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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

#151

Post by usersouzana »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #93

Imagine you had a crystal ball that lets you look 10 years into the future, and you asked it about whether we underestimate or overestimate how many jobs AI will replace in the future. It flickers for a moment, then it either says "In 2025, mankind vastly underestimated the amount of jobs AI can do in 2035" or "In 2025, mankind vastly overestimated the amount of jobs AI can do in 2035" How would you use that informat…

Heads or tails, then proceed accordingly. You won't waste any more time analyzing it in hopes of getting it right.

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

#152

Post by whynotminot »

SoftTalker wrote: post #140
whynotminot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really — even if AGI doesn’t work and these models don’t get any better, there’s still enormous value to be mined just from harnessing the existing state of the art. Or these guys pivot and go back to building CRUD apps. They’re either at the front of something revolutionary… or not… and they’ll go back to other lucrative big tech jobs.

Is there enormous value? AI is burning cash at an extraordinary rate on the promise that it will be an enormous value. But if it plateaus, then all the servers, GPUs, data centers, power and cooling and other infrastructure will have to be paid for out of revenue. Will customers be willing to pay the actual costs of running this stuff.

I don’t know if what they’ve built and are building in the future will justify the level of investment. I’m not an economist or a VC. It’s hard to fathom the huge sums being so casually thrown around.

All I can tell you is that for what I use AI for now in both my personal and professional life, I would pay a lot of money (way more than I already am) to keep just the current capabilities I already have access to today.

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

#153

Post by dingnuts »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #94
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…

I'm not seeing how comparing AI to a virus that killed millions and left tens of millions crippled is an effective way to support your argument.

especially when the world population is billions and at the beginning we were worried about double digit IFR.

Yeah. Imagine if COVID had actually killed 10% of the world population. Killing millions sucks, but mosquitos regularly do that too, and so does tuberculosis, and we don't shut down everything. Could've been close to a billion. Or more. Could've been so much worse.

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

#154

Post by spacemadness »

ben_w wrote: post #25
darth_avocado wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up, consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could you be excited for that?

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…

And we as humans figured all this out and still do nothing with this knowledge. We fight as hard as we can against collective wisdom.

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

#155

Post by spacemadness »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #97
darth_avocado wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up, consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could you be excited for that?

Business leaders in AI are _not_ excited and agree with your concerns. That's what the source article is about - the CEO of AI lab Anthropic said he sees major social problems coming soon. The problem is that the information environment is twisted in knots. The author, like many commentators, characterizes your concerns as "optimism" and "hype", because she doesn't think AI will actually have these large impacts.

I think he says this just to hype up how powerful of a force AI is which helps these CEOs bottom line eventually. Cynically “we’ve created something so powerful it will eliminate jobs and cause strife” gets those investors excited for more.

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

#156

Post by disambiguation »

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.…

> But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway.

I think quotes around "real value" would be appropriate as well. Consider all the great engineering it took to create Netflix, valued at $500b - which achieves what SFTP does for free.

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

#157

Post by myko »

idkwhattocallme wrote: post #150
phendrenad2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the contrary - they were providing value to the VP who benefitted from inflated headcount. That's "real value", it's just a rogue agent is misaligned with the company's goals. And AI cannot provide that kind of value. Will a VP in charge of 100 AI agents be respected as much as a VP in charge of 100 employees? At the end of the day, we're all just monkeys throwing bones in the air in front of a monolith we constru…

True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their d…

Not so fun in real life but I kind of like this as a video game concept

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

#158

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it's going to ruin the global economy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality.

Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up."

Silicon Valley and Redmond make desperate attempts to argue for their own continued relevance.

For Silicon Valley VC, software running on computers cannot be just a tool. It has to cause "disruption". It has to be "eating the world". It has to be a source of "intelligence" that can replace people.

If software and computers are just boring appliances, like yesterday's typewriters, calculators, radios, TVs, etc., then Silicon Valley VC may need to find a new line of work. Expect the endless media hype to continue.

No doubt soda technology is very interesting. But people working at soda companies are not as self-absorbed, detached from reality and overfunded as people working for so-called "tech" companies.

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

#159

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

darth_avocado wrote: post #51
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…

> 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.

ML models don't make fully informed decisions and will not until AGI is created. They can make biased guesses at best and have no means of self-directed inquiry to integrate new information with an understanding of its meaning. People employed in a decision making capacity are safe, whether that's managing people or building a bridge from a collection of parts and construction equipment.

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

#160

Post by const_cast »

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…

> What AI is going to wipe out is white collar jobs where people sleepwalk through the working day and carelessly half ass every task.

The only reason this existed in the first place is because measuring performance is extremely difficult, and becomes more difficult the more complex a person's job is.

AI won't fix that. So even if you eliminate 50% of your employees, you won't be eliminating the bottom 50%. At worst, and probably what happens on average, your choices are about as good as random choice. So you end up with the same proportion of shitty workers as you had before. At worst worst, you actively select the poorest workers because you have some shitty metrics, which happens more often than we'd all like to think.

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