7 ms·

Why I'm Worried About Job Loss and Thoughts on Comparative Advantage

85 points by cubefox 9mo ago

SilverElfin 9mo ago
The article lays out the problems and why they are real. But I wish it would be bold and just say what’s needed to solve the issue. Without fair distribution of gains and with rapid concentration of wealth, the only viable solution in this jobless future is radically different taxation.
- Uehreka 9mo ago
  Speaking as a fellow job-displacement-worrier, I don’t think people have answers. But contrary to what a lot of people say, there is a ton of utility in pointing out a problem without having a solution. In this case, I think a lot of people who might have good ideas are currently under the mistaken impression that this isn’t a problem. To the extent that I’ve heard people propose solutions, many of them have pretty big flaws: - Retraining - AI will likely swoop in quickly and automate many of the brand new jobs it creates. Also retraining has a bit of a messy history, it was pretty ineffective at stopping the bleeding when large numbers of manufacturing jobs were offshored/automated in the past. - “Make work” programs - I think these are pretty silly on the face of it, although something like this might be mecessary in the really short term if there’s very sudden massive job loss and we haven’t figured out a solution. - Universal Basic Income - Probably the best system I’ve heard anyone propose. However there are 3 huge issues: 1 - politically this is a huge no-go at the moment (after watching the massive Covid stimulus happen in 2020 I have a sliver of hope, but not much). 2 - Even a pretty good UBI probably wouldn’t be enough to cushion the landing for people who make a lot right now and have made financial decisions (number of kids, purchasing a house, etc) on the basis of their current salary. 3 - Even if this happens in America (presumably redistributing the wealth accruing to American AI companies) it would leave non-Americans out in the cold, and we currently have no globally powerful institution with the trust and capability to manage a worldwide UBI.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - arctic-true 9mo ago
    A simpler answer would simply be that, if you lay someone off on the basis that an AI can replace their entire job functionality, you have to keep paying their salary dollar for dollar until they find something else to do. This incentivizes companies to try and figure out creative ways to continue using their existing workforce to maximize the value they get out of AI systems. You’d counterbalance that - and solve the other problem - by offering massive tax relief for companies who hire junior employees. In the same way that we use tax relief to encourage real estate and infrastructure investment in underserved areas, we can use it to tip the scales of economic rationality toward continuing to employ young people with no experience or specialized expertise. Notice that neither of these proposals requires redistribution as such (seizing wealth).
    - hdhdhsjsbdh 9mo ago
      So then the corps find a way to fire you for something other than AI displacement, replace you with AI anyway, and you’re on your own. Basically identical to firing someone in a clever way that avoids having to pay unemployment, which already happens quite frequently. I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. We seem to live in a death cult where avoiding a slight inconvenience to 100 people is more important than providing a decent standard of living for the other 345 million people. You can invent whatever clever little solution you want in the meantime but eventually the chickens will come home to roost.
      - pixl97 9mo ago
        >I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. HN is filled with lots of temporarily depressed millionaires and many actual millionaires too. These are the ones that have bought into zero tax, government is all bad, free market capitalism for me Rand'ian ideas without any systematic thought on how their ideas would work out in practice. Add to this that a lot of media, and pretty much everything on TV, is owned by billionaires these days that use the news as their platform to propagandize on why they should own more of everything and become richer, so it's not exactly surprising we're at this place.
- strogonoff 9mo ago
  It is always possible to attribute whatever harms we come to as a result of some technology to one underlying issue or another, never to the technology itself—regarding any technology, be it LLMs or guns, this can be considered technically correct 100% of the time, because no technology is inherently good or bad. That said, in face of a particularly disastrous (and yet predictable) outcome it is not enough to call for solving of such underlying issues; it is vital to solve such underlying issues before we introduce respective technology all over the place—and if that is not possible, make corresponding adjustments of how that technology is rolled out.
- abraxas 9mo ago
  Mass extermination through famine, genocide or plague is another outcome. An Elysium earth worked by robots is a vision tech bro billionaires are rooting for and building towards. As for your idea, I see no signs of their striving for redistributing their wealth.
- claywren 9mo ago
  I am working on several documents that outline solutions. I will post them here.
thelastgallon 9mo ago
> comparative advantage tells you that some human labor will remain valuable in some configuration, but nothing about the wages, number of jobs, or the distribution of gains. You can have comparative advantage and still have massive displacement, wage collapse, and concentration of returns to capital. A world where humans retain “comparative advantage” in a handful of residual tasks at a fraction of the current wages is technically consistent with Oks’ framework, but obviously is worth worrying about and is certainly not fine.
alephnerd 9mo ago
