4 ms·

"An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

31 points by aanet 4mo ago

aanet 4mo ago
> Rapid improvements in AI capabilities and growing corporate adoption have led to predictions that the technology could lead to large-scale job losses before the end of the decade. So, just how concerned should we be about an AI “job apocalypse”? MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Neil Thompson and GS’ Joseph Briggs generally agree that these predictions likely won’t come to pass, though they differ on the scale of disruption ahead. Briggs expects significant labor displacement but only temporarily as new jobs eventually emerge. Thompson is less convinced about large-scale job displacement and takes comfort in the ability to anticipate changes, seeing AI as a rising tide rather than a crashing wave for labor. And Acemoglu expects a small net negative impact on labor over the next five years, with possible larger losses over the longer term if investment remains focused on replacing rather than complementing workers. Amid this debate, we find that AI’s impact on corporate labor needs—and earnings—remains too uncertain for markets to reward (for now). A GS report - including discussions with MIT labor economists DAren Acemoglu (Nobel), Neil Thompson
- Quarrel 4mo ago
  FWIW I think Acemoglu writes very well & I loved his book "Why Nations Fail" for introducing lots of interesting ideas to me, while also helping me understand my own (non-failed) society better.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  What I got from that is, if someone is really so desperate to wipe egg off their face, they'll rename some existing job titles and use that to justify stagnant wages. After all, you're not a "software engineer" anymore, but an "intelligence engineer"! You can do more with less! Meanwhile, the work is identical and hours are tracked more vigilantly.
Mistletoe 4mo ago
I tried to find a GS report from the top of the 2000 tech bubble but couldn't find one. I wonder what it would have said?
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
  There's this, which seems uncontroversial. https://people.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2004/Street_research/GS_IC_Sept_8_1999.pdf https://people.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2004/Street_...
bayarearefugee 4mo ago
> Key to this view is our expectation that over the long run AI will create many new jobs even as it destroys existing ones. Still waiting for anyone with this viewpoint to offer a single educated guess at what any of these created jobs might look like even in very broad terms. All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. I get that previous automation waves have lead to new jobs in the past, but automating knowledge and intelligence is just fundamentally a different thing than anything we have automated in the past and what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized?
- morkalork 4mo ago
  I'm still waiting for this theory to demonstrate itself in countries that already have labour surplesses
- otterdude 4mo ago
  > All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. Welcome to economics! Bullshit and conjecture all the way down.
  - saimiam 4mo ago
    If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other? Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them. Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action. Economics is closer to weather science - we can make certain inferences and predictions which can be wrong but the basic working theory is broadly correct, imho.
    - otterdude 4mo ago
      I think youre confusing a religious like belief in capitalism that posits that "greed is good" despite any contra indication with economics, which is a discipline where conjecture is taught as fact and empiricism if frowned upon. I'm not even going to touch your examples. They are completely illogical? Dell? The Internet?? Thats one company, and a technology. If you read the wealth of nations, the only real promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices, and thats why its considered "good" not because it solves all problems. I believe that, the rest is ill-supported conjecture. To point out the global stupidity that is economics, there is absolutely no consideration for the concept of a constraint. Constraints are a fundamental problem in optimization. This article lays it out nicely. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imperative/?social_token=230e18b100d16cb57bb49a853c65e69e&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sm-direct https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imper... Research this topic and you'll find economists arguing insistently that the conservation of mass or energy don't exist.
operatingthetan 4mo ago
Why are AI boosters turning around and trying to suggest AI now won't take our jobs? Or less jobs than previously stated? Meanwhile Meta has so much AI compute that they don't know what to do with, and they are ready to lease it out. And corporations suddenly want token austerity across the board. OpenAI is delaying their IPO until "next year." Something is starting to give.
- a34729t 4mo ago
  Because enough of the plebs are realizing the future is grim, so the PR firms have been put i to action. Earlier this year as if on cue Sam and Dario changed their tune on AI replacing workers.
  - operatingthetan 4mo ago
    I think the general public is already kind of bored of AI and the phase of corporations writing blank checks for frontier models is over. The top labs keep doing shady marketing stuff (and various embarrassing stunts) and it's difficult to take their word at face value on anything. Also Microsoft has been pouring money into AI and it's like not working at all. They might be in trouble.
    - andersonpico 4mo ago
