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White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

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Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#61

Post by monegator »

mikkupikku wrote: post #49
monegator wrote: post #7

I love how the comments are always full of doomposting. Get prepared. Something is coming * soon* And how any even slightly skepctical commend gets downvoted to hell. One may start thinking there are bots promoting the narrative.

Nobody thinks this way, so all the posts saying it must be bots. Wow, look at all the posts saying the thing, there must be a lot of bots. Or maybe you're choosing to perceive bots when actually a lot of people disagree with you?

I mean, looking around in social media i would describe most of LLM preachers and worshippers as either conmen or non-tech guys that still have no clue about the technology behind.. the kind that worship elon and his kind, without questioning every new absurd sales pitch that comes from that bunch as the future, no matter how little is that based in reality.

On the other side the doom posters tend to be awfully mediocre professionals (or again, conmen leveraging FOMO). Skeptics like in the article tend to be dismissed. I'm also a skeptic, and someone who you would define as a 10x i think, except a few years ago i would have just been, you know, good at my job?

Please let me know when i'm going to be automated so i can start becoming good at something else. The future may not be bright for a number of reason, but i still have not submitted to doom.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#62

Post by aurareturn »

gloxkiqcza wrote: post #50
aurareturn wrote: post #15

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was str…

In some ways AI sounds almost utopian. I theory it could redistribute manpower more evenly between small and large businesses, allowing them to compete more fairly and improving the efficiency of capitalism (the idealistic model, not the real world state). However, than you remember that the AI tech is currently almost fully in control by the big tech (and its next generation) and you have to ask whether they’ll be a…

Whoever has compute, will have the power. This is why big tech is plowing $1t into data center capex in 2026.

Disclaimer: I'm an AI compute investor.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#63

Post by mikkupikku »

monegator wrote: post #61
mikkupikku wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody thinks this way, so all the posts saying it must be bots. Wow, look at all the posts saying the thing, there must be a lot of bots. Or maybe you're choosing to perceive bots when actually a lot of people disagree with you?

I mean, looking around in social media i would describe most of LLM preachers and worshippers as either conmen or non-tech guys that still have no clue about the technology behind.. the kind that worship elon and his kind, without questioning every new absurd sales pitch that comes from that bunch as the future, no matter how little is that based in reality. On the other side the doom posters tend to be awfully medio…

In between the brainless masses mindlessly regurgitating press releases (most of whom are human, not bots) or reddit doomerisms from the other side, there are tons of people discussing real successes and failures they've had with the tech. If you can't see the middle, it's probably because you're in one of the extremes.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#64

Post by [deleted] »

rob74 wrote: post #57
flanked-evergl wrote: post #41

Managed decline policies of western governments are much more threatening to white-collar workers and everyone else than AI will ever be. AI will enable significantly faster economic growth, which is something the EU has been making impossible with legislation designed to destroy Europe's economic advantage.

Right, so it's time to dismantle environment/climate protection, worker safety/rights, employee protections etc. etc. like the Trump administration is currently doing over in the US, and make Europe great again?! (actually, MEGA would be a great acronym, but Trump's friends in the EU are more focused on dismantling it rather than making it great)

[deleted]

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#65

Post by mjd »

lelanthran wrote: post #59
mjd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it. If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable. Why would tbe company get rid of them just at that moment? Well, some will, because some companies are badly-run. Others will take advantage of the opportunity.

> Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it. You're assuming unbounded demand for whatever product the company is producing. If demand for their product is bounded, having 1 dev produce the output of 5 devs means that the company is going to have devs simply sitting around doing nothing for most of the day. > If a dev produces value for the company, and t…

Every company I have ever worked for has wanted to produce more better stuff to sell for more money. Some couldn't because they were resource constrained.

Where are these businesses that only ever want to sell the same amount of the same stuff forever?

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#66

Post by InfinityByTen »

truetraveller wrote: post #18
aurareturn wrote: post #15

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was str…

"Top customer service" and AI do not mix. People hate an AI response more than a late, real response.

Spot on! I hate being sucked into an "accountability sink", where delay/bad treatment/ tangential answers are ok (somehow acceptable) and justified because it's not personal, "it's just the process".

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#68

Post by ForHackernews »

aurareturn wrote: post #62
gloxkiqcza wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways AI sounds almost utopian. I theory it could redistribute manpower more evenly between small and large businesses, allowing them to compete more fairly and improving the efficiency of capitalism (the idealistic model, not the real world state). However, than you remember that the AI tech is currently almost fully in control by the big tech (and its next generation) and you have to ask whether they’ll be a…

Whoever has compute, will have the power. This is why big tech is plowing $1t into data center capex in 2026. Disclaimer: I'm an AI compute investor.

Strongly dispute this. Compute very depreciates rapidly. Inference is cheaper than training. DeepSeek was the warning shot across their bow, but the big AI firms can't afford to change course without jeopardizing their "Wile E. Coyote off the cliff" economics.

LLM performance is already plateauing; models will get more efficient. Good-enough models will be deployed on chips, the same way H.264 is a good-enough video codec but used ubiquitously.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#69

Post by lelanthran »

mjd wrote: post #65
lelanthran wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it. You're assuming unbounded demand for whatever product the company is producing. If demand for their product is bounded, having 1 dev produce the output of 5 devs means that the company is going to have devs simply sitting around doing nothing for most of the day. > If a dev produces value for the company, and t…

Every company I have ever worked for has wanted to produce more better stuff to sell for more money. Some couldn't because they were resource constrained. Where are these businesses that only ever want to sell the same amount of the same stuff forever?

> Every company I have ever worked for has wanted to produce more better stuff to sell for more money.

So has every company I've ever been in, but at the same time, there problem was never production, it was always sales.

No company I have ever been in had the problem of "demand is so large that even if we double output we still cannot satisfy it".

Both things are true at the same time - companies want to produce more, but their rate of production is not the limiting factor, the rate of sales is.

> Where are these businesses that only ever want to sell the same amount of the same stuff forever?

Where did I make that claim? What companies want is to sell more stuff, but production is not what is preventing them from selling more stuff.

Doubling production in a company does not lead to doubling sales - an increase in one never causes the other.

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