I don't think it's that complicated to begin with. Free money, focus on growth. Not free money and looking recession, cut cut cut. AI is a convinent buzzword to keep shareholders happy, no matter how much you actually invest in it. I don't think it was a grand conspiracy. Executives are just panicking and don't have much more of a clue than the workers. It's just too bad they could weather the storm regardless while people relying on paychecks suffer consequences.
• carabiner 2y ago
  If you look at fields like mechanical engineering, no, it hasn't, because there isn't much training data for that type of work available on the internet. (CAD isn't engineering.) It's locked up in corporations like Ford, SpaceX, Toyota. There isn't open source mechanical analysis work available at a professional level, which might be an FEA output that references 5 messy spreadsheets that gets written up in a 20 page report with charts, and that references 20 other internal docs, specs. And every company does analysis differently so I'm not sure you could adequately train a model that can generalize it well.
  • mywittyname 2y ago
    I think this is a flawed outlook. My wife works in healthcare and they just announced that AI would generate 50% of their documents. According to my wife, every in every review she's done of the work, there are critical errors in logic or reasoning (hallucinations), but leadership doesn't care because they a "grading" the AI on things like grammar and spelling. So, yay, it spelled "fusospirochetosis" correctly, but unfortunately it attributed that to a 23 year old woman who came in for a broken arm. I think we need to be prepared for "vibe coding" taking over every industry. Leadership is going to blindly implement broken AI to replace workers. Now, you might think that threat of lawsuits, regulations, and ethics standards will save your industry. And maybe that's true, but I personally don't think so. I personally think we are going to see country-scale enshitification of everything as lazy people use AI to generate everything which is then reviewed by lazy people who also use AI to review everything and no one notices or cares until it's too late (and maybe not even then). I hope you're right, but I'm not convinced.
    • mrweasel 2y ago
      > I personally think we are going to see country-scale enshitification of everything as lazy people use AI to generate everything which is then reviewed by lazy people who also use AI to review everything and no one notices or cares until it's too late Sound about right to me. A large quantity of documentation is written solely to be written, not read. If it's your job to write reports, article, memos, whatever, and you deep down know that this isn't being read, then why not have to AI do it? I think that we're producing way to many documents/reports/content in general and we need to slow down. Humans can't keep up, neither on the production side, nor the consumption, so we employ computers to "help", but it's all busy work.
• MrMcCall 2y ago
  It's the natural result of having more and more of our population being complete morons. The truth never goes away, but societies can shift closer to or futher away from being willing to learn and accept new concepts, attitudes, and behaviors. History is rife with examples: Galileo, St. Francis of Assisi, Boltzmann, Einstein, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eugene Parker, Bernie Sanders ... the list goes on and on. Most every tradition in Earth's various societies consists solely of excuses to keep doing the same stupid crap, for the same stupid reasons, with the same willfully ignorant disregard to better ways of doing things. Only compassion gives us the clear perspective on how we can best apply our energy to lift everyone's boat, without harm or misery to either ourselves or our blessed Earth. "Same as it ever was." --Talking Heads
  • fireburning 2y ago
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• nopelynopington 2y ago
  I flip flop daily on whether it has or not. Even the best AI engines write truly awful code, and it might not improve. But it also makes it easier for people to coast, and turn in half assed work, which is certainly a pathway to the decline of knowledge work
  • nzach 2y ago
    > it also makes it easier for people to coast, and turn in half assed work, which is certainly a pathway to the decline of knowledge work I understand your sentiment and I partially agree with it. But this kind of phrasing implies that "doing the bare minimum" (to put it in another way) is a strictly bad thing. Sure, its easy to condemn someone "half-assing" a job by labeling him as lazy or something like that. But the reality is that most of the time we don't need the best nor we are willing to pay properly for this effort. Imagine your baker, for example. Do you really need 100% of his effort and care to be put into every single bread he makes? For me this answer is "no". All I care is that he comply with all regulations and that his bread tastes good, I don't really mind if it's not best bread in the world. And even if it was the best I probably would find it too expensive to buy in a daily basis. Another example would be blacksmiths, at some point they we our only option to make something out of metal, and they would put quite a lot of care and attention to every piece they made. But at some we created some machines that can create things out of metal. These machines, at first, weren't really good and the products they made were of inferior quality. But they had enough quality to be useful, were cheaper and were able to produce immense quantities of goods. What I'm trying to say is that sometimes the "low effort" option is the correct choice. And I don't think this means the decline of knowledge work, this just means we will see a change in what is considered "relevant skills" for knowledge work.
