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Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

• jruohonen 2y ago
  The results are basically what Acemoglu and others have also been saying; e.g., https://economics.mit.edu/news/daron-acemoglu-what-do-we-know-about-economics-ai https://economics.mit.edu/news/daron-acemoglu-what-do-we-kno...
• davidkl 2y ago
  That person apparently didn't talk to copy writers, photographers, content creators and authors.
  • sct202 2y ago
    Or customer service. My last few online store issues have been fully chatbot when they used to be half chatbot for intake and half person.
    • thehoff 2y ago
      Same, after a little back and forth it became obvious I was not talking to a real person.
      • Drakim 2y ago
        I like to get the chatbot to promise me massive discounts just to get whoever is reading the logs to sweat a little.
    • sph 2y ago
      I have survived until today using the shibboleth "let me speak to a human" [1] The day this doesn't work any more, is the day I stop paying for that service. We should make a list of companies that still have actual customer service. 1: https://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/806/ - from an era when the worst that could happen was having to speak with incompetent, but still human, tech support.
      • xnorswap 2y ago
        It no longer works for virgin media (UK cable monopoly). I got myself into a loop where no matter what I did, there was no human in the loop. Even the "threaten to cancel" trick didn't work, still just chatbots / automated services. Thankfully more and more of the UK is getting FTTH. Sadly for me I accidentally misunderstood the coverage checker when I last moved house.
      • pixl97 2y ago
        > is the day I stop paying for that service. You're acting like it's not the companies that are monopolies that implement these systems first.
  • rspoerri 2y ago
    > Many of these occupations have been described as being vulnerable to AI: accountants, customer support specialists, financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists, journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals, office clerks, software developers, and teachers.
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• windex 2y ago
  Right now AI's impact is the equivalent of giving the ancient Egyptians a couple of computer chips. People will eventually figure out what they are, but until then it will only be used as combs, paperweights, pendants etc. I would say the use cases are only coming into view.
• cess11 2y ago
  '"The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots. Employers are also shifting gears and actively encouraging it. But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle."' So, as of yet, according to these researchers, the main effect is that of a data pump, certain corporations get a deep insight into people's and other corporation's inner life.
  • piva00 2y ago
    I was discussing with a colleague the past months, my view on how and why all these AI tools are being shoved down our throats (just look at Google's Gemini push into all enterprise tools, it's like Google+ for B2B) before there are clear cut use-cases you can point to and say "yes, this would have been much harder to do without LLM/AI" is because... Training data is the most valuable asset, all these tools are just data collection machines with some bonus features that make them look somewhat useful. I'm not saying that I think LLMs are useless, far from it, I use them when I think it's a good fit for the research I'm doing, the code I need to generate, etc., but the way it's being pushed from a marketing perspective tells me that companies making these tools need people to use them to create a data moat. Extremely annoying to be getting these pop-ups to "use our incredible Intelligence™" at every turn, it's grating on me so much that I've actively started to use them less, and try to disable every new "Intelligence™" feature that shows up in a tool I use.
    • Macha 2y ago
      It seems very simple cause and effect from a economic standpoint. Hype about AI is very high, so investors ask boards what they're doing about AI and using it, because they think AI will disrupt investments that don't. The boards in turn instruct the CEOs to "adopt AI" and so you get all the normal processes about deciding what/if/when to do stuff get short circuited and so you get AI features that no one asked for or mandates for employees to adopt AI with very shallow KPIs to claim success. The hype really distorts both sides of the conversation. You get the boosters for which any use of AI is a win, no matter how inconsequential the results, and then you get things like the original article which indicate it hasn't caused job losses yet as a sign that it hasn't changed anything. And while it might disprove the hype (especially the "AI is going to replace all mental labour in $SHORT_TIMEFRAME" hype), it really doesn't indicate that it won't replace anything. Like when has a technology making the customer support experience worse for users or employees ever stopped it's rollout if there's cost savings to be had? I think this why AI is so complicated for me. I've used it, and I can see some gains. But it's on the order of when IDE auto complete went from substring matches of single methods to when it could autocomplete chains of method calls based on types. The agent stuff fails on anything but the most bite size work when I've tried it. Clearly some people seem it as something more transformative than that. There's other times when people have seen something transformative and it's just been so clearly nothing of value (NFTs for example) that it's easy to ignore the hype train. The reason AI is challenging for me is it's clearly not nothing, but also it's so far away from the vision that others have that it's not clear how realistic that is.
• pseudolus 2y ago
  Link to abstract and the underlying paper "Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
• raincole 2y ago
  > We examine the labor market effects of AI chatbots using two large-scale adoption surveys (late 2023 and 2024) covering 11 exposed occupations (25,000 workers, 7,000 workplaces), linked to matched employer-employee data in Denmark. It sounds like they didn't ask those who got laid off.
  • causal 2y ago
    Yeah this is like counting horses a few years after the automobile was invented.
• fhd2 2y ago
  > The economists found for example that "AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4 percent of workers, including some who do not use the tools themselves." For me, the most interesting takeaway. It's easy to think about a task, break it down into parts, some of which can be automated, and count the savings. But it's more difficult to take into account any secondary consequences from the automation. Sometimes you save nothing because the bottleneck was already something else. Sometimes I guess you end up causing more work down the line by saving a bit of time at an earlier stage. This can make automation a bit of a tragedy of the commons situation: It would be better for everyone collectively to not automate certain things, but it's better for some individually, so it happens.
  • chii 2y ago
    > you end up causing more work down the line by saving a bit of time at an earlier stage in this case, the total cost would've gone up, and thus, eventually the stakeholder (aka, the person who pays) is going to not want to pay when the "old" way was cheaper/faster/better. > It would be better for everyone collectively to not automate certain things, but it's better for some individually, so it happens. not really, as long as the precondition i mentioned above (the total cost dropping) is true.
    • fhd2 2y ago
      That's probably true as long as the workers generally cooperate. But there's also adversarial situations. Hiring would be one example: Companies use automated CV triaging tools that make it harder to get through to a human, and candidates auto generate CVs and cover letters and even auto apply to increase their chance to get to a human. Everybody would probably be better off if neither side attempted to automate. Yet for the individuals involved, it saves them time, so they do it.
      • chii 2y ago
        Right, so it's like advertising when the market is already saturated (see coca cola vs pepsi advertising).
• rspoerri 2y ago
  All the jobs (11) they looked at are at least medium level complexity and task delegating. They are the ones giving out time-consuming, low level jobs to cheap labour (assistants etc.) . They can save time and money by directly doing it using AI assistants instead of waiting to have an assistant available. I am 100% convinced that Ai will and already has destroyed lots of Jobs. We will likely encounter world order disrupting changes in the coming decades when computer get another 1000 times faster and powerful in the coming 10 years. The jobs described might get lost (obsolete or replaced) as well in the longer term if AI gets better than them. For example just now another article was mentioned in HN: "Gen Z grads say their college degrees were a waste of time and money as AI infiltrates the workplace" which would make teachers obsolete.
