41–50 of 59 posts
Seems like a questionable correlation. The companies with money to burn on AI are those those that are growing and doing well so ofc their growing headcount too
One of the study authors, Ara, tweeted that they control for that by comparing early adopters against firms who haven't yet, and built like-for-like control groups with similar pre-adoption growth trajectories. (This is a rough quote).
What is the value of saying this when ChatGPT was released in 2022? There’s no way there’s enough data to make any meaningful extrapolation about anything.
The current narrative is that AI is displacing jobs. Similar to the current post there’s just not enough data to be conclusive.
I don't see this narrative being more prominent than the "AI won't be displacing jobs because things worked out in the past" counternarrative.
For example, only recently has The Economist published articles that go more towards that narrative (AFAIK) [1].
> there’s just not enough data to be conclusive.
With this, I can agree. We can still extrapolate based on what we currently know.
[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...
These studies miss a huge point, which is: working with automation outside of programming is tedious, frustrating, and soul crushing. I see it already with some non technical clients. I have notice a terrible trend of people just offloading everything to agents or prompting even the simplest interaction with other humans. Let me tell you, it’s fucking dire.
Inside can be as well. Please manually review these 5000 lines of slop I generated while watching YouTube and verify the unreadable readme due to all the bloat and icons is correct with the code. If that is not soul crushing I would not know what is.
- explained back to me the original request I had filed with details
- assumed the request was about something it was not
- didn’t reply to my question
- had no actionable element whatsoever
- repeated all of the above twice with different words.
This is a senior person running a marketing agency. The absurdity here is that I have a high cost per hour that falls back onto our shared client. Who I will now have to brief about how I spent about 2 hours due to this comms back and forth and deciphering LLM-novels on a problem that could have been solved in a 30min slot if the agency only took 5 minutes to read, understand and use their brain. The added time was for me to basically go back to my comms, understand if I had communicated poorly (I asked a non-tech third party: they got it in 3 minutes), and reassess everything twice. Result: two hours to do something that amounted to changing a link behavior.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. that's a common trope, and its both true and false true: more bank employees after ATM's false: less bank employees after smartphone banking
The big 4 Australian banks (Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, National Australia Bank and Westpac) all employ pretty much the same number of people now as they did 25 years ago, but their workforce composition has changed. More software developers, fewer branch staff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current narrative is that AI is displacing jobs. Similar to the current post there’s just not enough data to be conclusive.
Current narrative where? I don't see this narrative being more prominent than the "AI won't be displacing jobs because things worked out in the past" counternarrative . For example, only recently has The Economist published articles that go more towards that narrative (AFAIK) [1]. > there’s just not enough data to be conclusive. With this, I can agree. We can still extrapolate based on what we currently know. [1] htt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs. There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise. The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. It would suit their worldview for this time to be different, and so thats the message they push.
> The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. No, they are mostly right wing capitalists. LLM is not a left wing project. UBI is something they talked about, but super hard to believe it is anything but a way to shut up critics. > The claim is and always has been that automation increases n…
It's not the first industrial revolution, we've been in a good dozen of them now and absolutely none have resulted in large unemployment.
The only large unemployment we've experienced until now were linked to economic crisis which had nothing to do with industrial revolutions
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big 4 Australian banks (Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, National Australia Bank and Westpac) all employ pretty much the same number of people now as they did 25 years ago, but their workforce composition has changed. More software developers, fewer branch staff.
~20% outsorced workforce in places like India, Vietnam and Philipines nowadays
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not supported by the evidence. Current rates of employment are well below historic levels. In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education, retirement, prison, disability, etc. The only way jobs have kept up with automation is when you ignore population growth, but more people naturally increases the…
>Current rates of employment are well below historic levels. Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing. >In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education which may be investing in their future but isn’t directly producing anything. Retirement as a percentage of the…
Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster.
Your farming productivity numbers are also very exaggerated. The actual percentage of the population was very high because of food spillage, and inconsistent productivity due to weather etc. They often needed ~90% of the adult population to be farmers or people starved, and famine was still common. Right before industrialization that number started to drop which is largely what caused industrialization. You got a positive feedback loop of increased productivity when a vastly larger percentage of the population could do something other than produce food.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. that's a common trope, and its both true and false true: more bank employees after ATM's false: less bank employees after smartphone banking
The big 4 Australian banks (Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, National Australia Bank and Westpac) all employ pretty much the same number of people now as they did 25 years ago, but their workforce composition has changed. More software developers, fewer branch staff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
~20% outsorced workforce in places like India, Vietnam and Philipines nowadays
I’m only counting the Australian FTE. The numbers are up if you count the outsourcing.
28 million in 2026 vs 18.8 million in 2001 is a ~50% jump…
So no the numbers are down significantly even with outsourcing.