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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

#81

Post by ringeryless »

clarionbell wrote: post #40
cornholio wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is not deglobalizing, US is.

The world is deglobalizing. EU has been cutting off from Russia since the war started, and forcing medical industries to reshore since covid. At the same time it has begun drive to remilitarize itself. This means more heavy industry and all of it local. There is brewing conflict across continents. India and Pakistan, Red sea region, South China sea. The list goes on and on. It's time to accept it. The world has moved…

navel gazing will be shown to be a reactionary empty step, as all current global issues require more global cooperation to solve, not less.

the individual phenomena you describe are indeed detritus of this failed reaction to an increasing awareness of all humans of our common conditions under disparate nation states.

nationalism is broken by the realization that everyone everywhere is paying roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of their income in taxes, however what you receive for that taxation varies. your nation state should have to compete with other nation states to retain you.

the nativist movement is wrongful in the usa for the reason that none of the folks crying about foreigners is actually native american,

but it's globally in error for not presenting the truth: humans are all your relatives, and they are assets, not liabilities: attracting immigration is a good thing, but hey feel free to recycle tired murdoch media talking points that have made us nothing but trouble for 40 years.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#82

Post by Cthulhu_ »

begueradj wrote: post #72
solfox wrote: post #67

Extrapolating from my current experience with AI-assisted work: AI just makes work more meaningful. My output has increased 10x, allowing me to focus on ideas and impact rather than repetitive tasks. Now apply that to entire industries and whole divisions of labor: manual data entry, customer support triage, etc. Will people be out of those jobs? Most certainly. But it gives all of us a chance to level up—to focus on…

What about technical debts related to the generated code?

First off, is there any? That's making an assumption, one which can just as easily be attributed to human-written code. Nobody writes debt-free code, that's why you have many checks and reviews before things go to production - ideally.

Second, in theory, future generations of AI tools will be able to review previous generations and improve upon the code. If it needs to, anyway.

But yeah, tech debt isn't unique to AIs, and I haven't seen anything conclusive that AIs generate more tech debt than regular people - but please share if you've got sources of the opposite.

(disclaimer, I'm very skeptical about AI to generate code myself, but I will admit to use it for boring tasks like unit test outlines)

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#83

Post by jcelerier »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #58
cornholio wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the first significant hit are going to be drivers, delivery men, truckers etc. a demographic of 5 million jobs in US and double that in EU, with ripple effects costing other millions of jobs in industries such as roadside diners and hotels. The general tone of this study seems to be "It's 1995, and this thing called the Internet has not made TV obsolete"; same for the Acemoglu piece linked elsewhere in the.…

Generative AI has failed to automate anything at all so far. (Racist memes and furry pornography doesn't count.)

Yeah no, I'm seeing more and more shitty ai generated ads, shop logos, interior design & graphics for instance in barber shops, fast food places etc.

The sandwich shop next to my work has a music playlist which is 100% ai generated repetitive slop.

Do you think they'll be paying graphic designers, musicians etc. for now on when something certainly shittier than what a good artist does, but also much better than what a poor one is able to achieve, can be used in five minutes for free?

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#84

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jofzar wrote: post #16

Not 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.

> We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer.

And this trend isn't new; a lot of investments into e.g. customer support is to need less support staff, for example through better self-service websites, chatbots / conversational interfaces / phone menus (these go back decades), or to reduce expenses by outsourcing call center work to low-wage countries. AI is another iteration, but gut feeling says they will need a lot of training/priming/coaching to not end up doing something other than their intended task (like Meta's AIs ending up having erotic chats with minors).

One of my projects was to replace the "contact" page of a power company with a wizard - basically, get the customers to check for known outages first, then check their own fuse boxes etc, before calling customer support.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#85

Post by Dumblydorr »

WillAdams wrote: post #26

Have 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).

Probably not, economists generally stay in school straight to becoming professors or they’ll go into finance right after school.

That said I don’t think entry level illustration jobs can be around if software can do their job better than they do. Just like we don’t have a lot of calculators anymore, technological replacement is bound to occur in society, AI or not.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#86

Post by ringeryless »

patapong wrote: post #38
mg wrote: post #18

One thing nobody seems to discuss is: In the future, we will do a lot more. In other terms: There will be a lot more work. So even if robots do 80% of it, if we do 10x more - the amount of work we need humans to do will double. We will write more software, build more houses, build more cars, planes and everything down the supply chain to make these things. When you look at planet earth, it is basically empty. While r…

I agree! People will become more productive, meaning fewer people can do more work. That said, I hope this does not result in the production of evermore things at the cost of nature! I think we are at a crossroads as to what this will result in, however. In one case, the benefits will accrue at the top, with corporations earning greater profits while employing less people, leaving a large part of the population witho…

the earth is not the property of humans, nor is any of it empty until you show zero ecosystem or wildlife or plants there.

for sure, we are doing our best to eradicate the conditions that make earth habitable, however i suggest that the first needed change is for computer screen humans to realize that other life forms exist. this requires stepping outside and questioning human hubris, so it might be a big leap, but i am fairly confident that you will discover that absolutely none of our planet is empty.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#87

Post by smallnix »

clarionbell wrote: post #40
cornholio wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is not deglobalizing, US is.

The world is deglobalizing. EU has been cutting off from Russia since the war started, and forcing medical industries to reshore since covid. At the same time it has begun drive to remilitarize itself. This means more heavy industry and all of it local. There is brewing conflict across continents. India and Pakistan, Red sea region, South China sea. The list goes on and on. It's time to accept it. The world has moved…

> Global connectedness is holding steady at a record high level based on the latest data available in early 2025, highlighting the resilience of international flows in the face of geopolitical tensions and uncertainty.

https://www.dhl.com/global-en/microsites/core/global-connect...

Source for counter argument?

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#88

Post by decimalenough »

I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk.

Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent. And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#89

Post by lolinder »

WillAdams wrote: post #26

Have 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).

> every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance where someone who might have contracted for an image did not

This is not at all true. Some percentage of AI generated images might have become a contract, but that percentage is vanishingly small.

Most AI generated images you see out there are just shared casually between friends. Another sizable chunk are useless filler in a casual blog post and the author would otherwise have gone without, used public domain images, or illegally copied an image.

A very very small percentage of them are used in a specific subset of SEO posts whose authors actually might have cared enough to get a professional illustrator a few years ago but don't care enough to avoid AI artifacts today. That sliver probably represents most of the work that used to exist for a freelance illustrator, but it's a vanishingly small percentage of AI generated images.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#90

Post by OtherShrezzing »

Zanfa wrote: post #28
thehappypm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure suggesting google search is in decline? The latest Google earnings call suggests it’s still growing

Google Search is distinct from Google's expansive ad network. Google search is now garbage, but their ads are everywhere are more profitable than ever.

On Google's earnings call - within the last couple of weeks - they explicitly stated that their stronger-than-expected growth in the quarter was due to a large unexpected increase in search revenues[0]. That's a distinct line-item from their ads business.

>Google’s core search and advertising business grew almost 10 per cent to $50.7bn in the quarter, surpassing estimates for between 8 per cent and 9 per cent.[0]

The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to get outdated, and users are returning to their search product. Their results, particularly the Gemini overview box, are (usually) useful at the moment. Their key differentiator over generative chatbots is that they have reliable & sourced results instantly in their overview. Just concise information about the thing you searched for, instantly, with links to sources.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/168e9ba3-e2ff-4c63-97a3-8d7c78802...

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