White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit • Hacker News Board

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#31

Post by odyssey7 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:43 AM UTC

intellectronica wrote: post #4

Every morning the turkey rejoiced and said to himself "oh joy, I'm such a lucky turkey, I don't have to do anything, the food is plentiful, I just eat and shoot the breeze the whole day long, what an awesome life!" Until one morning, the day before thanksgiving, the turkey rejoiced about the awesome day he's about to have ... just to be picked up 5 minutes later and dragged to the slaughterhouse.

It’s a compelling story; but what you’re describing is, to the turkey, a black swan event, rather than an obvious inevitability that all the other turkeys keep telling the turkey is going to happen.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#32

Post by rspoerri » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:44 AM UTC

People tend to forget how fast technological development advances. Even if you lived trough it you tend to forget how recently the world looked very different.

- before 2012 there was no smartphone

- before 2001 there was no wikipedia

- before 1995 less then 10 percent of the rich country home users had internet

- before 2023 there was no ai available to home users.

Hardware has been getting faster by a factor of 100 in 10 years and ~10‘000 in 20 years. Ai currently develops faster because of a combination of software and hardware improvements. Even if the best current system is only right 1/100 times right now, its likely nearly allways accurate in 10 years.

I also like to remind people that the phone i am writing this on (iphone 12), has the same computing power as the earth simulator in 2003. that was the fastest computer on the earth back then.

Imagine this development and think what changes might come.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#33

Post by n4r9 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:44 AM UTC

CodeCompost wrote: post #25

chrz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets go back to waterfall even harder and write the super correct and detailed design doc.

You jest but this is precisely what we have done. Our customers have downright rejected SCRUM. It is considered a waste of money.

At a recent AI workshop management made clear that they see AI as rendering sprints and scrums obsolete, that Kanban makes a lot more sense, and that estimating effort/story-points is also becoming meaningless. Which is a strong silver lining if you ask me.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#34

Post by pydry » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:44 AM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #15

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was str…

Of the companies that I've worked with that made significant use of call centres they generally fall into three groups:

* Customer wants the human touch

* The company's systems were broken and the customer wouldnt have called at all if they could quickly and easily do what they wanted online.

* Customers are routinely furious and want to complain and/or understand and the company wants to brush them off.

AI doesnt help the first two, it only helps with deflection (what they call the last one).

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#35

Post by keiferski » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

Bifurcation is the right model and it’s already happening:

For things where the end customer doesn’t care if they’re interacting with an AI, reading content by an AI, etc. – or if the company doesn’t care what the customer thinks (see: automated phone customer support lines for the last twenty years) – the work will be replaced by AI work. Examples are any kind of rote documentation, generic digital asset creation like blog images, low level customer support, and most things where the company doesn’t really care about the customer, because the company is getting paid regardless.

If it does matter what the end customer thinks, the role will become increasingly humanistic in nature. Examples are high-end enterprise sales, personality and expertise-driven media and content, and anything where being “revealed” as an AI is perceived negatively.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#36

Post by windward » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

intellectronica wrote: post #4

Every morning the turkey rejoiced and said to himself "oh joy, I'm such a lucky turkey, I don't have to do anything, the food is plentiful, I just eat and shoot the breeze the whole day long, what an awesome life!" Until one morning, the day before thanksgiving, the turkey rejoiced about the awesome day he's about to have ... just to be picked up 5 minutes later and dragged to the slaughterhouse.

So I get to continue the hedonistic life without having to plan for a long slaughter? That's not such a bad way to go.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#37

Post by Stromgren » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

Madmallard wrote: post #5

robotswantdata wrote: post #2

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive. Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

Are you sure about that one? What exactly will these agents be able to do with enough consistency, accuracy, and reliability that people will want to hire them over humans? In my experience with even the most basic implementation of agents, i.e. customer service chat bots, I literally cannot stand interacting with them even once. They are extremely unhelpful and I will hang up or immediately ask to speak to a human.

I’ve been involved in building a system that reads structured data from a special form of contracts from a specific industry. Prices, clauses, pick up, delivery, etc. A couple hundred datapoints per contract. We had many discussions around how to present and sell an imperfect system. The thing is, the potential customers are today transcribing the contracts manually and we quickly realized that people make a ton of mistakes doing that. It became obvious when we were working on assertion datasets ourself. It’s not a perfect system and you have to consider how you use the data (aggregating for price indexing for instance), but we’re actually doing better than what people are achieving when they have to transcribe data for hours a day.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#38

Post by robotswantdata » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

Madmallard wrote: post #5

robotswantdata wrote: post #2

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive. Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

Are you sure about that one? What exactly will these agents be able to do with enough consistency, accuracy, and reliability that people will want to hire them over humans? In my experience with even the most basic implementation of agents, i.e. customer service chat bots, I literally cannot stand interacting with them even once. They are extremely unhelpful and I will hang up or immediately ask to speak to a human.

The voice agents in development right now feel 100x the current chatbots deployed by companies.

I had same opinion till a few months ago, now would prefer the [redacted company so as to not give free marketing] AI agent. You’ll start seeing this wave in around 3-6 months as most are in trial

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#39

Post by lelanthran » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

To be perfectly honest, the majority of work is going to see a restructure soon anyway.

"Triaging by LLM before sending task to any human" can work for almost anything, not just support calls. On another story I saw someone mention that they'd like something like an ad-blocker, but for content - a "content-blocker". Not too hard running even a local model that, via a browser extension, scnas the current page and places it into one of several bins: Read verbatim, summarise with ChatAI, Ignore completely, Read and mark for re-reading.

Software dev? Bin a ticket into "complex", "simple", "talk to lead dev".

Software proposal? Bin the proposal into "CotS available", "FOSS available", "Quick dev", "Too costly to proceed".

Bookkeeping? Accounting? They all have tasks that can be binned.

What does this all mean, I hear you ask? Well, you no longer need as many employees if some of the bins are "ChatAI and/or agent can complete this" with human review.

So, yeah, a lot of people are going to be out of work if this works like they say it does.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#40

Post by skywhopper » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:47 AM UTC

faangguyindia wrote: post #9

wait what? I am in india and jobs are being lost by thousands everyday in IT field. infact, i go and implement dumb AI models in many companies and executives immediately show "how many people they can fire with this advancement".

There is such a mind-bogglingly huge amount of waste in IT services worldwide, particularly in the consulting and offshoring areas, that big swings, up and down, in that area don’t actually have anything to do with what works well or doesn’t. Decisions are made to offshore work or drop offshore contracts based on the latest hype cycle, not whether it is effective or worthwhile.

So while there may be lots of consultants losing their jobs, that’s not because AI tools do the work better. It’s because management thinks investors will accept the story that AI tools will do the work better and save money. Management, and investors, don’t know, can’t judge, and honestly don’t actually care if it’s better or worse. And they run things so poorly it would be impossible to tell anyway.