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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

#101

Post by elif »

grim_io wrote: post #60
ACCount37 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 2025 you can add quality to jpegs. Your phone does it and you don't even notice. So the rhetorical metaphor employed holds up, in that AI is rapidly changing the fundamentals of how technology functions beyond our capacity to anticipate or keep up with it.

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

#102

Post by londons_explore »

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…

> Audit quality will continue to suffer

I wonder how much this actually matters? I understand that for an auditor, having a quality reputation matters. But if all audits from all firms are bad, how much would the world economy suffer?

Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer?

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

#103

Post by vitaflo »

shadowgovt wrote: post #17
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.

I really hope nobody had themselves convinced that software engineering couldn't be automated. Not with the code enterprise has been writing for decades now (lots and lots and lots of rules for gluing state to state, which are extremely structured but always just shy of being so structured that they were amenable to traditional finite-rule-based automation). The goal of the industry has always been self-replacement.…

If you want to know what will happen to software engineers in the US just follow the path of US factory workers in the 90s.

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

#104

Post by Spivak »

slipperydippery wrote: post #85
Spivak wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean ordering kiosks and self-checkout machines? We have automated it, it's just not everywhere has implemented it. The one I'm desperately waiting for is serverless restaurants—food halls already do it but I want it everywhere. Just let me sit down, put an order into the kitchen, pick it up myself. I promise I can walk 20 feet and fill my own drink cup.

Self check-out machines aren't automation.

There used to be two humans standing at the cash register, now because of software, automatic change machines, and cameras there is only one. One of those humans' jobs got automated.

Call it what you like but replacing the work of humans one for one is difficult and usually not necessary. Reformulating the problem to one that machines can solve is basically the whole game. You don't need a robot front desk worker to greet you, you just need a tablet to do your check in.

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

#105

Post by anthem2025 »

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.

Pretty crazy, and all you have to do is assume exponential performance growth for as long as it takes.

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

#107

Post by fibers »

londons_explore wrote: post #102
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…

> Audit quality will continue to suffer I wonder how much this actually matters? I understand that for an auditor, having a quality reputation matters. But if all audits from all firms are bad, how much would the world economy suffer? Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer?

Then you would have to think twice about the company you may be giving money to (ie the stock market and private bank loans). That's the whole objective of this. Every company is going to need an accountant in one way or another and you don't really need to follow strict GAAP for management requirements (what else is EBIDTA for if anything?), but it's something completely different than saying: I made x dollars and spent y dollars, here is what I have and what I owe, please give me money.

At the end of the day it is a question of convenience/standards, if GAAP didn't exist maybe firms could use a modified accrual standard that is wholly compliant with tax reporting and that's it.

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

#108

Post by Aloisius »

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…

Given the number of academic papers about it, model collapse is a popular idea among the people who know a lot about AI as well.

Model collapse is something demonstrated when models are recursively trained largely or entirely on their own output. Given most training data is still generated or edited by humans or synthetic, I'm not entirely certain why one would expect to see evidence of model collapse happening right now, but to dismiss it as something that can't happen in the real world seems a bit premature.

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

#109

Post by anthem2025 »

muldvarp wrote: post #83
grim_io wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can upscale a badly compressed jpeg using ai into something better looking. Often the results will be great. Sometimes the hallucinated details will not match the expectations. I think this applies fundamentally to all of the LLM applications.

And if you get that "sometimes" down to "rarely" and then "very rarely" you can replace a lot of expensive and inflexible humans with cheap and infinitely flexible computers. That's pretty much what we're experiencing currently. Two years ago code generation by LLMs was usually horrible. Now it's generally pretty good.

Lots of technology is cool if you get to just say “if we get rid of the limitations” while offering no practical way to do so.

It’s still horrible btw.

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

#110

Post by anthem2025 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #87
grim_io wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are selling yourself short if you believe you can be replaced by a next token predictor :)

I think humans who think they can't be replaced by a next token predictor think too highly of themselves. LLMs show it plain and clear: there's no magic in human intelligence. Abstract thinking is nothing but fancy computation. It can be implemented in math and executed on a GPU.

LLMs have no ability to reason whatsoever.

They do have the ability to fool people and exacerbate or cause mental problems.

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