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Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

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Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#481

Post by baxtr »

heavyset_go wrote: post #457
baxtr wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m naive but I’m not terrified about the future at all. Every efficiency wave made life better for humans. Why should this one be different? Assume many people lose their jobs. This in turn means companies will have higher margins. Higher margins attract more competition. More competition means lower margins since some will use the lower costs to offer lower prices. Lower prices increase quality of life for ev…

Throughout history, what were once middle class and artisan professions were increasingly automated and tons of people and their families ended up in poverty until they died. We just gloss over them and villify the ones who tried to do anything about it (the ones that weren't executed also died in poverty).

You need to be careful with these things. Such exaggerated narratives are the reason people are afraid.

during the Industrial Revolution many artisan and skilled trades lost their livelihoods.

And yet, while many people did suffer serious short-term hardship and wage collapse, most did not simply remain in lifelong poverty, because over time industrialization created new types of employment and average wages eventually rose.

You don’t want to go back to before the Industrial Revolution. Do you?

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#482

Post by rybosworld »

heavyset_go wrote: post #457
baxtr wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m naive but I’m not terrified about the future at all. Every efficiency wave made life better for humans. Why should this one be different? Assume many people lose their jobs. This in turn means companies will have higher margins. Higher margins attract more competition. More competition means lower margins since some will use the lower costs to offer lower prices. Lower prices increase quality of life for ev…

Throughout history, what were once middle class and artisan professions were increasingly automated and tons of people and their families ended up in poverty until they died. We just gloss over them and villify the ones who tried to do anything about it (the ones that weren't executed also died in poverty).

Yeah this always get's completely glossed over in these conversations.

People always say: "Things ended up working out in the end"

Things only worked out in the sense that society carried on without all the people who lost their jobs.

The U.S. has recent examples of large scale job destruction.

Michigan: From 2000-2009. Massive job destruction. 330,000 auto workers in 2000. Down to 109,000 in 2009. Estimates are that 1/3-1/2 of all those affected never achieved equal/similar employment. That is, somewhere around ~70k-120k workers never earned as much as they previously did. Since this was msotly contained within one city (Detroit), it's pretty easy for the country to ignore it and go on with their lives.

(Detroit was in decline since the 50's really. 2000-2009 is just a particularly bad snapshot.)

Coal mining towns have experienced the same phenomenon but more gradually. The poverty left behind by the destruction of those jobs has never been addressed.

With AI, we are heading into a situation where potentially a much larger amount of people will be affected. So maybe that changes the calculus on the government stepping in and fixing the problem. But I wouldn't count on it.

Sources for Michigan numbers:

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/workshop/2010/LEDautopres031...

https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1205...

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#483

Post by sdf2df »

Ekaros wrote: post #265
HWR_14 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever you want to say about other companies, Amazon (and Meta) is quite willing to spend many years pouring billions into technology they think will pay off later.

Looking at VR and Meta. They absolutely can be wrong. So even after investing what seems to be enough, there might not be any payoff.

And the investors were correct to crush the stock price down to 90-odd dollars. Which finally forced Zuck to face the music.

This place is full of bozos.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#484

Post by sdf2df »

greyw wrote: post #129
sdf2df wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You prove my point. Guys like you dont get it. You think OAI, Amazon etc can freely put large amounts of money into this for 5-10 years? Lmao - delusional. Investors are impatient. Show huge jumps in revenue this year or you no longer have permission to put monumental amounts of money into this anymore. Short of that they'll just destroy the stock price by selling off; leaving employees who get paid via SBC very unha…

Such are reductive and superficial way of thinking on how investments works. Makes me confident you dont really are able to make a good prediction

Lol okay, show me your portfolio. Ive beaten the market after-adjusting for risk for years on-end.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#485

Post by neya »

vb7132 wrote: post #347

I was at a big tech for last 10 years, quit my job last month - I feel 50x more productive outside than inside. Here is my take on AI's impact on productivity: First let's review what are LLMs objectively good at: 1. Writing boiler plate code 2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration) 3. Learning new things: Summarizing knowledge, explaining concepts 4. Documentation, menial tasks At a big tech…

I think a lot of people will not like to hear this but we use AI almost for everything internally. The noob way to go about this is just give it a couple of tasks and just give it complete root access to your life. That's always going to end up in disappointment. Instead, I realised, AI always needs an architect. Opinionated. Strategic. Authoritative.

