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

cnn.com

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

#181

Post by ironman1478 »

fny wrote: post #50

I think everyone is missing the bigger picture. This is not a matter of whether AI will replace humans whole sale. There are two more predominant effects: 1. You’ll need fewer humans to do the same task. In other forms of automation, this has led to a decrease in employment. 2. The supply of capable humans increases dramatically. 3. Expertise is no longer a perfect moat. I’ve seen 2. My sister nearly flunked a coding…

"I became proficient in Rust in a week". How did you evaluate that if you weren't an expert in Rust to begin with? What does proficient mean to you? Also, are you advocating we get rid of air traffic controllers with AI? How would we train the AI? What model would you use? If you can't solve a safety critical problem from first principles, there is no way an AI should be in the loop. This makes no sense.

Cynically, I'm happy we have this AI generated code. It's gonna create so much garbage and they'll have to pay good senior engineers more money to clean it all up.

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

#182

Post by richardw »

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…

CEO’s will be fine until their customers disappear. Are the AI’s going to click ads and buy iPhones?

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

#183

Post by mlsu »

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.…

I suspect that these "AI layoffs" are really "interest rate" layoffs in disguise.

Software was truly truly insane for a bit there. Straight out of college, no-name CS degree, making $120, $150k (back when $120k really meant $120k)? The music had to stop on that one.

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

#184

Post by geraneum »

leeroihe wrote: post #171
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…

[flagged]

> It's a perversion of the free market

We can, together, overcome such challenges when we accept that "The purpose of a system is what it does".

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

#185

Post by CKMo »

There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do?

Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity and potential to one day be competent, but the time and resource investment to make that happen is too much. I often find myself choosing to just use an AI for work I would have delegated to them, because I need it fast and I need it now. If I handed it off to them I would not get it fast, and I would need to also go through it with them in several back-and-forth feedback-review loops to get it to a state that's usable.

Given they are human, this would push back delivery times by 2-3 business days. Or... I can prompt and handhold an AI to get it done in 3 hours.

Not that I'm saying AI is a god-send, but new grads and entry-level roles are kind of screwed.

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

#186

Post by matteotom »

leeroihe wrote: post #172
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…

The best heuristic is what people are realizing happened with uncheck "skilled" immigration in places like canada (and soon the U.S.). Everyone was sold that we "need these workers" because nobody was willing to work and that they added to GDP. When in reality, there's now significant evidence that all these new arrivals did was put a net drain on welfare, devalue the labor of endemic citizens (regardless of race - i…

Can you provide more details about said "significant evidence"? This seems to be a pretty popular belief, despite being contrary to generally accepted economics, and I've yet to see good evidence for it.

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

#187

Post by horns4lyfe »

abletonlive wrote: post #176
leeroihe wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Thanks for saying it out loud. I meet a lot of people like you that think the same way as part of my job and they aren't willing to say it out loud. It's about protecting your work, even if an LLM can do it better. The only way an LLM can devalue your work is if it can do it better than you. And I don't just mean quality, I mean as a function of cost/quality/time. Anyway, we can be enemies I don't care - I've been ge…

lol “I do care, but not enough to actually care”

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

#188

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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.…

This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were in tech that are having trouble getting hired now are in people who were in those "adjacent" roles - think agile coaches, TPMs, etc. (but I have a ton of sympathy for these folks - many of them worked hard for years and built their skills - but these roles were always somewhat "optional").

I'd also highlight that beyond over-hiring being responsible for the downturn in tech employment, I think offshoring is way more responsible for the reduction in tech than AI when it comes to US jobs. Video conferencing tech didn't get really good and ubiquitous (especially for folks working from home) until the late teens, and since then I've seen an explosion of offshore contractors. With so many folks working remotely anyway, what does it matter if your coworker is in the same city or a different continent, as long as there is at least some daily time overlap (which is also why I've seen a ton of offshoring to Latin America and Europe over places like India).

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

#189

Post by geraneum »

drewcon wrote: post #106
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans are not familiar with exponential change so they have almost no ability to manage through exponential change. Its an apt comparison. The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.

> Humans are not familiar with exponential change

Humans are. We have tools to measure exponential growth empirically. It was done for COVID (i.e. epidemiologists do that usually) and is done for economy and other aspects of our life. If there's to be exponential growth, we should be able to put it in numbers. "True me bro" is not a good measure.

Edit: typo

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

#190

Post by Jubijub »

cjs_ac wrote: post #122
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.

That is a hugely simplistic take that tells me you never managed people out coordinated work across many people. I mean I a more productive individually at home too, so are probably all my folks in the team. But we don’t always work independently from each others, by which point having some days in common is a massive booster
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