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How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

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Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#11

Post by protocolture »

shevy-java wrote: post #4

So, more skynet leads to more real jobs? I am confused. Wasn't the initial claim that AI kills all jobs? I feel the claim right now is not really correct. One needs to do a thorough analysis of the whole job market across different countries, say, over 5 years. Or at the least 3 years but very complete and unbiased either way.

The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs. There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise.

The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. It would suit their worldview for this time to be different, and so thats the message they push.

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#14

Post by camillomiller »

These studies miss a huge point, which is: working with automation outside of programming is tedious, frustrating, and soul crushing. I see it already with some non technical clients. I have notice a terrible trend of people just offloading everything to agents or prompting even the simplest interaction with other humans. Let me tell you, it’s fucking dire.

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#15

Post by thesumofall »

Skeptical of the study approach, but it is an entirely possible scenario if we don’t hit AGI. Many of the non-tech companies are only now starting to invest into AI. For many of them, AI might unlock new business approaches. Eg a company switches to real time pricing. Great, but suddenly you need people swapping price tags. Or you launch a project to replace paper price tags with electronic tags. Those need to be regularly maintained and charged, etc. Oops, our legacy ERP system can’t deal with that. Let’s upgrade that

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#16

Post by consp »

camillomiller wrote: post #14

These studies miss a huge point, which is: working with automation outside of programming is tedious, frustrating, and soul crushing. I see it already with some non technical clients. I have notice a terrible trend of people just offloading everything to agents or prompting even the simplest interaction with other humans. Let me tell you, it’s fucking dire.

Inside can be as well. Please manually review these 5000 lines of slop I generated while watching YouTube and verify the unreadable readme due to all the bloat and icons is correct with the code.

If that is not soul crushing I would not know what is.

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#17

Post by somenameforme »

protocolture wrote: post #11
shevy-java wrote: post #4

So, more skynet leads to more real jobs? I am confused. Wasn't the initial claim that AI kills all jobs? I feel the claim right now is not really correct. One needs to do a thorough analysis of the whole job market across different countries, say, over 5 years. Or at the least 3 years but very complete and unbiased either way.

The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs. There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise. The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. It would suit their worldview for this time to be different, and so thats the message they push.

I'm not entirely sure that's the claim or conclusion. Like they said the companies increasing headcount are also being pumped full of $$$. That's a non-permanent state of affairs because it's heavily fueled by speculation about possible future scenarios which may or may not come to pass.

I think the bigger conclusion is that LLMs are, for now, having a minimal effect on the labor market. And I think this makes sense. In spite of individual claims of 10x productivity boost or whatever, their effect on the bottom line of companies seems to remain quite unclear, at best. On the contrary the token-maxing catastrophe seems to have resulted in companies becoming far more price conscious towards LLM usage.

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#20

Post by Retric »

protocolture wrote: post #11
shevy-java wrote: post #4

So, more skynet leads to more real jobs? I am confused. Wasn't the initial claim that AI kills all jobs? I feel the claim right now is not really correct. One needs to do a thorough analysis of the whole job market across different countries, say, over 5 years. Or at the least 3 years but very complete and unbiased either way.

The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs. There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise. The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. It would suit their worldview for this time to be different, and so thats the message they push.

That’s not supported by the evidence. Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.

In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education, retirement, prison, disability, etc.

The only way jobs have kept up with automation is when you ignore population growth, but more people naturally increases the required workforce. You inherently need more police, food, etc when you have more people.

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