Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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> That being said, we are not on the verge of replacing and eliminating humans in either white collar jobs or blue collar jobs.

Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system.

> Waymo not autonomous enough

It's not clear how often Waymo cars need remote attention, but it's not every 1-2 miles. Customers would notice the vehicle being stopped and stuck during the wait for customer service. There are many videos of people driving in Waymos for hours without any sign of a situation that required remote intervention.

Tesla and Baidu do use remote drivers.

The situations where Waymo cars get stuck are now somewhat obscure cases. Yesterday, the new mayor of SF had two limos double-parked, and a Waymo got stuck behind that. A Waymo got stuck in a parade that hadn't been listed on Muni's street closure list.

> Flying cars

Probably at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. They won't be cost-effective, but it will be a cool demo. EHang recently put solid state batteries into their flying car and got 48 minutes of flight time, instead of their previous 25 minutes. Ehang is basically a scaled-up quadrotor drone, with 16 motors and props. EHang been flying for years, but not for very long per recharge. Better batteries will help a lot.

[1] https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/electric-air-taxi-flights-...

> Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system. What are some good examples? I am very skeptical of anyone losing their jobs to AI. People are getting laid off for various reasons: - Companies are replacing American tech jobs with foreigners - Many companies hired more devs than they need - companies hired many devs during the pandemic, and don't need them anymore

Some companies may claim they are replacing devs with AI. I take it with a grain of salt. I believe some devs were probably replaced by AI, but not a large amount.

I think there may be a lot more layoffs in the future, but AI will probably account for a very small fraction of those.

> I believe some devs were probably replaced by AI, but not a large amount.

I'm not even sold on the idea that there were any. The media likes to blame AI for the developer layoffs because it makes a much more exciting story than interest rates and arcane tax code changes.

But the fact is that we don't need more than the Section 174 changes and the end of ZIRP to explain what's happened in tech. Federal economic policy was set up to direct massive amounts of investment into software development. Now it's not. That's a real, quantifiable impact that can readily explain what we've seen in a way that the current productivity gains from these tools simply can't.

Now, I'll definitely accept that many companies are attributing their layoffs to AI, but that's for much the same reason that the media laps the story up: it's a far better line to feed investors than that the financial environment has changed for the worse.

But I see so many devs typing here saying how vital AI is to their writing code efficiently and quickly now. If that is true then you need way less devs. Are people just sitting idle at their desks? I do see quite a bit of tech layoffs for sure. Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off?

>In 2024: At least 95,667 workers at U.S.-based tech companies have lost their jobs so far in the year, according to a Crunchbase News tally.

> Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off?

No, they are saying that the reason for the layoffs is not AI, it is financial changes making devs too expensive.

> If that is true then you need way less devs.

This does not follow. First of all, companies take a long time to measure dev output, it's not like you can look at a burn down chart over two sprints and decide to fire half the team because it seems they're working twice as fast. So any productivity gains will show up as layoffs only after a long time.

Secondly, dev productivity is very rarely significantly bounded by how long boilerplate takes to write. Having a more efficient way to write boilerplate, even massively more efficient, say 8h down to 1h, will only marginally improve your overall throughput, at least at the senior level: all that does is free you to think more about the complex issues you needed to solve. So if the task would have previously taken you 10 days, of which one day was spent on boilerplate, it may now take you, say, 8-9 days, because you've saved one day on boilerplate, plus some more minor gains here and there. So far from firing 7 out of every 8 devs, the 8h-to-1h boilerplate solution might allow you to fire 1 dev in a team of 10.

> But I see so many devs typing here saying how vital AI is to their writing code efficiently and quickly now. If that is true then you need way less devs.

Sure, in the same sense that editors and compilers mean you need way less devs.

Induced demand means we’ll need more devs than we have right now since every dev can produce more value (anyone using cursor for a longer while should be able to confirm that easily).

The problem is different in the meantime: nobody wants to be paying for training of those new devs. Juniors don’t have the experience to call LLM’s bullshit and seniors don’t get paid to teach them since LLMs replaced interns churning out boilerplate.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

BLS reports ~1.9 million software developer jobs and predicts 17% growth through 2033. Crunchbase is talking about "tech workers" not developers. And they don't even say that tech employment is down. I predict that when BLS publishes their preliminary job numbers for 2024 it will be at least 1.85 million, not 1.9 million as suggested by your Crunchbase News. I would lay 2:1 odds that it will be higher than 2023's number.

> But I see so many devs typing here saying how vital AI is to their writing code efficiently and quickly now. If that is true then you need way less devs

Same can be said for github, and open-source deoendency management tools like npm, and I'd argue that it had an even a much bigger impact then, and did you see what happen afterwards? Where were the mass layoffs back then? The number of software developers is actually much higher than before that era.

Why would Jevon's paradox not apply to human labor?

I am not sure what I expect for software developers besides that the nature if the work will change but it is still too early to say exactly how. We certainly cannot extrapolate linearly or exponentially from the past few years.

> Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off?

