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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

#131
Keep in mind this kind of drivel is produced by economists and the tail-end of CS, who are desperately trying to stay relevant in the emerging work place.

The wise, will displace economists and consultants with LLMs, but the trend followers will hire them to prognostic about the future impact - such that the net affect could be zero.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

If it’s also returning links, wouldn’t it be faster and more authoritative to just go read the official links and skip the LLM slop entirely?

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

#133
post #24
post #5

'"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…

Bingo. Especially with the 'coding assistants', these companies are getting great insight into how software features are described and built, and how software is architected across the board.

It's very telling that we see "we won't use your data for training" sometimes and opt-outs but never "we won't collect your data". 'Training' being at best ill defined.

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

#134

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…

I actually paid for tax advice from one of those big companies (it was recommended - last time I will take that person's recommendations!). I was very disappointed in the service. It felt like the person I was speaking to on the phone would have been better of just echoing the request into AI. So I did just that as I waited on the line. I found the answer and the tax expert "confirmed" it.

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

#135
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to get outdated Quite the opposite. It's never been more true. I'm not saying using LLMs for search is better, but as it stands right now, SEO spammers have beat Google, since whatever you search for, the majority of results are AI slop. Their increased revenue probably comes down to the fact that they no longer show any search results in the first screenful at…

> Quite the opposite. It's never been more true. I'm not saying using LLMs for search is better, but as it stands right now, SEO spammers have beat Google, since whatever you search for, the majority of results is AI slop.

It's actually sadder than that. Google appear to have realised that they make more money if they serve up ad infested scrapes of Stack Overflow rather than the original site. (And they're right, at least in the short term).

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

#136
post #73

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…

I had similar thoughts, but then remembered companies still burn billions on Google Ads, sure that humans...and not bots...click them, and thinking that in 2025 most people browse without ad-blockers.

Most people do browse without ad blockers, otherwise the entire DR ads industry would have collapsed years ago.

Note also that ad blockers are much less prevalent on mobile.

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

#137
post #73

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…

I had similar thoughts, but then remembered companies still burn billions on Google Ads, sure that humans...and not bots...click them, and thinking that in 2025 most people browse without ad-blockers.

People will pay for what works. I consult for a number of ecommerce companies and I assure you they get a return on their spend.

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

#138
The survey questions they asked are bad questions if you’re attempting to answer the question about future labor state. However they didn’t ask that, they asked existing employees how LLMs have changed their workplace.

This is the wrong question.

The question should be to hiring managers: Do you expect LLM based tools to increase or decrease your projected hiring of full time employees?

LLM workflows are already *displacing* entry-level labor because people are reaching for copilot/windsurf/CGPT instead of hiring a contract developer, researcher, BD person. I’m watching this happen across management in US startups.

It’s displacing job growth in entry level positions across primary writing copy, admin tasks or research.

You’re not going to find it in statistics immediately because it’s not a 1:1 replacement.

Much like the 1971 labor-productivity separation that everyone scratched their head about (answer: labor was outsourced and capital kept all value gains), we will see another asymptote to that labor productivity graph based on displacement not replacement.

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

#140

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…

Not consulting a real tax advisor is probably going to cost you much more. I wouldn't be saving on tax advisors. Moreover, I would hire two different tax advisors, so I could cross check them.

Most people’s (USA) taxes are not complex, and just require basic arithmetic to complete. Even topics like stock sales, IRA rollovers, HSAs, and rental income (which the vast majority of taxpayers don’t have) are straightforward if you just read the instructions on the forms and follow them. In 30 years of paying taxes, I’ve only had a tax professional do it once: as an experiment after I already did them myself to see if there was any difference in the output. I paid a tax professional $400 and the forms he handed me back were identical to the ones I filled out myself.
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