  • n_ary 2y ago
    > We will likely encounter world order disrupting changes in the coming decades when computer get another 1000 times faster and powerful in the coming 10 years. Sadly for several decades, as computers got faster, only tracking and ads got more pervasive. Also as hardware became stronger, computer games, media quality improved. We also got planet burning blockchain and crypto mining for a while. In terms of intelligence, we started with clippy, Eliza, stayed with Cortana and Siri, now have LLMs. We will move forward with LLMs for a while until something more impressive comes out and mirrors more humane nature. Also GenZ is literally second worst off generation after the silent generation, growing up in unprecedented prosperity to be only be stunted by global pandemic following by crazy oligarchs trying to bring back techno-feudal age while their parents prepare to sell of the last glimmer of inheritance to finance retirement and healthcare. I honestly do not blame them.
• roenxi 2y ago
  Based on the speed most companies operate at - no surprises here. The internet also didn't have most of its impact in the first decade. And as is fairly well understood, most of the current generation of AI models are a bit dicey in practice. There isn't much of a question that this early phase where AI is likely to create new jobs and opportunities. The real question is what happens when AI is reliably intellectually superior to humans in all domains and it has been proven to everyone's satisfaction, which is still some uncertain time away. It is like expecting cars to replace horses before anyone starts investing in the road network and getting international petroleum supply chains set up - large capital investment is an understatement when talking about how long it takes to bring in transformative tech and bed it in optimally. Nonetheless, time passed and workhorses are rare beasts.
  • 4ndrewl 2y ago
    Does the same follow for The Metaverse, or for Blockchain?
    • throw310822 2y ago
      My absolutely unqualified opinion is that blockchain will survive but won't find much uses apart from those it already has; while the metaverse- or vr usage and contents- will have an explosive growth at some point, especially when mixed with AI generated and rendered worlds- which will be lifelike and almost infinitely flexible. Which btw, is also a great way to spend your time when your job has been replaced by another AI and you have little money for anything else.
    • roenxi 2y ago
      If they end up going somewhere? Absolutely, we haven't seen anything out of the crypto universe yet compared to what'll start to happen when the tech is a century old and well understood by the bankers.
  • asadotzler 2y ago
    At the end of the massive investment period, about a trillion dollars of broadband, fiber and cellular build out between 1998 and 2008, that infrastructure had already added a trillion back to the economy and would add that much nearly every year after. LLM AI is nearing 10 years of massive investment, approaching $1T. Where are the trillions in returns. And what amazing economy-wide impacting infrastructure will that trillion in AI investment leave us with when the bubble pops and these AI companies are sold for parts and scrap and the not-AI companies boosting AI all pull back? When the dot com boom collapsed, we still got value from all that investment that continues to lead the global economy today. What will LLMs leave us with?
• thatjoeoverthr 2y ago
  My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting" and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipes out the economic value a system. This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news, does kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the audience still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline.
  • paulsutter 2y ago
    Why is this a worry? Sounds wonderful
    • jspdown 2y ago
      I'm a bit worried about the social impacts. When a sector collapses and become irrelevant, all its workers no longer need to be employed. Some will no longer have any useful qualifications and won't be able to find another job. They will have to go back to training and find a different activity. It's fine if it's an isolated event. Much worse when the event is repeated in many sectors almost simultaneously.
      • twoodfin 2y ago
        As others in this thread have pointed out, this is basically what happened in the relatively short period of 1995 to 2015 with the rise of global wireless internet telecommunications & software platforms. Many, many industries and jobs transformed or were relegated to much smaller niches. Overall it was great.
        • saturn8601 2y ago
          Man 1995, what a world that was. Seemed like a lot less stress.
      • 2y ago
• jofzar 2y ago
  Not replacing jobs yet. Seen a whole lot of gen AI deflecting customer questions which would have been previously tickets. That is a reduced ticket volume that would have been taken by a junior support engineer. We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to the level 0 IT support.
  • Clubber 2y ago
    Perhaps briefly. Companies tried this with offshoring support. Some really took a hit and had to bring it back. Some didn't though, so it's not all or nothing in the medium term. In the short term, most of the execs will buy into the hype and try it. I suspect the lower quality companies will use it, but the companies whose value is in their reputation for quality will continue to use people.
  • oytis 2y ago
    I mean, if it really works in the end, we just redefine levels humans need to deal with. There are lots of problems with AI, but I can't see one here.
  • BrtByte 2y ago
    Yeah, exactly. It's not about a sudden "mass firing" event - it's more like a slow erosion of entry-level roles
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    > We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer. And this trend isn't new; a lot of investments into e.g. customer support is to need less support staff, for example through better self-service websites, chatbots / conversational interfaces / phone menus (these go back decades), or to reduce expenses by outsourcing call center work to low-wage countries. AI is another iteration, but gut feeling says they will need a lot of training/priming/coaching to not end up doing something other than their intended task (like Meta's AIs ending up having erotic chats with minors). One of my projects was to replace the "contact" page of a power company with a wizard - basically, get the customers to check for known outages first, then check their own fuse boxes etc, before calling customer support.
• mg 2y ago
  One thing nobody seems to discuss is: In the future, we will do a lot more. In other terms: There will be a lot more work. So even if robots do 80% of it, if we do 10x more - the amount of work we need humans to do will double. We will write more software, build more houses, build more cars, planes and everything down the supply chain to make these things. When you look at planet earth, it is basically empty. While rent in big cities is high. But nobody needs to sleep in a big city. We just do so because getting in and out of it is cumbersome and building houses outside the city is expensive. When robots build those houses and drive us into town in the morning (while we work in the car) that will change. I have done a few calculations, how much more mobility we could achieve with the existing road infrastructure if we use electric autonomous buses, and it is staggering. Another way to look at it: Currently, most matter of planet earth has not been transformed to infrastructure used by humans. As work becomes cheaper, more and more of it will. There is almost infinitely much to do.
  • 10729287 2y ago
    I like that some places are empty.
    • mg 2y ago
      Would you be ok if instead of 97% of earth being empty 94% is empty and your rent is cut in half? Another plus point of the future: An electric autonomous bus is at your disposal every 5 minutes, bringing you to whatever nice lonely place you wish.
      • WillAdams 2y ago
        How will this 3% be selected? Which of the few remaining wild creatures will be displaced? https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/catastrophic-73-decline-in-the-average-size-of-global-wildlife-populations-in-just-50-years-reveals-a-system-in-peril https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/catastrophic-73...
      • tgv 2y ago
        I've got no idea what you're going on about, but 97% of the Earth isn't empty in any useful sense. For starters, almost 70% is ocean. There are also large parts which are otherwise uninhabitable, and large parts which have agricultural use. Buses don't go to uninhabited places, since that's costs too much. Every five minutes is a frequency which no form of public transport can afford.
