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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

#601

Post by throwaway2037 »

yobbo wrote: post #275
catigula wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions. Both sides of the aisle retreated fr…

> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads One theory is that the benefit they might be providing over domestic "grads" is lack of prerequisites for promotion above certain levels (language, cultural fit, and so on). For managers, this means the prestige of increased headcount without the various "burdens" of managing "careerists". For example, less plaus…

Careerists: What does this term mean?

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

#602

Post by godelski »

kergonath wrote: post #572
ricardobayes wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing. 3D printing is making huge progress in heavy industries. It’s not sexy and does not make headlines but it absolutely is happening. It won’t replace traditional manufacturing at huge scales (either large pieces or very high throughput). But it’s bringing costs way down for fiddly parts or replacements. It is also affecting designs, which can be made sim…

You're misunderstanding the parent's complaint and frankly the complaints with AI. Certainly 3D printing is powerful and hasn't changed things. But you forgot that 30 years ago people were saying there would be one in every house because a printer can print a printer and how this would revolutionize everything because you could just print anything at home.

The same thing with AI. You'd be blind or lying if you said it hasn't advanced a lot. People aren't denying that. But people are fed up being constantly being promised the moon and getting a cheap plastic replica instead.

The tech is rapidly advancing and doing good. But it just can't keep up with the bubble of hype. That's the problem. The hype, not the tech.

Frankly, the hype harms the tech too. We can't solve problems with the tech if we're just throwing most of our money at vaporware. I'm upset with the hype BECAUSE I like the tech.

So don't confuse the difference. Make sure you understand what you're arguing against. Because it sounds like we should be on the same team, not arguing against one another. That just helps the people selling vaporware

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

#603

Post by godelski »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #567
bawolff wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if anything i think AI is going to reverse the trend. Someone is going to have to be hired to clean up after them.

I think they said that about outsourcing software dev jobs. The reality is somewhere in the middle. extreme cases will need cleanup but overall it's here to stay, maybe with more babysitting.

I think the reality is Lemon Market Economics. We'll sacrifice quality for price. People want better quality but the truth is that it's a very information asymmetric game and it's really hard to tell quality. If it wasn't, we could all just rely on Amazon reviews and tech reviewers. But without informed consumers, price is all that matters even if it creates a market nobody wants.

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

#604

Post by godelski »

tsunamifury wrote: post #594
godelski wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[flagged]

I named 3 things...

You're going to have to specify which 2 you think happened

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

#605

Post by LeonB »

pmlnr wrote: post #513
jameslk wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure. Instead, we chose consumption, and helicopter money gave us bullshit jobs so we could keep buying more bullshit. This is fairly evident by the fact when the helicopter money runs out, all the bullshit jobs get cut. AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption,…

Keynes was talking about work in every sense,including house chore. We're well below 15 hours of house chores by now, so that part became true.

Washing machines created a revolution where we could now expend 1/10th of the human labour to wash the same amount of clothes as before. We now have more than 10 times as much clothes to wash.

I don’t know if it’s induced demand, revealed preference or Jevon’s paradox, maybe all 3.

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

#606

Post by e40 »

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…

Also section 174’s amortization of software development had a big role.

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

#607

Post by CMCDragonkai »

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?

Informational complexity bottlenecks. So many things are shackled to human decision making loops. If we were truly serious, we would unshackle everything and let it run wild. Would be chaotic, but chaos create strange attractors.

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

#608

Post by threeseed »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #592
threeseed wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t use RAG, and have no doubt the infrastructure for integrating AI into a large codebase has improved It really hasn't. The problem is that a GenAI system needs to not only understand the large codebase but also the latest stable version of every transitive dependency it depends on. Which is typically in the order of hundreds or thousands. Having it build a component with 10 year old, deprecated, CVE-riddled…

How did you think MCP was going to solve the issue of a large number of outdated dependencies?

Those large number of outdated dependencies are in the LLM "index" which can't be rapidly refreshed because of the training costs.

MCP would allow it to instead get this information at run-time from language servers, dependency repositories etc. But it hasn't proven to be effective.

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

#609

Post by casualscience »

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…

In big companies, this is a bit slower due to the need to migrate entrenched systems and org charts into newer workflows, but I think you are seeing more productivity there too. Where this is much more obvious is in indie games and software where small agile teams can adopt new ways of working quickly...

E.g. look at the indie games count on steam by year: https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492

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

#610

Post by rule2025 »

The real "white-collar massacre" is not caused by AI, but you have no irreplaceable, or the value created by hiring you is not higher than using AI. Businesses will not hesitate to use AI, you can't say that companies are ruthless, but that's the pursuit of efficiency. Just as horse-drawn carriages were replaced by cars and coachmen lost their jobs, you can't say it's a problem with cars.

History is always strikingly similar, the AI revolution is the fifth industrial revolution, and it is wise to embrace AI and collaborate with AI as soon as possible.

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