6 ms·

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual j

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.

SwtCyber 1y ago
We've definitely seen impact in areas like copywriting, customer service, and basic coding tasks, but it’s more nibbling at the edges than wholesale devouring
eatsyourtacos 1y ago
Well I'm part of a small few person team- I had a junior developer helping me who left. And I literally don't need someone like him anymore because I can do anything that he was doing via AI faster and better because it's under my control. I can have a 20 minute conversation and code revision that would have taken days for someone junior to code and would have probably been not done right (by 'right' I mean how I want it to be done, not necessarily wrong) To think the same isn't happening all over the place and will only continue is ignoring just how powerful this tech is.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  And when you are out sick, can AI do his role? When you are on vacation, can AI do his role? When you leave, can AI at least help define/interview your replacement, like he could have, even if he's too junior to step into the role? There is so much else that people do. So many details that are just being ignored because of short term 'gains' that justify ignoring so many details.
  - Sherveen 1y ago
    You aren't taking what he said seriously. The junior could also get sick, present management issues, etc. If this person plus a junior represented "1.3 engineering knots," he's saying... "actually, I'm still 1.3 engineering knots without him." When this person leaves, they go find someone else who is 1.3 engineering knots. The junior represented .3, without the 1., it doesn't matter that much. Headcount strategy shifts.
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      If your company can treat people as cogs this way, your company has zero value add/domain knowledge. A company's value is what it value adds, what domain knowledge/expertise it has, or cheapest price. If all you have is cheapest price, you will lose over time. You will be undercut. You won't have the domain knowledge to adapt, to see future changes coming down the path. So the company you talk about is already in the entropy vortex. It has no momentum. It has no future. It just hopes it can keep doing what it is doing now.
dfxm12 1y ago
Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000-layoffs-because-i-need-less-heads-with-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000...
- lernedsomecode 1y ago
  this stuff is all a cover from CEOs. We're in the middle of a downturn and they're pretending layoffs like this are due to AI so as not to spook investors.
- halfmatthalfcat 1y ago
  You have to trust they are actually telling the truth and not using it as a convenient scapegoat. What sounds better to shareholders “we’re replacing jobs with AI” or “we hired too many during the COVID hiring glut and need to lay more people off”?
  - GoatInGrey 1y ago
    But what if I want the option that validates my untreated anxiety?
- mattacular 1y ago
  Does anybody really believe that SalesForce of all companies has successfully replaced 4000 real and necessary jobs with AI? Or is that more likely just an excuse to justify more layoffs in the tech industry for the usual reasons.
  - jlarocco 1y ago
    It would be some kind of securities fraud for their CEO to say it to the media if it weren't at least partially true.
    - franktankbank 1y ago
      Doesn't have to be true, just needs to be unfalsifiable.
Spooky23 1y ago
It’s going to ramp. I have a team where 60% of the staff (6/10) is retiring in a year. Their function is around reconciling utilization and bills from multiple related suppliers with different internal stakeholders. They do a bunch of analysis and work with the internal stakeholders to optimize or migrate spend. It is high ROI for us, and the issue is both finding people with the right analytical and presentation skills and managing the toil of the “heavy” work. Basically, we’re able to train interns to do 80% of the processing work with LLM tooling. So we’re doing to promote two of the existing staff and replace 2/6 vacancies with entry level new grads, and use the unit to recruit talent and cycle them through. In terms of order of magnitude, we’ll save about $500k in payroll, spend $50k in services, and get same or better outcomes. Another example is we gave an L1 service desk manager Gemini and made him watch a YouTube video about statistics. He’s using it to analyze call statistics and understand how his business works without alot of math knowledge. For example, he looked at the times where the desk was at 95th percentile call volume and identified a few ways to time shift certain things to avoid the need for more agents or reduce overall wait times. All stuff that would require expensive talent and some sort of data analysis software… which frankly probably wouldn’t have been purchased. Thats the real AI story. Stupid business people are just firing people. The real magic is using the tools to make smart people smarter. If you work for a big company, giving Gemini or ChatGPT to motivated contracts and procurement teams would literally print money for you due to the stuff your folks are missing.
- LargeWu 1y ago
