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- Hacker News
- Some jobs are going to disappear and others will be created... same like in all eras in the past.by rrmdp
- Can't wait to see what will happen to all those frontend developers that the market is flooded it...by hugodan
- Door dashby Havoc
- AI is definitely eating jobs as no one would disagree with, I guess the question is more at what point does it go from low, medium, high, or apocalyptic job loss?by Incipient
- There's so many issues piling up on this mountain of steaming issues. I can't even tell you what a nightmare it is to try to get each company's idea of agentic support working, it's truly dystopian confusion/psychosis.by mrwaffle
- I am still recovering from a project where everything that could go wrong, did. People without experience coding in Python vibing Python code. People cosplaying software architects. People vibing specs, Jira tickets based on the code they vibed... architects telling devs to "upload the zip file into Claude and figure out what the code does" because there is no design, no spec, no requirements... madness.by surfingdino
- AI companies: give us money, think of all the jobs will be able to destroy and whose value we will somehow manage to capture!
General society: [notices this is what AI companies are explicitly trying to do.]
AI companies: don't worry about it bro, it'll all be fine -- better than fine in fact. And not just for us, promise! Actually we'll somehow create even more jobs, while still being able to massively increase productivity, even though this is contradictory and impossible. Because nothing is impossible with AI!
- Zombocom is proof of a time traveling AI god being real.by ares623
- >Brynjolfsson predicts that demand for experienced workers such as senior coders will still be high even if AI takes on more routine knowledge and coding work in the future
All well and good, but the age old question. How will people get experience if entry level is AI ? But maybe for a preview look at COBOL, there is huge demand for experience people.
by jmclnx - To this age old question the answer is between the lines that by the time seniors are gone AI would be fully taking over, at least by their assumptions.
And maybe due to falling population by then whoever left would have something useful to do nonetheless.
by geodel - > But maybe for a preview look at COBOL, there is huge demand for experience people.
Is there? I actually looked into this once, and nearly all the Cobol work I saw mentioned was being outsourced to software consulting companies in India. And it didn't sound like an especially good job there, either.
If anyone is genuinely paying disgusting amounts of money for deep Cobol expertise, I'd love to see any public evidence that this is happening on any significant scale!
by ekidd - You get experience by having an active interest, doing projects on your own, and not needing it spoonfed to you. When I was in college we learned some basic data structures and made an employee time clock program. I learned far more from the stuff I fiddled around with on my own time. I started tinkering in elementary school. The students that had done nothing with comp sci their entire lives and just wanted to make video games dropped out in 2 weeks.by esikich
- If the number of jobs stays constant but a lot of those jobs have been downgraded to gig labor without benefits, that's bad.
If the number of jobs stays constant but a lot of those jobs have been downgraded to fungible operators of AI, that's very bad.
- Gig labour has existing before AI, infact techies built it. Where was the "that's very bad" then?
Smells of hypocricy. And if the world didn't really change for gig workers before, why would it now?
by unified101 - Brynjolfsson: an AI “job apocalypse” is unlikely.
Also Brynjolfsson: It will likely impact entry-level jobs. There are huge implications for business and the economy, including some increases in living standards, but also, potentially, job disruption. We must act now to address this gap. We can’t just sit back and wait for the tsunami to hit us.
Also Brynjolfsson: If companies don’t hire people at the base of the pyramid, then they’re not going to have those people later when they need them. Now, AI can do a lot of those basic tasks. Some companies, such as law firms and investment banks, are not hiring as many people at the base. In the short run, I can see that logic, but, in a few years, where are they going to have the most experienced people? So they need to think harder about that.
So there's that. Basically what he's hoping is if everyone does what he recommends re: regulation and policy, then maybe the job apocalypse will become unlikely.
by darkstarsys - Yeah the base requirement has gone up. So more training/schooling is required.
Imagine when jobs started adding the requirement entry level positions require ability to read? That cut out so many people when that requirement was added yet the economy survived
by pyrolistical - Companies didn't like hiring entry level engineers even before AI came along because it took them such a long time to become productive and they had a habit of job hopping as soon as they did.
LLMs didn't really change anything about that but people like to give it credit for stuff.
In the long run it meant seniors commanded high salaries. It's the tragedy of the commons i guess except where the apocalypse is you need to build a free sushi restaurant and on site laundry for your spoiled developers.
by pydry - Something that gets ignored is that we're already facing a serious decline in the workforce as a result of the fertility crisis. If we can automate some jobs at the same time as people leave the workforce en masse, we can avoid a catasrophe.by matteoraso
- Talk about learning the wrong lessonby ares623
- Those are the wrong jobs. AI cannot yet be a nurse, for example.by amelius
- So a guy who runs worker displacement company tries to say we're not bad? It literally has a page where it shows how much of your company can be automated.by NoelJacob
- I think we are going to see a growing trend of communications opposite of what we've seen in the last 4 years; no more AI doomerism to avoid datacenter bans. Surly everyone is Dario's circle is telling him to keep his mouth shut.by wildrice
- As I've mentioned ad nauseum on HN for years yet no one listened - much of the time we as corporates in the tech industry used "AI" as an excuse for layoffs was for the same reason we used "COVID" as an explanation for layoffs before GPT4 was GAed.
The reality is, hiring severely overshot in 2021-22 with a degradation in quality. And 2-3 years of remote first showed that you can offshore with little-to-no operational impact.
Dario's messaging made sense as the underdog - which Anthropic was until a year ago. Their moat used to be FedRAMP until Emil Michael called their bluff.
by alephnerd - He clearly states that it worries him and he made a public letter.
The job disruption is real and it will be an job apocalypse for plenty of people.
If a company is now paying for ai tokens and you now have 5-20% higher cost but you are relevant more efficient, you will reduce your team by 5-20%.
It is already a job apocalypse for people who learned language and no longer get a job for translating or text analysis. People who want to be an illustrator have a job apocalpyse.
And we have not even SEEN what it will look like in 4-14 years. Physical AI / Robotic is progressing like crazy too.
by Zylokloto - It is obviously too early for any of this. Technologist have a highly distorted view of the overall economy. Most things just don't move that fast outside of information technology.
I routinely talk to people at my current non-tech job who don't even know what Claude is.
Technologist talk about tokenmaxxing while I can't imagine more than 10% of the non-tech workforce could even explain what a token is.
This level of automation is going to have an extremely slow roll out because of regulatory and sociological reasons.
There is no equivalent to the contagion of AI coding agents outside of programming. I am still fighting just to get access to Claude Cowork at work. I have quite a few automation ideas but there is not much in it for my manager. They have to sign off on something they don't understand with the best outcome their department shrinks. I can understand from their perspective, the status quo is perfectly fine. The risk is long term to the whole business not being competitive but neither my manager or I will be at this company by the time that materializes.
There is this cultural sorting function too that if you don't like change you probably don't work in tech. The culture that creates is night and day different to the non-technology workforce culture. Most people outside technology hate change. Time and time again, I have seen that even the most simple and obvious changes don't get made, even if it makes the task easier because of this bias against change.
by polnoner