Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 1001 posts

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

#201

Post by timr »

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 think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers.

Uh, not to be petty, but the growth was not exponential — neither in retrospect, nor given what was knowable at any point in time. About the most aggressive, correct thing you could’ve said at the time was “sigmoid growth”, but even that was basically wrong.

If that’s your example, it’s inadvertently an argument for the other side of the debate: people say lots of silly, unfounded things at Peak Hype that sound superficially correct and/or “smart”, but fail to survive a round of critical reasoning. I have no doubt we’ll look back on this period of time and find something similar.

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

#202

Post by mjburgess »

elktown wrote: post #164

Tech has a big problem of selective critical thinking due to a perpetual gold rush causing people to adopt a stockbroker mentality of not missing out on the next big thing - be it the next subfield like AI, the next cool tech that you can be an early adopter on etc. But yeah, nothing new under the sun; it's corruption.

In many spheres today "thought leadership" is a kind of marketing and sales activity. It is no wonder then that no one can think and no one can lead: either would be an fatal to healthy sales.

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

#203

Post by abletonlive »

CKMo wrote: post #185

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…

This is a big issue in the short term but in the long term I actually think AI is going to be a huge democratization of work and company building.

I spend a lot of time encouraging people to not fight the tide and spend that time intentionally experimenting and seeing what you can do. LLMs are already useful and it's interesting to me that anybody is arguing it's just good for toy applications. This is a poisonous mindset and results in a potentially far worse outcome than over-hyping AI for an individual.

I am wondering if I should actually quit a >500K a year job based around LLM applications and try to build something on my own with it right now.

I am NOT someone that thinks I can just craft some fancy prompt and let an LLM agent build me a company, but I think it's a very powerful tool when used with great intention.

The new grads and entry level people are scrappy. That's why startups before LLMs liked to hire them. (besides being cheap, they are just passionate and willing to make a sacrifice to prove their worth)

The ones with a lot of creativity have an opportunity right now that many of us did not when we were in their shoes.

In my opinion, it's important to be technically potent in this era, but it's now even more important to be creative - and that's just what so many people lack.

Sitting in front of a chat prompt and coming up with an idea is hard for the majority of people that would rather be told what to do or what direction to take.

My message to the entry-level folks that are in this weird time period. It's tough, and we can all acknowledge that - but don't let cynicism shackle you. Before LLMs, your greatest asset was fresh eyes and the lack of cynicism brought upon by years of industry. Don't throw away that advantage just because the job market is tough. You, just like everybody else, have a very powerful tool and opportunity right in front of you.

The amount of people trying to convince you that it's just a sham and hype means that you have less competition to worry about. You're actually lucky there's a huge cohort of experienced people that have completely dismissed LLMs because they were too egotistical to spend meaningful time evaluating it and experimenting with it. LLM capabilities are still changing every 6 months-1 year. Anybody that has decided concretely that there is nothing to see here is misleading you.

Even in the current state of LLM if the critics don't see the value and how powerful it is mostly a lack of imagination that's at play. I don't know how else to say it. If I'm already able to eliminate someone's role by using an LLM then it's already powerful enough in its current state. You can argue that those roles were not meaningful or important and I'd agree - but we as a society are spending trillions on those roles right now and would continue to do so if not for LLMs

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

#204

Post by Terr_ »

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 think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers.

Compare: "Whenever I think of skeptics dismissing completely novel and unprecedented outcomes occurring by mechanisms we can't clearly identify or prove (will) exist... I think of skeptics who dismissed an outcome that had literally hundreds of well-studied historical precedents using proven processes."

You're right that humans don't have a good intuition for non-linear growth, but that common thread doesn't heal over those other differences.

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

#205

Post by pc86 »

mjburgess wrote: post #191
CKMo wrote: post #185

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…

This is always the case though. A factor of 50x productivity between expert and novice is small. Consider how long it take you to conduct foot surgery vs. a food surgeon -- close to a decade of medical school + medical experience -- just for a couple hours of work. There have never been that many businesses able to hire novices for this reason.

This is a big part of why a lot of developers' first 1-3 jobs are small mom & pop shops of varying levels of quality, almost none of which have "good" engineering cultures. Market rate for a new grad dev might be X, it's hard to find an entry level job at X but mom & pop business who needs 0.7 FTE developers is willing to pay 0.8X and even though the owner is batshit insane it's not a bad deal for the 22 and 23 year olds willing to do it.

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

#206

Post by catigula »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188
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 hir…

Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions.

Both sides of the aisle retreated from domestic labor protection for their own different reasons so the US labor force got clobbered.

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

#207

Post by cjs_ac »

Jubijub wrote: post #190
cjs_ac wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is a spectrum: at one extremity is mandatory in-office presence every day; at the other is a fully-remote business. For any given individual, and for any given team, the approach needs to be placed on that spectrum according to what it is that that individual or team does. I'm not arguing in favour of any position on that spectrum; I'm arguing against blanket mandates that don't involve any consideration for what individuals in the business do.

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

#208

Post by mjburgess »

pc86 wrote: post #205
mjburgess wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is always the case though. A factor of 50x productivity between expert and novice is small. Consider how long it take you to conduct foot surgery vs. a food surgeon -- close to a decade of medical school + medical experience -- just for a couple hours of work. There have never been that many businesses able to hire novices for this reason.

This is a big part of why a lot of developers' first 1-3 jobs are small mom & pop shops of varying levels of quality, almost none of which have "good" engineering cultures. Market rate for a new grad dev might be X, it's hard to find an entry level job at X but mom & pop business who needs 0.7 FTE developers is willing to pay 0.8X and even though the owner is batshit insane it's not a bad deal for the 22 and 23 year…

Sure. I mean perhaps, LLMs will accelerate a return to a more medieval culture in tech where you "have to start at 12 to be any good". Personally, I think that's a good (enough) idea. By 22, I'd at least a decade of experience; my first job at 20 was as a contractor for a major national/multinational.

Programming is a craft, and just like any other, the best time to learn it is when it's free to learn.

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

#209

Post by whattheheckheck »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #159
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.

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.

Has anyone made a fully informed decision?

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

#210

Post by mechagodzilla »

CKMo wrote: post #185

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…

Interns and new grads have always been a net-negative productivity-wise in my experience, it's just that eventually (after a small number of months/years) they turn into extremely productive more-senior employees. And interns and new grads can use AI too. This feels like asking "Why hire junior programmers now that we have compilers? We don't need people to write boring assembly anymore." If AI was genuinely a big productivity enhancer, we would just convert that into more software/features/optimizations/etc, just like people have been doing with productivity improvements in computers and software for the last 75 years.
Post reply on HN