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"Massive disruption" of what kind? Current AI abilities make white-collar work more productive and potentially higher-paid, not less.

kbos87 1y ago
Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI? I am already massively more productive at work using AI. I'm not getting paid more, and I'm not working fewer hours. The road we are headed down is one where all of the economic benefits go straight to the owning class.
- MostlyStable 1y ago
  For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history. It's not universal and it's not instantaneous, but the base level assumption should be that increases in productivity will lead to increases in wages in the long run and we should have specific reasons why it won't happen for a given case to believe otherwise.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history Historically, increased productivity has almost literally never increased wages or benefits without worker uprisings Seriously look into the history of labor and automation
    - MostlyStable 1y ago
      Cool. What worker uprising occurred in the US in 1995? I (and basically every economist) disagree with your interpretation of historical events. https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370 https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370
      - bluefirebrand 1y ago
        Where is worker productivity on that graph exactly?
        MostlyStable 1y ago
        Why does that matter? According to you, productivity is not what leads to increases in wages. You claimed that wages only ever go up with a worker uprising. I showed that worker wages went up starting in 1995. According to you, there must have been a worker uprising to explain that.
        tobr 1y ago
        I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic, but bluefirebrand did not claim that wages only go up because of worker uprisings.
        MostlyStable 1y ago
        In the long term, the only thing that _can_ increase wages on average and in general is productivity. Productivity increases mean the pie is bigger, and without that, there is no where for increased wages to come _from_. So by saying that producity only results in increased wages in the case of the worker uprising, that is equivalent to saying that wages can only rise from a worker uprising. The only way this isn't true is for some other proposed mechanism for worker wages to go up, and the only other methods would be short time, single increases where all you are doing is taking from someone else (presumably capital I guess?) Sustained rates of increase _require_ increasing productivity. So no, they didn't explicitly state it, what they explicitly said was that productivity only results in increased wages if a worker uprising forces it. But that's the logical requirement of that statement.
        bluefirebrand 1y ago
        > there is no where for increased wages to come _from The pie doesn't have to grow when the pie is already massive, but only 1% of people are taking 90% of the pie
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      You could easily rephrase that as "Historically, worker uprisings have almost literally never increased wages or benefits, absent increased productivity" and it would be a lot closer to the truth of how automation impacts wages.
  - DrillShopper 1y ago
    > For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history. Not in the last 40 years in real income terms: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ This trend is likely to accelerate (productivity skyrocketing, wages stagnant)
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    you are confusing increases in profits with increases in wages :)
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI? We’re on HN. AI makes it easier for you to disrupt your employer.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    * Unless your employer happens to have engineered a monopoly
- mjr00 1y ago
  Why would your employer pay you more for using Python/Java/JavaScript? You're massively more productive when using those languages instead of C for many common development tasks. Did the introduction of Python drastically reduce software developer salaries?
