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AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

cnbc.com

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Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#21

Post by smt88 »

orochimaaru wrote: post #12

The study is bs. While executives are blaming AI, it is nowhere near levels of replacement. What I bet is happening under the covers is reprioritization of work, offshoring or both.

> What I bet is happening under the covers is reprioritization of work, offshoring or both.

AI has been frequently used as an explanation for layoffs.

Before AI, layoffs would be a positive signal to investors, but they'd be demoralizing to staff and/or harm the brand.

Now, you can say, "Wow, we're so good at technology, we're eliminated ___ jobs!" and try to get the best of both worlds.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#22

Post by est31 »

orochimaaru wrote: post #14
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad engineers were “too important” to unionize because their/our labor is “too special .” I think you could find 10,000 quotes from HN alone why SDEs were immune to labor market struggles that would need a union Oh well, good luck everyone.

Unions won’t solve this for you. If a company just decides they have enough automation to reduce union workforce it can happen the next time contracts get negotiated. Either way, there are layoff provisions with union agreements.

In Hollywood, union bargaining bought some time at least. Unions did mandate limits on the use of AI for a lot of the creation process.

AI is still used in Hollywood but nobody is proud of it. No movie director goes around quoting percentages of how many scenes were augmented by AI or how many lines in the script were written by ChatGPT.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#24

Post by jszymborski »

orochimaaru wrote: post #14
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad engineers were “too important” to unionize because their/our labor is “too special .” I think you could find 10,000 quotes from HN alone why SDEs were immune to labor market struggles that would need a union Oh well, good luck everyone.

Unions won’t solve this for you. If a company just decides they have enough automation to reduce union workforce it can happen the next time contracts get negotiated. Either way, there are layoff provisions with union agreements.

Tell that to dock workers, who have successfully delayed the automation of ports to the extent we see them automated in e.g. the PRC [0].

Hell, they're even (successfully) pushing back against automated gates! [1]

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/dock-workers-strike-...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/10/03/nx-s1-5135597/striking-dockwo...

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#25

Post by FirmwareBurner »

nradov wrote: post #19
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad engineers were “too important” to unionize because their/our labor is “too special .” I think you could find 10,000 quotes from HN alone why SDEs were immune to labor market struggles that would need a union Oh well, good luck everyone.

I'm not necessarily opposed to unionization in general but it's never going to save many US software industry jobs. If a unionization drive succeeds at some big tech company then the workers might do well for a few years. But inevitably a non-union startup competitor with a lower cost structure and more flexible work rules will come along and eat their lunch. Then all the union workers will get laid off anyway. Union…

Indeed, just look at the CGI VFX industry of Hollywood. US invented it and was the leader for a long time, but now it has been commodified, standardized and run into the ground, because union or not, you can't stop US studios form offshoring the digital asset work to another country where labor is 80% cheaper than California and quality is 80% there. So the US is left with making the SW tools that VFX artist use, as the cutting edge graphics & GPU knowhow is all clustered there.

Similarly, a lot of non-cutting edge SW jobs will also leave the US as tooling becomes more standardized, and other nations upskill themselves to deliver similar value at less cost in exchange for USD.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#27

Post by BolsunBacset »

fibers wrote: post #8

The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if th…

[flagged]

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#28

Post by polski-g »

muldvarp wrote: post #3

Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation". Was good while it lasted though.

Its the least regulated (not at all). So it will be the first to be changed.

AI lawyers? Many years away.

AI civil engineers? Same thing, there is a PE exam that protects them.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#30

Post by WillPostForFood »

techpineapple wrote: post #2

I’m suss about this paper when it makes this claim: “where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment , human labor.” Where is AI currently automating human labor? Not Software Engineering. Or - what’s the difference between AI that augments me so I can do the job of three people and AI that “automates human labor”

When the Stanford paper looked at augment vs automate, they used the data from Anthropic's AI Economic Index. That paper defined the terms like this:

We also analyze how AI is being used for tasks, finding 57% of usage suggests augmentation of human capabilities (e.g., learning or iterating on an output) while 43% suggests automation (e.g., fulfilling a request with minimal human involvement).

From the data, software engineers are automating their own work, not augmenting. Anthropic's full paper is here:

https://arxiv.org/html/2503.04761v1

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