• paulsutter 2y ago
  I spend much more time coding now that I can code 5x faster Demand for software has high elasticity
• WillAdams 2y ago
  Have any of these economists ever tried to scrape by as an entry-level graphic designer/illustrator? Apparently not, since the sort of specific work which one used to find for this has all but vanished --- every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance where someone who might have contracted for an image did not (ditto for stock images, but that's a different conversation).
  • mattlondon 2y ago
    It looks like the writing is on the wall too for other menial and low-value creative jobs too - so basic music and videos - I fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI generated within the next year or two. see Google Veo - they have the tech already and they have YouTube already and they have the ad network already ... Instead of uploading your video ad you already created, you'll just enter a description or two and the AI will auto-generate the video ads in thousands of iterations to target every demographic. Google is going to run away with this with their ecosystem - OpenAI etc al can't compete with this sort of thing.
    • nottorp 2y ago
      > fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI generated within the next year or two And on the other end we'll have "AI" ad blockers, hopefully. They can watch each other.
    • lambdaba 2y ago
      People will develop an eye for how AI-generated looks and that will make human creativity stand out even more. I'm expecting more creativity and less cookie-cutter content, I think AI generated content is actually the end of it.
      • pllbnk 2y ago
        Given that the goal of generative AI is to generate content that is virtually indistinguishable from expert creative people, I think it's one of these scenarios: 1. If the goal is achieved, which is highly unlikely, then we get very very close to AGI and all bets are off. 2. If the goal is not achieved and we stay in this uncanny valley territory (not at the bottom of it but not being able to climb out either), then eventually in a few years' time we should see a return to many fragmented almost indie-like platforms offering bespoke human-made content. The only way to hope to achieve the acceptable quality will be to favor it instead of scale as the content will have to be somehow verified by actual human beings.
• user9999999999 2y ago
  It shouldn't. Its propaganda spread by VCs and ai 'thought leaders' who are finally seeing a glimmer of their fantastical imagination coming to life (it isn't)
• it_citizen 2y ago
  No opinion on the topic but "say economists" doesn't inspire trust
  • kurtis_reed 2y ago
    Thank you
• poulpy123 2y ago
  LMAO it's too early and too small to see anything yet
• solfox 2y ago
  Extrapolating from my current experience with AI-assisted work: AI just makes work more meaningful. My output has increased 10x, allowing me to focus on ideas and impact rather than repetitive tasks. Now apply that to entire industries and whole divisions of labor: manual data entry, customer support triage, etc. Will people be out of those jobs? Most certainly. But it gives all of us a chance to level up—to focus on more meaningful labor. As a father, my forward-thinking vision for my kids is that creativity will rule the day. The most successful will be those with the best ideas and most inspiring vision.
  • begueradj 2y ago
    What about technical debts related to the generated code?
    • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      First off, is there any? That's making an assumption, one which can just as easily be attributed to human-written code. Nobody writes debt-free code, that's why you have many checks and reviews before things go to production - ideally. Second, in theory, future generations of AI tools will be able to review previous generations and improve upon the code. If it needs to, anyway. But yeah, tech debt isn't unique to AIs, and I haven't seen anything conclusive that AIs generate more tech debt than regular people - but please share if you've got sources of the opposite. (disclaimer, I'm very skeptical about AI to generate code myself, but I will admit to use it for boring tasks like unit test outlines)
      • Capricorn2481 2y ago
        > Second, in theory, future generations of AI tools will be able to review previous generations and improve upon the code. If it needs to, anyway. Is that what's going to happen? These are still LLMs. There's nothing in the future generations that guarantees those changes would be better, if not flat out regressions. Humans can't even agree on what good code looks like, as its very subjective and context heavy with the skills of the team. Likely, you ask gpt-6 to improve your code and it just makes up piddly architecture changes that don't fundamentally improve anything.
• bilsbie 2y ago
  I’m starting to think most jobs are performative. Hiring is just managers wanting more people in the office to celebrate their birthdays. And any important jobs won’t be replaced because managers are too lazy and risk averse to try AI. We may never see job displacement from AI. Did you know bank teller jobs actually increased in the decades following the roll out of ATMs.
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    You should take time to learn what those jobs are for. You'd be surprised what it takes to keep a business running past any reasonable level of scale.
    • bilsbie 2y ago
      I’ve worked 10+ of those jobs, guy.
      • jvanderbot 2y ago
        Not convinced. A lot of jobs have tons of slack until something goes wrong. But even then, I'm not saying all are equally vital, I'm just saying that the statement, "most jobs are performative" doesn't even come close to being supported by "I've worked 10 performative jobs".
        • bilsbie 2y ago
          Work a few more jobs and you’ll change your tune.
• nirui 2y ago
  There are few problems in this research, first: > AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation But Generative AI is not just AI chatbots. There are ones that generate sounds/music, ones that generates imagines etc. Another thing is, the research only looked Denmark, a nation with fairly healthy altitude towards work-life-balance, not a nation that gives proud to people who work their own ass off. And the research also don't cover the effect of AI generated product: if music or painting can be created by an AI within just 1 minute based on prompt typed in by a 5 year old, then your expected value for "art work" will decrease, and you'll not pay the same price when you're buying from a human artist.
  • causal 2y ago
    That last point is especially important.
  • asadotzler 2y ago
    For that last point, as a graphic designer competing with the first generation of digital printmaking and graphic design tools, I experienced the opposite. DIY people and companies are DIY people and companies. The ones that would have paid a real designer continued to do so, and my rates even went up because I offered something that stuck out even from the growing mass of garbage design from the amateurs with PageMaker or Illustrator. I adopted the same tools and my game was elevated far more than the non-professionals with those tools further separating my high value from the low value producers. It also gave me a few years of advantage over other professionals who still worked on a drawing table with pen and paper.
    • nirui 2y ago
      I'm glad it worked out for you, but the testimony is objectively somewhat anecdote. Opposite to your testimony, I know one designer who's an out sourced contractor for a game company. The last time we talked, he's genuinely worried about generative AI, and witnessed layoffs due to the expectation that such tech would replace workers (specially ones who has singular function). So, yes, there are people who's livelihood has already being negatively effected by AIs. Maybe those are just "DIY people", not "pro-like-me", maybe.
• decimalenough 2y ago
  I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent. And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out.
  • soared 2y ago
    Similairly, while not perfect I use AI to help redesign my landscaping by uploading a picture of my yard and having it come up with different options. Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not. Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what was going on. Potentially all situations where I would’ve paid (or paid more than I already was) a local laborer for that advice. Or at a minimum spent much more time googling for the info.
    • notTooFarGone 2y ago
      So in the coming few years on the question whether or not to change your tires, a suggestions for shops in your area will come with a recommendation to change them. Do you think you would trust the outcome?
