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US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
- shevy-java 5mo agoWill the people wake up? We need a modern take of the movie "They Live". Granted, any copy would not be anywhere near as good as the original, even for a B movie, but AI is really turning into skynet (but it sucks).
- eli_gottlieb 5mo agoThey Live was a product of its time. We live in our time, so instead we've got Sorry to Bother You.
- s_dev 5mo agoI'm not sure what 'film' America is trying to be but I've seen plenty of real life references that could have come straight from either the Handmaids Tale, Idiocracy, The Dead Zone or Civil War the past few years. Life does seem to imitate art sometimes.
- PaulKeeble 5mo agoPlenty of Do Not Look Up in there as well on a lot of topics.
- ok_dad 5mo agoNo, the art is calling out what’s always been there but you didn’t notice.
- new_account_100 5mo agoIf you're checking on open-registration internet forums (HackerNews in particular), you will never see "the people" wake up. If you're arguing against "AI" on HackerNews, you might as well join the Washington Generals. You and your opinion are tolerated only as long as there is a more popular pro-AI opinion in the replies to your comment.
- senordevnyc 5mo agoIn my observation, HN is rapidly turning into an extremely bitter and cynical anti-AI echo chamber.
- new_account_100 5mo agoThey've been banning my accounts for bitter and cynical anti-AI opinions for years. Whatever is making it through the filters to you is only a fraction of the real anti-AI animus expressed by the human users of this site.
- senordevnyc 5mo agoOr maybe you're just extreme? Regardless, it's tiresome.
- daedrdev 5mo agoI think people are blaming AI for a recession caused by trump’s tarrifs and the oil crisis. Businesses fear that oil prices may explode until enough of the economy enters a recession that oil demand decreases, and are already feeling the supply crunch
- agentifysh 5mo agoYet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word. I also think the fixation on Trump is misleading and takes away from the actual structural side effects of dollar issuance via unbacked fiat. It's convenient scapegoating to take your attention away from the long lingering issue of US dollar dominance and debt that is now causing large social divide and standard of living. The physics of a reserve currency is that it reverts to zero through endless supply to fuel the engine to accelerate inequality at home and abroad. You see that an increasingly smaller club of people are politically opposed yet benefit by creating a narrative that takes your attention away from it. This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.
- toomanyrichies 5mo agoNote for others - "ATH" => "All-Time High"
- stavros 5mo agoAlso the IATA code for the Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos, could have meant one or the other, no way to know which.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago> Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word. It did under Biden as well yet nobody had any issues claiming the economy was in terrible shape and that we were entering a potential recession. Which frankly I agreed with! The stock market tells a fraction of the story. Especially because institutional investors now dominate investment in a way they didn’t only a few decades ago. A booming stock market does not benefit “the common man” like it once did unless one believes in trickle down economics or something. Employee pensions have become rare in the private sector, matched 401(k)s used for investment are also becoming more scarce. The stock market just isn’t tied to “the average person” like it once was, relatively speaking. I do think Biden deserves immense blame for inflation getting out of control, but I also think as usual people overlooked what the Democrat president was handed, which was a Covid economy in this case. There was going to be fallout from that for years no matter what he did. No one blames Trump for the economy he handed off either.
- jesse_dot_id 5mo agoIt is quite clear that AI is only as useful as the person piloting it and therefore, if the job losses are due to AI, they are temporary. The C Suite folks spreading the batshit idea that AI can replace humans on LinkedIn will eventually lemming their way back to the correct side of reality. I personally think that AI is being used as a convenient blanket to hide the plumes of smoke emanating from an economy engulfed in flames.
- macintux 5mo agoThe problem is that the C Suite folks can hang onto their delusions longer than most people can get by without gainful employment.
- rvz 5mo agoThis is "AGI".
- jvanderbot 5mo ago> A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025, according to annual data published Friday. That compared with an increase in overall employment of 0.8% over the same period. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occupational-employment-projections-overview-and-highlights-2023-33.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup... https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm The article that flags AI risk still projects that the top 15 growth employment through 2033 contains software related jobs like Computer / Information Research Scientists, Data Scientists, Operations Research analysts.
- nradov 5mo agoHave past BLS predictions proved accurate?
- mechagodzilla 5mo agoRelatively accurate (I think they're pretty close like 70%+ of the time). Significantly better than just projecting that the next five years will be like the last 5 years.
- blakesterz 5mo agoPlanet Money just did an episode on this. The answer is, at least according to this, yes, pretty accurate. At least in the past https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5815308 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5815308
- danaris 5mo agoBut wasn't the BLS the organization that Trump fired and replaced all the leaders of recently, for putting out (accurate) reports that made him look bad?
