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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

#281

Post by pc86 »

ponector wrote: post #229
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)…

AI is not hurting jobs in Denmark they said. Software development jobs there have bigger threat: outsourcing to cheaper locations. As well for teachers: it is hard to replace a person supervising kids with a chatbot.

Has any serious person every suggested replacing teachers with chatbots? Seems like a non sequitur.

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

#282

Post by jll29 »

Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and their inability to make good forecasts.

Here's my own take:

- It is far too early to tell.

- The roll-out of ChatGPT caused a mind-set revolution. People now "get" what is possible already now, and it encourages conceiving and persuing new use cases on what people have seen.

- I would not recommend any kinds to train to become a translator for sure; even before LLMs, people were paid penny amounts per word or line translated, and rates plummeted further due to tools that cache translations in previous versions of documents (SDL TRADOS etc.). The same decline not to be expected for interpreters.

- Graphic designers that live from logo designs and similar works may suffer fewer requests.

- Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer programs) will be replaced by LLMs.

- LLMs are a basic technology that now will be embedded into various products, from email clients over word processors to workflow tools and chat clients. This will take 2-3 years, and it may reduce the number of people needed in an office with a secretarial/admin/"analyst" type background after that.

- Industry is already working on the next-gen version of smarter tools for medics and lawyers. This is more of a 3-5 year development, but then again some early adopters started already 2-3 years ago. Once this is rolled out, there will be less demand for assitants-type jobs such as paralegals.

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

#283

Post by bilsbie »

jvanderbot wrote: post #80
bilsbie wrote: post #75

I’m starting to think most jobs are performative. Hiring is just managers wanting more people in the office to celebrate their birthdays. And any important jobs won’t be replaced because managers are too lazy and risk averse to try AI. We may never see job displacement from AI. Did you know bank teller jobs actually increased in the decades following the roll out of ATMs.

You should take time to learn what those jobs are for. You'd be surprised what it takes to keep a business running past any reasonable level of scale.

I’ve worked 10+ of those jobs, guy.

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

#284

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

colinmorelli wrote: post #249
jacamera wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interfac…

I think a lot of problems will be solved by explicitly training on high quality content and probably injecting some expert knowledge in addition

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

#285

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

colinmorelli wrote: post #249
jacamera wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interfac…

The problem is they are being sold as everything solutions. Never write code / google search / talk to a lawyer / talk to a human / be lonely again, all here, under one roof. If LLM marketing was staying in its lane as a creator of convincing text we'd be fine.

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

#286

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #105
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…

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…

LLM is already very useful for a lot of tasks. NFT and most other crypto has never been useful for anything other than speculation.

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

#287

Post by noja »

benterix wrote: post #35
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…

GenAI is like plastic surgery for people who want to look better - looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't show it's plastic surgery. Resume filtering by AI can work well on the first line (if implemented well). However, once we get to the the real interview rounds and I see the CV is full of AI slop, it immediately suggests the candidate will have a loose attitude to checking the work generated by LLMs.…

> looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't show it's plastic surgery.

I think the plastic surgery users disagree here: it seems like visible plastic surgery has become a look, a status symbol.

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

#288

Post by victorbjorklund »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #105
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…

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…

NFT:s never had any real value. It was just speculation hoping some bigger sucker will come after you.

LLM:s create real value. I save a bunch of time coding with an LLM vs without one. Is it perfect? No, but it does not have to be for still creating a lot of value.

Are some people hyping it up too much? Sure, an reality will set in but it wont blow up. It will rather be like the internet. 2000s and everyone thought "slap some internet on it and everything will be solved". They overestimated the (shorterm) value of the internet. But internet was still useful.

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

#289

Post by ravenstine »

JohnMakin wrote: post #279
ravenstine wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's missing the point, and is kind of like saying why bother paying someone to build you a house when there are DIY home building kits. (or why even buy a home when you can live in a van rent-free) The point is that I would have paid for another human being's time. Why? Because I am not a young man anymore, and have little desire to do everything myself at this point. But now, I don't have to pay for someone's tim…

You do pay for it though. Compute isn't free.

Could I really have been more clear?

I am not talking about whether I have to pay more or less for anything. My problem is not paying. I want to pay so that I don't have to make something myself or waste time fiddling with a free template.

What I am proposing is that, in the current day, a human being is less likely to be at the other end of the transaction when I want to spend money to avoid sacrificing my time.

Sure, one can say that whomever is working for one of these AI companies benefits, but they would be outliers and AI is effectively homogenizing labor units in that case. Someone with creative talent isn't going to feasibly spin up a competitive AI business the way they could have started their own business selling their services directly.

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

#290

Post by voxl »

jll29 wrote: post #282

Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and their inability to make good forecasts. Here's my own take: - It is far too early to tell. - The roll-out of ChatGPT caused a mind-set revolution. People now "get" what is possible already now, and it encourages conceiving and persuing new use cases on what people have seen. - I would not recommend any kinds to train to become a translator for sure; even befo…

Name a better duo: software engineering hype cycles and anti-intellectualism
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