The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine • Hacker News Board

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

#581

Post by kergonath » Sat, May 31, 2025, 6:54 AM UTC

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.

> It is very possible that foreign powers use AI to generate social media content in mass for propaganda.

No need for AI. Troll farms are well documented and were in action before transformers could string two sentences together.

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

#582

Post by bawolff » Sat, May 31, 2025, 6:58 AM UTC

xkcd1963 wrote: post #520

bawolff wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even still, in theory this should free up more money to hire more lawyers, markerters, etc. The effect should still be there presuming the market isn't saturated with new ideas .

Something else will get expensive in the meantime, e.g. it doesn't matter how much you earn, landlords will always increase rent to the limit because a living space is a basic necessity

No, landlords will increase rent as much as they can because they like money (they call it capitalism for a reason). This is true of all goods, both essential and non-essential. All businesses follow the rule of supply and demand when setting prices or quickly go out of business.

In the scenario being discussed - if a bunch of companies hired a whole bunch of lawyers, markerters, etc that might make salaries go up due to increased demand (but probably not super high amoung as tech isnt the only industry in the world). That still first requires companies to be hiring more of these types of people for that effect to happen, so we should still see some of the increased output even if there is a limiting factor. We would also notice the salaray of those professions going up, which so far hasn't happened.

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

#583

Post by apex3stoker » Sat, May 31, 2025, 6:58 AM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #318

jayd16 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, aren't 3 out of 8 humans from India or China? If the company is big enough to appeal to a global applicant pool its a bit expected.

It’s presumably (from context) a company campus in the US that they’re taking about. I wouldn’t expect 3 of 8 legally authorized to work in the US people to be Chinese or Indian combined. Other than a few international visitors, I’d expect the makeup to look like the domestic tech worker demographics rather than like the global population demographics.

I think most software companies hire from computer science graduates from US colleges. It’s likely that international students makes up a large percentage of these graduates.

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

#584

Post by kergonath » Sat, May 31, 2025, 6:59 AM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #422

CMCDragonkai wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cause there are still bottlenecks. AI is definitely boosting productivity in specific areas, but the total system output is bottlenecked. I think we will see these bottlenecks get rerouted or refactored in the coming years.

What do you think the main bottlenecks are right now?

Quality control, for one. The state of commercial software is appalling. Writing code itself is not enough to get a useable piece of software.

LLMs are also not very useful for long term strategy or to come up with novel features or combinations of features. They also are not great at maintaining existing code, particularly without comprehensive test suites. They are good at coming up with tests for boiler plate code, but not really for high-level features.

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

#585

Post by lazyasciiart » Sat, May 31, 2025, 6:59 AM UTC

jsnider3 wrote: post #374

disambiguation wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway. I think quotes around "real value" would be appropriate as well. Consider all the great engineering it took to create Netflix, valued at $500b - which achieves what SFTP does for free.

Netflix's value comes from being convenient and compatible with the copyright system in a way sharing videos P2P definitely isn't.

And their increasingly restrictive usage policies are basically testing how important the 'convenient' piece is.

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

#586

Post by impossiblefork » Sat, May 31, 2025, 7:00 AM UTC

rekenaut wrote: post #299

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony now is that 120k is basically minimum wage for major metros (and in most cases that excludes home ownership). Of course, that growth in wages in this sector was a contributing factor to home/rental price increases as the "market" could bear higher prices.

I feel that saying "120k is basically minimum wage for major metros" is absurd. As of 2022, there are only three metro areas in the US that have a per capita income greater than $120,000 [1] (Bay Area and Southwest Connecticut). Anywhere else in the US, 120k is doing pretty well for yourself, compared to the rest of the population. The average American working full time earns $60k [2]. I'm sure it's not a comfortable…

It actually is basically minimum wage for major metros.

If I took a job for ~100k in Washington, I'd live worse than I did as a PhD student in Sweden. It would basically suck. I'm not sure ~120k would make things that different.

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

#587

Post by yusina » Sat, May 31, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

elif wrote: post #526

nradov wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

> a technology which 3 years ago did not exist

Decades of machine learning research would like to have a word.

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

#588

Post by godelski » Sat, May 31, 2025, 7:04 AM UTC

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.

Yet we're what? 5 years into "AI will replace programmers in 6 months"?

10 years into "we'll have self driving cars next year"

We're 10 years into "it's just completely obvious that within 5 years deep learning is going to replace radiologists"

Moravec's paradox strikes again and again. But this time it's different and it's completely obvious now, right?

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

#589

Post by yusina » Sat, May 31, 2025, 7:05 AM UTC

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…

> You would need to have something like networked driving, or government supported networks of driving information, to deal with the cultural factor.

Or actual intelligence. That observes its surroundings and learns what's going on. That can solve generic problems. Which is the definition of intelligence. One of the obvious proofs that what everybody is calling "AI" is fundamentally not intelligent, so it's a blatant misnomer.

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

#590

Post by ivape » Sat, May 31, 2025, 7:10 AM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #578

ivape wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are not accepting that their entire business will mostly go away. They are mostly frogs boiling in water, that's why they are kinda just incorporating these little chat bots and LLMs into their business, but the truth of the matter is it's all going away and it's impossible to believe. Take something like JIRA, it's entirely laughable because a simple LLM can handle entire project management with freaking v…

> Take something like JIRA, it's entirely laughable because a simple LLM can handle entire project management with freaking voice with zero programming When I used a not-so-simple LLM to make it act as a text adventure game it could barely keep track of the items in my inventory, so TBH i am a little bit skeptical that an LLM can handle entire project management - even without voice. Perhaps it might be able to use t…

There are innovative ways to accomplish the consistency you seek for the example application you mentioned. They are coming a lot sooner than you think, but hey this thread is a bit of a poker game before the flop, I’m just placing my bet - you can call the bluff.

We just have to wait for the cards to flip, and that’s happening on a quadratic curve (some say exponential).