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> Between May 2025 and May 2026, employment in the sector dropped a staggering 21 percent, according to BLS data. Yeah sure. I mean, same reason why HN readers hate AI, right? It replaces their jobs. (Obviously the difference is that the poor old claims adjusters didn't spend the last two decades "disrupting" every other industry and telling everyone else to "learn to code". Ha! If you hear a faint high noise, that's…
Anecdotally, many of them are aging out and the demands of adjusters are increasing while the pay hasn’t necessarily gone up. While technically you don’t have to know the ins and outs of construction, it helps a lot and there are just not a lot of people who have that knowledge. And if they do, they often go into construction themselves or sell roofs. Both of which can be far more lucrative.
On top of that, claims software has a lot of automation but very little real AI surface area. A lot of the things AI is good at (text generation) must have certain verbiage or use legally approved templates.
Granted, this may not be the case for all verticals, but this is just my observation from 20 years. (Mostly in smaller IA firms and state-based institutions).
Also, my wife has pointed out that there haven’t been any major cats in the last few years. Katrina kept people working for years. A lack of big storms has also contributed to this.
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Well, more because it pulverizes personal responsibility for bad decisions ("I didn't deny your claim, the computer did"). But yeah.
so basically manager and exec dream
So AI is going to take jobs not because AI is necessarily better or more appropriate, but because it accelerates bad decision making and makes those decisions exponentially worse.
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On the flip-side, LLM's can be pretty good at coming up with almost water-tight stories for the insurance claim!
I read and article on here some months ago titled something like "Leftist usecases for LLMs" and one of them was negotiating bureaucracies, and that reminds me, I need to call back JCP&L about my Board of Public Utilities complaint that an LLM helped me out together. You see, I live with in a rural area and especially since LED light bulbs have become the thing, it's been clear that we are delivered far less than 120…
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Which clueless executives are we blaming? The ones who purchase products from vendors like OpenAI or AI-powered products that run API calls through OpenAI et al., or the vendors themselves who make bombastic claims about capabilities? As an analogy, I don’t know if I fully blame my executives for buying Microsoft Teams when Microsoft Teams turns out to suck. Microsoft promised to my company’s executives that Microsof…
You should. It's their fault for picking a bad vendor. It's their fault for not finding someone with taste to solve the problem. Fundamentally its their business, pretending you can blame someone else for your ultimate accountability is stupid. Nobody is forcing you to take poison, and saying "Well Microsoft promised me it isn't poison!!!" at this point, decades into it selling poison, doesn't make much sense.
Literally anyone off the street can be a "decision maker" in technology today. Just buy what everyone else is buying and collect a huge paycheck while working remote. People who understand tech and sort of know what they are doing, are not included.
That has been my experience.
Ultimately this isn't "AI's fault". As the article points out, clueless executives who don't understand the capabilities and limitations of specific LLMs push the technology on workers so they can say they are "using AI to improve efficiency".
Which clueless executives are we blaming? The ones who purchase products from vendors like OpenAI or AI-powered products that run API calls through OpenAI et al., or the vendors themselves who make bombastic claims about capabilities? As an analogy, I don’t know if I fully blame my executives for buying Microsoft Teams when Microsoft Teams turns out to suck. Microsoft promised to my company’s executives that Microsof…
This is what they depend on actually. Scape goats for their failures. This quarter takes a hit then number go up.
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I read and article on here some months ago titled something like "Leftist usecases for LLMs" and one of them was negotiating bureaucracies, and that reminds me, I need to call back JCP&L about my Board of Public Utilities complaint that an LLM helped me out together. You see, I live with in a rural area and especially since LED light bulbs have become the thing, it's been clear that we are delivered far less than 120…
If you were monitoring the power coming into your house, why did you need claude to "put together a whole packet documenting brownouts"? Shouldn't you just have the raw data, maybe highlighted with the offending parts? Or was the prose of your complaint the issue?
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You should. It's their fault for picking a bad vendor. It's their fault for not finding someone with taste to solve the problem. Fundamentally its their business, pretending you can blame someone else for your ultimate accountability is stupid. Nobody is forcing you to take poison, and saying "Well Microsoft promised me it isn't poison!!!" at this point, decades into it selling poison, doesn't make much sense.
They didn't pick the bad vendor, the herd did. They all go to the same conferences, attend the same vendor lunches and buy the same garbage. And today, most of the IT managers are not technical at all. They have art degrees and have never been technology practitioners. Literally anyone off the street can be a "decision maker" in technology today. Just buy what everyone else is buying and collect a huge paycheck while…