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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

This prediction is made every year, yet white collar jobs continue to thrive in terms of pay and total employment. Ai can do a good job automating certain tasks but cannot respond to new information or adapt as well compared to humans. Lawyers and doctors do a lot more than write memos or browse information; they also represent clients in court, treat patients, etc. At best Ai helps white collar work by automating certain tasks, not replace it.

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Ask the writers and artists. They got a reason to go on strike.

How many articles nowadays use pictures generated by AI instead of stock images created by an artist?

I think there's clearly a change. 10 years ago, we hired people for a specific technical role and paid them $80K/year. Now, we still hire people for that same job, but only pay them $60K/year.

Companies loudly announce they're laying off workers to cut costs. A short time later they're advertising those same jobs, but people are hired, or even hired back, at a lower wage.

What used to be a well-paid job 15 or 20 years ago, no longer has job security or the same benefits. It may have even be contracted as a 'gig' job, with no job security or benefits.

I think a key thing here is whether usage would increase if cost went down, for instance doctors, if the price of a medical visit decreased (ignoring the way insurance and health care works for the moment), I think people would be more likely to go to the doctor. Thus if a doctor could see more people in less time without decreasing the quality of care (which maybe AI could help with), then the doctor may be able to decrease prices and see increased usage. The increased usage would then create greater demand, which could create more jobs. (I realize doctor's not a great example for this argument, but I'm too lazy to think about a better one, lawyer might actually work better, pretend I used that in the paragraph above)

This phenomenon can be seen in how lower priced restaurants can cause people to go out more and then create more demand for restaurants. (I think this has been studied by someone somewhere)

That said this doesn't always happen, part of this has to do with the balance between lowering prices and increasing demand, etc., and part of this goes to whether or not automation can completely cover the important aspects of the job (for the typical use case) it's replacing. For example, how travel comparison and search sites cover the typical use case for a travel agent roughly (I'm guessing).

I was testing why we go some wrong information from a database and hand writing some SQL. It didn't work and the issue was not immediately obvious, so I pasted it into chat gpt with a very carefully chosen prompt and it told me immediately that I should only use one =.

That probably saved me 20 minutes of looking through the manuals.

That very carefully chosen prompt, btw, was: "what is wrong with this code"? I have since refined it to be "what is wrong with this code, assume the tables exist".

No, it is not going to mean that anyone can code, but if developers are 10 to 20 percent more efficient that means that the same problems need at least that fewer developers, more when you take into account communication overhead between devs.

There is an argument of brain drain as certain white collar apprentice type jobs require "knowing how to do every task under you before promotion". As an ai abstracts and automates parts, it will make those people no longer appreciate or design work to play nice with those types of tasks. I imagine that an upset or two will shake the system based on people not knowing how to do basic secretarial tasks, but ultimately a lot of undergrads are going to have a hard time getting a job and wages will stagnate for the rest.

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