> found a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed occupations since late 2022. For young software developers specifically, employment fell almost 20% from its 2022 peak This is confounding AI-exposed white collar occupations with occupations that were overrepresented with extended remote work. I am on multiple boards and that was a major factor that disincentivized new grad hiring in the US, because a new grad salary in a white collar profession in the US is a mid-career salary in the rest of the world. AI is used as an excuse, but even most executives when polled agree that we do expect to see the amount of employees being hired at least in software adjacent roles to increase. I cannot justify hiring a mediocre new grad in Seattle for $120k who will end up using Claude Code anyhow when I can hire an early-career employee doing something similar in Romania or India for around $20k. The reality is a large portion of new grads and mid-career types who started their careers after 2020 are too mediocre for the TC paid. --- Edit: pulling a comment of mine from downthread > Why are then so many US developers still employed Becuase unlike the HN hivemind, a large portion of experienced developers in the US have found ways to realistically adopt new technologies where they are relevant. Reflexively being an AI fanatic or Luddite is stupid, but being a SWE who is able to to recognize and explain the value of these tools and their limits is extremely valuable. I can justify paying $300-400k TCs and 100% remote work if you are not a code monkey. This means being able to architect, manage upwards, do basic design and program management, hop onto customer calls, and keep upskilling on top of writing, testing, and reviewing code. We are not hiring SWEs to only push code. We hire SWEs in order to translate and implement business requirements into software. A developer who has a mindset like that is worth their weight in gold, and there are still plenty of these kinds of experienced developers in the US.
- baxtr 9mo ago
  I am confused by your last paragraph. Is it AI or not? First three paragraphs sounded like it’s not…
  - alephnerd 9mo ago
    It is not AI becuase employees hired in Romania and the US are both expected to be able to know how to use AI, which papers over performance issues in most cases that matter for a business (time to delivery), but I cannot justify hiring a deskilled NCG for $120k in the US. Edit: cannot reply > Why are then so many US developers still employed Becuase unlike the HN hivemind, a large portion of experienced developers in the US have found ways to realistically adopt new technologies where they are relevant. Reflexively being an AI fanatic or Luddite is stupid, but being a SWE who is able to tin recognize and explain the value of these tools and their limits is extremely valuable. I can justify paying $300-400k TCs if you are not a code monkey. This means being able to architect, manage upwards, do basic design and program management, hop onto customer calls, and keep upskilling on top of writing and reviewing code. We are not hiring SWEs to only push code. We hire SWEs in order to translate and implement business requirements into software. A developer who has a mindset like that is worth their weight in gold, and there are still plenty of these kinds of experienced developers in the US.
0xy 9mo ago
It's simple, if you refuse to adapt you will be replaced by those who will. Writing code by hand is not going to be the default mode going forward. You either do the majority of your work controlling autonomous agents and reviewing their work or you get surpassed by all of your colleagues. Are you going to be the farmer who refuses to buy a plow? I also do not have sympathy for those who refuse to adapt. These people hold back organizations by appealing to tradition and resisting any form of change.
- alephnerd 9mo ago
  [flagged]
- jlongr 9mo ago
  Alr bro we're making software not going to war.
  - 52-6F-62 9mo ago
    Now you know how these guys see everything. Like when Trump tells Canada (paraphrasing) "You think we're going to let China eat you first and just have the scraps?" Everything is a zero-sum game to them. They are philosophically void.
- QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
  This take seems to require that models stop getting better at some capability level a little above where they are now. Is this a future event that you are very confident of?
  - 0xy 9mo ago
    AGI is mathematically impossible given our current electrical infrastructure constraints and basic laws, so yes it is. We're already seeing a dramatic slowdown in relative improvements. The gap between Sonnet 3.5 (June 2024) and Opus 4.6 (Feb 2026) is large, but it's not 1,000x. Not even 100x.
tokai 9mo ago
Imagine wasting so much time on this AI-taking-jobs, while US job creation is tanking due very bad policies. Anything but tackling real issues I guess.
- rybosworld 9mo ago
  > why worry about two problems when we could just worry about one?
  - tokai 9mo ago
    because one is not actually a problem
    - Version467 9mo ago
      The author clearly disagrees with that statement.
- raincole 9mo ago
  US unemployment rate is really low right now. It's low in terms of the history data of the US, and it's super low compared to europe.
  - rybosworld 9mo ago
    Ludwig Institute has a much more honest assessment of the job market: https://www.lisep.org/ https://www.lisep.org/ The BLS numbers are so manipulated at this point that they are effectively useless for individuals to get a true sense of the market.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
yellow_lead 9mo ago
> Brynjolfsson analyzed millions of ADP payroll records and found a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed occupations since late 2022. > So what’s the mechanism at play? AI replaces codified knowledge Many job postings peaked in 2022 due to the pandemic. The original paper tries to account for this but falls short in my opinion. Original paper said[1]: > One possibility is that our results are explained by a general slowdown in technology hiring from 2022 to 2023 as firms recovered from the COVID-19 Pandemic... > Figure A12 shows employment changes by age and exposure quintile after excluding computer occupations... > Figure A13 shows results when excluding firms in information technology or computer systems design... > ... These results indicate that our findings are not specific to technology roles. Excluding computer and IT jobs is not enough in my opinion. Look at all these other occupations which had peak hiring in 2022. Nursing jobs in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPNURS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPNURS Sales jobs in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSALE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSALE Scientific research & development jobs in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSCREDE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSCREDE Baking & finance jobs in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPBAFI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPBAFI [1] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/12/CanariesintheCoalMine_Nov25.pdf https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/12/Cana...
randusername 9mo ago
> AI replaces codified knowledge – the kind of learning you get from classrooms or textbooks – but struggles with tacit knowledge, the experiential judgement that accumulates over years on the job. This is why seniors are spared and juniors are not. But Oks’ thesis treats this as reassurance: see, humans with deep knowledge still have comparative advantage! I believe this is more of a senior worker’s luxury, and the protection for “seniors” will move up and up the hierarchy over time. Times change, the ladders you and I climbed to success may not be around in the same forms for our children. That's not new. But will there be any ladders to climb if the bottom rungs are all gone?
- CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  All the kids already wanted be influencers, ironically turns out that's one of the safer career paths when AI is factored into the equation. Still not plumber or electrician safe, but the potential upsides are much higher.
  - readams 9mo ago
    AI is already taking over content generation
    - tartoran 9mo ago
      Eventually created and consumed by AI, fewer and fewer humans will consume it.
      - irl_zebra 9mo ago
        I will consume less of it, and have actively blocked or unsubscribed from orgs that promote it, but the generation behind us won't have these scruples.
  - Take8435 9mo ago
    AI Influencers are already making inroads. I don't think it's as safe as you think.
Aurornis 9mo ago
> For young software developers specifically, employment fell almost 20% from its 2022 peak. Employment in the 2020-2022 range was highly unusual due to COVID stimulus the resulting unprecedented hiring. Tech companies were hiring anyone they could and after some time juniors were the only way to feed the insatiable demand for more headcount. Comparing to this time without taking that into account is going to be misleading. This period was also a strange time for remote work. I’ve been remote since before then, but COVID era WFH felt like a turning point when bad behavior during remote work became normalized. That’s when we started having remote hires trying to work two jobs (and giving us half an effort / not getting their work done), and there was a rise of “quiet quitting” as a news media meme because everyone thought they could always just walk out and get a new job if they got fired for not working. We also weren’t doing juniors any favors by hiring them in high numbers without a sufficient ratio of seniors to mentor and lead them. That also coincided with the rise of GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. These tools were not great at the time, but if you were a junior who was over-hired into a company that didn’t have capacity to mentor you and you were working remote in the age when Reddit was promoting quiet quitting and overemployment on your feed every day, banging out PRs with GitHub Copilot for a couple hours a day and then going about your life for a $135K salary right out of college felt like you just hit the jackpot of historical confluences for work-life balance. I saw this exact story play out at multiple companies who got burned out on the idea of hiring juniors due to the risk. Combine that with the rapid improvement of the LLM tools and the idea quickly became that you just hire seniors and treat the LLMs as juniors rather than paying another salary for them to pilot Claude Code around. The seniors had to review the Claude Code output anyway, so why not cut out the middleman? Then add the economic downturn and the chaos of whatever this administration is doing this month and now there are so many qualified seniors on the market that hiring juniors is hard to justify. This is the part that would have happened with or without AI. All things considered, being down only 20% from the 2022 peak seems not that bad.
- esafak 9mo ago
  The study segregated juniors from seniors; it's controlled for that.
  - 9mo ago
lostphilosopher 9mo ago
In every discussion of AI eliminating or dramatically reducing the compensation for <some large double digit percentage> of “white collar” jobs (and probably “blue collar” too). It’s unclear to me what the end state is - the vast majority of the economy works on volume. You need large numbers of people with enough money to buy your product/service. As wealth concentrates there are fewer potential buyers and economies of scale start working against producers. (And governments need people with money to tax…)
- kolektiv 9mo ago
  The end state is economic collapse/feudalism - quite desired by various current oligarchs.
- smallmancontrov 9mo ago
  The economy becomes a palace economy, where the money fountains are owned by a few and the loot slowly flows through rings of gatekeepers while the outer rungs are plagued by desperation and poverty despite living in the shadow of abundance. These are common around the world and through time. It's the Star Wars fate.
- WarmWash 9mo ago
  Wealth likely won't mean much, it will be a concentration of power. The question is if the AI will respect that concentration of power, or if it will just do it's own thing.
  - tartoran 9mo ago
    The concentration of power will own the AI so it will be at their whim
- Shaddox 9mo ago
  Sadly, that matters very little! https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-earners-drive-nearly-191500198.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-earners-drive-nearly-1... If this is to be believed, regular consumer goods won't matter anymore, and instead you just cater to the wealthy.
LordHumungous 9mo ago
If the worst predictions about AI's effect on employment turn out to be correct, then I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI. Particularly if it becomes the case that profits are accruing to a few massive corporations who run the AI. There is no reason people have to tolerate a technology that is destructive to society, anymore than they have to tolerate companies selling fentanyl at 7/11.
- coffeefirst 9mo ago
  Yes, and that’s the least catastrophic option. I get the sense the boosters don’t read a lot of history.
- MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  >I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI. I agree. It will be an interesting debate to watch play out, because a) lots of end-users love using AI and will be loath to give it up, and b) advances in compute will almost certainly allow us to run current frontier models (or better) locally on our laptops and phones, which means that profits no longer accrue to a few massive AI labs. It would also would make regulating it a lot tricker, since kneecapping the AI labs would no longer effectively regulate the technology.
  - LordHumungous 9mo ago
    That would be an interesting scenario.
- Havoc 9mo ago
  > There is no reason people have to tolerate a technology that is destructive to society, All evidence to the contrary. Aside from the French occasionally burning down some cars the western populations (me unfortunately included) have become remarkably relaxed about such things. Even very extreme examples like blatant refusal by government to investigate absolutely horrific stuff like Epstein gets at most some mildly upset TikTok reels Add some aggressive lobbying by big tech and perhaps a sprinkle of palantir population monitoring and I don’t think we’ll see a refusal to tolerate at scale
digitalsushi 9mo ago
