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

There isn’t anything magically about precisely zero percent interest rates; the behavior we see is mostly a smooth extension of slightly higher rates, which the EU was at.

And of course ZIRP was pioneered in Japan, not the US.

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).

TACO

> Keynes lived in a time when the working class ...

Keynes lived in a time when the working class could not buy cheap from China... and complain that everybody else was doing the same!

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 of turkeys voting for Christmas and propaganda is an old invention. I don’t think there is anything special right now. And to be fair to the working class, it’s not hard to see how they could feel abandoned. It’s also broader than the working class. The middle class is getting squeezed as well. The only winners are the oligarchs.

It is very possible that foreign powers use AI to generate social media content in mass for propaganda. If anything, the internet up to 2015 seemed open for discussion and swaying by real people’s opinion (and mockery of the elite classes), while manipulation and manufactured consent became the norm after 2017.

He also lived in a time when the intense importance and function of a moral and cultural framework for society was taken for granted. He would have never imagined the level of social and moral degeneration of today.

I will not go into specifics because the authoritarians still disagree and think everything is fine with degenerative debauchery and try to abuse anyone even just pointing to failing systems, but it all does seem like civilization ending developments regardless of whether it leads to the rise of another civilization, e.g., the Asian Era, i.e., China, India, Russia, Japan, et al.

Ironically, I don’t see the US surviving this transitional phase, especially considering it essentially does not even really exist anymore at its core. Would any of the founders of America approve of any of America today? The forefathers of India, China, Russia, and maybe Japan would clearly approve of their countries and cultures. America is a hollowed out husk with a facade of red, white, and blue pomp and circumstance that is even fading, where America means both everything and nothing as a manipulative slogan to enrich the few, a massive private equity raid on America.

When you think of the Asian countries, you also think of distinct and unique cultures that all have their advantages and disadvantages, the true differences that make them true diversity that makes humanity so wonderful. In America you have none of that. You have a decimated culture that is jumbled with all kinds of muddled and polluted cultures from all over the place, all equally confused and bewildered about what they are and why they feel so lost only chasing dollars and shiny objects to further enrich the ever smaller group of con artist psychopathic narcissists at the top, a kind of worst form of aristocracy that humanity has yet ever produced, lacking any kind of sense of noblesse oblige, which does not even extend to simply not betraying your own people.

Keynes didn't anticipate social media

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.

The reality of most people is that they need to work to financially sustain themselves. Yes, there are people who just like what they do and work regardless, but I think we shouldn't discount the majority which would drop their jobs or at least work less hours had it not been out of the need for money.

What percentage of people would you say like working for fun? Would you really claim they make up a significant portion of society?

Even myself, work a job that I enjoy building things that I’m good at, that is almost stress free, and after 10-15 years find that I would much rather spend time with my family or even spend a day doing nothing rather than spend another hour doing work for other people. the work never stops coming and the meaninglessness is stronger than ever.

Meanwhile your examples for happy working are all billionaires who do w/e tf they want, and your example of sad non working are disabled people.

You're lucky. Most companies don't accept that. Frequently, even when they have part time arrangements, the incentives are such that middle managers are incentivized to squeeze you (including squeezing you out), despite company policies and HR mandates.

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.

I basically agree with you, and I think the thing that is missing from a bunch of responses that disagree is that it seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a brick wall in terms of the benefits of scaling. That is, most folks were pretty astounded by the gains you could get from just stuffing more training data into these models, but like someone who argues a 15 year old will be 50 feet tall based on the last 5 years' growth rate, people who are still arguing that past growth rates will continue apace don't seem to be honest (or aware) to me.

I'm not at all saying that it's impossible some improvement will be discovered in the future that allows AI progress to continue at a breakneck speed, but I am saying that the "progress will only accelerate" conclusion, based primarily on the progress since 2017 or so, is faulty reasoning.

> Yet we're what? 5 years into "AI will replace programmers in 6 months"?

Realistically, we're 2.5 years into it at most.

