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US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

bloomberg.com

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Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#221

Post by nz »

jemmyw wrote: post #209
nz wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each of those employees is a liability, for various reasons, not just financial. Even if their salaries were completely subsidized by the state, there are many problems that come from having a very large number of employees. Firstly, there is more coordination overhead, and that is not great. Secondly, people are very political and very envious, and that has a corrosive effect on, well everything. Thirdly, people are…

I like your take and ideas. Not sure about capped income because that seems like a reward for the capital owning class. I've seen the phenomena of people moving and redoing the same tech idea multiple times. I'm pretty convinced that is a negative for the industry. The seem to move on to get another chance at their idea after it becomes contaminated by reality at each employer, destroying a string of organizations wi…

An alternative to a capped income, would be that every income gets "inflated" by as much as needed until it reaches parity with big-tech incomes, which would require a kind of transnational union, but would have the effect of reversing the direction of extraction. Also, printing that money to inflate the income, would also cause asset-inflation, which also benefits people who own a life-changing amount of capital/assets. But _if_ you could cap asset-prices, then the inflation strategy might work. Note that I have not modeled this particular scenario yet.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#222

Post by dragontamer »

bdangubic wrote: post #215
dragontamer wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was our tax rate that got rid of our WW2 debt? Taxes definitely solved that problem. And it even brought about the golden age of post WW2 US economy. The correct taxes in the correct areas serve as an incentive structure to help encourage businesses and individuals to make good decisions. At least, that's what we did 80 years ago.

Taxes would not make top-10 reasons for post WWII “golden age.” The US Government is at present (without any chances of this being fixed ever again) about the least efficient entity that exists on the Planet Earth and giving it more money will not solve any problem. It will be used though but one of the two political parties to win election(s) and kill any tax law that was previously put in place

That's not what I asked

I asked what was the tax rate that got rid of our WW2 debt.

The golden age thing is an aside. Just a reminder that you can't call 1950s America weak on the world stage.

> The US Government is at present (without any chances of this being fixed ever again) about the least efficient entity that exists on the Planet Earth and giving it more money will not solve any problem

Taxes directly solve the debt and deficit problem. Period.

Let's start with things one step at a time. Now that we've had 40 years of trying to drown the budget in a bathtub (and only ballooning our debt), we should seriously start trying something different.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#223

Post by torben-friis »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188
torben-friis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read the article? This is about professions like paralegals or translators, not engineers.

Whenever articles like this come out, tons of the comments are just general zeitgeist responses about "corporate layoffs that blame AI". Which I think is a particular shame in this instance because I think the article narrows in with some actual good evidence that yes, there are vulnerable roles that AI is wholesale replacing and not leading to a "employees will just do more as they become more productive with AI" ou…

Yeah, its basically a list of the subset of white collar busywork that was mechanical but for some reason not automatable with regular programming.

Some or them like translators or graphic designers are kinda risky. Translating instruction manuals for sure is going the way of the dodo, but there is a ton of work in translating literature that shouldn't go away, it's its own art form. No coincidence that we're still publishing new translations of the Odyssey.

I think the art world has a problem in that they were surviving by making art-adjacent material, where people wanted content more than art and won't care about the loss of quality. Corporate logos, ad jingles, etc.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#224

Post by ls612 »

nradov wrote: post #166
jvanderbot wrote: post #7

> A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025, according to annual data published Friday. That compared with an increase in overall employment of 0.8% over the same period. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup... https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm…

Have past BLS predictions proved accurate?

Yes in the long term. Sometimes they will get surprised by unexpected events (Covid) but you can’t blame them when their tourism and hospitality numbers are wildly wrong when that happens.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#225

Post by LogicFailsMe »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #203
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you just keep right on believing that but I'm on the front lines and we still have plenty of people that need to be laid off and we need a reason so AI is as good a reason as any other.

I'm sure there are some organizations that have yet to correct. Most already have.

In a world where most is logically equivalent to few or some, and it is, this is a weak flex.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#226

Post by dualvariable »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #197
dualvariable wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biden inherited COVID, which required a very accommodating policy response, but then had the AI/LLM spending/hiring boom surprise sort of overlap that, which turned out to be highly inflationary, but nobody was predicting that back in 2021. There really was no winning move to play without precise knowledge of future events. And Pandemic-era stimulus started under Trump (including Trump putting his name on the checks)…

Maybe I need to go back and read some more there but my understanding was that the American Rescue Plan, in tandem with some of the stuff that you mentioned that I probably should’ve emphasized more, really drove inflation to new heights and arguably wasn’t necessary as Covid was winding down. Also a ton of spending on top of that. You’re right though that I should emphasize Trump engaged a lot of the same behaviors.…