    • singleshot_ 2y ago
      > Do you really need 100% of his effort and care to be put into every single bread he makes? Nope; just mine.
    • yoyohello13 2y ago
      I guess the thing is I don’t want to do the “bare minimum” I want what I do in life to mean something. I want to work hard and care about everything I do. Whether that’s family or work or leisure. Coasting and doing the bare minimum is not a good way to live. Society is pushing people to spend more and more of their life on meaningless slop, then wonder why there is a mental health crisis.
• deadbabe 2y ago
  The truth many will not want to admit is that knowledge work is essentially the “rentier income” version of labor. You secure an asset (specialized knowledge), and then you just live off of it while doing the minimal work you can, by turning yourself into an asset. Even though this affords many people a comfortable life, much like being a landowner of a vast portfolio of properties, it contributes to the inequality and degradation of society, splitting people between those who must labor physically and those who look down at them comfortably from high balconies. Society will not be worse off with most people doing physical labor. It was that way for thousands of years and humanity flourished. People may not like it, but humanity can only truly relax and do nothing when it has reached its peak and every problem is solved, and we are just not there yet. Back to work.
  • lisper 2y ago
    > turning yourself into an asset How is that any different from any other skilled labor? Recall the old joke about the plumber who charged $1 for banging on the pipe and $1000 for knowing where to bang. Even purely physical labor like digging ditches requires that you have certain physical traits (strength and stamina) that you can look at as assets. > Society will not be worse off with most people doing physical labor. Like what? There is virtually nothing that used to be done with human labor that can't be done by machine nowadays. Even ditch-digging is mostly done with backhoes, not men with shovels. For the moment we still need (some) humans to run the machines, but that's knowledge work too.
    • deadbabe 2y ago
      With physical labor you still need to do the work to deliver value, where as with knowledge work, you may not need to do anything until you are needed, but people pay to simply have access to you. Many software engineers for example, don’t do much most of the time, but they are an asset due to their familiarity with company systems.
      • lisper 2y ago
        > with knowledge work, you may not need to do anything until you are needed That can be true for physical labor as well. Fire fighters. Ambulance drivers. Soldiers. All get paid to be on-call.
• talkingtab 2y ago
  One could wonder if perhaps, as is usual, We people have it all wrong about this new technology. Perhaps AI is the death of corporations. Corporations are designed to extract money by charging as much as possible while spending as little as possible. That seems fair to me, right? We do not expect a corporation to understand the concept of common good. What AI does is to make it appear as though people are not needed, you can just replace them all with AI & machines. Profits go up, yes? Corporations make more and more money. What could go wrong. The first thing that is going wrong - currently - is that if you do not pay people enough money to buy things, then guess what happens to your business? Goodbye Apple. Goodbye Google. Goodbye moon. Oops, sorry. This is already happening. If the wolves on Isle Royale get too good at catching and eating deer, guess what happens? Secondly and perhaps most importantly is that corporations are good at exploiting. If you know how to make a car, a corporation can make one so easily that you do not need to pay any people. Exploit. If you see a corporation pursuing lock-in (here's looking at you Apple, Walmart, etc) then you see a corporation that has no good business model. This does not mean they are dead or not going to be around, it just means they are a dinosaur waiting for some event. But the question is whether they can invent the next car? And what if the thing in short supply is not in the category of commodities. We still do not really understand what we can do with computers, the internet or block chains. Corporations know how to exploit those technologies. After all we still have windows. But is that the best we can do? Track people? Wow. So if you are a person who can actually think, and do. If you can figure out how to cross a stream in the winter, or make sour dough bread or even just raise chickens, there is going to be a massive new opportunity. For you. Because AI cannot create new concepts that are people based and even if they can, then corporations will fire them if they do. If your job is however a corporate pablum thing, like for example if you write pablum pieces for the NYT, then my advice is to run for the hills. And run fast.
• nukem222 2y ago
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• Bukhmanizer 2y ago
  I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.
