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Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute

by twodave 10mo ago

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. 2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the overall software development process. Even if all my code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it written, I still have a full-time job.

somenameforme 10mo ago
Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything he could imagine, yet there was no radical shift in labor. We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires. He underestimated how many people were willing to designate the pursuit of wealth as the meaning of life itself. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics
- schmichael 10mo ago
  Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours. At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology. Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will reach workers as, if it does at all.
  - goatlover 10mo ago
    Failure of politics and the media then. Majority of voters have been fooled into voting against their economic interests.
  - anon7000 10mo ago
    > Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours I mean, that basically just sums up how capitalism works. Profit growth is literally (even legally!) the only thing a company can care about. Everything else, like product quality, pays service to that goal.
    - tirant 10mo ago
      That’s not a good summary of capitalism at all because you omit the part where interests of sellers and buyers align. Which is precisely what has made capitalism successful. Profit growth is based primarily on offering the product that best matches the consumer wish at the lowest price, and production cost possible. That benefits both the buyer and the seller. If the buyer does not care about product quality, then you will not have any company producing quality products. The market is just a reflection of that dinámica. And in the real world we can easily observed that: Many market niches are dominated by quality products (outdoor and safety gear, professional and industrial tools…) while others tend to be dominated by non-quality (low end fashion, toys). And that result is not imposed by profit growth but by the average consumer preference. You can of course disagree with those consumer preferences and don’t buy low quality products, that’s why you most probably also find high products in any market niche. But you cannot blame companies for that. What they sell is just the result of the aggregated buyers preferences and the result of free market decisions.
      - LtWorf 10mo ago
        Armies and pinkertons made capitalism succesfull.
    - timClicks 10mo ago
      Sorry if this is somewhat pedantic, but I believe that only US companies (and possibly only Delaware corporations?) are bound by the requirement to maximize shareholder value and then only by case law rather than statue. Other jurisdictions allow the directors more discretion, or place more weight on the company's constitution/charter.
- machomaster 10mo ago
  > We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires. We just instead started doing Bullshit Jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- thedailymail 10mo ago
  In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane. "There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."
  - somenameforme 10mo ago
    A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life", while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life philosophy as very important, and 82% viewing being financially well off as very important. It's rather unfortunate it only began in 1967, because I think we would see an even more extreme flip if we were able to just go back a decade or two more, and back towards Keynes' time. As productivity and wealth accumulation increased, society seems to have trended in the exact opposite direction he predicted. Or at least there's a contemporary paradox. Because I think many, if not most, younger people hold wealth accumulation with some degree of disdain yet also seek to do the exact same themselves. In any case, in a society where wealth is seen as literally the most important aspect in life, it's not difficult to predict what follows. [1] - https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph2016.pdf https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph20...
- azan_ 10mo ago
  > We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires. Didn’t we also get standards of living much higher than he would ever imagine? I think blaming everything on billionaires is really misguided and shallow.
  - somenameforme 10mo ago
    It depends on how you value things. I'd prefer to have a surplus of time and a scarcity of gizmos, rather than a surplus of gizmos and a scarcity of time. Obviously basic needs being met is very important, but we've moved way beyond that as a goal, while somehow also kind of simultaneously missing it.
enduser 10mo ago
This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to automate everything will be out-competed by companies/countries that use humans and robots together to maximum effect.
- vlovich123 10mo ago
  I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - baq 10mo ago
    Humans still play chess and horses are still around as a species. (Disclaimer: this is me trying to be optimistic in a very grim and depressing situation)
    - skissane 10mo ago
      B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs, then most of the population-minus the small minority who are independently wealthy and can live off their investments-go broke, and can’t afford to buy anything any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the independently wealthy lose all their investments and go broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills any more, so the AIs get turned off. And that’s why across-the-board AI-induced job losses aren’t going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren’t stupid enough to blow everything up because they don’t want to be blown up in the process. And if they actually are stupid enough, politicians will intervene with human protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans in the loop of major business processes. The horse comparison ultimately doesn’t work because horses don’t vote.
