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

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

#541

Post by kttjoppl »

fny wrote: post #144
hooverd wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you talk about Rust without your friend computer?

Of course not! But I can definitely ship useful tools, and I can could learn to talk the talk in a tenth of the time it would otherwise have taken. Which is my point, this is not about replacement, it's about reducing the need and increasing supply.

How are you going to ship a tool you don't understand? What are you going to do when it breaks? How are you going to debug issues in a language you don't understand? How do you know the code the LLM generated is correct?

LLMs absolutely help me pick up new skills faster, but if you can't have a discussion about Rust and Svelte, no, you didn't learn them. I'm making a lot of progress learning deep learning and ChatGPT has been critical for me to do so. But I still have to read books, research papers, and my framework's documentation. And it's still taking a long time. If I hadn't read the books, I wouldn't know what question to ask or how to evaluate if ChatGPT is completely off base (which happens all the time).

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

#542

Post by infinitebit »

I am SO thankful to see a news outlet take what tech CEOs say with a grain of salt re: AI. I feel like so many have just been breathlessly repeating anything they say without even an acknowledgement that there might be, you know, some incentive for them to stretch the truth.

(ftr i’m not even taking a side re: will AI take all the jobs. even if they do, the reporting on this subject by MSM has been abysmal)

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

#543

Post by andrekandre »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #392
matthest wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic? Because they don't have to do that. They could just operate at max efficiency all the time. Instead, they spread the wealth a bit by having bullshit jobs, even if the existence of these jobs is dependent on the market cycle.

> Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic? I do. It's much more important that people live a dignified life and be able to feed their families than "increasing shareholder value" or whatever. I'm a person that would be hypothetically supportive of something like DOGE cuts, but I'd rather have people earning a living even with Soviet-style ma…

  > It's much more important that people live a dignified life and be able to feed their families than "increasing shareholder value" or whatever.
its just my intuition, but talking to many people around me, i get the feeling like this is why people on both "left" and "right" are in a lot of ways (for lack of a better word) irate at the system as a whole... if thats true, i doubt ai will improve the situation for either...

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

#544

Post by throwaway2037 »

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…

Regarding the impact of LLMs on non-programming tasks, check out this one:

https://www.ft.com/content/4f20fbb9-a10f-4a08-9a13-efa1b55dd...

    > The bank [Goldman Sachs] now has 11,000 engineers among its 46,000 employees, according to [CEO David] Solomon, and is using AI to help draft public filing documents.

    > The work of drafting an S1 — the initial registration prospectus for an IPO — might have taken a six-person team two weeks to complete, but it can now be 95 per cent done by AI in minutes, said Solomon.

    > “The last 5 per cent now matters because the rest is now a commodity,” he said.
In my eyes, that is major. Junior ibankers are not cheap -- they make about 150K USD per year minimum (total comp).

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

#545

Post by squigz »

pkroll wrote: post #530
csomar wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

This isn't really applying LLMs to research in novel ways.

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

#546

Post by andrekandre »

aianus wrote: post #414
absurdo wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically yeah. You live in a world of layered servitude and, short of a financial windfall that hoists you up for some time, you’re basically guaranteed to work your entire life, and grow old, frail and poor. This isn’t a joke, it’s reality for many people that’s hidden from us to keep us deluded. Similar to my other mini-rant, I don’t have any valid answers to the problem at hand. Just acknowledging how fucked thin…

No, it's quite easy to make $1mm in a rich country and move to a poorer country and chill if you so desire.

  > make $1mm in a rich country and move to a poorer country and chill if you so desire
i wonder if such trends are good for said poorer country (e.g real estate costs) in the long run?

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

#547

Post by lambdasquirrel »

CSMastermind wrote: post #349

Huge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since the advent of computers. If you look at the work performed by office workers in the 1960s and compared it to what people today do it'd be almost unrecognizable. They spent huge amounts of time on things that software either does automatically or makes 1,000x faster. But by and large that actually created more white collar jobs because those capabilities mean…

Anecdotal, but AI was what enabled me to learn French, when I was doing that. Before LLMs, I would've had to pay a lot more money to get the class time I'd need, but the availability of Google Translate and DeepL meant that some meaningful, casual learning was within reach. I could reasonably study, try to figure things out, and have questions for the teachers the two or three times a week I had lessons.

Nowadays I'm learning my parents' tongue (Cantonese) and Mandarin. It's just comical how badly the LLMs do sometimes. I swear they roll a natural 1 on a d20 and then just randomly drop a phrase. Or at least that's my head canon. They're just playing DnD on the side.

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

#548

Post by throwaway2037 »

topspin wrote: post #475
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…

"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…

    > One place where AI is being disruptive is research: where researchers are applying models in novel ways and making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields.
Great point. The perfect example: (From Wiki):

    > In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions for protein structure prediction.
AFAIK: They are talking about DeepMind AlphaFold.

Related: (Also from Wiki):

    > Isomorphic Labs Limited is a London-based company which uses artificial intelligence for drug discovery. Isomorphic Labs was founded by Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO.

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

#549

Post by alluro2 »

roenxi wrote: post #28
darth_avocado wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up, consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could you be excited for that?

You're being confused by the numbers. We aren't trying to maximise consumer spending, the point is to maximise living standards. If the market equilibrium price of all goods was $0 consumer spending would be $0 and living standards would be off the charts. It'd be a great outcome. It just happens that up to this point there have been things that couldn't be done by capital. Now we're entering a world where there isn'…

Given the current mechanics evident in the society - declining education, healthcare and rising cost of living, homelessness and exploding economic inequality - who is "we", trying to maximise living standards, and what movement do you see leading towards such an outcome?

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

#550

Post by PeterHolzwarth »

Izkata wrote: post #535
SteveNuts wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A little further on and it'll be writers, actors, etc. The tech is going to have to be absolutely flawless, otherwise the uncanny-valley nature of AI "actors" in a movie will be as annoying as when the audio and video aren't perfectly synced in a stream. At least that's how I see it..

This was made a little over a week ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaTech/comments/1ksjcsr/this_vid... For most of them I'm not seeing any of those issues.

I get what you mean, but the last year has been a story of sudden limits and ceilings of capability. The (damned impressive) video you post is a bunch of extremely brief snippets strung together. I'm not yet sure we can move substantially beyond that to something transformative or pervasively destructive.

A couple years ago, we thought the trend was without limits - a five second video would turn into a five minute video, and keep going from there. But now I wonder if perhaps there are built in limits to how far things can go without having a data center with a billion Nvidia cards and a dozen nuclear reactors serving them power.

Again, I don't know the limits, but we've seen in the last year some sudden walls pop up that change our sense of the trajectory down to something less "the future is just ten months away."

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