Four years into people mocking "we'll have self driving cars next year" while they are on the street daily driving around SF.

As far as I've seen we appear to already have self driving vehicles, the main barriers are legal and regulatory concerns rather than the tech. If a company wanted to put a car on the road that beetles around by itself there aren't any crazy technical challenges to doing that - the issue is even if it was safer than a human driver the company would have a lot of liability problems.

100% this. I always argue that groundbreaking technologies are clearly groundbreaking from the start. It is almost a bit like a film, if you have to struggle to get into it in the first few minutes, you may as well spare yourself watching the rest.

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Over ten years for the we'll have self driving car spiel

> I don’t use RAG, and have no doubt the infrastructure for integrating AI into a large codebase has improved

It really hasn't.

The problem is that a GenAI system needs to not only understand the large codebase but also the latest stable version of every transitive dependency it depends on. Which is typically in the order of hundreds or thousands.

Having it build a component with 10 year old, deprecated, CVE-riddled libraries is of limited use especially when libraries tend to be upgraded in interconnected waves. And so that component will likely not even work anyway.

I was assured that MCP was going to solve all of this but nope.

> I could easily go back to the models I was using 1-2 years ago with little impact on my work.

I can't. GPT-4 was useless for me for software development. Claude 4 is not.

A decade?

The explosion of funding, awareness etc only happened after gpt-3 launch

All these folks are once again seeing the first 1/4 of a sigmoid curve and extrapolating to infinity.

with autonomous vehicles, the narrative of imperceptibly slow incremental change about chasing 9's is still the zeitgeist despite an actual 10x improvement in homicidality compared to humans already existing.

There is a lag in how humans are reacting to AI which is probably a reflexive aspect of human nature. There are so many strategies being employed to minimize progress in a technology which 3 years ago did not exist and now represents a frontier of countless individual disciplines.

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

3D printing is making huge progress in heavy industries. It’s not sexy and does not make headlines but it absolutely is happening. It won’t replace traditional manufacturing at huge scales (either large pieces or very high throughput). But it’s bringing costs way down for fiddly parts or replacements. It is also affecting designs, which can be made simpler by using complex pieces that cannot be produced otherwise. It is not taking over, because it is not a silver bullet, but it is now indispensable in several industries.

>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.

Why not just find one that starts in 2022 then. It would look even more dire.

Look at that graph again. It's indexed to 100 in Feb 1, 2020. It's now at 106. In other words, after all the pandemic madness, the total number of job postings on indeed is slightly larger than it was before, not smaller.

But for software, it's a lot smaller.

This website has its own graph which looks different.

https://www.trueup.io/job-trend

I have never gone to Indeed to apply for a job.

Stocks are valued against the risk free interest, or so the saying goes.

Doubling interest rate from .1% to .2% does a lot for your DCF models, and in this case we went from zero (or in some cases negative) to several percentage units. Of course stock prices tanked. That's what any schoolbook will tell you, and that's what any investor will expect.

Companies thus have to start turning dials and adjust parameters to make number go up again.

My direct experience has been that even very small tech businesses contend with IP issues as well. And they don't have the means to either risk or deliberately instigate a fight.

I think AlphaFold is where current AI terminology starts breaking down. Because in some real sense, AlphaFold is primarily a statistical model - yes, it's interesting that they developed it using ML techniques, but from the use standpoint it's little different than perturbation based black boxes that were used before that for 20 years.

Yes, it's an example of ML used in science (other examples include NN based force fields for molecule dynamics simulations and meteorological models) - but a biologist or meteorologist usually cares little how the software package they are using works (excluding the knowledge of different limitation of numerical vs statistical models).

The whole thing "but look AI in science" seem to me like Motte-and-bailey argument to imply the use of AGI-like MLLM agents that perform independent research - currently a much less successful approach.

Something else will get expensive in the meantime, e.g. it doesn't matter how much you earn, landlords will always increase rent to the limit because a living space is a basic necessity

This was made a little over a week ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaTech/comments/1ksjcsr/this_vid...

