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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

#431

Post by Kbelicius »

paulvnickerson wrote: post #414

This line of worry has never panned out. There are two points: 1) AI/automation will replace jobs. This is 100% certain in some cases. Look at the industrial revolution. 2) AI/automation will increase unemployment. This has never happened and it's doubtful it will ever happen. The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years after the industrial…

> 2) AI/automation will increase unemployment. This has never happened and it's doubtful it will ever happen.

> The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years after the industrial revolution started, we still have single-digit unemployment.

Horses, for thousand of years, were very useful to humans. Even with the various technological advances through that time their "unemployment" was very low. Until the invention and perfection of internal combustion engines.

To say that it is doubtful that it will ever happen to us is basically saying that human cognitive and/or physical capabilities are without bounds and that there is some reason that with our unbounded cognitive capabilities we will never be able to create a machine that could replicate those capabilities. That is a ridiculous claim.

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

#432

Post by nearbuy »

voxl wrote: post #290
jll29 wrote: post #282

Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and their inability to make good forecasts. Here's my own take: - It is far too early to tell. - The roll-out of ChatGPT caused a mind-set revolution. People now "get" what is possible already now, and it encourages conceiving and persuing new use cases on what people have seen. - I would not recommend any kinds to train to become a translator for sure; even befo…

Name a better duo: software engineering hype cycles and anti-intellectualism

Isn't your post anti-intellectual, since you're denigrating someone without justification just for referencing the work of a professor you disagree with?

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

#433

Post by worik »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #421
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.

> So…all you needed was a decent search engine,

Yes.

"...all you need" A good search engine is a big ask. Google at its height was quite good. LLMs are shaping up to be very good search engines

That would be enough, for me to be very pleased with them

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

#434

Post by asadotzler »

solfox wrote: post #67

Extrapolating from my current experience with AI-assisted work: AI just makes work more meaningful. My output has increased 10x, allowing me to focus on ideas and impact rather than repetitive tasks. Now apply that to entire industries and whole divisions of labor: manual data entry, customer support triage, etc. Will people be out of those jobs? Most certainly. But it gives all of us a chance to level up—to focus on…

I keep seeing these "my output is 10X with LLMs" but I'm not seeing any increase in quality or decrease in price for any of the very many tech products I've updated or upgraded in the last couple of years.

We're coming up in 3 years of ChatGPT and well over a year since I started seeing the proliferation of these 10X claims, and yet LLM users seem to be bearing none of the fruit one might expect from a 10X increase in productivity.

I'm beginning to think that this 10X thing is overstated.

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

#435

Post by jakubmazanec »

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…

Awfully early? We have "useful" LLMs for almost three years. Where is the productivity increase? Also, your example is not very relevant. 1) Would you pay the professional if you couldn't find the answer yourself? 2) If search engines were still useful (I'm assuming you googled first), wouldn't they be able to find the official calculator too?

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

#436

Post by asadotzler »

crabsand wrote: post #345

I believe LLMs will create more jobs than it eliminated by raising standards in various fields, including software development. We will have to get to 100% test coverage and document everything and add more bells and whistles to UI etc. The day to day activity may change but there will always be developers.

What I'm seeing is marked decrease in standards and quality everywhere I see LLMs (and diffusion models, any of the transformer-based stuff.)

Sometimes that decrease in quality is matched by an increase in reach / access, and so the benefits can outweigh the costs. Think about language translation in web browsers and even smart spectacles, for example. Language translation has been around forever but generally limited to popular books or small-scale proprietary content because it was expensive to use mult-lingual humans to do that work.

Now even my near-zero readership blog can be translated from English to Portuguese (or most other widely used languages) for a reader in Brazil with near-zero cost/effort for that user. The quality isn't as good as human translation, often losing nuance and style and sometimes even with blatant inaccuracies, but the increased access offered by language translation software makes the lower standard acceptable for lots of use cases.

I wouldn't depend on machine translation for critical financial, healthcare, or legal use cases, though I might start there to get the gist, but for my day-to-day reading on the web, it's pretty amazing.

Software at scale is different than individuals engaging in leisure activities. A loss of nuance and occasional catastrophic failures in a piece of software with hundreds of millions or billions of users could have devastating impacts.

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

#437

Post by saturn8601 »

9rx wrote: post #315
throwaway35364 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if no jobs, or fewer jobs than before, rush in to fill the void this time? You only need so many prompt engineers when each one can replace hundreds of traditional workers.

> What if no jobs, or fewer jobs than before, rush in to fill the void this time? That means either: 1. The capitalists failed to redeploy capital after the collapse. 2. We entered into some kind of post-capitalism future. To explore further, which one are you imagining?

The capitalists are failing to redeploy capital today. Thats why they have been dumping it into assets for years. They have too much capital and dwindling things they can do with it. AI will skyrocket their capital reserves. There is a poor mechanism for equalizing this since the Nixon years.

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

#438

Post by saturn8601 »

twoodfin wrote: post #126
jspdown wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit worried about the social impacts. When a sector collapses and become irrelevant, all its workers no longer need to be employed. Some will no longer have any useful qualifications and won't be able to find another job. They will have to go back to training and find a different activity. It's fine if it's an isolated event. Much worse when the event is repeated in many sectors almost simultaneously.

As others in this thread have pointed out, this is basically what happened in the relatively short period of 1995 to 2015 with the rise of global wireless internet telecommunications & software platforms. Many, many industries and jobs transformed or were relegated to much smaller niches. Overall it was great.

Man 1995, what a world that was. Seemed like a lot less stress.

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

#439

Post by [deleted] »

empath75 wrote: post #359
jll29 wrote: post #282

Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and their inability to make good forecasts. Here's my own take: - It is far too early to tell. - The roll-out of ChatGPT caused a mind-set revolution. People now "get" what is possible already now, and it encourages conceiving and persuing new use cases on what people have seen. - I would not recommend any kinds to train to become a translator for sure; even befo…

> - Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer programs) will be replaced by LLMs. It has been a very, very long time since editors have been proof-reading prose for typos and grammar mistakes, and you don't need LLMs for that. Good editors do a lot more creative work than that, and LLMs are terrible at it.

[deleted]

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

#440

Post by BurningFrog »

asadotzler wrote: post #408
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.

True.

The rate of improvement increased a lot at the Industrial Revolution, but the process has always been with us, to varying degree.

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