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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

#901

Post by treyd »

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…

That inflection point seems to more specifically start at the day of the new administration's inauguration.

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

#902

Post by Ray20 »

ricardobayes wrote: post #557
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.

Frankly, we don't know. That "turning point" that seemed so close for many tech, never came for some of them. Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing. Or self-driving, that is "just around the corner" for a decade now. And still is probably a decade away. Only time will tell if GenAI/LLMs are color TV or 3D TV.

>Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing

This was never the case, and this is obvious to anyone who has ever been to factories that doing mass-produced plastic

>Or self-driving, that is "just around the corner" for a decade now.

But it is really around the corner, all that remains is to accept it. That is, to start building and modifying the road infrastructure and changing the traffic rules to enable effective integration self-driving cars into road traffic.

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

#903

Post by kaibee »

casualscience wrote: post #609
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…

In big companies, this is a bit slower due to the need to migrate entrenched systems and org charts into newer workflows, but I think you are seeing more productivity there too. Where this is much more obvious is in indie games and software where small agile teams can adopt new ways of working quickly... E.g. look at the indie games count on steam by year: https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492

Has the amount of 95%+ reviews games-released increased though? And how much of that is due to the pandemic? Its anecdotal, but the game-dev discord I'm in has had a decent reduction in # of regulars since the tail end of the pandemic 24-25. And ironically, I was one of them until recently. I think people actually just had more time.

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

#904

Post by [deleted] »

FabHK wrote: post #760
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…

> progress slowed down significantly for many reasons I think progress (in the sense of economic growth) was roughly in line with what Keynes expected. What he didn't expect is that people, instead of getting 10x the living standard with 1/3 the working hours, rather wanted to have 30x the living standard with the same working hours.

[deleted]

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

#905

Post by jjk166 »

ccorcos wrote: post #789
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,…

If you work 15 hours/week then presumably someone who chose to work 45 hours/week would make 3x more money. This creates supply-demand pressure for goods and services. Anything with limited supply such as living in the nice part of town will price out anyone working 15 hours/week. And so society finds an equilibrium…

Presumably the reduction to a 15 hour workweek would be much the same as the reduction to the 40 hour workweek - everyone takes the same reduction in total hours and increase in hourly compensation encoded in labor laws specifically so there isn't this tragedy of the commons.

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

#906

Post by jjk166 »

LeonB wrote: post #605
pmlnr wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keynes was talking about work in every sense,including house chore. We're well below 15 hours of house chores by now, so that part became true.

Washing machines created a revolution where we could now expend 1/10th of the human labour to wash the same amount of clothes as before. We now have more than 10 times as much clothes to wash. I don’t know if it’s induced demand, revealed preference or Jevon’s paradox, maybe all 3.

> We now have more than 10 times as much clothes to wash.

Citation needed.

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

#907

Post by sharpshadow »

rbultje wrote: post #880
Lu2025 wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, R&D change is what triggered 2022 tech layoffs. Coders used to be free, all this play with Metaverse and such was on public dime. As soon as a company had to spend real money, it all came crashing down.

This is a weird take. Employees are supposed to be business expenses, that's the core idea of running a business: profit = revenue - expenses, where expenses are personnel / materials, and pay taxes over profit. Since the R&D change, businesses can't fully expense employees and need to pay (business) taxes over their salaries. Employees - of course - still pay personal taxes also (as was always the case).

If a software engineer in a R&D project is using a AI service to develop the software, does the bill count as company business expense or does it fall under section 174?

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

#908

Post by theshackleford »

HenryBemis wrote: post #878

> To be clear, Amodei didn’t cite any research or evidence for that 50% This reminds me the "Walter White" meme "I am the documentation". When the CEO of a company that makes LLM says something like that, "I perk up and listen" (to quote the article). When a doctor says "water in my village is bad quality, it gives diarrhea to 30% of the villagers", I don't need a fancy study from some university. The doctor "is the…

> They see that (e.g. with Notion-like-tools) if you enable the "AI", that thing can save _a lot_ of time on "Confluence-like" tasks.

If only it worked like this in reality. I used actual notion features literally this week and watched it fail so hard it was hilarious. It continually told me there was no documentation on X despite an entire page worth of documentation existing on it, had to be told this; at which point it apologised and regurgitated it.

Wow! What a time saver! I feel more productive already!

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

#909

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

aswegs8 wrote: post #842
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were in tech that are having trouble getting hir…

How are TPMs optional? In my experience they provide more value than PMs that don't understand technology.

Perhaps the terminology differs between companies, but in my experience TPM means technical program manager. For large projects they were responsible for creating project Gantt charts, identify blockers early, and essentially "greasing the wheels" between disparate teams.

Again, IMO the good ones added a lot of value by making sure no balls got dropped, which is easy to do with large, multi-team projects. Most of them, though, did a lot of just "status checks" and meeting updates.

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

#910

Post by karagenit »

bojan wrote: post #685
casualscience wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In big companies, this is a bit slower due to the need to migrate entrenched systems and org charts into newer workflows, but I think you are seeing more productivity there too. Where this is much more obvious is in indie games and software where small agile teams can adopt new ways of working quickly... E.g. look at the indie games count on steam by year: https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492

The number of critically acclaimed games remains the same though. So for now we're getting quantity, but not the quality.

What if the number of game critics just hasn’t increased, and since they can only play/review a fixed number of games each year due to time constraints, the number that they acclaim each year hasn’t grown? Not saying this is necessarily the case, just suggesting the possibility.
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