For most of them I'm not seeing any of those issues.

It does not need to be flawless. It needs to be good enough to put butts in seats.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849

"Our study suggests that LLMs have achieved superhuman performance on general medical diagnostic and management reasoning"

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.

Sure, i don't think its none, just less.

It also matters a bit where the reputation cost hits. Layoffs can spook investors because it makes it look like the company is doing poorly. If the reputation hit for ai is to non-investors, then it probably matters less.

95 is a pretty random cutoff. But you can see for yourself the number of 65%, 75%,85%,90% positively reviewed games has increased similarly: https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/?refinementList%5Btags%5D...

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.

source?

Informational complexity bottlenecks. So many things are shackled to human decision making loops. If we were truly serious, we would unshackle everything and let it run wild. Would be chaotic, but chaos create strange attractors.

Quality control, for one. The state of commercial software is appalling. Writing code itself is not enough to get a useable piece of software.

LLMs are also not very useful for long term strategy or to come up with novel features or combinations of features. They also are not great at maintaining existing code, particularly without comprehensive test suites. They are good at coming up with tests for boiler plate code, but not really for high-level features.

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I am VERY pro-immigration. I do have concerns about the H1B program though. IMO it's not great for both immigrant workers, as well as non-immigrant workers because it creates a class of workers for whom it's harder to change employers which weakens their negotiation position. If this is the case for enough of the workforce it artificially depresses wages for everyone. I want to see a reform that makes it much easier for H1B workers to change employers.

> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads

One theory is that the benefit they might be providing over domestic "grads" is lack of prerequisites for promotion above certain levels (language, cultural fit, and so on). For managers, this means the prestige of increased headcount without the various "burdens" of managing "careerists". For example, less plausible competition for career-ladder jobs which can then be reserved for favoured individuals. Just a theory.

It's also worth noting that it's almost entirely native born Americans that are pushing back against nepotism. Extreme nepotism is still the norm (an expectation even) in most South and East Asian cultures. And it's quite readily acknowledged if you speak to newer hires who haven't realized yet that it is best kept quiet.

It's a hard truth for many Americans to swallow, but it is the truth nonetheless.

Not to say there isn't an incredible amount of merit... but the historical impact of rampant nepotism in the US is widely acknowledged, and this newer manifestation should be acknowledged just the same.

> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with.

I hear this argument where I live for various reasons, but surely it only ever comes down to wages and/or conditions?

If the company paid a competitive rate (ie higher), locals would apply. Surely blaming a lack of local interest is rarely going to be due to anything other than pay or conditions?

My opinion is that off-shore teams are also going to be some of the jobs more easily replaced, because many of these are highly standardized with instructions due to the turnover they have. I wouldn’t be surprised if these outsourcing companies are already working toward that end. They are definitely automating and/or able to collect significant training data from the various tools they require their employees to use for customers.

I was working at a SoCal company a couple years ago (where I’m from), and we had a lot of Chinese and Indian folks. I remember cracking up when one of the Indian fellows pulled me aside and asked me where I was from, because I sounded so different with my accent and lingo. He thought I was from some small European country, lol.

I mean, aren't 3 out of 8 humans from India or China? If the company is big enough to appeal to a global applicant pool its a bit expected.

Any immigrants should read these threads carefully. If you're pro-union you're going to get screwed by your fellow man. Don't empower a union unless you want to be kicked out of the country.

According to these people, politicians like you here and labour doesn't. If that's true, do you want to empower labour to kick you out?

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.

As someone who entered the workforce just after this, I feel like I missed the peak. A ton if those people got boatloads of money, great stock options, and many years of experience that they can continue to leverage for excellent positions.