Of course not. The Section 174 changes are really only relevant to software devs—the conversation in the months leading up to them kicking in was all about how it would kill software jobs. But then when it happened the media latched onto this idea that it was the result of automation, with zero evidence besides the timing.

Since the timing also coincided with a gigantically important change to the tax code and a rapid increase in interest rates, both of which were predicted to kill software jobs, I'm suggesting that blaming AI is silly—we have a proximate cause already that is much more probable.

It just isn’t true that AI has made developers more efficient. Some might claim such on this site, but the vast majority of developers aren’t using it, or they find it to be a drag on their productivity (because for most tasks the median software engineer has to do, it actually can’t help), and the ones that do use it are (unknowingly maybe) exaggerating its impact.

Devs are getting laid off, yes. AI is not the reason. Executive/shareholder priorities are the reason.

A lot of devs are hacks. If an AI can do your job you had no value as a software developer.

It's pretty much impossible to get work as a copywriter now

I was thinking about this. I think we have an overcorrection right now. People get laid off because of expected performance of AI, not real performance. With copywriting and software development we have three options:

1. leaders notice they were wrong, start to increase human headcount again 2. human work is seen as boutique and premium, used for marketing and market placement 3. we just accept the sub-par quality of AI and go with it (quite likely with copywriting I guess)

I'd like to compare it with cinema and Netflix. There was a time where lost of stuff was mindless shit, but there was still place for A24 and it took the world by storm. What's gonna happen? No one knows.

But anyway, I figure that 90% of "laid off because of AI" is just regular lay-offs with a nice sounding reason. You don't loose anything by saying that and only gain in stakeholder trust.

90% might even be too low.

If you look up business analyst type jobs on JP Morgan website they are still hiring a ton right now.

What you actually notice is how many are being outsourced to other countries outside the US.

I think the main process at work is 1% actual AI automation and a huge amount of return to the office in the US while offshoring the remote work under the cover of "AI".

I imagine there aren't really layoffs, but slowing/stopping of hiring as you get more productivity out of existing devs. I imagine in the future, lots of companies will just let their employee base slowly attrition away.

Yeah, the AgentForce thing is a classic example. Internal leaks say Salesforce is using it as cover for more regular (cost cutting based) layoffs. People who've actually evaluated AgentForce don't think it's ready for prime time. It's more smoke and mirrors (and lots of marketing).

I think what Waymo's achieved is really impressive, and I like the way they've rolled out (carefully), but there's a lot of non evidence based defense of them in this comment thread. YouTube videos of people driving for hours are textbook survivorship bias. (What about all the videos people made but didn't upload because their drive didn't go perfectly?)

Nobody knows how many times operators intervene, because Waymo hasn't said. It's literally impossible to deduce.

Which means I also agree his estimate could also be wildly wrong too.

He’s saying AI can’t do the work of humans, not that dumb executives won’t pretend it can.

What is the silver bullet for battery tech?

Solid state batteries. Prototypes work, but high-volume manufacturing doesn't work yet. The major battery manufacturers are all trying to get this to production. Early versions will probably be expensive.

Maybe a 2x improvement in kwh/kg. Much less risk of fire or thermal runaway. Charging in < 10 mins.

The one thing I'm curious about with solid state batteries is if there's a path towards incremental improvements in power density like we've seen with lithium batteries?

It would be unfortunate if we get solid state batteries that have the great features that you describe but they're limited to 2x or so power density. Twice the power density opens a lot of doors for technology improvements and innovation but it's still limiting for really cool things like humanoid robotics and large scale battery powered aircraft.

Somebody may come up with a new battery chemistry. There are many people trying. There are constraints other than energy density - charge rate, discharge rate, safety, lifetime, cooling, etc. Lithium-air batteries have an energy density which potentially approaches that of gasoline, but decades of work have not produced anything usable.[1]

There are, of course, small startups promising usable lithium-air batteries Real Soon Now.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93air_battery

[2] https://airenergyllc.com/

For aircraft, hydrogen is the better option. Batteries are fine for very short hauls (100 miles). Beyond that hydrogen is quite good.

The big issues with hydrogen are volume and form factor. Hydrogen needs to be cryogenic or high pressure, and either work best with big spheroid-like tanks which don't naturally integrate into the wings where fuel is currently stored.

What about LK-99? Twitter influencers were talking about that.

I think there are ~3 major battery improvements to watch out for.

1. Solid state batteries. Likely to be expensive, but promise better energy density.

2. Some really good grid storage battery. Likely made with iron or molten salt or something like that. Dirt cheap, but horrible energy density.

3. Continued Lithium ion battery improvements, e.g. cheaper, more durable etc.

There are now a few large flow batteries. Here's one that's 400 megawatt-hours.[1] Round trip efficiency is poor and the installation is bulky, but storage is just tanks of liquid that are constantly recycled.

[1] https://newatlas.com/energy/worlds-largest-flow-battery-grid...

My money is on saltwater batteries. You can make them really cheaply. Flow batteries are still too complicated IMO.

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