Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm not worried about AI job loss

davidoks.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 582 posts

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#481

Post by midnitewarrior »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

Accountants will still exist, but we'll need fewer of them at any given time. In your example of flipping the 80/20 ratio, you are implying that each accountant would be able to (theoretically) handle a 5x workload with AI making up the gap.

Perhaps in reality more like a 3x advantage, due to human inefficiencies and the overhead of scaling the business to handle more clients.

Given that, 3x increase of productivity implies we either need 1/3 the accountants, or the accountancy supply brings down prices and more clients start hiring accountants due to affordability.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#482

Post by Sammi »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #461
Ensorceled wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently did a contract at medium sized business with a large retail and online business that had a CFO and several accountants / bookkeepers. You're describing a situation where that CFO only needs two or three accountants and bookkeepers to run the business and would lay off two or three people. It IS about headcount in a lot of cases.

[flagged]

I keep seeing that small teams or individuals are getting most of the productivity gains from new ai.

Small teams or individuals that learn to use ai well can outpace larger teams, even if the larger teams also use ai, because communication / coordination overhead grows faster than team size. Tasks that before needed large teams to get done, can now be done by smaller teams.

Large Knowledge work teams have lost their competitive advantage.

I see this as a business opportunity for small actors. Every large knowledge work team that doesn't quickly adapt and downsize itself, is now something you can disrupt as a small team or individual.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#484

Post by sarchertech »

booleandilemma wrote: post #411
sarchertech wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I have no idea what in the world you are talking about. Most 20 year olds working at McDonald’s are stoned and move at half a mile an hour whether it’s a lunch rush or it’s 2am. I worked retail for years before I finally switched full time to program…

Do you really wanna be competing with those people though? I'll be honest, I don't even want to be in the same room as them.

No, but I’m over the absurd pessimism.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#485

Post by sarchertech »

ArchieScrivener wrote: post #456
sarchertech wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we wipe out the vast majority of white collar jobs in just 10 years, we’re talking complete economic collapse. No society can possibly absorb that kind of disruption over such a short time. Also even assuming AI could completely replace lawyers. Lawyers control the legislature. They may not be able to stop your local model from telling you how to do something, but they can stop you from actually doing it without a…

Correct, which is why we will have the first worldwide revolution as people realize their democracies are fake, they are simply enslaved by capitalists; which is exactly what they told us Commies would do.

The chances of all of those revolutions not touching off world war 3 and decimating infrastructure and trade to the point that we can’t produce the chips to run AI is what now?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#486

Post by cbdevidal »

dakolli wrote: post #258
cbdevidal wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hence the need for an AI panopticon. Monitor and squish rebellions while they’re still in the planning phase.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#487

Post by raminism »

Gigachad wrote: post #162
zozbot234 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.

That is the famous Baumol effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#488

Post by lbreakjai »

techpression wrote: post #424
mercanlIl wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpreted the parent comment as asking what society _specifically_? Not some abstract concept, but something that exists a step or two away from where we are right now.

That is correct, living in Sweden with pretty high levels of social protection, but even so, high levels of white collar unemployment would make our very high risk housing market (we as a population has a very high loan ratio, much of it committed to housing) collapse once people can’t pay. That would make the banks likely to collapse because their money no longer exist and they’re all of a sudden real estate brokers…

But what is their wealth, exactly? Assets which no longer have value. Money which no longer has a use. Who's going to maintain their jets when the economy collapses? Who's going to build the parts? Who's going to build the tools to build the parts? Who's going to mine the ores?

Their lives are built atop the same supply chain we all depend on. They don't have their own miners, or aerospace engineers to design planes, or naval architects to build their boats.

They can not consume the marginal capacity of an economy that doesn't exist.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#489

Post by jon_north »

pjerem wrote: post #442
gizajob wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can build that with AI, then 9 people with AI can probably wipe out that company, only to be wiped out by 8 people with AI…and so on.

Not necessarily. That's the old "I made Twitter in a weekend" joke. That's not because you can technically replicate a product that your company will be successful. What makes a company successful are sales forces, internal processes and luck. Both are extremely difficult to replicate because sales forces are based on a human network you have to build, internal processes are either organic or kept secret, and luck ca…

massively underrated comment detected.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#490

Post by arcologies1985 »

sensanaty wrote: post #178
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…

I look through the backlog for my team consisting of 9 trillion ill-defined (if defined at all) tickets that tells you basically nothing. The large, overwhelming majority of my team's time is spent on combing through these tickets and making sense of them. Once we know what the ticket is even trying to say, we're usually out with the solution in a few days at most, so implementation isn't the bottleneck, nowhere near…

At my workplace we now use Claude Code to parse written specs and source code, search through JIRA, and draft, refine and organize tickets (using the JIRA API via a CLI tool). Way faster than through the UI.

However as you point out we have no program-accessible source of data on who stakeholders, contributors, managers, etc. are and have to write a lot of that ourselves. For a smaller business perhaps one could write all of that down in an accessible way to improve this but for a large dynamic business it seems very difficult.

Post reply on HN