  If LLM-based tools were such a money printing machine with a big ROI, why would you ever want to downsize? Keep redirecting that excess human capacity into building bigger and better capabilities to generate more revenue. Hire cheap grads to do the work. Except it seems like the opposite is happening. CS grads have high unemployment. Companies laying off staff. The rhetoric doesn't seem to add up to the reality.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  And your company now won't progress. Won't have insight. Sure you can keep on keeping on, but that is all. You also farm out expertise instead of building it. AI is an entropy machine for everything it touches. Companies that runs off of AI is a zombie company. Without people to understand an industry, what does your company ad? Without people to see new revenue streams, new directions, and most importantly NEW RISKS to your business model, you are a dead zombie company living off what the previous living, growing company built. But does that matter to owners when they get $500,000 more a year in their pockets?
api 1y ago
The doomer stuff about AI is another kind of hype. We are at the top of the bubble hype cycle.
malfist 1y ago
Amazon won't hire junior engineers because of AI unless it's direct from a college pipeline, and even those jobs have shrunk significantly in number. Even opening an L4 (junior) role requires VP approval these days.
nilkn 1y ago
It's rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and large companies, generally, aren't even attempting that). Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc.
- tristor 1y ago
  > Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc. My observation so far has been that executive leadership believes things that are not true about AI and starts doing the cost-cutting measures now, without any of the productivity gains expected/promised, which is actually leading to a net productivity loss from AI expectations based on hype rather than AI realities. When you lose out on team size, can't hire people for necessary roles (some exec teams now won't hire unless the role is AI related), and don't backfill attrition, you end up with an organization that can't get things done as quickly, and productivity suffers, because the miracle of AI has yet to manifest meaningfully anywhere.
- visarga 1y ago
  > the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization AI alone can't do that, even if you make the weakest link in the chain stronger, there are probably more weak links. In a complex system the speed is controlled by the weakest, most inefficient link in the chain. To make an organization more efficient they need to do much more than use AI. Maybe AI exposes other inefficiencies.
- torginus 1y ago
  I mean one of the services at work had a custom HTML dashboard. We eliminated it and replaced it with Grafana. I worked on both - my skillset went from coding pretty bar charts in SVG + Javascript to configuring Grafana, Dockerfiles and Terraform templates. There's very little overlap between the two, other than general geekiness, but thanks I'm still doing OK.
dathinab 1y ago
entry "throw away, no skill" positions for programming are also kinda going away, or at least get collapsed to a small fraction of positions to be fair this positions never made that much sense as they tend to cause more trouble then they are helping on the long run, but they exist anyway and companies should know better then throwing away "junior, not yet skilled, but learning" positions (but then many small startups also are not used to/have the resources to teach juniors, which is a huge issue in the industry IMHO) but I imagine for many of the huge "we mainly hire from universities"/FANG companies it will turn into a "we need only senior engineers and hire juniors only to grow our own senior engineers", this means the moment to you growth takes too long/stagnates by whatever _arbitrary_ metric you get kicked out fast. And like with their hiring process they have the resources, scale, and number of people who want to work for them to be able to really use some arbitrary imperfect effective discriminatory metrics. Another aspect is that a lot of the day to day work of software engineering is really dump simple churn, and AI has the potential to massively cut down the time a developer needs to do that, so less developers needed especially in mid to low skill positions. Now the only luck devs have is that there is basically always more work which was cut due to time pressure but often isn't even supper low priority, so getting things done faster might luckily not map one to one to less jobs being available.
- pingLost 1y ago
  >> ..this means the moment your growth takes too long/stagnates by whatever _arbitrary_ metric: you get HR's glossy `Exit Packet' with a cover of a pristine chartered white catamaran on the translucent aquamarine Carribbean in a palm treed cove, afloat with bikini babes lounging on deck, five minutes to fill your cardboard box, and manhandled by two security wide-shouldered bulls squeezing your arms to your sides gripped under your forearms, marching you down the aisle with rubber-knecking wide-eyed heads watching you repeatedly slip, fall forward, the experienced bulls lowering your arms to regain your shoes' purchase with the carpet, hurriedly packing you into the elevator with silent ignominious stares and hushed whispers of those packed in around you, then past hot Tanya at Reception in front of every Tom, Dick, Irene, and Harry, out the main revolving glass door entrance, into the overcast dishwater grey and miserable wind blown wet in truth is Seattle, to the sidewalk, left at the curb -furthest from proper and successful glitterati as possible. All double-time haste, signalling to everyone get this despicable loser/criminal POS off the property, fast. Its over, you're done. Sooner than you thought possible, you're freezing in a tent wasting days into months: tailing-downward foodbank boxes, the TIDE(tm) pee-bottle, those el-cheapo dirty gloves with the tips cut off, dirty layered thriftstore fleeces, its under filthy roaring I-5 for you pal, and your ilk of dangerous insane addict-crazed zombies screaming outside your hideous blue-tarped tent, and where's the knife. The answer to the fundamental question of your entire existence and net worth has reduced to simply ask: "How do I best empty my bowels"? ICEstapo hunter/killers gunning for you, to flush you offshore unseen and forgotten forever. You better run, you better run your ass off. Why didn't you study harder all those wasted years?! Welcome to Sam Altman's Club.