if software engineers get displaced, they will eventually drift into other jobs that benefit from people who solve problems like software engineers. and if the former software engineers are willing to work at a rate reduced to their former positions, and if they bring better efficiencies with them, then there will be a slow cascade. it doesn't follow that all software engineers are excellent at other work, please don't take that from my quip. but i could see the pattern, over time, being large enough to identify. since software engineering jobs historically are very well paid, it does give some plausibility that former engineers working for less money would have this displacing effect. its all icky no matter what i think, maybe someone else can tell me why i'm wrong and cheer me up
retrocog 9mo ago
This thread inspired me to write an article because from my perspective, the debate over AI and jobs is missing a crucial question: not whether employment will exist, but what holds communities together as systems erode? https://www.robpanico.com/articles/display/the-answer-isnt-macro/ https://www.robpanico.com/articles/display/the-answer-isnt-m...
jjk166 9mo ago
Pretty much all of this rests on the assumption that recent changes in software hiring practices are primarily driven by AI, and that such changes will continue and spread across industries without foreseeable limit. The reality is that higher interest rates hit software particularly hard because less venture capital is being thrown at traditional software development. When money is tight, cutting new hires decreases to push off layoffs, and when layoffs happen experienced potential hires become cheap, displacing inexperienced entry level hires. No one is telling their boss "reduce my budget, the AI is so good I don't need these people anymore" they are getting told by their boss "find a way to make due with 3 fewer people." We should expect overtaxed workers to try and find ways to utilize AI to take up some of this slack, and higher ups may spin a tale of increased efficiency, but the fact is AI adoption is a symptom, not a cause. The hiring decrease and layoffs happened at plenty of places that have failed to adopt AI as well. Given that the current situation is unique to the circumstances, it does not hold that software portends the fate of all white collar work. That being said, we can certainly expect AI to improve, and attempts to be made to replicate and improve upon any genuine efficiency gains made in the present experiment. But the fact is that while AI may make certain tasks easier, that will lead to reorganization of the labor force more than disappearance. When mechanization of agriculture reduced the labor required to produce enough food to sustain people, people stopped being farmers. It was a major societal shift, and there were certainly issues, but we don't have 90% of our population made up of unemployed farmers who can't afford to buy food, nor even a large percentage of the population who wants to farm but is forced to work a much less desirable job. Comparative advantage will guarantee people are still doing something. There will always be tasks which would benefit from human input, and there will always be more such tasks. We may not currently place much value in these tasks, but by virtue of AI doing the other tasks, the relative value of fully automated tasks will decrease and the tasks which require human labor will become more highly valued. In a world where the best paid people are ditch diggers, and ditch diggers can afford yachts because yacht production is fully automated, who cares what the wage of the ditch digger actually is? Wealth concentration is a concern, but not because it will make it impossible for the vast majority to live a decent life. Instead the economic lives (and likely socio-political lives as well) of these two groups will simply diverge. This is extremely concerning from a standpoint of justice, but it's really orthogonal to AI. We've had such aristocracies many times before - they arise because of a failure of social institutions, not technology. We've been on the path towards them long before AI came along, and there is no compelling evidence that AI has accelerated the process. As far as economics is concerned though, your quality of life will continue to improve, even if some billionaire's improves faster.
jgwil2 9mo ago
> If human labor really does become superfluous, that’s not a world where “ordinary people” are okay by default, but rather a world where the entire economic operating system needs to be redesigned. Oks treats this as a distant concern. I’d argue it’s the thing most worth worrying about, because policy needs to be built before we arrive there, not after. I agree with this sentiment, but history shows that humans are absolutely terrible at planning for revolutionary systemic changes like this. Our current inability to address climate change in any systematic way is just the latest example. It seems to me that if and when human labor becomes superfluous it will most likely result in a lot of chaos before a new system emerges.
dw_arthur 9mo ago
The Jevon's paradox example of plummeting costs to create videos doesn't make sense to me. If people are already watching 7 hours of videos a day how much more time do they have to consume video? There are only 24 hours in a day. Earth is only so large and can only handle so much pollution. There are limits we need to talk about here. I guess Elon hand waves it away by saying we'll go into space but that remains to be seen.
- dist-epoch 9mo ago
  I still watch the 7 hours of video every day, but the Instagram/TikTok algorithm can now find the perfect videos for me by choosing between 1000 hours of created video instead of the pre-AI 100 hours.
claywren 9mo ago
Hi, I wrote this article. If you’re interested in more posts about this topic — I write both on LessWrong and on X @wrenclay. Nathan Witkin has also posted a response to my article here https://open.substack.com/pub/arachnemag/p/the-jevons-paradox-for-intelligence?r=4bo104&utm_medium=ios https://open.substack.com/pub/arachnemag/p/the-jevons-parado...
avidphantasm 9mo ago
It’s fun, but also tiring, watching people come to the same conclusions Marx did from first principles, over, and over again.
signaldesk1992 9mo ago
I went through a layoff earlier this year and one thing that surprised me was how much of the stress wasn’t the job search itself, but just keeping track of everything else at the same time – benefits deadlines, paperwork, savings runway, follow-ups, etc. I ended up putting everything into a simple spreadsheet + checklist system so I could focus on actual decisions instead of remembering details. If anyone here is in that situation and wants something structured, I shared it here: https://signaldesk.gumroad.com/l/esywag https://signaldesk.gumroad.com/l/esywag Even if you don’t use it, biggest lesson for me was that having one place for all the moving parts made the whole process feel much more manageable.

