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Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

digitaleconomy.stanford.edu

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Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#101

Post by CuriouslyC »

ath3nd wrote: post #93
CuriouslyC wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault, yet if people crash LLMs, that's the LLMs fault. If a study showed 95% of people crashed jets without training, I wouldn't take that as a sign jets are a flawed idea. As it is, I have no problem with your naysaying, I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that, in fact I find it more amusing than anything.

Ah, there it is. The excuses, it's scrum all over again. Mystical practitioners discount the studies done in the open as not fair or not being done right, or the people participating not believing in it hard enough. My man, 95% of AI pilots failed. https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat... > As it is, I have no problem with your naysaying, I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that…

I don't care about the failures of others. I am succeeding. A study in 1920 would have proved that a man couldn't run a 4 minute mile, imagine if people had stopped trying.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#102

Post by wahnfrieden »

tommyengstrom wrote: post #50
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

I use similar style as you. neovim with ghci inside, plus hls, and ghciwatch. Claude code is nice because it is just a separate cli tool that doesn't force you to change editor etc. It can also research things for you, make plans that you can iterate before letting it loose, etc. Claude is also better than chatgpt at writing haskell in my experience.

Codex CLI with gpt-5-thinking on "high" reasoning is also good to try as an alternative now

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#103

Post by godelski »

helsinki8 wrote: post #90
ath3nd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who get overly excited from every new shining thing also thought that NFTs and Crypto and web3 (whatever the heck it means) are the next coming of Jesus. If LLM boosters were not so preachy about it, I'd left them off the hook easier. But at the current moment: - Only study up to date shows experienced developers have 19% less productivity when using LLMs https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experien…

And other people said the Internet was a fad and a bubble and cell phones were just for people who wanted to look important and solar panels would never work. History is full of people making wrong predictions in both directions about new technology. As the most obvious parallel, pets.com went bust in the first dot com bust and so did webvan. Today chewy is successfully replicating pets and ordering groceries online…

  > And other people said the Internet was a fad
So what? A broken clock is still right twice a day.

My point is: are there more false positives or false negatives?

You're also cherry picking. Even with AI there are pretty high profile people saying it's a fad as well as pretty high profile people saying it's going to kill us all.

Look at crypto. WAS it hype? Clearly. Don't tell me the price of bitcoin, tell me how the technology actually changed the world. Tell me how it did even a tenth of what the crypto bros promised.

Look at VR. Don't tell me how much you like the latest Quest, tell me how many people are in the metaverse. Tell me how many people even own a VR system. Tell me how the tech achieved a hundredth of what was promised.

Look at Segway. When was the last time you even saw one? Have you ever even used one? How many people even know what they are?

It doesn't matter if your prediction is right if it is 1 in 1000. The Simpson has a better batting record than that and they aren't even trying. What matters is consistent predictions. Even if you believe this time is different I don't know how you can not understand why people are skeptical. In the last decade we watched people become billionaires off of VR and crypto.

Even if AI is different, people are being glamorized for their experience in crypto and VR as reasons for why they'll be successful in AI. If you believe in AI then why wouldn't you see this as a fox in the chicken coup?

Those people didn't make their billions through technology, they made their billions through hype.

You can believe AI is a bubble and full of hype even if you believe the technology has a lot of uses. It's a lot easier to build hype around a grain of truth than a complete fabrication.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#104

Post by godelski »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #89
ath3nd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who get overly excited from every new shining thing also thought that NFTs and Crypto and web3 (whatever the heck it means) are the next coming of Jesus. If LLM boosters were not so preachy about it, I'd left them off the hook easier. But at the current moment: - Only study up to date shows experienced developers have 19% less productivity when using LLMs https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experien…

If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault, yet if people crash LLMs, that's the LLMs fault. If a study showed 95% of people crashed jets without training, I wouldn't take that as a sign jets are a flawed idea. As it is, I have no problem with your naysaying, I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that, in fact I find it more amusing than anything.

  > If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault
Yet if you make a plane and say that you don't need training or a license to operate it and you crash then yes, it is the plane's fault.