  • nickff 2y ago
    De-scoping is also a commonly-cited result of higher interest rates. We recently lived through a prolonged episode of zero-interest-rate-policy (ZIRP), which encouraged long-term and risky projects. When interest rates go up, the minimum acceptable return-on-investment (ROI) required to lure investment money away from low-risk investments like government bonds also increases correspondingly.
    • Bukhmanizer 2y ago
      Yeah I think there are a bunch of different reasons that corporations are doing less, interest rates are a major factor, but the point is that it isn’t exactly the “AI is taking our jobs” narrative that people want it to be.
      • nickff 2y ago
        Agreed! Uncertainty to do with short term economic issues, medium term geopolitical risk (Trump, China, Russia, etc.), and longer-term issues (national debt, Medicare, etc.) also shouldn’t be underestimated.
      • UncleOxidant 2y ago
        It seems like we're in kind of a lull that's being caused by expectations of what AI is about to be able to do. And these expectations could be completely wrong. But it's already causing changes in corporate planning and spending.
      • walterbell 2y ago
• iambateman 2y ago
  All knowledge work follows a distribution of skill…lots of people are in the middle of the curve when it comes to ability to do a varied set of tasks. If I quizzed someone in the middle of that curve on (1) basic keyboard shortcuts, (2) how to VLOOKUP in excel, (3) how to buy a domain, (4) how to make a presentation that truly looked good, (5) detect if an email is a phishing campaign, (6) make a secure password, (7) do research in their industry… You get my point…The skill of an average knowledge worker today is miles and miles away from elite levels. Knowledge work is not declining, we’re just watching the average ability of a typical worker go way up, over the course of a generation.
  • poincaredisk 2y ago
    Was this person employed in It? Did you ask them to quiz you in return? "How to buy a domain" is exactly something a HNer would ask as an obvious question. I wonder how many of us know when to plant carrots, the chemical structure of benzene, or can show Malawi on a map.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >The skill of an average knowledge worker today is miles and miles away from elite levels. Wouldn't that by definition always be true? Average and "elite" are dynamic values. I'm unsure if that gap is increasing or not.
• tootie 2y ago
  Everybody is commenting about AI, but that's barely mentioned in the article. In particular there is this quote: > The gap in wages between those with a college degree and those without one grew steadily beginning in 1980, but flattened during the past 15 years, though it remains high. I suspect there's a lot of factors at play and the expansion of access to college is part of it. The value of secondary education is somewhere diluted. There is the end of the zero interest era. There is massive layoffs of federal workers which skew heavily towards knowledge work. And some of it is was Starbucks cites as "removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more nimble teams" which is a pretty normal cyclical thing where an era of expansion and promotions makes your org to top-heavy and bureaucratic so you trim aggressively and probably end up rehiring some as needed. Like a controlled burn of an overgrown forest. And if some of those are permanently lost to AI then that's a bonus. I think a lot of business leaders are just expecting a recession and want to be on good footing before it hits.
  • KurSix 2y ago
    Companies got fat during the boom, especially post-2020, and now they're shedding layers to get leaner and more agile. It doesn't mean those jobs are obsolete forever, just that the pendulum is swinging the other way for now.
  • milesrout 2y ago
    >Everybody is commenting about AI, but that's barely mentioned in the article. As usual, they didn't read the article. They read the headline, assumed it was about AI, and wrote the same boring "management bad, AI bad, the present bad, programmers good, the past good" rants.
  • bjornsing 2y ago
    Personally I think it’s because a university degree used to be a proxy for cognitive ability and conscientiousness. Now that many more people have them that’s less true. The market is starting to realize and we’ll see some “corrections” going forward.
• Glyptodon 2y ago
  Yes, but I'm not sure it's entirely related to AI. I think one of the real lessons of the pandemic was that you can outsource everything knowledge related because paying peanuts for something that's somewhere from 1/8 to 1/2 as good is better than not paying peanuts. And this effect is deeply multiplicative the less skilled and more entry level the role is, a factor AI only exacerbates. The precursor to this was tech jobs postings, year by year, mostly only being for, first, 3+ years of experience, and then 5+, and so on. That said, AI, as it improves, will only exacerbate. At least until it becomes so multiplicative that having an AI + pilot is so productive that you'd never not be happy to hire another one.
