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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

#401

Post by catlikesshrimp »

jaredklewis wrote: post #369
jrflowers wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

That is the result of using fuel. In spite of efficiency gained, more work is possible; more work is demanded, too: a dress is not lasting a decade now, hopefully one season.

More people are also available since the fields are producing by themselves, comparatively. Not to mention less of us die to epidemies, famines and swords.

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

#402

Post by asadotzler »

nirui wrote: post #79

There are few problems in this research, first: > AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation But Generative AI is not just AI chatbots . There are ones that generate sounds/music, ones that generates imagines etc. Another thing is, the research only looked Denmark, a nation with fairly healthy altitude towards work-life-balance, not a nation that gives proud to people w…

For that last point, as a graphic designer competing with the first generation of digital printmaking and graphic design tools, I experienced the opposite. DIY people and companies are DIY people and companies. The ones that would have paid a real designer continued to do so, and my rates even went up because I offered something that stuck out even from the growing mass of garbage design from the amateurs with PageMaker or Illustrator. I adopted the same tools and my game was elevated far more than the non-professionals with those tools further separating my high value from the low value producers. It also gave me a few years of advantage over other professionals who still worked on a drawing table with pen and paper.

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

#403

Post by Sammi »

m00dy wrote: post #187
DebtDeflation wrote: post #180

The study looks at 11 occupations in Denmark in 2023-24. Maybe instead look at the US in 2025. EU labor regulations make it much harder to fire employees. And 2023 was mainly a hype year for GenAI. Actual Enterprise adoption (not free vendor pilots) started taking off in the latter half of 2024. That said, a lot of CEOs seem to have taken the "lay off all the employees first, then figure out how to have AI (or low co…

Surprisingly, Denmark is one of the easiest countries in which to fire someone.

Workers in denmark are almost all unionised and get unemployment benefits from their union. So it's pretty directly because of the unions that it becomes such a small issue for someone in denmark to be laid off.

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

#404

Post by asadotzler »

roenxi wrote: post #13

Based on the speed most companies operate at - no surprises here. The internet also didn't have most of its impact in the first decade. And as is fairly well understood, most of the current generation of AI models are a bit dicey in practice. There isn't much of a question that this early phase where AI is likely to create new jobs and opportunities. The real question is what happens when AI is reliably intellectuall…

At the end of the massive investment period, about a trillion dollars of broadband, fiber and cellular build out between 1998 and 2008, that infrastructure had already added a trillion back to the economy and would add that much nearly every year after. LLM AI is nearing 10 years of massive investment, approaching $1T. Where are the trillions in returns. And what amazing economy-wide impacting infrastructure will that trillion in AI investment leave us with when the bubble pops and these AI companies are sold for parts and scrap and the not-AI companies boosting AI all pull back? When the dot com boom collapsed, we still got value from all that investment that continues to lead the global economy today. What will LLMs leave us with?

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

#405

Post by voidspark »

asadotzler wrote: post #391
voidspark wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are already grounding their results in Google searches with citations. They have been doing that for a year already. Optional with all the big models from OpenAI, Google, xAI

And yet they still hallucinate and offer dead links. I've gotten wrong answers to simple historical event and people questions with sources that are entirely fabricated and referencing a dead link to an irrelevant site. Google results don't do that. This is why I use LLM's to help me come up with better searches that I perform and tune myself. That's valuable, the wordsmithing they can do given their solid word and w…

Is that using the state of the art reasoning models with Google search enabled?

OpenAI o3

Gemini 2.5 Pro

Grok 3

Anything below that is obsolete or dumbed down to reduce cost

I doubt this feature is actually broken and returning hallucinated links

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding

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

#406

Post by pllbnk »

Topfi wrote: post #124
pllbnk wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the goal of generative AI is to generate content that is virtually indistinguishable from expert creative people, I think it's one of these scenarios: 1. If the goal is achieved, which is highly unlikely, then we get very very close to AGI and all bets are off. 2. If the goal is not achieved and we stay in this uncanny valley territory (not at the bottom of it but not being able to climb out either), then…

> If the goal is achieved, which is highly unlikely, then we get very very close to AGI and all bets are off. Question on two fronts: 1. Why do you think, considering the current rate of progress think it is very unlikely that LLM output becomes indistinguishable from expert creatives? Especially considering a lot of tells people claim to see are easily alleviated by prompting. 2. Why do you think a model whose outpu…

Interesting thoughts, to which I partially agree.

1. The progress is there but it's been slowing down yet the downsides have largely remained.

1.1. With the LLMs, while thanks to the larger context window (mostly achieved via hardware, not software), the models can keep track of the longer conversations better, the hallucinations are as bad as ever; I use them eagerly yet I haven't felt any significant improvements to the outputs in a long time. Anecdotally, a couple days ago I decided to try my luck and vibe-code a primitive messaging library and it led me in the wrong path even though I was challenging it along the way; it was so convincing that I wouldn't have noticed hadn't my colleague told me there was a better way. Granted, the colleague is extremely smart, but LLM should have told me what was the right approach because I was specifically questioning it.

1.2. The image generation has also barely improved. The biggest improvement during the past year has been with 4o, which can be largely attributed to move from diffusion to autoregression but it's far from perfect and still suffers from hallucinations even more than LLMs.

1.3. I don't think video models are even worth discussing because you just can't get a decent video if you can't get a decent still in the first place.

2. That's speculation, of course. Let me explain my thought process. A truly expert level AI should be able to avoid mistakes and create novel writings or research just by the human asking it to do it. In order to validate the research, it can also invent the experiments that need to be done by humans. But if it can do all this, then it could/should find the way to build a better AI, which after an iteration or two should lead to AGI. So, it's basically a genius that, upon human request, can break itself out of the confines.

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

#407

Post by jrflowers »

jaredklewis wrote: post #369
jrflowers wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

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

This makes sense. If everyone’s current workloads were suddenly cut in half tomorrow, there would simply be enough demand to double their workloads. This makes sense across the board because much like clothing and textiles, demand for every product and service scales linearly with population.

I was mistaken, you did not suggest that employers would gift workers money commensurate with productivity, you simply posit that demand is conceptually infinite and Jevons paradox means that no jobs ever get eliminated.

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

#408

Post by asadotzler »

BurningFrog wrote: post #340

New technology has replaced human jobs since the start of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. The replaced workforce have always moved to other jobs, often in entirely new professions. For all those 250 years most people have predicted that the next new technology will make the replaced workforce permanently unemployed, despite the track record of that prediction. We constantly predict poverty and get prosperity…

Long before the industrial revolution. The ox-drawn plow was invented about 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia or India (my memory's poor, sorry) and it put a lot of workers with hoes out of work, while also growing prosperity and the number of people who gained work thanks to that increased prosperity and population growth it supported. It has always been this way and always will be.

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

#409

Post by olyjohn »

mmmBacon wrote: post #263
soared wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similairly, while not perfect I use AI to help redesign my landscaping by uploading a picture of my yard and having it come up with different options. Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not. Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what was going on. Potentially all situations where I would’ve paid (or paid more than I already was) a local l…

For the tire you can also use a penny. If you stick the penny in the tread with Liconln’s head down and his hair isn’t covered, then you need new tires. No AI. ;)

You don't even need a penny, or have to remember where on the penny you're supposed to be looking... There are wear bars in the tread in every single tire. If the tire tread is flush with them, the tires are shot. Also there is a date code on the side, and if your tires are getting near 10 years old, it's probably a good time to replace them.
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