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Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

anthropic.com

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Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#61

Post by andai »

byproxy wrote: post #59
tl2do wrote: post #20

From my experience as a software engineer, doubling my productivity hasn’t reduced my workload. My output per hour has gone up, but expectations and requirements have gone up just as fast. Software development is effectively endless work, and AI has mostly compressed timelines rather than reduced total demand.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Worst time to be an employee, as you are expected to work faster and faster. (The approach is very much quantity over quality.)

Best time to be a solo founder in underserved markets :)

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#62

Post by johnfn »

darth_avocado wrote: post #55
johnfn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.

> This seems unlikely This is already happening. Fewer people are getting hired. Companies are quietly (sometimes not, like Block) letting people go. At a personal level all the leaders in my company are sounding the “catch up or you’ll be left behind” alarm. People are going to be let go at an accelerated pace in the future (1-3 years).

I don’t think that addresses my point. I understand a lot of companies are firing under the guise of AI, but it’s unclear to me whether AI is actually driving this - especially when the article we are both responding to says:

> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#63

Post by Kye »

bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

I've taken to calling LLMs processors. A "Hello World" in assembly is about 20 lines and on par with most unskilled prompting. It took a while to get from there to Rust, or Firefox, or 1T parameter transformers running on powerful vector processors. We're a notch past Hello World with this processor.

The specific way it applies to your specific situation, if it exists, either hasn't been found or hasn't made its way to you. It really is early days.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#64

Post by nl »

This is a pretty interesting report.

The TL;DR is that there is little measurable impact (and I'd personally add "yet").

To quote:

"We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations"

My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle.

I have doubts that this impact is measurable yet - there is a lag between hiring intention and impact on jobs, and outside Silicon Valley large scale hiring decisions are rarely made in a 3 month timeframe.

The most interesting part is the radar plot showing the lack of usage of AI in many industries where the capability is there!

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#65

Post by willmadden »

bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

Build a new feature. If you aren't bogged down in bureaucracy it will happen much faster.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#66

Post by pixl97 »

nitwit005 wrote: post #57

The problem with using unemployment as a metric is hiring is driving by perception. You're making an educated guess as to how many people you need in the future. Anthropic can cause layoffs through pure marketing. People were crediting an Anthropic statement in causing a drop in IBM's stock value, which may genuinely lead to layoffs: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-stock-plunges-ai-threat-1... We'll probably have…

Between 2004 and 2008 I did many things in computing as a company that offered my services, one of these was information gathering automation. It almost never immediately lead to decreases in employment. The systems had a to be in place for a while, people had to get used to them, people had to stop making common mistakes with them.

Then the 2008 crash happened and those people were gone in a blink of an eye and never replaced. The companies grew in staff after that, but it was in things like sales and marketing.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#67

Post by bandrami »

willmadden wrote: post #65
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

Build a new feature. If you aren't bogged down in bureaucracy it will happen much faster.

Most of these are new features, but then they have to integrate with the existing software so it's not really greenfield. (Not to mention that our clients aren't getting any faster at approving new features, either.)

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#68

Post by recursivedoubts »

A possible outcome of AI: domestic technical employment goes up because the economics of outsourcing change. Domestic technical workers working with AI tools can replace outsourcing shops, eliminating time-shift issues, etc at similar or lower costs.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#69

Post by holografix »

One of the more interesting takes I heard from a colleague, who’s in the marketing department, is that he uses the corporate approved LLM (Gemini) for “pretend work” or very basic tasks. At the same time he uses Claude on his personal account to seriously augment his job.

His rationale is he won’t let the company log his prompts and responses so they can’t build an agentic replacement for him. Corporate rules about shadow it be damned.

Only the paranoid survive I guess

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#70

Post by sdf2df »

willmadden wrote: post #65
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

Build a new feature. If you aren't bogged down in bureaucracy it will happen much faster.

Its this kind of thinking that tells me people cant be trusted with their comments on here re. "Omg I can produce code faster and it'll do this and that".

No simply 'producing a feature' aint it bud. That's one piece of the puzzle.

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