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

#741

Post by Workaccount2 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #722

nxm wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 trillion in unnecessary Covid related spending when Covid impact was winding down was the key reason for inflation. "$2000 checks!" was the campaign slogan

We're blaming the 1000 dollar stimulus checks to the people and not the massive PPP loans that the government never bothered to collect on? It's amazing how well billionaires trained us to fight amongst one another as they ransack in broad daylight.

No. The checks were mostly meaningless.

The near zero interest rates, pause on student loan payments, pause on rent payments, doubling of unemployment pay, and then the dustings of stimulus checks and bonus childcare checks, all while most white collar workers just continued working like nothing happened, created an incredibly cash rich environment that most people have never seen before.

And the PPP loans handouts to business owners just to throw more gas on the fire.

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

#742

Post by fourside » Sat, May 31, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #544

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…

Regarding the impact of LLMs on non-programming tasks, check out this one: https://www.ft.com/content/4f20fbb9-a10f-4a08-9a13-efa1b55dd... > The bank [Goldman Sachs] now has 11,000 engineers among its 46,000 employees, according to [CEO David] Solomon, and is using AI to help draft public filing documents. > The work of drafting an S1 — the initial registration prospectus for an IPO — might have taken a six-person te…

This is certainly interesting and I don’t want to readily dismiss it, but I sometimes question how reliable these CEO anecdotes are. There’s a lot of pressure to show Wallstreet that you’re at the forefront of the AI revolution. It doesn’t mean no company is achieving great results but that it’s hard to separate the real anecdotes from the hype.

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

#743

Post by Workaccount2 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

andyferris wrote: post #699

frontfor wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe the war specifically drove the Fed to raise interest rates. Inflation and asset prices have risen sharply a year prior to the war.

There was a specific and particular expectation (and even patience) for inflation to drop naturally as the supply chains again reached equilibrium after Covid. Russia's invasion of Ukraine however caused a whole bunch of economic inputs like energy and fertilizer to spike, and central banks world wide didn't want economies to "get used to" constant high inflation rates, causing a perpetual problem.

Work from home was the wrench in the governments plan. If the pandemic happened in 2000, the stimulus would have been needed, as the tools for remote work were way too poor back then.

But instead all the productivity workers just switched to their home office and things just kept working. The stimulus should have been shut off in early-mid 2021 when this was abundantly clear. But the government let it run because people were so jubilant in the money shower.

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

#744

Post by jkestner » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #729

tim333 wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, but ... The argument that self-driving cars should be allowed on public roads as long as they are statistically as safe as human drivers (on average) seems valid, but of course none of these cars have AGI... they perform well in the anticipated simulator conditions in which they were trained (as long as they have the necessary sensors, e.g. Waymo's lidar, to read the environment in reliable fashion), but will no…

  I'd not personally be comfortable riding in one since I'm not senile, drunk, teenager, hothead, distracted (using phone while driving), etc - not part of the class that are dragging the human safety stats down.

The challenge is that most people think they’re better than average drivers.

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

#745

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

ghm2180 wrote: post #509

I wonder when the investors and investors in the early printing press or steam engine or excel spreadsheet was invented did they think of the ways — soul crushing homework(books), rapid and cruel colonization(steam engines and trains), innovative project management(excel) — there tech would be used? The demand for these products was not where it was intended at the time probably. Perhaps the answer to its biggest eff…

The trouble with looking at past examples of new tech and automation is that those were all verticals - the displaced worker could move to a different, maybe newly created, work area left intact by the change.

Where AI will be different (when we get there - LLMs are not AGI) is that it is a general human-replacement technology meaning there will be no place to run ... They may change the job landscape, but the new jobs (e.g. supervising AIs) will ALSO be done by AI.

I don't buy this "AGI by 2027" timeline though - LLMs and LLM-based agents are just missing so many basic capabilities compared to a human (e.g. ability to learn continually and incrementally). It seems that RL, test-time compute (cf tree search) and agentic application, have given a temporary second wind to LLMs which were otherwise topping out in terms of capability, but IMO we are already seeing the limits of this too - superhuman math and coding ability (on smaller scope tasks) do not translate into GENERAL intelligence since they are not based on general mechanism - they are based on vertical pre-training in these (atypical in terms of general use case) areas where there is a clean reward signal for RL to work well.

It seems that this crazy "we're responsibly warning you that we're going to destroy the job market!" spiel is perhaps because these CEOs realize there is a limited window of opportunity here to try to get widespread AI adoption (and/or more investment) before the limitations become more obvious. Maybe they are just looking for an exit, or perhaps they are hoping that AI adoption will be sticky even if it proves to be a lot less capable that what they are promising it will be.

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

#746

Post by redtaperat » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:04 PM UTC

topspin wrote: post #475

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…

"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…

[flagged]

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

#747

Post by JadeNB » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

trealira wrote: post #81

darth_avocado wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers If people don’t have jobs, government doesn’t have taxes to employ other people. If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well.

> If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well. Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a w…

> Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a waiter serving food at a restaurant, or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores, that kind of thing. Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face.

Wouldn't you have struggled to imagine most of what LLMs can now do 5 years ago?

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

#748

Post by bubbleRefuge » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #661

bootsmann wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Trump didnt kick off the layoffs. It was the war with Russia that drove the fed to raise interest rates in 2022 - a measure that was intended to curb inflation triggered by spikes in the prices of economic inputs (gas, oil, fertilizer, etc.). The tech layoffs started later that year. Widespread job cuts are an intended effect of raising interest rates - more unemployed = less spending = keeps a lid on inflation. AI i…

There is no proof that higher interest rates lead to greater unemployment. In fact, macro employment kind of boomed during the referenced period. I'd posit that higher rates actually boosted macro employment stats . Why ? Because higher rates = higher income to rich people via interest income channel = higher fed budget deficits ( gov is net payer of interest) = higher GDP = lower unemployment ceterus paribus.

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

#749

Post by singron » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

bjt12345 wrote: post #626

bawolff wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firstly, the capex is currently too high for all but the few. > This is a rather obvious statement, Nobody is saying companies have to make LLMs themselves. SASS is a thing.

By SAAS I assume you mean public LLMs, the problem is the hand-wringing occurring over intellectual property leaking from the company. Companies are actually writing policies banning their use. In regards to Private LLMs, the situation has become disappointing in the 6 months. I can only think of Mistral as being a genuine vendor. But given the limitations in context window size, fine tuning is still necessary, and e…

It's not clear to me that fine-tuning is even capex. If you fine tune new models regularly, that's opex. If you mean literally just the GPUs, you would presumably just rent them right? (Either from cloud providers for small runs or the likes of sfcompute for large runs) Or do you imagine 24/7 training?

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

#750

Post by JadeNB » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #159

darth_avocado wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers If people don’t have jobs, government doesn’t have taxes to employ other people. If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well.

ML models don't make fully informed decisions and will not until AGI is created. They can make biased guesses at best and have no means of self-directed inquiry to integrate new information with an understanding of its meaning. People employed in a decision making capacity are safe, whether that's managing people or building a bridge from a collection of parts and construction equipment.

> People employed in a decision making capacity are safe, whether that's managing people or building a bridge from a collection of parts and construction equipment.

Surely the modern history of decision making has been to move as much of it as possible away from humans and to algorithms, even "dumb" ones?