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

cnn.com

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

#821

Post by hansmayer »

madaxe_again wrote: post #820
hansmayer wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking technology adoption here, no need to sidetrack (although I would argue, the bubble of technology sector burning 200B to produce 10B in revenue will be so much more painful). Back in the day everyone was running to do something on the web, commercial or not, be it out of enthusiasm, greed, noble aspirations, art or even criminal (warez, anyone?). I won't even mention the iPhone moment here. Compare that…

Right - adoption was slower than people expected at the time, but it did happen, and a lot of the stuff that got thrown at the wall back then did eventually stick. We are absolutely in a hype and market bubble around AI right now - and like the dot com bubble, the growth came not in 2000, but years later. It turns out it takes time for a new technology to percolate through society, and I use the “mom metric” as a bel…

Well, both the web1.0 and the smartphones were major inflection points in technological development. I argue that the GenAI is not. Steve Jobs did not need to shove the AppStore down anybodys throat, the way Gemini and other crap are being shoved right now. The growth happened organically and exponentially, because everyone instantly saw value in those products. It happened through early adopters and the late majority. Here we have neither. Where are the thousands, well even hundreds of applications that the end users actually want to use? Your mum, based on your description fits more into the category of laggards, and that category never determines anything about a product/technology impact.

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

#822

Post by r0s »

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.

AI is going to 10x the amount of bullshit, fully automating the process.

NONE of the bullshit jobs are going away, there will simply be bigger, more numerous bullshit.

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

#823

Post by switchbak »

tdeck wrote: post #434
AznHisoka wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in innovative products and improvements to existing products.” Shipping features faster != innovation or improvements to existing products

Granting that those don't fully overlap, is that relevant to the point? I'm not seeing either.

Our jobs are full of a lot more than just writing code. In my case it seems like it’s helping to accelerate a portion of the dev cycle, but that’s a fairly smart portion, say 20%, and even a big impact on that just gets dominated by the other phases that haven’t been accelerated.

I’m not as bullish as some are on the impact of AI, but it does feel nice when you can deliver something in a fraction of the time it used to take. For me, it’s more useful as a research and idea exploration tool, less so about writing code. Part of that is that I’m in Scala land, so it just tends to not work as well as a more mainstream language.

We haven’t used it to help the product management and solution exploration side, which seems to be a big constraint on our execution.

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

#824

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]

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

#825

Post by latchkey »

immibis wrote: post #786
latchkey wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TACO

For those unaware, the "TACO trade" is when Wall Street investors trade based on the principle that "Trump Always Chickens Out". For example, buying in a tariff-induced dip on the principle that he'll probably repeal the tariffs. Now that someone's said to Trump's face that Wall Street thinks he always chickens out, he may or may not stop doing it.

And the reason why I said it is because 174 is part of Trump's Cut^3 bill from 2017. DOE 174.

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

#826

Post by intalentive »

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…

Yes. Tech is clearly a beneficiary of the Cantillon Effect.

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

#827

Post by salawat »

le-mark wrote: post #692
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we were to unionize Last time it was tried the union coerced everyone to root for their exploiters. People that unionize aren't magically different.

What “last time” are you referring to specifically?

I am also curious.

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

#828

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

pydry wrote: post #724
bojan wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"War with Russia" sounds like someone willingly started that war, and Russia was the target. Of course, nothing is further from the truth. "Russian invasion of Ukraine" is what should be written there.

Your demands of an absolute committment to maintaining the domestic establishment's war narrative while making a technical point have been noted. Slava Ukraini.

Who, precisely, do you consider to be the domestic establishment? Neither the President of the United States nor his Secretary of Defense subscribe to this narrative.

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

#829

Post by fny »

whyowhy3484939 wrote: post #180
fny wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is you learn X and your time to learn and ship Y is dramatically reduced. It would have taken me a month to write the GPU code I needed in Blender, and I had everything working in a week. And none of this was "vibed": I understand exactly what each line does.

You did not and you are not proficient. LLMs and AI in general cater to your insecurities. An actual good human mentor will wipe the floor with your arrogance and you'll be better for it.

I think you're under the impression that I am not a software engineer. I already know C, and I've even shipped a very small, popular, security sensitive open source library in C, so I am certainly proficient enough to rewrite Python into Rust for performance purposes without hiring a Rust engineer or write shaders to help debug models in Blender.

My point is that LLMs make it 10x easier to adapt and transition to new languages, so whatever moat someone had by being a "Rust developer" is now significantly erased. Anyone with solid systems programming experience could switch from C/C++ to Rust with the help of an LLM and be proficient in a week or two's time. By proficient, I mean able to ship valuable features. Sure they'll have to leveraging an LLM to help smooth out understanding new features like borrow checking, but they'll surely be able to deliver given how already circumspect the Rust compiler is.

I agree fundamentals matter and good mentorship matters! However, good developers will be able to do a lot more diverse tasks which means more supply of talent across every language ecosystem.

For example, I don't feel compelled at all to hire a Svelte/Vue/React developer specifically anymore: any decent frontend developer can race forward with the help of an LLM.

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