shaka-bear-tree 10mo ago
Funny the original post doesn’t mention AI replacing the coding part of his job. There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it. I want to be be optimistic. But it’s hard to ignore what I’m doing and seeing. As far as I can tell, we haven’t hit serious unemployment yet because of momentum and slow adoption. I’m not replying to argue, I hope you are right. But I look around and can’t shake the feeling of Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair waiting for gravity to kick in.
- zwnow 10mo ago
  > There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it. Any sources on that? Except for some big tech companies I dont see that happening at all. While not empirical most devs I know try to avoid it like the plague. I cant imagine that many devs actually jumped on the hype train to replace themselves...
  - tormeh 10mo ago
    This is what I also see. AI is used sparingly. Mostly for information lookup and autocomplete. It's just not good enough for other things. I could use it to write code if I really babysit it and triple check everything it does? Cool cool, maybe sometime later.
    - kakacik 10mo ago
      Who does typical code sweat shops churning out one smallish app at a time and quickly moving on? Certainly not your typical company-hired permanent dev, they (us) drown in tons of complex legacy code that keeps working for past 10-20 years and company sees no reason to throw it away. Those folks that do churn out such apps, for them its great & horrible long term. For folks like me development is maybe 10% of my work, and by far the best part - creative, problem-solving, stimulating, actually learning myself. Why would I want to mildly optimize that 10% and loose all the good stuff, while speed wouldn't visibly even improve? To really improve speed in bigger orgs, the change would have to happen in processes, office politics, management priorities and so on. No help of llms there, if anything trend-chasing managers just introduce more chaos with negative consequences.
frchalli 10mo ago
> The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. There were many secretaries up until the late 20th century that took dictation, either writing notes of what they were told or from a recording, then they typed it out and distributed memos. At first, there were many people typing, then later mimeograph machines took away some of those jobs, then copying machines made that faster, then printers reduced the need for the manual copying, then email reduced the need to print something out, and now instant messaging reduces email clutter and keep messages shorter. All along that timeline there were fewer and fewer people involved, all for the valuable task of communication. While they may not have held these people in high esteem, they were critical for getting things done and scaling. I’m not saying LLMs are perfect or will replace every job. They make mistakes, and they always will; it’s part of what they are. But, as useful as people are today, the roles we serve in will go away and be replaced by something else, even if it’s just to indicate at various times during the day what is or isn’t pleasing.
- piekvorst 10mo ago
  The crucial observation is the fact that automation has historically been a net creator of jobs, not destroyer.
  - zarzavat 10mo ago
    Sure, if you're content to stack shelves. AI isn't automation. It's thinking. It automates the brain out of human jobs. You can still get a job that requires a body. My job doesn't require a body, so I'm screwed. If you're say, a surgeon or a plumber, you're in a better place.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ForHackernews 10mo ago
      Yes, AI is automation. It automates the implementation. It doesn't (yet?) automate the hard parts around figuring out what work needs to be done and how to do it. The sad thing is that for many software devs, the implementation is the fun bit.
Den_VR 10mo ago
If there’s more work than resources, then is that low value work or is there a reason the business is unable to increase resources? AI as a race to the bottom may be productive but not sure it will be societally good.
- twodave 10mo ago
  Not low-value or it just wouldn't be on the board. Lower value? Maybe, but there are many, many reasons things get pushed down the backlog. As many reasons as there are kinds of companies. Most people don't work at one of the big tech companies where work priorities and business value are so stratified. There are businesses that experience seasonality, so many of the R&D activities get put on the backburner until the busy season is over. There are businesses that have high correctness standards, where bigger changes require more scrutiny, are harder to fit into a sprint, and end up getting passed over for smaller tasks. And some businesses just require a lot of contextual knowledge. I wouldn't trust an AI to do a payroll calculation or tabulate votes, for instance, any more than I would trust a brand new employee to dive into the deep end on those tasks.
hn_throwaway_99 10mo ago
I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow, linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier technology (or "horses" in this case), happens very quickly - it's the tipping point at which the old tech surpasses the new. For some reason I thought of Hemingway's old adage "How did you go bankrupt? - Slowly at first, then all at once." I agree with all the limitations you've written about the current state of AI and LLMs. But the fact is that the tech behind AI and LLMs never really gets worse. I also agree that just scaling and more compute will probably be a dead end, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that progress will still happen even when/if those barriers are broadly realized. Unless you really believe human brains have some sort of "secret special sauce" (and, FWIW, I think it's possible - the ability of consciousness/sentience to arise from "dumb matter" is something that I don't think scientists have adequately explained or even really theorized), the steady progress of AI should, eventually, surpass human capabilities, and when it does, it will happen "all at once".
