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

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181–190 of 662 posts

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

#181

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.

>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…

The future seems very uncertain right now and we are living in weird times. Its always a good idea to have a backup plan in case your career path doesn't work out!

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

#182
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…

LLMs are just another layer of abstraction on top of countless. It’s not going to be the last layer, though.

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

#183

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.

Is it hard to date with a trailer?

Would be more difficult depending on where you live. My plan was to talk to others online and see if I could find someone willing to live such a simple life with me, maybe starting with an LDR first (I'm sort of doing that already)

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

#184

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.

AI training costs are increasing around 3x annually across each of the last 8 years to achieve its performance improvements. Last year, spending across all labs was $150bn. Keeping the 3x trend means that, to keep pace with current advances, costs should rise to $450bn in 2025, $900bn in 2026, $2.7tn in 2027, $8.1tn in 2028, $25tn in 2028, and $75tn in 2029 and $225tn in 2030. For reference, the GDP of the world is a…

The current trained models are already pretty good enough for many things.

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

#186

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?

They don’t need AI for that, they just cut staff to the bare minimum and put in self checkouts.

And then they hire supervisors, helpers and checkout guards/security. I hope it at least makes sense on paper.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Nope, LLMs are quite functional in non-english languages. My partner regularly works with ChatGPT in Turkish

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

#189
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'd argue that, out of white collar jobs, it is actually one of the least automatable still. I.e. the rest of the jobs are likely going to get disrupted much faster because they are easier to automate (and have been the target of automation by the software industry in the past century). Whatever numbers were seeing now may be too early to reflect this accurately.

Also there are different metrics that are relevant like dollar count vs pure headcount. Cost cutting targets dollars. E.g. entry level developers are still expensive compared to other jobs.

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

#190
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Nope, LLMs are quite functional in non-english languages. My partner regularly works with ChatGPT in Turkish

My experience: hosted LLMs are very good, but even 30B models you run locally are quite poor (at least in Romanian). To some degree they still hallucinate words (they don't conjugate properly sometimes).
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