I feel that saying "120k is basically minimum wage for major metros" is absurd. As of 2022, there are only three metro areas in the US that have a per capita income greater than $120,000 [1] (Bay Area and Southwest Connecticut). Anywhere else in the US, 120k is doing pretty well for yourself, compared to the rest of the population. The average American working full time earns $60k [2]. I'm sure it's not a comfortable wage in some places, but "basically minimum wage" just seems ignorant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

Yeah 120k is the maximum I have earned over 20 years in the industry. I started off circa. 40k maybe that's 70k adj for inflation. Not in US.

CoL in London or Dublin is comparable to much of the US, but new grad salaries are in the $30-50k range.

The issue is salary expectations in the US are much higher than those in much of Western Europe despite having similar CoL.

And $120k for a new grad is only a tech specific thing. Even new grad management consultants earn $80-100k base, and lower for other non-software roles and industries.

HCOL wasn't the driver though. It is abundance of investment and desire to hire. If the titans could collude to pay engineer half as much, they would. They tried.

Sure, but there was a massive concentration of such people in those areas.

Worse yet, AI has been consuming Scott Adams quotes as part of its training...

"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Scott Adams

"Women define themselves by their relationships and men define themselves by whom they are helping. Women believe value is created by sacrifice. If you are willing to give up your favorite activities to be with her, she will trust you. If being with her is too easy for you, she will not trust you." -Scott Adams

"Nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people. That’s a hate group." -Scott Adams

"Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed." -Scott Adams

"I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black Americas because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. ... The only outcome is that I get called a racist." -Scott Adams

It is almost like once a company gets rolling, there is sufficient momentum to keep it going even if many layers aren't doing very much. The company becomes a kind of meta-economic zone where nothing really matters. Politics / fights emerge between departments / layers but has nothing to do with making a better product / service. This can go on for decades if the moat is large enough.

This is true, but generally speaking there should be more people "producing" than "ingesting." This is often not the case. Most meetings are useless, and this has become much worse in modern times. Example: agile "scrum" and its daily stand ups, which inevitably turn into status reports.

At some point in the 2000's, every manager decided they needed weekly 1:1's, resulting in even more meetings. Many of these are entirely ineffective. As one boss told me, "I've been told I need to have 1:1's, so I'm having them!" I literally sat next to him and talked every day, but it was a good time to go for coffee...

> Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes

The data does not support this. The businesses with the highest market caps are the ones with the highest earnings.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Sort by # of employees and you get a list of companies with lower market caps.

Not so fun in real life but I kind of like this as a video game concept

That metric is evaluated deep in the human psyche.

The more cloud spend the better. Take 10% of it as a bonus?

It's about to change to doing more with less headcount and higher AI spend

People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a fact, but do you really think these companies just have half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems absurd, and I honestly don't believe it.

Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut line, and we just didn't have enough people to do them.

I don't know where all these companies are that have half their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never worked at one.

What's more likely? 1. Companies are (for reasons unknown) hiring all these people and not having them do anything useful, or 2. These people actually do useful things, but HN commenters don't understand those jobs and simply conclude they're doing nothing?

There is a spectrum: at one extremity is mandatory in-office presence every day; at the other is a fully-remote business. For any given individual, and for any given team, the approach needs to be placed on that spectrum according to what it is that that individual or team does. I'm not arguing in favour of any position on that spectrum; I'm arguing against blanket mandates that don't involve any consideration for what individuals in the business do.

> We need to learn a thing or two from blue collars.

A majority of my friends are blue-collar.

You might be surprised.

Unions are adversarial, but the relationships can still be quite warm.

I hear that German and Japanese unions are full-force stakeholders in their corporations, and the relationship is a lot more intricate.

It's like a marriage. There's always elements of control/power play, but the idea is to maximize the benefits.

It can be done. It has been done.

It's just kind of lost, in tech.

I really think the loss of a mentor/apprentice type of experience is one of those baby-with-the-bath-water type of losses. There are definitely people with the personality types of they know everything and nothing can be learned from others, but for those of us who would much rather learn from those with more experience on the hows and whys of things rather than getting all of those paper cuts ourselves, working with mentors is definitely a much better way to grow.

