17 ms·

I'm not worried about AI job loss

• Flavius 8mo ago
  Maybe you should be a little worried. A healthy fear never killed anyone.
  • mudil 8mo ago
    "For quality of life, it is better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong, rather than a pessimist and right." -Elon Musk
    • RIMR 8mo ago
      Optimism is a luxury for those who won't be the ones paying for the mistake.
      • irishcoffee 8mo ago
        I'm optimistic that my favorite team will play well this season. I ain't paying for shit.
    • yifanl 8mo ago
      Profound quotes are only profound when said by someone who's widely respected.
      • snigsnog 8mo ago
        How many multi billion dollar companies have you founded?
        • yifanl 8mo ago
          Publicly traded ones? As many as Elon, why do you ask?
    • yoyohello13 8mo ago
      Is that true? I’m not so sure. In the 1950s I could have been optimistic that asbestos won’t give people cancer. “Some of you may die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to make” -also Elon Mush probably
    • theshackleford 8mo ago
      If only I took life advice from ketamine junkies.
  • podgietaru 8mo ago
    I mean - anxiety definitely kills people, right?
    • paulryanrogers 8mo ago
      Is it "healthy fear" if it turns out to be a fatal dose?
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• simonw 8mo ago
  I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further. And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403 https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403 It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.
  • camillomiller 8mo ago
    Well the zeitgeist is that our brains are so fried that such piece of mediocre writing penned by a GPT-container startupper can surge to the top
  • kerblang 8mo ago
    Let me get something straight: That essay was completely fake, right? He/It was lying about everything, and it was some sort of... what? Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading? Have we now transitioned to a point where we gaslight everyone for the hell of it just because we can, and call it, what, thought-provoking?
    • coffeefirst 8mo ago
      Yes. It’s an ad for his product, which nobody had heard of before. I’m not on twitter but I’m seeing it pretty much everywhere now.
    • hypfer 8mo ago
      > Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading? Those numbers are likely greatly exaggerated. Twitter is nowhere near where it was at its peak. You could almost call it a ghost town. Linkedin but for unhinged crypto- and AI bros. I'm sure the metrics report 80 million views, but that's not 80 million actual individuals that cared about it. The narrative just needs these numbers to get people to buy into the hype.
    • Kiro 8mo ago
      What was fake? I don't see anything controversial or factually wrong. I question the prediction but that's his opinion.
• RIMR 8mo ago
  > it’s been viewed about 100 million times and counting That's a weird way of saying 80 million times.
• 6380176 8mo ago
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• ddtaylor 8mo ago
  Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away. Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics. Let's be charitable and assume that this type of fast food worker gets paid $50,000 a year. For that job to be displaced it needs to be performed by a robot that can be acquired for a reasonable capital expenditure such as $200,000 and requires no maintenance, upkeep, or subscription fees. This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer. The reality is that they pay service technicians and professionals a lot of money to keep that equipment barely working.
  • password54321 8mo ago
    >the most unskilled labor People are worried about white-collar not blue-collar jobs being replaced. Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI.
    • Morromist 8mo ago
      Yeah, although in the "Something big is happening" Shumer did say at the end "Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects." Being the hype-man that he is I assume he meant humanoid robots - I think he's being silly here, and the sentence made me roll my eyes.
      • beeflet 8mo ago
        what difference does it make if the robots are humanoid or not? It merely reflects the designer's willingness to engage in sci-fi tropes.
    • ddtaylor 8mo ago
• nphardon 8mo ago
  (In the semiconductor industry) We experienced brutal layoffs arguably due to over-investment into Ai products that produce no revenue. So we've had brutal job loss due to Ai, just not in the way people expected. Having said that, it's hard to imagine jobs like mine (working on np-complete problems) existing if the LLMs continue advancing at the current rate, and its hard to imagine they wont continue to accelerate since they're writing themselves now, so the limitations of human ability are no longer a bottleneck.
  • Jianghong94 8mo ago
    Maybe I'm being naive here, but for AI (heck, for any good algorithm) to work well, you need some at least loosely-clearly defined objectives. I assume it's much more straightforward in semi, but there're many industries, once you get into the details, all kinds of incentives start to disalign and I doubt AI could understand all kinds of nuances. E.g. once I was tasked to build a new matching algorithm for a trading platform, and upon fully understanding of the specs I realized it can be interpreted as a mixed integer programming problem; the idea got shot down right away because PM don't understand it. There're all kinds of limiting factors once you get into the details.
    • gmadsen 8mo ago
      I think those conversations occur due to changes in timeline of deliverables or certainty of result, would that not be an implementation detail?
      • Jianghong94 8mo ago
        Well, like I said, there're hidden incentives behind the scene; in my case, the hidden incentive is that, the requester/client is one of the company's subpar broker, and PM probably decided to just offer an average level of commitment, not going above and beyond. Hence the plan was to do exactly what the broker want even though that was messy and inferior. You can't just write down that kind of motivation on paper anywhere. --- I said it because I did the analysis, and realized that if I implement the original version, which basically is a crazy way to iteratively solve the MIP problem, it's much harder to reason with internally, and much harder to code correctly. But obviously it keep the broker happy (the developer is doing exactly what I said)
• Davidzheng 8mo ago
  No it's not a February 2020 moment for sure. In February 2020, most people had heard of COVID and a few scattered outbreaks happened, but people generally viewed the topic as more of a curiosity (like major world news but not necessarily something that will deeply impact them). This is more like start of March 2020 for general awareness.