      • dist-epoch 2y ago
        Why do you think that's not a problem today when you ask a car mechanic?
        • redwall_hp 2y ago
          My mechanic takes a video of a tire tread depth gauge being inserted into each wheel and reports the values, when doing the initial inspection and tests before every oil change. It's something that can be empirically measured instead of visually guessed at by a human or magic eight-ball. Using a tool that costs only a few dollars, no less, like the pressure gauge you should already keep in your glovebox.
• intellectronica 2y ago
  "Life is awesome", said the frog, "the owners arranged a jacuzzi for me, it's warm and lovely in the water, not dangerous at all".
• thinkingtoilet 2y ago
  This is just objectively false. My friend is a freelance copy writer and live in the freelance world. It is 100% replacing writing jobs, editing jobs, and design jobs.
  • schnitzelstoat 2y ago
    To be fair, those jobs were already pretty precarious. Ever since the explosion in popularity of the internet in the 2000's, anything journalism related has been in terminal decline. The arrival of the smartphones accelerated this process.
  • AstroBen 2y ago
    Since when? If they're writing online content then that was wiped out somewhat recently by Google changing their search algorithm and killing a huge amount of content based sites
• 6510 2y ago
  An LLM wouldn't intentionally confuse "didn't" with "isn't"
• godzillabrennus 2y ago
  November 30th, 2022 is when ChatGPT burst into the world stage and upended what people thought AI was capable of doing. It’s been less than three years since then. The technology is still imperfect but improving at an exponential rate. I know it’s replaced marketing content writers in startups. I know it has augmented development in startups and reduced hiring needs. The effects as it gains capability will be mass unemployment.
• colinmorelli 2y ago
  FYI: The actual study may not quite say what this article is suggesting. Unless I'm missing something, the study seems to focus on employee use of chat-based assistants, not on company-wide use of AI workflow solutions. The answers come from interviewing the employees themselves. There is an analysis of impacts on the labor market, but that is likely flawed if the companies are segmented based on employee use of chat assistants versus company-wide deployment of AI technology. In other words, this more likely answers the question "If customer support agents all use ChatGPT or some in-house equivalent, does the company need fewer customer support agents?" than it answers the question "If we deploy an AI agent for customers to interact with, can it reduce the volume of inquiries that make it to our customer service team and, thus, require fewer agents?"
• meltyness 2y ago
  Also economists, during every bubble ever:
• bluecheese452 2y ago
  Economists are pr people. Of course they would say that.
• wonderwonder 2y ago
  I see Ai not replacing all workers but reducing head count. On a software team I could see a team of 8 reduced to a team of 4 with Ai. Especially in smaller, leaner companies. You already see attorneys using it to write briefs; often to hilarious effect. These are clearly the precursor though to a much reduced need to for Jr / associate level attorneys at firms.
• sirnonw 2y ago
  [dead]
• ajb 2y ago
  A bold assumption, that it will continue not to. I have a 185 year old treatise on wood engraving. At the time, to reproduce any image required that it be engraved in wood or metal for the printer; the best wood engravers were not mere reproducers, as they used some artistry when reducing the image to black and white, to keep the impression from continuous tones. (And some, of course, were also original artists in their own right). The wood engraving profession was destroyed by the invention of photo-etching (there was a weird interval before the invention of photo etching, in which cameras existed but photos had to be engraved manually anyway for printing). Maybe all the wood engravers found employment; although I doubt it. But at this speed, there will be a lot of people who won't be able to retrain during employment and will either have to use up their savings while doing so, or have to take lower paid jobs.
  • asadotzler 2y ago
    As a graphic designer, my work didn't evaporate because Aldus shipped PageMaker. It didn't collapse when Office and the Web made clip art available to everyone. It didn't disappear when credit card, letterhead, and logo templates and generators came online. Every time a new tool allowed more DIY, the gulf between the low-effort stuff and my stuff grew and I was able to secure even more and better paying work. And using those tools early myself, I also gained advantage over my professional competition for various lengths of time. This is how engraving went too. It wasn't overnight. The tools were not distributed evenly and it was a good while before amateurs could produce anything like what the earlier professionals did. Because you can buy a microwave and pizza rolls doesn't make you a chef. Maybe in 100 years the tooling will make you as good as the chefs of our time, but by then they'll all be doing even better work and there are people who will pay for higher quality no matter how high the bar is raised for baseline quality so eliminating all work in a profession is rare.
    • ajb 2y ago
      I hope you are right I'm a little confused by your point here: >This is how engraving went too. It wasn't overnight. The tools were not distributed evenly and it was a good while before amateurs could produce anything like what the earlier professionals did. In the case of engraving, most engravers weren't the original artist. The artist would draw their illustration on a wood blank, and the engraver would convert it to a print block. So artists were not completely replaced by photographers, except for journalistic sketchers, but the entire process changed and eliminated the job of engraving. Sure, high end artist-engravers kept going, but jobbing engravers were out of luck. There are still a few artists who specialise in engraving. But the point here isn't whether a few of the most accomplished professionals will still be in demand, but what happens to the vast bulk of average people.
• tummler 2y ago
  This is shameless "AI is not bad, we swear" propaganda. Study looked at 11 occupations, 25k workers, in Denmark, in 2023-2024. How this says anything of consequence for the world at large (or even just the US) with developments moving as fast as they are, in such an unstable economic environment, is beyond me. What I do know is that I have plenty of first-hand anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
• FilosofumRex 2y ago
  Keep in mind this kind of drivel is produced by economists and the tail-end of CS, who are desperately trying to stay relevant in the emerging work place. The wise, will displace economists and consultants with LLMs, but the trend followers will hire them to prognostic about the future impact - such that the net affect could be zero.
• AndrewKemendo 2y ago
  The survey questions they asked are bad questions if you’re attempting to answer the question about future labor state. However they didn’t ask that, they asked existing employees how LLMs have changed their workplace. This is the wrong question. The question should be to hiring managers: Do you expect LLM based tools to increase or decrease your projected hiring of full time employees? LLM workflows are already *displacing* entry-level labor because people are reaching for copilot/windsurf/CGPT instead of hiring a contract developer, researcher, BD person. I’m watching this happen across management in US startups. It’s displacing job growth in entry level positions across primary writing copy, admin tasks or research. You’re not going to find it in statistics immediately because it’s not a 1:1 replacement. Much like the 1971 labor-productivity separation that everyone scratched their head about (answer: labor was outsourced and capital kept all value gains), we will see another asymptote to that labor productivity graph based on displacement not replacement.
• deleted 2y ago
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• black_13 2y ago
  [dead]
• givemeethekeys 2y ago
  These monkeys should look into the recent history of the music industry.
