Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm not worried about AI job loss

davidoks.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 582 posts

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#441

Post by toldnotmywrath »

KittenInABox wrote: post #372
Bayko wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context This is why (personal experience) I am seeing a lot of FullStack jobs compared to specialized Backend, FE, Ops roles. AI does 90% of the job of a senior engineer (What the CEOs believe) and the companies now want someone that can do the full "100" and not just supply the missing "10". So that remaining 90 is now coming from an amalgamation of other responsibilities.

In my mind we will have a bimodal set of skills in software development, likely something like a product engineer (an engineer who is also a product manager-- this person conceptualizes features and systemically considers the software as a whole in terms of ergonomics, business sense, and the delight in building something used by others) and something like a deep-in-the-weeds engineer (an engineer who innovates on th…

Can I take a guess that you believe you will speciate into the former?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#442

Post by pjerem »

gizajob wrote: post #437
echelon wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet we're about to see a lot of 10-person $100M+ ARR companies emerge. That's a scale where teams can be tight and excel.

If you can build that with AI, then 9 people with AI can probably wipe out that company, only to be wiped out by 8 people with AI…and so on.

Not necessarily. That's the old "I made Twitter in a weekend" joke.

That's not because you can technically replicate a product that your company will be successful. What makes a company successful are sales forces, internal processes and luck. Both are extremely difficult to replicate because sales forces are based on a human network you have to build, internal processes are either organic or kept secret, and luck can only be provoked by staying alive long enough, which means you need money.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#443

Post by toldnotmywrath »

jama211 wrote: post #406
Animats wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> automation tools ... eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts. But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified. There's also a tradeoff between automation flexibility and cost. If you need an LLM for each transaction, your costs will be much higher than if some simple CRUD server does it. Here's a nice example from a more physical business - sandwich ma…

No? You don’t only gain justification for automation by cutting costs. You can gain justification by increasing profits. You can keep the same amount of people but use them more efficiently and you create more total value. The fact you didn’t consider this worries me. Also the statement “show why automation hasn’t taken over” is truely hysterically wrong. Yeah, sure, no automation has taken over since the Industrial…

You can increase profits by cutting costs. It is remarkably easier to do in the short term. And even if you choose not to downsize you can drop/stagnate wages to gain from the fact everyone else is downsizing.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#444

Post by jakobnissen »

Gigachad wrote: post #162
zozbot234 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.

It's more like automated, industrial stuff is cheap, while land and human labor is expensive (and thank God for that!)

Some old stuff is now cheap: Grain, oils, clothes, steel, heating, electricity and books, for example.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#445

Post by skeptic_ai »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

Let’s do some math.

He does 100 units of product per 100 units of time.

80 units of time on data entry 20 units of time on “thinking”

We now automatise the task in such a way that ratios flip:

So now we do 20 units of time for 100 products. Let’s assume we use same thinking as before of 20. So we use 40 units of time to produce 100 units of product.

Now let’s assume it’s linear growth:

We use 40 units of time for each task and we produce 200 units of product for 80 units of time.

Let’s now do 50 units of time for each and produce 250 units of product with same time as before. It’s definitely not the same.

you either work 40 and produce the same or work the same and produce 250. NOT THE SAME

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#446

Post by toldnotmywrath »

csa wrote: post #342
Animats wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> automation tools ... eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts. But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified. There's also a tradeoff between automation flexibility and cost. If you need an LLM for each transaction, your costs will be much higher than if some simple CRUD server does it. Here's a nice example from a more physical business - sandwich ma…

> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified. In many cases, this is a fallacy. Much like programming, there is often essentially an infinite amount of (in this case) bookkeeping tasks that need to be done. The folks employed to do them work on the top X number of them. By removing a lot of the scut work, second order tasks can be done (like verification, clarification, etc.) or can…

The firm simply assumes that if the top X was sufficient in the past, it is still sufficient now.

From the perspective of modern management, there's really no reason to keep people if you can automate them away.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#447

Post by entech »

The prevailing view of government’s incompetence and inability to act has reached such high levels that people do not even factor any sort of meaningful intervention anymore.

Does everyone really think that the world governments would allow any level job loss that would create panic before shutting this whole thing down within the area of their control?

It’s probably the western culture bias - people in UK or US have not seen or experienced big enough government intervention. US citizens are probably feeling a bit of the change now.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#448

Post by oefrha »

jama211 wrote: post #408
Ensorceled wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently did a contract at medium sized business with a large retail and online business that had a CFO and several accountants / bookkeepers. You're describing a situation where that CFO only needs two or three accountants and bookkeepers to run the business and would lay off two or three people. It IS about headcount in a lot of cases.

Or they’d keep the same number of people and increase total value output. Businesses tend to like the idea of growth more than cost cutting after all.

People don’t suddenly eat more food due to AI. That are a lot of industries with bounded total demand.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#449

Post by gniv »

A point that the article doesn't touch on directly, but it's part of the bottlenecks mentioned: a lot of jobs already are bullsh*t. They are there because a scapegoat is needed or because the nephew of the CEO needs a job, etc. In theory these jobs could have been removed long ago but they were not, and AI won't change that.
Post reply on HN