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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

#251

Post by dakolli »

dyauspitr wrote: post #181
dakolli wrote: post #165

When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs. LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a li…

Disagree. The input to output ratio is ridiculous. With the latest LLMs you can input very few words to generate a lot of production usable output.

How does that create jobs? This makes no sense, also I wouldn't consider 99% of what it outputs worthy of production, it just satisfies some low standards of a certain subset of modern business.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#252

Post by saulpw »

ddtaylor wrote: post #120
tsss wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Post-1940s the cooking process has increasingly become assembly-lined and cooks have been replaced by unskilled labor.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 emp…

> and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up This is correct. This also is a lot more complex than it sounds and creates a lot of work. Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled. > and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee…

> Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled.

Okay so the job of "cook" just became "grease disposal engineer"?

> Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee because "the kiosk won't let me"

That hasn't stopped some places I've visited from only allowing people to order from the kiosk. Literally I've said something to the person behind the counter who pointed to the iPad and when I said I wanted something else, shrugged and said we can't do that.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#253

Post by dakolli »

lich_king wrote: post #174
dakolli wrote: post #165

When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs. LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a li…

Neither datacenters nor chip manufacturing employ a whole lot of people. But I think you're looking at it wrong. Jobs come from people with money wanting to pay for jobs. That's not going to change. The jobs of the future may be that you're a court jester for Larry Ellison, or that you do something else that's fundamentally pointless but happens to be something that a person with money wants. Companion, entertainment…

Lmao, you need to go read up on the french revolution. This is the craziest comment I've read on this site in a long time.

And I know datacenters and semiconductor manufacturing don't employ a lot of people, thats my point, the advent of llms replaces more jobs than it creates.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#254

Post by dyauspitr »

dakolli wrote: post #251
dyauspitr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. The input to output ratio is ridiculous. With the latest LLMs you can input very few words to generate a lot of production usable output.

How does that create jobs? This makes no sense, also I wouldn't consider 99% of what it outputs worthy of production, it just satisfies some low standards of a certain subset of modern business.

This take is atleast 6 months old. I would say 90% of the stuff my team puts out now comes straight out of Claude and coverage, performance, latency, MTTF, velocity have never been better.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#255

Post by johnnyanmac »

tim333 wrote: post #241
RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

>such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. I'm 0.6 centuries old and have never heard that said for existing tech. Human level AI could presumably do human work by definition but that's not the case before we get that, including now.

The 0.90 century old economicists were discussing the idea.

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#256

Post by taysco »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #235
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…

The memory problem is already being addressed in various ways - antigravity seems to keep a series of status/progress files describing what's been done, what needs doing, etc. A bit clunky, but it seems to work - I can open it up on a repo that I was working in a few days back and it seems to pick up this context such that I don't have to completely bring it up to speed every time like I used to have to do. I've hear…

this works fine for like 2-3 small instruction sets. once you start getting to scale of a real enterprise system, the AI falls down and can't handle that amount of context. It will start ignoring critical pieces or not remember them. And without constant review AI will start priotizing things that are not your business priority.

I don't agree they have solved this problem, at all, or really in any way that's actually usable.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#257

Post by taysco »

febed wrote: post #134

AI is increasing my job security at the moment because the junior developers I work with use AI without discretion. On of them didn’t remember having worked on a feature they built with AI assistance in the recent past. To his credit he admitted he didn’t know how the code worked.

Ya'll have junior devs? I haven't seen one of those in almost a decade.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#258

Post by dakolli »

cbdevidal wrote: post #185
dakolli wrote: post #165

When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs. LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a li…

Automations do create jobs, but fewer jobs. Businesses wouldn’t invest so much money if they had to keep the same number of workers. Automation necessarily reduces the number of humans working in aggregate at one task. What DOES go up with automation is demand. Fewer farmers today than 100 years ago, but significantly more mouths to feed. What also increases is new kinds of jobs; entirely new fields. The automobile s…

This type of automation does not create jobs, and we are seeing that in jobs numbers. You're right it does reduce the amount of labour needed, hence why we are seeing equities rise why people's wages/opportunities shrink.

Get ready for french revolution v2, but global, the ruling class only exists because the working class tolerates them. This just won't work.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#259

Post by initramfs2 »

RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

I am also fairly certain that if we do arrive at some abundant utopia where you can wish for anything can have it arrive, society will collapse. It's just bringing up 7 billion (probably more) spoiled brats at that point of time. Work on its own is also a form of "social control". Idle hands are the devil's tools etc.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#260

Post by ddtaylor »

techpression wrote: post #158
ddtaylor wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be. And that's probably something most people are okay with. Work that can be automated should be and humans should be spending their time on novel things instead of labor if possible.

What society is ready for that? We are looking at an possible outcome that will make the Great Depression look like a strong financial era of growth and prosperity. I don’t think most people are ok with the road to the goal in this case, doesn’t matter if you have work or not, mass unemployment destroys societies.

> What society is ready for that?

A free society.

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