• coolThingsFirst 2y ago
  Yes, it has for a very long time I just got the memo too late. I will focus on making small startups(will clamor around for ideas since I'm not very creative) since getting a job is ALMOST impossible. I've GitHub projects, degree, don't expect anything crazy since COL is low in EE but it feels like unless you are Jeff Dean nowadays is auto-rejection. Very low number of callbacks. I do have a multi-year gap since graduation which I know it impacts but this market is INSANE and has been for years. For comparison, just with HS degree while in uni, I had more callbacks for orders of magnitude better companies than I do now. It's like instead of progressing my career prospects have winded down. Crazy times.
• apercu 2y ago
  I'm guessing that the people who most espouse the virtues of AI do not "test" the output much and just let LLMs pump out errors. I use LLM's daily, but as a tool to brainstorm, mostly, or to write small parts of scripts (e.g., shell, not TV shows). But everything has to be verified. Last weekend I was using ChatGPT Music Teacher (or, trying to anyway) to prep some voice leading practices for guitar. I spent almost a half hour trying to get that model, then the base ChatGPT model to give correct information about inversions and the notes in the chords. It was laughably wrong over and over again. It would misidentify chords, say that a chord had the base attributes of a triad (tonic, third, fifth) while giving me a chord shape that had the root twice, and a third, and calling that a second inversion. Or giving incorrect fret/note information. If I didn't know theory and how intervals work on a guitar I would have been pretty screwed. As it was, I wasted a half hour and never got anything usable. I'm not saying that the technology isn't fairly amazing, but like, don't believe the hype.
  • LeftHandPath 2y ago
    The most I've done with it so far has been asking what a nice database layout might look like for a given problem, copying the output to a markdown file, and then referencing it as I personally design the schema. LLMs are pretty cool, but they make all sorts of unpredictable errors, and - especially when you're using them for things you're unfamiliar with - introduce all sorts of hidden costs you won't catch until later.
  • unclad5968 2y ago
    I've wasted so much time trying to get LLMs to help me code. One issue I have is that I can never seem to get the AI to say the word no. No matter what I ask, it will say "Absolutely! You can solve [impossible problem] like so...". At this point I basically use them as documentation search engines. Searching for things like "does this library have a function to do thing?". Gemini and deepseek seem to be good enough at that. I've entirely given up on using LLMs for exploratory exercises.
    • toxik 2y ago
      Or the old asking a question Q1, getting wrong answer A1, explaining why it’s wrong with Q2, getting answer A2 that hyper-focuses on Q2 and misses important parts of Q1, restating Q1 you again obtain A1, repeat ad nauseam.
• alecco 2y ago
  Musk showed 80% were useless hires and AI gave the rest of the CEOs the excuse. So now they are downsizing and moving teams to India. From Google to American Airlines. What could possibly go wrong.
  • disambiguation 2y ago
    Musk showed that it takes a lot of people to build a bridge and only a few to maintain it. Why anyone continues to use it is another question entirely.
    • typewithrhythm 2y ago
      Twitter was built long before it's headcount reached its peak. It suffered through a fairly common problem where due to its value and revenue it tries to justify a huge headcount, usually due to managers getting paid based on headcount numbers. In reality it always should have had less numerous, better paid engineers, rather than management parasites.
• hoaxminion 2y ago
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• squigglydonut 2y ago
  If you want better than AI you must demand it as if life depended on it.
  • timewizard 2y ago
    How about quality of life improvements for everyone on the planet first? I think life /actually/ depends on that. Goofy energy wasting language models take an extreme backseat; however, this is "private equity world" and the rules are just to rip everyone off regardless of long term outcomes.
    • milesrout 2y ago
      What does this comment even mean? I understand all the individual words but in combination it is nonsensical. What are "quality of life improvements for everyone on the planet"? What does that even mean? Are you proposing some sort of communist system? Why, in response to an entirely unrelated comment on an unrelated topic? What the hell is "private equity world"?
• jongjong 2y ago
  Unfortunately, knowledge and intelligence has been losing a lot of value over the past couple of decades. Aside from tech making information more accessible, centralization and monopolization likely played the biggest part. Driven by the design of our monetary system. Most new money enters the economy backed by endless streams of real estate debt (mortgages), public debt and corporate debt... All these well-moneyed areas (real estate, government, corporations) have become monopolized and highly political. There's just no room for real knowledge work. It's all about status games and BS internal politics. People who benefit from Cantillion effects have no interest in bringing nerds into their organizations to compete against them for their spot in front of their easy money printer. Insiders are mostly hiring people who are dumber than themselves; people whom they can control.