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    {Total demand for software} is oddly not being mentioned by most people in this thread. First approximation, there are two AI coding futures: 1. AI coding increases software development productivity, decreasing the cost of software, stimulating more demand for the now more efficient development. 2. AI coding increases software development productivity such that the existing labor pool is too large for demand. I'd hazard (1) in the short term and (2) in the long term.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  You need to switch jobs in order to get paid at market rate. Companies have found that they do not need to keep up with the market rate to retain employees.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    It varies by company. I know of at least one major company that continually benchmarks market rates and uses those as default raises. Unsurprisingly, they have an average tenure of 10+ years...
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  Owning what? Your employer (likely) owns little of value in a world of cheap AI software generation. Open Source models are already the thing that you can use to code with, and will obviously get better. We have to believe some really weird stuff for this vision to be coherent, for example a nvidia-everything-world, where they are not only the sole provider of hardware but also control access to all relevant models, and all software products that any (non-tech) business needs to use AI. If by "owning class" you actually mean "all people with agency" then, yeah, I agree.
  - bigbadfeline 1y ago
    > Your employer (likely) owns little of value in a world of cheap AI software generation. That applies to you, not to your employer - in your hands, "cheap AI software generation" is, well... cheap. On the other hand, your employer owns patents, copyrights, distribution channels, politicians and connections - those become more valuable as the coding skills get cheaper. The "owning class" are those who own most of the high value items enumerated above.
    - jstummbillig 1y ago
      I don't know who you are describing, but it's certainly nothing close to the median employer.
      - bigbadfeline 1y ago
        The median employer isn't in the software business either, so "cheap coding" has little direct effect on them and it doesn't help the agency-rocking small fish in any way. However, as customers, the median employers are highly dependent upon precisely the type of employer I described, not upon "people with agency".
VWWHFSfQ 1y ago
USA is presently in the midst of a massive offshoring of software jobs which will only continue to accelerate as AI becomes better. These are "white collar" jobs that will never come back.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  > a massive offshoring of software jobs Where have I heard this before? The drawbacks of offshoring are well known by now and AI does not really mitigate them to any extent.
  - seadan83 1y ago
    So many of the drawbacks have been mitigated at this point too. Offshore teams are well organized, have their own managers, orgs, the offshore talent has really grown in ths last few decades with many excellent engineers, and remote/async work has become a first class citizen now. Despite offshore getting way better, the US jobs market in IT has not collapsed.
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      US tech jobs market has collapsed. Although partially self-inflicted wounds. If you don’t think so, you haven’t looked for a job in a while. AI should improve code quality for these offshore teams. That leaves time zone issues, which may or may not be a problem. If it is, offshore to Latin America.
      - seadan83 1y ago
        > If you don’t think so, you haven’t looked for a job in a while. This is not an argument. Any individuals experience is not going to be anything of a representative sample of pretty much anything. You need data to make your claim. You probably will also need to define "collapse." US-based AI companies are doing pretty well, if there were a collapse, that would not be the case. Plenty of companies are hiring. The job market is not what it was when there were 0% interest rates, but "collapsed" - that's some hot-take shit IMO good for twitter and clicks.
uhhhhhhh 1y ago
Companies are actively not hiring expecting AI to compensate and still have growth. I have seen these same companies giving smaller raises and less promotions, and eliminate junior positions. The endgame isn't more employees or paying them more. It's paying less people or no skilled people when possible. That's a fairly massive disruption.
- seadan83 1y ago
  We're just 3 years after a giant hiring binge, a similar amount of time post zero interest rates, the US economy has been threatening recession for two years, and economic uncertainty is very high, and post Covid had a glut of junior engineers coming onto the market. Between all of these plausible explanations for why hiring is way down, is there macro economic evidence it really is AI and not anything else?