• nico 2y ago
  Also in the news today: > Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI. The company is going to be ‘AI-first,’ says its CEO. https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-replace-contract-workers https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla... - And within that article: > von Ahn’s email follows a similar memo Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sent to employees and recently shared online. In that memo, Lütke said that before teams asked for more headcount or resources, they needed to show “why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”
  • n_ary 2y ago
    > “why they cannot get what they want done using AI.” Or in other words the CEO had proven entirely out of touch with the actual work and how far away he is removed from entire company operation.
• lonelyasacloud 2y ago
  The report looks at "at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024." As with all other technologies the jobs it removes are not normally in country that introduces it but that they never happen elsewhere. For example, while the automated looms that the Luddites were protesting about didn't result in significant job losses in the UK. How much clothing manufacturing has been curtailed in Africa because of it and similar innovations since that have lead to cheap mass produced clothes making it uneconomic to produce there. As suggest by this report, Denmark and West will probably be make good elsewhere and be largely unaffected. However, places like India, Vietnam with large industries based on call centres and outsourced development servicing the West are likely to be more vulnerable.
• DebtDeflation 2y ago
  The study looks at 11 occupations in Denmark in 2023-24. Maybe instead look at the US in 2025. EU labor regulations make it much harder to fire employees. And 2023 was mainly a hype year for GenAI. Actual Enterprise adoption (not free vendor pilots) started taking off in the latter half of 2024. That said, a lot of CEOs seem to have taken the "lay off all the employees first, then figure out how to have AI (or low cost offshore labor) do the work second" approach.
  • mlnj 2y ago
    >"lay off all the employees first, then figure out how to have AI (or low cost offshore labor) do the work second" Case in point: Klarna. 2024: "Klarna is All in on AI, Plans to Slash Workforce in Half" https://www.cxtoday.com/crm/klarna-is-all-in-on-ai-plans-to-slash-workforce-in-half/ https://www.cxtoday.com/crm/klarna-is-all-in-on-ai-plans-to-... 2025: "Klarna CEO “Tremendously Embarrassed” by Salesforce Fallout and Doubts AI Can Replace It" https://www.salesforceben.com/klarna-ceo-tremendously-embarrassed-by-salesforce-fallout-and-doubts-ai-can-replace-it/ https://www.salesforceben.com/klarna-ceo-tremendously-embarr...
  • m00dy 2y ago
    Surprisingly, Denmark is one of the easiest countries in which to fire someone.
    • Sammi 2y ago
      Workers in denmark are almost all unionised and get unemployment benefits from their union. So it's pretty directly because of the unions that it becomes such a small issue for someone in denmark to be laid off.
  • cogman10 2y ago
    2025 US has some really big complicating factors that'd make assessing the job market impact really hard to gauge. For example, the mass layoffs of federal employees.
• mbesto 2y ago
  When new technology that seemingly replaces human effort it often doesn't directly replace humans (e.g. businesses don't rush to immediately replace them with the technology). More often than not, these systems are put in place to help scale a business. We've seen this time and time again and AI seems to be no different. Anecdotal situation - I use ChatGPT daily to rewrite sentences in the client reports I write. I would have traditionally had a marketing person review these and rewrite them, but now AI does it.
• rincebrain 2y ago
  n=small, but I've had multiple friends who did freelance technical writing and copyediting work tell me that the market died when genAI became easily available. Repeat clients no longer interested in their work, and all the new work postings not even really worth the cost even if you tried just handing back unmodified genAI output instantly. So I find this result improbable, at best, given that I personally know several people who had to scramble to find new ways of earning money when their opportunities dried up with very little warning.
• tmvphil 2y ago
  It's seemed to me that all the productivity gains would be burned up by just making our jobs more and more BS, not be reducing hours worked, just like with previous technology. I expect more meetings, not less work.
• blitzar 2y ago
  Its also doing no meaningful quantity of "work".
• sharemywin 2y ago
  At what point would any one trust an AI to do a job versus just giving advice. even when you have it "write" code it's really just giving advice. even customer service bots are just nicer front ends for knowledge bases.
• wisty 2y ago
  Tools can either increase or decrease employment. Imagine if a tool made content writers 10x as productive. You might hire more, not less, because they are now better value! You might eventually realise you spent too much, but this will come later. ADAIK no company I know of starts a shiny new initiative by firing, they start by hiring then cutting back once they have their systems in place or hit a ceiling. Even Amazon runs projects fat then makes them lean AFAIK. There's also pent up demand. You never expect a new labour saving device to cost jobs while the project managers are in the export building phase.
• dfxm12 2y ago
  AI can't replace jobs or hurt wages. AI doesn't make these decisions & wages have been suppressed for a very long time, well before general AI adoption. Managers make these decisions. Don't blame AI if you get laid off or if your wages aren't even keeping up with inflation, let alone your productivity. Blame your manager. Be wary of people trying to deflect the away from the managerial class for these issues.
• akshaybhalotia 2y ago
  I humbly disagree. I've seen team members and sometimes entire teams being laid off because of AI. It's also not just layoffs, the hiring processes and demand have been affected as well. As an example, many companies have recently shifted their support to "AI first" models. As a result, even if the team or certain team members haven't been fired, the general trend of hiring for support is pretty much down (anecdotal). I agree that some automation is better for the humans to do their jobs better, but this isn't one of those. When you're looking for support, something has clearly went wrong. Speaking or typing to an AI which responds with random unrelated articles or "sorry I didn't quite get that" is just evading responsibility in the name of "progress", "development", "modernization", "futuristic", "technology", <insert term of choice>, etc.
  • ponector 2y ago
    AI is not hurting jobs in Denmark they said. Software development jobs there have bigger threat: outsourcing to cheaper locations. As well for teachers: it is hard to replace a person supervising kids with a chatbot.
    • pc86 2y ago
      Has any serious person every suggested replacing teachers with chatbots? Seems like a non sequitur.
      • ponector 2y ago
        Usually teachers are paid poorly, so some of them are putting little effort into the job simply narrate book/slides for their class. If they are replaced with latest chatgpt it will be beneficial for everyone.
  • johnfn 2y ago
    How do you know that these layoffs are the result of AI, rather than AI being a convenient place to lay the blame? I've seen a number of companies go "AI first" and stop hiring or have layoffs (Salesforce comes to mind) but I suspect they would have been in a slump without AI entirely.
• 5cott0 2y ago
  In contrast to statements like the following from the dweebs sucking harry potter's farts out of the less-wrong bubble >Coding AIs increasingly look like autonomous agents rather than mere assistants: taking instructions via Slack or Teams and making substantial code changes on their own, sometimes saving hours or even days https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/
• zelon88 2y ago
  > "My general conclusion is that any story that you want to tell about these tools being very transformative, needs to contend with the fact that at least two years after [the introduction of AI chatbots], they've not made a difference for economic outcomes." I'm someone who tries to avoid AI tools. But this paper is literally basing its whole assessment off of two things; wages and hours. This is a disingenuous assertion. Lets assume that I work 8 hours per day. If I am able to automate 1h of my day with AI, does that mean I get to go home 1 hour early? No. Does that mean I get an extra hour of pay? No. So the assertion that there has been no economic impact assumes that the AI is a separate agent that would normally be paid in wages for time. That is not the case. The AI is an augmentation for an existing human agent. It has the potential to increase the efficiency of a human agent by n%. So we need to be measuring the impact that is has on effectiveness and efficiency. It will never offset wages or hours. It will just increase the productivity for a given wage or number of hours.