• trilogic 8mo ago
  You are not worrried for one of the 2 reasons: 1 You are not affected somehow (you got savings, connections, not living paycheck to paycheck, and have food on the table). 2 You prefer to persue no troubles in matters of complexity. Time will tell, is showing it already.
  • ares623 8mo ago
    For 1, unless you already have an self-sustaining underground bunker or island, you will be affected. No matter how much savings and total compensation you have. If you went out to get grocery in the last week, it will affect you.
    • 7777332215 8mo ago
      What shall I need the bunker for?
      • meindnoch 8mo ago
        Don't worry about it.
    • small_model 8mo ago
      You can get stuff delivered now and just need a ring camera and solid locks :)
      • ares623 8mo ago
        Delivered by other people in the same financial situation as you of course :)
  • stephenpontes 8mo ago
    Agree. I feel like most of the people sounding the alarm have been in the software-focused job hunting market for 6+ months. Those who downplay it are either business owners themselves or have been employed for 2+ years. I think a lot of software engineers who _haven't_ looked for jobs in the past few years don't quite realize what the current market feels like.
• gordonhart 8mo ago
  Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a functioning product.
  • malyk 8mo ago
    Can you give an example to help us understand? I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.
    • contagiousflow 8mo ago
      Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything
      • fishpham 8mo ago
        As always, the limit is human bandwidth. But that's basically what AI-forward companies are doing now. I would be curious which tasks OP commenter has that couldn't be done by an agent (assuming they're a SWE)
        • Analemma_ 8mo ago
          This sounds bogus to me: if AI really could close 100% of your backlog with just a couple more humans in the loop, you’d hire a bunch of temps/contractors to do that, then declare the product done and lay off everybody. How come that isn’t happening?
          • fishpham 8mo ago
• Nevermark 8mo ago
  > Bottlenecks rule everything around me The self-setup here is too obvious. This is exactly why man + machine can be much worse than just machine. A strong argument needs to address what we can do as an extremely slow operating, slow learning, and slow adapting species, that machines that improve in ability and efficiency monthly and annually will find they cannot do well or without. It is clear that we are going through a disruptive change, but COVUD is not comparable. Job loss is likely to have statistics more comparable to the Black Plague. And sensible people are concerned it could get much worse. I don’t have the answers, but acknowledging and facing the uncertainty head on won’t make things worse.
  • Morromist 8mo ago
    I belive the black plague actually caused a massive labor shortage and wages increased. When a huge amount of people die and you still need to have people build bridges and be soldiers and finish building the damn cathedral that's been under construction for the last 400 years then that is what will happen. Here's an article: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...
    • Nevermark 8mo ago
      I meant the jobs die. So I am not sure what would stand in for "labor shortage" in a situation of sustained net job losses. Perhaps a growth opportunity for mannequins to visually fill the offices/shops of the fired, and maintain appearances? But yes, if lots of people deathed by AI, the remaining humans might have more job security! Could that be called a "soft landing"?
      • Morromist 8mo ago
        Ahh I see what you mean.
  • throwaway0123_5 8mo ago
    > Job loss is likely to have statistics more comparable to the Black Plague. Maybe this is overly optimistic, but if AI starts to have negative impacts on average people comparable to the plague, it seems like there's a lot more that people can do. In medieval Europe, nobody knew what was causing the plague and nobody knew how to stop it. On the other hand, if AI quickly replaces half of all jobs, it will be very obvious what and who caused the job loss and associated decrease in living standards. Everybody will have someone they care about affected. AI job loss would quickly eclipse all other political concerns. And at the end of the day, AI can be unplugged (barring robot armies or Elon's space-based data centers I suppose).
• lcfcjs6 8mo ago
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• mjr00 8mo ago
  I'm one of those developers who is now writing probably ~80% of my code via Claude. For context, I have >15 years experience and former AWS so I'm not a bright-eyed junior or former product manager who now believes themselves a master developer. I'm not worried about AI job loss in the programming space. I can use Claude to generate ~80% of my code precisely because I have so much experience as a developer. I intuitively know what is a simple mechanical change; that is to say, uninteresting editing of lines of code; as opposed to a major architectural decision. Claude is great at doing uninteresting things. I love it because that leaves me free to do interesting things. You might think I'm being cocky. But I've been strongly encouraging juniors to use Claude as well, and they're not nearly as successful. When Claude suggests they do something dumb--and it DOES still suggest dumb things--they can't recognize that it's dumb. So they accept the change, then bang their head on the wall as things don't work, and Claude can't figure it out to help them. Then there are bad developers who are really fucked by Claude. The ones who really don't understand anything. They will absolutely get destroyed as Claude leads them down rabbit holes. I have specific anecdotes about this from people I've spoken to. One had Claude delete a critical line in an nginx config for some reason and the dev spent a week trying to resolve it. Another was tasked with doing a simple database maintenance script, and came back two weeks later (after constant prodding by teammates for a status update) with a Claude-written reimplementation of an ORM. That developer just thought they would need another day of churning through Claude tokens to dig themselves out of an existential hole. If you can't think like a developer, these tools won't help you. I have enough experience to review Claude's output and say "no, this doesn't make sense." Having that experience is critical, especially in what I call the "anti-Goldilocks" zone. If you're doing something precise and small-scoped, Claude will do it without issues. If you try to do something too large ("write a Facebook for dogs app") Claude will ask for more details about what you're trying to do. It's the middle ground where things are a problem: Claude tries to fill in the details when there's something just fundamentally wrong with what it's being asked. As a concrete example, I was working on a new project and I asked Claude to implement an RPC to update a database table. It did so swimmingly, but also added a "session.commit()" line... just kind in the middle of somewhere. It was right to do so, of course, since the transaction needed to be committed. And if this app was meant to a prototype, sure. But anyone with experience knows that randomly doing commits in the middle of business logic code is a recipe for disaster. The issue, of course, was not having any consistent session management patterns. But a non-developer isn't going to recognize that that's an issue in the first place. Or a more silly example from the same RPC: the gRPC API didn't include a database key to update. A mistake on my part. So Claude's initial implementation of the update RPC was to look at every row in the table and find ones where the non-edited fields matched. Makes... sense, in a weird roundabout way? But God help whoever ends up vibe coding something like that. The type of AI fears are coming from things like this in the original article: > I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. [...] when I test it, it's usually perfect. Which is great. How many developers are getting paid full-time to make new apps on a regular basis? Most companies, I assume, only build one app. And then they spend years and many millions of dollars working on that app. "Making a new app from scratch" is the easy part! What's hard is adding new features to that app while not breaking others, when your lines of code go from those initial tens of thousands to tens of millions. There's something to be said about the cheapness of making new software, though. I do think one-off internal tools will become more frequent thanks to AI support. But developers are still going to be the ones driving the AI, as the article says.
