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

#651

Post by jeffreygoesto » Sat, May 31, 2025, 9:42 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #631

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?

As far as I've seen we appear to already have self driving vehicles, the main barriers are legal and regulatory concerns rather than the tech. If a company wanted to put a car on the road that beetles around by itself there aren't any crazy technical challenges to doing that - the issue is even if it was safer than a human driver the company would have a lot of liability problems.

What? If that stuff works, no liability will have to be executed. How can you state that it works and claim liability problems at the same time?

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

#652

Post by genewitch » Sat, May 31, 2025, 9:51 AM UTC

amarcheschi wrote: post #618

eastbound wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Italian party Lega (in the government coalition) has been using deep fakes for some time now. It's not only ridiculous, it's absolutely offensive to the people they mock - von Der leyen, other Italian politicians... -

Queen Ursula deserves to be mocked.

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

#653

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 9:54 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #588

digitcatphd wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I basically agree with you, and I think the thing that is missing from a bunch of responses that disagree is that it seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a brick wall in terms of the benefits of scaling. That is, most folks were pretty astounded by the gains you could get from just stuffing more training data into these models, but like someone who argues a 15 year old will be 50 feet tall based on the last 5 years' growth rate, people who are still arguing that past growth rates will continue apace don't seem to be honest (or aware) to me.

I'm not at all saying that it's impossible some improvement will be discovered in the future that allows AI progress to continue at a breakneck speed, but I am saying that the "progress will only accelerate" conclusion, based primarily on the progress since 2017 or so, is faulty reasoning.

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

#654

Post by hoseyor » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:00 AM UTC

bootsmann wrote: post #634

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…

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

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Post by theawakened » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:04 AM UTC

I've said this before and I'll say it again: The idea that 'AI' will EVER take over any programmers job is ridiculous. These idiots think they are going to create AGI, it's never going to happen, not with this race of people. There is far too much ignorance in humanity. AI will never be able to be any better than it's source, humanity. It's a soon-to-be realization for these billionaire talking heads. Nothing can rise higher than it's source. Even if they cover every square foot of land with data centers, it'll never work like they expect it to. The AI bubble will burst so hard the entire world will quake. I give it 5 years max.

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

#656

Post by gmerc » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:04 AM UTC

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…

The flaw with the Zirp narrative that companies managed to raise more money than ever before the moment they had a somewhat believable narrative instead of the crypto/web3/metaverse nonsense.

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

#657

Post by SirHumphrey » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:09 AM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #548

topspin wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output?" No. The bottleneck isn't intellectual productivity. The bottleneck is a legion of other things; regulation, IP law, marketing, etc. The executive email writers and meeting attenders have a swarm of business considerations ricocheting around in their heads in eternal battle with each other. It takes a lot of supposedly brilliant thinking to safely monetize all…

> One place where AI is being disruptive is research: where researchers are applying models in novel ways and making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields. Great point. The perfect example: (From Wiki): > In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions for protein structure prediction. AFAIK: They are talking about DeepMind Al…

I think AlphaFold is where current AI terminology starts breaking down. Because in some real sense, AlphaFold is primarily a statistical model - yes, it's interesting that they developed it using ML techniques, but from the use standpoint it's little different than perturbation based black boxes that were used before that for 20 years.

Yes, it's an example of ML used in science (other examples include NN based force fields for molecule dynamics simulations and meteorological models) - but a biologist or meteorologist usually cares little how the software package they are using works (excluding the knowledge of different limitation of numerical vs statistical models).

The whole thing "but look AI in science" seem to me like Motte-and-bailey argument to imply the use of AGI-like MLLM agents that perform independent research - currently a much less successful approach.

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

#658

Post by tim333 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:09 AM UTC

jameslk wrote: post #512

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…

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,…

I think something Keynes got wrong there and much AI job discussion ignores is people like working, subject to the job being fun. Look at the richest people with no need to work - Musk, Buffett etc. Still working away, often well past retirement age with no need for the money. Keynes himself, wealth and probably with tenure working away on his theories. In the UK you can quite easily do nothing by going on disability allowance and doing nothing and many do but they are not happy.

There can be a certain snobbishness with academics where they are like of course I enjoy working away on my theories of employment but the unwashed masses do crap jobs where they'd rather sit on their arses watching reality TV. But it isn't really like that. Usually.

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

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Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:10 AM UTC

JSR_FDED wrote: post #352

idkwhattocallme wrote: post #23

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock.…

I don’t doubt there’s a lot of knowledge workers who aren’t adding value. I’m worried about the shrinking number of opportunities for juniors.

I agree with this, but I still think that offshoring is much more responsible for this than AI.

I have definitely seen real world examples where adding junior hires at ~$100k+ is being completely forgone when you can get equivalent output from someone making $40k offshore.

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

#660

Post by d4mi3n » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:11 AM UTC

ireadmevs wrote: post #636

kergonath wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was extrapolating, as well. Going from children in the mines to the welfare state in a generation was quite something. Unfortunately, progress slowed down significantly for many reasons but I don’t think we should really blame Keynes for this. > We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated. I think it has always been that way. Looking through history, there are many examples…

There’s no middle class. You either have to work for a living or you don’t.

While you’re not wrong in what differentiates those with wealth to those without, I think ignores a lot of nuance.

Does one have savings? Can they afford to spend time with their children outside of working day to day? Do they have the ability to take reasonable risks without chancing financial ruin in pursuit of better opportunities?

These are things we typically attribute to someone in the middle class. I worry that boiling down these discussions to “you work and they don’t” misses a lot of opportunity for tangible improvement to quality of life for large number of people.