EthanHeilman 1y ago
In my personal experience I've seen: - OCR eat a good chunk of data entry jobs, - Automated translation eat a number of translation jobs, - LLM have eaten quite a few tier I support roles. I don't have numbers tho, maybe people are still doing data entry or hiring translators on mechanical turk.
- jdietrich 1y ago
  Also illustrators, voiceover artists and customer service agents. Commercial photographers have seen their income from stock image services collapse and they are now seriously worried about the impact Nano Banana will have on work like product and fashion photography. The question is no longer whether AI will put people out of work, but how many and how quickly.
- torginus 1y ago
  I have a friend who used to do book translations. Due to some craftsman union rules, the minimum rate for translations has been set (and of course that's what everybody pays). Machine translation didn't decrease these rates, but they haven't been increased in 15 years, which made inflation completely eat it up. Initially machine translation was way worse (by professional standards) than people assumed, essentially useless, you had to rewrite everything. As time went on, and translation got better, the workflow shifted from doing it yourself to doing a machine pass, and rewriting it to be good enough. (Machine translation today is still just 'okay', not professional quality) On the initially set rates 15 years ago you could eke out a decent-ish salary (good even if you worked lots of hours and were fast). Today if you tried to do the work by hand, you'd starve to death.
  - torginus 1y ago
    Sorry for replying to my own comment but I had a separate thought - this is how I feel about LLMs today. While they help with programming, I feel like the scope of my tasks have increased over time as well. I feel like this is happening to me - I'm insanely more productive and my tech stack has increased hugely over the past two years as has my productivity. But I don't make significantly more money, or get a ton more recognition, it's just accepted.
Springtime 1y ago
I mean, I keep web pages about cases that previously used a human and have now been replaced with neural network models. Some of which include: - Translation. See: Gizmodo firing its Spanish translation team and switching exclusively to LLMs. - Editors. See Microsoft replacing their news editors at MSN with LLMs. - Customer service. Various examples around the world. - Article graphics for publications. See: The San Francisco Standard (which used it for various articles for a period), Bleepingcomputer.com, Hackaday (selectively, before some pushback). - Voice acting. The Finals game used synthetic voices for the announcer voices.
potato3732842 1y ago
I think a lot of clerical tasks where people are crossing defined things with other defined things that could be somewhat automated expensively before can be somewhat automated less expensively enough to be worth doing now. So jobs being killed by AI are basically being killed same way that office number crunching technology killed administrative assistant positions and put those tasks onto other people. Take for example a purchasing department for a big company. Some project needs widgets. Someone crosses the specs against what their suppliers make. They take the result of that and makes a judgement call. AI replaces that initial step so a team of N can now do the work that formerly took a team of N + Y. Bespoke software could have replaced that step too but it would have been more expensive, less flexible, etc, etc. since there's all this work required to make human facing content into machine parsable content, including the user's input and the juice simply wasn't worth the squeeze. With AI doing all that drudgery on an as-needed basis the juice now is worth the squeeze in some applications.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  Can the AI find alternative suppliers when your current ones go out of business or closes down production lines (even just for short term re-tooling)? Can AI negotiate when you get a big sale and need a huge production run? There are so many moving parts that a human juggles, more than what you list. All AI solutions seem like this. Automate the day to day duties of a job, when the real value of the person doing the jobs are much more than that. Maybe you can automate away 2 purchasing jobs down to 1, but what happens when that 1 person gets sick, when they go on vacation, when they retire/move to a better job? And the sick thing is that the company that tries to be smart longer term won't be able to compete with the short term companies that cut as much as possible using AI to maximize short term benefits. Long term these 'cut everything' AI leaning zombie companies won't last, but they will last long enough to undercut and take out the longer term thinking companies with them. AI is an entropy machine. It sucks all momentum from everything it touches.
  - cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
  - 1y ago