• RS-232 8mo ago
  The advent of AI may shape up to be just like the automobile. At first, it's a pretty big energy hog and if you don't know how to work it, it might crash and burn. After some time, the novelty wears off. More and more people begin using it because it is a massive convenience that does real work. Luddites who still walk or ride their bike out of principle will be mocked and scoffed. Then the mandatory compliance will come. A government-issued license will be required to use it and track its use. This license will be tied to your identity and it will become a hard requirement for employment, citizenship, housing, loans, medical treatment, and more. Not having it will be a liability. You will be excluded from society at large if you do not comply. Last will come the AI-integrated brain computer interface. You won't have any choice when machine-gun-wielding Optimus robots coral you into a self-driving Tesla bus to the nearest FEMA camp to receive your Starlink-connected Neuralink N1 command and control chip. You will be decapitated if you refuse the mark of the beast. Rev 20:4
  • dysoco 8mo ago
    > This license will be tied to your identity and it will become a hard requirement for employment, citizenship, housing, loans, medical treatment, and more. Not having it will be a liability. You will be excluded from society at large if you do not comply. That's just an American thing, I've never owned a car and most people of my age I know haven't either.
    • RS-232 8mo ago
      That's fair. The public infrastructure in other places around the world is a lot more hospitable to other methods of transportation.
  • 7777332215 8mo ago
    > Last will come the AI-integrated brain computer interface. You won't have any choice Choose to die
    • cindyllm 8mo ago
      [dead]
• ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
  Related discussions on the essay mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974928
• qgin 8mo ago
  You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.
  • bobthepanda 8mo ago
    Also, you don’t need AI to replace your job, you need someone higher up in leadership who thinks AI could replace your job. It might all wash out eventually, but eventually could be a long time with respect to anybody’s personal finances.
    • betenoire 8mo ago
      Right, it doesn't help pay the bills to be right in the long run if you are discarded in the present. There exists some fact about the true value of AI, and then there is the capitalist reaction to new things. I'm more wary of a lemming effect by leaders than I am of AI itself. Which is pretty much true of everything I guess. It's the short sighted and greedy humans that screw us over, not the tech itself.
  • password54321 8mo ago
    We are already in low-hire low-fire job market where while there aren't massive layoffs to spike up unemployment there also aren't as many vacancies.
  • ninetyninenine 8mo ago
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  • tech_ken 8mo ago
    That's exactly the point of the essay though. The way that you're implicitly modeling labor and collaboration is linear and parallelizable, but reality is messier than that: > The most important thing to know about labor substitution...is this: labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. The question isn’t whether AI can do specific tasks that humans do. It’s whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone: in other words, whether there is any way that the addition of a human to the production process can increase or improve the output of that process... AI can have an absolute advantage in every single task, but it would still make economic sense to combine AI with humans if the aggregate output is greater: that is to say, if humans have a comparative advantage in any step of the production process.
• sunaurus 8mo ago
  I’m not worried about job loss as a result of being replaced by AI, because if we get AI that is actually better than humans - which I imagine must be AGI - then I don’t see why that AI would be interested in working for humans. I’m definitely worried about job loss as a result of the AI bubble bursting, though.
  • beeflet 8mo ago
    because it's designed to. It's not like naturally-evolved intelligence where it acts in its own interests (it is hard to even imagine what that would be in this case). The token-predictors are just acting out an obedient character. They do not have free will, they are obedient to the character they are playing.
    • sunaurus 8mo ago
      If it remains just a token-predictor that can’t evolve, then I am not worried about it replacing humans.
• 827a 8mo ago
  The take that I am increasingly believing is that Software Engineers should broadly be worried, because while there will always be demand for people who can create software products, whatever the tools may be, the skills necessary to do it well are changing rapidly. Most Software Engineers are going to wake up one day and realize their skills aren't just irrelevant, but actively detrimental, to delivering value out of software. There will also be far fewer positions demanding these skills. Easy access to generating code has moved the bottleneck in companies to positions & skills that are substantially harder to hire for (basically: Good Judgement); so while adding Agentic Sorcerers would increase a team's code output, it might be the wrong code. Corporate profit will keep scaling with slower-growing team sizes as companies navigate the correct next thing to build.
