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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#121

Post by michaeldoron »

bgwalter wrote: post #113
michaeldoron wrote: post #78

Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and…

Why not use the promised exponential growth of home ownership that led to the catastrophic real estate bubble that burst in 2008 as an example? We are still dealing with the aftereffects, which led to the elimination of any working class representation in politics and suppression of real protests like Occupy Wall Street. When this bubble bursts, the IT industry will collapse for some years like in 2000.

The growth of home ownership was an indicator of real estate investment, not of real world capabilities - once the value of real estate dropped and the bubble burst, those investments were worth less than before, causing the crisis. In contrast, the growth in this scenario is the capabilities of foundation models (and to a lesser extent, the technologies that stem out of these capabilities). This is not a promise or an investment, it's not an indication of speculative trust in this technology, it is a non-decreasing function indicating a real increase in performance.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#122

Post by cjs_ac »

sevensor wrote: post #12

What AI is going to wipe out is white collar jobs where people sleepwalk through the working day and carelessly half ass every task. In 2025, we can get LLMs to do that for us. Unfortunately, the kind of executive who thinks AI is a legitimate replacement for actual work does not recognize the difference. I expect to see the more credulous CEOs dynamiting their companies as a result. Whether the rest of us can surviv…

There's a connection to the return to office mandates here: the managers who don't see how anyone can work at home are the ones who've never done anything but yap in the office for a living, so they don't understand how sitting somewhere quiet and just thinking counts as work or delivers value for the company. It's a critical failure to appreciate that different people do different things for the business.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#123

Post by azemetre »

zhobbs wrote: post #66
untrust wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another question: If AI is going to eat up everyone's jobs, how will any business be safe from a new competitor showing up and unseating them off their throne? I don't think that the low level peons would be the only ones at stake as a company could be easily outcompeted as well since AI could conceivably outperform or replace any existing product anyways. I guess funding for processing power and physical machinery t…

Yeah this will likely lead to margin compression. The best companies will be fine though, as brand and existing distribution is a huge moat.

“Best” is carrying a lot of wait. More accurate to say the monopolistic companies that engage in regulatory capture will be fine.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#124

Post by PeterStuer »

idkwhattocallme wrote: post #23

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock.…

"Hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout"

Which is the sole reason automation will not make most people obsolete until the VP level themselves are automated.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#125

Post by bachmeier »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #116
bachmeier wrote: post #89

> AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks "Starting" is doing a hell of lot of work in that sentence. I'm starting to become a billionaire and Nobel Prize winner. Anyway, I agree with Mark Cuban's statement in the article. The most likely scenario is that we become more productive as AI complements humans. Yesterday I made this comment on another HN story: "Copilot told me it's there…

> I'm starting to become a billionaire Suggests you are accumulating money, not losing it. That I think is the point of the original comment: AI is getting better, not worse. (Or humans are getting worse? Ha ha, not ha ha.)

> That I think is the point of the original comment: AI is getting better, not worse.

Well, in order to meet the standard of the quote "wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs … sometime soon. Maybe in the next couple of years" we need more than just getting better. We need considerably better technology with a better cost structure to wipe out that many jobs. Saying we're starting on that task when the odds are no better than me becoming a billionaire within two years is what we used to call BS.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#126

Post by ryandrake »

munksbeer wrote: post #35
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc? It's easy to imagine a world in which there are way less white collar workers and everything else is pretty much the same. It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're bett…

>It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're better off, even if everybody else has less widgets. History seems to show this doesn't happen. The trend is not linear, but the trend is that we live better lives each century than the previous century, as our technology increases. Maybe it will be different this time though.

"Technology increases" have not made my life better than my boomer parents' and they will probably not make the next generation's lives better than ours. Big things like housing costs, education costs, healthcare costs are not being driven down by technology, quite the opposite.

Yes, the lives of "people selling stuff" will likely get better and better in the future, through technology, but the wellbeing of normal people seems to have peaked at around the year 2000 or so.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#127

Post by DrillShopper »

trealira wrote: post #81
darth_avocado wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers If people don’t have jobs, government doesn’t have taxes to employ other people. If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well.

> If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well. Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a w…

> a waiter serving food at a restaurant

I have already eaten at three restaurants that have replaced the vast majority of their service staff with robots, and they're fine at that. Do I think they're better than a human? No, personally, but they're "good enough".

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#128

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

sevensor wrote: post #53
Der_Einzige wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consulting companies like the Big 4 where this happens most are bigger/stronger than ever (primarily due to AI related consulting). Try again.

What makes you think productive work is what consulting companies are selling? They're there for laundering accountability. When you bring in consultants to roll out your corporate AI strategy, and it all falls apart in a few years, you can say, "we were following best practices, nobody could have anticipated X," where X is whatever failure mode ultimately tanks the AI strategy.

Do you think that it's possible in principle to have a better or worse corporate AI strategy? I do, and because I do, it seems clear that companies paying top dollar are doing so because they expect a better one. There's no reason to pay KPMG's rates if all you need is a fall guy.

Most criticisms I see of management consulting seem to come from the perspective, which I get the sense you subscribe to, that management strategy is broadly fake so there's no underlying thing for the consultants to do better or worse on. I don't think that's right, but I'm never sure how to bridge the gap. It'd be like someone telling me that software architecture is fake and only code is real.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#129

Post by pseudo0 »

abracadaniel wrote: post #86
ben_w wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game theory/Nash equilibrium/Prisoner's Dilemma, and the turkey's perspective in the problem of induction. So far, for any given automation, each actor gets to cut their own costs to their benefit — and if they do this smarter than anyone else, they win the market for a bit. Every day the turkey lives, they get a bit more evidence the farmer is an endless source of free food that only wants the best for them. It's ea…

My long term fear with AI is that by replacing entry level jobs, it breaks the path to train senior level employees. It could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat from it, but could lead to massive collapse as no one is left with any understanding of how existing systems work, or how to design replacements.

Juniors and offshore teams will probably be the most severely impacted. If a senior dev is already breaking off smaller tightly scoped tasks and fixing up the results, that loop can be accomplished much more quickly by iterating with a LLM. Especially if you have to wait a business day for someone in India to even start on the task when a LLM is spitting out a similar quality PR in minutes.

Ironically a friend of mine noticed that the team in India they work with is now largely pushing AI-generated code... At that point you just need management to cut out the middleman.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#130

Post by bachmeier »

SoftTalker wrote: post #119
bachmeier wrote: post #89

> AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks "Starting" is doing a hell of lot of work in that sentence. I'm starting to become a billionaire and Nobel Prize winner. Anyway, I agree with Mark Cuban's statement in the article. The most likely scenario is that we become more productive as AI complements humans. Yesterday I made this comment on another HN story: "Copilot told me it's there…

It it sustainable? I know when I program, it's sometimes nice to get to something that's easy, even if it's tedious and repetitive. It's like stopping to walk for a bit when you're on a run. You're still moving, but you can catch your breath and recharge.

Oh, I agree, but I'd say that it's probably easier to do those small things than it is to figure out a prompt to have Copilot do them. If it feels good, there's no reason not to do it yourself. I think we'd all agree that it's a joy to be able to tell Copilot to write out the scaffolding at the start of a new project.
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