• Animats 2y ago
  Demand for college graduates peaked long ago. Only about half of US workers with college degrees have jobs which require them.
  • hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    I wasn't aware of this statistic, so more details: https://archive.vn/e0k2M https://archive.vn/e0k2M
  • kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Most job postings say something like bs saves you 5 years on the job experience though. And not a lot of jobs out there that are truly entry level zero experience or relevance required. Even programming, like good luck getting a job today without any years already on the job or a degree. Its not 2005 anymore.
• fireburning 2y ago
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• tangotaylor 2y ago
  > A recent academic paper found that software developers who used an A.I. coding assistant improved a key measure of productivity by more than 25 percent, and that the productivity gains appeared to be largest among the least experienced developers. I dunno about this citation. I just read the paper and it considers "productivity" in this context to be the number of builds, commits, and pull requests in a developer week. Interestingly, there was no statistically significant difference in build success rate between those who used the AI tool (Copilot in this case) and those who didn't. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566
  • Derbasti 2y ago
    Personally, I've seen junior developers most negatively impacted by AI. It seems to stymie learning and reasoning skills.
    • toxik 2y ago
      There is definitely an effect of ”you forget what you don’t need to remember” happening even to me.
    • globular-toast 2y ago
      In my experience, the best developers out there have all worked through hard problems by themselves. "Been through the trenches", so to speak. That means getting right to the bottom of difficult bugs etc., no matter how long it takes. On the other hand, the worst developers reach out for help the moment things start to look unfamiliar to them. Over the years I've tried to encourage such developers to think for themselves, but I've come to realise some just can't do it if they know someone else on the team probably has the answers. Availability of LLMs seems to be the worst thing for this kind of developer. Now they don't even have any kind of social barrier to reaching out for help. I just don't see how they're ever going to learn to do anything. Code monkeys have always existed, and can be useful, but why wouldn't the engineers just go straight to the LLM instead of going through code monkeys?
    • fransje26 2y ago
• ctrlp 2y ago
  Many "white collar" jobs are bullshit makework for college grads. There is nothing intrinsically valuable in them but they are necessary to keep the population occupied. When the economics become favorable again, there will be another iteration of creating these jobs with subtle ways to make the "career" seem meaningful when in truth they are just made up sinecures.
  • tucnak 2y ago
    Do you work in politics brother?
    • ctrlp 2y ago
      No sir, I work in technology. Sometimes adjacent to government, but never politics itself. Why do you ask?
      • tucnak 2y ago
        You reminded me of someone! :-)
• KurSix 2y ago
  Still, I wouldn't say we're seeing the death of knowledge work, more like a redefinition. The bigger issue is whether our current education system and workforce training are keeping up.
• austin-cheney 2y ago
  It’s a natural reckoning that industries are still figuring out. For a long time software has seen vast over employment. Even with all the layoffs there is still a lot of fat left to trim. Look, the only purpose of software is automation and the only purpose of automation is labor elimination. This used to be common knowledge when software jobs were far fewer and still has not realistically sunk in with the modern work force. People that don’t fully embrace this as a value consensus are ripe for elimination. A lot of software employment has also seen rising wages inversely proportional to return on investment until so many of the layoffs started. There are many people employed to write software that aren’t very good and cannot independently qualify a return on investment without considerable help. That is a problem of poor candidate selection and improper/insufficient training. For years employers have attempted to short circuit this problem with open source helpers like Spring Boot, jQuery, React and so forth. Now they are doubling down with AI. You still have a population of people unqualified and insufficiently to perform the work assigned. All of these things mean software employment is a liability of declining worth that employers are still not willing to accept.
