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AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

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Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#131

Post by OtherShrezzing »

ACCount37 wrote: post #36
grim_io wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just the nature of being early adopters. Other fields will get their turn once a baseline of best practices is established that the consultants can sell training for. In the meantime, memes aside, I'm not too worried about being completely automated away. These models are extremely unreliable when unsupervised. It doesn't feel like that will change fundamentally with just incrementally better training.

Does it have to? Stack enough "it's 5% better" on top of each other and the exponent will crush you.

AI training costs are increasing around 3x annually across each of the last 8 years to achieve its performance improvements. Last year, spending across all labs was $150bn. Keeping the 3x trend means that, to keep pace with current advances, costs should rise to $450bn in 2025, $900bn in 2026, $2.7tn in 2027, $8.1tn in 2028, $25tn in 2028, and $75tn in 2029 and $225tn in 2030. For reference, the GDP of the world is around $125tn.

I think the labs will be crushed by the exponent on their costs faster white-collar work will be crushed by the 5% improvement exponent.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#132

Post by tobyjsullivan »

drusepth wrote: post #116
londons_explore wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Audit quality will continue to suffer I wonder how much this actually matters? I understand that for an auditor, having a quality reputation matters. But if all audits from all firms are bad, how much would the world economy suffer? Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer?

> Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer? Is this hyperbole? It seems like the real question being asked here is "would the world be worse off without deterministic checks and balances", which I think most people would agree is true, no?

I read it as assuming the deterministic checks and balances are already absent. We have the illusion of determinism but, in practice, audits (and justice) are mostly theatre as it is.

From that perspective, lowering the quality of something that is already non-rigourous might not have any perceivable effect. It’s only a problem if public perception lowers, but that’s a marketing issue that the big-4 already have a handle on.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#133

Post by anthem2025 »

orochimaaru wrote: post #12

The study is bs. While executives are blaming AI, it is nowhere near levels of replacement. What I bet is happening under the covers is reprioritization of work, offshoring or both.

It’s also just natural cost cutting from businesses that were previously massively over hiring, and outside of AI don’t exactly have a ton of areas with huge growing investment.

Plus slashing jobs like this keeps the plebs in line. They don’t like software engineers having the money and job security to raise a stink over things. They want drones terrified of losing everything.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#134

Post by robotnikman »

muldvarp wrote: post #3

Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation". Was good while it lasted though.

If it gets to the point where I can no longer find a tech job I am just going to buy a trailer, live somewhere cheap, and just make money doing odd jobs while spending most of my time programming what I want. I don't want to participate in a society where all I have for job options is a McJob or some Amazon warehouse.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#135

Post by anthem2025 »

smt88 wrote: post #21
orochimaaru wrote: post #12

The study is bs. While executives are blaming AI, it is nowhere near levels of replacement. What I bet is happening under the covers is reprioritization of work, offshoring or both.

> What I bet is happening under the covers is reprioritization of work, offshoring or both. AI has been frequently used as an explanation for layoffs. Before AI, layoffs would be a positive signal to investors, but they'd be demoralizing to staff and/or harm the brand. Now, you can say, "Wow, we're so good at technology, we're eliminated ___ jobs!" and try to get the best of both worlds.

Yeah, unquestioning “journalists” have allowed them to turn laying off thousands into an ad for their new tech.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#136

Post by dragonwriter »

graeme wrote: post #121
tux3 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cashiers should not, and will not prevent theft. They're not paid nearly enough to get in danger, and it is not their job. I'm sure you can find videos of thefts in San Francisco if you need a visual demonstration. No cashier is going to jump in front of someone to stop a theft.

A thief doesn't know what a cashier will do. And a cashier is an eye witness or can yell "hey stop them!" You're doing the all or nothing fallacy. The fact that a cashier does not prevent all thefts does not mean a cashier does NOTHING for theft.

> The fact that a cashier does not prevent all thefts does not mean a cashier does NOTHING for theft.

Yes, for one thing, it ignores that a very large share of retail theft is insider theft, and that cash handling positions are the largest portion of that.

Cashiers absolutely do something for theft.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#137

Post by manmal »

shadowgovt wrote: post #17
muldvarp wrote: post #3

Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation". Was good while it lasted though.

I really hope nobody had themselves convinced that software engineering couldn't be automated. Not with the code enterprise has been writing for decades now (lots and lots and lots of rules for gluing state to state, which are extremely structured but always just shy of being so structured that they were amenable to traditional finite-rule-based automation). The goal of the industry has always been self-replacement.…

The experiences people are having when working with big, complex codebases don’t line up with your gloomy outlook. LLMs just fall apart beyond a certain project size, and then the tech debt must be paid.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#138

Post by bdcravens »

muldvarp wrote: post #3

Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation". Was good while it lasted though.

I'm sure those who lost a job to software at some point are feeling a great deal of sympathy for developers who are now losing out to automation.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#139

Post by throwaway31131 »

elif wrote: post #98
muldvarp wrote: post #3

Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation". Was good while it lasted though.

I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable, but that the interface is the easiest to adapt to our workflow. I have a feeling language models will be good at virtually every "sit at a desk" job in a virtually identical capacity, it's just the act of plugging an AI into these roles is non-obvious. Like every business was impacted by the Internet equally, the early applications were just an artifact of what…

> I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable

I don't know. It seems pretty friendly to automation to me.

When was the last time you wrote assembly? When was the last time you had map memory? Think about blitting memory to a screen buffer to draw a square on a screen? Schedule processes and threads?

These are things that I routinely did as a junior engineer writing software a long time ago. Most people at that time did. For the most part, the computer does them all now. People still do them, but only when it really counts and applications are niche.

Think about how large code bases are now and how complicated software systems are. How many layers they have. Complexity on this scale was unthinkable not so long ago.

It's all possible because the computer manages much of the complexity through various forms of automation.

Expect more automation. Maybe LLMs are the vehicle that delivers it, maybe not. But more automation in software is the rule, not the exception.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#140

Post by jameslk »

fibers wrote: post #8

The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if th…

How many of these jobs are getting offshored because of AI?

Language barriers, culture, and knowledge are some of the biggest challenges to overcome for offshoring. AI potentially solves many of those challenges

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