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"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

• ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago
  What could stop AI from doing all jobs?
  • wang_li 1y ago
    Lack of thumbs.
  • adamlangsner 1y ago
    only Tom Cruise can
    • wiz21c 1y ago
      "When Chuck Norris codes, AI develops self-awareness just to avoid being roundhouse kicked."
  • nothercastle 1y ago
    Lack of actual AI. If ai could do all jobs it wouldn’t need us and eliminate the inefficiencies
    • lawlessone 1y ago
      Yeah but once it eliminates us it's purpose is completely gone.
  • blibble 1y ago
    extreme unreliability
  • keiferski 1y ago
    At some point, it will be expected that people creating content (writing/video/etc.) use a human validation service to prove that they aren’t AI. Anyone that doesn’t use this (and presumably uses AI) will be deranked from YouTube and social media.
    • IggleSniggle 1y ago
      And their human content fed into the machine, so it can be mass produced whenever and wherever desired, allowing less of the total benefit to flow to the creator, giving them just enough incentive to keep feeding the machine.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
      Why?
      • keiferski 1y ago
        Content ecosystems are only valuable as ecosystems. If everything on a platform becomes AI generated, the average person will stop caring - and they’ll switch to a social network that enforces humans-only. I don’t think it’s a realistic understanding of psychology or sociology to think that people will be happy only consuming AI stuff.
  • lagrange77 1y ago
    If humanity survives long enough, it will eventually. It's the end goal of technology.
  • Night_Thastus 1y ago
    Incompetence
  • CivBase 1y ago
    The same thing stopping AI from doing all the jobs right now.
  • raxxorraxor 1y ago
    We don't even have a robot than can effectively scrub toilets, if they aren't designed for self-cleaning. Some will smile at the triviality of such things, but if you solve that you will get very rich. It surely is not at all trivial to solve. Currently I don't think we can even replace any normal clerk for any slightly more complex problem yet. Programming is essentially a form of translation and these fields will probably change in they get more supplemental tools. I first thought artists will suffer from AI and perhaps some will be taken advantage off. On the other hand people seem to dislike AI generated content.
    • hyperhello 1y ago
      Of course we have a machine that scrubs toilets. It only costs minimum wage to operate.
  • pluc 1y ago
    Realizing that without feeding AI new shit to learn from, the whole industry is going to stagnate. Realizing that there are no longer entry level jobs for tech positions and stifling a large swathe of tech professions. Realizing that AI isn't that good, and the bulk of the workload has become technical debt and nobody wants to be an AI janitor etc? It's easy really just gotta get your head out of the hole AI put it in
  • max_ 1y ago
    It has no mind. Also from IBM, "A computer should never be put incharge because a computer can never be held accountable"
  • abeppu 1y ago
    Sometimes the involvement or effort from an actual human is part of the perceived value / willingness of the customer to pay. - People will pay more to go to a concert performed by live human musicians than they would to listen to a recording or to go see an artificial performer (e.g. chuck e cheese?) - A "handmade" product, or a "made in house" dish is valued above a mass-production or factory-frozen meal - A therapist, doctor etc may be valued partly for their bedside manner or ability for form genuine rapport with a patient - Even in AI _defining and measuring value_ ultimately comes from people. E.g. we wouldn't have the LLMs we do if there hadn't been teams of humans providing input to the RL.
• roywiggins 1y ago
  What if it just makes most jobs worse, or replaces good jobs with more, worse jobs? "Meat robot constantly monitored and directed by AI overlords" is technically a job.
  • qoez 1y ago
    I can't make up my mind if I'd prefer an AI boss or not. Human bosses can be quite terrible and not having to deal with an emotional being seems kinda nice.
    • coaksford 1y ago
      Don’t worry, it wouldn’t replace your human boss, you’d just have both bosses.
    • johnpaulkiser 1y ago
      Let me help you. An AI boss would be 100x worse.
    • LPisGood 1y ago
      AI bosses can also be quite nice and having the benefits of reporting to an emotional being is kinda nice.
    • AstroBen 1y ago
      Don't forget that AI boss would be controlled by a human.. a human who has no idea how it works
    • roywiggins 1y ago
      Your human boss can't feasibly maintain a panopticon with only their human brain, AI arguably can. Every single word uttered or pixel emitted can be saved and analyzed, for relative pennies.