- ls612 5mo agoYes in the long term. Sometimes they will get surprised by unexpected events (Covid) but you can’t blame them when their tourism and hospitality numbers are wildly wrong when that happens.
- nurettin 5mo agoThe demand for cushy white collar desk jobs (which weren't around 30 years ago) is crashing. Rest of the world, not so much.
- elromulous 5mo agoCushy white collar desk jobs were not around in the mid 90s?
- new_account_100 5mo agoNope, Most American workers were just auto plant workers and soybean farmers until the internet was invented in 1991.
- ralph84 5mo ago30 years ago was the middle of the .com boom and white collar jobs had been around for a century already. White collar employment started with the industrial revolution and really took off during the post-WWII boom.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoFigure has been doing a 75 hour live stream of it actually replacing a real job and it has that AI magic where it has gestures and movements that seem emergent. They’re coming for anything manual in less than 2 years.
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- artninja1988 5mo agoHas anyone done the math on how many jobs AI has to replace in order to justify current valuations? Would be interesting to see imo
- lispisok 5mo agoI think the goal is to replace workers who cost $10,000/mo with an AI agent that costs $8,000/mo
- new_account_100 5mo ago$8000/month is way too low. If you're only spending $8000/month on AI you're in drastic danger of being replaced by a more efficient AI firm.
- hx8 5mo agoYou should replace a team of 7 costing $70,000/mo with a team of 2 costing $30,000/mo and $100,000/mo in ai tokens.
- zapkyeskrill 5mo agoIf you replace 100 then that's 800k/mo spend. Would that do?
- new_account_100 5mo agoThat's a decent start, but if we're talking shop you might as well bump to at least 1.2-1.3M just to play it safe.
- marcosdumay 5mo agoThere's no public valuation of any AI company. But by the investment contracts OpenAI announced, if they replaced every white collar job in the world and captured all of their salary, they would have a P/E of ~1/70. (Assuming no costs at all.) You decide what return horizon you are comfortable with and solve the linear equation for it. (But my numbers are from the end of last year, I haven't seen any more recent compilation of their contracts.)
- awfulneutral 5mo agoThat thing that reassures me is that I kind of think most people in software aren't doing much useful work anyway, so if the whole thing was really driven by hiring the fewest humans possible to get the work done, companies probably could have fired half of us even without AI.
- AbbeFaria 5mo agoThis matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.
- treis 5mo agoThink this is the FAANGs entering their stodgy middle life phase like Oracle et al did decades ago. Except for Google they haven't done anything innovative in like a decade. It's time to wring money out of the monopoly and buy companies to add to that.
- iejwjw 5mo agoThis is the take nobody is ready for! Everyone is under the illusion that growth is infinite and there are no periods where things jam to a halt and we get stagnation.
- AbbeFaria 5mo agoIt’s more nuanced than that. There are lines of business where there is plenty of growth and places where growth has stagnated or business is decelerating. In the former, you can see some of the products that MSFT is shipping such as MAIA chips, Azure Horizon DB, MSFT Fabric, Sovereign clouds etc. These businesses are seeing steady growth and there’s plenty of work to be done whereas for products like IoT, XBox and anything to do with gaming in general etc you will see that there isn’t much growth left and yet these products have a lot of headcount behind them. So MSFT isn’t stagnating (revenue keeps increasing). Although there are quite a few businesses within MSFT that can use a lot of headcount reduction, this is my take as a low level L63 grunt.
- djoldman 5mo agoNon-paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/us-is-starting-to-see-heavy-job-losses-in-roles-exposed-to-ai/ar-AA23iPFc https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/us-is-starting-to-see-...
- eli_gottlieb 5mo agoThis is going to be horribly embarrassing when it turns out that AI can only outcompete human labor in some roles. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers
- sakopov 5mo agoMost of the job losses are in tech and it all started back in late 2022 and early 2023 arguably before AI was perceived as a real threat. I think after 3 years of tech hiring melting because of all the economic uncertainty people can't see the forest for the trees anymore. Justy $0.02
- achierius 5mo agoIs that the case? The article says that the losses were > led by customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople.
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- matltc 5mo agoWould like to see the numbers if we exclude healthcare jobs. I think job growth has been net-negative across the board when healthcare is excluded.
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago> saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025 So, the "AI job losses" just happen to be before AI started to boom, during the kickoff of largest trade war in 100 years? They don't mention the trade war at all in the piece? And no analysis whatsoever of what other factors could have resulted in "customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople" being let go. Who the hell writes this crap? What was the point?
- amazingamazing 5mo agoThe reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.
- hnav 5mo agoAlmost like the whole “learn how to code” thing was a play. Commoditize your complement and all.