85 points by cubefox 9mo ago

The article lays out the problems and why they are real. But I wish it would be bold and just say what’s needed to solve the issue. Without fair distribution of gains and with rapid concentration of wealth, the only viable solution in this jobless future is radically different taxation.

Uehreka 9mo ago
Speaking as a fellow job-displacement-worrier, I don’t think people have answers. But contrary to what a lot of people say, there is a ton of utility in pointing out a problem without having a solution. In this case, I think a lot of people who might have good ideas are currently under the mistaken impression that this isn’t a problem. To the extent that I’ve heard people propose solutions, many of them have pretty big flaws: - Retraining - AI will likely swoop in quickly and automate many of the brand new jobs it creates. Also retraining has a bit of a messy history, it was pretty ineffective at stopping the bleeding when large numbers of manufacturing jobs were offshored/automated in the past. - “Make work” programs - I think these are pretty silly on the face of it, although something like this might be mecessary in the really short term if there’s very sudden massive job loss and we haven’t figured out a solution. - Universal Basic Income - Probably the best system I’ve heard anyone propose. However there are 3 huge issues: 1 - politically this is a huge no-go at the moment (after watching the massive Covid stimulus happen in 2020 I have a sliver of hope, but not much). 2 - Even a pretty good UBI probably wouldn’t be enough to cushion the landing for people who make a lot right now and have made financial decisions (number of kids, purchasing a house, etc) on the basis of their current salary. 3 - Even if this happens in America (presumably redistributing the wealth accruing to American AI companies) it would leave non-Americans out in the cold, and we currently have no globally powerful institution with the trust and capability to manage a worldwide UBI.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- arctic-true 9mo ago
  A simpler answer would simply be that, if you lay someone off on the basis that an AI can replace their entire job functionality, you have to keep paying their salary dollar for dollar until they find something else to do. This incentivizes companies to try and figure out creative ways to continue using their existing workforce to maximize the value they get out of AI systems. You’d counterbalance that - and solve the other problem - by offering massive tax relief for companies who hire junior employees. In the same way that we use tax relief to encourage real estate and infrastructure investment in underserved areas, we can use it to tip the scales of economic rationality toward continuing to employ young people with no experience or specialized expertise. Notice that neither of these proposals requires redistribution as such (seizing wealth).
  - hdhdhsjsbdh 9mo ago
    So then the corps find a way to fire you for something other than AI displacement, replace you with AI anyway, and you’re on your own. Basically identical to firing someone in a clever way that avoids having to pay unemployment, which already happens quite frequently. I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. We seem to live in a death cult where avoiding a slight inconvenience to 100 people is more important than providing a decent standard of living for the other 345 million people. You can invent whatever clever little solution you want in the meantime but eventually the chickens will come home to roost.
    - pixl97 9mo ago
      >I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. HN is filled with lots of temporarily depressed millionaires and many actual millionaires too. These are the ones that have bought into zero tax, government is all bad, free market capitalism for me Rand'ian ideas without any systematic thought on how their ideas would work out in practice. Add to this that a lot of media, and pretty much everything on TV, is owned by billionaires these days that use the news as their platform to propagandize on why they should own more of everything and become richer, so it's not exactly surprising we're at this place.
strogonoff 9mo ago
It is always possible to attribute whatever harms we come to as a result of some technology to one underlying issue or another, never to the technology itself—regarding any technology, be it LLMs or guns, this can be considered technically correct 100% of the time, because no technology is inherently good or bad. That said, in face of a particularly disastrous (and yet predictable) outcome it is not enough to call for solving of such underlying issues; it is vital to solve such underlying issues before we introduce respective technology all over the place—and if that is not possible, make corresponding adjustments of how that technology is rolled out.
abraxas 9mo ago
Mass extermination through famine, genocide or plague is another outcome. An Elysium earth worked by robots is a vision tech bro billionaires are rooting for and building towards. As for your idea, I see no signs of their striving for redistributing their wealth.
claywren 9mo ago
I am working on several documents that outline solutions. I will post them here.

thelastgallon 9mo ago

> comparative advantage tells you that some human labor will remain valuable in some configuration, but nothing about the wages, number of jobs, or the distribution of gains. You can have comparative advantage and still have massive displacement, wage collapse, and concentration of returns to capital. A world where humans retain “comparative advantage” in a handful of residual tasks at a fraction of the current wages is technically consistent with Oks’ framework, but obviously is worth worrying about and is certainly not fine.

alephnerd 9mo ago

> found a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed occupations since late 2022. For young software developers specifically, employment fell almost 20% from its 2022 peak This is confounding AI-exposed white collar occupations with occupations that were overrepresented with extended remote work. I am on multiple boards and that was a major factor that disincentivized new grad hiring in the US, because a new grad salary in a white collar profession in the US is a mid-career salary in the rest of the world. AI is used as an excuse, but even most executives when polled agree that we do expect to see the amount of employees being hired at least in software adjacent roles to increase. I cannot justify hiring a mediocre new grad in Seattle for $120k who will end up using Claude Code anyhow when I can hire an early-career employee doing something similar in Romania or India for around $20k. The reality is a large portion of new grads and mid-career types who started their careers after 2020 are too mediocre for the TC paid. --- Edit: pulling a comment of mine from downthread > Why are then so many US developers still employed Becuase unlike the HN hivemind, a large portion of experienced developers in the US have found ways to realistically adopt new technologies where they are relevant. Reflexively being an AI fanatic or Luddite is stupid, but being a SWE who is able to to recognize and explain the value of these tools and their limits is extremely valuable. I can justify paying $300-400k TCs and 100% remote work if you are not a code monkey. This means being able to architect, manage upwards, do basic design and program management, hop onto customer calls, and keep upskilling on top of writing, testing, and reviewing code. We are not hiring SWEs to only push code. We hire SWEs in order to translate and implement business requirements into software. A developer who has a mindset like that is worth their weight in gold, and there are still plenty of these kinds of experienced developers in the US.