  • raducu 2y ago
    > here are many people employed to write software that aren’t very good and cannot independently qualify a return on investment without considerable help. That is a problem of poor candidate selection and improper/insufficient training. Every time there's a downturn in labor field, common courtesy goes out the window (I might say more nasty things, but the truth is I don't know you so it might very well be unwarranted for in this case, but I do know many callous people who spew/project similar things). Sort of like what Buffet said about the tide -- you see people's true colors. The company I'm working for fired people because of financial issues and the new CEO instead of being humble and just saying what it is, indirectly called those fired or about to be fired "lazy". I know those people, none were lazy. I've worked in this field for 20 years and very few people are actually incompetent or lazy (mainly banks) -- and those are not the people to get fired in a downturn, because those people usually move into management (because why would you get rid of a good sd, qa ? or if you're a good senior sd or qa, why would you move to a junior manager position?). It's usually the environment and management problem, not a incompetency or laziness problem for why things go wrong when they do. And finally, who and why hired those bad people in the first place? Or did they become bad after they were hired? > have attempted to short circuit this problem with open source helpers like Spring Boot, jQuery, React and so forth. It's not a short circuit at all, just common sense. Every time I see a long running java project that uses some obscure bullshit frameworks ("spring is overrated") I KNOW there's huge cost in the future for the re-invention of features spring boot has out of the box and solving many many issues and quirks with library integrations, lifecycle management, hours upon hours of people learning the quirks of the spring-less project idioms, that spring users will never encounter.
• stuaxo 2y ago
  Productivity keeps going up, now to the point where there is less and less work. Instead of paying people more and reducing hours we let enough be taken by some at the top it unbalanced the whole system. We should be working 3 day weeks on the same wages by now. 4 day week would be a start, it would give parents enough time to do chores and have a weekend.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • globular-toast 2y ago
    Productivity is not a problem. We produce way more food than we need, way more cars than we need, way more plastic gadgets than we need etc. In fact, we produce so much that it's making people sick: obesity, diabetes, atrophy, cancer, loneliness, depression etc. At some point a long time ago productivity stopped being the thing that made us happy and started being the thing that made us sick. But our politicians never stopped using this crude measurement as a target. If there's one thing people love it's a number. Number goes up: good, number goes down: bad. Easy. But there's no number for happiness, so our political systems are incapable of targeting it. Now that productivity is long behind us we now need to start working out how to climb out of these local optima we've dug ourselves into. We need to solve problems like cancer. This doesn't get done by people going to a building and turning a handle all day. This gets done by thinking.
    • erikerikson 2y ago
      > Productivity is not a problem GP didn't claim it was
• schnitzelstoat 2y ago
  No, it's just that interest rates are higher.
  • underdeserver 2y ago
    Underrated comment. My null hypothesis is that interest rates are over, fat is being trimmed, of course the people most affected are going to be those at the bottom of the food chain: inexperienced new grads. Sucks to be a new grad (as it did in 2008-9), but in macro terms I'd say wait and check back in two years.
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      How do they survive for 2 years without a job?
      • underdeserver 2y ago
        Really sucks to be them. Try hard and compromise on pay. I also remember seeing some study that says that 2008 grads' pay never caught up, and that e.g. 2010 grads' pay is higher despite their having less experience. Sucks, but you play the cards you're dealt.
        • johnnyanmac 2y ago
          Damm shame. Really hope they remember this inevitable resentment when it comes time to vote on policy. It seems the '08 grads did not.
          • underdeserver 2y ago
            Vote on what policy? What vote do you think could have made a difference?
            • johnnyanmac 2y ago
              Direct votes will vary from state to state. But as a recent example in CA voted against rent control... Guess who funded against that prop? I was more talking indirect, but simply voting in whatever rep that sounded better without keeping the policies they focus on.
• CokeFaultSoyuz 2y ago
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• curtisszmania 2y ago
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• natmaka 2y ago
  Thanks to Lunar: https://www.debian.org/News/2024/20241119 https://www.debian.org/News/2024/20241119
• zkmon 2y ago
  "an M.I.T. economist who was a co-author of the paper, said in an interview that a software developer’s job could change over the longer term, so that the human coder became a kind of project manager overseeing multiple A.I. assistants" Really? An economist has the authority and understanding to say that? People are getting carried away by projecting the gains seen from AI assistants. They need to understand that they can't simply project some trends so linearly. The same people saw cars and aeroplanes and said that we are going to have flying cars very soon. Nice projection of the trends!
• quux 2y ago
  Gift article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/business/economy/white-collar-layoffs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7E4.qy5h.UUBm6_f50E-B&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/business/economy/white-co...
