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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

#161
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for not making my point clear. I'm arguing that the category of the problem matters a lot. Chess is, compared to self-driving cars and (in my opinion) programming, very limited in its rules, the fixed board size and the lack of "fog of war".

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" ~ Upton Sinclair Your stance was the widely held stance not just on hacker news but also by the leading proponents of ai when chatgpt was first launched. A lot of people thought the hallucination aspect is something that simply can't be overcome. That LLMs were nothing but glorified stochastic parrots. Well, t…

>That LLMs were nothing but glorified stochastic parrots.

Well yes , now we know they make kids kill themselves.

I think we've all fooled ourselves like this beetle

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/t...

for thousands of years up until 2020 anything that conversed with us could safely be assumed to be another sentient/intelligent being.

No we have something that does that, but is neither sentient or intelligent, just a (complex)deterministic mechanism.

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

#162
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.

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 wouldnt stop any of this but professionalization would

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what's actually happening is all your life you've been told by experience if something can talk to you is that it must be somewhat intelligent. Now you get can't around that this might not be the case. You're like that beetle going extinct mating with beer bottles. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/t...

"What's actually happening" is all your life you've been told that human intelligence is magical and special and unique. And now it turns out that it isn't. Cue the coping.

We've already found that LLMs implement the very same type of abstract thinking as humans do. Even with mechanistic interpretability being in the gutters, you can probe LLMs and find some of the concepts they think in.

But, of course, denying that is much less uncomfortable than the alternative. Another one falls victim to AI effect.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Buy a trailer, live somewhere cheap, do odd jobs Unrelated to the discussion, but I love these kinds of backup plans. I've found that most guys I talk to have one. Just a few days ago a guy was telling me that, if his beloved wife ever divorces him, then he'd move to a tropical island and become a coconut seller. (My personal plan: find a small town in the Sonoran Desert that has a good library, dig a hole under a n…

Is it hard to date living under a cactus?

Nah dating under a cactus is easy: just don't be a prick.

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

#165
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable, but that the interface is the easiest to adapt to our workflow. I have a feeling language models will be good at virtually every "sit at a desk" job in a virtually identical capacity, it's just the act of plugging an AI into these roles is non-obvious. Like every business was impacted by the Internet equally, the early applications were just an artifact of what…

> I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable I don't know. It seems pretty friendly to automation to me. When was the last time you wrote assembly? When was the last time you had map memory? Think about blitting memory to a screen buffer to draw a square on a screen? Schedule processes and threads? These are things that I routinely did as a junior engineer writing software a long time ago. Most people at…

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

#166

AI is the popular cover excuse for layoffs. I can’t think of a single job that modern AI could easily replace.

I think the initial job loss from AI will come from having individual workers be more productive and eliminate the need to have larger teams to get the same work done.

For cost centers, maybe. If your development team or org is a revenue generator with a backlog, I don't see why the team would be trimmed.

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

#167
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…

How many of these jobs are getting offshored because of AI? Language barriers, culture, and knowledge are some of the biggest challenges to overcome for offshoring. AI potentially solves many of those challenges

> AI potentially solves many of those challenges

Isn't it exactly the opposite?

Language barriers: LLMs are language models and all of the major ones are built in English, speaking that language fluently is surely a prerequisite to interacting with them efficiently?

Knowledge: famously LLMs "know" nothing and are making things up all of the time and sometimes approximate "knowledge"

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

#168

Every day when I am out in the city, I am amazed by how many jobs we have NOT managed to replace with AI yet. For example, cashiers. There are still many people spending their lives dragging items over a scanner, reading a number from a screen, holding out their hand for the customer to put money in, and then sorting the coins into boxes. How hard can it be to automate that?

Pharmacists are my favourite. They're a human vending machine that is bad at counting and reading. But law protects them. Pretty good regulatory capture.

Please actually understand what pharmacists actually do and _why_ AI is not a good replacement for them yet, unless you want to die of certain drugs interactions.

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

#169

Every day when I am out in the city, I am amazed by how many jobs we have NOT managed to replace with AI yet. For example, cashiers. There are still many people spending their lives dragging items over a scanner, reading a number from a screen, holding out their hand for the customer to put money in, and then sorting the coins into boxes. How hard can it be to automate that?

Pharmacists are my favourite. They're a human vending machine that is bad at counting and reading. But law protects them. Pretty good regulatory capture.

Pharmacists are a fantastic example. My pharmacy is delivered my prescription by computer. They text me, by computer, when it's ready to pick up. I drive over there … and it isn't ready, and I have to loiter for 15 minutes.

Also, after the prescription ends, they're still filling it. I just never pick it up. The autonomous flow has no ability to handle this situation, so now I get a monthly text that my prescription is ready. The actual support line is literally unmanned, and messages given it are piped to /dev/null.

The existing automation is hot garbage. But C-suite would have me believe our Lord & Savior, AI, will fix it all.

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