AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

It seems more true than the "this is good for bitcoin" meme now that bitcoin seems to track the dollar very closely

My personal theory is that the stock market rewards the behavior of cutting jobs as a signal of the company being on the AI bandwagon. Doesn't matter if the roles were needed or not. Line goes up, therefore it is good.

This is a complete reversal in the past where having a high headcount was an easy signal of a company's growth (i.e. more people, means more people building features, means more growth).

Investors are lazy. They see one line go down, they make the other line go up.

CEOs are lazy. They see line go up when other line goes down. So they make other line go down.

(I am aware that "line go up" is a stupid meme. But I think it's a perfect way to describe what's happening. It is stupid, lazy, absurd, memetic. It's the only thing that matters, stripped off of anything that is incidental. Line must go up.)

Software development is one of the listed industries. Well before AI we have seen that few companies wanted entry level devs due to the training and such.

Reducing in call centers has been going on for a while as more people use automated solutions (not necessarily AI) and many of the growing companies make it hard to reach a real person anyways (Amazon, Facebook, etc). I feel like AI is throwing fuel on the existing fire, but isn't as much of a driver as the headlines suggest.

Given the timeline this is more likely a reversion to the mean following the end of zero interest rate policy.

Juniors become seniors.

If we replace all juniors with AI, in a few years there won't be skilled talent for senior positions.

AI assistance is a lot different than AI running the company. Making expensive decisions. While it could progress, bear in mind that some seniors continue to move up in the ranks. Will AI eventually be the CEO?

We all dislike how some CEOs behave, but will AI really value life at all? CEOs have to have some place to live, after all.

The jobs are going to India

> You really do have to account for why this is mainly happening in industries that are adopting AI

Correlation is not causation. The original research paper does not prove a connection.

> I doubt very much that these three Stanford professors would be blindsided by the concept of rates and tarriffs.

They are nonetheless subject to publish or perish pressure and have strong incentives to draw publishable attention-grabbing results even where the data is inconclusive.

Fitting, since it came up with unrelated information (the R&D tax thing) and the 3rd bullet point. Also started talking about tariffs as if it had addressed them, then notes that it doesn't address them.

It is in their interest to find explanations for reductions in labor that don't assign the blame to corporate greed.

For example, a call center might use the excuse of AI to fire a bunch of people. They would have liked to just arbitrarily fire people a few years ago, but if they did that people would notice the reduction in quality and perhaps realize it was done out of self-serving greed (executives get bigger bonuses / look better, etc). The AI excuse means that their service might be worse, perhaps inexcusably so, but no one is going to scrutinize it that closely because there is a palatable justification for why it was done.

This is certainly the type of effect I feel like underlies every story of AI firing I've heard about.

And some jobs, offshored or not, are just human frontend to datacenters.

> AI potentially solves many of those challenges

Isn't it exactly the opposite?

Language barriers: LLMs are language models and all of the major ones are built in English, speaking that language fluently is surely a prerequisite to interacting with them efficiently?

Knowledge: famously LLMs "know" nothing and are making things up all of the time and sometimes approximate "knowledge"

I think you are conflating 2 things. AI could be going after new entry level jobs in software engineering. I am not a professional engineer but an accountant by trade (I like writing software as a hobby lol) but this article looks like evidence that IIT grads will have a harder time getting these jobs that AI is attacking. My comment rests on the fact that the report doesn't really reconcile with AI destroying entry level jobs for accounting, but rather this type of work being offshored to APAC/India. There are still new COEs being built up for mid cap companies for shared services in India to this day and I don't mean Cognizant and Wipro, but rather the end customer being the company in question with really slick offices there.

Do you have any actual evidence that supports the headline? The article does not. It simply mentions 13% decline in relative employment and then blames AI with no actual evidence. Given what I know about the current state of AI and off-shoring, I think off-shoring is a million times more likely to be the culprit than AI.

Have you seen how the profession has worked post SOX? Did you know 2016 was the peak year where you had accounting students enrolled in uni in the states? I want you to think laterally about this.

Maybe for software engineering but not for accounting. I've had to interface with many offshored teams and interviewed at places where accounting ops were in COE centers in EU/APAC.

Where is the evidence for this? Who is "applying pressure on the labour market"?

I've always seen it as "Actually Indians", but yeah. That's a lot of what is destroying the US tech job market. It happened to blue collar work in the 90s and early 2000s, now it's our turn.

> I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable

I don't know. It seems pretty friendly to automation to me.

When was the last time you wrote assembly? When was the last time you had map memory? Think about blitting memory to a screen buffer to draw a square on a screen? Schedule processes and threads?

These are things that I routinely did as a junior engineer writing software a long time ago. Most people at that time did. For the most part, the computer does them all now. People still do them, but only when it really counts and applications are niche.

Think about how large code bases are now and how complicated software systems are. How many layers they have. Complexity on this scale was unthinkable not so long ago.

It's all possible because the computer manages much of the complexity through various forms of automation.

Expect more automation. Maybe LLMs are the vehicle that delivers it, maybe not. But more automation in software is the rule, not the exception.