- lbrito 5mo agoThis has been true for many years though
- iejwjw 5mo agoIt’s been true since pre llm’s. In retrospect look at the graveyard filled with projects - this is a reflection of over hiring and poor project selection.
- cmiles8 5mo agoThis is very true and has been for a while. AI is just giving CEOs an excuse to just trim that fat. Even after layoffs most of big tech could cut 50% of its workforce tomorrow and see minimal impact long term. Thats driving a lot of the present layoffs as CEOs go “oh crap we gotta look like we’re with the cool kids on this AI stuff”… and then just do a big cut and cite AI. Truth is they could have cut years ago but had no social pressure to do so.
- torben-friis 5mo agoHave you read the article? This is about professions like paralegals or translators, not engineers.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo agoWhenever articles like this come out, tons of the comments are just general zeitgeist responses about "corporate layoffs that blame AI". Which I think is a particular shame in this instance because I think the article narrows in with some actual good evidence that yes, there are vulnerable roles that AI is wholesale replacing and not leading to a "employees will just do more as they become more productive with AI" outcome. Looking through the list of those professions, I would bet that nearly half of them won't even exist anymore except for some extremely niche cases. Paralegals, translators, credit authorizers, many types of secretaries - AI can basically do nearly all the work for many of these occupations.
- robberat7 5mo agoThis is intentional. Companies are actively trying to develop capabilities to replace humans. I am surprised there are not enough protests against this.
- hammock 5mo agoInstead of protesting they are all getting together on Monday mornings in sf and hiking
- kingbiz 5mo agoHa I've been following that group for a while now and it gets bigger every week!
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- raincom 5mo agoI am happy to see them replace humans with AI machines. However, housing, healthcare, and other insurances have become super expensive. Who is going to buy all the stuff these companies produce? Maybe, it will become a two tier economy: wealthy selling stuff to fellow wealthy people; under ground economy with bartering their trades for food, building shacks for living, flea market dentists, old Wild West style flea market medical doctors selling potions, elixirs, dry lizard oil, etc.
- hnav 5mo agoExactly, the “economy” only matters because the ruling classes need the labor. If you could accomplish everything using machines you could have all the resources, beautiful vistas and global warming runway to yourself. Maybe some classical occupations exist like teachers, artisans, actors, sex workers so that the ruling class can still flex on each other.
- sdaHwtr 5mo agoIt does not matter at this stage is an excuse for layoffs or not. The entire world should impose sanctions on the US for the largest IP theft in history until the laundering companies are illegal (and the waterways closed due to US wars are open). If this administration works against its people and the whole world, maybe there should be a regime change. Peaceful version of Jan 6th. All the unemployed have little to lose.
- martin-t 5mo agoDiscussions about this topic need to separate "AI" and aAI. - "AI" is a tool which workers use - usually to produce outputs of the same or lower quality faster. It needs a human to be constantly monitoring, steering and verifying it. - aAI is actual AI - what sci-fi authors imagined and what ML companies promise. You ask aAI a question and it either gives you a complete, unbiased and correct answer or says why it cannot do that (insufficient information, not enough computing power, etc.). It doesn't ignore instructions or get stuck in a loop. It doesn't delete your database or exfiltrate secrets. Obviously, this is a spectrum, not a hard division. Crucially, "AI" is a tool for workers. aAI is a tool for owners - it replaces workers. Owners give aAI control over a company or some other form of capital and it monitors, steers and verifies humans, who will still be economically valuable for manual work, at least until robots catch up. --- All the people hyping AI either still see it as a tool ("AI", not aAI), not believing it will mature into aAI and replace them; or they are the owner class who will benefit from not having to pay wages while maintaining their passive income. If most of your income comes from work (as opposed to passive income from ownership), you have 0 reason to be excited by AI. Your life will not be better if you lose your economic value. --- EDIT: If you disagree, you should be able to express why and we can have a rational discussion about it. If you cannot express why, consider not participating in the discussion at all, not even by reducing the visibility of my opinion by downvoting it.
- Devasta 5mo agoAm I meant to pretend that companies weren't for years beforehand using RTO to drive layoffs? They are always doing it, AI is just the cover.
- rundef 5mo agoWhatever happened to the "AI won't replace you; someone who uses AI will" narrative?
- TurdF3rguson 5mo agoAI replaced the guy who wrote it.
- iejwjw 5mo agoWhen is that moment gonna come that boosters keep saying - wherein those who get left behind will be chopped at their legs and consequently laid off? Many ego’s are gonna be battered after all this fizzles out
- LogicFailsMe 5mo agoHoney, I overhired during the pandemic and I need a scapegoat for the layoffs!
