5 ms·

The fear in most people is not of losing the job, but of losing their value in the market as ai raises the floor of capabilities of other people competing for t

by chii 2mo ago

The fear in most people is not of losing the job, but of losing their value in the market as ai raises the floor of capabilities of other people competing for the same job.

freehorse 2mo ago
I think the main fear is that the (assumed) increase of productivity means that employers may require less employees, resulting to less positions in the market. But I don't think that expertise is no longer relevant or we see getting more people hired with less expertise because AI. If anything, there is this talk about companies not hiring junior engineers as much. Moreover, as getting the expertise could become harder, it could become more of a moat.
- chii 2mo ago
  > require less employees, resulting to less positions in the market which i counter with the idea that more efficiency means more output for less - ala, more surplus. This extra surplus drives higher demand for more products/services. It's the same idea as economic resource becoming cheaper leading to a higher usage of it: namely, Jevons paradox.
  - freehorse 2mo ago
    This is an argument that circulates a lot, but there are more bottlenecks than programming in businesses etc, so it does not mean that demand for this resource can increase necessarily to a degree of covering out the productivity increase. For now, I don't think we see companies in general hiring more in order to increase their productivity, if anything we see more and more layoffs and restructures on AI grounds. This could change once it becomes more clear how AI will exactly be used and what the brave new world will look like, but for the medium term future it makes more sense to be concerned than hopeful.
ekidd 2mo ago
What I actually fear is more subtle: I already do a fair bit of project management and technical leadership. I could do more. Sure, I'd miss the coding, but I also enjoy a lot of the stuff around it. But the goal is to expand what the AI can do in each generation. At this point, Fable 5 can ace almost any greenfield project a skilled developer might have written in a few days. But it's bad at refactoring, bad at keeping the code clean as it goes, and bad at discovering new insights as it codes. So Anthropic will train Fable 6, using benchmarks like SlopCodeBench that test maintenance over time. Now what about project management? Train Fable 7. What about product management and talking to stakeholders? Train Fable 8. What about market research and sales? Train Fable 9. By this point, Anthropic doesn't need to actually release these newest models to the public. Why, that might be dangerous! Instead, they write, "deisgn [sic] a successful software product and sell it plz." And they spin up a million dollars worth of compute and let it crank out SaaSes, iPhone apps, etc., driving entire software companies out of business. Then they spin up some more instances, and say, "make robot plz" and "try a thousand ways to make yrself smrater." I mean, Qwen and DeepSeek keep finding ways to pack more smarts into a given number of weights. Fable 9 will likely be able to do the same. Hell, Fable 5 can probably run 1,000 machine learning experiments now, just grinding through ideas the way ChatGPT's internal models grind through proofs. And this is my problem. If it were just programmers losing their jobs, well, sometimes professions die. But what makes you think it will stop with us? How far will this go in the next 4 years? The next 20?
- pmontra 2mo ago
  Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed. Of course (let me go distopic) we could end up with a dozen of one man companies powered by AIs and robots selling or bartering products and services to each other, what's enough to have food, a house with a pool, a doctor and everybody else has died long before.
  - ekidd 2mo ago
    > Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed. Well, that's why they want the robots! If your robots are capable enough, and if your AIs are smart enough, why, they could just build the yachts directly! Right now, ordinary humans are needed by the economy because we do all the work, and because robotics hardware is still far behind AI. But there's no inherent logical reason why you need a human to turn raw materials into luxury products. The really important questions are: Who controls the AI and robots? How good will they get? Who or what does all the work? And who controls the natural resources? > Of course (let me go distopic) Yup, that is a possible end state.
amelius 2mo ago
Because losing their value in the market means they'll lose their job.
Planktonne 2mo ago
I think you've misidentified the fear. People worry about losing their jobs in a market that hires fewer people (because AI makes doing more work easier) but not about losing their jobs because they can't keep up. The whole point of AI is that you can't meaningfully fall behind. If you ever did, you could ask AI to get you up to speed again. The tech that automates work and effort is not something you need work and effort to use. Similarly, I don't currently have a bread machine. I am not falling behind in baking skills to people who do, because I could always, at literally any point, get a bread machine and hit the exact same productivity level.
zulban 2mo ago
I'm far above that floor so I'm not worried. What worries me is the job is transforming into something that a different type of person than me enjoys.