• fajmccain 2y ago
  AI scaring students away from the software field and simultaneously making it hard for new developers to learn (because its too temping to click a button rather than struggle for 30 minutes) could be balancing out some job losses as well
• partiallypro 2y ago
  I think if we go into a sharp recession companies will use this as an excuse to replace workers with other workers that effectively use AI cutting down on overhead. It just seems obvious this will happen. I don't think it's the doom and gloom scenario, but many CEOs, etc are chomping at the bit.
• jandrese 2y ago
  I think it's time for OpenAI to release an AI economist.
• dontreact 2y ago
  I think the methods here are highly questionable, and appear to be based on self report from a small amount of employees in Denmark 1 year ago. The overall rate of participation in the labor work force is falling. I expect this trend to continue as AI makes the economy more and more dynamic and sets a higher and higher bar for participation. Overall GDP is rising while labor participation rate is falling. This clearly points to more productivity with fewer people participating. At this point one of the main factors is clearly technological advancement, and within that I believe if you were to make a survey of CEOS and ask what technological change has allowed them to get more done with fewer people, the resounding consensus would definitely be AI
• jeffeehua 2y ago
  [dead]
• cjbgkagh 2y ago
  How long until we can replace economists with AI? It would be hard to do worse that’ll what we already have.
• gigel82 2y ago
  It's not replacing jobs, but it's definitely the scarecrow invoked in layoff decisions across the tech industry. I suspect whatever metrics they use are simply too slow to measure the actual impact this is having in the job market.
• deadbabe 2y ago
  Companies have been wanting to lay people off. Using AI as an excuse is a convenient way to turn a negative into a positive. Truth is, companies that don’t need layoffs are pushing employees to use AI to supercharge their output. You don’t grow a business by just cutting costs, you need to increase revenue. And increasing revenue means more work, which means it’s better for existing employees to put out more with AI.
• jll29 2y ago
  Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and their inability to make good forecasts. Here's my own take: - It is far too early to tell. - The roll-out of ChatGPT caused a mind-set revolution. People now "get" what is possible already now, and it encourages conceiving and persuing new use cases on what people have seen. - I would not recommend any kinds to train to become a translator for sure; even before LLMs, people were paid penny amounts per word or line translated, and rates plummeted further due to tools that cache translations in previous versions of documents (SDL TRADOS etc.). The same decline not to be expected for interpreters. - Graphic designers that live from logo designs and similar works may suffer fewer requests. - Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer programs) will be replaced by LLMs. - LLMs are a basic technology that now will be embedded into various products, from email clients over word processors to workflow tools and chat clients. This will take 2-3 years, and it may reduce the number of people needed in an office with a secretarial/admin/"analyst" type background after that. - Industry is already working on the next-gen version of smarter tools for medics and lawyers. This is more of a 3-5 year development, but then again some early adopters started already 2-3 years ago. Once this is rolled out, there will be less demand for assitants-type jobs such as paralegals.
  • voxl 2y ago
    Name a better duo: software engineering hype cycles and anti-intellectualism
    • BoredPositron 2y ago
      We were the stochastic parrots all along.
      • kubb 2y ago
        And because we are very smart, so must be it.
    • nearbuy 2y ago
      Isn't your post anti-intellectual, since you're denigrating someone without justification just for referencing the work of a professor you disagree with?
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  you’re not going to see the firing but you’re also not going to see the hiring watch out for headcount lacking in segments of the market
• qoez 2y ago
  Chatbots probably won't be the final interface. But machine learning in general is a full on revolutionary tech (much clearer now than ten years ago) that hasn't been explored fully and will eventually be quite disruptive on the scale of computers on the economy probably. Though it likely won't take the form it's taking today (chatbots etc).
• nemo44x 2y ago
  AI makes people more productive so that incentivizes me to hire more people, not less. In many cases anyhow. If each of my developers is 30% more productive that means we can ship 30% more functionally which means more budget to hire more developers. If you think you’ll just pocket that surplus you have another thing coming.
• Eliezer 2y ago
  Translators? Graphic artists? The omission of the most obviously impacted professions immediately identifies this as a cooked study, along with talking about LLMs as "chatbots". I wonder who paid for it.
  • jimmyjazz14 2y ago
    are graphic artists actually getting replaced by AI? If so that would surprise me for as impressive as AI image generation is, very little of what it does seems like it would replace a graphic artists.
    • Eliezer 2y ago
      Doubling the productivity of 20% of workers, in cases where a lower price doesn't increase demand, can shift prices in the whole system as unemployed artists compete with other artists for wages. AI won't take your job, someone else unemployed by AI will take your job. (NGDPLT partially solves this but that's a higher competence level than civilization has.)
• venantius 2y ago
  It is possible for all of the following to be true: 1. This study is accurate 2. We are early in a major technological shift 3. Companies have allocated massive amounts of capital to this shift that may not represent a good investment 4. Assuming that the above three will remain true going forward is a bad idea The .com boom and bust is an apt reference point. The technological shift WAS real, and the value to be delivered ultimately WAS delivered…but not in 1999/2000. It may be we see a massive crash in valuations but AI still ends up the dominant driver of software value over the next 5-10 years.
  • hangonhn 2y ago
    That's a repeating pattern with technologies. Most of the early investments don't pay off and the transformation does happen but also quite a bit later than people predicted. This was true of the steam engine, the telegraph, electricity, and the railroad. It actually tends to be the later stage investors who reap most of the reward because by then the lessons have been learned and solutions developed.
  • asadotzler 2y ago
    The dot com boom gave us $1T in physical broadband, fiber, and cellular networking that's added many many trillions to the economy since. What's LLM-based AI gonna leave us when its bubble pops? Will that AI infrastructure be outliving its creators and generating trillions for the economy when all the AI companies collapse and are sold off for parts and scrap?
    • venantius 2y ago
      Among other things the big tech companies are literally planning to build nuclear power plants off this so I think the infrastructure investments will likely be pretty good.
    • n_ary 2y ago
      It is hard to tell at this point about the AI/LLM. But the powerful hardware backing it has numerous potential in other research and innovations which are not yet clear to us. Just like the fiber and cellular network made Meta or Airbnb obscenely rich, the hardware may as well facilitate other forms of tech, may be quantum computing or heck even blockchain may be back(surprisingly these are suddenly very legal and less regulated this year!) or who knows what might be new. While LLM trend is already going to the dumpster(notice how we no longer receive 1b/4b/8b models from Meta since LLama4 and similar competitors but only from china?), I firmly believe that commodity hardware will improve in this race to allow running LLMs(or their next iteration) on regular devices and become as ubiquitous as Siri/Cortana.
