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Comment by NotAnOtter | Hacker News Reader

I also work at google (until last Friday). Agree with what you said. My thoughts are

1. This quote is clearly meant to exaggerate reality, and they are likely including things like fully automated CL/PR's which have been around for a decade as "AI generated".

2. I stated before that if a team of 10 is equally as productive as a team of 8 utilizing things like copilot, it's fair to say "AI replaced 2 engineers", in my opinion. More importantly, Tech leaders would be making this claim if it were true. Copilot and it's clones have been around long enough know for the evidence to be in, and no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" - therefor my claim is (by 'denying the consequent'), using copilot does not materially accelerate development.

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> no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI"

Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.

In today's social climate claiming to replace humans with AI would attract the wrong kind of attention from politicians (during an election year) and from the public in general.

This would be even more unwise to admit for a company like Google who's an "AI producer". They may leave such a language for closed meetings with potential customers during sales pitches though.

> and from the public in general

Don't think the public will be that concerned about people in Google's salary bracket losing their jobs.

The public might though be concerned that if they are being replaced, many in other positions at other companies will soon be replaced as well.

That’s not how the mind works. People cheered when Elon fired 80% of the Twitter staff. No one cares when people with high paying jobs suffer.

The people who cheered about the firing of 80% of the Twitter staff largely believed (rightly or wrongly) that they were being adversely affected by them. While Google may be seen with more wariness in tech circles, I don't think the average person believes that Google is actively harming them (again, rightly or wrongly).

I think twitter is an outlier because people hated the employees already for various reasons.

For example they thought that twitter had a bloated workforce because of videos like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buF4hB5_rFs).

And a lot of people heavily disagreed with how they handled moderation. You can take things like the hunter Biden laptop suppression or in the funny category you had the getting banned for saying learn to code (https://reason.com/2019/03/11/learn-to-code-twitter-harassme...).

Take random company without controversies and you will find less vitriol about them getting fired.

These aren't the same types of events. In Twitter's case, it was a one-off act, caused by one-off circumstances. With Google, it'd be more of a precursor to a new trend that might soon take root and impact me or those I care about.

It’s a disservice to the public to assume they aren’t capable of understanding why AI job losses might be concerning even if they aren’t directly impacted. Most people aren’t so committed to class warfare that they will root for the apocalypse as long as it stomps a rich guy first.

Software engineers and grocery store workers are in different income brackets, but in the same class (labor/prolaterian). It is managers, executives, and investors that are in the capitalist class. Class is determined by your relationship to production.

Software engineer salaries and stock compensation can be enough to shift alignment somewhat, especially after many years of capital accumulation.

if you make the majority of your earnings from passive income or you do not need to work to live you are more part of the leisure class

Two things: capitalists don't not work; and if you have a sizeable portfolio, you may not need to work and may earn plenty of passive income, yet still work because you add more value at the margin working than fiddling with stock allocations or angel investing or whatnot (vs index funds etc.).

It's easy to get a capitalist to come out of retirement. Most of the time you just have to ask them to take a look at your business. Before you know it they accept a board position and shortly thereafter they are running point as President.

For an illustrated example, you can watch Succession

I’ve switched from manager to IC and vice-versa a few times at FAANG. Didn’t strike me as moving between the capitalist and proletariat classes, lol!

You mean poor person. As long as it stomps a poor person. The rich don’t have a habit of getting stomped. They direct other poor people to stomp their contemporaries. The poor don’t have a chance.

I don't think a lot of people realize how few people are "rich" in the sense of not being impacted by the labor market, or how virtually all of them are retirees. CFOs aren't looking forward to a massive shift in the labor market for accountants any more than CPAs. Warren Buffet has a "job," he writes those letters for BH and oversees the firm's investments at a high level... and most of the people who live off of investments have children in the workforce. Even most people whose children live off of their investments have kids in the (nonprofit) workforce.

No one cares about self checkout on supermarkets impact on their employees, until their employer does something similar.

I care as a consumer who hates standing in long lines. My former bank branch had thirteen teller stations and two tellers. This wasn't on a bad day. This was for years.

The bank tellers didn't go away: they just became higher paid and higher skilled when cash management was no longer the job.

People in Google salary brackets get jobs at Google-1 salary brackets, pushing junior people at Google-1 to Google-2, all the way down to IT departments at non-tech firms. This impacts everybody who's in the industry or capable of switching.

Why would the general public care about Google employees. Google is however a major saas provider. And people might start to worry that their employer is going to soon buy a subscription to whatever that that Google used to automate jobs.

> I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.

Depends on who you ask.

If Trump wins and Elon Musk actually gets a new job, they would be bragging about replacing humans with AI all day long. And corporates are going to love it.

Not sure about what voters think though. But the fact that most of these companies are in California, New York etc means that it barely matters.

Corporates will soon have to realise the hard reality that when masses of humans have been replaced there won't be masses of humans with salaries to buy said corporate's goods anymore.

AI is socialism, and it's unstoppable. People are trying to stop progress and go back to the old days. Nothing about the universe permits this.

A new economy is forming and there is nothing that can stop it without causing major, unintended fallout.

Yup, just like full self driving and ending the war in Ukraine on 24 hours.

I find the boast about ending the war to be reasonably likely -- if it is clear the US is switching sides in the conflict, a negotiated capitulation could happen pretty quickly.

In a similar vein, solving world hunger is closer today than it's ever been. The previous best hope was global thermonuclear war, but honestly that would leave enough survivors as to be mostly ineffective, and much more likely to have the opposite result. Severe climate change has a better shot at fully eliminating [human] hunger.

>> they would be bragging about replacing humans with AI all day long.

Has either bragged about this at all?

