What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

I urge caution when examining statistics, as even with the best will in the world… well, the Datasaurus dozen was created for good reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datasaurus_dozen

Tesla have been claiming the stats show superiority of their AI vs. humans since at least 2016: https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/06/tesla-says-drivers-using-a...

The lesson from the Datasaurus should be to ask detailed questions, e.g.:

• exposure bias: is the AI used more or less in certain conditions, on certain kinds of roads

• sharpshooter: shouldn't need to ask this one of a public company, but given regular headlines: how many crashes happen a few seconds after it switches itself off?

• driver demographics: most severe accidents by humans are due to impairment or being a new driver, is the AI actually better than an experienced-and-not-impaired driver?

• the nature of the failure modes: as a cyclist I've been hit by a car that stopped at a junction and pulled out into me, this was not fun but no serious injury; this is very different to any of the highway speed fatalities.

> Separately from the data, it is just so nice to hit a button and sit back and relax for the entirety of the drive.

No doubt. Myself, this is why I have been happy to live in a city with a good public transport network and use that instead of driving.

> I look forward to the other car companies catching up

My point is that they are in some important senses already ahead. Less optimised for the headline, more optimised for the real dream.

I am aware of its use. The point is: I *am* aware, even if the creator doesn't say so.

5 years is an eternity with the current rate of change of AI. Its development is already turning into an international geopolitical issue, even though the implications for mere task-level economics have yet to settle.

Even if it wasn't, 2031 (ish) happens to be roughly when a lot of long-term exponential growth trends all happen to reach points that suggest the assumptions behind them have to break, like more than 100% of electricity being made by PV etc.; the only thing I am confident of about AI is that even its current trend line on METR were to continue it becomes physically unmeasurable sooner than that. This also means nobody will pay Tim Sweeney so much as a single Zimbabwe Dollar in royalties for games written in the Unreal Engine.

Half the game logic I played on Kongregate back in the heyday of Flash games is now one-to-few shot prompting on Claude even if you don't pay for it, and even if you don't pay for ChatGPT you can get assets at that scale pretty quickly. I know 'cause I've tried. It's just, like every blog post whose headings contain emoji, every time there's a 6-7 word paragraph a little too bombastic about how important something is, every time I read or hear "you're absolutely right" or "delve" or "nuance", and yes hear even when the lips those words pass through happen to be human…

…the way most people prompt these models, I can tell. Most people don't bother to ask it to speak like a posh victorian, or draw poster art like it's the 60s, and they don't check and reject when the shadow on the foreground of the moon base doesn't match the Earth in the sky. And because humans are lazy and greedy, so even if the visual models gets as good as the finest artists and the language models as good as Nobel laureates, we're going to learn the style of whatever the default output of those models is when prompted by lazy and greedy humans. And we'll hate it, because it's a cliché, and we avoid those like the plague.

Your perspective is one that assumes a single entity is using AI, rather than disparate groups of people working on disparate problem spaces/topics, each with different "intelligence" thresholds for them to say "good enough". The goal post isn't changing, it's that there are multiple problem spaces with completely different, fixed, goalposts.

And even then, within a single group, you'll have multiple thresholds, of "this really helps make my coding more productive" to "I no longer type code, just review" to eventually "I'm no longer employed".

I don't think we disagree on the capabilities of the latest agents, but my point is that the software industry has already been through multiple rounds of "the [models,agents,bots] only just became good enough to impact work in the last few months," yet this and several other studies have shown that the clankers still haven't taken any jobs. If the November timeline doesn't show an impact, then it must be because we only just got access to Fable and Solus in July. And if the Fable and Solus timeline don't show an impact, then it's because of this other thing that happened where models really took off – the data just needs to catch up.

Everyone has an anecdote about someone being laid off because of AI, and everyone has anxiety about the next model being the big one that will really cause the industry to implode, but there's never any hard labor impact. It's always still coming, still waiting for the next model, next study, next jobs report. As Smith said, people who believe that AI is going to take jobs will never be convinced that it's not coming eventually.

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