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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

#211

Post by wisty »

Tools can either increase or decrease employment.

Imagine if a tool made content writers 10x as productive. You might hire more, not less, because they are now better value! You might eventually realise you spent too much, but this will come later.

ADAIK no company I know of starts a shiny new initiative by firing, they start by hiring then cutting back once they have their systems in place or hit a ceiling. Even Amazon runs projects fat then makes them lean AFAIK.

There's also pent up demand.

You never expect a new labour saving device to cost jobs while the project managers are in the export building phase.

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

#212

Post by voidspark »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #163
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.

LLMs are already grounding their results in Google searches with citations. They have been doing that for a year already. Optional with all the big models from OpenAI, Google, xAI

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

#213

Post by tbrownaw »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #178
ninetyninenine wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it easily hallucinates this stuff. It’s understanding of a picture is decidedly worse then its understanding of words. Be careful here about asking if it needs a tire change it is likely giving you an answer that only looks real.

It's also something so trivial to determine yourself. It blows my mind the degree that people are offloading any critical thinking to AI

There's a reason that people have to be told to not just believe everything they read on the Internet. And there's a reason some people still do that anyway.

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

#214

Post by pixl97 »

sph wrote: post #17
sct202 wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

I have survived until today using the shibboleth "let me speak to a human" [1] The day this doesn't work any more, is the day I stop paying for that service. We should make a list of companies that still have actual customer service. 1: https://xkcd.com/806/ - from an era when the worst that could happen was having to speak with incompetent, but still human, tech support.

> is the day I stop paying for that service.

You're acting like it's not the companies that are monopolies that implement these systems first.

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

#215

Post by boredtofears »

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…

I thought the value of using a licensed tax agent is that if they give you advice that ends up being bad, they have an ethical/professional obligation to clean up their mess.

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

#216

Post by dfxm12 »

AI can't replace jobs or hurt wages. AI doesn't make these decisions & wages have been suppressed for a very long time, well before general AI adoption. Managers make these decisions. Don't blame AI if you get laid off or if your wages aren't even keeping up with inflation, let alone your productivity. Blame your manager.

Be wary of people trying to deflect the away from the managerial class for these issues.

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

#217

Post by steamrolled »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #105
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 develo…

> It can’t replace a human for support

But it is replacing it. There's a rapidly-growing number of large, publicly-traded companies that replaced first-line support with LLMs. When I did my taxes, "talk to a person" was replaced with "talk to a chatbot". Airlines use them, telcos use them, social media platforms use them.

I suspect what you're missing here is that LLMs here aren't replacing some Platonic ideal of CS. Even bad customer support is very expensive. Chatbots are still a lot cheaper than hundreds of outsourced call center people following a rigid script. And frankly, they probably make fewer mistakes.

> and it will blow up like NFTs

We're probably in a valuation bubble, but it's pretty unlikely that the correct price is zero.

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

#218

Post by clarionbell »

munksbeer wrote: post #149
clarionbell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The world is deglobalizing. We have had thousands of years of globalising. The trend has always been towards a more connected world. I strongly suspect the current Trump movement (and to an extent brexit depending on which brexit version you chose to listen to) will be blips in that continued trend. That is because it doesn't make sense for there to be 200 countries all experts in microchip manufacturing and banana…

But doesn't make sense to be dependent on your enemies either.

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

#219

Post by akshaybhalotia »

I humbly disagree. I've seen team members and sometimes entire teams being laid off because of AI. It's also not just layoffs, the hiring processes and demand have been affected as well.

As an example, many companies have recently shifted their support to "AI first" models. As a result, even if the team or certain team members haven't been fired, the general trend of hiring for support is pretty much down (anecdotal).

I agree that some automation is better for the humans to do their jobs better, but this isn't one of those. When you're looking for support, something has clearly went wrong. Speaking or typing to an AI which responds with random unrelated articles or "sorry I didn't quite get that" is just evading responsibility in the name of "progress", "development", "modernization", "futuristic", "technology", , etc.

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

#220

Post by mchusma »

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…

Yeah, 2023 I would expect no effect. 2024 I think generally not, wasn’t good or deployed enough. I think 2025 might be the first signs, it I still think there is a lot of plumbing and working with these things. 2026 though I expect to show an effect.
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