  - lovich 1y ago
    That hiring binge was already nullified by the waves of layoffs. I think everything else you’re saying is happening/has happened but companies hiring less because of anticipated AI productivity gains is also occurring. Like the scuttlebutt I hear about certain faangs requiring managers have 9-10 direct reports now instead of 7
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  All that I've seen with AI in the workplace is my coworkers becoming dumber. Asking them technical questions they should know the answer to has turned into "let me LLM that for you" and giving me an overly broad response. It's infuriating. I've also hilariously seen this in meetings, where folks are being asked something and awkwardly fill time while they wait for a response which they try and not read word for word.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    That's totally normal actually. When you ask, you have to tell them "Think through this step by step."
Arainach 1y ago
Productivity per capita is dramatically up since the 1970s. Wages are flat. Employers are greedy and short sighted. Employers would rather pay more to hire someone new who doesn't know their business than give a raise to an existing employee who's doing well. They're not going to pay someone more because they're more productive, they'll pay them the same and punish anyone who can't meet the new quota.
- MostlyStable 1y ago
  This is not true. Wages did stagnate from about the mid 70s until about the mid 90s, but median, real wages have been increasing steadily since then [0] [0] https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370 https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Sounds like wages are about 20 years removed where they should be then, since cost of living didn't exactly stagnate for 20 years
    - MostlyStable 1y ago
      "Real" as opposed to "nominal" in this context means inflation adjusted, which means that wages have been increasing faster than inflation for 30 years. Now, it is true that some components of cost of living, most notably housing, have (especially in particular regions) also increased in cost faster than the general inflation level. But that's not due to some inherent breakdown between productivity and wages. It's due to a series of bad policy and development choices mostly in cities. So if you want to have that discussion, that's fine, but it's totally separate from the original discussion about productivity and wages.
      - bluefirebrand 1y ago
        > which means that wages have been increasing faster than inflation for 30 years If you look at the graph you posted and carried the slope of the pre-70s trajectory forward, assuming that the 70s-90s slump had not happened, would the graph end in the same place it is currently? No. Not even close > So if you want to have that discussion, that's fine, but it's totally separate from the original discussion about productivity and wages. It's absolutely not a separate discussion, the end result is that the same "real wage" that used to provide a comfortable life is now poverty You cannot just shrug your shoulders and say "well incomes are matching productivity so this is fine actually"
ffsm8 1y ago
You seem to have the same opinion as kbos87 then, because given your higher productivity, do you honestly think there will not be less job openings from your employer going forward? What you just said as a rebuttal was pretty much his point, you just didn't internalize what the productivity gains mean at the macro level, only looking at the select few that will continue to have a job
- zozbot234 1y ago
  Were there "less job openings from our employers" when the software industry shifted en masse from coding in FORTRAN to C/C++, then to Java and later on to Python and JavaScript? Each of these choices came with a massive gain in productivity. Why then did the software sector grow and not shrink at the macro level?
jaredklewis 1y ago
Salaries are determined by the replacement cost of the employee in question, not their productivity. How does AI increase wages?
knowitnone 1y ago
so if they are more productive, does that not mean companies will need fewer staff? Why would they give you more pay when they can so easily replace you. Remember, you're not doing much of the work anymore so expect lower pay.
- mattliu 1y ago
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kbos87 1y ago

Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI? I am already massively more productive at work using AI. I'm not getting paid more, and I'm not working fewer hours. The road we are headed down is one where all of the economic benefits go straight to the owning class.

MostlyStable 1y ago
For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history. It's not universal and it's not instantaneous, but the base level assumption should be that increases in productivity will lead to increases in wages in the long run and we should have specific reasons why it won't happen for a given case to believe otherwise.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history Historically, increased productivity has almost literally never increased wages or benefits without worker uprisings Seriously look into the history of labor and automation
  - MostlyStable 1y ago
    Cool. What worker uprising occurred in the US in 1995? I (and basically every economist) disagree with your interpretation of historical events. https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370 https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      Where is worker productivity on that graph exactly?
      - MostlyStable 1y ago
        Why does that matter? According to you, productivity is not what leads to increases in wages. You claimed that wages only ever go up with a worker uprising. I showed that worker wages went up starting in 1995. According to you, there must have been a worker uprising to explain that.
        tobr 1y ago
        I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic, but bluefirebrand did not claim that wages only go up because of worker uprisings.
        MostlyStable 1y ago
        In the long term, the only thing that _can_ increase wages on average and in general is productivity. Productivity increases mean the pie is bigger, and without that, there is no where for increased wages to come _from_. So by saying that producity only results in increased wages in the case of the worker uprising, that is equivalent to saying that wages can only rise from a worker uprising. The only way this isn't true is for some other proposed mechanism for worker wages to go up, and the only other methods would be short time, single increases where all you are doing is taking from someone else (presumably capital I guess?) Sustained rates of increase _require_ increasing productivity. So no, they didn't explicitly state it, what they explicitly said was that productivity only results in increased wages if a worker uprising forces it. But that's the logical requirement of that statement.
        bluefirebrand 1y ago
        > there is no where for increased wages to come _from The pie doesn't have to grow when the pie is already massive, but only 1% of people are taking 90% of the pie
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    You could easily rephrase that as "Historically, worker uprisings have almost literally never increased wages or benefits, absent increased productivity" and it would be a lot closer to the truth of how automation impacts wages.
- DrillShopper 1y ago
  > For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history. Not in the last 40 years in real income terms: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ This trend is likely to accelerate (productivity skyrocketing, wages stagnant)
- bdangubic 1y ago
  you are confusing increases in profits with increases in wages :)
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI? We’re on HN. AI makes it easier for you to disrupt your employer.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  * Unless your employer happens to have engineered a monopoly
mjr00 1y ago
Why would your employer pay you more for using Python/Java/JavaScript? You're massively more productive when using those languages instead of C for many common development tasks. Did the introduction of Python drastically reduce software developer salaries?
- ethbr1 1y ago
  {Total demand for software} is oddly not being mentioned by most people in this thread. First approximation, there are two AI coding futures: 1. AI coding increases software development productivity, decreasing the cost of software, stimulating more demand for the now more efficient development. 2. AI coding increases software development productivity such that the existing labor pool is too large for demand. I'd hazard (1) in the short term and (2) in the long term.
charcircuit 1y ago
You need to switch jobs in order to get paid at market rate. Companies have found that they do not need to keep up with the market rate to retain employees.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  It varies by company. I know of at least one major company that continually benchmarks market rates and uses those as default raises. Unsurprisingly, they have an average tenure of 10+ years...
jstummbillig 1y ago
Owning what? Your employer (likely) owns little of value in a world of cheap AI software generation. Open Source models are already the thing that you can use to code with, and will obviously get better. We have to believe some really weird stuff for this vision to be coherent, for example a nvidia-everything-world, where they are not only the sole provider of hardware but also control access to all relevant models, and all software products that any (non-tech) business needs to use AI. If by "owning class" you actually mean "all people with agency" then, yeah, I agree.
- bigbadfeline 1y ago
  > Your employer (likely) owns little of value in a world of cheap AI software generation. That applies to you, not to your employer - in your hands, "cheap AI software generation" is, well... cheap. On the other hand, your employer owns patents, copyrights, distribution channels, politicians and connections - those become more valuable as the coding skills get cheaper. The "owning class" are those who own most of the high value items enumerated above.
  - jstummbillig 1y ago
    I don't know who you are describing, but it's certainly nothing close to the median employer.
    - bigbadfeline 1y ago
      The median employer isn't in the software business either, so "cheap coding" has little direct effect on them and it doesn't help the agency-rocking small fish in any way. However, as customers, the median employers are highly dependent upon precisely the type of employer I described, not upon "people with agency".

VWWHFSfQ 1y ago

USA is presently in the midst of a massive offshoring of software jobs which will only continue to accelerate as AI becomes better. These are "white collar" jobs that will never come back.

zozbot234 1y ago
> a massive offshoring of software jobs Where have I heard this before? The drawbacks of offshoring are well known by now and AI does not really mitigate them to any extent.
- seadan83 1y ago
  So many of the drawbacks have been mitigated at this point too. Offshore teams are well organized, have their own managers, orgs, the offshore talent has really grown in ths last few decades with many excellent engineers, and remote/async work has become a first class citizen now. Despite offshore getting way better, the US jobs market in IT has not collapsed.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    US tech jobs market has collapsed. Although partially self-inflicted wounds. If you don’t think so, you haven’t looked for a job in a while. AI should improve code quality for these offshore teams. That leaves time zone issues, which may or may not be a problem. If it is, offshore to Latin America.
    - seadan83 1y ago
      > If you don’t think so, you haven’t looked for a job in a while. This is not an argument. Any individuals experience is not going to be anything of a representative sample of pretty much anything. You need data to make your claim. You probably will also need to define "collapse." US-based AI companies are doing pretty well, if there were a collapse, that would not be the case. Plenty of companies are hiring. The job market is not what it was when there were 0% interest rates, but "collapsed" - that's some hot-take shit IMO good for twitter and clicks.

