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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

#361

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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…

> tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent

But are those really the same? You're not paying the tax agent to give you the advice per se: even before Gemini, you could do your own research for free. You're really paying the tax agent to provide you advice that you can trust without having to go to the extra steps of doing deep research.

One of the most important bits of information I get from my tax agent is, "is this likely to get me audited if we do it?" It's going to be quite some time before I trust AI to answer that correctly.

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

#362

Post by NeutralCrane »

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…

> 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.

Have you somehow managed to avoid the last several decades of human-sourced dieting advice?

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

#363

Post by freedomben »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #361
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…

> tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent But are those really the same? You're not paying the tax agent to give you the advice per se: even before Gemini, you could do your own research for free. You're really paying the tax agent to provide you advice that you can trust without having to go to the extra steps of doing deep research. One of the most important bits of info…

Also, frequently you're buying some protection by using the licensed agent. If they give you bad advice, there's a person to go to and in the most extreme cases, maybe file a lawsuit or insurance claim against.

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

#364

Post by jmacd »

I am currently dealing with a relatively complex legal agreement. It's about 30 pages. I have a lawyer working on it who I consider the best in the country for this domain.

I was able to pre-process the agreement, clearly understand most of the major issues, and come up with a proposed set of redlines all relatively easily. I then waited for his redlines and then responded asking questions about a handful of things he had missed.

I value a lawyer being willing to take responsibility for their edits, and he also has a lot of domain specific transactional knowledge that no LLM will have, but I easily saved 10 hours of time so far on this document.

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

#365

Post by kubb »

BoredPositron wrote: post #297
voxl wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We were the stochastic parrots all along.

And because we are very smart, so must be it.

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

#367

Post by rightbyte »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #329
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call." What call. Maybe some readers miss the (perhaps subtle) difference between "Generative AI is not ..." and "Generative Ai is not going to ..." Then first can be based on fact, e.g., what has happened so far. The second is based on pure speculation. No one knows what will happen in the future. HN is continually being flooded with speculation,…

> "Generative AI is not ..." But here's the thing - there is already plenty of documented proof of individuals losing their job to ChatGPT. This is an article from 2 years ago : https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki... Early on in a paradigm shift, when you have small moves, or people are still trying to figure out the tech, it's likely that individual moves are hard to distinguish from noise.…

> economic analyses done that said it took decades for the PC to have a positive impact on productivity

I honestly think computers have a net negative productivity impact in many organizations. Maybe even "most".

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

#368

Post by tgv »

mg wrote: post #65
tgv wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got no idea what you're going on about, but 97% of the Earth isn't empty in any useful sense. For starters, almost 70% is ocean. There are also large parts which are otherwise uninhabitable, and large parts which have agricultural use. Buses don't go to uninhabited places, since that's costs too much. Every five minutes is a frequency which no form of public transport can afford.

The nature of technological progress is that it makes formerly uninhabitable areas inhabitable. Costs of buses are mostly the driver. Which will go away. The rest is mostly building and maintaining them. Which will be done by robots. The rest is energy. The sun sends more energy to earth in an hour than humans use in a year.

I've done a quick check on the financial statement 2023 of the Amsterdam public transport company, and personnel (which is absolutely not just drivers) is 1/3 of the total.

And use of solar energy is absolutely unrelated to doubling the living areal. That can, and should, be done anyway.

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

#369

Post by jaredklewis »

jrflowers wrote: post #356
jaredklewis wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline is about wages and jobs. It’s very possible that AI could result in time savings of 50% of work hours in a week and still have no impact on wages or jobs. This is because the economy is not a static thing. If one variable changes (productivity), it’s not a given that GDP will remain constant and jobs/wages will consequently be reduced. More likely is that all of the variables are always in flux, reacting…

> It’s very possible that AI could save 50% of work hours in a week and still have no impact on wages or jobs. I like this sentence because it is grammatically and syntactically valid but has the same relationship to reality as say, the muttering of an incantation or spell has, in that it seeks to make the words come true by speaking them. Aside from simply hoping that, if somebody says it it could be true, “If every…

The cited statistics is in reference to time saved (as a percent of work hours), not a reduction in paid working hours.

But more generally, my comment is not absurd; it's a pattern that has played itself out in economic history dozens of times.

Despite the fact that modern textile and clothing machinery are easily 1000x more efficient than weaving cloth and sewing shirts by hand, the modern garment industry employs more people today than that of middle age Europe.

Will AI be the same? I don't know, but it wouldn't be unusual if it was.

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

#370

Post by datpuz »

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…

Nearly every job, even a lot of creative ones, require a degree of accuracy and consistency that gen AI just can't deliver. Until some major breakthrough is achieved, not many people doing real work are in danger.
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