baxtr 9mo ago
I am confused by your last paragraph. Is it AI or not? First three paragraphs sounded like it’s not…
- alephnerd 9mo ago
  It is not AI becuase employees hired in Romania and the US are both expected to be able to know how to use AI, which papers over performance issues in most cases that matter for a business (time to delivery), but I cannot justify hiring a deskilled NCG for $120k in the US. Edit: cannot reply > Why are then so many US developers still employed Becuase unlike the HN hivemind, a large portion of experienced developers in the US have found ways to realistically adopt new technologies where they are relevant. Reflexively being an AI fanatic or Luddite is stupid, but being a SWE who is able to tin recognize and explain the value of these tools and their limits is extremely valuable. I can justify paying $300-400k TCs if you are not a code monkey. This means being able to architect, manage upwards, do basic design and program management, hop onto customer calls, and keep upskilling on top of writing and reviewing code. We are not hiring SWEs to only push code. We hire SWEs in order to translate and implement business requirements into software. A developer who has a mindset like that is worth their weight in gold, and there are still plenty of these kinds of experienced developers in the US.

0xy 9mo ago

It's simple, if you refuse to adapt you will be replaced by those who will. Writing code by hand is not going to be the default mode going forward. You either do the majority of your work controlling autonomous agents and reviewing their work or you get surpassed by all of your colleagues. Are you going to be the farmer who refuses to buy a plow? I also do not have sympathy for those who refuse to adapt. These people hold back organizations by appealing to tradition and resisting any form of change.

alephnerd 9mo ago
[flagged]
jlongr 9mo ago
Alr bro we're making software not going to war.
- 52-6F-62 9mo ago
  Now you know how these guys see everything. Like when Trump tells Canada (paraphrasing) "You think we're going to let China eat you first and just have the scraps?" Everything is a zero-sum game to them. They are philosophically void.
QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
This take seems to require that models stop getting better at some capability level a little above where they are now. Is this a future event that you are very confident of?
- 0xy 9mo ago
  AGI is mathematically impossible given our current electrical infrastructure constraints and basic laws, so yes it is. We're already seeing a dramatic slowdown in relative improvements. The gap between Sonnet 3.5 (June 2024) and Opus 4.6 (Feb 2026) is large, but it's not 1,000x. Not even 100x.

tokai 9mo ago

Imagine wasting so much time on this AI-taking-jobs, while US job creation is tanking due very bad policies. Anything but tackling real issues I guess.

rybosworld 9mo ago
> why worry about two problems when we could just worry about one?
- tokai 9mo ago
  because one is not actually a problem
  - Version467 9mo ago
    The author clearly disagrees with that statement.
raincole 9mo ago
US unemployment rate is really low right now. It's low in terms of the history data of the US, and it's super low compared to europe.
- rybosworld 9mo ago
  Ludwig Institute has a much more honest assessment of the job market: https://www.lisep.org/ https://www.lisep.org/ The BLS numbers are so manipulated at this point that they are effectively useless for individuals to get a true sense of the market.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

yellow_lead 9mo ago

> Brynjolfsson analyzed millions of ADP payroll records and found a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed occupations since late 2022. > So what’s the mechanism at play? AI replaces codified knowledge Many job postings peaked in 2022 due to the pandemic. The original paper tries to account for this but falls short in my opinion. Original paper said[1]: > One possibility is that our results are explained by a general slowdown in technology hiring from 2022 to 2023 as firms recovered from the COVID-19 Pandemic... > Figure A12 shows employment changes by age and exposure quintile after excluding computer occupations... > Figure A13 shows results when excluding firms in information technology or computer systems design... > ... These results indicate that our findings are not specific to technology roles. Excluding computer and IT jobs is not enough in my opinion. Look at all these other occupations which had peak hiring in 2022. Nursing jobs in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPNURS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPNURS Sales jobs in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSALE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSALE Scientific research & development jobs in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSCREDE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSCREDE Baking & finance jobs in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPBAFI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPBAFI [1] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/12/CanariesintheCoalMine_Nov25.pdf https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/12/Cana...

randusername 9mo ago

> AI replaces codified knowledge – the kind of learning you get from classrooms or textbooks – but struggles with tacit knowledge, the experiential judgement that accumulates over years on the job. This is why seniors are spared and juniors are not. But Oks’ thesis treats this as reassurance: see, humans with deep knowledge still have comparative advantage! I believe this is more of a senior worker’s luxury, and the protection for “seniors” will move up and up the hierarchy over time. Times change, the ladders you and I climbed to success may not be around in the same forms for our children. That's not new. But will there be any ladders to climb if the bottom rungs are all gone?