• ferguess_k 2y ago
  What I worry a lot more instead is how knowledge of manufacturing and engineering could be lost due to our greed. Typical scenario: Industry I is not doing fine in country C (i.e. the fund managers are not happy about lack of growth of the public companies in this sector) due to reasons R1, R2, ..., Rn. Then management decided to outsource and eventually dismantle the factories to "globalize" it. Knowledge retained by the older generation of engineers, technicians and workers were completely lost when they passed away.
  • ge96 2y ago
    Didn't that already happen with US to China from the 70s
    • tempodox 2y ago
      Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
      • makeitdouble 2y ago
        Shareholders in the 70s made a lot of money. They'll be OK to rinse and repeat that history.
        • tempodox 2y ago
          True. And the people selling shovels for the “AI” gold rush are making boatloads of money now. But it's still up to us whether we buy their customers' products.
        • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
          That'll only work if somebody is willing to do the job for a lower price. The US may be in a different position the next time around.
          • trashtester 2y ago
• owenpalmer 2y ago
  Jonathan Blow has been talking about this problem for a while now. I especially love his talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?si=HgGG5PWyu7CBxYxt https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?si=HgGG5PWyu7CBxYxt
• glitchc 2y ago
  Is this anything more than just supply and demand? As a society, we have shunned physical labour as an effective means to earn a living. In the education system, we insist that everyone graduate from high school, regardless of the attained level of achievement. As a result, we have a huge supply of young people who are college educated and have eschewed the trades because they believe that physical labour is below their standing. They're not wrong, since that's what they've been told their entire lives. They're all looking for white-collar work, but we simply don't have enough jobs for all of them.
• yuppii 2y ago
  Could that also be, because the money is fake now? It does not actually follow the value, created out of thin air (?)
• karaterobot 2y ago
  I don't see any clear examples in this article of people being laid off due to AI. I see one anonymous source who suspects his team was halved and that the higher-ups expect them to do twice the work using AI assistants. But, teams were slashed in half and expected to do more with less before AI, so I'm not sure that counts. I'm not naive enough to think AI companies wouldn't come after knowledge workers, but I'm waiting for confirmation that they are capable of doing that yet. If not, Betteridge's Law is confirmed in this case.
• hgs3 2y ago
  The vast majority of jobs that sustain our standard of living are blue-collar: farmers who grow our food, textile workers who make our clothes, construction workers who build our homes, plumbers, electricians, waste disposal workers, etc. I'd say it's white-collar work that became overinflated this past century, largely as a reaction to the automation and outsourcing of many traditional blue-collar roles. Now, with white-collar jobs themselves increasingly at risk, it's unclear where people will turn. The economic pie continues to shrink, and I don't see that trend reversing. It appears to me that our socio-economic model simply doesn't scale with technology. We need to have a constructive conversation about how to adapt.
  • libertine 2y ago
    > It appears to me that our socio-economic model simply doesn't scale with technology. We need to have a constructive conversation about how to adapt. This doesn't add up with the number of billionaires and the growth over the last decades - it just seems that there's a bottleneck and the value captured from technology isn't trickling down. Of course, you can claim that such "billionaires" and that part of that "value" is the result of speculation, but since billionaires can use that speculation to buy money and acquire more assets, then for sure there's some value there that isn't getting to the vast majority of the people.
    • SR2Z 2y ago
      My 2c is that most normal people are incapable of capturing this kind of value simply because they aren't educated enough on how to use a computer to do these things. ChatGPT is the first time in a while that a new technology is easy enough to use and integrate that the productivity gains could be captured by the lowest-skilled workers. Uber/Lyft are the antithesis of this: their apps do very simple things but at scale and with an eye towards confusing their drivers. It's not unthinkable that a co-op version of these apps could exist, but the folks with the skills to build them get snapped up by big tech pretty quick. IMO if we want to share the wealth, the ONLY way to do it is by upskilling workers and simplifying technology.
      • 2y ago
• anonfordays 2y ago
  Considering the crumbling infrastructure, high demand for trades, increasing deportations, etc. blue-collar workers will likely see their compensation increase while white-collar workers see theirs decrease. The next industry for SV to disrupt needs to be construction. White-collar workers will see a demand for software tools that increase the efficiency of the trades.
• phendrenad2 2y ago
  I wish that articles like this didn't have such a US-centric limited view of the world. It's possible that knowledge work is booming elsewhere in the world, yet this is not explored or considered.