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.

SwtCyber 1y ago

We've definitely seen impact in areas like copywriting, customer service, and basic coding tasks, but it’s more nibbling at the edges than wholesale devouring

eatsyourtacos 1y ago

Well I'm part of a small few person team- I had a junior developer helping me who left. And I literally don't need someone like him anymore because I can do anything that he was doing via AI faster and better because it's under my control. I can have a 20 minute conversation and code revision that would have taken days for someone junior to code and would have probably been not done right (by 'right' I mean how I want it to be done, not necessarily wrong) To think the same isn't happening all over the place and will only continue is ignoring just how powerful this tech is.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago
And when you are out sick, can AI do his role? When you are on vacation, can AI do his role? When you leave, can AI at least help define/interview your replacement, like he could have, even if he's too junior to step into the role? There is so much else that people do. So many details that are just being ignored because of short term 'gains' that justify ignoring so many details.
- Sherveen 1y ago
  You aren't taking what he said seriously. The junior could also get sick, present management issues, etc. If this person plus a junior represented "1.3 engineering knots," he's saying... "actually, I'm still 1.3 engineering knots without him." When this person leaves, they go find someone else who is 1.3 engineering knots. The junior represented .3, without the 1., it doesn't matter that much. Headcount strategy shifts.
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    If your company can treat people as cogs this way, your company has zero value add/domain knowledge. A company's value is what it value adds, what domain knowledge/expertise it has, or cheapest price. If all you have is cheapest price, you will lose over time. You will be undercut. You won't have the domain knowledge to adapt, to see future changes coming down the path. So the company you talk about is already in the entropy vortex. It has no momentum. It has no future. It just hopes it can keep doing what it is doing now.

dfxm12 1y ago

Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000-layoffs-because-i-need-less-heads-with-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000...

lernedsomecode 1y ago
this stuff is all a cover from CEOs. We're in the middle of a downturn and they're pretending layoffs like this are due to AI so as not to spook investors.
halfmatthalfcat 1y ago
You have to trust they are actually telling the truth and not using it as a convenient scapegoat. What sounds better to shareholders “we’re replacing jobs with AI” or “we hired too many during the COVID hiring glut and need to lay more people off”?
- GoatInGrey 1y ago
  But what if I want the option that validates my untreated anxiety?
mattacular 1y ago
Does anybody really believe that SalesForce of all companies has successfully replaced 4000 real and necessary jobs with AI? Or is that more likely just an excuse to justify more layoffs in the tech industry for the usual reasons.
- jlarocco 1y ago
  It would be some kind of securities fraud for their CEO to say it to the media if it weren't at least partially true.
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    Doesn't have to be true, just needs to be unfalsifiable.

Spooky23 1y ago

It’s going to ramp. I have a team where 60% of the staff (6/10) is retiring in a year. Their function is around reconciling utilization and bills from multiple related suppliers with different internal stakeholders. They do a bunch of analysis and work with the internal stakeholders to optimize or migrate spend. It is high ROI for us, and the issue is both finding people with the right analytical and presentation skills and managing the toil of the “heavy” work. Basically, we’re able to train interns to do 80% of the processing work with LLM tooling. So we’re doing to promote two of the existing staff and replace 2/6 vacancies with entry level new grads, and use the unit to recruit talent and cycle them through. In terms of order of magnitude, we’ll save about $500k in payroll, spend $50k in services, and get same or better outcomes. Another example is we gave an L1 service desk manager Gemini and made him watch a YouTube video about statistics. He’s using it to analyze call statistics and understand how his business works without alot of math knowledge. For example, he looked at the times where the desk was at 95th percentile call volume and identified a few ways to time shift certain things to avoid the need for more agents or reduce overall wait times. All stuff that would require expensive talent and some sort of data analysis software… which frankly probably wouldn’t have been purchased. Thats the real AI story. Stupid business people are just firing people. The real magic is using the tools to make smart people smarter. If you work for a big company, giving Gemini or ChatGPT to motivated contracts and procurement teams would literally print money for you due to the stuff your folks are missing.