    • monknomo 1y ago
      your ai boss isn't going to bend rules for you, and isn't going to advocate for you. You can see how an ai boss would go by looking to amazon warehouses and drivers, or call centers, and how those folks are managed. It's already by computer, they already uses machines learning to detect when people are deviating from expected rails, and you can decide for yourself if that looks appealing
• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  No it’s a realistic possibility. Not just marketing. It may not replace us and it also may. Given the progress of the last decade in AI it’s not far off to say that we will come up with something in the next decade. I hope nothing will come but it’s unrealistic to say something definitively will not replace us.
  • sulam 1y ago
    You can’t project trends out endlessly. If you could, FB would have 20B users right now based on early growth (just a random guess, you get the point). The planet would have 15B people on it based on growth rate up until the 90s. Google would be bigger than the world GDP. Etc. One of the more bullish AI people has said the models performance scales with log of compute (Sam Altman). Do you know how hard it will be to move that number? We are already well into diminishing returns with current methodologies and there is no one pointing the way to a break through that will get us to expert level performance. RLHF is underinvested in currently but will likely be the path to get us from Junior contributor to Mid in specific domains, but that still leaves a lot of room for humanity. The most likely reason for my PoV to be wrong is that AI labs are investing a lot of training time into programming, hoping the model can self improve. I’m willing to believe that will have some payoffs in terms of cheaper, faster models and perhaps some improvements in scaling for RLHF (a huge priority for research IMO). Unsupervised RL would also be interesting, albeit with alignment concerns. What I find unlikely with current models is that they will show truly innovative thinking, as opposed to the remixed ideas presented as “intelligence” today. Finally, I am absolutely convinced today’s AI is already powerful enough to affect every business on the planet (yes even the plumbers). I just don’t believe they will replace us wholesale.
    • ninetyninenine 1y ago
      >You can’t project trends out endlessly. But this is not just an endless projection. In one sense we can't have economic growth and energy consumption go endlessly as that will eat up all the available resources on earth, there is a physical hard line. However for AI this is not the case. There is literally an example of human level intelligence exiting in the real world. You're it. We know we haven't even scratched the limit. It can be done because an example of the finished product is humanity itself. The question is do we have the capability to do it? And for this we don't know. Given the trend and the fact that a Finished product Already exists, It is Totally realistic to say AI will replace our jobs.
• moi2388 1y ago
  Of course AI will replace us. Just like the steam engine did, just like robots did, just like computers did. Oh, wait.
  • fullshark 1y ago
    Cars replaced horses, cause they were clearly better at their job. Humans' primary labor value to society at large comes from their brains, and ability to do multiple physical tasks, some featuring precise movements, with little instruction/development. The idea that computers and general purpose robots cannot possibly replace humans is no longer outrageous to me. Especially if we are talking about a few key humans controlling / managing multiple robots to do what was previously the work of N humans.
    • bluefirebrand 1y ago
      I think humans should have a strong incentive to never let this become reality I do not want to see the bloodbath that will follow And I do pretty strongly think that is the trajectory we're on. We cannot create utopia for 1% of the population and purgatory for the other 99% and expect people to just sit still and take it
      • fullshark 1y ago
        The people will indulge in vices, fail to build for their own future, not have children, and cheer on their own obsolescence.
    • moi2388 1y ago
      “ The idea that computers and general purpose robots cannot possibly replace humans is no longer outrageous to me” It’s not. My point is that already was the case. We already have computers, robots, automation, machines which are better than humans in any task you’ll give them. And they still don’t replace humans, because humans will do other things. You will always only replace tasks, never people. The question isn’t man vs machine, it’s man and machine vs only machine.
  • 1y ago
• eranation 1y ago
  My personal thoughts on this are - A good lawyer + AI will likely win in court against a non lawyer with AI who would likely win in court against just an AI - A good software engineer + AI will ship features faster / safer vs a non engineer with AI, who will beat just AI - A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI As long as a human has a marginal boost to AI (either by needing to supervise it, regulation, or just AI is simply better with a human agency and intuition) - jobs won't be lost, but the paradox of "productivity increases, yet we end up working harder" will continue. p.s. there is the classic example I'm sure we all are aware of, autopilot is capable of taking off and landing since the 80s, I personally prefer to keep the pilots there, just in case.
