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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

#341

Post by muldvarp »

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 do think software engineering is more exposed than many other jobs for multiple reasons:

There is an unimaginable amount of freely accessible training data out there. There aren't for example many transcribed therapy sessions out there.

The only thing that matters about software is that it's cheap and it sort of works. Low-quality software is already common. Bugs aren't usually catastrophic in the way structural failures would be.

Software engineers are expensive compared to many other white-collar workers.

Software engineering is completely unregulated and there is no union or lobby for software engineers. The second an LLM becomes good enough to replace you, you're gone.

Many other "sit at desk" jobs have at least some tasks that can't be done on a computer.

Software engineering feels like an extremely uncertain career right now.

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

#342

Post by stock_toaster »

ulfw wrote: post #337
rapind wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Once stagflation really starts to set in, things will get rough.

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

#343

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#344

Post by _kb »

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…

> So what comes next?

Feudalism.

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

#345

Post by ajkjk »

jclulow wrote: post #250
ajkjk wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is firing a bunch of people because you made a machine that you believe can do their jobs not textbook corporate greed? It seems like the worst impulses of Taylorism made manifest?

This is worse: this is just pretending like the machine does their jobs because it benefits them.

The big (biggest? ) problem of modernity is that quality is decorrelated from profit. There's a lot more money in having the optics of doing a good job than in actually doing it; the economy is so abstracted and distributed that the mechanism of competition to punish bad behavior, shitty customer service, low standards, crappy work, fraud... is very weak. There is too much information asymmetry, and the timescale of information propagation is too long to have much of an effect. As long as no one notices what you're fucking up very quickly you can get away with it for a long time.

Seems even worse to me. At least in the 'competition' paradigm there's a mechanism for things getting better for consumers. No such thing here.

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

#346

Post by AstroBen »

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.

until you realize the success of a business is way more dependent on non-engineering skills

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

#347

Post by jameslk »

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…

> So what comes next?

When you don’t need as many people because of automation, you also don’t need them to fight your wars. You use drones and other automated weapons. You don’t need things like democracy because that was to prevent people from turning to revolution, and that problem has been solved with automated weapons. So then you don’t really need as many people anymore, so you stop providing the expensive healthcare, food production, and water to keep them all alive

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

#348

Post by ugh123 »

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…

Well good thing we have our best guys in gov't to address this /s

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

#349

Post by notepad0x90 »

mc32 wrote: post #322
notepad0x90 wrote: post #315

I think this is to be expected, all tech has societal impact like this. This is just happening over a span of few years instead of decades and centuries. Failure in government policy making at it's peak.

Wait; what would you look for a gov policy to do here? Stunt growth? Prevent efficiency or something else like what?

Tax incentives , labor laws,etc..

Yes, stunt growth if that growth is immediately harmful to the public. Provide adverse incentives that increase the cost of replacing humans. Less or no government subsidies, incentives or tax breaks if you replace humans with LLMs. Even without replacing humans, tax LLM usage like cigarettes.

In the short term that is. over time, wind down these artificial costs, so that humans transition to roles that can't be automated by LLMs. Go to school, get training,etc.. in other fields. Instead of having millions of unemployed restless people collapsing your society.

But everyone is on the take, they want their short term lobbying money and stock tips so they can take what's theirs and run before the ship sinks. (if I can be a bit over dramatic :) )

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

#350

Post by isodev »

But how do they know it's AI and not, say, other economy-related issues? Just the other day there was a report that companies are not adopting AI because they don't know about it... and now suddenly, so many are using AI that it causes 13% decline in jobs?
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