Skeptical of the study approach, but it is an entirely possible scenario if we don’t hit AGI. Many of the non-tech companies are only now starting to invest into AI. For many of them, AI might unlock new business approaches. Eg a company switches to real time pricing. Great, but suddenly you need people swapping price tags. Or you launch a project to replace paper price tags with electronic tags. Those need to be regularly maintained and charged, etc. Oops, our legacy ERP system can’t deal with that. Let’s upgrade that
What is the value of saying this when ChatGPT was released in 2022? There’s no way there’s enough data to make any meaningful extrapolation about anything.
We can’t really say what this means. Maybe heavy AI use caused companies to perform better and grow. Or maybe the type of company that went big into AI was the type of company that was getting investments and growing because of it?
I am confused. Wasn't the initial claim that AI kills all jobs?
I feel the claim right now is not really correct. One needs to do a thorough analysis of the whole job market across different countries, say, over 5 years. Or at the least 3 years but very complete and unbiased either way.
The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs. There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise.
The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. It would suit their worldview for this time to be different, and so thats the message they push.
That’s not supported by the evidence. Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.
In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education, retirement, prison, disability, etc.
The only way jobs have kept up with automation is when you ignore population growth, but more people naturally increases the required workforce. You inherently need more police, food, etc when you have more people.
>Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.
Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing.
>In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education which may be investing in their future but isn’t directly producing anything. Retirement as a percentage of the population similarly exploded etc.
The first thing anyone does in employment statistics is remove non participants. Bringing them back in is weird. If you don't need or want a job its kind of a non sequitur to be lumped in with the employment seeking population. AI doomers aren't suggesting that its going to gainfully retire the population.
>preindustrial societies
Pre industrial societies can be loosely grouped into "People farming to make 3-5 times the food they need" and "city dwellers". Now that a single person can farm for 100s of people, we do have hundreds more city jobs going. We dont have a huge number of out of work farmers sitting around doing nothing. Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. Likewise cloud didnt leave IT people lining up at the dole office, but it just moved them from cleaning up on prem messes to cleaning up cloud messes and onprem messes.
I'm not entirely sure that's the claim or conclusion. Like they said the companies increasing headcount are also being pumped full of $$$. That's a non-permanent state of affairs because it's heavily fueled by speculation about possible future scenarios which may or may not come to pass.
I think the bigger conclusion is that LLMs are, for now, having a minimal effect on the labor market. And I think this makes sense. In spite of individual claims of 10x productivity boost or whatever, their effect on the bottom line of companies seems to remain quite unclear, at best. On the contrary the token-maxing catastrophe seems to have resulted in companies becoming far more price conscious towards LLM usage.
These studies miss a huge point, which is: working with automation outside of programming is tedious, frustrating, and soul crushing.
I see it already with some non technical clients. I have notice a terrible trend of people just offloading everything to agents or prompting even the simplest interaction with other humans. Let me tell you, it’s fucking dire.
Inside can be as well. Please manually review these 5000 lines of slop I generated while watching YouTube and verify the unreadable readme due to all the bloat and icons is correct with the code.
If that is not soul crushing I would not know what is.
Skeptical of the study approach, but it is an entirely possible scenario if we don’t hit AGI. Many of the non-tech companies are only now starting to invest into AI. For many of them, AI might unlock new business approaches. Eg a company switches to real time pricing. Great, but suddenly you need people swapping price tags. Or you launch a project to replace paper price tags with electronic tags. Those need to be regularly maintained and charged, etc. Oops, our legacy ERP system can’t deal with that. Let’s upgrade that
dumbest take ever, infra around digital price tags is well explored and thought out
aldi rolls out their entire global pricing information from within germany.
nevermind that this stuff can be handled by robots easily.
That’s because Aldi /did/ the upgrade…?
What is the value of saying this when ChatGPT was released in 2022? There’s no way there’s enough data to make any meaningful extrapolation about anything.
To get onto Hacker News and other social media sites for marketing exposure?
The current narrative is that AI is displacing jobs.
Similar to the current post there’s just not enough data to be conclusive.
We can’t really say what this means. Maybe heavy AI use caused companies to perform better and grow. Or maybe the type of company that went big into AI was the type of company that was getting investments and growing because of it?
Because people are wasting time and tokens doing irrelevant to the bottom line things.
Cool you spent 2 days and $200 building a react UI for your spreadsheet.
That's interesting and goes directly against what everyone complains about in the employment sector.
I'm sure there is a big caveat in there somewhere.
Too soon.
"Oh yeah, we had to hire a bunch of guys to clean up the slop"
>AI adoption and the associated gains are unevenly distributed.
is that more or less than regular headcount growth?
It's not entirely clear to me, but I believe this is 10% over the control. The 10% is therefore relative to "regular headcount growth".
So, more skynet leads to more real jobs?
I am confused. Wasn't the initial claim that AI kills all jobs?
I feel the claim right now is not really correct. One needs to do a thorough analysis of the whole job market across different countries, say, over 5 years. Or at the least 3 years but very complete and unbiased either way.
The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs. There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise.
The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. It would suit their worldview for this time to be different, and so thats the message they push.
That’s not supported by the evidence. Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.
In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education, retirement, prison, disability, etc.
The only way jobs have kept up with automation is when you ignore population growth, but more people naturally increases the required workforce. You inherently need more police, food, etc when you have more people.
> That’s not supported by the evidence. Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.
What evidence?
Wasn’t employment in engineering down before all this could’ve gotten enough traction to actually displace jobs?
>Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.
Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing.
>In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education which may be investing in their future but isn’t directly producing anything. Retirement as a percentage of the population similarly exploded etc.
The first thing anyone does in employment statistics is remove non participants. Bringing them back in is weird. If you don't need or want a job its kind of a non sequitur to be lumped in with the employment seeking population. AI doomers aren't suggesting that its going to gainfully retire the population.
>preindustrial societies
Pre industrial societies can be loosely grouped into "People farming to make 3-5 times the food they need" and "city dwellers". Now that a single person can farm for 100s of people, we do have hundreds more city jobs going. We dont have a huge number of out of work farmers sitting around doing nothing. Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. Likewise cloud didnt leave IT people lining up at the dole office, but it just moved them from cleaning up on prem messes to cleaning up cloud messes and onprem messes.
> Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before.
that's a common trope, and its both true and false
true: more bank employees after ATM's
false: less bank employees after smartphone banking
I'm not entirely sure that's the claim or conclusion. Like they said the companies increasing headcount are also being pumped full of $$$. That's a non-permanent state of affairs because it's heavily fueled by speculation about possible future scenarios which may or may not come to pass.
I think the bigger conclusion is that LLMs are, for now, having a minimal effect on the labor market. And I think this makes sense. In spite of individual claims of 10x productivity boost or whatever, their effect on the bottom line of companies seems to remain quite unclear, at best. On the contrary the token-maxing catastrophe seems to have resulted in companies becoming far more price conscious towards LLM usage.
I't has been very good as suppressing wages.
there never has been a nuclear war, so why do some people worry about it, I dont understand, probably they have some axes to grind
These studies miss a huge point, which is: working with automation outside of programming is tedious, frustrating, and soul crushing. I see it already with some non technical clients. I have notice a terrible trend of people just offloading everything to agents or prompting even the simplest interaction with other humans. Let me tell you, it’s fucking dire.
Inside can be as well. Please manually review these 5000 lines of slop I generated while watching YouTube and verify the unreadable readme due to all the bloat and icons is correct with the code.
If that is not soul crushing I would not know what is.
The human teams that were there doing CMS translations, or doing image assets, are no more...