      Not disagreeing, but I wonder how much you have to fuck up to put a trillion dollar company in trouble. Surely it can't be that bad, right?
      - operatingthetan 4mo ago
        Nadella only understands SAAS/Cloud and everything looks like a SAAS/Cloud nail to his hammer. They threw Copilot at every single thing they could think of with no discretion and now Copilot is the worst brand in all of AI. They don't even realize this yet and are still dumping money into the Copilot hole.
- 4mo ago
harimau777 4mo ago
The thing that I never hear discussed is how long it will take these "new jobs" to materialize and how much they will pay.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  And what people do before the new jobs show up.
  - DrewADesign 4mo ago
    Well in the Industrial Revolution, the no-longer-necessary skilled craftsman became miserable, poorly paid cogs in service of their new automatic controllers. So a lot of us have that to look forward to. Personally, I’ve switched back to the track I was on in my twenties: I spent the day doing moderately interesting work in a skilled trade, periodically having to haul 80lb-90lb steel machine parts up two flights of stairs in an un-air-conditioned, 100 degree manufacturing facility wearing heavy protective clothes and tools. I’ve worked in blue collar jobs before so I’m used to it, but I’ve seen a lot of developers say they’re going to be electricians or something. Good fucking luck! I’d conservatively estimate that 90% of developers I worked with are too soft, either emotionally or physically, to complete the first week of a years-long trade apprenticeship. The starting salary is only marginally better than working at Walgreens, and you’re expected to do a shitload of grunt work that is usually done by 20-year-olds. I foresee the entry-level retail, DoorDash, uber, instacart, et al scenes getting a whole lot nerdier over the next few years.
    - sublinear 4mo ago
      With all due respect, you seem rather cynical and upset for someone who made it past "the first week of a years-long trade apprenticeship".
      - DrewADesign 4mo ago
        In general, as a person? Not at all. When discussing the tech industry that employed me for almost two decades, in total? You’re definitely not wrong. Especially after graduating from art school in 2024 to career change into technical artistry, seeing the very real damage generative AI was doing to people trying to enter the creative fields, and seeing the tech scene responses range from incredibly smug to outright jubilant. Suddenly HN and every other technical forum was full of overnight armchair philosophers making sweeping statements about art, artists, commercial art, and who deserved to be paid for art. (Coincidentally, since the tech job market slowed way down, far fewer tech people here seem so smug about people losing their careers to automation!) The prospect of sweeping tech industry job market disruptions used to make me feel bad, but I can’t really muster that up anymore. So yeah, sure. Despite it being a huge part of my life for a very long time, I’m pretty solidly in the “fuck the modern tech industry” camp right now, and I think it’s a pretty rational response.
Ozzie-D 4mo ago
[flagged]
nondevmendel 4mo ago
A few points: 1. As a somewhat self-denying but admittedly obvious "tech bro", I can't help but cringe at some of the tech bro podcasts claiming that AI is not going to mass replace jobs. After a previous round of layoffs at my company due to financial constraints. We've managed to not just replace the bulk of our developers withy Claude, but seriously outperform them and build some serious, real-world applications in very short order. These were applications that touch highly sensitive databases across multiple departments in our company. I cannot see where all these engineering jobs are going to go if our small company was able to replace our engineering team with one 4X smaller and get better output. 2. These same podcasters claim that "this is why people should be in trades and doing skilled labor, such as electricians and plumbers." We have to be fools to think that AI + robotics is not going to replace all this very shortly. For the longest time I said it would be about ten years, now, but seeing how my unbogglingly fast Claude got so good (i.e., just compared to last year), I find it hard to imagine that this would be less than three years out. I personally think that these "tech-elite" podcasters are trying to brand a message so that people won't be afraid of AI, but that none of them believe this message themselves. 3. For a tech-first forum/news site, I'm shocked by how anti-AI the sentiment seems to be here. I too am concerned for jobs, but that doesn't change how bullish and excited I am about what I am currently able to build and will be able to build going forward using AI. You may call that selfish, and I won't disagree, but I think it's also intrinsically tech-first, to have this viewpoint. I have no issue with somebody not being tech-first but complaining on Hacker News about a tech-first reality. It sounds disingenuous to me.
- Stitch4223 4mo ago
  My role in IT was always to make myself obsolete. We’re in automation after all. AI doesn’t change that principle, it does remove some of the work I don’t like (when applied correctly).
newsomix9xl 4mo ago
Ai equals job loss has always been a lie except for very special niche jobs e.g. illustrator. AI can't even do ASCII diagrams. AI is our friend, but maybe CEOs who want superbonuses and obscene wages and pay themselves in stock so they have to play stock price games: not our friend.
red-iron-pine 4mo ago
> However, Acemoglu notes that if workers in higher-paid managerial roles are also displaced, as some think they could be, then inequality could actually decline. "inequality could decline" is a hell of a way to say "everyone will be out of a job, even the managers"