LargeWu 1y ago
If LLM-based tools were such a money printing machine with a big ROI, why would you ever want to downsize? Keep redirecting that excess human capacity into building bigger and better capabilities to generate more revenue. Hire cheap grads to do the work. Except it seems like the opposite is happening. CS grads have high unemployment. Companies laying off staff. The rhetoric doesn't seem to add up to the reality.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
And your company now won't progress. Won't have insight. Sure you can keep on keeping on, but that is all. You also farm out expertise instead of building it. AI is an entropy machine for everything it touches. Companies that runs off of AI is a zombie company. Without people to understand an industry, what does your company ad? Without people to see new revenue streams, new directions, and most importantly NEW RISKS to your business model, you are a dead zombie company living off what the previous living, growing company built. But does that matter to owners when they get $500,000 more a year in their pockets?

api 1y ago

The doomer stuff about AI is another kind of hype. We are at the top of the bubble hype cycle.

malfist 1y ago

Amazon won't hire junior engineers because of AI unless it's direct from a college pipeline, and even those jobs have shrunk significantly in number. Even opening an L4 (junior) role requires VP approval these days.

nilkn 1y ago

It's rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and large companies, generally, aren't even attempting that). Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc.

tristor 1y ago
> Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc. My observation so far has been that executive leadership believes things that are not true about AI and starts doing the cost-cutting measures now, without any of the productivity gains expected/promised, which is actually leading to a net productivity loss from AI expectations based on hype rather than AI realities. When you lose out on team size, can't hire people for necessary roles (some exec teams now won't hire unless the role is AI related), and don't backfill attrition, you end up with an organization that can't get things done as quickly, and productivity suffers, because the miracle of AI has yet to manifest meaningfully anywhere.
visarga 1y ago
> the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization AI alone can't do that, even if you make the weakest link in the chain stronger, there are probably more weak links. In a complex system the speed is controlled by the weakest, most inefficient link in the chain. To make an organization more efficient they need to do much more than use AI. Maybe AI exposes other inefficiencies.
torginus 1y ago
I mean one of the services at work had a custom HTML dashboard. We eliminated it and replaced it with Grafana. I worked on both - my skillset went from coding pretty bar charts in SVG + Javascript to configuring Grafana, Dockerfiles and Terraform templates. There's very little overlap between the two, other than general geekiness, but thanks I'm still doing OK.

dathinab 1y ago

entry "throw away, no skill" positions for programming are also kinda going away, or at least get collapsed to a small fraction of positions to be fair this positions never made that much sense as they tend to cause more trouble then they are helping on the long run, but they exist anyway and companies should know better then throwing away "junior, not yet skilled, but learning" positions (but then many small startups also are not used to/have the resources to teach juniors, which is a huge issue in the industry IMHO) but I imagine for many of the huge "we mainly hire from universities"/FANG companies it will turn into a "we need only senior engineers and hire juniors only to grow our own senior engineers", this means the moment to you growth takes too long/stagnates by whatever _arbitrary_ metric you get kicked out fast. And like with their hiring process they have the resources, scale, and number of people who want to work for them to be able to really use some arbitrary imperfect effective discriminatory metrics. Another aspect is that a lot of the day to day work of software engineering is really dump simple churn, and AI has the potential to massively cut down the time a developer needs to do that, so less developers needed especially in mid to low skill positions. Now the only luck devs have is that there is basically always more work which was cut due to time pressure but often isn't even supper low priority, so getting things done faster might luckily not map one to one to less jobs being available.

pingLost 1y ago
>> ..this means the moment your growth takes too long/stagnates by whatever _arbitrary_ metric: you get HR's glossy `Exit Packet' with a cover of a pristine chartered white catamaran on the translucent aquamarine Carribbean in a palm treed cove, afloat with bikini babes lounging on deck, five minutes to fill your cardboard box, and manhandled by two security wide-shouldered bulls squeezing your arms to your sides gripped under your forearms, marching you down the aisle with rubber-knecking wide-eyed heads watching you repeatedly slip, fall forward, the experienced bulls lowering your arms to regain your shoes' purchase with the carpet, hurriedly packing you into the elevator with silent ignominious stares and hushed whispers of those packed in around you, then past hot Tanya at Reception in front of every Tom, Dick, Irene, and Harry, out the main revolving glass door entrance, into the overcast dishwater grey and miserable wind blown wet in truth is Seattle, to the sidewalk, left at the curb -furthest from proper and successful glitterati as possible. All double-time haste, signalling to everyone get this despicable loser/criminal POS off the property, fast. Its over, you're done. Sooner than you thought possible, you're freezing in a tent wasting days into months: tailing-downward foodbank boxes, the TIDE(tm) pee-bottle, those el-cheapo dirty gloves with the tips cut off, dirty layered thriftstore fleeces, its under filthy roaring I-5 for you pal, and your ilk of dangerous insane addict-crazed zombies screaming outside your hideous blue-tarped tent, and where's the knife. The answer to the fundamental question of your entire existence and net worth has reduced to simply ask: "How do I best empty my bowels"? ICEstapo hunter/killers gunning for you, to flush you offshore unseen and forgotten forever. You better run, you better run your ass off. Why didn't you study harder all those wasted years?! Welcome to Sam Altman's Club.

