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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

#91

Post by jvwww »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #41
DubiousPusher wrote: post #25

I've spent 10 years implementing new technology into businesses from all over the world and the thing that has killed the most projects at the proof of concept phase has not been whether it works. It's whether the cost of going to production from PoC produces a significant ROI. AI is absolutely changing the economics there. Humans were simply nowhere near answering all the useful questions they had which software cou…

> Now, software is cheaper and so people who couldn't afford to answer questions they've long wondered about can afford to answer them. Temporarily. Token price will rise sharply when the bills finally come due.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that this true? And if so, why can't I just use any of the very good open source Chinese models (and eventually American once reflection, thinking machines, etc catch up).

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#92

Post by burpingtree »

rayiner wrote: post #70
binary132 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“One million high-paying upper-middle class family supporting jobs were destroyed, but on the bright side, one million minimum-wage Walmart greeter jobs were created! See? We’re breaking even!”

Building and maintaining data centers aren’t minimum wage jobs. They are the best kind of jobs: accessible to somewhat above average people across a broad range of backgrounds. (As opposed to upper middle class knowledge worker jobs that are only accessible to the cognitive top 10%.)

I understand building data centers, but what does maintaining data centers entail? Are those going to be high paying jobs and how many of them. I don’t know much about the area but it seems like they would be low wage and not very many needed once the data centers are built.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#93

Post by HumblyTossed »

jvwww wrote: post #91
HumblyTossed wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, software is cheaper and so people who couldn't afford to answer questions they've long wondered about can afford to answer them. Temporarily. Token price will rise sharply when the bills finally come due.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that this true? And if so, why can't I just use any of the very good open source Chinese models (and eventually American once reflection, thinking machines, etc catch up).

Look around? It's rape and pillage time for corporations.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#94

Post by HumblyTossed »

visarga wrote: post #90
HumblyTossed wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there will be infinite abundance Maybe. > nobody will need to work anymore If we define "nobody" as very wealthy people who partake in that abundance while everyone else ... goes away.

When AI gets that good, a solar panel can power a pile of motors and gears to move and do work for you that previously required humans. You won't need the job, you need to solve your necessities more directly. And that job is a good fit for the AI that was so good it put you out of a job.

So... robots build shit that the wealthy who own the robots can profit from it and I need to ... what? ... go grow my own potatoes if I want to live?

Okay...

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#95

Post by treis »

pram wrote: post #27
windward wrote: post #17

While I'm still catastrophically worried about what AI means for my career, I've noticed that my current employer - very AI forward, and growing the team - is still facing an ever expanding backlog. High productivity is generally good for the employee, unless you're productive enough you run out of work to do. So how much code is needed?

Yes I’ve seen very little change over the past 3 years in my role (platform engineering) except mostly JIRA tickets are more unreadable because people just have Claude vomit a novel into it. I mean I use it every day of course, but the velocity of work doesn’t really seem to be budging lol. And frankly a lot of time wasted on AI made gadgets, and meetings about those gadgets (look at this dashboard Claude made! etc)

It absolutely has for me. Hours/days out of a month of smashing my head against silly bugs or SQL syntax errors have gone away.

I will agree that some of the savings has been eaten up elsewhere. Lots of trivial but not wrong PR comments ther lead to churn as an example.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#97

Post by Izkata »

pram wrote: post #27
windward wrote: post #17

While I'm still catastrophically worried about what AI means for my career, I've noticed that my current employer - very AI forward, and growing the team - is still facing an ever expanding backlog. High productivity is generally good for the employee, unless you're productive enough you run out of work to do. So how much code is needed?

Yes I’ve seen very little change over the past 3 years in my role (platform engineering) except mostly JIRA tickets are more unreadable because people just have Claude vomit a novel into it. I mean I use it every day of course, but the velocity of work doesn’t really seem to be budging lol. And frankly a lot of time wasted on AI made gadgets, and meetings about those gadgets (look at this dashboard Claude made! etc)

You may be interested in this report from earlier this year: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways

And a breakdown of it that gives a bit of an alternate explanation of their numbers (and more closely matches what we're seeing IMO): https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

Short version is that what you, I, and other responses to you are seeing is backed up by the numbers: AI code generation leads to significant bottlenecks, burnout, increased bugs, insane code churn (rewrites), and decreased feature deployment (presumably due to dealing with the bugs and bottlenecks). And as of when this was done, increased AI did not improve the situation, it generally made it worse.

The code churn stat is what bothers me the most: People keep portraying the whole "quickly rewrite/re-generate code with AI" thing as a feature, but looking at it over time, it actually means you lose your battle-tested code and no longer have a stable foundation to build on top of. That's where I think the major problems will show up as code needs to be maintained - and, seemingly, already has been.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#98

Post by variadix »

rayiner wrote: post #14

I hope this results in a rebalancing of the social and economic power of high-IQ versus average-IQ workers. We will need construction workers and tradespeople to build and maintain these AI data centers. Probably even with robots. But we won’t need as many engineers, lawyers, and other people whose job it is to consume and generate bits. If we tax the proceeds of AI generated productivity sufficiently, this could be…

I think it’s possible AI job disruption (or the threat thereof) could lead to a new labor movement capable of uniting people across the isle. It remains to be seen, but I think if the threat of a “permanent underclass” isn’t enough to get people to compromise and cooperate, nothing will.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#99

Post by r4rf »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #48
elmer2 wrote: post #32

I'm a consultant and I've already worked for multiple AI companies that shut down over the last two years. I think the main problem is that they all are relying on the big token providers and trying to capture value with various services. At some point the token costs will increase so much, it will put all of these AI companies out of business. Don't get me wrong. AI is definitely useful. The high costs are currently…

I believe this to be completely mistaken, because the bang-for-buck is getting better. Luna on max thinking is very capable and builds you a feature for 20 cents. Its just that in a gold rush, there are few winners and many losers. There used to be hundreds of car companies in the beginning, only a dozen or so survived long term.

ERm said another way.

Most people and firms by extension don't actually A) know what people want B) re-design their operations for the technology to amplify productivity that translates into finished goods and thereby the financials and market-share.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#100

Post by ang_cire »

delichon wrote: post #15
jerojero wrote: post #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 bes…

AI construction jobs are temporary up to Kardashev 3 or so.

We not gonna make it to level 1, bro
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