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

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

#51

Post by cjs_ac »

ACCount37 wrote: post #36
grim_io wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just the nature of being early adopters. Other fields will get their turn once a baseline of best practices is established that the consultants can sell training for. In the meantime, memes aside, I'm not too worried about being completely automated away. These models are extremely unreliable when unsupervised. It doesn't feel like that will change fundamentally with just incrementally better training.

Does it have to? Stack enough "it's 5% better" on top of each other and the exponent will crush you.

Are LLMs stackable? If they keep misunderstanding each other, it'll look more like successive applications of JPEG compression.

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

#52

Post by ACCount37 »

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…

The reports from the usual "offshoring centers" aren't exactly inspiring. It's a bloodbath over there.

Seems like the capabilities of current systems map onto "the kind of labor that gets offshored" quite well. Some of the jobs that would get offloaded to India now get offloaded to Anthropic's datacenters instead.

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

#53

Post by stonemetal12 »

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.

Why bet? In the news recently Australian bank CBA was caught offshoring positions and claiming the jobs had been replaced by AI.

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

#54

Post by seneca »

skeeterbug wrote: post #48
seneca wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always seen it as "Actually Indians", but yeah. That's a lot of what is destroying the US tech job market. It happened to blue collar work in the 90s and early 2000s, now it's our turn.

Nah. Offshoring has been a thing since I started working in 2003. There are always cycles. When offshore projects fail, work comes back.

It's not just offshoring now though. It's offshoring plus hundreds of thousands of H-1b holders being brought onshore. Entire departments at major tech companies in US offices are populated by foreign labor. As far as I'm aware that's unprecedented, and it's very different from the offshoring cycle.

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

#55

Post by chrisweekly »

brandon272 wrote: post #33

> Some examples of these highly exposed jobs include customer service representatives, accountants and software developers. We seem to be in this illogical (delusional?) era where we are being told that AI is 'replacing' people in certain sectors or types of work (under the guise that AI is better or will soon be better than humans in these roles) yet those same areas seem to be getting worse? - Customer service seem…

> "The general consensus around software development seems to be that while AI is lowering the barrier of entry to "producing code", the rate of production of tech debt and code that no one "owns" (understands) has exploded with yet-to-be-seen consequences."

^ This. (Tho I'm not sure about it being "general consensus".) Vibe code is the payday loan (or high-interest credit card) of tech debt. Demo-quality code has a way of making it into production. Now "everyone" can produce demos and PoCs. Companies that leverage AI as a powerful tool in the hands of experienced engineers may be able to iterate faster and increase quality, but I expect a sad majority to learn the hard way that there's no free lunch, and shipping something you don't understand is a recipe for disaster.

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

#56

Post by ACCount37 »

cjs_ac wrote: post #51
ACCount37 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it have to? Stack enough "it's 5% better" on top of each other and the exponent will crush you.

Are LLMs stackable? If they keep misunderstanding each other, it'll look more like successive applications of JPEG compression.

By all accounts, yes.

"Model collapse" is a popular idea among the people who know nothing about AI, but it doesn't seem to be happening in real world. Dataset quality estimation shows no data quality drop over time, despite the estimates of "AI contamination" trickling up over time. Some data quality estimates show weak inverse effects (dataset quality is rising over time a little?), which is a mindfuck.

The performance of frontier AI systems also keeps improving, which is entirely expected. So does price-performance. One of the most "automation-relevant" performance metrics is "ability to complete long tasks", and that shows vaguely exponential growth.

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

#57

Post by jordanb »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #42
jordanb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree that outsourcing and oversupply are the real culprits and AI is a smoke screen. The outcome is the same though.

> outcome is the same though Not really. If it’s overproduction, the solution is tighter standards at universities (and students exercising more discretion around which programmes they enroll in). If it’s overproduction and/or outsourcing, the solutions include labour organisation and, under this administration, immigration curbs and possibly services tariffs. Either way, if it’s not AI the trend isn’t secular—it sho…

It can be oversupply/outsourcing and also secular: You can have basically chronic oversupply due to a declining/maturing industry. Chronic oversupply because the number of engineers needed goes down every year and the pipeline isn't calibrated for that (academia has been dealing with this for a very long time now, look up the postdocalypse). Outsourcing, because as projects mature and new stuff doesn't come along to replace, running maintenance offshore gets easier.

Software isn't eating the world. Software ate the world. New use cases have basically not worked out (metaverse!) or are actively harmful.

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

#58

Post by grim_io »

muldvarp wrote: post #47
grim_io wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just the nature of being early adopters. Other fields will get their turn once a baseline of best practices is established that the consultants can sell training for. In the meantime, memes aside, I'm not too worried about being completely automated away. These models are extremely unreliable when unsupervised. It doesn't feel like that will change fundamentally with just incrementally better training.

> These models are extremely unreliable when unsupervised. > It doesn't feel like that will change fundamentally with just incrementally better training. I could list several things that I thought wouldn't get better with more training and then got better with more training. I don't have any hope left that LLMs will hit a wall soon. Also, LLMs don't need to be better programmers than you are, they only need to be goo…

No matter how much better they get, I don't see any actual sign of intelligence, do you?

There is a lot of handwaving around the definition of intelligence in this context, of course. My definition would be actual on the job learning and reliability i don't need to second guess every time.

I might be wrong, but those 2 requirements seem not compatible with current approach/hardware limitations.

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

#59

Post by HankStallone »

seneca wrote: post #54
skeeterbug wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Offshoring has been a thing since I started working in 2003. There are always cycles. When offshore projects fail, work comes back.

It's not just offshoring now though. It's offshoring plus hundreds of thousands of H-1b holders being brought onshore. Entire departments at major tech companies in US offices are populated by foreign labor. As far as I'm aware that's unprecedented, and it's very different from the offshoring cycle.

I wouldn't say it's unprecedented, since I first heard about a call center in Texas that was over 90% foreign labor several years ago. But it's certainly gotten worse.

I suspect that some companies/policymakers may be trying to flood the market, so to speak, in case importing them gets harder in the future or a bunch get sent home.

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

#60

Post by grim_io »

ACCount37 wrote: post #56
cjs_ac wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are LLMs stackable? If they keep misunderstanding each other, it'll look more like successive applications of JPEG compression.

By all accounts, yes. "Model collapse" is a popular idea among the people who know nothing about AI, but it doesn't seem to be happening in real world. Dataset quality estimation shows no data quality drop over time, despite the estimates of "AI contamination" trickling up over time. Some data quality estimates show weak inverse effects (dataset quality is rising over time a little?), which is a mindfuck. The perform…

The jpeg compression argument is still valid.

It's lossy compression at the core.

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