CuriouslyC 9mo ago
All the kids already wanted be influencers, ironically turns out that's one of the safer career paths when AI is factored into the equation. Still not plumber or electrician safe, but the potential upsides are much higher.
- readams 9mo ago
  AI is already taking over content generation
  - tartoran 9mo ago
    Eventually created and consumed by AI, fewer and fewer humans will consume it.
    - irl_zebra 9mo ago
      I will consume less of it, and have actively blocked or unsubscribed from orgs that promote it, but the generation behind us won't have these scruples.
- Take8435 9mo ago
  AI Influencers are already making inroads. I don't think it's as safe as you think.

Aurornis 9mo ago

> For young software developers specifically, employment fell almost 20% from its 2022 peak. Employment in the 2020-2022 range was highly unusual due to COVID stimulus the resulting unprecedented hiring. Tech companies were hiring anyone they could and after some time juniors were the only way to feed the insatiable demand for more headcount. Comparing to this time without taking that into account is going to be misleading. This period was also a strange time for remote work. I’ve been remote since before then, but COVID era WFH felt like a turning point when bad behavior during remote work became normalized. That’s when we started having remote hires trying to work two jobs (and giving us half an effort / not getting their work done), and there was a rise of “quiet quitting” as a news media meme because everyone thought they could always just walk out and get a new job if they got fired for not working. We also weren’t doing juniors any favors by hiring them in high numbers without a sufficient ratio of seniors to mentor and lead them. That also coincided with the rise of GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. These tools were not great at the time, but if you were a junior who was over-hired into a company that didn’t have capacity to mentor you and you were working remote in the age when Reddit was promoting quiet quitting and overemployment on your feed every day, banging out PRs with GitHub Copilot for a couple hours a day and then going about your life for a $135K salary right out of college felt like you just hit the jackpot of historical confluences for work-life balance. I saw this exact story play out at multiple companies who got burned out on the idea of hiring juniors due to the risk. Combine that with the rapid improvement of the LLM tools and the idea quickly became that you just hire seniors and treat the LLMs as juniors rather than paying another salary for them to pilot Claude Code around. The seniors had to review the Claude Code output anyway, so why not cut out the middleman? Then add the economic downturn and the chaos of whatever this administration is doing this month and now there are so many qualified seniors on the market that hiring juniors is hard to justify. This is the part that would have happened with or without AI. All things considered, being down only 20% from the 2022 peak seems not that bad.

esafak 9mo ago
The study segregated juniors from seniors; it's controlled for that.
- 9mo ago

lostphilosopher 9mo ago

In every discussion of AI eliminating or dramatically reducing the compensation for <some large double digit percentage> of “white collar” jobs (and probably “blue collar” too). It’s unclear to me what the end state is - the vast majority of the economy works on volume. You need large numbers of people with enough money to buy your product/service. As wealth concentrates there are fewer potential buyers and economies of scale start working against producers. (And governments need people with money to tax…)

kolektiv 9mo ago
The end state is economic collapse/feudalism - quite desired by various current oligarchs.
smallmancontrov 9mo ago
The economy becomes a palace economy, where the money fountains are owned by a few and the loot slowly flows through rings of gatekeepers while the outer rungs are plagued by desperation and poverty despite living in the shadow of abundance. These are common around the world and through time. It's the Star Wars fate.
WarmWash 9mo ago
Wealth likely won't mean much, it will be a concentration of power. The question is if the AI will respect that concentration of power, or if it will just do it's own thing.
- tartoran 9mo ago
  The concentration of power will own the AI so it will be at their whim
Shaddox 9mo ago
Sadly, that matters very little! https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-earners-drive-nearly-191500198.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-earners-drive-nearly-1... If this is to be believed, regular consumer goods won't matter anymore, and instead you just cater to the wealthy.

LordHumungous 9mo ago

If the worst predictions about AI's effect on employment turn out to be correct, then I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI. Particularly if it becomes the case that profits are accruing to a few massive corporations who run the AI. There is no reason people have to tolerate a technology that is destructive to society, anymore than they have to tolerate companies selling fentanyl at 7/11.

coffeefirst 9mo ago
Yes, and that’s the least catastrophic option. I get the sense the boosters don’t read a lot of history.
MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
>I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI. I agree. It will be an interesting debate to watch play out, because a) lots of end-users love using AI and will be loath to give it up, and b) advances in compute will almost certainly allow us to run current frontier models (or better) locally on our laptops and phones, which means that profits no longer accrue to a few massive AI labs. It would also would make regulating it a lot tricker, since kneecapping the AI labs would no longer effectively regulate the technology.
- LordHumungous 9mo ago
  That would be an interesting scenario.
Havoc 9mo ago
> There is no reason people have to tolerate a technology that is destructive to society, All evidence to the contrary. Aside from the French occasionally burning down some cars the western populations (me unfortunately included) have become remarkably relaxed about such things. Even very extreme examples like blatant refusal by government to investigate absolutely horrific stuff like Epstein gets at most some mildly upset TikTok reels Add some aggressive lobbying by big tech and perhaps a sprinkle of palantir population monitoring and I don’t think we’ll see a refusal to tolerate at scale

digitalsushi 9mo ago

if software engineers get displaced, they will eventually drift into other jobs that benefit from people who solve problems like software engineers. and if the former software engineers are willing to work at a rate reduced to their former positions, and if they bring better efficiencies with them, then there will be a slow cascade. it doesn't follow that all software engineers are excellent at other work, please don't take that from my quip. but i could see the pattern, over time, being large enough to identify. since software engineering jobs historically are very well paid, it does give some plausibility that former engineers working for less money would have this displacing effect. its all icky no matter what i think, maybe someone else can tell me why i'm wrong and cheer me up

retrocog 9mo ago

This thread inspired me to write an article because from my perspective, the debate over AI and jobs is missing a crucial question: not whether employment will exist, but what holds communities together as systems erode? https://www.robpanico.com/articles/display/the-answer-isnt-macro/ https://www.robpanico.com/articles/display/the-answer-isnt-m...

