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AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

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Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#471

Post by questionableans »

mgh95 wrote: post #466
questionableans wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s definitely specific. 70% Advancing the state of the art in my areas of expertise + 30% Enabling experts in other areas I care about to advance the state of the art by making all the problems related to my expertise just go away

Fair enough, but a huge amount of labor is much more aligned with the skilled but not SOTA work. People don't build payments systems, inventory management systems, or EHRs to advance the state of the art; they build them to provide a service for employment. I think <5% of labor falls under what you are speaking about.

I 100% agree.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#472

Post by askvictor »

captainkrtek wrote: post #156
simonw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the aspects of AI ethics that I don't think gets nearly enough attention: the general psychological effect that information about AI has on people, regardless of their interactions with the tools themselves. Students getting lazy, or dropping out of subjects entirely because they don't think they have a future in them. Depression and a general feeling of despair. I see this in programming communities q…

It makes more sense through the lens of advancing the short / medium term interests of corporations under the guise of “helping people”. When we’re all brain rotted and unemployed, how will we spend money on corporations? Its a spiral.

The short story "The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine" by Greg Egan deals with this nicely. I won't give away the ending though.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#473

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #326
Workaccount2 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an eternal cycle between uncomfortable and productive and comfortable and lazy. 15-20 years ago SWE work was brutal and paid OKish, but not great if you calculated the hourly. Then the era of free VC money came, culminating in the pandemic boom, where people were crash coursing JavaScript to land a remote job doing 4 hours of work a week for $170k. The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction.

Before the first dotcom era, software jobs paid like most other professional office jobs. Decent money but nothing really remarkable. With the dotcom boom and VC money, that changed. I doubled my salary going to a startup in 1998. I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it. 15-20 years ago software development was still very we…

> I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it.

That's not the whole story, though. The Internet inherently changed the value prop for software work, where a small number of engineers could support a huge number of users. That leverage makes software work inherently waaaay more profitable than it was pre-Internet, which is why companies could afford to throw gobs of money at top engineering talent.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#474

Post by alephnerd »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #469
alephnerd wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies were already out-sourcing before great video conferencing software or an understanding of how to work with remote teams. And those experiments failed in the 2000s. But in the 2020s with an extended pandemic lockdown over 2-3 years, async work was proven to succeed. I am one of those decisionmakers and the pandemic effect did convince the last stragglers that offshoring by directly managing a subsidiary in…

Your experience exactly matches mine as well. But some of these comments are just like from another planet. Like a comment I responded to saying "All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades", and then when I responded with disbelief about how anyone could think that remote working tools have been static for decades I was chastised for not giving s…

Yep. I feel like Cassandra warning the Trojans.

All the comments here on this thread feel almost exactly like the same things I heard about Chinese manufacturing or Korean cars back in the 2000s.

At an individual level, it's difficult to make any changes, but at the very least one can start thinking of how to live in this new world.

Just having enough EQ as an Engineer to give an actual business justification about your initiatives or teams (NARR attach rate, developer velocity, actual tangible examples of generating pipeline) along with actually trying to train and mentor new grads and consistently upskilling would in most cases be enough to protect your job, but people here want to stick their head in the sand.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#475

Post by hajile »

_heimdall wrote: post #410
lisbbb wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have already eaten a ton of inflation, particularly in the first year or so when Biden was President. Trump printed trillions to forestall a collapse during covid. The wisdom of that move is lost on me. I would have preferred the collapse--we might be recovering by now instead of sitting on an even higher precipice awaiting the inevitable fall.

There is an interesting argument to be made that they have no choice once the problem passes a certain point. The interplay between bond yields, the fed funds rate, and inflation can lead to weird situations. Right noe the Fed is having to lower rates because (a) job numbers are pretty bad and (b) the US debt is held in a surprising number of short term bonds and higher rates make the debt just rack up faster. They'r…

When you outsource all your jobs that actually produce goods instead of services, you have nothing left to offer. At the same time, we're proving that short-term consumerism is completely destructive (designed to break is just another variant of the broken window fallacy).

Either you lower US standard of living to match the countries it is currently outsourcing to or you establish protectionism and isolationist policies with a focus on total efficiency rather than short-term gains.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#476

Post by system2 »

jjk166 wrote: post #447
system2 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are tools, not jobs.

The combine harvester and the automated telephone switchboard were tools. If a tool allows for tasks to be done with much less labor, and the quantity of those tasks that need doing don't increase by a commensurate amount, then it does mean replaced jobs. The people replaced may move into new and perhaps even better jobs, either at different employers or transforming their current roll, but the job they once had is i…

That's the natural evolution of jobs, though. It is not like barbers will lose their jobs because of a new Cylon coming to market. These tools are gradually improving and adding more speed to workers. If someone's job is extremely mundane and limited, they have to evolve before these things take over. Those people can also lose their jobs when a new, smarter, and harder-working employee is hired and capable of doing what they are doing with a few clicks. This is the most common thing I see in companies. Boring employees get replaced by smarter ones every day. Better evolve or get eaten by the competition.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#477

Post by leosanchez »

sumedh wrote: post #290
leosanchez wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live in the cheapest Indian cities Sorry to burst your bubble but, I love living in my T3 city I was born in. Don't talk for 1.4 billion people. Thanks.

> Don't talk for 1.4 billion people. The data for Indians moving out of India does the talking.

The phrase was:

> I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live in the cheapest Indian cities

It is pretty easy to disprove it, as me and my friends that are living in T3 cities are pretty content with our lives.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#478

Post by [deleted] »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #104
dehrmann wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t ju…

[deleted]

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#479

Post by fiatpandas »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #3

A little bit off topic: but I couldn't even start to read the article because "I reached my article limit" out of I site I never visited before... What are they using to determine how many articles I've read? Opening in a private window solved the issue, however I'm pretty sure I don't regularly read anything on this site (maybe never was an overstatement?).

Shared public IP?

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#480

Post by giantg2 »

lumost wrote: post #393
giantg2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our existing IT workforce without outsourced roles. If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring…

I do wonder at times if tariffs and offshoring protection are necessary at a certain point. Forcing a labor constraint on an economy (within reason) can spur efficiency. Accepting high structural unemployment in the name of the free market seems irrational.

I think we've taken free market to an extreme in a race to the bottom. Tariffs are probably a good thing, but maybe not in the way they have been currently implemented. Almost 15% of the country is on SNAP and we're spending hundreds of billions per month on debt interest. I'm not sure how we come back from this.
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