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

cnn.com

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

#521

Post by autobodie »

pmlnr wrote: post #513
jameslk wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure. Instead, we chose consumption, and helicopter money gave us bullshit jobs so we could keep buying more bullshit. This is fairly evident by the fact when the helicopter money runs out, all the bullshit jobs get cut. AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption,…

Keynes was talking about work in every sense,including house chore. We're well below 15 hours of house chores by now, so that part became true.

Source? Keynes was a serious economist, not a charlitan futurist.

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

#522

Post by autobodie »

xkcd1963 wrote: post #507
bawolff wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if anything i think AI is going to reverse the trend. Someone is going to have to be hired to clean up after them.

Thats the impression I got. Things overall get just worse in quality because people rely too much on low wages and copy pasting LLM answers

Get worse for who? The ruling class will simply never care how bad things get for working people if things are getting better for the ruling class.

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

#523

Post by hattmall »

xkcd1963 wrote: post #507
bawolff wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if anything i think AI is going to reverse the trend. Someone is going to have to be hired to clean up after them.

Thats the impression I got. Things overall get just worse in quality because people rely too much on low wages and copy pasting LLM answers

I think that's true in software development. A lot of the focus is on coding because that's really the domain of the people interested in AI, because ultimately they ARE software. But the killer app isn't software, it's anything where the operation is formulaic, but the formula can be tedious to figure out, but once you know it you can confirm that it's correct by working backwards. Software has far too many variables, not least of which is the end user. On the other hand things like accounting, finance, and engineering are far more suitable for trained models and back testing for conformity.

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

#524

Post by autobodie »

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…

No, we would see profits increase, and we have been seeing profits increase.

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

#525

Post by petersellers »

ivape wrote: post #466
nradov wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly. You still need a way to track and prioritize tasks even if you use voice input. Jira may be replaced with something better, built around an LLM from the ground up. But the basic project management requirements will never go away.

Yes, that's quite easy. I say "Hey reorganize the tasks like-so, prioritize this, like so", and if I really need to, I can go ahead and hook up some function calls but I suspect this will be unnecessary with a few more LLM iterations (if even that). You can keep running from how powerful these LLMs are, but I'll just sit and wait for the business/startup apocalypse (which is coming). Jira will not be replaced by some…

If replacing Jira is really as easy as you claim, then it would have happened by now. At the very least, we'd be getting hit by a deluge of HN posts and articles about how to spin up your very own project management application with an LLM.

I think that this sentiment, along with all of the hype around AI in general, is failing to grasp a lot of the complexity around software creation. I'm not just talking about writing the code for a new application - I'm talking about maintaining that application, ensuring that it executes reliably and correctly, thinking about the features and UX required to make it as frictionless as possible (and voice input isn't the solution there, I'm very confident of that).

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

#526

Post by elif »

nradov wrote: post #479
digitcatphd wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of now yes. But we are still in day 0.1 of GenAI. Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and 100x cheaper? There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.

10× better by what metric? Progress on LLMs has been amazing but already appears to be slowing down.

with autonomous vehicles, the narrative of imperceptibly slow incremental change about chasing 9's is still the zeitgeist despite an actual 10x improvement in homicidality compared to humans already existing.

There is a lag in how humans are reacting to AI which is probably a reflexive aspect of human nature. There are so many strategies being employed to minimize progress in a technology which 3 years ago did not exist and now represents a frontier of countless individual disciplines.

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

#527

Post by Nasrudith »

abracadaniel wrote: post #86
ben_w wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game theory/Nash equilibrium/Prisoner's Dilemma, and the turkey's perspective in the problem of induction. So far, for any given automation, each actor gets to cut their own costs to their benefit — and if they do this smarter than anyone else, they win the market for a bit. Every day the turkey lives, they get a bit more evidence the farmer is an endless source of free food that only wants the best for them. It's ea…

My long term fear with AI is that by replacing entry level jobs, it breaks the path to train senior level employees. It could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat from it, but could lead to massive collapse as no one is left with any understanding of how existing systems work, or how to design replacements.

The worst case for such a cycle is generating new jobs in reverse engineers. Although in practice with what we have seen with machinists it tends to just accelerate existing trends towards outsourcing to countries who haven't had the 'entry level collapse'.

We've already eliminated certain junior level domains essentially by design. There aren't any 'barber-surgeons' with only two years of training for good reason. Instead we have surgery integrated it into a more lengthy and complicated educational path to become what we now would consider a 'proper' surgeon.

I think the answer is that if the 'junior' is uneconomical or otherwise unacceptable be prepared to pay more for the alternative, one way or another.

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

#528

Post by xkcd1963 »

autobodie wrote: post #522
xkcd1963 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats the impression I got. Things overall get just worse in quality because people rely too much on low wages and copy pasting LLM answers

Get worse for who? The ruling class will simply never care how bad things get for working people if things are getting better for the ruling class.

I meant just regular products as example if I login to bitpanda on browser the parts that would hold the translation hold the keys for translations instead. Just countless examples and many security issues as well.

Regarding class struggle I think class division always existed but we the mass have all the tools to improve our situation.

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

#529

Post by itishappy »

pmlnr wrote: post #513
jameslk wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure. Instead, we chose consumption, and helicopter money gave us bullshit jobs so we could keep buying more bullshit. This is fairly evident by the fact when the helicopter money runs out, all the bullshit jobs get cut. AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption,…

Keynes was talking about work in every sense,including house chore. We're well below 15 hours of house chores by now, so that part became true.

We've got 10 whole hours left over for "actual" work!

(Quotes because I personally have a significantly harder time doing bloody housework...)

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

#530

Post by pkroll »

csomar wrote: post #517
topspin wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output?" No. The bottleneck isn't intellectual productivity. The bottleneck is a legion of other things; regulation, IP law, marketing, etc. The executive email writers and meeting attenders have a swarm of business considerations ricocheting around in their heads in eternal battle with each other. It takes a lot of supposedly brilliant thinking to safely monetize all…

> where researchers are applying models in novel ways and making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields. Can you give an example, say in Medicine, where AI made a significant advancement? That is we are talking neural networks and up (ie: LLM) and not some local optimization.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849

"Our study suggests that LLMs have achieved superhuman performance on general medical diagnostic and management reasoning"

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