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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

#161

Post by aaronbaugher »

ryandrake wrote: post #140
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I'm one of those weird kids who liked doing those puzzles where you had to walk through a list of tricky instructions and end up with the right answers, so I'm pretty good at that sort of thing. I also have fairly simple finances: a regular W-2 job and a little side income that doesn't have taxes withdrawn. But last year the IRS sent me a $450 check and a note that said I'd made a mistake on my taxes and paid too much. Sadly, they didn't tell me what the mistake was, so I couldn't be sure to correct it this year.

Technically, all you have to do is follow the written instructions. But there are a surprising number of maybes in those instructions. You hit a checkbox that asks whether you qualify for such-and-such deduction, and find yourself downloading yet another document full of conditions for qualification, which aren't always as clear-cut as you'd like. You can end up reading page after page to figure out whether you should check a single box, and that single box may require another series of forms.

My small side income takes me from a one-page return to several pages, and next year I'm probably going to have to pay estimated taxes in advance because that non-taxed income leaves me owing at the end of the year more than some acceptable threshold that could result in fines. All because I make an extra 10% doing some evening freelancing.

Most people's taxes shouldn't be complex, but in practice they're more complex than they should be.

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

#162

Post by atrus »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #148
atrus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How exactly is this different from getting advice from someone who acts confidently knowledgeable? Diet advice is an especially egregious example, since I can have 40 different dieticians give me 72 different diet/meal plans with them saying 100% certainty that this is the correct one. It's bad…

If a junior developer lies about something important, they can be fired and you can try to find someone else who wouldn't do the same thing. At the very least you could warn the person not to lie again or they're gone. It's not clear that you can do the same thing with an LLM as they don't know they've lied.

You're falling into the mistake of "correct" or "lied" though. Being wrong isn't lying.

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

#163

Post by ninetyninenine »

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…

Until we solve the hallucination problem google search still has a place of power as something that doesn’t hallucinate.

And even if we solve this problem of hallucination, the ai agents still need a platform to do search.

If I was Google I’d simply cut off public api access to the search engine.

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

#164

Post by erkt »

flmontpetit wrote: post #152
chgs wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to use ai for the same things I’d have used Google for in 2005. Google is pretty much useless now as it changed into ann ad platform, and I suspect AI will go the same way soon enough.

It seems like an obvious thing on the surface, but I've already noticed that when asked questions on LLM usage (eg building RAG pipelines and whatnot), ChatGPT will exclusively refer you to OpenAI products.

I just asked O3 for a software stack for deploying AI in a local application and it recommended llama over OpenAI API.

It has always been easy to imagine how advertising could destroy the integrity of LLM's. I can guarantee that there will be companies unable to resist the temporary cash flows from it. Those models will destroy their reputation in no time.

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

#165

Post by surement »

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).

> Have any of these economists ever tried to scrape by as an entry-level graphic designer/illustrator?

"Equip yourself with skills that other people are willing to pay for." –Thomas Sowell

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

#166

Post by poisonborz »

jspdown wrote: post #61
patapong wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That said, I hope this does not result in the production of evermore things at the cost of nature! It will for sure! Just today the impact is collosal. As an example, people used to read technical documentation, now, they ask LLMs. Which replaces a simple static file by 50k matrix multiplication.

...and saves humongous amounts of time in the process. Documentations are rarely a good read (however sad, I like good docs), and we should waste less engineering time reading them.

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

#167

Post by nico »

Also in the news today:

> Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI. The company is going to be ‘AI-first,’ says its CEO.

https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla...

-

And within that article:

> von Ahn’s email follows a similar memo Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sent to employees and recently shared online. In that memo, Lütke said that before teams asked for more headcount or resources, they needed to show “why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”

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

#168

Post by lonelyasacloud »

The report looks at "at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024."

As with all other technologies the jobs it removes are not normally in country that introduces it but that they never happen elsewhere.

For example, while the automated looms that the Luddites were protesting about didn't result in significant job losses in the UK. How much clothing manufacturing has been curtailed in Africa because of it and similar innovations since that have lead to cheap mass produced clothes making it uneconomic to produce there.

As suggest by this report, Denmark and West will probably be make good elsewhere and be largely unaffected.

However, places like India, Vietnam with large industries based on call centres and outsourced development servicing the West are likely to be more vulnerable.

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

#169

Post by atrus »

tempfile wrote: post #151
atrus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How exactly is this different from getting advice from someone who acts confidently knowledgeable? Diet advice is an especially egregious example, since I can have 40 different dieticians give me 72 different diet/meal plans with them saying 100% certainty that this is the correct one. It's bad…

Do people actually behave this way with you? If someone presents a plan confidently without explaining why, I tend to trust them less (even people like doctors, who just happen to start with a very high reputation). In my experience people are very forthcoming with things they don't know.

Someone can present a plan, explain that plan, and be completely wrong.

People are forthcoming with things they know they don't know. It's the stuff that they don't know that they don't know that get them. And also the things they think they know, but are wrong about. This may come as a shock, but people do make mistakes.

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

#170

Post by poisonborz »

mg wrote: post #25
10729287 wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

Rents, or any living costs going down? But everything is based on "stocks only go up".
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