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

#671

Post by trinix912 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:29 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #658

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,…

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…

The reality of most people is that they need to work to financially sustain themselves. Yes, there are people who just like what they do and work regardless, but I think we shouldn't discount the majority which would drop their jobs or at least work less hours had it not been out of the need for money.

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

#672

Post by godelski » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:29 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #653

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?

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 l…

  > it seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a brick wall in terms of the benefits of scaling

What's annoying is plenty of us (researchers) predicted this and got laughed at. Now that it's happening, it's just quiet.

I don't know about the rest, but I spoke up because I didn't want to hit a brick wall, I want to keep going! I still want to keep going! But if accurate predictions (with good explanations) aren't a reason to shift resource allocation then we just keep making the same mistake over and over. We let the conmen come in and people who get too excited by success that they get blind to pitfalls.

And hey, I'm not saying give me money. This account is (mostly) anonymous. There's plenty of people that made accurate predictions and tried working in other directions but never got funding to test how methods scale up. We say there's no alternatives but there's been nothing else that's been given a tenth of the effort. Apples and oranges...

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

#673

Post by hoseyor » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:30 AM UTC

quonn wrote: post #662

hoseyor wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why would it have anything to do with AI? Generative AI has been widely used for two years and the drop is exactly around January 20. What happened in AI around that time?

[flagged]

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

#674

Post by godelski » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #647

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?

Four years into people mocking "we'll have self driving cars next year" while they are on the street daily driving around SF.

I'm quoting Elon.

I don't care about SF. I care about what I can but as a typical American. Not as an enthusiast in one of the most technologically advanced cities on the planet

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

#675

Post by dagw » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:44 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.

You either have to work for a living or you don’t

The words 'have to' are doing a lot of work in that statement. Some people 'have to' work to literally put food on the table, other people 'have to' work to able to making payments on their new yacht. The world is full of people who could probably live out the rest of their lives without working any more, but doing so would require drastic lifestyle changes they're not willing to make.

I personally think the metric should be something along the lines of how long would it take from losing all your income until you're homeless.

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

#676

Post by risyachka » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:47 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.

They are only self-driving in a very controlled environments of few very good mapped out cities with good roads in good weather.

And it took what like 2 decades to get there. So no, we don't have self-driving even close. Those examples look more like hard-coded solution for custom test cases.

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

#677

Post by Traubenfuchs » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:47 AM UTC

abracadaniel wrote: post #86

ben_w wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game theory/Nash equilibrium/Prisoner's Dilemma, and the turkey's perspective in the problem of induction. So far, for any given automation, each actor gets to cut their own costs to their benefit — and if they do this smarter than anyone else, they win the market for a bit. Every day the turkey lives, they get a bit more evidence the farmer is an endless source of free food that only wants the best for them. It's ea…

My long term fear with AI is that by replacing entry level jobs, it breaks the path to train senior level employees. It could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat from it, but could lead to massive collapse as no one is left with any understanding of how existing systems work, or how to design replacements.

As a senior software engineer code monkey this is my greatest hope!

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

#678

Post by komali2 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:49 AM UTC

hoseyor wrote: post #670

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.

He also lived in a time when the intense importance and function of a moral and cultural framework for society was taken for granted. He would have never imagined the level of social and moral degeneration of today. I will not go into specifics because the authoritarians still disagree and think everything is fine with degenerative debauchery and try to abuse anyone even just pointing to failing systems, but it all d…

That a capitalist society might achieve a 15 hour workweek if it maintained a "non debauched culture" and "culture homogeneity" is an extraordinary claim I've never seen a scrap of evidence for. Can you support this extraordinary claim?

That there's any cultural "degenerative debauchery" is an extraordinary claim. Can you back up this claim with evidence?

"Decimated," "muddled," and "polluted" imply you have an objective analysis framework for culture. Typically people who study culture avoid moralizing like this because one very quickly ends up looking very foolish. What do you know that the anthropologists and sociologists don't, to where you use these terms so freely?

If I seem aggressive, it's because I'm quite tired of vague handwaving around "degeneracy" and identity politics. Too often these conversations are completely presumptive.

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

#679

Post by dgfitz » Sat, May 31, 2025, 11:00 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #663

SarahC_ wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bullshit jobs" are the rubbish required to keep the paperwork tidy, assessed and filed. No company pays someone to do -nothing-. AI isn't going to generate those jobs, it's going to automate them. ALL our bullshit jobs are going away, and those people will be unemployed.

I foresee programers replaced by AI and the people who programed becoming pointy haired bosses to the AI.

I for see that when people only employ AI for programming, it quickly hits the point where they train on their own (usually wrong) code and it spirals into an implosion.

When kids stop learning to code for real, who writes GCC v38?

This whole LLM is just the next bitcoin/nft. People had a lot of video cards and wanted to find a new use for them. In my small brain it’s so obvious.

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

#680

Post by antonvs » Sat, May 31, 2025, 11:01 AM UTC

SarahC_ wrote: post #619

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,…

"Bullshit jobs" are the rubbish required to keep the paperwork tidy, assessed and filed. No company pays someone to do -nothing-. AI isn't going to generate those jobs, it's going to automate them. ALL our bullshit jobs are going away, and those people will be unemployed.

> "Bullshit jobs" are the rubbish required to keep the paperwork tidy, assessed and filed.

It's also the jobs that involve keeping people happy somehow, which may not be "productive" in the most direct sense.

One class of people that needs to be kept happy are managers. What makes managers happy is not always what is actually most productive. What makes managers happy is their perception of what's most productive, or having their ideas about how to solve some problem addressed.

This does, in fact, result in companies paying people to do nothing useful. People get paid to do things that satisfy a need that managers have perceived.