371–380 of 1001 posts
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If someone is going to suggest UBI, I wish they could explain to me how Reservations have failed so hard in the U.S.. I think that would be a cautionary tale.
Decades and decades of mistreatment are not going to be remedied by some modest handouts. That doesn't mean that UBI as a whole could never work.
There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity…
Are you honestly trying to tell us that the code you receive from an AI is not requiring any of your time to review and tweak and is 100% correct every time and ready to deploy into your code base with no changes what so ever? You my friend must be a steely eyed missile man of prompting
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.…
Agree, but two questions: First, is AI really a better scapegoat? "Reducing headcount due to end of ZIRP" maybe doesn't sound great, but "replacing employees with AI" sounds a whole lot worse from a PR perspective (to me anyway). Second, are companies actually using AI as the scapegoat? I haven't followed it too closely, but I could imagine that layoffs don't say anything about AI at all, and it's mostly media and FU…
whereas "AI" is intuitively an external force; it's much harder to assign blame to company leadership.
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.…
> But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway. I think quotes around "real value" would be appropriate as well. Consider all the great engineering it took to create Netflix, valued at $500b - which achieves what SFTP does for free.
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True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their d…
> Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes The data does not support this. The businesses with the highest market caps are the ones with the highest earnings. https://companiesmarketcap.com/ Sort by # of employees and you get a list of companies with lower market caps.
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.…
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Tragedy of the commons: no one being able to buy stuff is a problem for everyone, but being able to save just a bit more by getting rid of your workforce is a huge advantage for your business.
“tragedy of the commons” is treated as a Theory of Human Nature when it’s really a religious principle underlying how we operate our society.
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Whenever I think about AI and labor, I can't help thinking about David Graeber's [Bullshit Jobs]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs ). And there's multiple confounding factors at play. Yes, lots of jobs are bullshit, so maybe AI is a plausible excuse to downside and gain efficiency. But also the dynamic that causes the existence of bullshit jobs hasn't gone away. In fact, assuming AI does actually provide m…
Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping peopl…
Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut line, and we just didn't have enough people to do them.
I don't know where all these companies are that have half their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never worked at one.
What's more likely? 1. Companies are (for reasons unknown) hiring all these people and not having them do anything useful, or 2. These people actually do useful things, but HN commenters don't understand those jobs and simply conclude they're doing nothing?
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> If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc? It's easy to imagine a world in which there are way less white collar workers and everything else is pretty much the same. It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're bett…
> All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc? I can tell you for many of those professions their customers are the same white collar workers. The blue collar economy isn't plumbers simply fixing the toilets of the HVAC guy, while the HVAC guy cools the home of the electrician, while...
That is exactly what blue collar economy used to be though: people making and fixing stuff for each other. White collar jobs is a new thing.
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> 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 be…
LLM bulls will say that they are going to generate synthetic data that is better than the real data.