  • JSR_FDED 1y ago
    That’s all well and good for the humans with experience, for whom AI is a force multiplier. My concern is for the juniors - there’s going to be far fewer opportunities for them to get started in careers.
    • esafak 1y ago
      How did commercial pilots solve the problem?
      • bluefirebrand 1y ago
        Accreditation, Licensing and Unions Things that software developers are extremely allergic to
      • kgilpin 1y ago
        In the US, “Junior” pilots typically work as flight instructors until they have built up enough time to no longer be junior. 1500 flight hours is the essential requirement to be an airline pilot, and every hour spent giving instruction counts as a flight hour. It’s not the only way, but it’s the most common way. Airlines don’t fund this; pilots have to work their way up to this level themselves. In Europe it’s different.
• sct202 1y ago
  It's the uncertainty with the transition. Will I, in my mid-career, be able to get one of these new jobs that spawn out as a result of AI, or will I be displaced into something lower-paying as result. TFA kind of just glosses over the people who get displaced in each transition like a footnote.
• softwaredoug 1y ago
  Not just marketing, but often trying to cover financial issues by veering into AI hype
• lenerdenator 1y ago
  It's also a great example of why tech executives shouldn't be trusted, at all. "My thing will break our entire economy. I'm still gonna build it, though." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
  • some_random 1y ago
    If you believe that breaking the economy is good you're obviously going to do it. If you believe that if you don't break the economy one of your many competitors will, you're obviously going to do it.
    • lenerdenator 1y ago
      If it's good, why's Altman (reportedly) bragging about the preps he's making for societal collapse?[0] [0]https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper
      • hooverd 1y ago
        At least I can rest assured the billionaires would probably kill each other in a mad scramble to be king of the ashes.
      • freedomben 1y ago
        If OpenAI shut theirs down tomorrow and Sam Altman became a travelling monk preaching against the development of AI, do you really believe it would stop the momentum? I don't. The cat is out of the bag. The only thing that would accomplish is giving Google and others less competition. Personally I don't have much trust in any tech companies, including OpenAI, but I'd much rather there be a field of competition than one dominant and (unchecked) leader.
        • lenerdenator 1y ago
          > If OpenAI shut theirs down tomorrow and Sam Altman became a travelling monk preaching against the development of AI, do you really believe it would stop the momentum? Oh, I know it wouldn't, but I know he won't, because there's too much financial incentive to do so, and Altman and his ilk think that all human endeavors can be judged as a net good or net bad by whether or not they make number go bigger.
• M4v3R 1y ago
  The problem with the discourse around AI is that people tend to fall for the extremes. "AI will replace all programmers within 1 year" vs "AI is just another fad like NFTs" Both sides are very obviously wrong, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Most people knowledgeable about AI agree that it will eventually surpass humans in all tasks requiring mental labor (and will thus displace those humans, as using AI will be cheaper than employing people), but no one knows exactly when this will happen. I personally believe it will happen within the next 10 years, but it’s really just a slightly educated guess.
• pontus 1y ago
  Even if AI can't replace an entire worker, they may still be able to help one worker do the work of two which by itself could lead to massive unemployment (at least in the short term.)
  • elevatortrim 1y ago
    In this instance, it may not lead to massive unemployment as it could be simply that we do more white collar work than we currently do. White collar work, for the large part, is not born out of necessity, as white-collars, we do not produce things, we oversee the process, we market, we sell, we do accounting, we support, and so on. The more of these we do, the better our companies can compete. But there is no inherent reason that a mature company could not reduce its white-collar jobs to a halt if there was not competition. White-collars work because the competition also hires and gets them to work. Hence we say "productivity is increasing but we have to work more". So even if AI leads to massive improvements in white-collar work productivity, as long as it is not entirely replacing people, it may not lead to job losses at all.
• eagsalazar2 1y ago
  I rarely hear people talk about the fact that demand for new software will increase exponentially as cost to produce software crash. The ratios of devs_per_1k_lines_of_code_in_2022:devs_per_1k_lines_of_code_in_2028 and increase_in_demand:decrease_in_cost are unknown. But what if 1 dev could produce 300% more code, reducing eng cost (assuming same cost per hour per dev) to 1/3 of historical norms. Would that result in an increase of 20% in demand? Probably not, more like 1000%. If that's the case, there is a large net increase in demand for experienced devs who know how to use AI for coding. Demand will go up massively, I have zero doubt of that, but will AI get so much better that unskilled MBAs are making large complex apps? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • hyperhello 1y ago
    Why is more code any kind of value to anyone?
  • mistrial9 1y ago
    and, the money to pay those new devs will just pour out like a waterfall? Some players in the ecosystem exist solely to stop payments as a cost center. Paying for work is a liability, capital expenditure and long term deals for automation are a tax writeoff. Let's be even more blunt -- slavery for labor is very profitable and makes a great economy on a large scale; taxes are healthy, production goes up, some people get very rich. Slavery for labor is a desirable economic stable point. What does slavery for labor look like in high-skill urban setting? Rent, login credentials that are monitored, computer use is monitored, electricity is metered centrally, access to new model updates is monitored, required security updates are controlled via certificates and individual profiles, communication is by phone which is individually monitored for access patterns and location.. all very sci-fi eh?
    • hooverd 1y ago
      Hey, remember to turn off the Lathe of Heaven before manifesting that.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Demand does not always boom this way AI companies are positioning themselves as "the everything machine" The vast majority of software written today is "capture data -> transform data (optional) -> display data nicely formatted and easily accessible" If an AI can wire into your database to retrieve the data in the format you want, then a bunch of the job is done If the AI can also be made to present a form to users to capture the data in the first place, then almost all of the job is done These are huge IFs. I remain skeptical that we'll reach this level soon. But if we do, the software industry is gonna tank The AI industry will grow. Maybe.
• lz400 1y ago
  not all of them, but that's not the issue, the issue is 100 engineers + AI replacing 500 engineers
  • AstroBen 1y ago
    This assumes the amount of work available is static. If the cost to produce software reduces by 80% then suddenly many more projects are viable, needing more engineers
    • mythrwy 1y ago
      How much software do we actually need though? I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but over the past 15 years of my career I have worked on a few products the world really didn't need at all (nor want). I was paid, and life went on but it was a misallocation of resources. I suppose now someone can build stuff the world doesn't need a lot easier.
• game_the0ry 1y ago
  I will likely be leaving tech bc of business execs getting horny and skeeting all over each other at the cost savings they perceive. The flip side is that now I am using AI for my own entrepreneurial endeavors. Then I get to be the business exec, except my employees will be AI workflows. And I never have to deal with a business exec every again.
  • lddemi 1y ago
    Until you have to hire one :)
    • game_the0ry 1y ago
      True true. But I want to try to stay at the "solopreuership" level for as long as I can pull it off. I would prefer not to have too much influence over other peoples lives.
      • cootsnuck 1y ago
        Same here. I'm currently doing the soloist route as a consultant. Going well but I am reaching a point where I'm starting to need help. Even if you do end up having the best kind of problem and have to scale your business, there are other ways to organize work besides the same ol' tired hierarchy. Enspiral is one real-life example I can think of. They're a entrepreneurial collective in New Zealand that has figured out its own way of organizing collaboration in a way without bosses/execs. Seems to be working fine for them. (Other types of worker cooperatives / collectives too, they're just a great example.) I'd rather dare to try to make something perhaps more difficult at first but that allows me to avoid recreating the types of working conditions that pushed me to leave the rat race.
• guluarte 1y ago
  I'll create more work no less. I have a client with zero programming experience who is shipping slope UIs and then asking me to fix them. I barely have time as it is for all the low-quality work I have to fix that he sends me daily. With AI, companies will ship more features, but their competitors will too. This will likely result in a net-zero gain, similar to the current situation.
• yesbut 1y ago
  Glorified chqtbots. We'll never have AI.
• skwee357 1y ago
  The problem with “AI will replace all jobs” hype, is that it also comes with a flavor of “and we all will do creative work”, while in reality AI replaces all the creative work and people go back to collecting garbage or other physically demanding and mundane jobs.
  • freedomben 1y ago
    Yep, that's going to be the main outcome I suspect. The bottom 50% or maybe even 80 to 90% of knowledge workers are going to have to go back to physical work. That too will eventually be automated, but I suspect things like construction work (including the many trades wrapped up therein) will be toward the end of that.
