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Comment by gitfan86 | Hacker News Reader

AGI has become a philosophical term in the way you are using it. Which is fine to discuss philosophy, but to the point of the article, AI enabled automation is beginning to have significant impact on the economy due to the new functionality.

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Where have LLM AIs made measurable economic impacts that weren't already using some form of AI to start with (translation, legal, content farms, marketing, robotics)?

SubReddits for copywriting and graphic design and digital art are full of people talking about how the amount of gig work available has dropped off.

Software developers on HN are saying the same thing. I don't see much evidence that AI has changed the game such that it would cause the work to dry up, though. In fact, I am surprised it hasn't created more work exploring the possibilities of new AI APIs.

But when you can get 5% returns just by sticking your money in the bank, why would you bother investing in software, where 99¢ is considered an exorbitant cost by its customers? That is no doubt why all of these creative industries are on the decline. There is, generally speaking, no money to be made.

I think software devs on here are conflating AI with a hidden recession and other economic factors causing a slump in tech. I still can’t find a single thing that AI could reasonably replace about my job even if I was a junior developer. As a senior engineer using LLM tooling, it offers some benefits, but it’s still nowhere near “job stealing” capabilities.

There's a new fallacy, where AI is dismissed if it "can't replace" a human completely. AI is more like an augmentation tool, that allows fewer people to create work faster by effectively outsourcing the grunt work.

Better tools like Copilot and ChatGPT reduce the amount of time it takes to deliver a feature, reducing the need to horizontally scale developers.

Why hire 10 when 3 could do the same work with AI tooling?

I think while tech is obviously contracting post-COVID from overhiring, it's also true that you just don't need as many people anymore.

> Why hire 10 when 3 could do the same work with AI tooling?

Why hire 3 when you can hire 10 to do the work of 33? It was only a couple of years ago when businesses were boasting "We can't possibly hire enough."

But, of course, there isn't enough money to be made anymore, which is the real reason creative industries are on the decline.

Fair examples!

Also, not to move the goal posts, but there has been a large economic shift since Q3 2022 with tech & finance belt tightening, inflation normalizing and generally slowing. So these things don't happen in a vacuum (which makes them hard to measure!).

For example my previous & current employer have done their first layoffs since pre-pandemic, and neither has anything to do with AI. They just overexpanded and need to shrink.

I think for us to say it's "beginning to have a significant impact on the economy", there needs to be an actual measurable increase in productivity due to AI-enabled automation, which so far has been elusive. It might be impacting employment in some specific jobs, but the mix of jobs in the economy is always constantly changing.

Just because something is difficult to measure does not mean it doesn't exist. People who have automated their jobs are unlikely to report that, since they like having a paycheck. But that doesn't mean it isn't happening.

It's not difficult to measure though - we've been tracking total factor productivity of our economy for decades. Steam power, electrification, computers - all of these things had huge, measurable impacts on the amount of economic output vs input. No self-reporting (of what?) necessary. If AI means that companies are getting the same or more output from less input of labor and capital, productivity should be soaring right now.

> Steam power, electrification, computers - all of these things had huge, measurable impacts on the amount of economic output vs input.

Well... maybe not computers, which seems relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox#IT_unprod...

Ha, I was thinking of that when I typed it. I agree though - I think many of the AGI boosters on HN would be very surprised by how little economic productivity increased thanks to computers and the Internet.

If we measure economic output in dollar terms, heightened competition could result in better quantity, quality, and variety of products, such as shows or software available to an average global consumer, while not raising their expenses nor aggregate income for the producing companies.

Thus, in some market segments, it's possible for real productivity to increase without having a significant impact on economically measured output.

@gitfan86 - You would measure that the same way productivity is always measured - The company's overall economic output would be unchanged, and their labor inputs would have decreased, so the total factor productivity would have increased by virtue of automating the DEI group (just the same as when companies used 'mail-merge' to automate large groups of people doing that work manually, for instance).

Electrical output, number of units shipped can be measured.

How do you measure the output of a DEI department? Now assume those people automated their jobs with Chat GPT. How would you measure the change in productivity?

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