Yeah, I probably grossly oversimplified that and forgot about a bunch of other factors. Stimulus was split about 50/50 between Trump and Biden. The ARP probably was a bit too large and contributed something like 1.5% to the eventual inflation spike. A lot of the inflation spike, though, was due to supply shocks, then energy shocks from Ukraine, then "revenge spending" demand shocks as society reopened with not enough goods and a lot of excess savings. Then we had the nascent AI tech hiring boom which was pushing up costs and housing in places like SF and Seattle. By 2024 we were well on our way into the current K-shaped economy with the hypersclar buildout driving inflation due to private sector spending (even in the face of the Fed hiking rates like crazy). Really it is likely that only about ~20% or less of the inflation under Biden was due to government spending.

It is true in 2024 that there was a hell of a lot of gaslighting going on that the economy was great for everyone and that we were having a "vibecession" and praising "Bidenomics" when the K-shaped economy was already appearing, and this DNC messaging effort clearly failed. But it also didn't have a lot to do with Biden, and arguably pushing the message that implicitly accepted that Biden was entirely responsible for the economic conditions of the previous 4 years was flawed and factually inaccurate messaging. Maybe it wouldn't have been possible to argue otherwise, but I do remember a lot of Democrats who argued that Trump's economy had relatively little to do with any of his policies in his first term. I similarly think that Biden had relatively little control over the economy in his term.

Currently, though, Trump pretty well owns this economy due to what his war with Iran is doing. He doesn't own the background of what is going on with AI and hyperscalar spending and the likely bubble and the inflationary pressure and K-shaped economy (although Republican tax cuts over the past 45+ years are cumulatively responsible for the K-shaped economy and Trump owns some of that), but Trump is doing his best to just pour gas over the economy and light it all on fire.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#227

Post by readthenotes1 »

Xeoncross wrote: post #156
cdrnsf wrote: post #141

Every interaction I have with AI where I previously would’ve interacted with a person is worse. Whether that’s something mundane like scheduling an appointment, use at a doctor’s office, chat support. I imagine it’s cheaper for the company deploying it, but it’s all bad. It lines up with companies being more concerned with investors than actual users and customers though.

Ah, but it's cheaper. Replace "AI" with "auto parts" or "store food" and you see the same thing. Replace "AI" with "police force" or "contractors" and it's the same thing. Why is everyone and everything getting worse? A sort of "Prisoner's dilemma" I suppose: no one wants to take a stand and lose their business edge just for principles sake.

[flagged]

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#228

Post by G0lg0thvn »

nradov wrote: post #206
curioussavage wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a ridiculous view. It’s literally everywhere. Wanting to make money is one thing. Complete disregard for how you make it is another.

They're not doing anything illegal.

Naive at best; Your statement doesn’t exclude greed as a driving factor. The legality of actions have nothing to do with the morality underlying them.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#229

Post by fidotron »

nradov wrote: post #161
fidotron wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time this was compounded by a "better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in" strategy, where you hired people to deny them to your competition and then invented things for them to do. If it turns out whole segments are in fact pointless then the endgame could be truly nuts.

That was never a major factor in employment statistics. Only a handful of the most profitable tech companies ever had the financial resources to even attempt that strategy, and only for a small fraction of their employees.

At FAANG it has been huge. Whole departments/products/divisions level, including many of the most expensive employees.

There are reasons so many products get made to go precisely nowhere, because no one ever seriously intended for them to do otherwise. There are even cases where things succeeded by accident which were not supposed to and then have to be redone properly.

As observed in another (more eloquent) comment here making the same point

> In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.

This is completely right.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#230

Post by Forgeties79 »

dualvariable wrote: post #226
Forgeties79 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I need to go back and read some more there but my understanding was that the American Rescue Plan, in tandem with some of the stuff that you mentioned that I probably should’ve emphasized more, really drove inflation to new heights and arguably wasn’t necessary as Covid was winding down. Also a ton of spending on top of that. You’re right though that I should emphasize Trump engaged a lot of the same behaviors.…

Yeah, I probably grossly oversimplified that and forgot about a bunch of other factors. Stimulus was split about 50/50 between Trump and Biden. The ARP probably was a bit too large and contributed something like 1.5% to the eventual inflation spike. A lot of the inflation spike, though, was due to supply shocks, then energy shocks from Ukraine, then "revenge spending" demand shocks as society reopened with not enough…

I think this is the first nuanced conversation about Biden and Trump I’ve had in years and I greatly appreciate it
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