Many people now think that AI is a mortal threat to jobs - are they right? \ stacker news ~econ

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Many people now think that AI is a mortal threat to jobs - are they right?

1425 sats \ 18 comments \ @Signal312 12 May econ

I often spend a couple hours looking at Substack.com, trying to get a sense of what's happening in the (non mainstream) world.

I just did that again last night, and wow, my feed was absolutely stuffed with all kinds of fearful "AI will take all our jobs" articles. I don't know if it's the algorithm, or there's just a lot of this going around. I do know that the tech job market is crummy now.

Don't get me wrong - AI will, of course, take a lot of jobs. But is it really this bad, already? And what other jobs will open up? Here's another recent post by @stack_harder on the topic #975640.

And here's some of the articles that I came across, just in my last Substack session.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-162828620?selection=0840c2de-f615-40e9-a914-ec19e91429f5 The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway - It's Not a Hypothetical, I've Already Lost My Job to AI For The Last Year

https://substack.com/home/post/p-160917692?selection=0056dac6-e190-4c80-b360-c991752a5198 The many fallacies of 'AI won't take your job, but someone using AI will'

https://substack.com/home/post/p-161486972 Yes, you will lose your job to AI -My best advice for preserving your value

https://femcel1836.substack.com/p/why-are-there-no-fucking-jobs WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS? - The current job market makes me understand wanting to become a tradwife and I do not want to understand that. Below are my thoughts and analysis as a recent, unemployed college graduate.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-161370460 Everyone I know is worried about work

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122 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury 12 May

My brief thought is that yes, AI is going to take a fuck-ton of jobs, it's going to re-architect the modern world. It's like the central thing at my startup and I assume the rest of the world will be a few years behind, especially when you add in whatever economic apocalypse is forthcoming and people want a way to slash jobs without having to really think about wtf they're actually doing.

The bigger thing I wanted to say was that the second-to-last link was really something. I have a lot of thoughts knocking around in my head. It's worth a read.

27 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 21h

I think maybe that second to last person can't get a job because of their personality.

27 sats \ 2 replies \ @Signal312 OP 16h

I agree. I read some of her other posts as well. Yeah, she was REALLY negative, and threw some of the people she worked/interviewed with for under the bus. A crazy commie, too, talking about when the revolution comes.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 14h

I found it an interesting exercise to take some of my more visceral emotional reactions out of it and to reflect on what's on display. She's smart, writes well, seems to have good experience. Is it really so hard to find work? Is that the shared experience of a 24 y/o new grad? She also seems deeply entitled to be living some kind of picturesque life of glamor right now. Like she wants to step right into some remarkable gig, the kind of life you used to have to grind away to arrive at.

And the nepotism thing is also a mixed bag. It's true that many people I know get opportunities because of people they know. Sometimes this feels gross (boss's kid gets special treatment), sometimes less (boss's kid gets special treatment but is also pretty great), and sometimes it feels just right (I hire someone I know because I know that they are fantastic.)

I don't have a takeaway, except maybe to wonder how different is it now? Real estate prices, sure. Some of the issues we all understand due to fiat problems. But if you wanted to make it in LA at 24 in some cultural industry, were there ever better options?

And even if there were, and this chick's difficulties are 85% her own fault, and Gen-Z is as whiny and entitled and lazy as people say, it's really good to understand how they feel, because everyone else will be feeling the consequences of it.

3 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 14h

For instance, consider this recent SN post. If you start out thinking that you should be able to do whatever you want, and make a good living from it wherever you want, then the world will disappoint. (This is what I'd like to know more about -- was her situation easier, in LA, at 24, twenty years ago?)

But if you start out w/ the assumption that the world owes you nothing, and you need to find a way to survive, it seems like you have options. And maybe more options than anyone has ever had.

But also, it's hard to see something entirely outside of your field of view. I can sympathize with that, too. But sympathy isn't a solution. The right model of the world is the solution, or most of it. I just don't know how right mine is.

174 sats \ 7 replies \ @Undisciplined 12 May

I don't know the specifics of tech jobs, but normal attrition can often be in the single percents. So, even if AI only eliminated a few tenths of a percent of positions, that would make the job market much tighter.