Yup. It was a standard part of their HR policy. They are all about long, long-term employment.

They are a marquée company, and get the best of the best, direct from top universities.

Also, no one has less than a Master's, over there.

We got damn good engineers as interns.

> by the late 2010s it was getting hard to find new grads who actually understood systems internals and OS/architecture concepts, so a lot of jobs adjacent to those ended up moving abroad to Israel, India, and Eastern Europe where universities still treat CS as engineering instead of an applied math disciple

That doesn’t fit my experience at all. The applied math vs engineering continuum is mostly dependent on whether a CS program at a given school came out of the engineering department or the math apartment. I haven’t noticed any shift on that spectrum coming from CS departments except that people are more likely to start out programming in higher level languages where they are more insulated from the hardware.

That’s the same across countries though. I certainly haven’t noticed that Indian or Eastern European CS grads have a better understanding of the OS or the underlying hardware.

It's worth reminding folks that one doesn't _need_ a formal education to get by. I did terrible in school and never went to college and years later have reached a certain expertise (which included many fortunate moments along the way).

What I had growing up though were interests in things, and that has carried me quite far. I worry much more about the addictive infinite immersive quality of video games and other kinds of scrolling, and by extension the elimination of free time through wasted time.

I mean, a lot of what you mentioned is an issue around critical thinking (and I'm not sure that's something that can be taught), which has always remained an issue in any job market, and to solve that deskilling via automation (AI or traditional) was used to remediate that gap.

But if you deskill processes, it makes it harder to argue in favor of paying the same premium you did before.

True, but this becomes less of an issue as AI improves, right? Which is the 'happier' direction to see a problem moving, as if AI doesn't improve, it threatens the jobs less.

You’ve eloquently expressed exactly the same disconnect: as long as we think the purpose of internships is to write the same kind of code that interns write today, sure, AI probably makes the whole thing less efficient.

But if the purpose of an internship is to learn how to work in a company, while producing some benefit for the company, I think everything gets better. Just like we don’t measure today’s terms by words per minute typed, I don’t think we’ll measure tomorrow’s interns by Lines of code that hand – written.

So much of the doom here comes from a thought process that goes “we want the same outcomes as today, but the environment is changing, therefore our precious outcomes are at risk.“

Compared to 30-40 years ago, I believe many in the US would argue that society has already collapsed to a significant extent, with regards to healthcare, education, housing, cost of life, homelessness levels etc.

If these mechanisms you mention are in place and functioning, why is there, for example, such large growth of the economic inequality gap?

Ah yes the old "let's make individuals responsible for solving societal problems" bit. Nevermind that the state is sometimes the only entity capable of addressing the situation at scale.

No, it's quite easy to make $1mm in a rich country and move to a poorer country and chill if you so desire.

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?

As a developer that uses LLMs, I haven't seen any evidence that LLMs or "AI" more broadly are improving exponentially, but I see a lot of people applying a near-religious belief that this is happening or will happen because... actually, I don't know? because Moore's Law was a thing, maybe?

In my experience, for practical usage LLMs aren't even improving linearly at this point as I personally see Claude 3.7 and 4.0 as regressions from 3.5. They might score better on artificial benchmarks but I find them less likely to produce useful work.

> Humans are not familiar with exponential change

Humans are. We have tools to measure exponential growth empirically. It was done for COVID (i.e. epidemiologists do that usually) and is done for economy and other aspects of our life. If there's to be exponential growth, we should be able to put it in numbers. "True me bro" is not a good measure.

Edit: typo

Viruses spread and propagate themselves, often changing along the way. AI doesn't, and probably shouldn't. I think we've made a few movies on why that's a bad idea.

> The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.

Which ones, specifically? I’m genuinely curious. The ones about “[an] unfalsifiable disease-free utopia”? The one from a labor economist basically equating Amodei’s high-unemployment/strong economy claims to pure fantasy? The fact that nothing Amodei said was cited or is substantiated in any meaningful way? Maybe the one where she points out that Amodei is fundamentally a sales guy, and that Anthropic is making the rounds saying scary stuff just after they released a new model - a techbro marketing push?

