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I'm not worried about AI job loss

davidoks.blog

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Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#21

Post by ianbutler »

simonw wrote: post #4

I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further. And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403 It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.

I just skimmed this and the so called zeitgeist here is fear. People are scared, it's material concern and he effectively stoked it.

I work on this technology for my job and while I'm very bullish pieces like that are as you said slopish and as I'll say breathless because there are so many practical challenges here to deal with standing between what is being said there and where we are now.

Capability is not evenly distributed and it's getting people into loopy ideas of just how close we are to certain milestones, not that it's wrong to think about those potential milestones but I'm wary of timelines.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#22

Post by tsss »

ddtaylor wrote: post #9

Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away. Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none…

The burger cook job has already been displaced and continues to be. Pre-1940s those burger restaurants relied on skilled cooks that got their meat from a butcher and cut fresh lettuce every day. Post-1940s the cooking process has increasingly become assembly-lined and cooks have been replaced by unskilled labor. Much of the cooking process _is_ now done by robots in factories at a massive scale and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up. In the past 10 years, automation has further increased and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English. In conclusion, both the required skill-level and amount of labor needed for restaurants has been reduced drastically by automation and in fact many higher skilled trade jobs have been hit even harder: cabinetmakers, coachbuilders and such have been almost eradicated by mass production.

It will happen to you.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#23

Post by gordonhart »

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a functioning product.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#24

Post by Jianghong94 »

nphardon wrote: post #12

(In the semiconductor industry) We experienced brutal layoffs arguably due to over-investment into Ai products that produce no revenue. So we've had brutal job loss due to Ai, just not in the way people expected. Having said that, it's hard to imagine jobs like mine (working on np-complete problems) existing if the LLMs continue advancing at the current rate, and its hard to imagine they wont continue to accelerate s…

Maybe I'm being naive here, but for AI (heck, for any good algorithm) to work well, you need some at least loosely-clearly defined objectives. I assume it's much more straightforward in semi, but there're many industries, once you get into the details, all kinds of incentives start to disalign and I doubt AI could understand all kinds of nuances.

E.g. once I was tasked to build a new matching algorithm for a trading platform, and upon fully understanding of the specs I realized it can be interpreted as a mixed integer programming problem; the idea got shot down right away because PM don't understand it. There're all kinds of limiting factors once you get into the details.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#25

Post by slavoingilizov »

ddtaylor wrote: post #9

Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away. Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none…

Can you walk me through this argument for a customer service agent? The jobs where the nuance and variety isn’t there and don’t involve physical interaction are completely different to flipping burgers

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#26

Post by ares623 »

trilogic wrote: post #20

You are not worrried for one of the 2 reasons: 1 You are not affected somehow (you got savings, connections, not living paycheck to paycheck, and have food on the table). 2 You prefer to persue no troubles in matters of complexity. Time will tell, is showing it already.

For 1, unless you already have an self-sustaining underground bunker or island, you will be affected. No matter how much savings and total compensation you have. If you went out to get grocery in the last week, it will affect you.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#27

Post by stephenpontes »

trilogic wrote: post #20

You are not worrried for one of the 2 reasons: 1 You are not affected somehow (you got savings, connections, not living paycheck to paycheck, and have food on the table). 2 You prefer to persue no troubles in matters of complexity. Time will tell, is showing it already.

Agree. I feel like most of the people sounding the alarm have been in the software-focused job hunting market for 6+ months.

Those who downplay it are either business owners themselves or have been employed for 2+ years.

I think a lot of software engineers who _haven't_ looked for jobs in the past few years don't quite realize what the current market feels like.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#28

Post by Der_Einzige »

ddtaylor wrote: post #9

Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away. Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none…

Funny, I go to South Korea and the fast food burger joints literally operate exactly as you say they couldn't. I've had the best burger in my life from a McDonalds in South Korea operated practically by robots.

It's a non reality in America's extremely piss poor restaurant industry. We have a competency crisis (the big key here) and worker shortage that SK doesn't, and they have far higher trust in their society.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#29

Post by Nevermark »

> Bottlenecks rule everything around me

The self-setup here is too obvious.

This is exactly why man + machine can be much worse than just machine. A strong argument needs to address what we can do as an extremely slow operating, slow learning, and slow adapting species, that machines that improve in ability and efficiency monthly and annually will find they cannot do well or without.

It is clear that we are going through a disruptive change, but COVUD is not comparable. Job loss is likely to have statistics more comparable to the Black Plague. And sensible people are concerned it could get much worse.

I don’t have the answers, but acknowledging and facing the uncertainty head on won’t make things worse.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#30

Post by Der_Einzige »

simonw wrote: post #4

I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further. And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403 It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.

This is what they get for not reading our antislop paper (ICLR 2026) and using our anti-slopped sampler/models, or Kimi (which is remarkable relatively non sloppy)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061

I thought normies would have caught onto the EM dash, overuse of semicolons, overuse of fancy quotes, lack of exclamation marks, "It's not X, it's Y", etc. Clearly I was wrong.

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