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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

#41

Post by iberator »

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…

I lost my job as a software developer some time ago.

Flipping burgers is WAY more demanding than I ever imagined. That's the danger of AI:

It takes jobs faster than creating new ones PLUS for some fields (like software development) downshifting to just about anything else is brutal and sometimes simply not doable.

Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#42

Post by contagiousflow »

malyk wrote: post #33
gordonhart wrote: post #23

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…

Can you give an example to help us understand? I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.

Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#43

Post by bobthepanda »

qgin wrote: post #40

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

Also, you don’t need AI to replace your job, you need someone higher up in leadership who thinks AI could replace your job.

It might all wash out eventually, but eventually could be a long time with respect to anybody’s personal finances.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#44

Post by fishpham »

contagiousflow wrote: post #42
malyk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example to help us understand? I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.

Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything

As always, the limit is human bandwidth. But that's basically what AI-forward companies are doing now. I would be curious which tasks OP commenter has that couldn't be done by an agent (assuming they're a SWE)

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#45

Post by dwa3592 »

malyk wrote: post #33
gordonhart wrote: post #23

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…

Can you give an example to help us understand? I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.

>>I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI.

That's a sign that you have spurious problems under those tickets or you have a PM problem.

Also, a job is a not a task- if your company has jobs which is a single task then those jobs would definitely be gone.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#46

Post by ninetyninenine »

gordonhart wrote: post #23

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…

[dead]

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#47

Post by lbrito »

malyk wrote: post #33
gordonhart wrote: post #23

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…

Can you give an example to help us understand? I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.

Then why isn't it? Just offload it to the clankers and go enjoy a margarita at the beach or something.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#48

Post by Analemma_ »

fishpham wrote: post #44
contagiousflow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything

As always, the limit is human bandwidth. But that's basically what AI-forward companies are doing now. I would be curious which tasks OP commenter has that couldn't be done by an agent (assuming they're a SWE)

This sounds bogus to me: if AI really could close 100% of your backlog with just a couple more humans in the loop, you’d hire a bunch of temps/contractors to do that, then declare the product done and lay off everybody. How come that isn’t happening?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#49

Post by hypfer »

kerblang wrote: post #15
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.

Let me get something straight: That essay was completely fake, right? He/It was lying about everything, and it was some sort of... what? Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading? Have we now transitioned to a point where we gaslight everyone for the hell of it just because we can, and call it, what, thought-provoking?

> Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading?

Those numbers are likely greatly exaggerated. Twitter is nowhere near where it was at its peak. You could almost call it a ghost town. Linkedin but for unhinged crypto- and AI bros.

I'm sure the metrics report 80 million views, but that's not 80 million actual individuals that cared about it. The narrative just needs these numbers to get people to buy into the hype.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#50

Post by matt_heimer »

gordonhart wrote: post #23

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…

It's not binary. Jobs will be lost because management will expect the fewer developers to accomplish more by leveraging AI.
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