I like anthropic. They make a great product. Shame about their CEO - just another techbro pumping his scheme.

I don’t remember that. How do you explain the total collapse of public trust in science and medical institutions?

Try revisiting their content from spring of 2020 (flatten the curve, wild death predictions, etc).

> I guess the key is to not even have a political angle

It’s a fantasy to imagine technical knowledge allows you to transcend the political and 2020 only reinforced that.

> It could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat from it, but could lead to massive collapse

When you consider how this interacts with the population collapse (which is inevitable now everywhere outside of some African countries) this seems even worse. In 20 years, we will have far fewer people under age 60 than we have now, and among that smaller cohort, the percentage of people at any given age who have useful levels of experience will be less because they may not be able to even begin meaningful careers.

Best case scenario, people who have gotten 5 or more years of experience by now (college grads of 2020) may scrape by indefinitely. They'll be about 47 then and have no one to hire that's more qualified than AI. Not necessarily because AI is so great; rather, how will there be someone with 20 years of experience when we simply don't hire any junior people this year?

Worst case, AI overtakes the Class of 2020 and moves up the experience-equivalence ladder faster than 1 year per year, so it starts taking out the classes of 2015, 2010, etc.

Juniors and offshore teams will probably be the most severely impacted. If a senior dev is already breaking off smaller tightly scoped tasks and fixing up the results, that loop can be accomplished much more quickly by iterating with a LLM. Especially if you have to wait a business day for someone in India to even start on the task when a LLM is spitting out a similar quality PR in minutes.

Ironically a friend of mine noticed that the team in India they work with is now largely pushing AI-generated code... At that point you just need management to cut out the middleman.

This is what I fear as well: some companies might adopt a "sustainable" approach to AI, but others will dynamite the entry path to their companies. Of course, if your only goal is to sell a unicorn and be out after three years, who cares... but serious companies with lifelong employees that adopt the AI-first strategy are in for a surprise (looking at you, Microsoft).

I’m actually worried we’ve gotten a kickstart on that process already. Anecdotally it seems like entry level developer jobs are harder to come by today than a decade ago. Without the free-money growth we were seeing for a long time it seems like companies are more incentivized to only hire senior developers at the loss of the greater good that comes with hiring and mentoring junior developers.

Caveat that this is anecdotal, not sure if there are numbers on this.

This isn't AI-specific, though; businesses decided that it was everyone else's responsibility to train their employees over a decade ago.

I agree with your worry.

That said, the first thing that jumps to my mind is cars. Back when they were first introduced you had to be a mechanically inclined person to own one and deal with it. Today, people just buy them and hire the very small number of experts (relative to the population of drivers) to deal with any issues. Same with smartphones. The majority of users have no idea how they really work. If it stop working they seek out an expert.

ATM, AI just seems like another level of that. JS/Python programmers don't need to know bits and bytes and memory allocation. Vibe coders won't need to know what JS/Python programmers need to know.

Maybe there won't be enough experts to keep it all going though.

If it takes a few decades, they may actually automate all but the most impressive among senior positions though.

The worst case for such a cycle is generating new jobs in reverse engineers. Although in practice with what we have seen with machinists it tends to just accelerate existing trends towards outsourcing to countries who haven't had the 'entry level collapse'.

We've already eliminated certain junior level domains essentially by design. There aren't any 'barber-surgeons' with only two years of training for good reason. Instead we have surgery integrated it into a more lengthy and complicated educational path to become what we now would consider a 'proper' surgeon.

I think the answer is that if the 'junior' is uneconomical or otherwise unacceptable be prepared to pay more for the alternative, one way or another.

>or anyone else of that sort

This category is expansive enough to make fools of almost everyone on hn.

People hunted large mammals to extinction long before modern society, so tragedy of the commons is nature in general. We know other predators do it as well, not just humans.

“Best” is carrying a lot of wait. More accurate to say the monopolistic companies that engage in regulatory capture will be fine.

Luckily we are firing all those people so they will be available for new roles.

This feels a lot like the dot boom/dot bust era where a lot of new companies are going to sprout up from the ashes of all this disruption.

Also: network effects, inertia, cornering the market enough to make incumbents uneconomical, regulatory capture...

AI certainly will increase competition in some areas, but there are countless examples where being the best at something doesn't make you the leader.

> 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.

Yeah, it's as though "middle class" was a brief miracle of our age. Serfs and nobility is the more probably human condition.

Hey, is there a good board game in there somewhere? Serfs and Nobles™

ML models don't make fully informed decisions and will not until AGI is created. They can make biased guesses at best and have no means of self-directed inquiry to integrate new information with an understanding of its meaning. People employed in a decision making capacity are safe, whether that's managing people or building a bridge from a collection of parts and construction equipment.

> The blue collar economy isn't plumbers simply fixing the toilets of the HVAC guy, while the HVAC guy cools the home of the electrician, while...

That is exactly what blue collar economy used to be though: people making and fixing stuff for each other. White collar jobs is a new thing.

"Technology increases" have not made my life better than my boomer parents' and they will probably not make the next generation's lives better than ours. Big things like housing costs, education costs, healthcare costs are not being driven down by technology, quite the opposite.

Yes, the lives of "people selling stuff" will likely get better and better in the future, through technology, but the wellbeing of normal people seems to have peaked at around the year 2000 or so.

I think that's mostly myth, and a very very deeply ingrained myth. That's why probably hundreds of people already feel the rage boiling up inside of them right now after reading my first sentence.

But it is myth. It has always been in the interest of the rulers and the old to try to imprint on the serfs and on the young how much better they have it.

Many of us, maybe even most of us, would be able to have fulfilling lives in a different age. Of course, it depends on what you value in life. But the proof is in the pudding, humanity is rapidly being extinguished in industrial society right now all over the world.

Right, but the elephant in the room is that despite those industries being constantly understaffed and labor being in extreme demand, they're underpaid. It seems nobody gives a flying fuck about the free market when it comes to the labor market, which is arguably the most important market.

So, flooding those industries with more warm bodies probably won't help anything. I imagine it would make the already fucked labor relations even more fucked.

This is the real answer. Eventually, when 95% of us have no jobs because AI and robotics are doing everything, then the rich will just buy and sell from each other. The other 7 billion people are not economically relevant and will just barely participate in the economy. It'll be like the movie Elysium.

I briefly did a startup that was kind of a side-project of a guy whose main business was building yachts. Why was he OK with a market that just consisted of rich people? "Because rich people have the money!"

My many robots will be busy building glorious mansions out of yogurt cups.

Certainly not what I want, but it looks like we could be headed there. And the "industry leaders" seem cool with it, to judge by their politics.

The economy of India is trending in the opposite direction to this narrative. More and more people lifted out of poverty as they modernise.

I'd been thinking modern day Russia, but I admit to being ignorant of a lot of countries outside the U.S.

It’s an interesting argument, thanks.

A good analogy would be web development transition from c to java to php to Wordpress. I feel like it did make web sites creation for small business more accessible. OTOH a parallel trend was also mass-scale production of industry-specific platforms, such as Yahoo Shopping.

It’s not clear to me which trend won in the end.

> > it doesn’t address the social consequences of rapid onset and large scale unemployment

> It'll be a slow burn, though.

Have you been watching the current developer market?

It's really, really rough out here for unemployed software developers.

Social media. Especially in SV, the embarrassment of failing publicly having been given so much money is far too painful psychologically.

Spinning that to say you're a "visionary" for replacing expensive employees with AI (even when it's clear we're not there yet) is risky, but a good enough smoke screen to distract the average bear from poking holes in your financials.

> What phenomena, exactly, require positing AI disruption?

AI company CEOs trying to juice their stock evaluations?