It is quite good at following most orders. Hence why you must ALWAYS be in the loop. AI can augment, but not replace. Maybe some day it might. But it's not now, even with the latest SOTA models.

I let AI write my emails for me. But never the ability to hit send. I let AI access to my data to make informed decisions, but never let it make the final decision.

You may think I'm being paranoid, but I'm a very cautious person. I don't jump into new technology fresh out of the oven and this has served me well for the last 15 years. (I learned my lesson courtesy of MongoDb).

With AI, I am taking the same approach. Experiment, understand the limits and only then implement. Working really well so far and have managed to automate tons of tedious tasks from emails to sales to even meetings.

I don't use Clawdbot, not any library. I wrote my own wrappers for everything using Elixir. I used Instructor and Ash framework with Phoenix and a bunch of generators to automate tedious tasks. I control the endpoints the models are loaded from (Open router) and use a multi-model flow so no one company has enough data about me. Only bits and pieces of random user IDs.

Privacy is the real challenge with AI.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#486

Post by Madmallard »

sigseg1v wrote: post #415
Madmallard wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh believe me I broke it down super finely, down to single files and even single functions in some places It still is completely and utterly hopeless

I've done this multiple times in various codebases, both medium sized personal ones (approx 50k lines for one project, and a smaller 20k line one earlier) and am currently in the process of doing a similar migration at work (~1.4 million lines, but we didn't migrate the whole thing, more like 300k of it). I found success with it pretty easily for those smaller projects. They were gamedev projects, and the process was…

"I also wanted to build a LOT of unit tests, integration tests, and static validation. From a bit of prior experience I found that this is where AI tooling really shines, and it can write tests with far more patience that I ever could. This lets it build up a large hoard of regression and correctness tests that help when I want to implement more things later and the codebase grows."

The tests it writes in my experience are extremely terrible, even with verbose descriptions of what they should do. Every single test I've ever written with an LLM I've had to modify manually to adjust it or straight up redo it. This was as recent as a couple months ago for a C# MAUI project, doing playwright-style UI-based functionality testing.

I'm not sure your AST idea would work for my scenario. I'd be wanting to convert XNA game-play code to PhaserJS. It wouldn't even be close to 95% similar. Several things done manually in XNA would just be automated away with PhaserJS built-ins.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#487

Post by sdf2df »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #239
sdf2df wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally, a fella who gets it. Apple has already shown this decades ago - they got the iPhone and iPod developed and out the door in relatively short-time scales given the impact of the products on the world. Once you know what you want, exactly what you want, things moves fast - really fast.

I've seen biz team taking 3 4 months to do UAT But sure let's buy 200$ per month claude to ship things faster lol

Lol yeah. Much of the issues re. lack of productivity comes from management who dont have the ability to focus+clarity+confidence of where to go and also create the environment to get the max out of people.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#488

Post by sdf2df »

leptons wrote: post #241
jaxn wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some of us, the world has already changed drastically. I am shipping more code, better code, less buggy code WAY faster than ever before. Big systemic changes for the better to our infra as well. There are days where I easily do 2 weeks worth of my best work ever. I totally understand that not everyone is having that experience. And yet until people live it, it seems they just discount the experience others are h…

>I am shipping more code, better code, less buggy code WAY faster than ever before. It's clearly relative. For all we know you're a crap coder and AI is now your crutch. We have no evidence that with AI you are as good as an average developer with a fair amount of experience. And even if you do have a fair amount of experience, that doesn't mean you're a good coder.

Exactly lol.

The iPod project was done in months, not years. Im convinced most people aren't as good at programming / focusing on the right stuff as they claim.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#489

Post by sdf2df »

booleandilemma wrote: post #150
silentkat wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m at a big tech company. They proudly stated more productivity measures in commits (already nonsense). 47% more commits, 17% less time per commit. Meaning 128% more time spent coding. Burning us out and acting like the AI slop is “unlocking” productivity. There’s some neat stuff, don’t get me wrong. But every additional tool so far has started strong but then always falls over. Always. Right now there’s this “orche…

Management is just stupid sometimes. We had a similar metric at my last company and my manager's response was "well how else are we supposed to measure productivity?", and that was supposed to be a legitimate answer.

The benefits of AI either accrue toward incremental revenue-generation or cost-saving.

Its not rocket science to measure actually. The issue is most people dont know how to think properly to invent the right proxies.

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