No opinion on the topic but "say economists" doesn't inspire trust
Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
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Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#42Have any of these economists ever tried to scrape by as an entry-level graphic designer/illustrator? Apparently not, since the sort of specific work which one used to find for this has all but vanished --- every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance where someone who might have contracted for an image did not (ditto for stock images, but that's a different conversation).
It looks like the writing is on the wall too for other menial and low-value creative jobs too - so basic music and videos - I fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI generated within the next year or two. see Google Veo - they have the tech already and they have YouTube already and they have the ad network already ...
Instead of uploading your video ad you already created, you'll just enter a description or two and the AI will auto-generate the video ads in thousands of iterations to target every demographic.
Google is going to run away with this with their ecosystem - OpenAI etc al can't compete with this sort of thing.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or customer service. My last few online store issues have been fully chatbot when they used to be half chatbot for intake and half person.
Same, after a little back and forth it became obvious I was not talking to a real person.
I like to get the chatbot to promise me massive discounts just to get whoever is reading the logs to sweat a little.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#44No opinion on the topic but "say economists" doesn't inspire trust
Thank you
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#45Based on the speed most companies operate at - no surprises here. The internet also didn't have most of its impact in the first decade. And as is fairly well understood, most of the current generation of AI models are a bit dicey in practice. There isn't much of a question that this early phase where AI is likely to create new jobs and opportunities. The real question is what happens when AI is reliably intellectuall…
Does the same follow for The Metaverse, or for Blockchain?
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#46My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting" and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipe…
What's the alternative here? Apart from well-known, but not so useful useful advice to have a ton of friends who can hire you or be so famous as to not need an introduction.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#47'"The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots. Employers are also shifting gears and actively encouraging it. But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle."' So, as of yet, according to these researchers, the main effect is that of a data pump, certain corporations get…
I was discussing with a colleague the past months, my view on how and why all these AI tools are being shoved down our throats (just look at Google's Gemini push into all enterprise tools, it's like Google+ for B2B) before there are clear cut use-cases you can point to and say "yes, this would have been much harder to do without LLM/AI" is because... Training data is the most valuable asset, all these tools are just…
It seems very simple cause and effect from a economic standpoint. Hype about AI is very high, so investors ask boards what they're doing about AI and using it, because they think AI will disrupt investments that don't.
The boards in turn instruct the CEOs to "adopt AI" and so you get all the normal processes about deciding what/if/when to do stuff get short circuited and so you get AI features that no one asked for or mandates for employees to adopt AI with very shallow KPIs to claim success.
The hype really distorts both sides of the conversation. You get the boosters for which any use of AI is a win, no matter how inconsequential the results, and then you get things like the original article which indicate it hasn't caused job losses yet as a sign that it hasn't changed anything. And while it might disprove the hype (especially the "AI is going to replace all mental labour in $SHORT_TIMEFRAME" hype), it really doesn't indicate that it won't replace anything.
Like when has a technology making the customer support experience worse for users or employees ever stopped it's rollout if there's cost savings to be had?
I think this why AI is so complicated for me. I've used it, and I can see some gains. But it's on the order of when IDE auto complete went from substring matches of single methods to when it could autocomplete chains of method calls based on types. The agent stuff fails on anything but the most bite size work when I've tried it.
Clearly some people seem it as something more transformative than that. There's other times when people have seen something transformative and it's just been so clearly nothing of value (NFTs for example) that it's easy to ignore the hype train. The reason AI is challenging for me is it's clearly not nothing, but also it's so far away from the vision that others have that it's not clear how realistic that is.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like that some places are empty.
Would you be ok if instead of 97% of earth being empty 94% is empty and your rent is cut in half? Another plus point of the future: An electric autonomous bus is at your disposal every 5 minutes, bringing you to whatever nice lonely place you wish.
I've got no idea what you're going on about, but 97% of the Earth isn't empty in any useful sense. For starters, almost 70% is ocean. There are also large parts which are otherwise uninhabitable, and large parts which have agricultural use. Buses don't go to uninhabited places, since that's costs too much. Every five minutes is a frequency which no form of public transport can afford.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#49Not replacing jobs yet. Seen a whole lot of gen AI deflecting customer questions which would have been previously tickets. That is a reduced ticket volume that would have been taken by a junior support engineer. We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to the level 0 IT support.
Perhaps briefly. Companies tried this with offshoring support. Some really took a hit and had to bring it back. Some didn't though, so it's not all or nothing in the medium term. In the short term, most of the execs will buy into the hype and try it. I suspect the lower quality companies will use it, but the companies whose value is in their reputation for quality will continue to use people.
Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
#50My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting" and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipe…
> it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous
"Like all ‘magic’ in Tolkien, [spiritual] power is an expression of the primacy of the Unseen over the Seen and in a sense as a result such spiritual power does not effect or perform but rather reveals: the true, Unseen nature of the world is revealed by the exertion of a supernatural being and that revelation reshapes physical reality (the Seen) which is necessarily less real and less fundamental than the Unseen" [1].
The writing and receiving of resumes has been superfluous for decades. Generative AI is just revealing that truth.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved...