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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

#931

Post by hoosieree »

perrygeo wrote: post #751
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…

Such an important point, I've seen and suspected the end of ZIRP being a much much greater influence on white collar work than we suspect. AI is going to take all the negative press but the flow of capital is ultimately what determines how the business works, which determines what software gets built. Conway's law 101. The white collar bloodbath is more of a haircut to shed waste accumulated during the excesses of ZI…

AI also happens to be a perfect scapegoat: CEOs who over-hired get to shift the blame to this faceless boogeyman, and (bonus!) new hires are more desperate/willing to accept worse compensation.

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

#932

Post by Lu2025 »

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…

> unique inflection near the start of 2025

I wonder what happened in January 2025...

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

#933

Post by [deleted] »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #913
actuallyalys wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, for this analogy to work, we’d have to see AI causing a small but consistently doubling amount of lost jobs.

If that were happening right now, how would we know? COVID-19 cases were tracked imperfectly but pretty well; is there any equivalent for AI-related job losses?

[deleted]

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

#934

Post by givemeethekeys »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #833
givemeethekeys wrote: post #787

Many people are unable to find jobs because they are too old. Even older people prefer to hire younger people.

Okay? What does that have to do with anything?

Losing one’s job is only half of the story. Finding another one when you’re getting old in the AI age is more difficult than before AI.

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

#935

Post by hoosieree »

pera wrote: post #632
topspin wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Bullshit: Chatbots are not failing to demonstrate a tangible increase in companies' output because of regulations and IP law, they are failing because they are still not good for the job. LLMs only exist because the companies developing them are so ridiculously powerful that can completely ignore the rule of law, or if necessary even change it (as they are currently trying to do here in Europe). Remember we are talki…

And currently trying in the US too: https://apnews.com/article/ai-regulation-state-moratorium-co...

They want to ban states from imposing their own regulations on AI.

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

#936

Post by hoosieree »

wcfrobert wrote: post #427
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…

If AI makes everyone 10x engineers, you can 2x the productive output while reducing headcount by 5x. Luckily software companies are not ball bearings factories.

Or a 4-hour workweek.

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

#937

Post by Lu2025 »

tim333 wrote: post #664
LeonB wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I saw some research once that the hours women spend doing housework hasn't changed. I think because human nature, not anything to do with the tech.

[flagged]

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

#938

Post by tilne »

daxfohl wrote: post #384
ledauphin wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the one does actually sound worse because... it's actually worse. it clarifies that the companies themselves were playing games with people's livelihoods because of the potential for profit. whereas "AI" is intuitively an external force; it's much harder to assign blame to company leadership.

I'd read the first as adjusting to market demand, not playing with people's lives. If if were construed as playing with lives, that could apply to basically any investment.

Agreed. You could make the case that employment in general is playing with someone’s life.

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

#939

Post by jalapenos »

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…

Always disheartening how much people forget and tolerate the underlying deliberate human absurdity that created these events.

Almost no one has seen a world where the price of money wasn't centrally planned, a committee of experts deciding it based on gut feel like they did in command economies like the Soviet union.

And then thousands of people's lives are disrupted as the interest rate swings wildly due purely to government action (corona lockdowns and fed zirp response), and it all somehow just ends up people talking about AI instead.

The true wrongdoers get absolutely no consequences, and we all just carry on like there's no problem. Often because our taxes go to paying hordes of academics and economists to produce layers and layers of sophisticated propaganda that of course this system is the best one.

Absurd and shitty world.

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

#940

Post by actuallyalys »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #913
actuallyalys wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, for this analogy to work, we’d have to see AI causing a small but consistently doubling amount of lost jobs.

If that were happening right now, how would we know? COVID-19 cases were tracked imperfectly but pretty well; is there any equivalent for AI-related job losses?

Right, my point is that we don't have the data to make a similar exponential argument. We can't rule out the possibility that we're currently in the early stages of exponential growth based on direct measurement. If it is exponential, once it doubles enough times, it will show up in overall economic data.

We can also look at the tools, which have improved relatively quickly but don't appear to be improving exponentially. GPT-4 and GPT-4o came out about a year after their predecessors. Is GPT-4o a bigger leap that GPT-4 was? Are GPT-4.5 or 4.1 a bigger leap than GPT-4 was? I honestly don't know, but the general reception suggests otherwise. The biggest leaps recently seem to be making models that perform roughly as well as past ones but are much smaller. That has advantages from the standpoint of democratization and energy consumption, but those kinds of improvements seems to favor a situation where AI augments workers rather than replaces them.

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