by chii 2mo ago

The fear in most people is not of losing the job, but of losing their value in the market as ai raises the floor of capabilities of other people competing for the same job.

freehorse 2mo ago

I think the main fear is that the (assumed) increase of productivity means that employers may require less employees, resulting to less positions in the market. But I don't think that expertise is no longer relevant or we see getting more people hired with less expertise because AI. If anything, there is this talk about companies not hiring junior engineers as much. Moreover, as getting the expertise could become harder, it could become more of a moat.

chii 2mo ago
> require less employees, resulting to less positions in the market which i counter with the idea that more efficiency means more output for less - ala, more surplus. This extra surplus drives higher demand for more products/services. It's the same idea as economic resource becoming cheaper leading to a higher usage of it: namely, Jevons paradox.
- freehorse 2mo ago
  This is an argument that circulates a lot, but there are more bottlenecks than programming in businesses etc, so it does not mean that demand for this resource can increase necessarily to a degree of covering out the productivity increase. For now, I don't think we see companies in general hiring more in order to increase their productivity, if anything we see more and more layoffs and restructures on AI grounds. This could change once it becomes more clear how AI will exactly be used and what the brave new world will look like, but for the medium term future it makes more sense to be concerned than hopeful.

ekidd 2mo ago

What I actually fear is more subtle: I already do a fair bit of project management and technical leadership. I could do more. Sure, I'd miss the coding, but I also enjoy a lot of the stuff around it. But the goal is to expand what the AI can do in each generation. At this point, Fable 5 can ace almost any greenfield project a skilled developer might have written in a few days. But it's bad at refactoring, bad at keeping the code clean as it goes, and bad at discovering new insights as it codes. So Anthropic will train Fable 6, using benchmarks like SlopCodeBench that test maintenance over time. Now what about project management? Train Fable 7. What about product management and talking to stakeholders? Train Fable 8. What about market research and sales? Train Fable 9. By this point, Anthropic doesn't need to actually release these newest models to the public. Why, that might be dangerous! Instead, they write, "deisgn [sic] a successful software product and sell it plz." And they spin up a million dollars worth of compute and let it crank out SaaSes, iPhone apps, etc., driving entire software companies out of business. Then they spin up some more instances, and say, "make robot plz" and "try a thousand ways to make yrself smrater." I mean, Qwen and DeepSeek keep finding ways to pack more smarts into a given number of weights. Fable 9 will likely be able to do the same. Hell, Fable 5 can probably run 1,000 machine learning experiments now, just grinding through ideas the way ChatGPT's internal models grind through proofs. And this is my problem. If it were just programmers losing their jobs, well, sometimes professions die. But what makes you think it will stop with us? How far will this go in the next 4 years? The next 20?

pmontra 2mo ago
Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed. Of course (let me go distopic) we could end up with a dozen of one man companies powered by AIs and robots selling or bartering products and services to each other, what's enough to have food, a house with a pool, a doctor and everybody else has died long before.
- ekidd 2mo ago
  > Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed. Well, that's why they want the robots! If your robots are capable enough, and if your AIs are smart enough, why, they could just build the yachts directly! Right now, ordinary humans are needed by the economy because we do all the work, and because robotics hardware is still far behind AI. But there's no inherent logical reason why you need a human to turn raw materials into luxury products. The really important questions are: Who controls the AI and robots? How good will they get? Who or what does all the work? And who controls the natural resources? > Of course (let me go distopic) Yup, that is a possible end state.

amelius 2mo ago

Because losing their value in the market means they'll lose their job.

Planktonne 2mo ago

I think you've misidentified the fear. People worry about losing their jobs in a market that hires fewer people (because AI makes doing more work easier) but not about losing their jobs because they can't keep up. The whole point of AI is that you can't meaningfully fall behind. If you ever did, you could ask AI to get you up to speed again. The tech that automates work and effort is not something you need work and effort to use. Similarly, I don't currently have a bread machine. I am not falling behind in baking skills to people who do, because I could always, at literally any point, get a bread machine and hit the exact same productivity level.

zulban 2mo ago

I'm far above that floor so I'm not worried. What worries me is the job is transforming into something that a different type of person than me enjoys.