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Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

economist.com

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Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#4
post #2

[flagged]

>The Economist, Silicon Valley's primary submarine, dispels the notion that AI causes unemployment because SV has realized that the peasants get unruly.

???

From a few months ago: https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260516_DE_...

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#5
I can’t read the article but in my group, which is not terribly AI exposed due to its hands-on nature, we are in fact hiring extra people into next year to handle additional AI initiatives that I am confident will succeed. In subsequent years, the plan as I have heard it is to let headcount go down by attrition.

I would not take extra hiring now as evidence that AI is preserving job numbers.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#6
If most of the jobs its creating are related to construction of infrastructure then that's not really positive news as these jobs are temporary, once demand settles then why kind of jobs are going to be created?

It might be benefiting other areas, but I think as the technology improves a lot of those are going to start looking like what's happening in software development (which is arguably what the technology is best at right now).

So yeah, idk.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#7
Paywalled

> On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations.

Good news that ought to be taken with a pinch of salt given how the current administration responds to unfavorable BLS data -

> On Friday, August 1, [2025] President Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer from her role as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In social media posts announcing and confirming her firing, he said that he believed the jobs report released by the agency earlier that day included numbers that were “rigged in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

https://www.epi.org/policywatch/firing-bls-commissioner-erik...

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#8

I can’t read the article but in my group, which is not terribly AI exposed due to its hands-on nature, we are in fact hiring extra people into next year to handle additional AI initiatives that I am confident will succeed. In subsequent years, the plan as I have heard it is to let headcount go down by attrition. I would not take extra hiring now as evidence that AI is preserving job numbers.

The article mostly cites the huge growth in blue-collar jobs caused by the data center buildout. It’s very handy-wavy about white collar jobs, “yes lots of jobs have been lost, but also the tech sector always has a lot of year-to-year churn, maybe this is just churn”.

Not a super insightful article. The AI jobs apocalypse may or may not be real, but this article doesn’t provide any compelling evidence for its thesis.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#9

I can’t read the article but in my group, which is not terribly AI exposed due to its hands-on nature, we are in fact hiring extra people into next year to handle additional AI initiatives that I am confident will succeed. In subsequent years, the plan as I have heard it is to let headcount go down by attrition. I would not take extra hiring now as evidence that AI is preserving job numbers.

What type of activities your group performs?

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#10
post #3

Remind me what percentage of the workforce works “AI jobs”?

Well one way to look at it is:

As a programmer, but working in two non-SWE roles, I have turned job A 70% over to AI, and job B 90%.

Where systems and scaffolds can be put in place to manage various aspects of a job, would this not be considered, partially, an "AI job"?

If you work in government grants and R&D, what if agents can now triage 100-1000x the opportunity count that you could ever handle alone, and you had a pipeline system in place to manage said opportunities and relationships? And then you, as the human, become the mouthpiece and reviewer of hoards of filtered output? Is that Federal Grants & R&D position now not mostly an AI job?

I'd say a large percentage of digital-based jobs can be considered varying percentages of AI jobs.

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