uhhhhhhh 1y ago

Companies are actively not hiring expecting AI to compensate and still have growth. I have seen these same companies giving smaller raises and less promotions, and eliminate junior positions. The endgame isn't more employees or paying them more. It's paying less people or no skilled people when possible. That's a fairly massive disruption.

seadan83 1y ago
We're just 3 years after a giant hiring binge, a similar amount of time post zero interest rates, the US economy has been threatening recession for two years, and economic uncertainty is very high, and post Covid had a glut of junior engineers coming onto the market. Between all of these plausible explanations for why hiring is way down, is there macro economic evidence it really is AI and not anything else?
- lovich 1y ago
  That hiring binge was already nullified by the waves of layoffs. I think everything else you’re saying is happening/has happened but companies hiring less because of anticipated AI productivity gains is also occurring. Like the scuttlebutt I hear about certain faangs requiring managers have 9-10 direct reports now instead of 7
candiddevmike 1y ago
All that I've seen with AI in the workplace is my coworkers becoming dumber. Asking them technical questions they should know the answer to has turned into "let me LLM that for you" and giving me an overly broad response. It's infuriating. I've also hilariously seen this in meetings, where folks are being asked something and awkwardly fill time while they wait for a response which they try and not read word for word.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  That's totally normal actually. When you ask, you have to tell them "Think through this step by step."

Arainach 1y ago

Productivity per capita is dramatically up since the 1970s. Wages are flat. Employers are greedy and short sighted. Employers would rather pay more to hire someone new who doesn't know their business than give a raise to an existing employee who's doing well. They're not going to pay someone more because they're more productive, they'll pay them the same and punish anyone who can't meet the new quota.

MostlyStable 1y ago
This is not true. Wages did stagnate from about the mid 70s until about the mid 90s, but median, real wages have been increasing steadily since then [0] [0] https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370 https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Sounds like wages are about 20 years removed where they should be then, since cost of living didn't exactly stagnate for 20 years
  - MostlyStable 1y ago
    "Real" as opposed to "nominal" in this context means inflation adjusted, which means that wages have been increasing faster than inflation for 30 years. Now, it is true that some components of cost of living, most notably housing, have (especially in particular regions) also increased in cost faster than the general inflation level. But that's not due to some inherent breakdown between productivity and wages. It's due to a series of bad policy and development choices mostly in cities. So if you want to have that discussion, that's fine, but it's totally separate from the original discussion about productivity and wages.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > which means that wages have been increasing faster than inflation for 30 years If you look at the graph you posted and carried the slope of the pre-70s trajectory forward, assuming that the 70s-90s slump had not happened, would the graph end in the same place it is currently? No. Not even close > So if you want to have that discussion, that's fine, but it's totally separate from the original discussion about productivity and wages. It's absolutely not a separate discussion, the end result is that the same "real wage" that used to provide a comfortable life is now poverty You cannot just shrug your shoulders and say "well incomes are matching productivity so this is fine actually"

ffsm8 1y ago

You seem to have the same opinion as kbos87 then, because given your higher productivity, do you honestly think there will not be less job openings from your employer going forward? What you just said as a rebuttal was pretty much his point, you just didn't internalize what the productivity gains mean at the macro level, only looking at the select few that will continue to have a job

zozbot234 1y ago
Were there "less job openings from our employers" when the software industry shifted en masse from coding in FORTRAN to C/C++, then to Java and later on to Python and JavaScript? Each of these choices came with a massive gain in productivity. Why then did the software sector grow and not shrink at the macro level?

jaredklewis 1y ago

Salaries are determined by the replacement cost of the employee in question, not their productivity. How does AI increase wages?

knowitnone 1y ago

so if they are more productive, does that not mean companies will need fewer staff? Why would they give you more pay when they can so easily replace you. Remember, you're not doing much of the work anymore so expect lower pay.

mattliu 1y ago
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