31 points by aanet 4mo ago

aanet 4mo ago

> Rapid improvements in AI capabilities and growing corporate adoption have led to predictions that the technology could lead to large-scale job losses before the end of the decade. So, just how concerned should we be about an AI “job apocalypse”? MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Neil Thompson and GS’ Joseph Briggs generally agree that these predictions likely won’t come to pass, though they differ on the scale of disruption ahead. Briggs expects significant labor displacement but only temporarily as new jobs eventually emerge. Thompson is less convinced about large-scale job displacement and takes comfort in the ability to anticipate changes, seeing AI as a rising tide rather than a crashing wave for labor. And Acemoglu expects a small net negative impact on labor over the next five years, with possible larger losses over the longer term if investment remains focused on replacing rather than complementing workers. Amid this debate, we find that AI’s impact on corporate labor needs—and earnings—remains too uncertain for markets to reward (for now). A GS report - including discussions with MIT labor economists DAren Acemoglu (Nobel), Neil Thompson

Quarrel 4mo ago
FWIW I think Acemoglu writes very well & I loved his book "Why Nations Fail" for introducing lots of interesting ideas to me, while also helping me understand my own (non-failed) society better.
sublinear 4mo ago
What I got from that is, if someone is really so desperate to wipe egg off their face, they'll rename some existing job titles and use that to justify stagnant wages. After all, you're not a "software engineer" anymore, but an "intelligence engineer"! You can do more with less! Meanwhile, the work is identical and hours are tracked more vigilantly.

Mistletoe 4mo ago

I tried to find a GS report from the top of the 2000 tech bubble but couldn't find one. I wonder what it would have said?

TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
There's this, which seems uncontroversial. https://people.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2004/Street_research/GS_IC_Sept_8_1999.pdf https://people.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2004/Street_...

bayarearefugee 4mo ago

> Key to this view is our expectation that over the long run AI will create many new jobs even as it destroys existing ones. Still waiting for anyone with this viewpoint to offer a single educated guess at what any of these created jobs might look like even in very broad terms. All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. I get that previous automation waves have lead to new jobs in the past, but automating knowledge and intelligence is just fundamentally a different thing than anything we have automated in the past and what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized?

morkalork 4mo ago
I'm still waiting for this theory to demonstrate itself in countries that already have labour surplesses
otterdude 4mo ago
> All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise. Welcome to economics! Bullshit and conjecture all the way down.
- saimiam 4mo ago
  If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other? Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them. Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action. Economics is closer to weather science - we can make certain inferences and predictions which can be wrong but the basic working theory is broadly correct, imho.
  - otterdude 4mo ago
    I think youre confusing a religious like belief in capitalism that posits that "greed is good" despite any contra indication with economics, which is a discipline where conjecture is taught as fact and empiricism if frowned upon. I'm not even going to touch your examples. They are completely illogical? Dell? The Internet?? Thats one company, and a technology. If you read the wealth of nations, the only real promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices, and thats why its considered "good" not because it solves all problems. I believe that, the rest is ill-supported conjecture. To point out the global stupidity that is economics, there is absolutely no consideration for the concept of a constraint. Constraints are a fundamental problem in optimization. This article lays it out nicely. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imperative/?social_token=230e18b100d16cb57bb49a853c65e69e&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sm-direct https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imper... Research this topic and you'll find economists arguing insistently that the conservation of mass or energy don't exist.

operatingthetan 4mo ago

Why are AI boosters turning around and trying to suggest AI now won't take our jobs? Or less jobs than previously stated? Meanwhile Meta has so much AI compute that they don't know what to do with, and they are ready to lease it out. And corporations suddenly want token austerity across the board. OpenAI is delaying their IPO until "next year." Something is starting to give.

a34729t 4mo ago
Because enough of the plebs are realizing the future is grim, so the PR firms have been put i to action. Earlier this year as if on cue Sam and Dario changed their tune on AI replacing workers.
- operatingthetan 4mo ago
  I think the general public is already kind of bored of AI and the phase of corporations writing blank checks for frontier models is over. The top labs keep doing shady marketing stuff (and various embarrassing stunts) and it's difficult to take their word at face value on anything. Also Microsoft has been pouring money into AI and it's like not working at all. They might be in trouble.
  - andersonpico 4mo ago
    Not disagreeing, but I wonder how much you have to fuck up to put a trillion dollar company in trouble. Surely it can't be that bad, right?
    - operatingthetan 4mo ago
      Nadella only understands SAAS/Cloud and everything looks like a SAAS/Cloud nail to his hammer. They threw Copilot at every single thing they could think of with no discretion and now Copilot is the worst brand in all of AI. They don't even realize this yet and are still dumping money into the Copilot hole.
4mo ago

harimau777 4mo ago

The thing that I never hear discussed is how long it will take these "new jobs" to materialize and how much they will pay.

AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
And what people do before the new jobs show up.
- DrewADesign 4mo ago
  Well in the Industrial Revolution, the no-longer-necessary skilled craftsman became miserable, poorly paid cogs in service of their new automatic controllers. So a lot of us have that to look forward to. Personally, I’ve switched back to the track I was on in my twenties: I spent the day doing moderately interesting work in a skilled trade, periodically having to haul 80lb-90lb steel machine parts up two flights of stairs in an un-air-conditioned, 100 degree manufacturing facility wearing heavy protective clothes and tools. I’ve worked in blue collar jobs before so I’m used to it, but I’ve seen a lot of developers say they’re going to be electricians or something. Good fucking luck! I’d conservatively estimate that 90% of developers I worked with are too soft, either emotionally or physically, to complete the first week of a years-long trade apprenticeship. The starting salary is only marginally better than working at Walgreens, and you’re expected to do a shitload of grunt work that is usually done by 20-year-olds. I foresee the entry-level retail, DoorDash, uber, instacart, et al scenes getting a whole lot nerdier over the next few years.
  - sublinear 4mo ago
    With all due respect, you seem rather cynical and upset for someone who made it past "the first week of a years-long trade apprenticeship".
    - DrewADesign 4mo ago
      In general, as a person? Not at all. When discussing the tech industry that employed me for almost two decades, in total? You’re definitely not wrong. Especially after graduating from art school in 2024 to career change into technical artistry, seeing the very real damage generative AI was doing to people trying to enter the creative fields, and seeing the tech scene responses range from incredibly smug to outright jubilant. Suddenly HN and every other technical forum was full of overnight armchair philosophers making sweeping statements about art, artists, commercial art, and who deserved to be paid for art. (Coincidentally, since the tech job market slowed way down, far fewer tech people here seem so smug about people losing their careers to automation!) The prospect of sweeping tech industry job market disruptions used to make me feel bad, but I can’t really muster that up anymore. So yeah, sure. Despite it being a huge part of my life for a very long time, I’m pretty solidly in the “fuck the modern tech industry” camp right now, and I think it’s a pretty rational response.

Ozzie-D 4mo ago

[flagged]

nondevmendel 4mo ago

A few points: 1. As a somewhat self-denying but admittedly obvious "tech bro", I can't help but cringe at some of the tech bro podcasts claiming that AI is not going to mass replace jobs. After a previous round of layoffs at my company due to financial constraints. We've managed to not just replace the bulk of our developers withy Claude, but seriously outperform them and build some serious, real-world applications in very short order. These were applications that touch highly sensitive databases across multiple departments in our company. I cannot see where all these engineering jobs are going to go if our small company was able to replace our engineering team with one 4X smaller and get better output. 2. These same podcasters claim that "this is why people should be in trades and doing skilled labor, such as electricians and plumbers." We have to be fools to think that AI + robotics is not going to replace all this very shortly. For the longest time I said it would be about ten years, now, but seeing how my unbogglingly fast Claude got so good (i.e., just compared to last year), I find it hard to imagine that this would be less than three years out. I personally think that these "tech-elite" podcasters are trying to brand a message so that people won't be afraid of AI, but that none of them believe this message themselves. 3. For a tech-first forum/news site, I'm shocked by how anti-AI the sentiment seems to be here. I too am concerned for jobs, but that doesn't change how bullish and excited I am about what I am currently able to build and will be able to build going forward using AI. You may call that selfish, and I won't disagree, but I think it's also intrinsically tech-first, to have this viewpoint. I have no issue with somebody not being tech-first but complaining on Hacker News about a tech-first reality. It sounds disingenuous to me.

Stitch4223 4mo ago
My role in IT was always to make myself obsolete. We’re in automation after all. AI doesn’t change that principle, it does remove some of the work I don’t like (when applied correctly).

newsomix9xl 4mo ago

Ai equals job loss has always been a lie except for very special niche jobs e.g. illustrator. AI can't even do ASCII diagrams. AI is our friend, but maybe CEOs who want superbonuses and obscene wages and pay themselves in stock so they have to play stock price games: not our friend.

red-iron-pine 4mo ago

> However, Acemoglu notes that if workers in higher-paid managerial roles are also displaced, as some think they could be, then inequality could actually decline. "inequality could decline" is a hell of a way to say "everyone will be out of a job, even the managers"