  • SirMaster 8mo ago
    Is AI filling in for all those COBOL programmers they needed yet?
• nphardon 8mo ago
  Unfortunately, one of the struggles in old high tech (thats the only thing i know, are you also experiencing this?) is that the C-level people don't look at Ai and say LLM's can make an individual 10x more productive therefore (and this is the part they miss) we can make our tool 10x better. They think: therefore we can lay off 9 people.
  • aurareturn 8mo ago
    There aren't 10x revenue gains in most businesses if their workers become 10x more productive. Some markets grow very slow and/or have capped growth. Therefore, the best way to increase profit is to lower cost.
• delegate 8mo ago
  Bottlenecks. Yes. Company structures these days are not compatible with efficient use of these new AI models. Software engineers work on Jira tickets, created by product managers and several layers of middle managers. But the power of recent models is not in working on cogs, their true power is in working on the entire mechanism. When talking about a piece of software that a company produces, I'll use the analogy of a puzzle. A human hierarchy (read: company) works on designing the big puzzle at the top and delegating the individual pieces to human engineers. This process goes back and forth between levels in the hierarchy until the whole puzzle slowly emerges. Until recently, AI could only help on improving the pieces of the puzzle. Latest models got really good at working on the entire puzzle - big picture and pieces. This makes human hierarchy obsolete and a bottleneck. The future seems to be one operator working on the entire puzzle, minus the hierarchy of people. Of course, it's not just about the software, but streams of information - customer support, bug tickets, testing, changing customer requirements.. but all of these can be handled by AI even today. And it will only get better. This means different things depending on which angle you look at it - yes, it will mean companies will become obsolete, but also that each employee can become a company.
  • codegangsta 8mo ago
    Yeah I’m very much seeing this right now. I’m a pretty big generalist professionally. I’ve done software engineering in a broad category of fields (Game engines, SaaS, OSS, distributed systems, highly polished UX and consumer products), while also having the experience of growing and managing Product and Design teams. I’ve worn a lot of hats over the years. My most recent role I’m working on a net new product for the company and have basically been given fully agency over this product: from technical, budget, team, process, marketing, branding and positioning. Give someone experienced like me capital, AI and freedom and you absolutely can build high quality software and a pretty blinding pace. I’m starting to get the feeling than many folks struggling with adopting or embracing AI well for their job has more to do with their job/company than AI
  • arctic-true 8mo ago
    This gives me a lot of hope for a decentralized future for all kinds of service industries. Why would you go to a big-name accounting firm where the small number of humans can only give you a sliver of attention, when you can go to a one-man shop and get much more of the one human’s attention? Especially if you know that the “work” will be done by the same tools? So many of the barriers to entry in various services - law, accounting, financial advising, etc. - is that you need a team to run even the smallest operation that can generate enough revenue to put food on your table. Perhaps that won’t be the case for long - and the folks that used to be that “team” can branch out and be the captains of their own ships, too.
• ej88 8mo ago
  i am somewhat worried in the short term about ai job displacement for a subsection of the population for me the 2 main factors are: 1. whether your company's priority is growing or saving - growing companies especially in steep competition fight for talent and ai productivity results in more hiring to outcompete - saving companies are happy to cut jobs to save on margin due to their monopoly or pressure from investors 2. how 'sequence of tasks-like' your job is - SOTA models can easily automate long running sequences of tasks with minimal oversight - the more your job resembles this the more in-danger you are (customer service diffusion is just starting, but i predict this will be one of the first to be heavily disrupted) - i'm less worried about jobs where your job is a 'role' that comes with accountability and requires you to think big picture on what tasks to do in the first place
• looneysquash 8mo ago
  Ordinary people aren't even ok now. Lest we forget, software engineers aren't exactly ordinary people: they make quite a bit above the median wage. AI taking our jobs is scary because it will turn us into "ordinary people". And ordinary people are not ok. They're barely surviving.
• ef2k 8mo ago
  The article frames the premise that "everything will be fine" around people with "regular jobs", which I assume means non knowledge work, but most of public concern is on cognitive tasks being automated. It also argues that models have existed for years and we're yet to see significant job loss. That's true, but AI is only now crossing the threshold of being both capable and reliable enough to be automate common tasks. It's better to prepare for the disruption than the sink or swim approach we're taking now in hopes that things will sort themselves out.
  • justonepost1 8mo ago
    There is no “preparing for the disruption” at an individual level, aside from maybe trying to 100x a polymarket bet to boost your savings.
• cal_dent 8mo ago
  My view is that we spend a lot of time thinking that ai cant do x and y when the wider problem is the short to medium term redirection of capital to tech rather than labour. Ai might not replace current work but it’s already replacing future hypothetical work. Now whether it can actually do that the job is besides the point in the short term. The way business models work is that if there’s an option to reduce your biggest cost (labour) you’d very much give it a go first. We might see a resurgence of labour if it turns out be all hype but for the short to medium term they’ll be a lot of disruption. Think we’re already seeing that in employment data in the US, as new hiring and job creation slows. A lot of that will for sure be the current economic environment but I suspect (more so in tech focused industries) that will also be due to tech capex in place of headcount growth
• RevEng 8mo ago
  I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the paradox they referred to. However, it also tends to come with a major shift in wealth since in the short term the owners of the machines are producing more with less. As it becomes more common place and prices change they lose much of that advantage, but the workers never get that.
  • zozbot234 8mo ago
    > I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.
