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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

#501
post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of a handful of people I work with who could be replaced by LLM. The hallucinations would be less frequent than the screw-ups the current humans make. It could at least consolidate 5 of those people into 1 with increased efficiency.

I could consolidate those 5 with a trained chimp, but it wouldnt mean that chimps are about to overthrow mankind.

If general government policies adapted to a world with less available jobs, it wouldn't be an issue.

As it stands, our governments are continuing on as normal despite the introduction of a technology which has the capability to erase an enormous amount of jobs from the pool (certainly many standard office jobs).

A world with less work and no general change in policy (no UBI or similar scheme) is a world with more unemployed people, falling living standards, more crime, and more instability.

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

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. I'm going to counterpoint somewhat. I think those attributes are evenly spread into all countries, but equally I think they are uncommon in all countries. I don't live in the US. I have traveled there and elsewhere. I would agree that there are lots of cultural differences between places, even places as nominally similar as say the UK, Au…

> I think those attributes are evenly spread into all countries, but equally I think they are uncommon in all countries. The data does not support your statement. From a startup report just four days ago: The United States alone generates 46.6% of all startup activity worldwide, nearly half of the global total. Together with China (9.2%), the United Kingdom (5.6%), and India (5%), these four countries account for 66.…

It's not so much about risk taking as about getting proper funding and overcoming the bureaucracy barriers. E.g. Poland itself has very low startup rates, but somehow Poles which go to USA create things like OpenAI ;)

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

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, at the highest levels you'll find these traits everywhere. But there is a reason these folks have ascended to the highest levels. What I'm saying is that you find it far more often in junior people in the USA.

I gif it far more often in UK juniors, US juniors tend to be more concerned with moving to their next job than doing the current one. Maybe we just have different cultural expectations.

US juniors are getting paid a lot more at their second job.

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

#504

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

I agree its a popular excuse, however unlike the blockchain craze there’s legitimate use cases of productivity improvements with AI.

And if you can (in some cases) substantially increase productivity, then logically you can reduce team size and be as productive with less.

With the right prompting, you can cut a copywriting team in half easily.

My business has one copywriter/strategist, who I’ve automated the writing part by collecting transcripts and brand guidelines from client meetings. Now she can focus on much higher quality edits, work with other parts of the strategy pipeline, and ultimately more clients than before.

I can easily imagine a corp with 100 junior copywriters quickly reducing headcount

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

#505
post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok and video games are also a more viable path to making $100,000 a month than any other professional path.

It is a career path, but it 1) is a path that only works for a small amount of people, most people don't earn anything like that 2) requires a special kind of personality and set of skills 3) is subject to the whim of algorithms 4) requires brand building over time but can be destroyed overnight for many reasons. Most "regular" jobs are much more stable.

Not so long ago people who played with programming and computers were wasting their time and potential, disappointed their parents and would have been better off getting a "regular" job.

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

#506
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI will at least be cheaper than a CEO, it might also be more competent and more ethical. The argument against making a Large Language Model the CEO seems to mostly be about protecting the feelings of the existing CEO, maybe the Board should look past these "feelings" and be bold ?

I'll re-explain. A human CEO might do morally questionable things. All do not, of course, but some may. Yet even so, they need a planet with air, water, and some way to survive. They also may what their kids to survive. An AI may not care. It could be taking "bad CEO" behaviour to a whole new level. And even if the AI had human ethics, humans play "us vs them" games all the time. You don't get much more "them" than a…

Nah, the insistence that humans are somehow uniquely too smart to destroy themselves is obviously laughable, it's troubling that you wrote that down without bursting into laughter because it is so silly.

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

#507
post #81
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, 95% of the AI hype is to apply pressure on the labor market and provide cover for offshoring/downsizing.

Where is the evidence for this? Who is "applying pressure on the labour market"?

1 person billion dollar company - the new buzz phrase when "democratize" became so yesterday is in my opinion just that.

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

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who: * lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job, * failed to grok requirements through the language barrier, * were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base, * committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim, * and could not be held liable b…

For a counterpoint, I’ve worked with many great engineers in Latin America who are smart, capable, and in the same time zones as the US

I’ve worked with awful, stereotypically garbage offshore teams. I’ve worked with quality offshore teams. The difference was money. The quality teams made less than, but nearly as much as an American worker. Maybe not a FAANG guy or a New York / SF worker, but all those small cities in flyover states? They came in 20-30k under, perhaps.

Language l, cultural, and time barriers still come into play regardless of how good they are, however.

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

#509

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?

> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place? I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but: What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task. But if you give them a nebulous proble…

> And I rarely see non-americans say something like "I think our customers would like it if we added X to the product, can I work on that?".

The most crucial difference in this context is that Americans are employed directly by the company, while foreign workers are behind several layers of management belonging to several companies. While you can walk around and deliver elevator pitches to higher-ups, foreign workers must track their time spent on tasks down to the minute in Jira. Then, they must find a manager who would like to pitch a feature to a manager who would pitch a feature to a manager in the U.S.

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

#510

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?

As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who: * lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job, * failed to grok requirements through the language barrier, * were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base, * committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim, * and could not be held liable b…

Firstly, I want to say that we are "cheap" because things are dirt cheap here.

Now, I am not a software developer but in high school, but I have my brother/cousins working in the software dev industry and here are my thoughts.

>language barrier: I genuinely don't know how incompetent developers you can hire, I mean sure if you hire extremely shitty developers but even that's rare.

Most people here are comfortable enough with english, in the sense that literally anyone can speak english & mostly get the point across. Yes, I have heard of some misarrangements but I don't think that its really much of an issue.

Now some outsourcing companies are mass recruiters who recruit tech from Cs colleges where noone recruited them (Tata consultancy services, infosys?) and the thing with them is that they don't even pay the mediocre expectations of a developer even in INDIA, they are basically exploiting junior developers and are compared with govt. insitutions in my country given how slow they are.

My brother works in a decent Consultancy services but he says that there are a lot of inefficiencies in the system.

He worked on a project and we estimated and he got 1% or less than 1% of the work that he MOSTLY did. and so my brother has way more incentive to freelance and get a "remote job" not consultancy.

I think that you confused yourself with remote job and consultancy part. Remote jobs hiring / freelancing indians is still cheaper than a consultancy imo who are parasites on the developers.

My brother works in a consultancy right now because the job market is shitty and he has gotten offers 4x his current salary from countries like switzerland and america. Yet, my family doesn't want him to do the 4x income work because he is already working a job and they don't want him to burn out

And they don't want him to leave the job because its "safe", you can't trust these startups etc. given the volatile nature and if they fail, then whoops the job market is really messed up right now, even in India and also arrange marriage is a huge thing and the girl's family usually checks the company that the boy works in and they usually get fishy if its remote job (and I mean, for good reason)

Also trust me some indians can definitely work in american timezones too but that is a little tough. But I mean, we are okay if you might call us once or twice late at night when its day in america and you have something really urgent. Atleast I am okay with that.

And you could pay 2x the salary the normal indian dev gets and I feel like even that would be less than an american dev. This can really filter some devs to get those with seniority or good projects.

Its a problem of incentives for consultancies (which is what you seem to hate) and maybe that's a bit fair given how much inefficiencies I see in that system. Just remote hire directly (I suppose)

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