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

theregister.com

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

#101

Post by colinmorelli »

FYI: The actual study may not quite say what this article is suggesting. Unless I'm missing something, the study seems to focus on employee use of chat-based assistants, not on company-wide use of AI workflow solutions. The answers come from interviewing the employees themselves. There is an analysis of impacts on the labor market, but that is likely flawed if the companies are segmented based on employee use of chat assistants versus company-wide deployment of AI technology.

In other words, this more likely answers the question "If customer support agents all use ChatGPT or some in-house equivalent, does the company need fewer customer support agents?" than it answers the question "If we deploy an AI agent for customers to interact with, can it reduce the volume of inquiries that make it to our customer service team and, thus, require fewer agents?"

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

#102

Post by gilbetron »

decimalenough wrote: post #88

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…

How do you know it was correct without being a tax expert? And consulting a tax expert would give you legal recourse if it was wrong.

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

#103

Post by colinmorelli »

decimalenough wrote: post #88

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…

This is the real value of AI that, I think, we're just starting to get into. It's less about automating workflows that are inherently unstructured (I think that we're likely to continue wanting humans for this for some time).

It's more about automating workflows that are already procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health, finance, etc).

Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs, your medical history, your preferences, etc. But gathering all of that information requires a mix of collecting medical records, talking to the patient, etc. Once that information is available, we can execute a fairly procedural plan to put together a diet that will likely work for you.

These are cases that I believe LLMs are actually very well suited, if the solution can be designed in such a way as to limit hallucinations.

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

#104

Post by markus_zhang »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #85
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.

AI I different. It impacts everything directly. It's like the computer in boost. It's like trains taking over horses but for every job out there.

Well at least that's the potential.

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

#105

Post by ozgrakkurt »

decimalenough wrote: post #88

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…

It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring.

As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it.

Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are developing. Very junior developers are hired mostly as an investment so they become productive and stay with the company. AI might help with some of this but doesn’t really replace anyone in the process.

For support, there is massive value in talking to another human and having them trying to solve your issue. LLMs don’t feel much better than the hardcoded menu style auto support there already is.

I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs

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

#106

Post by Ekaros »

cornholio wrote: post #31
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #15

My 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…

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.…

I think that drivers are probably pretty late in cycle. Many environments they operate in are somewhat complicated. Even if you do a lot to make automation possible. Say with garbage move to containers that can simply be lifted either by crane or forks. Still places were those containers are might need lot of individual training to navigate to.

Similar thing goes to delivery. Moving single pallet to store or replacing carpets or whatever. Lot of complexity if you do not offload it to receiver.

More regular the environment is easier it is to automate. A shelving in store in my mind might be simpler than all environments where vehicles need to operate in.

And I think we know first to go. Average or below average "creative" professionals. Copywriter, artists and so on.

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

#107

Post by eqmvii »

decimalenough wrote: post #88

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…

Your tax example isn't far off from what's already possible with Google.

The legal profession specifically saw the rise of computers, digitization of cases and records, and powerful search... it's never been easier to "self help" - yet people still hire lawyers.

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

#108

Post by FilosofumRex »

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.

Those types of jobs are mostly in India & Philippines, not the US or Denmark, so let them deal with it.

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

#110

Post by colinmorelli »

gilbetron wrote: post #102
decimalenough wrote: post #88

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…

How do you know it was correct without being a tax expert? And consulting a tax expert would give you legal recourse if it was wrong.

As for correctness, they mentioned the LLM citing links that the person can verify. So there is some protection at that level.

But, also, the threshold of things we manage ourselves versus when we look to others is constantly moving as technology advances and things change. We're always making risk tradeoff decisions measuring the probability we get sued or some harm comes to us versus trusting that we can handle some tasks ourselves. For example, most people do not have attorneys review their lease agreements or job offers, unless they have a specific circumstance that warrants they do so.

The line will move, as technology gives people the tools to become better at handling the more mundane things themselves.

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