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OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

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Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#111

Post by zozbot234 »

nicce wrote: post #81
BeetleB wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing jobs is not an ethical issue. Automation and technology has been replacing jobs for well over a century, almost always to better outcomes for society. If it were an ethical issue, then it would be unethical not to do it. In any case, which jobs have been replaced by LLMs? Most of the actual ones I know were BS jobs to begin with - jobs I wish had not existed to begin with. The rest of the ones are where CEO…

Yeah, the issue is that there is no common benefit if the private company is the only one doing the replacement. Are we ready for AGI before we solve issues of capitalism? Otherwise, the society may get a harsh reset.

There's actually a lot of common benefit. That company can now supply their goods and services in greater quantity and at lower cost, which raises consumers' standard of living. Meanwhile the workers who were previously employed in menial clerical tasks will simply switch to supervising the AI's that perform those same tasks for them.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#112

Post by ffsm8 »

azemetre wrote: post #106
muldvarp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there? I don't see any contradiction there. For me it's funny that the first time most programmers ever think about the ethics of automating away jobs is when they themselves become automated.

The book "Why We Fear AI" by Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer talks about this dynamic. Whether it will lead to a class awakening because previously if you were aligned with the company you were rewarded as well, but now if you align with the company you're advocating to destroy your livelihood. What rational worker would want to take part in this?

Lots? I mean most people I know aren't even willing to entertain the notion wherever it's gonna happen within our lifetime.

The argument usually centers around the fact that LLMs aren't AGI, which is obviously true but also kinda missing the point

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#113

Post by WalterBright »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #65
nilkn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and large companies, generally, aren't even attempting that). Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materia…

When my father joined an attorney's office as recently as the 80s, there was a whole team of people that worked with: Of course, there were the attorneys who actually argued the cases, but also legal assistants who helped create various briefs, secretaries who took dictation (with a typewriter, of course) to write those documents, receptionists who managed the attorney's schedules and handled memos and mail, filing c…

It already happened to all kinds of jobs.

I recall the mine water pump had a boy run up and down a ladder opening and closing steam valves to make the piston go up and down. The boy eventually rigged up a stick to use the motion of the piston to automatically open and close the valves. Then he went to sleep while the stick did his job.

Hence the invention of the steam engine.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#114

Post by rglullis »

myko wrote: post #98
jajko wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what we are all whining here about (apart from folks working on llms and/or holding bigger stocks of such, a non-trivial and a vocal group here) has hit many other jobs already in the past. Very often thanks to our own work. It is funny, in worst way possible of course, that even our chairs are not as stable as we thought they are. Even automation can be somehow automated away. Remember all those posts stati…

Having used agentic ai (Claude Code, Gemini CLI) and other LLM based tools quite a bit for development work I just don't see it replacing developers anytime soon. Sure a lot of my job now is cleaning up code created by these tools but they are not building usable systems without a lot of developer oversight. I think they'll create more software developer roles and specialties.

What you are saying does not contradict the point from your parent. Automation can create "more roles and specialties" while reducing the total number of people in aggregate for greater economic output and further concentration of capital.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#117

Post by muldvarp »

azemetre wrote: post #106
muldvarp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there? I don't see any contradiction there. For me it's funny that the first time most programmers ever think about the ethics of automating away jobs is when they themselves become automated.

The book "Why We Fear AI" by Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer talks about this dynamic. Whether it will lead to a class awakening because previously if you were aligned with the company you were rewarded as well, but now if you align with the company you're advocating to destroy your livelihood. What rational worker would want to take part in this?

Software developers. Many of them are still championing LLMs. Also anybody who still contributes to open source software.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#118

Post by nicce »

zozbot234 wrote: post #111
nicce wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the issue is that there is no common benefit if the private company is the only one doing the replacement. Are we ready for AGI before we solve issues of capitalism? Otherwise, the society may get a harsh reset.

There's actually a lot of common benefit. That company can now supply their goods and services in greater quantity and at lower cost, which raises consumers' standard of living. Meanwhile the workers who were previously employed in menial clerical tasks will simply switch to supervising the AI's that perform those same tasks for them.

I don't think this will happen. It does not work with the capitalism if we have only few companies which have all this power. And many consumers don't have jobs left so the value of money increases faster than the "cost" decreases.

> Meanwhile the workers who were previously employed in menial clerical tasks will simply switch to supervising the AI's that perform those same tasks for them.

Put this to numbers, right now - if we remove all workers and leave managers on those fields - how many people are still employed?

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#119

Post by DrewADesign »

bgwalter wrote: post #70
muldvarp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how thinking about some source code is an innately more human activity than welding. Both can be done by humans, both couldn't be done by anything but humans until automation came along and now both can be done by humans and automated systems. I also fail to see how LLMs can turn humans into "biorobots". You can still do all the things you could do before LLMs came along. The economic value of those thing…

Then go weld. There are still some positions for humans.

Tons of welding and other manufacturing jobs in the northeast— they’ll even apprentice you into positions with no existing knowledge and larger companies (like General Dynamics) will even pay for your job-related degrees, sometimes being able to take the classes on the clock or get a stipend.

They have to do this because the industry has basically been kicking the aging-workforce can down the road for a few decades since off-shoring and automation outpaced increasing demand, and now they don’t have nearly enough people that even know how to program CNC machines when CAM software falls short.

I have a feeling a lot of displaced software people will go that route, and have a big change in compensation and working conditions in the process.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#120

Post by Workaccount2 »

conartist6 wrote: post #54
Spooky23 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s going to ramp. I have a team where 60% of the staff (6/10) is retiring in a year. Their function is around reconciling utilization and bills from multiple related suppliers with different internal stakeholders. They do a bunch of analysis and work with the internal stakeholders to optimize or migrate spend. It is high ROI for us, and the issue is both finding people with the right analytical and presentation ski…

Except that we know that even if you can't put your finger on what it is right now, there's something in the way of "ChatGPT just literally prints money" being at all realistic. It's pretty obvious in the markets if anyone has figured out a repeatable strategy for printing money. This is to say that we know from looking at outcomes over the long term that the kinds of concrete gains you're describing are offset by su…

>This is to say that we know from looking at outcomes over the long term

Public LLMs have been around for 3 years, and adoption is still nascent. We don't have any long term data, and the longest term data we have involves a bunch of outdated models. Most people are still awful at using LLMs, and probably the most skilled users are the college kids who are graduating right now (the youth is always god-tier with new tech).

I cannot think of anything more foolish right now than not trying to leverage SOTA models to save you money, especially because you heard rumors of shadow losses that can only be found in the bottom line.

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