The only thing I've heard floated is Musk running a "government efficiency commission" which I just assumed meant he would be looking for ways to gut a lot of the never ending, never dying government programs. I've never heard him saying the commissions goal was to replace people with AI.

https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/2024-election/trump-m...

The former president said such an audit would be to combat waste and fraud and suggested it could save trillions for the economy.

As the first order of business, Trump said that this commission will develop an action plan to eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months.

Trump and Musk will get bored quickly if elected. Once in office your power is checked.

> I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.

Would it be? Do they care?

Sam Altman's been talking about how GenAI could break capitalism (maybe not the exact quote, but something similar), and these companies have been pushing out GenAI products that could obviously and easily be used to fake photographic or video evidence of things that have occurred in the real world. Elon's obsessed with making an AI that's trained to be a 20-year-old male edgelord from the sewer pits of the internet.

Compared to those things, "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" is absolutely anodyne.

100%.

Altman encourages anyone that will listen to him that monopolies are the only path to success in business. He has a lot riding on making sure everyone is addicted to AI and that he’s the one selling the shovels.

Google isn’t far off.

Most capitalists have this fantasy that they can reduce their labour expenses with AI and continue stock buy-backs and ever-increasing executive payouts.

What sucks is that they rely on class divisions so that people don’t feel bad when the “overpaid” software developers get replaced. Problem is that software developers are also part of the proletariat and creating these artificial class divisions is breaking up the ability to organize.

It’s not AI replacing jobs, it’s capital holders. AI is just the smoke and mirrors.

Sam's company is not a multi-trillion dollar behemoth that employs hundreds of thousands and has practical (near-)monopoly on a huge swaths of the digital economy.

>> Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.

When I was working in RPA (robotic process automation) about 7 years ago, we were explicitly told not to say "You can reduce your team size by having use develop an automation that handles what they're doing!"

Even back then we were told to talk about how RPA (and by proxy AI) empowers your team to focus on the really important things. Automation just reduces the friction to getting things done. Instead of doing 4 hours of mindless data input or moving folders from one place to the other, automation gives you back those four hours so your team can do something sufficiently more important and focus on the bigger picture stuff.

Some teams loved the idea. Other leaders were skeptical and never adopted it. I spent the majority of those three years trying to selling them on this idea automation was good and very little time actually coding. Its interesting seeing the paradigm shift and seeing this stuff everywhere now.

> Even back then we were told to talk about how RPA (and by proxy AI) empowers your team to focus on the really important things.

As a non-politically savy person ;-) I have a feeling that this is a similarly dangerous message, since what prevents many teams to focus on really important things is often far too long meetings with managers and similar "important" stakeholders.

The reason you don't lead with headcount reduction is two-fold.

1. Almost every business has growing workload. That means reassigning good employees and not hiring new headcount, not firing existing headcount. Unipurpose, low-value offshore teams are the only ones who get cut (e.g. doing "{this} for every one of {these}" work).

2. Most operational automation is impossible to build well without deep process expertise from the SME currently performing it. If you fire that person immediately after automating their task, what do you think the next SME tells you, when you need their help?

Successfully scaling operational automation programs therefore rely on additional headcount avoidance (aka improving their volume:employee ratio) and value measurement (FTE-equivalent time savings) to justify/measure.

no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI"

That's only worth doing if you're trying to cut costs though. If the company has unmet ambitions there's no reason to shrink the headcount from 10 to 8 and have the same amount of output when you can keep 10 people and have the output of 12 by leveraging AI.

Almost all the big tech companies have had layoffs over the past several years. I think it’s safe to say cost cutting is very much part of their goal.

But the specific roles being laid off are arbitrary, and the overall goal headcount reduction is driven by macroeconomics factors (I'm being generous there), not based on new efficiencies.

Note the difft between "cost cutting" (do less, to lower cost) and "efficiency" (do same, but with less cost)

The goal of these cost cutting initiatives is not an absolute reduction in cost, but a relative one. They needed to show an improvement in operating margin, ie % of revenue spent on engineers.

If your engineers become 20% more efficient then your margins are better and your problem is solved. (Indeed if you have tech that can make any engineer 20% more efficient then you are back in the game of hiring as many as you can find, as long as each added engineer brings in enough additional revenue.)

Thanks, that is how I read the announcement. The powers that be decided that there must be some quota to be fulfilled, and magically that quota was fulfilled.

AI engineers will not yet get a Nobel prize for putting everyone out of work.

"we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI"

Most likely what is actually happening is that the X% of workforce you would lay off is being put to other projects and Google in general can take on X% more projects for the same labor $$. So there is no real reason to make that particular "replaced" statement.

Google has to sell its AI some how. The problem is that businesses will see this and want to fire head count because they go, "Well I guess AI can do it for freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!". Nope no way is it writing code freely.

> including things like fully automated CL/PR's which have been around for a decade

I haven't seen this yet so I'm intrigued. Is this a commercial product, or internal tooling?

I’m assuming this refers to things analogous to dependabot on GitHub where maybe it automatically updates a library version reference and runs the tests and creates a PR if everything seems good, or similarly for fixing style issues or other stuff that is pretty trivial and has good test coverage.

When you maintain an open source project on GitHub you will occasionally get some open source automated bot that submits a PR to do things like this without you even asking, and I’m sure there’s plenty more you can sign up for or implement yourself.

I wouldn’t really call it AI, but it is automated. I agree with the parent comment that a journalist trying to push an angle would probably lump it in as AI in order to make the number seem larger.

It's common at most mega-corps like google. For example, if a utility function in an internal library was deprecated and replaced with a different function that has the same functionality. A team might write a script which generates hundreds/thousands of PR's to make the migration to the new function.

You don't want a single PR that does that, because that would affect thousands of projects, and if something goes wrong with a single one, the whole PR needs to be rolled back.

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