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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

#301

Post by aianus »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #291
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’d prefer that my family are financially stable over “human progress”. One benefits me and the other benefits tech companies. Easy choice.

If our ancestors had thought like that we'd all be very busy and "stable" doing subsistence farming like we were doing 10,000 years ago.

Better our children never have to work because the robots do everything and they inherited some ownership of the robots.

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

#302

Post by muldvarp »

grim_io wrote: post #84
muldvarp wrote: post #82

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".

I think I haven't made my point clear enough:

Chess was once thought to require general intelligence. Then computing power became cheap enough that using raw compute made computers better than humans. Computers didn't play chess in a very human-like way and there were a few years where you could still beat a computer by playing to its weaknesses. Now you'll never beat a computer at chess ever again.

Similarly, many software engineers think that writing software requires general intelligence. Then computing power became cheap enough that training LLMs became possible. Sure, LLMs don't think in a very human-like way: There are some tasks that are trivial for humans and where LLMs struggle but LLMs also outcompete your average software engineer in many other tasks. It's still possible to win against an LLM in an intelligence-off by playing to its weaknesses.

It doesn't matter that computers don't have general intelligence when they use raw compute to crush you in chess. And it won't matter that computers don't have general intelligence when they use raw compute to crush you at programming.

The proof that software development requires general intelligence is on you. I think the stuff most software engineers do daily doesn't. And I think LLMs will get continously better at it.

I certainly don't feel comfortable betting my professional future on software development for the coming decades.

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

#303

Post by lotsofpulp »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #126
Lovesong wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You detect someone leaving your store with a 4€ item. What then?

You ban them from coming back in after a few warnings. Stores seem really icy about facial recognition right now though. The optics are pretty bad (a play on words pun?)

Who is going to stop them from coming back in?

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

#304

Post by cm2187 »

raincole wrote: post #297
fibers wrote: 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…

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

And being "superior" doesn't necessarily mean extraordinary coding skills. The vast majority of code to be written doesn't require that. What it requires however is a combination of common sense and good understanding of the underlying business. This is in short supply in many of the locations the jobs are being offshored to. But let's be honest, it was also on short supply in the corporate IT departments being offshored, though not quite to the same degree.

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

#305

Post by redman25 »

aianus wrote: post #301
lotsoweiners wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d prefer that my family are financially stable over “human progress”. One benefits me and the other benefits tech companies. Easy choice.

If our ancestors had thought like that we'd all be very busy and "stable" doing subsistence farming like we were doing 10,000 years ago. Better our children never have to work because the robots do everything and they inherited some ownership of the robots.

Do you really believe that all technological progress has bettered humanity? Where’s the four day work week we were promised? I thought automation was supposed to free us from labor.

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

#306

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

Spivak wrote: post #39
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #38

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?

You mean ordering kiosks and self-checkout machines? We have automated it, it's just not everywhere has implemented it. The one I'm desperately waiting for is serverless restaurants—food halls already do it but I want it everywhere. Just let me sit down, put an order into the kitchen, pick it up myself. I promise I can walk 20 feet and fill my own drink cup.

Japan does this a lot of places, and it makes the experience much easier.

And I think the entire mid and low range restaurants could replace servers with a tablet and people would be happier. I'm not sure how it doesn't make more money for the restaurant too, making it so easy to order more during a meal.

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

#307

Post by raincole »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #300
raincole wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true. A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office. Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mo…

I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world.

I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make in these places, they'd be much more opposed to remote work.

And that was before LLM. Today practically the entire planet can write passable English.

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

#308

Post by softwaredoug »

For similar forms of automation, isn’t 13% somewhat inline with what you’d expect?

For example, I wonder how many fewer juniors were needed when we had better programming languages and tools? Do certain programming practices lead to fewer new workers? How many new factory workers aren’t hired on the factory floor due to a form of automation?

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

#309

Post by [deleted] »

raincole wrote: post #307
deanmoriarty wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true. A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office. Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mo…

I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world. I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make i…

[deleted]

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

#310

Post by typewithrhythm »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #300
raincole wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true. A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office. Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mo…

It's interesting, ai seems to be enabling the middle in a positive way.

On the other side, we have started to find that the value of outsourcing to very low cost regions has completely disappeared.

I expect that the wages in eastern Europe will quickly rise in a way they never did in former outsourcing hotspots (India for example), because they are able to do similarly complex and quality work to westerners, and are now enabled by awesome translation tools.

The low quality for cheaper is now better served by the Artificial Indian.

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