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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

#331

Post by calebh »

elif wrote: post #98
muldvarp wrote: 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…

I'm not so certain that non-desk jobs will be safe either. What makes the current LLMs great at programming is the vast amount of training data. There might be some other breakthrough for typical jobs - some combination of reinforcement learning, training on videos of people doing things, LLMs and old-fashioned AI.

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

#332

Post by Buttons840 »

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?

If remote work is cheaper for the owners, then why are the workers the ones promoting it?

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

#333

Post by repeekad »

jimmont wrote: post #327

Organizations are choosing to eliminate workers rather than amplify them with AI because they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity. That's the rent extraction model consuming its own productive infrastructure. The Stanford study documents organizations systematically choosing inferior economic strategies because their rent-extraction frameworks cannot conc…

I hope AI fuels a re-independence of many industries by making business software discovery and integration cheap and easy, every plumber with more than 10 years experience should own their company with low cost software running it, the efficiency gains from consolidating resources a la private equity for marketing and book keeping go away in an AI powered world

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

#334

Post by kaibee »

beeflet wrote: post #253
muldvarp wrote: 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.

Most "Software Engineering" is just applying the same code in slightly different contexts. If we were all smarter it would have been automated earlier through the use of some higher-level language.

> If we were all smarter

Its not really an intelligence thing. You could have the most intelligent agent, but if the structural incentives for that agent are for example, "build and promote your own library for X for optimal career growth.", you would still have massive fragmentation. And under the current rent-seeking capitalist framework, this is a structural issue at every level. Firefox and Chrome? Multiple competing OSes? How many JS libraries? Now sure, maybe if everyone was perfectly intelligent _and_ perfectly trusting, then you could escape this.

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

#336

Post by wesapien »

jimmont wrote: post #327

Organizations are choosing to eliminate workers rather than amplify them with AI because they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity. That's the rent extraction model consuming its own productive infrastructure. The Stanford study documents organizations systematically choosing inferior economic strategies because their rent-extraction frameworks cannot conc…

Late Stage Capitalism. The real paper clip maximizers are the Silicon Valley and Wallstreet bros we met along the way.

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

#337

Post by ulfw »

rapind wrote: post #317
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #311

Of course it has. That's the entire point of AI. Ostensibly it's to help programmers, or writers, or lawyers, or whomever. But those are just the users of AI. The owners and buyers of AI at a company level are developing and using it to push down payroll expenses. That's it. It's to avoid paying people, and providing them benefits. Even if you fire 50% of your employees, realize it was a terrible mistake, and hire mo…

I will say though as someone who solo runs their own product business, right now feels like a great time to be building your own thing. No idea if this will last long though.

Fewer and fewer people to buy said thing when layoffs and no-hiring continues

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

#338

Post by asa400 »

lokrian wrote: post #153
runako wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every executive publicly saying obviously* false things like X job will be done by AI in 18 months is putting downward pressure on the labor market. The pressure is essentially peer pressure among executives: are we stupid for continuing to hire engineers instead of handing our engineering budget to Anthropic? * - Someone should maintain a walkback list to track these. I believe recent additions are Amodei of Anthrop…

Maybe it's a good time to ask for advice. Which IT job roles and companies are least vulnerable to offshoring? Defense contractors and the like?

Stuff that isn’t pure SaaS. Physical products that benefit from hands on interaction with customers, worksites, and other internal producers. Small and/or local businesses that want someone whose face they can see in person.

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

#339

Post by fakedang »

Aurornis wrote: post #329
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?

It’s amusing to see these comments as if American tech companies don’t already have offices all over the world. Even a mid-size tech company I worked for had over a dozen small offices around the world to collect as many qualified developers as they could. They had some remote work too. Still hired a lot of Americans. Thinking that remote work will be the end of American workers has been the driving force behind outs…

> Still hired a lot of Americans. Thinking that remote work will be the end of American workers has been the driving force behind outsourcing pushes for decades, but it hasn’t worked that way.

The difference is that back then the project lead could explore outsourcing certain roles to India, EE and LatAm, while today the VP can explore outsourcing the project lead roles to those countries. These countries have built up their own native tech talent, many of whom already bring more to the table than the typical American - they work longer hours, for cheaper, and often bring a lot more experience. I've seen companies who only run sales teams with Americans, with the rest of the workforce being shipped out.

Notably, India already has nearly 2000 GCCs (Global Capability Centers, mega complexes of offices for foreign companies) set up, with that number only projected to increase as more mid-market firms expand. While many of them are just back offices, some of them, like Walmart's GCC, is the entire tech division - the CTO remains in the US, while the entire software team is in India. While earlier the Indian team would have had to adjust their timings to USA's, now quite a few US-based employees have had to adjust their timings to India's.

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