The only thing that AI is good at is a job that someone has already done before.

That's plan C, plan B is to one person SAAS a better app than my current company makes.

Is it hard to date with a trailer?

>Buy a trailer, live somewhere cheap, do odd jobs

Unrelated to the discussion, but I love these kinds of backup plans. I've found that most guys I talk to have one. Just a few days ago a guy was telling me that, if his beloved wife ever divorces him, then he'd move to a tropical island and become a coconut seller.

(My personal plan: find a small town in the Sonoran Desert that has a good library, dig a hole under a nice big Saguaro cactus, then live out my days reading library books in my cool and shady cave.)

Does it have to? Stack enough "it's 5% better" on top of each other and the exponent will crush you.

> These models are extremely unreliable when unsupervised.

> It doesn't feel like that will change fundamentally with just incrementally better training.

I could list several things that I thought wouldn't get better with more training and then got better with more training. I don't have any hope left that LLMs will hit a wall soon.

Also, LLMs don't need to be better programmers than you are, they only need to be good enough.

Despite being the target of a lot of schadenfreude, most software developers aren't working on automation.

Nice watching it tear down recruiters though.

You don’t need to perfect AI to the point of becoming credentialed professionals to gut job markets— it’s not just developers, or creative markets. Nobody’s worried that the world won’t have, say, lawyers anymore — they’re worried that AI will let 20% of the legal workforce do 100% of the requisite work, making the skill essentially worthless for the next few decades because we’d have way too many lawyers. Since the work AI does is largely entry-level work, that means almost nobody will be able to get a foothold in the business. Wash, rinse, repeat to varying levels across many white collar professions and you’ve got some real bad times brewing for people trying to enter the white collar workforce from now on— all without there being a single AI lawyer in the world.

Same thing for doctors. Turns out radiologists are fine, it's software engineers that should be scared.

Eventually, maybe. Right now I see a lot more people wasting time with AI in search of these promised efficiencies. A lot of companies reducing headcount are simply hiding the fact that they are deprioritizing projects or reducing their overall scope because the economy is shit (I know, I know - but it feels worse than reported IMO) and that's the right business cycle thing to do. If you're dramatic and take the DOGE/MAGA approach to management, just fire everyone and the important issues will become obvious where investment is actually needed. It's a headcount 'zero based budget' played out IRL. The truth is, there is a lot of fat to be cut from most large companies and I feel like it's the current business trend to be ruthless with the blade, especially since you have AI as a rose colored scapegoat.

The way I like to describe it is that you can't go from 1 developer to 0 thanks to AI, but you might be able to go from 10 to 9. Although not sure what the exact numbers are.

For cost centers, maybe. If your development team or org is a revenue generator with a backlog, I don't see why the team would be trimmed.

no

And then they hire supervisors, helpers and checkout guards/security. I hope it at least makes sense on paper.

It’s also just resulting in atrocious customer experience.

I can go to Safeway or the smaller chain half a block away.

The Safeway went all in on self checkouts. The store is barely staffed, shelves are constantly empty, you have to have your receipt checked by security every time, they closed the second entrance permanently, and for some reason the place smells.

Other store has self checkouts but they also have loads of staff. I usually go through the normal checkout because it’s easier and since they have adequate staff and self checkout lines it tends to be about the same speed to.

End result is I don’t shop at Safeway if I can avoid it.

Cashiers should not, and will not prevent theft. They're not paid nearly enough to get in danger, and it is not their job.

I'm sure you can find videos of thefts in San Francisco if you need a visual demonstration. No cashier is going to jump in front of someone to stop a theft.

Is the theft really happening at the checkout?

And if so, why can't we detect it via camera + AI?

You seem to like self-checkout processes. I don't. I avoid any place where I have to interact with a screen. Be it a screen installed on-premise or the screen on my phone. It is not a relaxing experience for me.

Serverless restaurants have been common in Australia for decades. You just get a buzzer and then need to go pick up your food when it is ready. There's a single person behind the bar to take orders and pour beer/wine/soda.

I don't use self-checkouts at the stores, nor would I eat at automated or self-service restaurants. I have a kitchen for that already.

But it's good if both are available, as apparently there will be customers for both.

Self check-out machines aren't automation.

Seems like perfect option for robots (not humanoid). Bring me my food. You can still keep people in kitchen for a bit, but well servers in many restaurants are not really needed.

Please actually understand what pharmacists actually do and _why_ AI is not a good replacement for them yet, unless you want to die of certain drugs interactions.

Pharmacists are a fantastic example. My pharmacy is delivered my prescription by computer. They text me, by computer, when it's ready to pick up. I drive over there … and it isn't ready, and I have to loiter for 15 minutes.

Also, after the prescription ends, they're still filling it. I just never pick it up. The autonomous flow has no ability to handle this situation, so now I get a monthly text that my prescription is ready. The actual support line is literally unmanned, and messages given it are piped to /dev/null.

The existing automation is hot garbage. But C-suite would have me believe our Lord & Savior, AI, will fix it all.