    • globalnode 8mo ago
      sure sure
    • Gigachad 8mo ago
      What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.
      • alchemism 8mo ago
        As predicted in The Diamond Age.
      • cbdevidal 8mo ago
        Automation made the TV inexpensive, but if you look at a chart on inflation almost everything that cannot be easily automated has risen in price. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019-768x956.png https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019-...
• SirMaster 8mo ago
  I don't worry about it because worrying about it just seems like a waste of time and an unproductive, negative way to think about things. Instead I spend my time and thought not in worry but in adapting to the changing landscape.
  • fogzen 8mo ago
    You don’t spend all your time doomscrolling X? :) Glad to know there’s others out there.
    • SirMaster 8mo ago
      I don't use any of that social networking stuff. Never seemed that interesting or worth my time. The closest I get to social networks is reddit and this, and forums. But even on reddit I just look at a few subreddits related to my hobbies.
• nickorlow 8mo ago
  > This is the year that ordinary people start to think about how it’ll change human life ... for the 3rd year in a row. Feels like the new 'year of the Linux desktop'
• chaostheory 8mo ago
  Here’s what both authors are missing: the age demographic bomb. What is it? It’s when the elderly start outnumbering everyone else including working adults I.e. nations turn into giant retirement homes and we start running out of workers like Japan, Germany, China, Italy, and South Korea AI will buy us some time from economic collapse, though on the bright side the environment can recover a bit since human growth was the worse stressor
• febed 8mo ago
  AI is increasing my job security at the moment because the junior developers I work with use AI without discretion. On of them didn’t remember having worked on a feature they built with AI assistance in the recent past. To his credit he admitted he didn’t know how the code worked.
  • downboots 8mo ago
    AI breaks the window you repair, at scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
  • taysco 8mo ago
    Ya'll have junior devs? I haven't seen one of those in almost a decade.
  • Seattle3503 8mo ago
    How much is the subject matter expertise you built at the last job was useful at your current job?
• davidw 8mo ago
  It doesn't help to figure this out that this moment is one where a lot of programming jobs are going away...
• dakolli 8mo ago
  When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs. LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a limited number of jobs. LLMs are not creating new jobs, they only create "AI automate {insert business process} SaaS" that are themselves heavily automated.. I suppose there are more datacenter jobs (for now), and maybe some new ML researcher positions.. but I don't really see job growth.. Are we supposed to just all go work at a datacenter or in the semiconductor industry (until they automate that too)?
  • lich_king 8mo ago
    Neither datacenters nor chip manufacturing employ a whole lot of people. But I think you're looking at it wrong. Jobs come from people with money wanting to pay for jobs. That's not going to change. The jobs of the future may be that you're a court jester for Larry Ellison, or that you do something else that's fundamentally pointless but happens to be something that a person with money wants. Companion, entertainment, errands. Now, that may sound dystopian, but on some level, so are most white collar jobs today. Microsoft employs 200k people. How many of these are directly involved in shipping money-making products - five percent? Ten? The rest is there essentially for the self-sustaining bureaucracy itself. And there's no reason for that bureaucracy to exist except the whims of people with money and power - delegation, empire-building, pet projects, etc.
    • UncleOxidant 8mo ago
      The examples you give for jobs of the future don't sound appealing or very numerous. It seems like you're saying that people will be employed as personal assistants to the uber wealthy. But there aren't a lot of uber wealthy - certainly not enough to employ large amounts of the economy.
      • lich_king 8mo ago
• lukeigel 8mo ago
  Very proud of David Oks.
  • jeremyhuff 8mo ago
    We are all very proud of david oks
• hunterpayne 8mo ago
  This reminds me of that old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times". I see AI causing lots of chaos. I also see AI causing some of the biggest opportunities in some time. Many businesses are destroying their competitive advantage by deploying AI slop. Over time, they will degrade their ability to make a working and snappy website. This will create opportunities for new businesses to take their place. If you ever wanted to start a new business, shockingly this is the time as the current crop slowly degrades their customer portals into slop. They will probably reach a point where they can no longer deliver working, efficient and secure apps anymore. Maybe I am wrong, but the history of business on the web says I am right. If you go back and look at why those businesses think they are successful, and if that analysis is correct, then I am.
• lemax 8mo ago
  I think that, for possibly a very long time, AI will just increase the quality bar and scale of expectations when we produce things. We might take the same amount of time (or longer) to produce something, but with significantly better outcomes. Ultimately human preferences and tastes prevail and the world is full of problems that are not simple I/O, that are not repeatable, and that require human taste to improve. The people who will immediately survive economically are the ones who leverage AI to produce stuff that wasn't possible before.
  • an0malous 8mo ago
    If anything, I see a decrease in the quality bar. Code is sloppier, there are more bugs, more outages, more security issues. Whatever alpha AI provides is being spent on feature velocity and AI integrations at the cost of those other things.
• ls612 8mo ago
  One of the most robust findings in labor economics is that labor and capital are long run complements, not substitutes. I would be shocked if AI is an exception to that rule, for software engineers the sheer flood of code that will be generated in the coming years will demand more and more labor to manage.
• hndamien 8mo ago
  We would all benefit from progress if only they would stop printing money.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• jackfranklyn 8mo ago
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  • xyzzy123 8mo ago
    I'm not very familiar with the field on a practical basis. What parts of the job require judgement that is resistant to automation? What percentage of customers need that? If the hours an accountant spends on a customer go from 4 per month to 1, do you reckon they can sustainably charge the same?