For the sake of argument let's say 2% of workers in tech are normally leaving their job during the year and there are normally enough open positions for them to take. If 0.1% of positions are cut, then there will now be 2.1% of unemployed chasing 1.9% of positions.

Not only is that a 5% increase in unemployed tech workers, but now almost 10% of unemployed tech workers have no available position to take.

21 sats \ 6 replies \ @Signal312 OP 12 May

I imagine that 2% will think a lot harder about leaving their job!

You're an econ guy...what do you think about all this?

Right now it feels like AI is doing a "shock and awe" type campaign. I use it all the time, and it can just do SO MUCH. It's a little unnerving.

I was doing some work recently in Gumroad.com, and their tech support AI was absolutely outstanding. It was extremely helpful, with an easy link at the bottom to "contact a human" if you needed to (which I did once). I started my tech career in customer support - wonder if that opportunity will still exist in a few years.

(BTW Gumroad open sourced it - it's Helper, on github - https://github.com/antiwork)

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @LibertasBR 2h

I think this movement of few jobs in this area has many factors and AI can be the smallest of them. Some colleagues I have in the area complain that in recent years it has had an explodation of poorly trained professionals and accepted any value to do inferior quality work. With the AI becoming more accurate it may be that keeping people insufficient and cheap is no longer advantageous. And in my opinion, based on some data, I believe that there is a "Shock and Awe", with more people using and forcing the Age soon that it is not as efficient as an experienced professional.

26 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 12 May

I'm reasonably confident in my short-term and long-term projections, but I have no confidence at all in any particular medium-term predictions.

Short-term: lots of change, which is very painful and messy

Long-term: enormously enhanced productivity will greatly improve standards of living

106 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 21h

I think it's going to take longer for young people to launch out of subsistence living, unless they're willing to get out of the knowledge-producing industry and go back to physical labor.

I just don't see what value a young person with no domain-expertise brings to a knowledge industry anymore. I'd venture to guess that AI will outperform 99% of undergraduates on knowledge tasks in their first 1 or 2 years on the job. So why bother?

So it'll be harder for young folks to get a foot in the door. They may have to work longer at subsistence wages to build up a portfolio to show that they can do self-directed work, including orchestrating AI outputs to align with a business use case, before they'd get hired by a company. Or they might have to go the entrepreneurial route, which is probably a good scenario if more people were to do that.

64 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 16h

In times of rapid change, more entrepreneurship is really important. We need people hunting out the new profit opportunities.

I think we'll see another similar change, as we saw with electronic computing. Being good at arithmetic hasn't been a marketable skill for a long time. However, being a creative technical thinker became even more valuable.

Now, my guess is that being a walking encyclopedia will lose it's value, but productively using knowledge will be even more valuable.

Honestly, with how fat and sick our society has gotten, a tilt towards physical professions is not the worst thing in the world.

40 sats \ 1 reply \ @Signal312 OP 15h

It's interesting to remember that something like "being good at arithmetic" WAS actually a marketable skill years ago.

Now it isn't, of course.

It would be interesting to see how the job market changed with the advent of personal computing - when computers got cheap enough that most people and certainly all businesses could afford one. Were there people back then, very worried about how computers would replace them?

I imagine there were, but I don't really remember that. I think there was a big push to retrain laid-off factory workers as IT people, but I think that didn't work at all.

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34 sats \ 0 replies \ @ContraMundum5 6h

The blue collared workers will be the need again in a technology driven age..I did a whole podcast on this ….👇🏻

https://fountain.fm/episode/UzKsVqtpEsVpaOLaDMRv

39 sats \ 0 replies \ @LowK3y19 17h

I’m a photographer and I already here the older guys saying AI is gonna do our jobs soon

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @aPolitical 19h

AI shouldn't be a threat a anyone, instead we should start making optimum use of AI

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BallLightning 15h

Well, people starved and died because of job loss during the industrial revolution, but humanity survived and thrived because of it...

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei 23h

I think AI is an innovation just like other modern advancements, such as the Internet and WiFi. It serves to disrupt our lives, but if we learn to work with it and master it, we can still provide value and preserve our jobs. Admittedly, those who are slower to adapt will be ousted out of their jobs.

Personally, AI has been infused into my nation’s online learning system, and I have been tasked to conduct workshops on the AI-enabled features. I think we have to ensure that we move ahead with the times