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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

#81

Post by trealira »

darth_avocado wrote: post #51
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc? It's easy to imagine a world in which there are way less white collar workers and everything else is pretty much the same. It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're bett…

> 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 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.

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

#82

Post by whynotminot »

bgwalter wrote: post #61
whynotminot wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the quote makes perfect sense in this context, regardless of the prior application. As to my recommendation to what they do — I dunno man. I’m a software engineer. I don’t know what I am going to do yet. But I’m sure as shit not burying my head in the sand.

Even if you apply the quote in a different sense, which would take away all its pithiness, you are still presupposing that "AI" will turn out to be a success. The gross injustices in the original quote were already a fact, which makes the quote so powerful.

AI as is, is already a success, which is why I find it so baffling that people continue to write pieces like this.

We don’t need AGI for there to be large displacement of human labor. What’s here is already good enough to replace many of us.

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

#83

Post by psadauskas »

sevensor wrote: post #12

What AI is going to wipe out is white collar jobs where people sleepwalk through the working day and carelessly half ass every task. In 2025, we can get LLMs to do that for us. Unfortunately, the kind of executive who thinks AI is a legitimate replacement for actual work does not recognize the difference. I expect to see the more credulous CEOs dynamiting their companies as a result. Whether the rest of us can surviv…

AIs are great at generating bullshit, so if your job involves generating bullshit, you're probably on the chopping block.

I just wish that instead of getting more efficient at generating bullshit, we could just eliminate the bullshit.

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

#84

Post by jollyllama »

paulluuk wrote: post #33

Around the time when bitcoin started to get serious public attention, late 2017, I remember feeling super hyped about it and yet everyone told me that money spent on bitcoin was wasted money. I really believed that bitcoin, or at least cryptocurrency as a whole, would fundamentally change how banking and currencies would work. Now, almost 10 years later, I would say that it did not live up to my believe that it would…

Crypto is a really interesting point, because even the subset of people who have invested in it don't use it on a day to day basis. The entire valuation is based on speculative use cases.

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

#85

Post by JKCalhoun »

ben_w wrote: post #25
darth_avocado wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up, consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could you be excited for that?

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…

> turkey's perspective in the problem of induction…

Had to look that up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion

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

#86

Post by abracadaniel »

ben_w wrote: post #25
darth_avocado wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up, consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could you be excited for that?

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.

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

#87

Post by al_borland »

edent wrote: post #60
monero-xmr wrote: post #4

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_auto... It wasn’t just Elon. The hype train on self driving cars was extreme only a few years ago, pre-LLM. Self driving cars exist sort of, in a few cities. Quibble all you want but it appears to me that “uber driver” is still a popular widespread job, let alone truck driver, bus driver, and “car owner” itself. I really wish the AI ceos would actually make my l…

Buy a dishwasher - they're cheap, work really well, and don't use much energy / water. Same as a washing machine / drier. Chuck the clothes in, press a button, done. There are Roomba style lawnmowers for your grass cutting. I'll grant you painting a house and plumbing a toilet aren't there yet!

With the laundry machine and dishwasher, it still requires effort. A human needs to collect the dirty stuff, put it into the machine properly, decide when it should run, load the soap, select a cycle type, start it, monitor the machine to know when it’s done, empty the machine, and put the stuff away properly, thus starting the human side of the process again.

It’s less work than it used to be, but remove the human who does all that and the dirty dishes and clothes will still pile up. It’s not like we have Rosie, from The Jetsons, handling all those things (yet). How long before the average person has robot servants at home? Until that day, we are effectively project managers for all the machines in our homes.

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

#88

Post by JKCalhoun »

thmsths wrote: post #18
darth_avocado wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up, consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could you be excited for that?

Tragedy of the commons: no one being able to buy stuff is a problem for everyone, but being able to save just a bit more by getting rid of your workforce is a huge advantage for your business.

… in the interim, of course.

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

#89

Post by bachmeier »

> AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks

"Starting" is doing a hell of lot of work in that sentence. I'm starting to become a billionaire and Nobel Prize winner.

Anyway, I agree with Mark Cuban's statement in the article. The most likely scenario is that we become more productive as AI complements humans. Yesterday I made this comment on another HN story:

"Copilot told me it's there to do the "tedious and repetitive" parts so I can focus my energy on the "interesting" parts. That's great. They do the things every programmer hates having to do. I'm more productive in the best possible way.

But ask it to do too much and it'll return error-ridden garbage filled with hallucinations, or just never finish the task. The economic case for further gains has diminished greatly while the cost of those gains rises."

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

#90

Post by bckr »

michaeldoron wrote: post #78

Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and…

That’s not what major news outlets are for. I’m not sure exactly what they’re for.
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