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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

#171
post #98
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'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…

The only thing that AI is good at is a job that someone has already done before.

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

#172
Thinly veiled economic propaganda aside, I am dealing with a different AI mess everyday. Technical debt is exploding everywhere I turn. There is an ever larger part of me these days that wishes I could just call the bluff all at once and let all the companies in question learn the inevitable lessons here the hard way.

The worst thing for me would be just needing to get a job like I had before being a dev, the stakes are so much grander for all the companies. It's only really existential for the side of this that isn't me/us. I've been working since I was 15, I can figure it out. I'll be more happy cutting veggies in a kitchen than every single CEO out there when all is said and done!

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

#173
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'm sure those who lost a job to software at some point are feeling a great deal of sympathy for developers who are now losing out to automation.

Despite being the target of a lot of schadenfreude, most software developers aren't working on automation.

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

#174
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 work in physical domains that need labor “here and now”, think plumbers, electricians, and the like. You can’t send that labor overseas, and the union can control attempts at subversion via labor force importation. But even that has limitations, e.g. union factory workers simply having their factory shipped overseas.

Software development at its core can be done anywhere, anytime. Unionization would crank the offshoring that already happens into overdrive.

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

#175
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.

So what your argument is we're so special that we deserve to hold back human progress to have a privileged life? If it's not that what would you want a union to do in this situation?

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

#176
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The experiences people are having when working with big, complex codebases don’t line up with your gloomy outlook. LLMs just fall apart beyond a certain project size, and then the tech debt must be paid.

Is it gloomy? I personally liken it to inventing the washing machine instead of doing laundry by hand, beating it against a washboard, for another hundred years.

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

#177
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…

How will this work exactly?

I think I have a pretty good idea of what AI can do for software engineering, because I use it for that nearly every day and I experiment with different models and IDEs.

The way that has worked for me is to make prompts very specific, to the point where the prompt itself would not be comprehensible to someone who's not in the field.

If you sat a rando with no CS background in front of Cursor, Windsurf or Claude code, what do you suppose would happen?

It seems really doubtful to me that overcoming that gap is "just more training", because it would require a qualitatively different sort of product.

And even if we came to a point where no technical knowledge of how software actually works was required, you would still need to be precise about the business logic in natural language. Now you're writing computer code in natural language that will read like legalese. At that point you've just invented a new programming language.

Now maybe you're thinking, I'll just prompt it with all my email, all my docs, everything I have for context and just ask it to please make my boss happy.

But the level of integrative intelligence, combined with specialized world knowledge required for that task is really very far away from what current models can do.

The most powerful way that I've found to conceptualize what LLMs do is that they execute routines from huge learnt banks of programs that re-combine stored textual information along common patterns.

They're cut and paste engines where the recombination rules are potentially quite complex programs learnt from data.

This view fits well with the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs - they are good at combining two well understood solutions into something new, even if vaguely described.

But they are quite bad at abstracting textual information into a more fundamental model of program and world state and reasoning at that level.

I strongly suspect this is intrinsic to their training, because doing this is simply not required to complete the vast majority of text that could realistically have ended up in training databases.

Executing a sophisticated cut&paste scheme is in some ways just too effective; the technical challenge is how do you pose a training problem to force a model to learn beyond that.

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

#178
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?

The current system is not long term stable, and poor accounting is part of the reason more people don't know that. Even worse accounting would speed up the decline.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it gets to the point where I can no longer find a tech job I am just going to buy a trailer, live somewhere cheap, and just make money doing odd jobs while spending most of my time programming what I want. I don't want to participate in a society where all I have for job options is a McJob or some Amazon warehouse.

That's plan C, plan B is to one person SAAS a better app than my current company makes.

That's actually a good idea. Now I just need to come up with an idea for an SAAS app. I was thinking originally or making one of the games on my project backlog and seeing how much I could make off it. Or creating one of the many idea I have for websites and webapps and see where they go.
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