- pcrh 10mo ago
  For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was much slower than you might expect. The model T Ford motor car reached peak production in 1925 [0], and for an inexact comparison (I couldn't find numbers for the US) the horse population of France started to decline in 1935, but didn't drop below 80% of its historical peak until the late 1940's down to 10% of its peak by the 1970's [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Mass_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Mass_production [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/
  - throw9384940 10mo ago
    Frech eat horse meat. Cattle is still present in US...
  - hn_throwaway_99 10mo ago
reeredfdfdf 10mo ago
"The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value." I wish corporations really acted this rationally. At least where I live hospitals fired most secretaries and assistants to doctors a long time ago. The end result? High-paid doctors spending significant portion of their time on administrative and bureaucratic tasks that were previously handled by those secretaries, preventing them from seeing as many patients as they otherwise would. Cost savings may look good on spreadsheet, but really the overall efficiency of the system suffered.
- kylinhacker 10mo ago
  I'm a full-stack developer, Recently i find that almost 90% of my work deadlines have been brought forward, and the bosses' scheduling has become stricter. the coworker who is particularly good at pair programming with AI prefers to reduce his/her scheduling(kind of unconsciously)。Work is sudden，but salary remains steady。what a bummer
- ehnto 10mo ago
  That's what I see when companies cut juniors as well. AI cannot replace a junior because a junior has full and complete agency, accountability, and purpose. They retain learning and become a sharper bespoke resource for the business as time goes on. The PM tells them what to do and I give them guidance. If you take away the juniors, you are now asking your seniors to do that work instead which is more expensive and wasteful. The PM cannot tell the AI junior what to do for they don't know how. Then you say, hey we also want you to babysit the LLM to increase productivity, well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to it tomorrow. Now I am wasting two types of time.
  - jack_pp 10mo ago
    > well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to it tomorrow You could actually just do that, leave an agent on a problem you would give a junior, go back on your main task and whenever you feel like it check the agent's work.
    - 10mo ago
retinaros 10mo ago
Most of corporate people dont provide direct value…
gniv 10mo ago
> most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks This is very important yet rarely talked about. Having worked in a well-run group on a very successful product I could see that no matter how many people would be on a project there was alway too much work. And always too many projects. I am no longer with the company but I can see some of the ideas talked about back then being launched now, many years later. For a complex product there is always more to do and AI would simply accelerate development.
MLgulabio 10mo ago
[dead]
ben_w 10mo ago
> 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. They have more work to do until they don't. The number of bank tellers went up for a while after the invention of the ATM, but then it went down, because all the demand was saturated. We still need food, farming hasn't stopped being a thing, nevertheless we went from 80-95% of us working in agriculture and fishing to about 1-5%, and even with just those percentages working in that sector we have more people over-eating than under-eating. As this transition happened, people were unemployed, they did move to cities to find work, there were real social problems caused by this. It happened at the same time that cottage industries were getting automated, hand looms becoming power-looms, weaving becoming programmable with punch cards. This is why communism was invented when it was invented, why it became popular when it did. And now we have fast-fashion, with clothes so fragile that they might not last one wash, and yet still spend a lower percentage of our incomes on clothes than the pre-industrial age did. Even when demand is boosted by having clothes that don't last, we still make enough to supply demand. Lumberjacks still exist despite chainsaws, and are so efficient with them that the problem is we may run out of rainforests. Are there any switchboard operators around any more, in the original sense? If I read this right, the BLS groups them together with "Answering Service", and I'm not sure how this other group then differs from a customer support line: https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes432011.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes432011.htm > 2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the overall software development process. Even if all my code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it written, I still have a full-time job. This would be absolutely correct — I've made the analogy to Amdahl's law myself previously — if LLMs didn't also do so many of the other things. I mean, the linked blog post is about answering new-starter questions, which is also not the only thing people get paid to do. Now, don't get me wrong, I accept the limitations of all the current models. I'm currently fairly skeptical that the line will continue to go up as it has been for very much longer… but "very much longer" in this case is 1-2 years, room for 2-4 doublings on the METR metric. Also, I expect LLMs to be worse at project management than at writing code, because code quality can be improved by self-play and reading compiler errors, whereas PM has slower feedback. So I do expect "manage the AI" to be a job for much longer than "write code by hand". But at the same time, you absolutely can use an LLM to be a PM. I bet all the PMs will be able to supply anecdotes about LLMs screwing up just like all the rest of us can, but it's still a job task that this generation of AI is still automating at the same time as all the other bits.

