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Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

anthropic.com

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Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#111

Post by httpz »

bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

This is a classic case of Productivity Paradox when personal computers were first introduced into workplaces in the 80s.

A famous economist once said, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#112

Post by bee_rider »

kdheiwns wrote: post #97
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

Yep. All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago, where I could search for something and find actually relevant and helpful info quickly. I've seen lots of people say AI can basically code a project for them. Maybe it can, but that seems to heavily depend on the field. Other than boilerplate code or very generic projects, it's a step above useless imo when it comes to gam…

Thinking of it, I haven’t seen as many “copy paste from StackOverflow” memes lately. Maybe LLMs have given people the ability to

1) Do that inside their IDEs, which is less funny

2) Generate blog post about it instead of memes

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#114

Post by SamuelAdams »

g947o wrote: post #15

I am not going to trust a single word from a company whose business is selling you AI products.

I also thought it was hilarious that they invented a brand new metric that (surprise) makes their product’s long term projection look really good (financially).

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#115

Post by bandrami »

httpz wrote: post #111
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

This is a classic case of Productivity Paradox when personal computers were first introduced into workplaces in the 80s. A famous economist once said, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

That's only certain if investments in tech infrastructure always led to productivity increases. But sometimes they just don't. Lots of firms spent a lot of money on blockchain five years ago, for instance, and that money is just gone now.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#116

Post by sdf2df »

stevenhuang wrote: post #106
sdf2df wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Not a throaway, can't remember what my old account is called 2) Feel free to screen shot. Stick it on your desktop and set a reminder and check the state of the world in 12 months time. Job done fella.

12 months I won't be surprised if there's not much change. But in 5 years? 10? Anything can happen. It is presumptuous to think you can project the future capabilities of this technology and confidently state that labour markets will never be affected.

You prove my point.

Guys like you dont get it. You think OAI, Amazon etc can freely put large amounts of money into this for 5-10 years? Lmao - delusional. Investors are impatient. Show huge jumps in revenue this year or you no longer have permission to put monumental amounts of money into this anymore.

Short of that they'll just destroy the stock price by selling off; leaving employees who get paid via SBC very unhappy.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#117

Post by thewhitetulip »

behnamoh wrote: post #5

I don't think there's been much of an impact, really. Those who know how to use AI just got tangentially more productive (because why would you reveal your fake 10x productivity boost so your boss hands you 10x more tasks to finish?), and those w/o AI knowledge stayed the way they were. The real impact is for indie-devs or freelancers but that usually doesn't account for much of the GDP.

If everyone was 10x productive then we would have had native Claude Code app for each platform.

Instead they are using Electron and calling it a day. Very ironic isn't it? If AI is so good then why don't we get native software from Anthropic?

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#118

Post by thewhitetulip »

sdf2df wrote: post #44
sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #13

My speed shipping software increased but so did the demands of features by my company.

I don't really get this TBH. Shipping speed never/is was the issue. Most companies are terrible at figuring out what exactly they should be allocating resources behind. Speeding up does not solve the problem that most humans who are at the top of the hierarchy are poor thinkers. In fact it compounds it. More noise, nice.

Yep requirement gathering takes forever Then validation takes forever

Writing code is lesser problem than figuring out what we want when we want, and to get stakeholders at one place.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#119

Post by bicx »

torben-friis wrote: post #80
bicx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a bear market in a bloated company, maybe. We’re still actively hiring at my startup, even with going all-in on AI across the company. My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year.

>My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year That's... not a good look for your engineers?

It’s hard to compare, honestly. Last year, my PM didn’t have the AI tools to do any of this, and engineers were spread thin. Now, the PM (with a specialized Claude Code environment) has the enthusiasm of a new software engineer and the product instincts of a senior PM.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#120

Post by sdf2df »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #118
sdf2df wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get this TBH. Shipping speed never/is was the issue. Most companies are terrible at figuring out what exactly they should be allocating resources behind. Speeding up does not solve the problem that most humans who are at the top of the hierarchy are poor thinkers. In fact it compounds it. More noise, nice.

Yep requirement gathering takes forever Then validation takes forever Writing code is lesser problem than figuring out what we want when we want, and to get stakeholders at one place.

Finally, a fella who gets it.

Apple has already shown this decades ago - they got the iPhone and iPod developed and out the door in relatively short-time scales given the impact of the products on the world. Once you know what you want, exactly what you want, things moves fast - really fast.

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