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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

#451

Post by ponector »

pc86 wrote: post #281
ponector wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is not hurting jobs in Denmark they said. Software development jobs there have bigger threat: outsourcing to cheaper locations. As well for teachers: it is hard to replace a person supervising kids with a chatbot.

Has any serious person every suggested replacing teachers with chatbots? Seems like a non sequitur.

Usually teachers are paid poorly, so some of them are putting little effort into the job simply narrate book/slides for their class. If they are replaced with latest chatgpt it will be beneficial for everyone.

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

#452

Post by photonthug »

jaredklewis wrote: post #411
catlikesshrimp wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't doing the same job in half the time lead to having to pay half the salary? Indirectly, I mean. You can now hire half the people or pay the same number of people half. Unless twice the work is suddenly required, which I doubt.

No one knows, but if history is any guide, it is very unlikely. I would also be surprised if the twice the work was "suddenly" required, but would you be surprised if people buy more of something if it costs less? In the 1800s ordinary Americans typically owned only a few outfits. Coats were often passed down several generations. Today, ordinary Americans usually own dozens of outfits. Did Americans in the 1800s simp…

I am not an economist but isn’t there increasing evidence that for many goods/services, supply/demand/cost are just not that closely related anymore? I feel like we’ve seen this repeatedly with greedflation and the post Covid “supply shocks” blamed long after they stop being relevant. Prices go up but don’t come down because meaningful competition is simply not present anymore for large sectors. When it is present.. algorithmic price fixing can take the place of other kind of cabals.

Outside of goods, there must be more schools than ever before, and more academics qualified to teach at them, but is it bringing down the cost of education?

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

#453

Post by mmcnl »

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…

But all those jobs have been at risk for a long time already, yet they still exist. There is so much "pre-AI" low-hanging fruit that is still there. So why is that? I don't have the answer, but clearly there is more to it than just technology.

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

#454

Post by freejazz »

colinmorelli wrote: post #249
jacamera wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! All LLMs do is “hallucinate”. Sometimes the output happens to be right, same as a broken clock.

I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd. Surely we all are aware that AI has always been probabilistic in nature. Very few people seem to go around talking about how their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but just sometimes happens to be right. Just like every other form of ML we've come up with, LLMs are imperfect. They get things wrong. This is more of an indictment of yeeting a pure AI chat interfac…

>I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd.

It's not about it being perfect or not. It's about how they come about with the responses they do.

>Very few people seem to go around talking about how their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but just sometimes happens to be right.

Yeah, but no one is anthropomorphizing binary classifiers.

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

#455

Post by freejazz »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #284
colinmorelli wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd. Surely we all are aware that AI has always been probabilistic in nature. Very few people seem to go around talking about how their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but just sometimes happens to be right. Just like every other form of ML we've come up with, LLMs are imperfect. They get things wrong. This is more of an indictment of yeeting a pure AI chat interfac…

I think a lot of problems will be solved by explicitly training on high quality content and probably injecting some expert knowledge in addition

Yeah but that's not easy, which is why it wasn't done in any of the cases where it's needed.

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

#456

Post by vacuity »

mjburgess wrote: post #192
Garlef wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting: At first I was objecting in my mind ("Clearly, the magic - LLMs - can create effect instead of only revealing it.") but upon further reflecting on this, maybe you're right: First, LLMs are a distillation of our cultural knowledge. As such they can only reveal our knowledge to us. Second, they are limited even more so by the users knowledge. I found that you can barely escape your "zone of proximal develo…

My view has been something of a middle ground. It's not exactly that it reveals relevant domains of activity are merely performative, but its a kind of "accelerationism of the almost performative". So it pushes these almost-performative systems into a death spiral of pure uselessness. In this sense, I have rarely seen AI have negative impacts. Insofar as an LLM can generate a dozen lines of code, it forces developers…

I find most software development performative, and I believe LLMs will only further that end. I suppose this is a radical view.

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

#457

Post by sanderjd »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #285
colinmorelli wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd. Surely we all are aware that AI has always been probabilistic in nature. Very few people seem to go around talking about how their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but just sometimes happens to be right. Just like every other form of ML we've come up with, LLMs are imperfect. They get things wrong. This is more of an indictment of yeeting a pure AI chat interfac…

The problem is they are being sold as everything solutions. Never write code / google search / talk to a lawyer / talk to a human / be lonely again, all here, under one roof. If LLM marketing was staying in its lane as a creator of convincing text we'd be fine.

This happens with every hype cycle. Some people fully buy into the most extreme of the hype, and other people reverse polarize against that. The first group ends up offsides because nothing is ever as good as the hype, but the second group often misses the forest for the trees.

There's no shortcut to figuring out what the truth of what a new technology is actually useful for. It's very rarely the case that either "everything" or "nothing" is the truth.

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

#458

Post by DharmaPolice »

atrus wrote: post #162
DharmaPolice wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a junior developer lies about something important, they can be fired and you can try to find someone else who wouldn't do the same thing. At the very least you could warn the person not to lie again or they're gone. It's not clear that you can do the same thing with an LLM as they don't know they've lied.

You're falling into the mistake of "correct" or "lied" though. Being wrong isn't lying .

OK, perhaps lying is the wrong word but someone who repeatedly fabricated information would be treated the same as a liar in most contexts.

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

#459

Post by everdrive »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #396
jaredklewis wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper analyzes facts re: wages and jobs, which I think are (comparatively) easy to measure as compared with productivity, and are also an area where people have concerns about the impact of AI. Mostly people aren't worried about productivity itself, which would be weird. "Oh no, AI is making us way more productive, and now we're getting too much stuff done and the economy is growing too much." The major concern i…

Won't doing the same job in half the time lead to having to pay half the salary? Indirectly, I mean. You can now hire half the people or pay the same number of people half. Unless twice the work is suddenly required, which I doubt.

>Unless twice the work is suddenly required, which I doubt.

I'm not sure why you doubt it. In a company, efficiency improvements never mean you don't have to do as much work. They always mean you just have more time in the day for extra work. It's part of the reason I really don't care at all about automation, LLMs, etc, at least from an efficiency perspective. (there's another case to be made for automated response, etc.) I hear people say that it opens them up to do more of the interesting work they care about, but in practice I've never seen this be true.

It feels lot like when people in IT talk about how they are "always learning new things." Yes, that's true, but what you're learning is worthless: An updated UI for Defender, a new proprietary query language, branding hierarchies for tech company products, etc. It's all worthless knowledge.

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

#460

Post by decimalenough »

jakubmazanec wrote: post #435
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?

LLMs have come a long way in those 3 years. The early ones were absolute garbage compared to what we have today.

1) Yes. I had in fact already booked the appointment, but decided to try asking Gemini for shits and giggles.

2) I did google, but I didn't know an official calculator existed, and the search results presented me with a morass of random links that I couldn't make heads or tails of. Remember, I'm not a domain expert in this area.

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