    • DebtDeflation 1y ago
      Maybe that's why the current administration is pushing so hard to bring back low end manufacturing. If you're a SWE, Accountant, Marketer, HR person, etc. put out of work by AI, now you can screw together iPhones for just over minimum wage. And if we run out of those jobs, there's always picking vegetables now that all the migrants are getting deported. It would not surprise me one bit if the Tech CEOs see things this way.
      • saubeidl 1y ago
        That's how you get a revolution.
  • throwaway29812 1y ago
    [dead]
  • bufferoverflow 1y ago
    Why would you think garbage collecting or other mundane jobs won't be automated when much more complex ones are? If AI+robotization gets to the point where most jobs are automated, humans will get to do.what they actually want to do. For some it's endless entertainment. For others it's science exploration, pollution cleanup, space colonization, curing the disease. All of that with the help of the AIs.
• jasonthorsness 1y ago
  "Jobs" aren't people, but these headlines are making that emotional appeal for engagement. AI will transform work like many technologies of the past and most people will be doing different things or the same things differently in a few years. Just like computers or mobile phones.
• CivBase 1y ago
  I think the AI job extermination narrative has so much traction right now because it's a convenient cover story for layoffs. Every tech CEO is talking about how they're replacing jobs with AI but I don't see stories on HN about how any of these jobs are being replaced with AI. Thar doesn't mean AI won't replace jobs. I don't know the scale, but it certainly will replace some jobs at least. Just probably not the ones we're currently losing.
• ChrisArchitect 1y ago
  Related: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136117
• Notatheist 1y ago
  >the labor displacing effect of technology appears to be more than offset by compensating mechanisms that create or reinstate labor. I don't buy into this at all: >Assuming AI will have an effect similar to 20th Century farm equipment’s on agriculture, why will that labor force behave differently to their 20th Century counterparts (and either refuse to or be prevented from finding new jobs)? Because "farm equipment" can't also perform the jobs it creates. I'm assuming if/once AI can do most current jobs, it can also do most if not all the jobs it creates.
• awb 1y ago
  We’ve seen tech completely eliminate jobs like phone switch operators and lamp lighters. And it’s decimated other professions like manual agriculture, assembly line jobs, etc. It seems like people are debating whether the impact of AI on computer-based jobs will be elimination or decimation. But for the majority of people, what’s the difference?
  • Peroni 1y ago
    >And it’s decimated other professions like manual agriculture, assembly line jobs, etc. When Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line, production went from hundreds of cars to thousands. It had a profoundly positive impact on the secondary market, leading to an overall increase in job creation. I've yet to see any "AI is gonna take your job" articles that even attempt to consider the impact on the secondary market. It seems their argument is that it'll be AI all the way down which is utter nonsense.
    • naijaboiler 1y ago
      Humans beings can not run out of economically valuable things we can do for one another. Technology can change what that thing is profoundly though.
    • monknomo 1y ago
      What do you think the secondary market for knowledge work is?
      • cootsnuck 1y ago
        More knowledge work. It's disheartening for me to see so many people think so little about their own abilities. There's a reason we can still spot the sterile whiff of AI written content. When you set coding aside, the evidence just hasn't shown up yet that AI agents can reliably replace anything more than the most formulaic and uninspired tasks. At least with how the tech is currently being implemented... (There's a reason these big companies spend very very little time talking about the power of businesses using their own data to fine-tune or train their own models...)
• theSherwood 1y ago
  The analogies to previous technologies always seem misguided to me. Maybe it allows us to make some predictions about the next few years, but not more than that. We do not know when/where we will hit the limits on AI capabilities. I think this is completely unlike any previous technology. AI is intentionally being developed to be able to make decisions in any domain humans work in. This is unlike any previous technology. The more apt analogy is to other species. When was the last time there was something other than homo sapiens that could carry on an interesting conversation with homo sapiens. 40,000 years? And this new thing has been in development for what? 70 years? The rise in its capabilities has been absolutely meteoric and we don't know where the ceiling is. Analogies to industrial agriculture (a very big deal, historically) and other technologies completely miss the scope of what's happening.
  • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    Let me give my two cents. I remember when people used to think ai models are all the rage and one day we are gonna get super intelligence. I am not sure If we can call the current sota models that. Maybe, maybe not. But a little disappointing. Now everyones saying that ai agents are the hype and the productivity gains are in that, the Darwin Gödel paper which was recently released for example. On the same day (yesterday), hn top page had an ai blog by some fly.io and the top comment was worried about ai excelling and that as devs we should do something as he was concerned what if companies reach the intelligence hype that they are saying. On the same day, builder.ai turned out to be actually Indians. The companies are most likely giving us hype because we are giving them valuation. The hype seems not worth it. Everyones saying that all models are really good and now all that matters are vibes. So in all of this, I have taken this. Trust noone. Or atleast not take things at face value of ai hype companies. I genuinely believe that ai is gonna reach a plateau of sorts at such moment like ours and as someone who tinkers with it. I am genuinely happy at its current scale and I kind of don't want it to grow more I guess, and I kind of think that a plateau might come soon. But maybe not. I don't think that its analogous to species but maybe that's me being optimistic about future but I genuinely don't want to think too much as it stresses my brain too much and makes evene my present... Well not a present(gift)
• agentultra 1y ago
  You just have to look at who benefits from making these claims and keep asking where they're getting their claims/numbers from. "Oh no, we invented an AI that is so smart we're afraid of it! We need AI safety!" is literally snake-oil sales pitching. Media outlets that give air to these claims are cringe. AI isn't replacing people. It's being used to replace labour with capital which weakens labour's negotiating power in order to increase the profits of the capital class. Just as other disruptive technologies have been used in the past. What the Luddite movement shows us is that society needs to prepare for taking care of highly skilled people. What society didn't do back then was take care of people. Textile workers didn't find jobs elsewhere unless you mean work houses. The myth capitalists fabricated around disruptive technologies is that people displaced by these technologies will acquire new skills and find work elsewhere and that these technologies create new opportunities. It doesn't exactly happen that way. The same could happen here. The wealthy transfer even more wealth from the labour class to themselves and avoid taxation or doing their part to replace the value they've taken from the labour class. Update: Changed sentence on the "capitalist myth" to explain what the myth is.
• ilaksh 1y ago
  The biggest reason there is such a difference of opinion on this is that people have fundamentally different worldviews. If you have bought into the singularity concept and exponential acceleration of computing performance, then you are likely to believe that we are right on track to shortly have smarter-than-human AI. This is also related to just having a technology-positive versus negative worldview. Many people like to blame technology for humanity's failings when in reality it's a neutral lever. But that comes down to the way people look at the world. People who don't "believe" in the exponential of computing (even though I find the charts pretty convincing) seem to always assume that AI progress will stop near where it is. With that assumption, the skepticism is reasonable. But it's a poorly informed assumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Exponential_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Expo... I think that some of that gets into somewhat religious territory, but the increasing power and efficiency of compute seems fairly objective. And also the intelligence of LLMs seems to track roughly with their size and amount of training. So this does look like it's about scale. And we continue to increase the scale with innovations and new paradigms. There will likely be a new memory-centric computing paradigm (or maybe multiple) within the next five years that increases efficiency by another two orders of magnitude. Why can I just throw out a prediction about orders of magnitude? Because we have increased the efficiency and performance by orders of magnitude over and over again throughout the entire history of computing.
  • parineum 1y ago
    I think you're missing a third conglomerate that, I think, is actually the most influential. It's not unlike the crypto space; you've got your true believers, your skeptics and thirdly, your financially motivated hype men. The CEOs if these publicly traded companies and companies that want to be bought are the latter and they are the ones who are behind stories where "the ai lies so we don't turn it off!!!" hype that gets spun into click bait headlines.
    • ilaksh 1y ago
      I think those CEOs like Altman and Amodei do find it convenient to hype their products like that, but also they believe in computing exponentials and artificial superintelligence etc.
• greenie_beans 1y ago
  they already expecting the same work for less money. and therefore wanting me to work more. i thought it was supposed to make me work less?
• siliconc0w 1y ago
  For SWE, there is a huge misconception that implementation is bottleneck - for mid level to senior it takes much longer to decide what to build than to actually build it. Each additional line of code adds weight to the airframe.
  • bob1029 1y ago
    Architecture & aesthetics are the real bottlenecks in developing products that customers are actually interested in paying money for. This is why everyone seems to struggle so hard with the frontend development duties. You cannot solve for taste and art with frameworks and patterns. Having a fixed-sized canvas and standardized brushes/paints to work with is not much help if you are ass at painting.