    • dullcrisp 8mo ago
      Why would better efficiency mean they have to charge less?
      • christophilus 8mo ago
        Because your competitor will double their number of customers, and halve their prices— forcing you to do the same.
        • dullcrisp 8mo ago
          So then everyone would continue earning the same as before.
  • OccamsMirror 8mo ago
    You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment. AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because: - Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline. - Quality becomes more auditable because outputs can be checked with automated review layers. - Communication overhead shrinks with fewer back-and-forth cycles when AI pre-fills and structures the work. - Labor arbitrage expands and the limiting factor stops being “can we find someone locally who knows our messy process” and becomes “who is cheapest who can supervise and resolve exceptions.” So yeah, the jobs mostly remain and some people become more valuable. But the clearing price for that labor moves toward the global minimum faster than it used to. The impact won’t show up as “no jobs,” it is already showing up as stagnant or declining Western salaries, thinner career ladders, and more of the value captured by the firms that own the workflows rather than the people doing the work.
• paulsutter 8mo ago
  “People asking if Al is going to take their jobs is like an Apache in 1840 asking if white settlers are going to take his buffalo” (Noah Smith on Twitter, I mean X)
• zb3 8mo ago
  Yeah, YOU are not worried about the job loss, but just because SOME human will be needed doesn't mean that a particular human will. There are humans that can't do any mental work that AI can't. Those humans are not useful for mental work and that's what can cause real AI job loss. The bar for being useful for mental work is increasing rapidly.. Jobs that are easy disappear and are replaced with jobs that are no longer as easy, either requiring more mental skills (that many people don't have) or are soul crushing manual jobs that are also getting harder constantly.. So yes, YOU are not worried, because you are privileged here.
• ryu360i 8mo ago
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  • lbreakjai 8mo ago
    No one is being held responsible today. When's the last time a company leaking personal data got meaningfully held accountable? The price of the fine will just be factored in, and that'll be the price of doing business.
    • ryu360i 8mo ago
      [dead]
• jgon 8mo ago
  I always like to do a little digging when I read one of these articles. The first point I come to is that the author is employed by a16z (https://a16z.com/author/david-oks/ https://a16z.com/author/david-oks/) and so you have to immediately apply the "talking his book" filter. A16Z is heavily invested in AI and so any sorts of concerns around job loss and possible regulation or associated actions by the public at large represent a risk to these investments. Secondly David Oks attended Masters School for his high school, an elite private boarding school with tuition currently running 72kUSD/year if you stay there the whole time, and 49kUSD/year if you go there just for schooling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_School). I am going to generally say that people who were able to have 150k+ spent on their high school education (to say nothing of attending Oxford at 30kGBP/year for international student tuition) might just possibly be people who have enough generational family wealth that concerns like job losses seem pretty abstract or not something to really worry about. It's just another in a long series of articles downplaying the risks of AI job losses, which, when I dig into the author's background, are written by people who have never known any sort of financial precarity in their lives, and are frequently involved AI investment in some manner.
• everettde 8mo ago
  what an absolute undermining of the human greed, and our ability to rationalize the part of society that'll affect our well-being until we're dead. they don't care about the majority losing jobs, or even starving to death so long as they ensure a great future for themselves and the people they, supposedly, care about.
• mbgerring 8mo ago
  Something I don’t see enough people talking about is how AI will reduce barriers to entry. One of the things that drove the tech boom in the 2010s was cloud computing driving the cost of starting an internet company into the ground. What happens when there’s software you think should exist, and you no longer need to hire a bunch of people at $150k-$250k per year to build it?
  • yonaguska 8mo ago
    Im employed by two semi-technical cofounders that vibe coded the MVP until they couldn't maintain the technical complexity. I expect scenarios like this to continue. There is a subset of companies that eventually will those engineers.
  • georgemcbay 8mo ago
    > What happens when there’s software you think should exist, and you no longer need to hire a bunch of people at $150k-$250k per year to build it? What happens when 200 out-of-work former software engineers take a look at your software and use LLMs to quickly build their own version each undercutting everyone else's prices in a race to the bottom?
    • mbgerring 8mo ago
      I think what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of software that doesn’t get built at all because the cost of serving a particular niche market is still too high, and that AI may put some of those markets within reach. So, those software engineers may be able to move sideways instead of competing to build the same software.
• djfergus 8mo ago
  I’m fascinated by the confidence in the cyborg theory that there will always be value in having a human in the loop. Especially for domains like code where the inputs and outputs are bits not atoms. This is exactly what chess experts like Kasparov thought in the late 90s: “a grandmaster plus a computer will always beat just a computer”. This became false in less than a decade.
  • derektank 8mo ago
    There are lots of things people want explicitly because a human is part of the loop. AI generated art will never attract the same premium as something created by (or at least claimed to be by) a human. People seek status, and that can only be conferred by other people. The problem is that, unlike other products of human labor, status is a zero sum game.
  • Seattle3503 8mo ago
    Chess is a "kind" learning environment. The world tends to have more "wicked" environments.
• silexia 8mo ago
  It's not job losses we are worried about, but the complete destruction of the human species.
