Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

martynasm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 109 posts

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#11

Post by edu »

Madmallard wrote: post #5
robotswantdata wrote: post #2

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive. Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

Are you sure about that one? What exactly will these agents be able to do with enough consistency, accuracy, and reliability that people will want to hire them over humans? In my experience with even the most basic implementation of agents, i.e. customer service chat bots, I literally cannot stand interacting with them even once. They are extremely unhelpful and I will hang up or immediately ask to speak to a human.

Obviously your support chatbot with talk to your flavor of clawd that will call Claude Code that will code a solution that will be reviewed by Codex that will merge and release it and then will ping clawd that will send an email to the user announcing that their issue has been fixed. /s just in case

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#13

Post by qsera »

faangguyindia wrote: post #9

wait what? I am in india and jobs are being lost by thousands everyday in IT field. infact, i go and implement dumb AI models in many companies and executives immediately show "how many people they can fire with this advancement".

Where is the news that say this?

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#14

Post by chrz »

robotswantdata wrote: post #2

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive. Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

Lets go back to waterfall even harder and write the super correct and detailed design doc.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#15

Post by aurareturn »

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was strategic to not provide good service in order to gain an advantage somewhere else in the business.

But now, you can hire 1 customer service person, who could then use AI agents to provide the top quality customer service. Previously, you needed to hire 5 people, which wasn't worth it.

So you went from no customer service employee to 1.

I suspect that this is what will happen. Many companies will hire their first customer service person or more. Many big companies will layoff most of their customer service people. The net effect might actually increase total customer service employment.

I suspect that job openings for customer service employees will actually be higher than now but companies won't be able to find enough AI-skilled people to fill the job. We're going to read about how there are more job openings than ever but companies can't find the AI skillset they need. This is why I think people who adopt AI now, learn it, understand it, get good at it, will be in high demand.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#16

Post by faangguyindia »

qsera wrote: post #13
faangguyindia wrote: post #9

wait what? I am in india and jobs are being lost by thousands everyday in IT field. infact, i go and implement dumb AI models in many companies and executives immediately show "how many people they can fire with this advancement".

Where is the news that say this?

why would these private consultancy firms leak news?

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#17

Post by ares623 »

robotswantdata wrote: post #2

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive. Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

Well ain't this a chronological oddity. Always 6 months away!

I don't want Codex dammit! I'm a Claude Code man.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#18

Post by truetraveller »

aurareturn wrote: post #15

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was str…

"Top customer service" and AI do not mix. People hate an AI response more than a late, real response.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#19

Post by askl »

robotswantdata wrote: post #2

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive. Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

It's always different this time. It always will only take a couple more months or years. And then people move on to the next hype topic.
Post reply on HN