by twodave 10mo ago

somenameforme 10mo ago

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything he could imagine, yet there was no radical shift in labor. We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires. He underestimated how many people were willing to designate the pursuit of wealth as the meaning of life itself. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics

schmichael 10mo ago
Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours. At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology. Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will reach workers as, if it does at all.
- goatlover 10mo ago
  Failure of politics and the media then. Majority of voters have been fooled into voting against their economic interests.
- anon7000 10mo ago
  > Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours I mean, that basically just sums up how capitalism works. Profit growth is literally (even legally!) the only thing a company can care about. Everything else, like product quality, pays service to that goal.
  - tirant 10mo ago
    That’s not a good summary of capitalism at all because you omit the part where interests of sellers and buyers align. Which is precisely what has made capitalism successful. Profit growth is based primarily on offering the product that best matches the consumer wish at the lowest price, and production cost possible. That benefits both the buyer and the seller. If the buyer does not care about product quality, then you will not have any company producing quality products. The market is just a reflection of that dinámica. And in the real world we can easily observed that: Many market niches are dominated by quality products (outdoor and safety gear, professional and industrial tools…) while others tend to be dominated by non-quality (low end fashion, toys). And that result is not imposed by profit growth but by the average consumer preference. You can of course disagree with those consumer preferences and don’t buy low quality products, that’s why you most probably also find high products in any market niche. But you cannot blame companies for that. What they sell is just the result of the aggregated buyers preferences and the result of free market decisions.
    - LtWorf 10mo ago
      Armies and pinkertons made capitalism succesfull.
  - timClicks 10mo ago
    Sorry if this is somewhat pedantic, but I believe that only US companies (and possibly only Delaware corporations?) are bound by the requirement to maximize shareholder value and then only by case law rather than statue. Other jurisdictions allow the directors more discretion, or place more weight on the company's constitution/charter.
machomaster 10mo ago
> We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires. We just instead started doing Bullshit Jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
thedailymail 10mo ago
In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane. "There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."
- somenameforme 10mo ago
  A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life", while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life philosophy as very important, and 82% viewing being financially well off as very important. It's rather unfortunate it only began in 1967, because I think we would see an even more extreme flip if we were able to just go back a decade or two more, and back towards Keynes' time. As productivity and wealth accumulation increased, society seems to have trended in the exact opposite direction he predicted. Or at least there's a contemporary paradox. Because I think many, if not most, younger people hold wealth accumulation with some degree of disdain yet also seek to do the exact same themselves. In any case, in a society where wealth is seen as literally the most important aspect in life, it's not difficult to predict what follows. [1] - https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph2016.pdf https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph20...
azan_ 10mo ago
> We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires. Didn’t we also get standards of living much higher than he would ever imagine? I think blaming everything on billionaires is really misguided and shallow.
- somenameforme 10mo ago
  It depends on how you value things. I'd prefer to have a surplus of time and a scarcity of gizmos, rather than a surplus of gizmos and a scarcity of time. Obviously basic needs being met is very important, but we've moved way beyond that as a goal, while somehow also kind of simultaneously missing it.

enduser 10mo ago

This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to automate everything will be out-competed by companies/countries that use humans and robots together to maximum effect.

vlovich123 10mo ago
I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- baq 10mo ago
  Humans still play chess and horses are still around as a species. (Disclaimer: this is me trying to be optimistic in a very grim and depressing situation)
  - skissane 10mo ago
    B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs, then most of the population-minus the small minority who are independently wealthy and can live off their investments-go broke, and can’t afford to buy anything any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the independently wealthy lose all their investments and go broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills any more, so the AIs get turned off. And that’s why across-the-board AI-induced job losses aren’t going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren’t stupid enough to blow everything up because they don’t want to be blown up in the process. And if they actually are stupid enough, politicians will intervene with human protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans in the loop of major business processes. The horse comparison ultimately doesn’t work because horses don’t vote.

shaka-bear-tree 10mo ago

Funny the original post doesn’t mention AI replacing the coding part of his job. There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it. I want to be be optimistic. But it’s hard to ignore what I’m doing and seeing. As far as I can tell, we haven’t hit serious unemployment yet because of momentum and slow adoption. I’m not replying to argue, I hope you are right. But I look around and can’t shake the feeling of Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair waiting for gravity to kick in.