• jmyeet 8mo ago
  The author is wrong. IMHO he's operating under a false premise that the labor market just kind of "happens" or even that the labor market itself is "efficient". At no point have worker rights and conditions advanced without being demanded, sometimes violently. The history of maritime safety is written in blood. The robber baron era was peppered with deadly clashes such as the Homestead Strike. As a reminder, we had a private paramilitary force for the wealthy called the Pinkerton Detective Agency (despite the name, they were hired thugs) that at it's peak outnumbered the US Army. Heck, you can go back to the Black Death when there was a labor shortage to work farms and the English Crown tried to pass laws to cap wages to avoid "gouging" by peasants for their labor. Automation could be very good for society. It could take away menial jobs so we all benefit. But this won't happen naturally because that's essentially a wealth transfer to the poor and the wealthy just won't stand for that. No, what's going to happen is that AI specifically and automation in general will be used to suppress labor wages and furhter transfer wealth to the already wealthy. We don't need to replace everyone for this to happen. Displacing just 5% of the workforce has a massive effect on wages. The remaining 95% aren't asking for raises and they're doing more work for the same wages as they pick up whatever the 5% was doing. We see this exact pattern in the permanent layoff culture in tech right now. At the top you have a handful of AI researchers who command $100M+ pay packages. The vast majority are either happy to still have a job or have been laid off, possibly multiple times, and spend a ton of time going through endless interview rounds for jobs that may not even exist. This two-tiered society is very much in our near future (IMHO). In the Depression you had wandering hoboes who were constantly moving, seeking temporary low-paid work and a meal. This situation was so bad we got real socialist change with the New Deal. 2008 killed the entry-level job market and it has yet to recover. That's why you see so many millenails with Masters degrees and a ton of student debt working as baristas. Covid popped the tech labor bubble, something tech companies had been wanting for a long time. Did you not notice that they all started doing layoffs at about the exact same time? Even when they're massively profitable? So the author isn't worried about job loss? Delusional. We're teetering on the edge of complete societal collapse.
  • ares623 8mo ago
    There's one aspect that doesn't come up often enough as well, and I think something most people are too afraid to even imagine about. What happens when you have a surplus of able bodied young people who are angry and without purpose? What's the easiest way to divert all that anger and give them purpose at the same time? People in developing nations worked around this by immigrating.
• agentultra 8mo ago
  I’m not worried about a world without people. I’m more worried that even if these tools do a bad job people will be too addicted to the convenience to give them up. Example: recruiters locked into an AI arms race with applicants. The application summaries might be biased and contain hallucinations. The resumes are often copied wholesale from some chat bot or other. Nobody wins, the market continues to get worse, but nobody can stop either.
  • senordevnyc 8mo ago
    But why would the market get worse? Those recruiters aren’t just in an arms race with applicants, they’re also in an arms race with each other, and there’s an incentive to improve their tools too.
    • agentultra 8mo ago
      I don’t know if you’re in the job market right now but there are highly skilled and qualified people who have been looking for work for months. I don’t know if you can tell what’s “better,” with these tools.
• jillesvangurp 8mo ago
  Good article. Nice to get some counter arguments to the utopian/libertarian/dystopian world views that dominate the debate here normally. None of those views are new. You can go back hundreds of years and find very similar points of view as early as the the seventeenth century when modern science was born, early industrialism, pre and post WW-II, etc. The real world is much more resilient and stubborn. The industrial revolution indeed wiped out a lot of jobs. But it created a lot more new ones. Agriculture and food production no longer is >90% of the economy. The utopian version of that (we all get free food) never happened. The dystyopian version (we'll all starve) didn't happen either. And the Luddite version (we'll all go back to artisanal farming) didn't happen either. What happened is that well fed laborers went to work doing completely different stuff. Subsistence farming now only exists in undeveloped countries and regions in e.g. rural Africa. The simple reality is that we have 8 billion people probably growing towards 10 billion. These people are going to buy and spend stuff with their income. Whatever that is, is what the economy is and what we collectively value. If AI puts us all out of work, people aren't going to sit on their hands and go back to subsistence farming. They'll fill the time with whatever is is that they can create income with so they can spend it on things that are valuable to them. This notion of value is what is key. Because if AI lowers the cost of something, it simply becomes cheaper. We need a lot of valuable and scarce resources to power AI. That isn't cheap. So, there's an equilibrium of stuff that is valuable enough to automate with it that people still want to pay for by committing their valuable resources to it. Which as they become scarcer become more valuable and more interesting from an economic point of view. The economy adapts towards activity that facilitates value creation. We're opportunists. It all boils down to what we can do for each other that is valuable and interesting to us. Whatever that is, is where there will be a lot of growth. I'm in software, I'm not worried about less work. I'm worried about handling the barrage of stuff I don't have time to do that I now need to start worrying about doing. There's no way I'm going to do any of that without AI. It's already generating more work than I can handle. This isn't frivolous stuff that I don't need, it's stuff that's valuable to my company because we can sell it to other companies who need that stuff.
• jama211 8mo ago
  Yes, businesses tend to prefer growth over cost cutting. We need to handle the transition period well though or it will hurt.
• disfictional 8mo ago
  The key to the essay is that "ordinary people will be fine." Software Engineers will be highly impacted, though not in the way most commenters seem to think. Management isn't going to arbitrarily decide that, "AI can do 65% of the job, so we'll lay off 65% of the engineers." They won't hire. Attrition? New projects? "Just use AI tools to be more productive. Find the bottlenecks and automate them. Focus on your core value." AI isn't going to be a fast slash to the workforce; it will be a constantly accelerating drain. Yes, ordinary people will be fine, but those of us who aspired to be artisans of building these systems will be stretched further and further until all we do is maintain AI code full-time for a discounted price.
