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People wouldn’t be anti-AI if they weren’t losing their livelihood over AI only to find that everything they thought they’d do while being unemployed is also be
by darth_avocado 10mo ago
People wouldn’t be anti-AI if they weren’t losing their livelihood over AI only to find that everything they thought they’d do while being unemployed is also being ruined by AI.
- satvikpendem 10mo ago[flagged]
- browningstreet 10mo ago4000 customer support people at Salesforce replaced by AI
- AndrewDucker 10mo agoWhich they now regret: https://maarthandam.com/2025/12/25/salesforce-regrets-firing-4000-staff-ai/ https://maarthandam.com/2025/12/25/salesforce-regrets-firing... (But you are correct that they did lay them off.)
- hu3 10mo ago> Which they now regret for now. being early can be the same thing as being wrong.
- satvikpendem 10mo ago> competently doing what the person did AI is not there yet to replace any person's job.
- E39M5S62 10mo agoTell that to translators.
- 12_throw_away 10mo ago> AI is not there yet to replace any person's job. This is of course true, but it has not actually prevented any layoffs. Management generally does not understand this, does not care, or is happy to have a pretext to fire a bunch of workers to make stock go up.
- tempodox 10mo agoWhich doesn’t stop profit-oriented decision makers from trying it anyway.
- layer8 10mo agoI know translators who did, they couldn’t make a living with it anymore.
- satvikpendem 10mo agoAI cannot do translators' jobs fully, these companies hire (or hire back) people who check the translation and fix mistakes.
- layer8 10mo agoThese review people already did exist before with human translations, and it’s also not their full-time job.
- satvikpendem 10mo agoFrom the few translators I know, they're expected to do it all, rather than having others to review as well. I don't know how it is in big companies but I don't understand why they'd have separate review people alongside translators, seems like redundant effort.
- layer8 10mo agoCompanies that commission translation routinely check the results, to make sure they receive the expected quality and that the domain-specific details are correct. They may check less once they gained confidence with a translator, but the same is true to some extent with LLMs. In any case, “reviewer of LLM translations” doesn’t exist as a full-time job to anywhere near the extent that “translator” used to be.
- satvikpendem 10mo agoThat makes sense from the client side and I wouldn't expect that's what people mean when they say translator jobs are being automated.
- darth_avocado 10mo ago> I have not heard of a single person actually losing their job to AI People are losing jobs to AI. It is in the form of layoffs so that companies can invest in AI, it is in the form of lower hiring of junior engineers because AI is supposed to do those jobs, it is in the form of silent reductions because less people are expected to do more using AI, it is in the form of entire job roles being replaced (customer success), it is in the form of second order market effects of reduced spending from people who lost their jobs, and much more.
- satvikpendem 10mo agoRead my comment again. They are not losing them to AI, they are losing them to all the other factors you mentioned, most of which are economic. There is no way that an LLM for example is fully capable of entirely replacing an individual human's job at this current point in time.
- darth_avocado 10mo agoRespectfully, you need to look at what I said. “People are losing jobs over AI…” My follow up expands on it. You are arguing that LLMs are not capable of entirely replacing a human’s job therefore people are not losing jobs over AI is extremely bad faith. If a machine in a factory automates 50% of a worker’s job, it still replaces half the workers. The factory won’t employ the same number of people and the people absolutely lost their jobs to automation.
- satvikpendem 10mo agoBut it's not AI they're losing jobs over, that's my point, because no AI can replicate a full human employee's work. They are losing their jobs over other indirect conditions like economic ones, if they even are which I don't see any actual evidence of beyond, as I said, ZIRP ending induced layoffs and similar.
- bloppe 10mo agohttps://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/06/dont-blame-ai-for-your-job-woes?giftId=NjkzM2U3NmItNGU5ZS00MDk1LWI0ZWYtNjNkMTY0ZjRkNWUy&utm_campaign=gifted_article https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/06/d... I'm sure you could argue endlessly about which factors are more important to more people, but overall employment does appear to be reverting to its longer-term trends after pandemic disruptions, and these kinds of corrections have historically impacted junior positions much more than senior positions.
- UncleMeat 10mo agoAt the very least, the bosses are trying to make it happen. I am regularly in meetings where my director or vp tells people that we should replace vendor staffing with AI and that we will get minimal engineering headcount because AI should make us more productive. Even if the bosses are wrong, we can still see the impulse and be pissed off about it.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoIn those meetings, ask the director when you're going to start replacing directors with AI. (I mean, this is terrible career advice, but it would point out the problem. Either AI is good enough to replace directors, or it isn't. If it is, then their jobs go too. If it's not, then it's probably not good enough to replace a lot of other peoples' jobs. But the problem is, the directors think that their jobs are so hard that they can't be done by AI, but everyone else's jobs are easy.)
- hackable_sand 10mo agoTechnologists are being deliberately misanthropic. Spreading hate, fear, causing death, and violating every social standard of consent while they do it. Something ugly has been grown in the bowels of the bay and it needs to stop.
- expedition32 10mo agoProbably quite a feel people on HN paying their mortgage with selling digital crack to kids. But with all technology eventually society catches up and the wild west is over.
- tempodox 10mo agoBy now, new forms of digital crack are being invented faster than lawmakers are able (or willing) to catch up with the previous forms. Yesterday, society and democracy were being destroyed by social media, today by “AI”. By the time the toxic effects of social media are being reined in (if ever), the forces of destruction will have moved on to “AI” or whatever comes after, in their efforts to concentrate wealth, power and influence in the hands of ever fewer people.
- ethbr1 10mo agoWasn't this the observation / tension at the heart of Mountainhead? The solution to this was representative democracy electing independently-minded technical experts, but electoral / parliamentary systems in many countries would need to change to make this viable. E.g. in the US, what percentage of Congress do you think could give even an accurate 100-level description of AI?
- renegade-otter 10mo agoIt's easy to "disrupt" and "change the world" when you are protected from the consequences by a wall of money.