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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

#281

Post by OccamsMirror »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment.

AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because:

- Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline.

- Quality becomes more auditable because outputs can be checked with automated review layers.

- Communication overhead shrinks with fewer back-and-forth cycles when AI pre-fills and structures the work.

- Labor arbitrage expands and the limiting factor stops being “can we find someone locally who knows our messy process” and becomes “who is cheapest who can supervise and resolve exceptions.”

So yeah, the jobs mostly remain and some people become more valuable. But the clearing price for that labor moves toward the global minimum faster than it used to.

The impact won’t show up as “no jobs,” it is already showing up as stagnant or declining Western salaries, thinner career ladders, and more of the value captured by the firms that own the workflows rather than the people doing the work.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#282

Post by small_model »

realusername wrote: post #273
small_model wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ^ been a SWE for 20 years the market is the worst I have seen it, many good devs been looking for 1-2 years and not even getting a response, whereas 3-4 years ago they would have had multiple offers. Im still working but am secure in terms of money so will be ok not working (financially at least). But I expect a tsunami of layoffs this and next year, then you are competing with 1000x other devs and Indians who w…

That's called an economic crisis, it has nothing to do with AI, my friends also have trouble to find 100% manual jobs which were easily available 2 years ago. Yes I said the word that none of these company want to say in their press conference.

Thats because there are more tech/service workers competing for the manual jobs now.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#283

Post by UncleOxidant »

taysco wrote: post #256
UncleOxidant wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I'm saying is, don't get to thinking that the memory problem is some kind of insurmountable, permanent barrier that's going to keep us safe. It's already being addressed, maybe crudely at first, but the situation is already much better than it was - I no longer have to bring the model up to speed completely every time I start a new session. Part of this is much larger context windows (1M tokens now). New architectures are also being proposed to deal with the issue, as well.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#284

Post by roenxi »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

> The bookkeeper is still there, still needed, but now they're doing the part that actually requires judgment.

The argument might be fundamentally sound, but now we're automating the part that requires judgement. So if the accountants aren't doing the mechanical part or the judgement part, where exactly is the role going? Formalised reading of an AI provided printout?

It seems quite reasonable to predict that humans just won't be able to make a living doing anything that involves screens or thinking, and we go back to manual labour as basically what humans do.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#286

Post by gedy »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #268
initramfs2 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Throughout history, big advances have come from humans having more "idle time", so we should be aiming for the population to be less busy as they can then hopefully focus on pursuing the arts or sciences.

> big advances have come from humans having more "idle time"

A few people

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#288

Post by wnc3141 »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

I'd imagine that when the 80% of less productive time is automated, the market doesn't respond by demanding 80% more output. There's just 20% as much work either making this a part time job or more likely a much smaller workforce as the number of man*hours demanded by the market greatly reduces.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#289

Post by jgon »

I always like to do a little digging when I read one of these articles. The first point I come to is that the author is employed by a16z (https://a16z.com/author/david-oks/) and so you have to immediately apply the "talking his book" filter. A16Z is heavily invested in AI and so any sorts of concerns around job loss and possible regulation or associated actions by the public at large represent a risk to these investments.

Secondly David Oks attended Masters School for his high school, an elite private boarding school with tuition currently running 72kUSD/year if you stay there the whole time, and 49kUSD/year if you go there just for schooling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_School). I am going to generally say that people who were able to have 150k+ spent on their high school education (to say nothing of attending Oxford at 30kGBP/year for international student tuition) might just possibly be people who have enough generational family wealth that concerns like job losses seem pretty abstract or not something to really worry about.

It's just another in a long series of articles downplaying the risks of AI job losses, which, when I dig into the author's background, are written by people who have never known any sort of financial precarity in their lives, and are frequently involved AI investment in some manner.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#290

Post by beeflet »

ddtaylor wrote: post #264
beeflet wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all jobs will be automatable, and there will be no room for humans to work on novel things.

That's like saying we shouldn't push the space exploration boundary because people are so used to staying within it. If you want to make the argument that singularity has occurred and that knowledge oracles are no longer needed, that's a bold claim. If you want to make the argument it would escape our control, etc. that's a valid argument for proper controls. If you want to make the argument that LLMs are sentient an…

I'm not saying any of that I am just saying that you and everyone you love will be killed by this technology and the world as we know it will be destroyed.
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