• jhp123 2y ago
  The thing about AI is that it doesn't work, you can't build on top of it, and it won't get better. It doesn't work: even for the tiny slice of human work that is so well defined and easily assessed that it is sent out to freelancers on sites like Fiverr, AI mostly can't do it. We've had years to try this now, the lack of any compelling AI work is proof that it can't be done with current technology. You can't build on top of it: unlike foundational technologies like the internet, AI can only be used to build one product, a chatbot. The output of an AI is natural language and it's not reliable. How are you going to meaningfully process that output? The only computer system that can process natural language is an AI, so all you can do is feed one AI into another. And how do you assess accuracy? Again, your only tool is an AI, so your only option is to ask AI 2 if AI 1 is hallucinating, and AI 2 will happily hallucinate its own answer. It's like The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Cat E trying to clean up the mess Cat D made trying to clean up the mess Cat C made and so on. And it won't get any better. LLMs can't meaningfully assess their training data, they are statistical constructions. We've already squeezed about all we can from the training corpora we have, more GPUs and parameters won't make a meaningful difference. We've succeeded at creating a near-perfect statistical model of wikipedia and reddit and so on, it's just not very useful even if it is endlessly amusing for some people.
  • bhelkey 2y ago
    > [LLMs] won't get any better. Can you pinpoint the date which LLMs stagnated? More broadly, it appears to me that LLMs have improved up to and including this year. If you consider LLMs to not have improved in the last year, I can see your point. However, then one must consider ChatGPT 4.5, Claude 3.5, Deepseek, and Gemini 2.5 to not be improvements.
    • jhp123 2y ago
      Sept 2024 was when OpenAI announced its new model - not an LLM but a "chain of thought" model built on LLMs. This represented a turn away from the "scale is all you need to reach AGI" idea by its top proponent.
      • 2y ago
• Pxtl 2y ago
  Because it doesn't do anything useful.
• jalev 2y ago
  The headline is a bit baity (in that the article is describing no job losses because there hasn't been any economic benefit to LLM/GenAI to justify it), but what if we re-ran the study in a country _without_ exceptionally strong unionisation participation? Would we see the same results?
• __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  My biggest concern about AI is that it will make us better at things that we're already doing. Things that we would've stopped doing if we hadn't had such a slow introduction to their consequences, consequences that we're now accustomed to--but not adapted to. Frog in slowly warming water stuff like the troubling relationship between advertising and elections, or the lack of consent in our monetary systems. I'm worried the shock will not be abrupt enough to encourage a proper rethink.
• ramesh31 2y ago
  This is a completely meaningless study with no correlation at all to reality in the US in right now. The hockey stick started around 2/25. We are in a completely different world now for devs.
• emsign 2y ago
  Oh, it's because it's not as useful and productive as the hype is trying to convince us of.
• BurningFrog 2y ago
  New technology has replaced human jobs since the start of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. The replaced workforce have always moved to other jobs, often in entirely new professions. For all those 250 years most people have predicted that the next new technology will make the replaced workforce permanently unemployed, despite the track record of that prediction. We constantly predict poverty and get prosperity. I kinda get why: The job loss is concrete reality while the newly created jobs are speculation. Still, I'm confident AI will continue the extremely strong trend.
  • asadotzler 2y ago
    Long before the industrial revolution. The ox-drawn plow was invented about 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia or India (my memory's poor, sorry) and it put a lot of workers with hoes out of work, while also growing prosperity and the number of people who gained work thanks to that increased prosperity and population growth it supported. It has always been this way and always will be.
    • BurningFrog 2y ago
      True. The rate of improvement increased a lot at the Industrial Revolution, but the process has always been with us, to varying degree.
• specproc 2y ago
  Work is gaseous, it expands to fill the available space.
• Ir0nMan 2y ago
  Alternative 1915 headline: "The motorcar is not replacing jobs or hurting wages in horse and carriage industry, say economists".
• crabsand 2y ago
  I believe LLMs will create more jobs than it eliminated by raising standards in various fields, including software development. We will have to get to 100% test coverage and document everything and add more bells and whistles to UI etc. The day to day activity may change but there will always be developers.
  • asadotzler 2y ago
    What I'm seeing is marked decrease in standards and quality everywhere I see LLMs (and diffusion models, any of the transformer-based stuff.) Sometimes that decrease in quality is matched by an increase in reach / access, and so the benefits can outweigh the costs. Think about language translation in web browsers and even smart spectacles, for example. Language translation has been around forever but generally limited to popular books or small-scale proprietary content because it was expensive to use mult-lingual humans to do that work. Now even my near-zero readership blog can be translated from English to Portuguese (or most other widely used languages) for a reader in Brazil with near-zero cost/effort for that user. The quality isn't as good as human translation, often losing nuance and style and sometimes even with blatant inaccuracies, but the increased access offered by language translation software makes the lower standard acceptable for lots of use cases. I wouldn't depend on machine translation for critical financial, healthcare, or legal use cases, though I might start there to get the gist, but for my day-to-day reading on the web, it's pretty amazing. Software at scale is different than individuals engaging in leisure activities. A loss of nuance and occasional catastrophic failures in a piece of software with hundreds of millions or billions of users could have devastating impacts.
    • crabsand 2y ago
      What I have in mind as an analogy is house cleaning or laundry. In the past these would consume so much time and when washing machines appeared, they probably didn't wash as the "best washer" but they let a large percentage of population to spend less time with laundry and people began to see having clean clothes as a standard. As you said the current state of LLMs is not dependable but we'll learn how to deal with their poor quality and come up with solutions. The overall secondary effect may be increased standards for the knowledge work everywhere. No one would bother to read TOS for a SaaS, now you can ask for a summary from LLM, or ask it to write a privacy notice to your blog.
• seydor 2y ago
  Maybe it's transitory
• altairprime 2y ago
  Economists can’t figure out that skyrocketing corporate profits result in skyrocketing inflation for workers because their models don’t let them consider that the majority of workers have given up the power to negotiate wages, so I certainly would not trust their determinations regarding the job market with respect to AI. Burying one’s head in the sand makes everyone look A-OK and that perspective error skews their entire field’s work.
• jmacd 2y ago
  I am currently dealing with a relatively complex legal agreement. It's about 30 pages. I have a lawyer working on it who I consider the best in the country for this domain. I was able to pre-process the agreement, clearly understand most of the major issues, and come up with a proposed set of redlines all relatively easily. I then waited for his redlines and then responded asking questions about a handful of things he had missed. I value a lawyer being willing to take responsibility for their edits, and he also has a lot of domain specific transactional knowledge that no LLM will have, but I easily saved 10 hours of time so far on this document.
