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US Job Market Visualizer

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Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#91

Post by thewebguyd »

yifanl wrote: post #17
visarga wrote: post #10

If AI produces surplus where does it go? Not talking about investment backed datacenter buildout and AI labs. Talking about the results of AI work... I think AI outcomes distribute to contexts where it is used, and produce a change in how we work, what work we take on. Competition takes care of taking those surpluses and investing them in new structure, which becomes load bearing and we can't do without it anymore. I…

If AI being a million billion zillion times more productive at doing bullshit jobs nets in very little economic gain, then that lays bare the net economic value of all our bullshit jobs. But given that the stock market hasn't panicked, this must mean at least one of these premises is false: 1. Economic activity is relatively flat. 2. AI makes us a million billion zillion times more productive than we used to be. 3. T…

> lays bare the net economic value of all our bullshit jobs.

This was already obvious, the more important question is what are we (collectively, society & our governments) going to do about it?

We (should have) already known most of our jobs were bullshit jobs, especially white collar jobs. The difference is now we might have something coming that will eliminate the bullshit jobs.

But society will always need bullshit jobs or the whole system collapses. Not everyone can go dig ditches, so what do we do?

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#92

Post by codeulike »

gtr wrote: post #75
dwroberts wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term Maybe it was linked from a comment somewhere on HN but just today I saw a post saying “Microwaves are the future of all food: if you don’t think so, you better get…

I know it's not the point of the comment but it's a bit of a flawed analogy. Microwaves have wone to a large extent, such that people without them are a bit of an oddity, and cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.

Definitely not going to dinner round your house

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#93

Post by wcarss »

observationist wrote: post #22

It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility. It's not great for them, but it's a definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit, instead of running an "AI bad"…

> Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus

Could you elaborate on this? Is it just a claim, or is there some consensus out there based on something that it doesn't/shouldn't apply?

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#94

Post by linhns »

bwhiting2356 wrote: post #14

Are childcare and kindergarten teachers really exposed to AI? In theory, we could put a class of 30 children in front of chatbots with one supervisor. But I doubt we would chose to do this as a society. If office work becomes more automated, early childhood education is actually one area I'd expect to take up the Slack. I can't imagine a situation where we have millions of unemployed former office workers but we leav…

I'd say yes. One teacher can use AI and be able to cover for more children. Thus less teachers are required.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#95

Post by swozey »

This (tech) career has proven to be so disappointing, and it's all the stuff around the actual work. I love working on computers.

Started my career in the decade of offshoring and didn't think we'd have anything close to an "AI" taking our jobs before we potentially unionized or had a government that would protect its labor force from being replaced by literal robots.

2020-2022 felt like the usa tech ship was finally growing into something really great. All gone now.

When I worked in devops I always worried that my job was automating away other engineers, it definitely had a "when will this come for me" feeling, because it really was, now the dev and ops are both getting automated away.

This is my first time looking at HN in practically a year. Tech is just so uninteresting to me now. Nobody is hiring SDE/SWE/SREs except for the problem makers, like Anthropic, Meta, etc. Anthropic has pages and pages of $300k-$600k roles open right now. But do you go help the rest of your colleagues lose their jobs?

I guess lets talk about kubernetes or something...

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#96

Post by pluralmonad »

gtr wrote: post #75
dwroberts wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term Maybe it was linked from a comment somewhere on HN but just today I saw a post saying “Microwaves are the future of all food: if you don’t think so, you better get…

I know it's not the point of the comment but it's a bit of a flawed analogy. Microwaves have wone to a large extent, such that people without them are a bit of an oddity, and cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.

Your social circles must be very different from mine if everyone you know uses their microwave for cooking, rather than just reheating leftovers.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#97

Post by ivanjermakov »

visarga wrote: post #10

If AI produces surplus where does it go? Not talking about investment backed datacenter buildout and AI labs. Talking about the results of AI work... I think AI outcomes distribute to contexts where it is used, and produce a change in how we work, what work we take on. Competition takes care of taking those surpluses and investing them in new structure, which becomes load bearing and we can't do without it anymore. I…

It's up to business owners to decide. At the end of the day, in free market economy, goods become more affordable.

Agriculture is a good example of that: http://www.johnhearfield.com/History/Breadt.htm

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#98

Post by ben_w »

observationist wrote: post #22

It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility. It's not great for them, but it's a definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit, instead of running an "AI bad"…

> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen.

No, AI has not "already" won. And phrasing it as you do, "It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten" is an admission of that.

People may indeed not pause, but there's never any guarantee that the next step of progress is possible; whatever we reach may be all we can do, and we'll only find out when we get there. Or it might go hyperbolic and give us everything.

I'm not certain, but I suspect Jevons paradox is probably the wrong thing to bring up here, that's about cheaper stuff revealing more latent demand, and sure, that's possible and it may reveal a latent demand for everyone to build their own 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise (any of them) as a personal home, but we may also find that AI ends the economic incentives for consumerism which in turn remove a big driver to constantly have more stuff and demand goes down to something closer to a home being a living yurt made out of genetically modified photovoltaic vines that also give us unlimited free food.

(I mean, if we're talking about the AI future, why not push it?)

What I do think is worth bringing up is comparative advantage: Again, this is just an "I think", I'm absolutely not certain here, but if AI can supply all demand at unlimited volumes*, I think the assumptions behind comparative advantage, break.

> It's time to surf or drown, because it doesn't look like any of the people in charge have the slightest clue about how to handle what's coming.

Yes, and I think they've also not even managed to figure out the internet yet.

* and AI may well be able to, even if all models collectively "only" reach the equivalent of a fully-rounded human of IQ 115; and yes I know IQ tests are dodgy, but we all know what they approximate, by "fully rounded" I mean that thing their steel-man form tries to approach, not test passing itself which would have the AI already beat that IQ score despite struggling with handling plates in a dishwasher.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#100

Post by StilesCrisis »

dwroberts wrote: post #54
observationist wrote: post #22

It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility. It's not great for them, but it's a definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit, instead of running an "AI bad"…

> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term Maybe it was linked from a comment somewhere on HN but just today I saw a post saying “Microwaves are the future of all food: if you don’t think so, you better get…

This was a real, unironic mindset for a while: https://a.co/d/0iYb8mlz
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