zwnow 10mo ago
> There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it. Any sources on that? Except for some big tech companies I dont see that happening at all. While not empirical most devs I know try to avoid it like the plague. I cant imagine that many devs actually jumped on the hype train to replace themselves...
- tormeh 10mo ago
  This is what I also see. AI is used sparingly. Mostly for information lookup and autocomplete. It's just not good enough for other things. I could use it to write code if I really babysit it and triple check everything it does? Cool cool, maybe sometime later.
  - kakacik 10mo ago
    Who does typical code sweat shops churning out one smallish app at a time and quickly moving on? Certainly not your typical company-hired permanent dev, they (us) drown in tons of complex legacy code that keeps working for past 10-20 years and company sees no reason to throw it away. Those folks that do churn out such apps, for them its great & horrible long term. For folks like me development is maybe 10% of my work, and by far the best part - creative, problem-solving, stimulating, actually learning myself. Why would I want to mildly optimize that 10% and loose all the good stuff, while speed wouldn't visibly even improve? To really improve speed in bigger orgs, the change would have to happen in processes, office politics, management priorities and so on. No help of llms there, if anything trend-chasing managers just introduce more chaos with negative consequences.

frchalli 10mo ago

> The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. There were many secretaries up until the late 20th century that took dictation, either writing notes of what they were told or from a recording, then they typed it out and distributed memos. At first, there were many people typing, then later mimeograph machines took away some of those jobs, then copying machines made that faster, then printers reduced the need for the manual copying, then email reduced the need to print something out, and now instant messaging reduces email clutter and keep messages shorter. All along that timeline there were fewer and fewer people involved, all for the valuable task of communication. While they may not have held these people in high esteem, they were critical for getting things done and scaling. I’m not saying LLMs are perfect or will replace every job. They make mistakes, and they always will; it’s part of what they are. But, as useful as people are today, the roles we serve in will go away and be replaced by something else, even if it’s just to indicate at various times during the day what is or isn’t pleasing.

piekvorst 10mo ago
The crucial observation is the fact that automation has historically been a net creator of jobs, not destroyer.
- zarzavat 10mo ago
  Sure, if you're content to stack shelves. AI isn't automation. It's thinking. It automates the brain out of human jobs. You can still get a job that requires a body. My job doesn't require a body, so I'm screwed. If you're say, a surgeon or a plumber, you're in a better place.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ForHackernews 10mo ago
    Yes, AI is automation. It automates the implementation. It doesn't (yet?) automate the hard parts around figuring out what work needs to be done and how to do it. The sad thing is that for many software devs, the implementation is the fun bit.

Den_VR 10mo ago

If there’s more work than resources, then is that low value work or is there a reason the business is unable to increase resources? AI as a race to the bottom may be productive but not sure it will be societally good.

twodave 10mo ago
Not low-value or it just wouldn't be on the board. Lower value? Maybe, but there are many, many reasons things get pushed down the backlog. As many reasons as there are kinds of companies. Most people don't work at one of the big tech companies where work priorities and business value are so stratified. There are businesses that experience seasonality, so many of the R&D activities get put on the backburner until the busy season is over. There are businesses that have high correctness standards, where bigger changes require more scrutiny, are harder to fit into a sprint, and end up getting passed over for smaller tasks. And some businesses just require a lot of contextual knowledge. I wouldn't trust an AI to do a payroll calculation or tabulate votes, for instance, any more than I would trust a brand new employee to dive into the deep end on those tasks.

hn_throwaway_99 10mo ago

I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow, linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier technology (or "horses" in this case), happens very quickly - it's the tipping point at which the old tech surpasses the new. For some reason I thought of Hemingway's old adage "How did you go bankrupt? - Slowly at first, then all at once." I agree with all the limitations you've written about the current state of AI and LLMs. But the fact is that the tech behind AI and LLMs never really gets worse. I also agree that just scaling and more compute will probably be a dead end, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that progress will still happen even when/if those barriers are broadly realized. Unless you really believe human brains have some sort of "secret special sauce" (and, FWIW, I think it's possible - the ability of consciousness/sentience to arise from "dumb matter" is something that I don't think scientists have adequately explained or even really theorized), the steady progress of AI should, eventually, surpass human capabilities, and when it does, it will happen "all at once".

