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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#441

Post by nopinsight »

snowwrestler wrote: post #400

Historically, people have been pretty good at predicting the effects of new technologies on existing jobs. But quite bad at predicting the new jobs / careers / industries that are eventually created with those technologies. This is why free market economies create more wealth over time than centrally planned economies: the free market allows more people to try seemingly crazy ideas, and is faster to recognize good id…

My thesis is that this could lead to a booming market for “pink-collar” service jobs. A significant latent demand exists for more and better services in developed countries.

For instance, upper-middle-class and middle-class individuals in countries like India and Thailand often have access to better services in restaurants, hotels, and households compared to their counterparts in rich nations.

Elderly care and health services are two particularly important sectors where society could benefit from allocating a larger workforce.

Many others will have roles to play building, maintaining, and supervising robots. Despite rapid advances, they will not be as dexterous, reliable, and generally capable as adult humans for many years to come. (See: Moravec's paradox).

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#442

Post by digdugdirk »

snowwrestler wrote: post #400

Historically, people have been pretty good at predicting the effects of new technologies on existing jobs. But quite bad at predicting the new jobs / careers / industries that are eventually created with those technologies. This is why free market economies create more wealth over time than centrally planned economies: the free market allows more people to try seemingly crazy ideas, and is faster to recognize good id…

More people need to understand the actual history of the luddites. The real issue was the usage of mechanized equipment to overwhelm an entire sector of the economy of the day - destroying the labor value of a vast swath of craftspeople and knocking them down a peg on the social ladder.

Those people who were able to get work were now subject to a much more dangerous workplace and forced into a more rigid legalized employer/employee structure, which was a relatively new "corporate innovation" in the grand scheme of things. This, of course, allowed/required the state to be on the hook for enforcement of the workplace contract, and you can bet that both public and private police forces were used to enforce that contract with violence.

Certainly something to think about for all the users on this message board who are undoubtedly more highly skilled craftspeople than most, and would never be caught up in a mass economic displacement driven by the introduction of a new technological innovation.

At the very least, it's worth a skim through the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#443

Post by epgui »

AznHisoka wrote: post #425
tdeck wrote: post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

“we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in innovative products and improvements to existing products.” Shipping features faster != innovation or improvements to existing products

And?

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#444

Post by droopyEyelids »

ccorcos wrote: post #426
tdeck wrote: post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

AI tools seem to be most useful for little things. Fixing a little bug, making a little change. But those things aren’t always very visible or really move the needle. It may help you build a real product feature quicker, but AI is not necessarily doing the research and product design which is probably the bottleneck for seeing real impact.

If they're fixing all the little bugs that should give everyone much more time to think about product design and do the research.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#445

Post by actuallyalys »

Terr_ wrote: post #204
michaeldoron wrote: post #78

Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and…

> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Compare: "Whenever I think of skeptics dismissing completely novel and unprecedented outcomes occurring by mechanisms we can't clearly identify or prove (will) exist... I think of skeptics who dismissed an outcome that had literally hundreds of well-studied historical precedents using proven processes." You'r…

Yeah, for this analogy to work, we’d have to see AI causing a small but consistently doubling amount of lost jobs.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#446

Post by andrekandre »

bdangubic wrote: post #293
ajmurmann wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am VERY pro-immigration. I do have concerns about the H1B program though. IMO it's not great for both immigrant workers, as well as non-immigrant workers because it creates a class of workers for whom it's harder to change employers which weakens their negotiation position. If this is the case for enough of the workforce it artificially depresses wages for everyone. I want to see a reform that makes it much easier…

amen! that will never happen though, nothing ever happens here that helps the workers and whatever rights we have now are slowly dwindling (immigrants or otherwise…)

  > nothing ever happens here that helps the workers and whatever rights we have now are slowly dwindling
its almost as if we need a 'workers party' or something... though i'd imagine first-past-the-post in the u.s makes that difficult.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#447

Post by argomo »

ccorcos wrote: post #428
tw04 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also it potentially means mass unemployment and we have literally no plan in place if that happens beyond complete societal collapse. Even if you think all the naysayers are “luddites”, do you really think it’s a great idea to have no backup plan beyond “whupps we all die or just go back to the Stone Age”?

> do you really think it’s a great idea to have no backup plan What makes you think people haven’t made back up plans? Or are you saying government needs to do it for us?

Ah yes the old "let's make individuals responsible for solving societal problems" bit. Nevermind that the state is sometimes the only entity capable of addressing the situation at scale.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#448

Post by catigula »

renewiltord wrote: post #386
catigula wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions. Both sides of the aisle retreated fr…

[flagged]

The funny thing is that you're not wrong and this is yet another feather in the cap of "foreign labor are literal scabs" argument.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#449

Post by _heimdall »

CMCDragonkai wrote: post #420
tdeck wrote: post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

It's cause there are still bottlenecks. AI is definitely boosting productivity in specific areas, but the total system output is bottlenecked. I think we will see these bottlenecks get rerouted or refactored in the coming years.

> AI is definitely boosting productivity in specific areas

What makes you so sure of the productivity boost when we aren't seeing a change in output?

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#450

Post by ccorcos »

janalsncm wrote: post #356
CSMastermind wrote: post #349

Huge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since the advent of computers. If you look at the work performed by office workers in the 1960s and compared it to what people today do it'd be almost unrecognizable. They spent huge amounts of time on things that software either does automatically or makes 1,000x faster. But by and large that actually created more white collar jobs because those capabilities mean…

I don’t like this argument because 1) it doesn’t address the social consequences of rapid onset and large scale unemployment and 2) there is no law of nature that a job lost here creates a new job there. On the first point, unemployment during the Great Depression was “only” 30%. And those people were eventually able to find other jobs. Here, we are talking about permanent unemployment for even larger numbers of peop…

What makes you so concerned about rapid onset of we haven’t seen any significant change in the (USA) unemployment rate?

And there are some laws of nature that are relevant such as supply-demand economics. Technology often makes things cheaper which unlocks more demand. For example, I’m sure many small businesses would love to build custom software to help them operate but it’s too expensive.

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