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Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

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Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#241

Post by jacamera »

dingnuts wrote: post #227
colinmorelli wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real value of AI that, I think, we're just starting to get into. It's less about automating workflows that are inherently unstructured (I think that we're likely to continue wanting humans for this for some time). It's more about automating workflows that are already procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health, finance, etc). U…

"Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's bullshit[0]. > Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive. and I would know, I've had to use one to help me manage an ea…

Exactly! All LLMs do is “hallucinate”. Sometimes the output happens to be right, same as a broken clock.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#242

Post by jplusequalt »

mg wrote: post #18

One thing nobody seems to discuss is: In the future, we will do a lot more. In other terms: There will be a lot more work. So even if robots do 80% of it, if we do 10x more - the amount of work we need humans to do will double. We will write more software, build more houses, build more cars, planes and everything down the supply chain to make these things. When you look at planet earth, it is basically empty. While r…

Yes, lets extract even more resources from the Earth when we're already staring down the barrel of long term environmental issues.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#243

Post by freehorse »

karpour wrote: post #232
colinmorelli wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real value of AI that, I think, we're just starting to get into. It's less about automating workflows that are inherently unstructured (I think that we're likely to continue wanting humans for this for some time). It's more about automating workflows that are already procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health, finance, etc). U…

I recently tried looking up something about local tax law in ChatGPT. It confidently told me a completely wrong rule. There are lots of sources for this, but since some probably unknowingly spread misinformation, ChatGPT just treated it as correct. Since I always verify what ChatGPT spits out, it wasn't a big deal for me, just a reminder that it's garbage in, garbage out.

Yeah, I also find very often llms say sth wrong just because they found it in the internet. The problem is that we know to not trust a random website, but LLMs make wrong info more believable. So the problem in some sense is not exactly the LLM, as they pick up on wrong stuff people or "people" have written, but they are really bad at figuring these errors out and particularly good at covering them or backing them up.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#244

Post by throwaway743 »

karpour wrote: post #232
colinmorelli wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real value of AI that, I think, we're just starting to get into. It's less about automating workflows that are inherently unstructured (I think that we're likely to continue wanting humans for this for some time). It's more about automating workflows that are already procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health, finance, etc). U…

I recently tried looking up something about local tax law in ChatGPT. It confidently told me a completely wrong rule. There are lots of sources for this, but since some probably unknowingly spread misinformation, ChatGPT just treated it as correct. Since I always verify what ChatGPT spits out, it wasn't a big deal for me, just a reminder that it's garbage in, garbage out.

Chatgpt isn't any good these days. Try switching to Claude or Gemini 2.5 pro.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#245

Post by Workaccount2 »

Zanfa wrote: post #121
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Google's earnings call - within the last couple of weeks - they explicitly stated that their stronger-than-expected growth in the quarter was due to a large unexpected increase in search revenues[0]. That's a distinct line-item from their ads business. >Google’s core search and advertising business grew almost 10 per cent to $50.7bn in the quarter, surpassing estimates for between 8 per cent and 9 per cent.[0] The…

> The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to get outdated Quite the opposite. It's never been more true. I'm not saying using LLMs for search is better, but as it stands right now, SEO spammers have beat Google, since whatever you search for, the majority of results are AI slop. Their increased revenue probably comes down to the fact that they no longer show any search results in the first screenful at…

Can you give an example of an everyday person search that generates a majority of AI slop?

If anything my frustration with google search comes from it being much harder to find niche technical information, because it seems google has turned the knobs hard towards "Treat search queries like they are coming from the average user, so show them what they are probably looking for over what they are actually looking for."

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#246

Post by freehorse »

decimalenough wrote: post #88

I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would…

> And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out.

Sounds like reddit could also do a good job at this, though nobody said "reddit will replace your jobs". Maybe because not as many people actively use reddit as they use generative AI now, but I cannot imagine any other reason than that.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#247

Post by dml2135 »

atrus wrote: post #169
tempfile wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people actually behave this way with you? If someone presents a plan confidently without explaining why, I tend to trust them less (even people like doctors, who just happen to start with a very high reputation). In my experience people are very forthcoming with things they don't know.

Someone can present a plan, explain that plan, and be completely wrong. People are forthcoming with things they know they don't know. It's the stuff that they don't know that they don't know that get them. And also the things they think they know, but are wrong about. This may come as a shock, but people do make mistakes.

And if someone presents a plan, explains that plan, and is completely wrong repeatedly and often, in a way that makes it seem like they don’t even have any concept whatsoever of what they may have done wrong, wouldn’t you start to consider at some point that maybe this person is not a reliable source of information?

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#248

Post by jplusequalt »

solfox wrote: post #159
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it actually works like that, it'll be just like all labor-saving innovations, going back to the loom and printing press and the like; people will lose their job, but it'll be local / individual tragedies, the large scale economic impact will likely be positive. It'd still suck to lose your job / vocation though, and some of those won't be able to find a new job.

Honestly, much of work under capitalism is meaningless (see: The Office). The optimistic take is that many of those same paper-pushing roles could evolve into far more meaningful work—with the right training and opportunity (also AI). When the car was invented, entire industries tied to horses collapsed. But those that evolved, leveled up: Blacksmiths became auto mechanics and metalworkers, etc. As a creatively minde…

>the future of work is entrepreneurial. It’s creative.

How is this the conclusion you've come to when the sectors impacted most heavily by AI thus far have been graphic design, videography, photography, and creative writing?

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#249

Post by colinmorelli »

jacamera wrote: post #241
dingnuts wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's bullshit[0]. > Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive. and I would know, I've had to use one to help me manage an ea…

Exactly! All LLMs do is “hallucinate”. Sometimes the output happens to be right, same as a broken clock.

I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd. Surely we all are aware that AI has always been probabilistic in nature. Very few people seem to go around talking about how their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but just sometimes happens to be right.

Just like every other form of ML we've come up with, LLMs are imperfect. They get things wrong. This is more of an indictment of yeeting a pure AI chat interface in front of a consumer than it is an indictment of the underlying technology itself. LLMs are incredibly good at doing some things. They are less good at other things.

There are ways to use them effectively, and there are bad ways to use them. Just like every other tool.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#250

Post by lysecret »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #15

My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting" and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipe…

Funny you call it value I call it inefficiency.
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