241–250 of 662 posts
High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs But let's blame AI
You really do have to account for why this is mainly happening in industries that are adopting AI, why it's almost exclusively impacting entry-level positions (with senior positions steady or growing), and why controlling for broad economic conditions failed to correct this. I doubt very much that these three Stanford professors would be blindsided by the concept of rates and tarriffs.
This is a complete reversal in the past where having a high headcount was an easy signal of a company's growth (i.e. more people, means more people building features, means more growth).
Investors are lazy. They see one line go down, they make the other line go up.
CEOs are lazy. They see line go up when other line goes down. So they make other line go down.
(I am aware that "line go up" is a stupid meme. But I think it's a perfect way to describe what's happening. It is stupid, lazy, absurd, memetic. It's the only thing that matters, stripped off of anything that is incidental. Line must go up.)
High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs But let's blame AI
You really do have to account for why this is mainly happening in industries that are adopting AI, why it's almost exclusively impacting entry-level positions (with senior positions steady or growing), and why controlling for broad economic conditions failed to correct this. I doubt very much that these three Stanford professors would be blindsided by the concept of rates and tarriffs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's my point. AI doesn't need to be general to be useful. LLMs might replace software engineers without ever being "general intelligence".
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".
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I do their work. No work got automated.
This. And I do their work a lot more slowly because it's not my regular job, and I actually already had to do some of the work (getting the items out of my trolley and onto the conveyor). Now I stand there forever fumbling with barcodes, trying to get bags to stay open, switching between getting items out of the trolley and scanning. The old checkout system is so much more efficient when you are buying anything more…
[edit] Aldi did automate the management of getting shoppers to do that work, because there’s not a person standing there taking and handing out quarters, but (very simple) machines. Without those machines they might need a person, so that hypothetical role (the existence of which might make the whole scheme uneconomical) is automated. But they didn’t automate cart return, all that work’s still being done by people.
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Unions won’t solve this for you. If a company just decides they have enough automation to reduce union workforce it can happen the next time contracts get negotiated. Either way, there are layoff provisions with union agreements.
Tell that to dock workers, who have successfully delayed the automation of ports to the extent we see them automated in e.g. the PRC [0]. Hell, they're even (successfully) pushing back against automated gates! [1] [0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/dock-workers-strike-... [1] https://www.npr.org/2024/10/03/nx-s1-5135597/striking-dockwo...
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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?
High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs But let's blame AI
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there some central authority that’s telling people to blame this all on AI, or how is everyone reaching this conclusion and ignoring the other obvious factors you stated?
It is in their interest to find explanations for reductions in labor that don't assign the blame to corporate greed. For example, a call center might use the excuse of AI to fire a bunch of people. They would have liked to just arbitrarily fire people a few years ago, but if they did that people would notice the reduction in quality and perhaps realize it was done out of self-serving greed (executives get bigger bonu…