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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

#271

Post by ryoshu »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #132
drusepth wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer? Is this hyperbole? It seems like the real question being asked here is "would the world be worse off without deterministic checks and balances", which I think most people would agree is true, no?

I read it as assuming the deterministic checks and balances are already absent. We have the illusion of determinism but, in practice, audits (and justice) are mostly theatre as it is. From that perspective, lowering the quality of something that is already non-rigourous might not have any perceivable effect. It’s only a problem if public perception lowers, but that’s a marketing issue that the big-4 already have a ha…

They don’t though. Marketing hits reality all the time. The Big 4 will survive, but you can only gaslight people for so long.

The all-in on AI shows a lack of imagination around innovation.

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

#272

Post by johnnienaked »

elif wrote: post #101
grim_io wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this like how crypto changed finance and currency

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

#273

Post by renewiltord »

deathanatos wrote: post #169
renewiltord wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The only way AI could fix this if it said "replace the pharmacist with a vending machine and hire a $150k junior engineer to make sure the DB is updated afterwards", which you never know, Claude Opus 4 might suggest. At that point, we'll know AGI has been achieved.

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

#274

Post by johnnienaked »

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.

Why isn't it then

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

#275

Post by johnnienaked »

ACCount37 wrote: post #163
lawlessone wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Considering we don't understand consciousness at ALL or how humans think, you might want to backtrack your claims a bit.

Any abstraction you're noticing in an LLM is likely just a plagiarized one

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

#276

Post by brainless »

swader999 wrote: post #147
robotnikman wrote: post #134

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.

This is the best thing engineers can do. I moved to building as a solo founder. I am building an LLM enabled coding product and I teach. I'm hosting a session on Claude Code today, 134 guests signed up. I'm gradually planning to make money teaching for a few months while building the product.

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

#277

Post by narcotraffico1 »

johnnienaked wrote: post #265
narcotraffico1 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American workers are truly under attack from all sides. H1B. Outsourcing. What's left? The blue collar manufacturing is mostly gone. White collar work well on its way out. Why is our own government (by the people for the people) actively assisting in destroying American's ability to get jobs (H1B)? Especially in these conditions. I'm no racist or idiot but it's unacceptable. I didn't expect the gov to actively be con…

Efficiency rules all. It just doesn't make sense to pay someone $10 when you can pay someone else $2

And when we're all out of work except for the doctors and nurses, electricians and plumbers, there will be nobody to contribute to consumer spending. And we will suffer, at the hand of the government that assisted in this scam.

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

#278

Post by marcosdumay »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #4
techpineapple wrote: post #2

I’m suss about this paper when it makes this claim: “where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment , human labor.” Where is AI currently automating human labor? Not Software Engineering. Or - what’s the difference between AI that augments me so I can do the job of three people and AI that “automates human labor”

What is the effective difference between augment and automate? Either way, fewer man hours are needed to produce the same output.

> What is the effective difference between augment and automate?

The paper says one of those is impacted, and the other isn't.

So, yeah, not only that's what the GP is asking, but I'd like to know it too.

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

#279

Post by lucasjans »

esafak wrote: post #264
kerblang wrote: post #180

High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs But let's blame AI

Let's read the paper instead: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/... It presents a difference-in-differences ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_in_differences ) design that exploits staggered adoption of generative AI to estimate the causal effect on productivity. It compares headcount over time by age group across several occupations, showing significant differentials across age grou…

I appreciate the link to differences in differences, I didn't know what to call this method.

The OP's point could still be valid: it’s still possible that macro factors like inflation, interest rates, or tariffs land harder on the exact group they label ‘AI-exposed.’ That makes the attribution messy.

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

#280

Post by jvanderbot »

esafak wrote: post #264
kerblang wrote: post #180

High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs But let's blame AI

Let's read the paper instead: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/... It presents a difference-in-differences ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_in_differences ) design that exploits staggered adoption of generative AI to estimate the causal effect on productivity. It compares headcount over time by age group across several occupations, showing significant differentials across age grou…

Were entry level jobs the first to go in earlier developer downturns?

Is AI being used to attempt to mitigate that effect?

I don't think their methods or any statistical method could decouple a perfectly correlated signal.

Without AI, would junior jobs have grown as quickly as other?

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