jjk166 9mo ago

Pretty much all of this rests on the assumption that recent changes in software hiring practices are primarily driven by AI, and that such changes will continue and spread across industries without foreseeable limit. The reality is that higher interest rates hit software particularly hard because less venture capital is being thrown at traditional software development. When money is tight, cutting new hires decreases to push off layoffs, and when layoffs happen experienced potential hires become cheap, displacing inexperienced entry level hires. No one is telling their boss "reduce my budget, the AI is so good I don't need these people anymore" they are getting told by their boss "find a way to make due with 3 fewer people." We should expect overtaxed workers to try and find ways to utilize AI to take up some of this slack, and higher ups may spin a tale of increased efficiency, but the fact is AI adoption is a symptom, not a cause. The hiring decrease and layoffs happened at plenty of places that have failed to adopt AI as well. Given that the current situation is unique to the circumstances, it does not hold that software portends the fate of all white collar work. That being said, we can certainly expect AI to improve, and attempts to be made to replicate and improve upon any genuine efficiency gains made in the present experiment. But the fact is that while AI may make certain tasks easier, that will lead to reorganization of the labor force more than disappearance. When mechanization of agriculture reduced the labor required to produce enough food to sustain people, people stopped being farmers. It was a major societal shift, and there were certainly issues, but we don't have 90% of our population made up of unemployed farmers who can't afford to buy food, nor even a large percentage of the population who wants to farm but is forced to work a much less desirable job. Comparative advantage will guarantee people are still doing something. There will always be tasks which would benefit from human input, and there will always be more such tasks. We may not currently place much value in these tasks, but by virtue of AI doing the other tasks, the relative value of fully automated tasks will decrease and the tasks which require human labor will become more highly valued. In a world where the best paid people are ditch diggers, and ditch diggers can afford yachts because yacht production is fully automated, who cares what the wage of the ditch digger actually is? Wealth concentration is a concern, but not because it will make it impossible for the vast majority to live a decent life. Instead the economic lives (and likely socio-political lives as well) of these two groups will simply diverge. This is extremely concerning from a standpoint of justice, but it's really orthogonal to AI. We've had such aristocracies many times before - they arise because of a failure of social institutions, not technology. We've been on the path towards them long before AI came along, and there is no compelling evidence that AI has accelerated the process. As far as economics is concerned though, your quality of life will continue to improve, even if some billionaire's improves faster.

jgwil2 9mo ago

> If human labor really does become superfluous, that’s not a world where “ordinary people” are okay by default, but rather a world where the entire economic operating system needs to be redesigned. Oks treats this as a distant concern. I’d argue it’s the thing most worth worrying about, because policy needs to be built before we arrive there, not after. I agree with this sentiment, but history shows that humans are absolutely terrible at planning for revolutionary systemic changes like this. Our current inability to address climate change in any systematic way is just the latest example. It seems to me that if and when human labor becomes superfluous it will most likely result in a lot of chaos before a new system emerges.

dw_arthur 9mo ago

The Jevon's paradox example of plummeting costs to create videos doesn't make sense to me. If people are already watching 7 hours of videos a day how much more time do they have to consume video? There are only 24 hours in a day. Earth is only so large and can only handle so much pollution. There are limits we need to talk about here. I guess Elon hand waves it away by saying we'll go into space but that remains to be seen.

dist-epoch 9mo ago
I still watch the 7 hours of video every day, but the Instagram/TikTok algorithm can now find the perfect videos for me by choosing between 1000 hours of created video instead of the pre-AI 100 hours.

claywren 9mo ago

Hi, I wrote this article. If you’re interested in more posts about this topic — I write both on LessWrong and on X @wrenclay. Nathan Witkin has also posted a response to my article here https://open.substack.com/pub/arachnemag/p/the-jevons-paradox-for-intelligence?r=4bo104&utm_medium=ios https://open.substack.com/pub/arachnemag/p/the-jevons-parado...

avidphantasm 9mo ago

It’s fun, but also tiring, watching people come to the same conclusions Marx did from first principles, over, and over again.

signaldesk1992 9mo ago

I went through a layoff earlier this year and one thing that surprised me was how much of the stress wasn’t the job search itself, but just keeping track of everything else at the same time – benefits deadlines, paperwork, savings runway, follow-ups, etc. I ended up putting everything into a simple spreadsheet + checklist system so I could focus on actual decisions instead of remembering details. If anyone here is in that situation and wants something structured, I shared it here: https://signaldesk.gumroad.com/l/esywag https://signaldesk.gumroad.com/l/esywag Even if you don’t use it, biggest lesson for me was that having one place for all the moving parts made the whole process feel much more manageable.