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

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371–380 of 662 posts

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

#371
post #317

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.

[deleted]

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

#372

Are people really replacing customer service agents with LLMs? It doesn't seem practical. Customer service handles all the things that customers aren't trusted to manage on their own with a self-service portal - that's the whole point of having a trusted human involved at all. Giving those tasks to LLMs won't work because the customer can just prompt inject their way to whatever toolcalls correspond to their desired…

I think they might be replacing first-tier support, the people who currently answer really stupid questions, handle really common cases, etc. When you need real support and there's no script you go to second-tier support...

As a person who aspires to actually read documentation, try common troubleshooting, google it, etc. before calling support I'd really love to go directly to second-tier, but apparently bulk of support calls are low-effort users, and now they'd get the pleasure of LLM, instead of a person, telling them to reset their router, make sure the thingie on a spray bottle is in "on" position, or call the airline.

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

#373
post #340

Lots of people are sceptical but I cannot imagine a use for entry level positions anymore. At my work everybody got to calling AI "the intern", which is not confusing because we do not have and have no use for interns.

I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of interns.

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

#374
post #317

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.

I do wonder, will this drive the value of software “things” way down? Once everyone starts solo building their own things…

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

#375
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?

In an ideal world, we'd have some sort of central system that businesses are bound by, in the interest of the common good, to employ domestic workers.

But alas, such a system is fundamentally impossible. Physics just won't allow it.

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 heal…

Dark. But I can't think of a way to rebuke it…

There's likely a slippery slope fallacy in there somewhere (I hope). If interested in the (not so) sci-fi aspects of automated weapons and their ramifications, I often plug Daniel Suarez's great Kill Decision talk and book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMYYx_im5QI

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

#377
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, for $100k or slightly less you can hire very good devs with 5+ yr experience in CN or DE. Often speaks English at full professional proficiency without the help of LLMs too. I know because I currently work for a fully remote startup with people from both countries. For that kind of money you can do what in the U.S., hire below average juniors? Even the most clueless junior likely makes more in SV.

Flip that around. Junior devs in the US earning $100k is the anomaly. The fact this is the case indicates the pipeline for competent developer talent is bottlenecked. Right now is still an amazing time to be in Tech. The fact the industry is so hungry for talent it’s paying such rates and is expanding abroad in search of new supply is a sign of it’s health.

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they will give us subsistence UBI

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

#379
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The jobs are going to India

They will come back (eventually). Having to work with ESL contractors from firms like Cognizant or HCL is true pain. Normally it would be like 3-4 US employees working on something and then its like 20-30 ESL outsourced people working on something. The quality is so poor though its not worth it. My current org nuked their contract w HCL after 2 years because how shitty they are and now everything is back onshore. Mil…

They are. Companies also do this and then wonder why they get blackmailed for terabytes of leaked proprietary data on the darkweb.

Saving money on wages isn't the only consideration.

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

#380

AI is the popular cover excuse for layoffs. I can’t think of a single job that modern AI could easily replace.

The jobs aren't being taken by AI. The capital that used to fund those positions is instead being diverted into AI initiatives.
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