  > I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that
Many of these studies show participants self rate as being more productive and getting things done more quickly. In fact, self reporting is well known to be an unreliable metric. People frequently hallucinate. People self report seeing ghosts, aliens, demons, Big Foot, past lives, and all kinds of things that don't exist. Most of these people aren't lying either, they believe the things they report. Most people (probably everybody) have experienced the Mandela Effect in some form or another. Hell, we even know eye witness testimony can be unreliable and even manipulated/influenced.

I've seen plenty around me who claim to be faster with the help of AI. Some are! But most seem to be faster at producing lines of code, not faster at completing the goal. I see a lot more slop and frequently that slop just results in work being outsourced to others. Which, to be fair, does mean they're "faster". But their speed is not on the intended metric.

Maybe I'm the one hallucinating. But maybe you are too. All I know is that when I use AI tools I feel faster but I've also found a get a lot less done.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#105

Post by godelski »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #56
ath3nd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are very useful tools for software development That's an opinion many disagree with. As a matter of fact, the only limited study up to date showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%. Let's reserve opinions and link studies. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... My anecdotal experience, for example, is that LLMs are such a negative drain on…

Probably depends on how it’s being used. I use LLMs every day. They are useful to me ( quite useful), but I don’t really use them for coding. I use them as a “fast reference” source, an editor, or as a teacher. I’ve been at this since 1983, so I’ve weathered a couple of sea changes.

My favorite use is LLMs is a fuzzy search. Give them a description, to search that, iterate. Or get them to role play an expert in some field. Doesn't matter if they hallucinate. Take that jargon and use it to improve your searches.

They're super helpful in these contexts. But these are also contexts where I don't need to rely on accuracy.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#106

Post by keeda »

adroniser wrote: post #82
bgwalter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's time to fight back. Politicians need to be educated that "AI" is plagiarism and is used as an excuse to scale back the workforce. It also ruins the thriving intellectual landscape. Since you are a professor, they might listen to you.

didn't hackers used to be for piracy?

It is difficult to get a man to stick to his principles when it is his salary that those principles will impinge upon.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#107

Post by ggm »

camillomiller wrote: post #98
ggm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why are so many corporations reducing staff citing ai?

Reread the main comment and then mine.

Except its being applied in sectors like law and commerce and is unrelated to specific economic conditions, much as the 10% across the board IT firing was unrelated to specific economic conditions.

I'd say some of it may be the economy but I also think some of it Isn't.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#108

Post by CuriouslyC »

godelski wrote: post #104
CuriouslyC wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault, yet if people crash LLMs, that's the LLMs fault. If a study showed 95% of people crashed jets without training, I wouldn't take that as a sign jets are a flawed idea. As it is, I have no problem with your naysaying, I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that, in fact I find it more amusing than anything.

> If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault Yet if you make a plane and say that you don't need training or a license to operate it and you crash then yes, it is the plane's fault. > I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that Many of these studies show participants self rate as being more productive and getting things done more quickly. In fact, self reporting…

I don't need to vibe my productivity improvement, I can see it in the 18 projects and 3 scientific papers I've gotten close to complete in the last 2.5 weeks.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#109

Post by adamsvystun »

So what they actually found is that there is a decline in employment of young people's decline in AI-exposed industries. There are thousands of confounding variables that could have caused this, and they tested only a few. This is by no means a conclusive evidence that AI is taking away entry level software jobs.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#110

Post by godelski »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #108
godelski wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault Yet if you make a plane and say that you don't need training or a license to operate it and you crash then yes, it is the plane's fault. > I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that Many of these studies show participants self rate as being more productive and getting things done more quickly. In fact, self reporting…

I don't need to vibe my productivity improvement, I can see it in the 18 projects and 3 scientific papers I've gotten close to complete in the last 2.5 weeks.

Great! If you got more to go off of than vibes then that's a great sign. Tons of people measure their performance in vibes. Frankly, because performance is a really difficult thing to measure.

But we're all just talking to "some random dude on the internet" and that context isn't shared. I'm certain you see both people where AI is helping as well as people where it isn't. Maybe in different proportions than others. But if you're upset that I don't know you, well... that's a bit hard to do in forums like this.

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