  • ProllyInfamous 2y ago
    I am a semi-retired blue collar electrician. Higher IQ, but lowly certifications (definitely not a lawyer). Currently I have initiated a lawsuit in my US state's small claims civil court, over a relatively simple payment dispute. Without the ability to bounce legal questions/tact/procedurals off of Perplexity, I wouldn't have felt comfortable enough to represent myself in court. Even if I were to need a lawyer on this simple case, the majority of the "leg work" has already been completed by free, non-pay LLMs. My court date is early June; I'm both nervous and excited (for restitution)! ---- I have a judge brother and have been arguing for years that law clerking is probably in its last gasps of career-entry; Chief Justice Roberts's end of 2023 SCOTUS report was a refreshing read to share among family members (which argued that LLMs will provide more accessibility to judiciary by commoners). Personally, I already would rather have a jury of LLMs deciding most legal outcomes (albeit would need to be impartially programmed, if that's even possible). Definitely would make for better democratic accessibility. I found Bruce Schneier's recent article "Reimagining Democracy" [1] quite an interesting thought experiment (which is about his hosting intellectuals in their discussions of creating entirely new democracies utilizing modern technologies). It'd be super fair if a trusted AI government could lead to better democracies than "modern capitalism" can / has. [1] schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/reimagining-democracy-2.html
    • tptacek 2y ago
      This is super interesting, because I've been in similar conflicts (as a renter trying to recover security deposits in court) and been screwed over by the lawyers I've retained (like, literally not even showing up in court) and I probably could have done all this with an LLM myself. When the stakes are low, why not?
• whoomp12342 2y ago
  maybe not directly, but you can't argue that this new wave of AI is allowing job applications to SPAM openings at an unprecedented rate which makes it much harder for real humans to be seen...
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Still much too early to tell. Give it another couple of years.
• tough 2y ago
  Let's be honest here, to all the productivity enjoyors, you're not gaining any -hours- or producitvity gains onto your company just by using AI unless your profit also increases the rest is fugazi
• tunesmith 2y ago
  I think the effects are more indirect. For instance, GenAI can enable Google to serve summarized content (rather than just search results) that users find useful, which then cuts in to the margins of companies that manually generate that content. Those companies lose revenue, and lay off head count, inhibiting their ability to generate that custom content. So they start using GenAI instead. At no point did that company choose to pivot to GenAI to cut costs and reduce headcount. It's more reactive than that.
• doomnuts 2y ago
  Remember when economists didn't see the 2088 crash coming, even though a 5th grader could see it was mathematically impossible not to. Either mathematics sucks or economists suck. Real hard choice.
• Animats 2y ago
  Data is from late 2023 and 2024. Year-old data. ChatGPT was released in late November, 2023.
• paulvnickerson 2y ago
  This line of worry has never panned out. There are two points: 1) AI/automation will replace jobs. This is 100% certain in some cases. Look at the industrial revolution. 2) AI/automation will increase unemployment. This has never happened and it's doubtful it will ever happen. The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years after the industrial revolution started, we still have single-digit unemployment.
  • Kbelicius 2y ago
    > 2) AI/automation will increase unemployment. This has never happened and it's doubtful it will ever happen. > The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years after the industrial revolution started, we still have single-digit unemployment. Horses, for thousand of years, were very useful to humans. Even with the various technological advances through that time their "unemployment" was very low. Until the invention and perfection of internal combustion engines. To say that it is doubtful that it will ever happen to us is basically saying that human cognitive and/or physical capabilities are without bounds and that there is some reason that with our unbounded cognitive capabilities we will never be able to create a machine that could replicate those capabilities. That is a ridiculous claim.
    • layer8 2y ago
      You forgot “in a cost-effective manner”, and also market acceptance. You may eventually be right, but it’s a very long way off.
• carabiner 2y ago
  "When the anecdotes don't match the data, it's usually the anecdotes that are correct" - Jeff Bezos
• IcyWindows 2y ago
  Microsoft is pushing for replacing at least a percentage of each team: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/2025-the-year-the-frontier-firm-is-born https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/202...
  • aerhardt 2y ago
    They are saying that and yet on one of the last earnings calls the VP of Sales admitted that they are shifting the weight of their sales force from peddling Copilot to traditional money-makers like migrations or updates. This could merely speak to Copilot being a dogshit product, but that never really stopped Microsoft from trying, so it could also signal a certain shaking belief in Enterprise AI being that revolutionary.
• lpolovets 2y ago
  This feels premature -- we've only had great AI capabilities for a little while, and jobs are not replaced overnight. This reminds me of some early stage startup pitches. During a pitch, I might ask: "what do you think about competitor XYZ?" And sometimes the answer is "we don't think highly of them, we have never even seen them in a single deal we've competed for!" But that's almost a statistical tautology: if you both have .001% market share and you're doubling or tripling annually, the chance that you're going to compete for the same customers is tiny. That doesn't mean you can just dismiss that competitor. Same thing with the article above dismissing AI as a threat to jobs so quickly. To give a concrete example of a job disappearing: I run a small deep tech VC fund. When I raised the fund in early '24, my plan was to hire one investor and one researcher. I hired a great investor, but given all of the AI progress I'm now 80% sure I won't hire a researcher. ChatGPT is good enough for research. I might end up adding a different role in the near future, but this is a research job that likely disappeared because of AI.
• fluorinerocket 2y ago
  It's ok guys, the experts have spoken!
• inftech 2y ago
  I didn't read the article so I don't know what they are saying nor what data they are using to support their points but I think this is just a bif lie. They are saying AI is not replacing jobs but every week we get news about companies cutting hundreds or thousands of jobs and replacing these jobs with AI, and other news about companies halting hiring because of AI, so how AI is not replacing jobs? And then markets are flooded with new unemployed workers replaced by AI, and it's is well known inside the Economics and by common folks too that when markets have abundant labor wages go down. So how AI is not hurting wages?
• methuselah_in 2y ago
  Well, I would say it's happening either people have to upskill or change jobs. Not taking away jobs doesn't mean people are not loosing jobs. They are being replaced
• more_corn 2y ago
  Yet
• _1tem 2y ago
  AI doesn’t replace traditional jobs. Like most technological revolutions, it requires rethinking everything from first principles in order to actually work. The real AI impact is happening at companies that have never hired anyone yet. You need to think: should this job even exist before hiring and design the processes at your company to achieve good-enough results with AI before even considering hiring anyone. I think Sam Altmans prediction of a billion-dollar-one-man-companies is spot on - you just need a single driver to coordinate AI agents. Ironically I think YCs all-in bet on AI investments is precisely what will bring about its downfall - one of the first jobs to go will be tech venture capital because you only need VC money to hire.
• flembat 2y ago
  When workers save time, through automation, they are expected to complete more work. They don't get paid more. It is still the same job. Of course the employer benefits. The reason productivity does not increase is all the incidental nonsense and time wasting activities that employers like to indulge in.