- mapontosevenths 5mo agoThats been mostly straightened out for years. This is tariffs, oil, and uncertainty more than anything. When I worked in finance the thing that made the analysts happiest was a split election wherein neither side could accomplish much. We now have the opposite of that, and worse a capricious leader who makes huge changes without much justification or explanation. Pressing "shuffle" on the economic policy doesn't help anyone. To finance the best government is the least effective government.
- winrid 5mo agoFun fact the US government was designed to be ineffective on purpose. It's not supposed to do much by design
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- brazukadev 5mo agoThe US government is far from ineffective, it might just have been designed to not benefit the people.
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- winrid 5mo agoHow does it not? We have a ton of social programs.
- brazukadev 5mo agoit is the richest country in the world, mate. Every citizen should get a comfortable life, not just a $1,000 check. But most of the money must go to the military and Wall Street.
- Papazsazsa 5mo ago"Follow me: a day in the life of a soup line influencer"
- cmiles8 5mo agoThere’s very little evidence of AI replacing jobs en mass. There a ton of evidence that underperforming companies are trimming fat, with CEOs citing AI impacts rather than their own bad decisions that led to the fat that needed trimming.
- khuey 5mo agoAI is perfect for this because you get to sweep bad decisions you made under the rug and look like a forward-thinking visionary. Why would any CEO not blame their layoffs on AI, true or not?
- cmiles8 5mo agoThat’s exactly what’s happening. Problem is though that nobody is really buying that narrative anymore.
- plantwallshoe 5mo agoUnderperforming? Big tech companies are reporting record profits and major layoffs in the same press releases.
- cmiles8 5mo agoRelative to the number of people they employ, yes they were underperforming. Most did rampant over-hiring during the pandemic and are simply correcting for that now.
- mrandish 5mo agoLosses in job categories management can claim was related to AI. Some management may even believe AI can fully replace all work done by those positions. In some of those cases they will learn they were mistaken. The eventual rehiring of some positions will happen unevenly over time, be attributed by management to "ongoing growth" and not be reported by the media.
- krapp 5mo agoNot to worry. I've been assured many, many times that automation only ever creates more, better and higher paying jobs than it removes, and that no one but talentless bottom-feeding hacks are losing jobs to AI anyway, not the elite crème de la crème of HN. So the good times are on their way gentlemen!
- Falimonda 5mo agoHere's a real-time layoffs tracker for anyone interested: https://jobs.voxos.ai/us/layoffs https://jobs.voxos.ai/us/layoffs
- TurdF3rguson 5mo agonot very balanced if it doesn't also track new hires
- sofixa 5mo agoSome might be interested in the Iceberg Index: https://iceberg.mit.edu/report.pdf https://iceberg.mit.edu/report.pdf Basically, AI is replacing tasks of jobs, not jobs per se. There's a study by folks from MIT on what tasks, and which roles are most at risk.
- CamelCaseName 5mo agoLooks like this data only goes until May 2025, so it's a year out of date. Also, overall employment is still up 0.8%
- cdrnsf 5mo agoEvery interaction I have with AI where I previously would’ve interacted with a person is worse. Whether that’s something mundane like scheduling an appointment, use at a doctor’s office, chat support. I imagine it’s cheaper for the company deploying it, but it’s all bad. It lines up with companies being more concerned with investors than actual users and customers though.
- Xeoncross 5mo agoAh, but it's cheaper. Replace "AI" with "auto parts" or "store food" and you see the same thing. Replace "AI" with "police force" or "contractors" and it's the same thing. Why is everyone and everything getting worse? A sort of "Prisoner's dilemma" I suppose: no one wants to take a stand and lose their business edge just for principles sake.
- roxolotl 5mo agoThis is why a political solution is the only way forward. I’m optimistic that people are finally fed up but who knows.
- oliwarner 5mo agoWhat sort of political solution is there? What intervention could roll this back?
- dragontamer 5mo agoTaxes. If these companies can afford $trillions, then the government can collect some dues that can fund retraining programs or whatever.
- bdangubic 5mo agoyea, historically in the United States we have been successfully solving all our problems by collecting more taxes. nothing more efficient than giving money to our Government
- Epa095 5mo agoIf its because of AI we should see a similar trend across other developed countries, no? And maybe even a correlation with how much they adopt AI https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ai-adoption-rates-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ai-adoption-rates-by-countr...
- tim333 5mo ago> A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025 A 0.2% drop seems more like too small to tell from statistical noise more that heavy.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo agoText-only,^1 no Javascript, HTTPS optional: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23iPFc https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23iPFc 1. For example, links https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23iPFc
- RDignity 5mo ago[flagged]