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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

#271

Post by alephnerd »

chongli wrote: post #255
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…

Tomorrow's interns will be accustomed to using AI, will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more. Maybe tomorrow's interns will be "AI experts" who need less hand-holding, but the day after that will be kids who used AI throughout elementary school and high school and know nothing at all, deferring to AI on every question, and have zero ability to tell right from wrong among the AI response…

I mean, a lot of what you mentioned is an issue around critical thinking (and I'm not sure that's something that can be taught), which has always remained an issue in any job market, and to solve that deskilling via automation (AI or traditional) was used to remediate that gap.

But if you deskill processes, it makes it harder to argue in favor of paying the same premium you did before.

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

#272

Post by ls612 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #133
phendrenad2 wrote: post #104

These are the moments that make millionaires. A majority of people believe that AI is going to thoroughly disrupt society. They've been primed to worry about an "AI apocalypse" by Hollywood for their entire lives. The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. You can't get more diametrically opposed than that. If you can correctly guess (or logically determine) which is correct, and bet all of y…

> The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. Why is that the counter-narrative? Doesn't it seem more likely that it will contine to gradually improve, perhaps asymptotically, maybe be more specifically trained in the niches where it works well, and it will just become another tool that humans use? Maybe that's a flop compared to the hype?

At the rate the hyperscalers are increasing capex anything less than 1990s internet era growth rates will not be pretty. So far its been able to sustain those growth rates at the big boy AI companies (look at OpenAI revenue over time) but will it continue? Are we near the end of major LLM advances or are we near the beginning? There are compelling arguments both ways (running out of data is IMO the most compelling bear argument).

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

#273

Post by thfuran »

dlivingston wrote: post #170
PeterStuer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout" Which is the sole reason automation will not make most people obsolete until the VP level themselves are automated.

No, not if the metric by which VPs get clout changes.

The more cloud spend the better. Take 10% of it as a bonus?

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

#274

Post by MattSayar »

hooverd wrote: post #254
MattSayar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you talk about assembly without the internet? I fully understand your point and even agree with it to an extent. LLMs are just another layer of abstraction, like C is an abstraction for asm is an abstraction for binary is an abstraction for transistors... we all stand on the shoulders of giants. We write code to accomplish a task, not the other way around.

I think friction is important to learning and expertise. LLMs are great tools if you view them as compression. I think calculators are a good example, people like to bring those up as a gotcha, but an alarming amount of people are now innumerate on basic receipt math or comprehending orders of magnitude.

It is absolutely essential that we still have experts who know the details. LLMs are just the tide that lifts all ships.

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

#275

Post by yobbo »

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…

> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads

One theory is that the benefit they might be providing over domestic "grads" is lack of prerequisites for promotion above certain levels (language, cultural fit, and so on). For managers, this means the prestige of increased headcount without the various "burdens" of managing "careerists". For example, less plausible competition for career-ladder jobs which can then be reserved for favoured individuals. Just a theory.

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

#276

Post by [deleted] »

paulcole wrote: post #167
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.…

Just curious, did you put yourself in the superfluous category either time?

[deleted]

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

#277

Post by bluefirebrand »

ryandrake wrote: post #115
JKCalhoun wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? You forgot the born-wealthy. I feel increasingly like a rube for having not made my little entrepreneurial side-gigs focused strictly on the ultra-wealthy. I used to sell tube amplifier kits, for example, so you and I could have a really high-end audio experience with a very modest outlay of cash (maybe $300). Instead I should have sold the same amp…

This is the real answer. Eventually, when 95% of us have no jobs because AI and robotics are doing everything, then the rich will just buy and sell from each other. The other 7 billion people are not economically relevant and will just barely participate in the economy. It'll be like the movie Elysium. I briefly did a startup that was kind of a side-project of a guy whose main business was building yachts. Why was he…

> This is the real answer. Eventually, when 95% of us have no jobs because AI and robotics are doing everything, then the rich will just buy and sell from each other

My prediction is that the poor will reinvent the guillotine

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

#279

Post by blibble »

abletonlive wrote: post #265
izabera wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does "huge democratization of work" even mean? what world do you people live in? the current global unemployment rate on my planet is around 5% so that seems pretty democratised already?

What I mean by that is that you have even more power to start your own company or use LLMs to reduce the friction of doing something yourself instead of hiring someone else to do it for you. Just as the internet was a democratization of information, llms are a democratization of output. That may be in terms of production or art. There is clearly a lower barrier for achieving both now compared to pre-llm. If you can't…

> What I mean by that is that you have even more power to start your own company or use LLMs to reduce the friction of doing something yourself instead of hiring someone else to do it for you.

> Previously I would have had to have 1 million dollars sitting around to fund the amount of output that I am able to produce with a $20 subscription to an LLM service.

this sounds like the death of employment and the start of plutocracy

not what I would call "democratisation"

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

#280

Post by tcdent »

gedy wrote: post #225
catigula wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The language I use being from southern California has, on more than one occasion, sparked conversation about it.

Sorry, dude, it's like, all I know.

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