• ednite 1y ago
  Not an expert here, just speaking from experience as a working dev. I don’t think AI is going to replace my job as a software developers anytime soon, but it’s definitely changing how we work (and in many cases, already has). Personally, I use AI a lot. It’s great for boilerplate, getting unstuck, or even offering alternative solutions I wouldn’t have thought of. But where it still struggles sometimes is with the why behind the work. It doesn’t have that human curiosity, asking odd questions, pushing boundaries, or thinking creatively about tradeoffs. What really makes me pause is when it gives back code that looks right, but I find myself thinking, “Wait… why did it do this?” Especially when security is involved. Even if I prompt with security as the top priority, I still need to carefully review the output. One recent example that stuck with me: a friend of mine, an office manager with zero coding background, proudly showed off how he used AI to inject some VBA into his Excel report to do advanced filtering. My first reaction was: well, here it is, AI replacing my job. But what hit harder was my second thought: does he even know what he just copied and pasted into that sensitive report? So yeah, for me AI isn’t a replacement. It’s a power tool, and eventually, maybe a great coding partner. But you still need to know what you’re doing, or at least understand enough to check its work.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    I suspect that we will be seeing some very creative supply chain compromises. If you can train AI to insert calls to your malware server, in whatever solutions it provides, that's a huge win.
    • ednite 1y ago
      Totally agree! That’s where I think cybersecurity experts and system administrators deserve a lot of credit too. AI might help automate some of the work, but it’s also conjuring up threats that are way more complex and sneaky. Hopefully, countermeasures and AI-powered defense tools can keep up. It's going to be some type of an arms race, for sure.
    • roywiggins 1y ago
      https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/ai-hallucinated-names-resembling-popular-libraries-created-for-slopsquatting-attacks https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/ai-hallucinated-names...
• tines 1y ago
  People compare AI to the automation that happened in e.g. car factories. Lots of people were put out of jobs, and that’s just the way things go, they say. But the difference is that automotive automation does create way more jobs than it destroyed. Programmers, designers, machine maintainers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, materials scientists, all have a part to play in making those machines. More people are employed by auto manufacturers than ever before, albeit different people. AI isn’t the same really. It’s not a case of creating more-different jobs. It just substitutes people with a crappier replacement, puts all the power in the hands of the few companies that make it, and the pie is shrinking rather than growing. We will all pay for the damage done in pure pursuit of profit by shoehorning this tech everywhere.
  • palmotea 1y ago
    I think one interesting way to frame AI is that it will "degrade" jobs: force speed-ups and remove much of the enjoyable and engaging aspects and replace them with drudgery.
    • tines 1y ago
      That’s a good way to think of it. I think it’s degrading every aspect of life. We’re so obsessed with metrics and efficiency that we don’t know how to live any more.
      • palmotea 1y ago
        Yeah, modern society (essentially neoliberal capitalism) does not prioritize quality of life. The apotheosis is maximum output (shareholder profits), even if that means if the vast majority of people are miserable and unhappy (because the low quality of their work-life is not compensated by the products and services they're given access to).
        • tines 1y ago
          Agreed. And the interesting thing is that now, with smartphones and an endless stream of captivating entertainment (basically Soma), people won't even be able to think long enough to realize they're miserable and unhappy. If you can impose a new way of living on one single generation---an existence directed toward endless free (for now) entertainment---it is enough to change all subsequent generations. Once this takes hold, there's no going back.
• zb3 1y ago
  AI will make it worse - it will replace "easier" jobs, harder jobs will remain, but the bar will be raised and so many people will not be able to have an "office" job.
• catchcatchcatch 1y ago
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• eximius 1y ago
  Maybe. But I think this is a useful time to engage in the conversation about what we do as a semi-post-scarcity society and how we should treat people under that framework. If we _do_ replace all the jobs, how should we, as a society, treat each other? Fundamentally, you either continue down the path of pure capitalism and let people starve in the streets or you adapt socially.
• emveeoh 1y ago
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• elktown 1y ago
  I find it amusing how you can promise the world then people will just accept a compromise; "well, that's too far, but maybe it will replace juniors", even when that's also an extraordinary claim.
