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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

#221

Post by asadotzler »

whynotminot wrote: post #39
codr7 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite is more true imo. It's the AI hype squad that are banking their future on AI magically turning into AGI; because, you know, it surprised us once.

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.

They've so far spent about what the world spent to build out almost all of the broadband internet, the fiber, cable, cellular, etc. If AI companies stop now, about 10 years after they got going, does their effort give us trillions of dollars being added to the economy each year from today forward, like we got for every year after the 10 years of internet build out between 1998 and 2008? I'm not seeing it. If they stop now, that's a trillion dollars in the dumper because no one can afford to operate the existing tech without a continual influx of investor cash that may never pay off.

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

#222

Post by spamizbad »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #22
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?

> 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? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc?

I can tell you for many of those professions their customers are the same white collar workers. The blue collar economy isn't plumbers simply fixing the toilets of the HVAC guy, while the HVAC guy cools the home of the electrician, while...

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

#223

Post by ofjcihen »

ironman1478 wrote: post #181
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…

To your second point we’re seeing a huge comeback of vulnerabilities that we’re “mostly gone”. Things like very basic RCEs and SQLi. This is a great thing for security workers as well.

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

#224

Post by aloknnikhil »

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…

It's not that entry-level jobs / interns are irrelevant. It's more that entry-level has been redefined and it requires significant uplevelling in terms of skills necessary to do a job at that level. That's not necessarily a bad thing. As others have said here, I would be more willing to hand-off more complex tasks to interns / junior engineers because my expectation is they leverage AI to tackle it faster and learn in the process.

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

#225

Post by gedy »

catigula wrote: post #206
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

I was working at a SoCal company a couple years ago (where I’m from), and we had a lot of Chinese and Indian folks. I remember cracking up when one of the Indian fellows pulled me aside and asked me where I was from, because I sounded so different with my accent and lingo. He thought I was from some small European country, lol.

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

#226

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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 where the horrific disloyalty of both companies and employees, comes to bite us in the ass.

The whole idea of interns, is as training positions. They are supposed to be a net negative.

The idea is that they will either remain at the company, after their internship, or move to another company, taking the priorities of their trainers, with them.

But nowadays, with corporate HR, actively doing everything they can to screw over their employees, and employees, being so transient, that they can barely remember the name of their employer, the whole thing is kind of a worthless exercise.

At my old company, we trained Japanese interns. They would often relocate to the US, for 2-year visas, and became very good engineers, upon returning to Japan. It was well worth it.

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

#227

Post by xp84 »

gerad wrote: post #220
brookst wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't agree with this argument at all. Today, you hire an intern and they need a lot of hand-holding, are often a net tax on the org, and they deliver a modest benefit. Tomorrow's interns will be accustomed to using AI, will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more. Their total impact will be much higher. The whole "entry level is screwed" view only works if you assume that companies…

They don't have the experience to tell bad AI responses from good ones.

True, but this becomes less of an issue as AI improves, right? Which is the 'happier' direction to see a problem moving, as if AI doesn't improve, it threatens the jobs less.

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

#228

Post by catigula »

ofjcihen wrote: post #214
catigula wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't even make sense. What corporations do you think will exist in this world? You're not going to sell me your SaaS when I can rent AIs to make faster cheaper IP that I actually own to my exact specifications.

This is always the indicator I look for whether or not someone actually knows what they’re talking about. If you can’t extrapolate on your own thesis you can’t be knowledgeable in the field. Good example was a guy on here who was convinced every company would be ran by one person because of AI. You’d wake up in the morning and decide which products your AI came up with while you slept would be profitable. The obvious…

I agree, I was actually leaving the question open-ended because I can't necessarily scale it all the way up, it's too complex. Why would they even rent me AIs when they can just be every company? Who is "they"?

All that needs to be understood is that the narcissistic grandeur delusion that you will singularly be positioned to benefit from sweeping restructuring of how we understand labor must be forcibly divested from some people's brains.

Only a very select few are positioned to benefit from this and even their benefit is only just mostly guaranteed rather than perfectly guaranteed.

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

#229

Post by ofjcihen »

fny wrote: post #146
BigJono wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I became proficient in Rust in a week, and I picked up Svelte in a day. I’ve written a few shaders too! The code I’ve written is pristine. All those conversations about “should I learn X to be employed” are totally moot. fucking lmao

My point is you learn X and your time to learn and ship Y is dramatically reduced. It would have taken me a month to write the GPU code I needed in Blender, and I had everything working in a week. And none of this was "vibed": I understand exactly what each line does.

It would have taken you a month and you would have been able to understand it 100x more.

LLMs are great but what they really excel at is raising the rates of Dunning-Kruger in every industry they touch.

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

#230

Post by Loughla »

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…

So what happens when you retire and have no replacement because you didn't invest in entry level humans?

This feels like the ultimate pulling up the ladder after you type of move.

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