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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

#981

Post by acrooks »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #785
acrooks wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if some of this output will take a while to be visible en masse. For example, I founded a SaaS company late last year which has been growing very quickly. We are track to pass $1M ARR before the company's first birthday. We are fully bootstrapped, 100% founder owned. There are 2 of us. And we feel confident we could keep up this pace of growth for quite a while without hiring or taking capital. (Of course, t…

Curious, if you don’t mind mentioning what AIs you’re using (besides the obvious Claude, etc) and what for to augment your reach?

I think it's important to start with identifying your bottlenecks, and work from there to determine the solutions you need. In the case of our business, I feel that my time is best spent talking to customers and prospects. These discussions directly impact revenue, retention, product strategy, etc.

So then I start thinking ... what sort of things am I doing that take me away from talking to customers? I spend a lot of time on implementation. I spend a lot of time on administrative sales tasks (chasing people for meetings, writing proposals, negotiating contracts). I spend a lot of time on meeting prep and follow-up. And many more. So I'm always on the hunt for tools with a problem already in mind.

In terms of specific tools...

Claude is a great backbone for a lot. Both the chatbot but also the API. I use the chatbot to help me write proposals and review contracts. I used it to write scripting to automate our implementation process which was once quite manual and is now a button click.

Cursor has been a game changer. In particular, it means that we spend very little time on bugfixes and small features. This keeps my CTO almost 100% focused on big picture needle-moving projects. We are now doing some research into things like Codex/Claude Code to see how we could improve this further.

Another app that I really love is called Granola. It automatically joins all of my meetings, writes notes, reminds me what promises I made, helps me write follow-up emails, and helps me prep for meetings.

Finally, we use an email client called Sedna (disclaimer: I used to work at Sedna) which is fully programmable. We've been building our own internal tooling (leveraging the Claude API) on top of Sedna to help automate different workflows. For example, my inbox is now perfectly prioritised. In many cases, when I receive emails from customers, an AI has already written a draft that I can review and send. I know there are a lot of out-of-the-box tools out there like Fyxer to help with things like this, but I've really appreciated the ability to get exactly what we want by building certain things ourselves.

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

#982

Post by steveBK123 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #886
steveBK123 wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trade is you need to live in VHCOL city to earn enough and have a high savings rate. Avoid spending it all on VHCOL real estate. And then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere”, possibly before your kids head off to college. Most cannot meet all those conditions and end up on the hedonic treadmill.

> you need to live in VHCOL city to earn enough and have a high savings rate Yes to the latter, no to the former. The states with the highest savings rates are Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, Massachussetts and Maryland [1]. Only Massachussetts is a top-five COL state [2]. > then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere” This is the real hurdle. Ultimately,…

CT & NJ being top of the list points to the great NYC metropolitan wage premium though doesn't it? MA at #4 picks up Boston, MD at #5 picks up DC, etc.

CA probably nowhere on the list because its such a small state that any Silicon Valley premium gets diluted at the state level average.

I am not finding a clear definition of this index but it appears to be $saved/$income (or $saved/$living expenses) right? So 114% in CT dollars is probably way more than 102% Kansas dollars..

It's also worth noting the point I was making is - if you take a "one years NYC income in savings" amount of money and relocate to say, New Mexico.. the money goes a lot further than trying to do the opposite!

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

#983

Post by runeks »

CKMo wrote: post #185

There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity…

> Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person.

The AI will definitely require handholding. And that hand-holder will be an intern or a recent college-grad.

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

#984

Post by runeks »

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,…

Keynes also convinced us that high unemployment and high inflation couldn't happen at the same time. This was proven wrong in the early 1970s.

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

#985

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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,…

> Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure.

I suspect he didn't factor in how may people would be retired and on entitlements.

We're not SUPER far from that now, when you factor in how much more time off the average person has now, how much larger of percentage of the population is retired, and how much of a percentage is on entitlements.

The distribution is just very unequal.

I.E. if you're the median worker, you've probably seen almost no benefit, but if you're old or on entitlements, you've seen a lot of benefits.

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

#986

Post by fennecfoxy »

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…

Inflation & mismanagement.

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

#987

Post by DrillShopper »

pixl97 wrote: post #756
threeseed wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet only became a fad once it was already large and had tens of millions of users. I remember the pre-Web days of Usenet and BBS and no one thought those were trendy. AI is far more akin to crypto.

Lots of people talk about crypto yet almost no one uses it. Pretty much everyone I know uses AI for something.

That might be a perspective thing. I can think of three people in my life who have used AI at any point, and two of the three used it for diffusion models right when Stable Diffusion was first released.

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

#988

Post by marcosdumay »

tilne wrote: post #920
marcosdumay wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so probably the remark needs an update Only if you want to add "internet, web, and mobile" before "age". Otherwise it doesn't need any change. But that phrase is about the productivity statistics, not about computers or actual productivity.

You’re saying that the internet, web, and mobile haven’t improved productivity?

They didn't change a bit the productivity statistics.

The problem with computers not changing the productivity statistics is one of the great mysteries economists argue about. It's very clear nowadays that there are problems on both the "statistics" and "productivity" sides of it, but the internet, web, and mobile didn't change anything.

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

#989

Post by boshalfoshal »

indigoabstract wrote: post #967

So if I understand correctly, it's basically down between: 1. cure cancer 2. fix the economy 3. keep everybody happily employed. And he's saying we can only pick two, or pick one. Except for the last one, that's not really an option.

And as it stands, AI is nowhere close to (1) and (2), but is pretty close to making all of (3) redundant.

This could be because most work is actually frivilous (very possible), but its also easy for them to sell those since ostensibly (1) and (2) actually require a lot of out of distribution reasoning, thinking, and real agentic research (which current models probably aren't capable of).

(3) just makes the most money now with the current technology. Curing cancer with LLMs, though altruistic, is more unrealistic and has no clear path to immediate profitability because of that.

These "AGI" companies aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts with humanity in mind, its pretty clearly meant to be a "final company standing" type race where everyone at the {winning AI Company} is super rich and powerful in whatever new world paradigm shows up afterwards.

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

#990

Post by ccorcos »

jjk166 wrote: post #905
ccorcos wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless the law forbids working more than 15 hours per week, the numbers will shift around but the supply-demand market equilibrium will remain approximately the same.

If minimum wage goes up 40/15 = 267%, then the price of your coffee will go up 267% because the coffeeshop owner needs to pay 267% more to keep the cafe staffed.

The 40 hour work week is something a cultural equilibrium. But we've all heard of doctors, lawyers, and bankers working 100h weeks which affords them some of the most desirable real estate in the world...

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