pcrh 10mo ago
For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was much slower than you might expect. The model T Ford motor car reached peak production in 1925 [0], and for an inexact comparison (I couldn't find numbers for the US) the horse population of France started to decline in 1935, but didn't drop below 80% of its historical peak until the late 1940's down to 10% of its peak by the 1970's [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Mass_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Mass_production [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/
- throw9384940 10mo ago
  Frech eat horse meat. Cattle is still present in US...
- hn_throwaway_99 10mo ago

reeredfdfdf 10mo ago

"The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value." I wish corporations really acted this rationally. At least where I live hospitals fired most secretaries and assistants to doctors a long time ago. The end result? High-paid doctors spending significant portion of their time on administrative and bureaucratic tasks that were previously handled by those secretaries, preventing them from seeing as many patients as they otherwise would. Cost savings may look good on spreadsheet, but really the overall efficiency of the system suffered.

kylinhacker 10mo ago
I'm a full-stack developer, Recently i find that almost 90% of my work deadlines have been brought forward, and the bosses' scheduling has become stricter. the coworker who is particularly good at pair programming with AI prefers to reduce his/her scheduling(kind of unconsciously)。Work is sudden，but salary remains steady。what a bummer
ehnto 10mo ago
That's what I see when companies cut juniors as well. AI cannot replace a junior because a junior has full and complete agency, accountability, and purpose. They retain learning and become a sharper bespoke resource for the business as time goes on. The PM tells them what to do and I give them guidance. If you take away the juniors, you are now asking your seniors to do that work instead which is more expensive and wasteful. The PM cannot tell the AI junior what to do for they don't know how. Then you say, hey we also want you to babysit the LLM to increase productivity, well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to it tomorrow. Now I am wasting two types of time.
- jack_pp 10mo ago
  > well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to it tomorrow You could actually just do that, leave an agent on a problem you would give a junior, go back on your main task and whenever you feel like it check the agent's work.
  - 10mo ago

retinaros 10mo ago

Most of corporate people dont provide direct value…

gniv 10mo ago

> most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks This is very important yet rarely talked about. Having worked in a well-run group on a very successful product I could see that no matter how many people would be on a project there was alway too much work. And always too many projects. I am no longer with the company but I can see some of the ideas talked about back then being launched now, many years later. For a complex product there is always more to do and AI would simply accelerate development.

MLgulabio 10mo ago

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ben_w 10mo ago

> 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. They have more work to do until they don't. The number of bank tellers went up for a while after the invention of the ATM, but then it went down, because all the demand was saturated. We still need food, farming hasn't stopped being a thing, nevertheless we went from 80-95% of us working in agriculture and fishing to about 1-5%, and even with just those percentages working in that sector we have more people over-eating than under-eating. As this transition happened, people were unemployed, they did move to cities to find work, there were real social problems caused by this. It happened at the same time that cottage industries were getting automated, hand looms becoming power-looms, weaving becoming programmable with punch cards. This is why communism was invented when it was invented, why it became popular when it did. And now we have fast-fashion, with clothes so fragile that they might not last one wash, and yet still spend a lower percentage of our incomes on clothes than the pre-industrial age did. Even when demand is boosted by having clothes that don't last, we still make enough to supply demand. Lumberjacks still exist despite chainsaws, and are so efficient with them that the problem is we may run out of rainforests. Are there any switchboard operators around any more, in the original sense? If I read this right, the BLS groups them together with "Answering Service", and I'm not sure how this other group then differs from a customer support line: https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes432011.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes432011.htm > 2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the overall software development process. Even if all my code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it written, I still have a full-time job. This would be absolutely correct — I've made the analogy to Amdahl's law myself previously — if LLMs didn't also do so many of the other things. I mean, the linked blog post is about answering new-starter questions, which is also not the only thing people get paid to do. Now, don't get me wrong, I accept the limitations of all the current models. I'm currently fairly skeptical that the line will continue to go up as it has been for very much longer… but "very much longer" in this case is 1-2 years, room for 2-4 doublings on the METR metric. Also, I expect LLMs to be worse at project management than at writing code, because code quality can be improved by self-play and reading compiler errors, whereas PM has slower feedback. So I do expect "manage the AI" to be a job for much longer than "write code by hand". But at the same time, you absolutely can use an LLM to be a PM. I bet all the PMs will be able to supply anecdotes about LLMs screwing up just like all the rest of us can, but it's still a job task that this generation of AI is still automating at the same time as all the other bits.