EthanHeilman 1y ago

In my personal experience I've seen: - OCR eat a good chunk of data entry jobs, - Automated translation eat a number of translation jobs, - LLM have eaten quite a few tier I support roles. I don't have numbers tho, maybe people are still doing data entry or hiring translators on mechanical turk.

jdietrich 1y ago
Also illustrators, voiceover artists and customer service agents. Commercial photographers have seen their income from stock image services collapse and they are now seriously worried about the impact Nano Banana will have on work like product and fashion photography. The question is no longer whether AI will put people out of work, but how many and how quickly.
torginus 1y ago
I have a friend who used to do book translations. Due to some craftsman union rules, the minimum rate for translations has been set (and of course that's what everybody pays). Machine translation didn't decrease these rates, but they haven't been increased in 15 years, which made inflation completely eat it up. Initially machine translation was way worse (by professional standards) than people assumed, essentially useless, you had to rewrite everything. As time went on, and translation got better, the workflow shifted from doing it yourself to doing a machine pass, and rewriting it to be good enough. (Machine translation today is still just 'okay', not professional quality) On the initially set rates 15 years ago you could eke out a decent-ish salary (good even if you worked lots of hours and were fast). Today if you tried to do the work by hand, you'd starve to death.
- torginus 1y ago
  Sorry for replying to my own comment but I had a separate thought - this is how I feel about LLMs today. While they help with programming, I feel like the scope of my tasks have increased over time as well. I feel like this is happening to me - I'm insanely more productive and my tech stack has increased hugely over the past two years as has my productivity. But I don't make significantly more money, or get a ton more recognition, it's just accepted.

Springtime 1y ago

I mean, I keep web pages about cases that previously used a human and have now been replaced with neural network models. Some of which include: - Translation. See: Gizmodo firing its Spanish translation team and switching exclusively to LLMs. - Editors. See Microsoft replacing their news editors at MSN with LLMs. - Customer service. Various examples around the world. - Article graphics for publications. See: The San Francisco Standard (which used it for various articles for a period), Bleepingcomputer.com, Hackaday (selectively, before some pushback). - Voice acting. The Finals game used synthetic voices for the announcer voices.

potato3732842 1y ago

I think a lot of clerical tasks where people are crossing defined things with other defined things that could be somewhat automated expensively before can be somewhat automated less expensively enough to be worth doing now. So jobs being killed by AI are basically being killed same way that office number crunching technology killed administrative assistant positions and put those tasks onto other people. Take for example a purchasing department for a big company. Some project needs widgets. Someone crosses the specs against what their suppliers make. They take the result of that and makes a judgement call. AI replaces that initial step so a team of N can now do the work that formerly took a team of N + Y. Bespoke software could have replaced that step too but it would have been more expensive, less flexible, etc, etc. since there's all this work required to make human facing content into machine parsable content, including the user's input and the juice simply wasn't worth the squeeze. With AI doing all that drudgery on an as-needed basis the juice now is worth the squeeze in some applications.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago
Can the AI find alternative suppliers when your current ones go out of business or closes down production lines (even just for short term re-tooling)? Can AI negotiate when you get a big sale and need a huge production run? There are so many moving parts that a human juggles, more than what you list. All AI solutions seem like this. Automate the day to day duties of a job, when the real value of the person doing the jobs are much more than that. Maybe you can automate away 2 purchasing jobs down to 1, but what happens when that 1 person gets sick, when they go on vacation, when they retire/move to a better job? And the sick thing is that the company that tries to be smart longer term won't be able to compete with the short term companies that cut as much as possible using AI to maximize short term benefits. Long term these 'cut everything' AI leaning zombie companies won't last, but they will last long enough to undercut and take out the longer term thinking companies with them. AI is an entropy machine. It sucks all momentum from everything it touches.
- cindyllm 1y ago
  [dead]
- 1y ago