Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 1001 posts

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

#551

Post by directevolve »

digitcatphd wrote: post #474
simonsarris wrote: post #465

I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 lev…

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.

We’re already heading toward the sigmoid plateau. The GPT 3 to 4 shift was massive. Nothing since had touched that. I could easily go back to the models I was using 1-2 years ago with little impact on my work.

I don’t use RAG, and have no doubt the infrastructure for integrating AI into a large codebase has improved. But the base model powering the whole operation seems stuck.

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

#552

Post by infinitebit »

So glad to see a MSM outlet take the words of an AI ceo with even a single grain of salt. I’ve been really disappointed with the way so many publications have just been breathlessly repeating what is essentially a sales pitch.

(ftr i’m not even taking a side re: is AI going to take all the jobs. regardless of what happens the fact remains that the reporting has been absolute sh*t on this. i guess “the singularity is here” gets more clicks than “sales person makes sales pitch”)

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

#553

Post by binoct »

intended wrote: post #536
elif wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

This is my favorite thing to point out from the day we started talking about autonomous vehicles on tech sites. If you took a Tesla or a Waymo and dropped into into a tier 2 city in India, it will stop moving. Driving data is cultural data, not data about pure physics. You will never get to full self driving, even with more processing power, because the underlying assumptions are incorrect. Doing more of the same thi…

One of my favorite things to question about autonomous driving is the goalposts. What do you mean the “stated goal of full self driving”, which is unachievable? Any vehicle, anywhere in the world, in any conditions? That seems an absurd goal that ignores the very real value in having vehicles that do not require drivers and are safer than humans but are limited to certain regions.

Absolutely driving is cultural (all things people do are cultural) but given 10’s of millions of miles driven by Waymo, clearly it has managed the cultural factor in the places they have been deployed. Modern autonomous driving is about how people drive far more than the rules of the road, even on the highly regulated streets of western countries. Absolutely the constraints of driving in Chennai are different, but what is fundamentally different? What leads to an impossible leap in processing power to operate there?

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

#554

Post by apwell23 »

digitcatphd wrote: post #474
simonsarris wrote: post #465

I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 lev…

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.

> Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and 100x cheaper?

why don't you bring it up then.

> There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.

do you know something that rest of us don't ?

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

#555

Post by ramesh31 »

ggm wrote: post #269

Without well paid middle classes, who is buying all the fancy goods and services? Money is just rationing. If you devalue the economy implicitly you accept that, and the consequences for society at large. Lenin's dictum: A capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with Comes to mind

>Without well paid middle classes, who is buying all the fancy goods and services?

Rich people buying even fancier goods and services. You already see this in the auto industry. Why build a great $20,000 car for the masses when you can make the same revenue selling $80,000 cars to rich people (and at higher margins)? This doesn't work of course when you have a reasonably egalitarian society with reasonable wealth inequality. But the capitalists have figured out how to make 75% of us into willing slaves for the rest. A bonus of this is that a good portion of that 75% can be convinced to go into lifelong debt to "afford" those things they wish they could actually buy, further entrenching the servitude.

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

#556

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#557

Post by ricardobayes »

digitcatphd wrote: post #474
simonsarris wrote: post #465

I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 lev…

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.

Frankly, we don't know. That "turning point" that seemed so close for many tech, never came for some of them. Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing. Or self-driving, that is "just around the corner" for a decade now. And still is probably a decade away. Only time will tell if GenAI/LLMs are color TV or 3D TV.

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

#558

Post by rusk »

eastbound wrote: post #531
autobodie wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keynes lived in a time when the working class was organized and exerting its power over its destiny. We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.

It is very possible that foreign powers use AI to generate social media content in mass for propaganda. If anything, the internet up to 2015 seemed open for discussion and swaying by real people’s opinion (and mockery of the elite classes), while manipulation and manufactured consent became the norm after 2017.

This is a pre-/post- Snowden & Schrems, which challenged the primary economic model of the internet as a surveillance machine.

All the free money dried up and the happy clapping Barney the Dinosaur Internet was no more!

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

#559

Post by PeterHolzwarth »

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…

The classic example is the 50's/60's photograph of an entire floor of a tall office building replaced by single spreadsheet. This passed without comment.

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

#560

Post by brokegrammer »

We don't need AI to wipe out entry-level office jobs. David Graeber wrote about this in Bullshit Jobs. But now that we have AI, it's a good excuse to wipe out those jobs for good, just like Elon did after he acquired Twitter. After that, we can blame AI for the deed.
Post reply on HN