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

theregister.com

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

#421

Post by jaredcwhite »

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…

> including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator

So…all you needed was a decent search engine, which in the past would have been Google before it was completely enshittified.

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

#422

Post by Arctic_fly »

datpuz wrote: post #374
bredren wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to the study, "users report average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours" from using AI tools. That's a bit more than one hour per 40 hour work week. Could be data is lagging as sibling comment said but this seems wildly difficult to report on a number like this. It also doesn't take into account the benefits to colleagues of active users of LLMs (second order savings). My use of LLMs often mean…

IMO, if you're gaining a significant amount of productivity from LLMs in a technical field, it's because you were either very junior and lacked much of the basic knowledge required of your role, or you performed like you were.

Definitely not the case for coding. I'm a capable senior engineer, and I know many other very experienced senior engineers who are all benefitting immensely from AI, both in the code editor and chat interfaces.

My company just redid our landing page. It would probably have taken a decent developer two weeks to build it out. Using AI to create the initial drafts, it took two days.

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

#423

Post by aerhardt »

IcyWindows wrote: post #418

Microsoft is pushing for replacing at least a percentage of each team: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/202...

They are saying that and yet on one of the last earnings calls the VP of Sales admitted that they are shifting the weight of their sales force from peddling Copilot to traditional money-makers like migrations or updates. This could merely speak to Copilot being a dogshit product, but that never really stopped Microsoft from trying, so it could also signal a certain shaking belief in Enterprise AI being that revolutionary.

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

#424

Post by Arctic_fly »

7qW24A wrote: post #398
rightbyte wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

It’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down. If you use the BLS’s definition of productivity, then computers seem to be a net drag on productivity: https://usafacts.org/articles/what-is-labor-productivity-and... Even more surprising for me is that productivity growth declined during the ZIRP era. How did we take all that free money and product less ?

This is an excellent question. My very unscientific suspicion is that the decreases in average attention span and ability to concentrate zero out the theoretical possible increases in productivity that computers allow.

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

#425

Post by sanderjd »

datpuz wrote: post #374
bredren wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to the study, "users report average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours" from using AI tools. That's a bit more than one hour per 40 hour work week. Could be data is lagging as sibling comment said but this seems wildly difficult to report on a number like this. It also doesn't take into account the benefits to colleagues of active users of LLMs (second order savings). My use of LLMs often mean…

IMO, if you're gaining a significant amount of productivity from LLMs in a technical field, it's because you were either very junior and lacked much of the basic knowledge required of your role, or you performed like you were.

Sorry but this just definitely isn't true.

I would (similarly insultingly) suggest that if you think this is true, you're spending time doing things more slowly that you could be doing more productively by using contemporary tools.

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

#426

Post by grandmczeb »

datpuz wrote: post #374
bredren wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to the study, "users report average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours" from using AI tools. That's a bit more than one hour per 40 hour work week. Could be data is lagging as sibling comment said but this seems wildly difficult to report on a number like this. It also doesn't take into account the benefits to colleagues of active users of LLMs (second order savings). My use of LLMs often mean…

IMO, if you're gaining a significant amount of productivity from LLMs in a technical field, it's because you were either very junior and lacked much of the basic knowledge required of your role, or you performed like you were.

IMO, if you haven’t been getting a significant productivity boost from LLMs in a technical field, it’s because you lack the basic brain plasticity to adapt to new tools, or feel so psychologically threatened by change that you act like you do.

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

#427

Post by treis »

datpuz wrote: post #374
bredren wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to the study, "users report average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours" from using AI tools. That's a bit more than one hour per 40 hour work week. Could be data is lagging as sibling comment said but this seems wildly difficult to report on a number like this. It also doesn't take into account the benefits to colleagues of active users of LLMs (second order savings). My use of LLMs often mean…

IMO, if you're gaining a significant amount of productivity from LLMs in a technical field, it's because you were either very junior and lacked much of the basic knowledge required of your role, or you performed like you were.

I disagree. Maybe there's savants out there that can write SQL, K8s auto scaling yaml, dockerfiles, React components, backend code, and a dozen other things. But for the rest of us LLMs are helpful for the things we wade into every so often.

It's not miraculous but I feel like it saves me a couple hours a week from not going on wild goose chases. So maybe 5% of my time.

I don't think any engineering org is going to notice 5% more output and layoff 1/20th of their engineers. I think for now most of the time saved is going back to the engineers.

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

#428

Post by lpolovets »

This feels premature -- we've only had great AI capabilities for a little while, and jobs are not replaced overnight.

This reminds me of some early stage startup pitches. During a pitch, I might ask: "what do you think about competitor XYZ?" And sometimes the answer is "we don't think highly of them, we have never even seen them in a single deal we've competed for!" But that's almost a statistical tautology: if you both have .001% market share and you're doubling or tripling annually, the chance that you're going to compete for the same customers is tiny. That doesn't mean you can just dismiss that competitor. Same thing with the article above dismissing AI as a threat to jobs so quickly.

To give a concrete example of a job disappearing: I run a small deep tech VC fund. When I raised the fund in early '24, my plan was to hire one investor and one researcher. I hired a great investor, but given all of the AI progress I'm now 80% sure I won't hire a researcher. ChatGPT is good enough for research. I might end up adding a different role in the near future, but this is a research job that likely disappeared because of AI.

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

#430

Post by asadotzler »

ajb wrote: post #117

A bold assumption, that it will continue not to. I have a 185 year old treatise on wood engraving. At the time, to reproduce any image required that it be engraved in wood or metal for the printer; the best wood engravers were not mere reproducers, as they used some artistry when reducing the image to black and white, to keep the impression from continuous tones. (And some, of course, were also original artists in th…

As a graphic designer, my work didn't evaporate because Aldus shipped PageMaker. It didn't collapse when Office and the Web made clip art available to everyone. It didn't disappear when credit card, letterhead, and logo templates and generators came online. Every time a new tool allowed more DIY, the gulf between the low-effort stuff and my stuff grew and I was able to secure even more and better paying work. And using those tools early myself, I also gained advantage over my professional competition for various lengths of time.

This is how engraving went too. It wasn't overnight. The tools were not distributed evenly and it was a good while before amateurs could produce anything like what the earlier professionals did.

Because you can buy a microwave and pizza rolls doesn't make you a chef. Maybe in 100 years the tooling will make you as good as the chefs of our time, but by then they'll all be doing even better work and there are people who will pay for higher quality no matter how high the bar is raised for baseline quality so eliminating all work in a profession is rare.

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