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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

#251

Post by jplusequalt »

solfox wrote: post #67

Extrapolating from my current experience with AI-assisted work: AI just makes work more meaningful. My output has increased 10x, allowing me to focus on ideas and impact rather than repetitive tasks. Now apply that to entire industries and whole divisions of labor: manual data entry, customer support triage, etc. Will people be out of those jobs? Most certainly. But it gives all of us a chance to level up—to focus on…

>The most successful will be those with the best ideas and most inspiring vision.

This has never been the truth of the world, and I doubt AI will make it come to fruition. The most successful people are by and large those with powerful connections, and/or access to capital. There are millions of smart, inspired people alive right now who will never rise above the middle class. Meanwhile kids born in select zip codes will continue to skate by unburdened by the same economic turmoil most people face.

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

#252

Post by Workaccount2 »

lambdaba wrote: post #66
mattlondon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like the writing is on the wall too for other menial and low-value creative jobs too - so basic music and videos - I fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI generated within the next year or two. see Google Veo - they have the tech already and they have YouTube already and they have the ad network already ... Instead of uploading your video ad you already created, you'll just enter a desc…

People will develop an eye for how AI-generated looks and that will make human creativity stand out even more. I'm expecting more creativity and less cookie-cutter content, I think AI generated content is actually the end of it.

>People will develop an eye for how AI-generated looks

People will think they have an eye for AI-generated content, and miss all the AI that doesn't register. If anything it would benefit the whole industry to keep some stuff looking "AI" so people build a false model of what "AI" looks like.

This is like the ChatGPT image gen of last year, which purposely put a distinct style on generated images (that shiny plasticy look). Then everyone had an "eye for AI" after seeing all those. But in the meantime, purpose made image generators without the injected prompts were creating indistinguishable images.

It is almost certain that every single person here has laid eyes on an image already, probably in an ad, that didn't set off any triggers.

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

#253

Post by danans »

johnfn wrote: post #235
akshaybhalotia wrote: post #219

I humbly disagree. I've seen team members and sometimes entire teams being laid off because of AI. It's also not just layoffs, the hiring processes and demand have been affected as well. As an example, many companies have recently shifted their support to "AI first" models. As a result, even if the team or certain team members haven't been fired, the general trend of hiring for support is pretty much down (anecdotal)…

How do you know that these layoffs are the result of AI, rather than AI being a convenient place to lay the blame? I've seen a number of companies go "AI first" and stop hiring or have layoffs (Salesforce comes to mind) but I suspect they would have been in a slump without AI entirely.

> How do you know that these layoffs are the result of AI, rather than AI being a convenient place to lay the blame?

Both of those can be true, because companies are placing bets that AI will replace a lot of human work (by layoffs and reduced hiring), while also using it in the short term as a reason to cut short term costs.

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

#254

Post by catdog »

franticgecko3 wrote: post #158
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring. As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are develo…

I agree with most of your points but this one >I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs No way. NFTs did not make any headway in "the real world": their value proposition was that their cash value was speculative, like most other Blockchain technologies, and that understandably collapsed quickly and brilliantly. Right now developers are using LLMs and they…

LLMs are somewhat useful compared to NFTs and other blockchain bullshit which is nearly completely useless. It will be interesting what happens when the money from the investment bubble dries out and the real costs need to be paid by the users.

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

#255

Post by pydry »

munksbeer wrote: post #149
clarionbell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is deglobalizing. EU has been cutting off from Russia since the war started, and forcing medical industries to reshore since covid. At the same time it has begun drive to remilitarize itself. This means more heavy industry and all of it local. There is brewing conflict across continents. India and Pakistan, Red sea region, South China sea. The list goes on and on. It's time to accept it. The world has moved…

> The world is deglobalizing. We have had thousands of years of globalising. The trend has always been towards a more connected world. I strongly suspect the current Trump movement (and to an extent brexit depending on which brexit version you chose to listen to) will be blips in that continued trend. That is because it doesn't make sense for there to be 200 countries all experts in microchip manufacturing and banana…

>We have had thousands of years of globalising.

It happens in cycles. Globalization has followed deglobalization before and vice versa. It's never been one straight line upward.

>That is because it doesn't make sense for there to be 200 countries all experts in microchip manufacturing and banana growing.

It'll break down into blocs, not 200 individual countries.

Ask Estonia why they buy overpriced LNG from America and Qatar rather than cheap gas from their next door neighbor.

If you think the inability to source high end microchips from anywhere apart from Taiwan is going to prevent a future conflict (the Milton Friedman(tm) golden arches theory) then I'm afraid I've got bad news.

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

#256

Post by black_13 »

BrtByte wrote: post #62
fhd2 wrote: post #9

> The economists found for example that "AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4 percent of workers, including some who do not use the tools themselves." For me, the most interesting takeaway. It's easy to think about a task, break it down into parts, some of which can be automated, and count the savings. But it's more difficult to take into account any secondary consequences from the automation. Sometimes you…

Short-term gains for individuals can gradually hollow out systems that, ironically, worked better when they were a little messy and human

[dead]

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

#257

Post by 5cott0 »

In contrast to statements like the following from the dweebs sucking harry potter's farts out of the less-wrong bubble

>Coding AIs increasingly look like autonomous agents rather than mere assistants: taking instructions via Slack or Teams and making substantial code changes on their own, sometimes saving hours or even days

https://ai-2027.com/

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

#258

Post by zelon88 »

> "My general conclusion is that any story that you want to tell about these tools being very transformative, needs to contend with the fact that at least two years after [the introduction of AI chatbots], they've not made a difference for economic outcomes."

I'm someone who tries to avoid AI tools. But this paper is literally basing its whole assessment off of two things; wages and hours. This is a disingenuous assertion.

Lets assume that I work 8 hours per day. If I am able to automate 1h of my day with AI, does that mean I get to go home 1 hour early? No. Does that mean I get an extra hour of pay? No.

So the assertion that there has been no economic impact assumes that the AI is a separate agent that would normally be paid in wages for time. That is not the case.

The AI is an augmentation for an existing human agent. It has the potential to increase the efficiency of a human agent by n%. So we need to be measuring the impact that is has on effectiveness and efficiency. It will never offset wages or hours. It will just increase the productivity for a given wage or number of hours.

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

#259

Post by calmoo »

throwaway743 wrote: post #244
karpour wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ChatGPT is still good. Try o3.

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

#260

Post by admissionsguy »

jofzar wrote: post #16

Not replacing jobs yet. Seen a whole lot of gen AI deflecting customer questions which would have been previously tickets. That is a reduced ticket volume that would have been taken by a junior support engineer. We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to the level 0 IT support.

I have had AI support agents deflect my questions, but not resolve them. It is more companies ending customer support under the guise of automation than AI obsoleting the support workers.
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