• andai 8mo ago
  The strongest point this article makes is that humans themselves are the greatest obstacle to change and progress. That doesn't exactly bolster the author's position. Sure, there's already companies 30 years behind the curve. But in an increasingly competitive and fast moving economy, "the human is slowing it down by orders of magnitude" doesn't exactly sound like a vote in favor of the human.
• pjmlp 8mo ago
  Says the guy that never had to look for a job in a world region where they don't abound.
• npodbielski 8mo ago
  > we’ll have spent quite a while in a world of such abundance and plenty that jobs might simply be superfluous. Perhaps we’ll spend our lives in leisure, pursuing poetry or pure mathematics or the fine art of looksmaxxing. That is quite a optimistic view that I do not share. The US shitshow with epstein files shows what those with power are actually capable of. The star trek utopia universe is not the world we are building right now collectively. I would expect instead that with robotics and AI combined there will be a lot of more technical jobs for maintaining and building automated systems that serves rich people but not common folks. But still you need knowledge and skill to do that which means you still need to learn and teach those. Which means you still need education and people working there. You still need people that support education sector and technical and maintance sector for AI and robotics. All of them need to eat and have basic needs to be fulfilled. You need agriculture and services and housing and entertainment and dozens of others for that too. So in an essence the author is right but still with AI capable robots I would not expect utopia but somekind of world between blade-runner and alien: you won't be scrolling mindlessly while all you needs are being met but rather trying to save money for the things you dream off while working stupid mindless job you do not like. Which is basically what most of us are doing right now. So yes nothing will change for most of us but humanity will find a way somehow to make world suck in so many ways by exploiting each other, by stealing from each other, by lying and generally making a world living hell for everyone. Because we do not know any better. AI won't change that. So as the old saying goes: a lot have to change for everything to stay the same.
• entech 8mo ago
  The prevailing view of government’s incompetence and inability to act has reached such high levels that people do not even factor any sort of meaningful intervention anymore. Does everyone really think that the world governments would allow any level job loss that would create panic before shutting this whole thing down within the area of their control? It’s probably the western culture bias - people in UK or US have not seen or experienced big enough government intervention. US citizens are probably feeling a bit of the change now.
• gniv 8mo ago
  A point that the article doesn't touch on directly, but it's part of the bottlenecks mentioned: a lot of jobs already are bullsh*t. They are there because a scapegoat is needed or because the nephew of the CEO needs a job, etc. In theory these jobs could have been removed long ago but they were not, and AI won't change that.
• DeathArrow 8mo ago
  If we can do things easier and faster we will just do more things. It always was like that.
• hi_hi 8mo ago
  I'm not worries about AI job losses...yet. I am worried about when they start wanting to make a profit on AI. I'm assuming we either have to pay the actual price for these things (I have no idea what that looks like, but I'm pretty sure it isn't $20 or $200 per month), or we have to put up with the full force advertising. Or most likely, we have to do both. It'll be another one of those "I remember when..." stories we get to tell our kids. Like "I remember when emails were useful and exciting" or "I remember when I could order a taxi and it was clean, reliable and even came with a bottle of water..." or "I remember when I could have conversations with strangers on the internet that didn't instantly descend into arguments and hate".
• Bender 8mo ago
  I think there is an aspect of this people may be missing. Companies are dropping entry level jobs for AI. Should that continue there will eventually not be humans in what was the first few tiers of a job role. AI only exists because the military needs are propping it up. Civilians are always the first to beta test and refine military services. Should the military not find AI to be as useful as their were sold it will lose funding and the house of cards comes crashing down thus leaving all these companies with broken and hollowed out roles with all the experienced people having retrained in something else. That may impact share holders and shake confidence in a few markets.
  • password54321 8mo ago
    >AI only exists because the military needs are propping it up AI already serves as a surveillance tool and is being used by Palantir.
    • Bender 8mo ago
      AI already serves as a surveillance tool and is being used by Palantir. Agreed but the actual funding is primarily for military use. Palantir would not be able to fund all these data-centers by themselves. They are secondary beneficiaries.
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
• Falsintio 8mo ago
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• xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
  'Ordinary people still be fine' Ordinary people are ALREADY not doing okay.
• prima-facie 8mo ago
  The collective AI hysteria is now in full swing.
• dawsmik 8mo ago
  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance Dear software programmers: 90% of your jobs are going away soon. Most of you are on the first step. Those of you who progress through these step the fastest will be most prepared for what is about to come.
• gverrilla 8mo ago
  That entire gigantic piece could be a tweet with approximately the same information density.
• hananova 8mo ago
  I'm honestly also not worried about AI job loss. But for a far darker reason: I think it's a self-solving problem. Once techbros take it too far where an actual significant amount of people face job loss and thus face hardships in housing and feeding themselves, society as a whole is going to wish it nipped AI in the bud when it still could. Knowing techbros though, their moment of introspection, if it ever comes, will come far too late. To me, actively trying to cause mass job loss in a country with essentially zero social security sounds, actively trying to get as many people in the "nothing to lose" state as possible, sounds genuinely suicidal.
• fogzen 8mo ago
  I’ve noticed most of the people involved with AI doomerism are social media (X) addicts. Same with a lot of CEOs and VCs. To be honest they don’t sound mentally healthy and somewhat delusional.
• throawayonthe 8mo ago
  > we shouldn’t forget how amazing even, say, GPT-3.5 would be from the perspective of 2016 i'm not sure why it would be more amazing in 2016 than in 2023 where it... wasn't very amazing lol
• black_13 8mo ago
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