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White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

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Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#51

Post by windward »

motbus3 wrote: post #28
fabian2k wrote: post #22

I think the argument here is a bit of a strawman, though there is a good point in there as well. AI will not automate all customer support, but it has the potential to automate a large fraction of it. The anecdote in there is about complex B2B enterprise software. That's not the majority of customer support, and is very heavy on escalating to actual experts. You don't have to remove 100% of the jobs to have huge effe…

Not putting names but a company I know closely had 20 engineers and now has only 4. And I feel like they plan for less

>And I feel like they plan for less

I think this mentality must have its own imminent apocalypse. Gifted with an enormous increase in potential productivity, the decision is to do the same but cheaper? Who allocates capital to such spiritless commodification? It all feels like using a printing press to make one bible a month.

There must be a role that can be more productive. It might not necessarily be our skillsets that fit those roles - and the roles might be more stratified - but someone is going to be able to be do more, be paid more.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#52

Post by mikkupikku »

lelanthran wrote: post #39

To be perfectly honest, the majority of work is going to see a restructure soon anyway. "Triaging by LLM before sending task to any human" can work for almost anything, not just support calls. On another story I saw someone mention that they'd like something like an ad-blocker, but for content - a "content-blocker". Not too hard running even a local model that, via a browser extension, scnas the current page and plac…

I implemented HN article triage years ago using nothing more than naive Bayesian classification on the text of the headlines. Worked surprisingly well, you might try that.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#55

Post by rob74 »

kensai wrote: post #6

Just watch this for some depressive vibes: https://x.com/TechLayoffLover

Is this based on anything real or just AI-generated slop meant to trigger angry reactions? It doesn't quote any sources for any of the stories, so as far as I can see, they're probably 100% made up...

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#57

Post by rob74 »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #41

Managed decline policies of western governments are much more threatening to white-collar workers and everyone else than AI will ever be. AI will enable significantly faster economic growth, which is something the EU has been making impossible with legislation designed to destroy Europe's economic advantage.

Right, so it's time to dismantle environment/climate protection, worker safety/rights, employee protections etc. etc. like the Trump administration is currently doing over in the US, and make Europe great again?!

(actually, MEGA would be a great acronym, but Trump's friends in the EU are more focused on dismantling it rather than making it great)

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#58

Post by tripledry »

robotswantdata wrote: post #2

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive. Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

> It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

True, but also there are perception biases that lead us to believe progress is exponential, even though it might as well be an S-curve.

I'm having a hard time finding the right terms, but I'm sure there is some bias to think that "the line goes up".

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#59

Post by lelanthran »

mjd wrote: post #43
lelanthran wrote: post #39

To be perfectly honest, the majority of work is going to see a restructure soon anyway. "Triaging by LLM before sending task to any human" can work for almost anything, not just support calls. On another story I saw someone mention that they'd like something like an ad-blocker, but for content - a "content-blocker". Not too hard running even a local model that, via a browser extension, scnas the current page and plac…

Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it. If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable. Why would tbe company get rid of them just at that moment? Well, some will, because some companies are badly-run. Others will take advantage of the opportunity.

> Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it.

You're assuming unbounded demand for whatever product the company is producing. If demand for their product is bounded, having 1 dev produce the output of 5 devs means that the company is going to have devs simply sitting around doing nothing for most of the day.

> If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable.

I don't follow this argument - there is a practical limit to how much development a company requires. In the past they may have had a team of 10 to satisfy that limit. If the limit is satisfied by a team of 2 the company... does what exactly?

After all, a limit is a limit.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#60

Post by n4r9 »

odyssey7 wrote: post #48
n4r9 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a recent AI workshop management made clear that they see AI as rendering sprints and scrums obsolete, that Kanban makes a lot more sense, and that estimating effort/story-points is also becoming meaningless. Which is a strong silver lining if you ask me.

I want to understand how AI leads to this outcome.

I think it's to do with the bottleneck shifting away from code generation and towards specifying and reviewing and integrating code. The process of working with AI agents to produce specs, tech specs, code, and reviews lends itself more to a flow-based structure (like kanban).

Bear in mind this is a B2B enterprise company with a mix of legacy and greenfield. And management has invested heavily into designing a robust spec/context-based workflow for using agents. Might be different elsewhere.

Personally I don't think scrums, planning, retros etc were better than kanban even before AI, at least if you have switched-on, motivated and smart people on your team. They actually made things less agile, and story-points give a false sense of predictability. Imo the crucial factor may be that AI agents are smart and switched-on (with the right context).

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