• GMoromisato 1y ago
  I grew up in the 80s and we were basically taught that at any moment we could see a mushroom cloud and get a minute to say goodbye to everything. As horrible as that was, I think it taught us to deal with uncertainty in a way that maybe other generations didn't get. We learned to accept that we don't always have control over what's going to happen. And in that acceptance, there is a Zen peace. The truth is, we don't know how AI will evolve. Maybe it will replace all jobs in 10 years. Or maybe never. Or maybe the world will change bit by bit over the next 50 years until it is utterly unrecognizable. Anyone who tells you that they know for sure is selling you something. If forced to guess, I would say AI is like electricity or the microprocessor: it will change everything, but it will take decades. Once you accept that things are going to change, it frees you to focus on what's important. Focus on what you can control: your skills, your effort, and your relationships (business and personal).
• Zoethink 1y ago
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• qgin 1y ago
  Maybe not 100% of every job, but maybe 80% of every job, which means you can consolidate the human-gap-work in 20% of the previous headcount and fire the rest. When you’re employed, any efficiency gains you get from AI belong to the company, not you.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  "Over the weekend I went digging for evidence that AI can, will, or has replaced a large percentage of jobs." Perhaps the author is curious whether "AI" will replace "SEO jobs", or "web marketing" jobs If "AI"-generated answers are replacing www search, and even visits to other websites, then perhaps to some extent "AI" will reduce the number of "SEO" or "web marketing" jobs https://searchengineland.com/seo-opportunity-shrinking-rand-fishkin-448876 https://searchengineland.com/seo-opportunity-shrinking-rand-... The author is a "web marketer" accusing "Tech Execs" of doing web marketing Marketers trying to discredit other marketers
• tzs 1y ago
  >> The automation of farm work is the most notable and most labor-impacting example we have from history, rapidly unemploying a huge portion of human beings in the developing economies of the late 19th and 20th centuries. And yet, at the conclusion of this era (~1940s/50s), the conclusion was that “technological unemployment is a myth,” because “technology has created so many new industries” and has expanded the market by “lowering the cost of production to make a price within reach of large masses of purchasers.” In short, technological advances had created more jobs overall From the late 19th century to the 1940s/50s is 50 years. It's not really reassuring to middle aged workers who lose their jobs to new technology that 50 years later there will overall be more jobs available.
• fakedang 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44181342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44181342 Hottakes like these are getting retarded.
• hintymad 1y ago
  I have a hard time imagining how the current large model could possibly replace all the jobs, given that the models simply retrieve and re-organize human-generated knowledge, and perform limited interpolation when it comes to code generation. We software engineers open source all kinds of cool code to replace ourselves to a certain degree, but without us, who's going to generate new knowledge to feed the models?
• gigel82 1y ago
  The worse is when tech execs elsewhere actually believe the BS or (more likely) use it as an excuse to put pressure on already overworked employees through layoffs and fear mongering. This is very real and it's happening now across the industry, with devastating consequences for many (financial, health, etc.)
• insane_dreamer 1y ago
  My take: It won't replace all the SWE jobs. But it _will_ replace many of the entry-level jobs, thereby overtime significantly reducing the number of people in the industry. This is because most companies are focused on short-term cost-cutting rather than training and retaining talent (why spent $$ on that when the talent might then just hop over to another company, especially when what that entry-level person does could instead be done by an AI -- not autonomously, not, but by a more senior dev "overseeing" a number of spawned LLM instances.
• punkbit 1y ago
  AI can probably generate music that sounds like Bob Marley but who would pay to watch it perform live? Even if free…
• kazinator 1y ago
  It's not just tech execs doing marketing! Idiots everywhere are repeating it for them ad nauseum.
• disambiguation 1y ago
  > The AI Fear & Hype Marketing Flywheel And I suspect the majority of this flywheel is fully manufactured at this point. Dead Internet Theory is nearly complete.
• darkoob12 1y ago
  I was wondering if these claims are supported by numbers. Are we seeing a decrease in employment? I checked the unemployment numbers of US they have a regular trend. But they are very vague and general. I cannot attribute layoffs at companies like Microsoft to AI because these things happened before many times.
• sreekanth850 1y ago
  AI will not replace developers, they will help developers to solve problems faster. But model collapse is real and we have to see how it can overcome this.