How do we know that the rise in unemployment is being driven by AI specifically, and not by wider economic circumstances?
The article's evidence for the AI claim is just "some guy you've never heard of says so".
The article's evidence for the AI claim is just "some guy you've never heard of says so".
The accurate, but boring headline is almost always, "stock (tumble|gain) as algorithmic traders reinforce trend. Further news may occur."
I think I originally read that this happens in a book somewhere, then observed and noticed yeah that seems to be the norm. Not surprised it seems to be same thing in these adjacent metric % headlines where there's no proper thought if there exists a causal link between X and Y.
I think my brain has learned to recognize the pattern "Something rises X% as Thing Happened" and it reminds me of that cheeky quote about how every headline that is in the form of a question is, ... uh I forgot the full quote. But feels like almost this could have some kind of cheeky rule of its own, about how no causal link ever exists in a headline like this.
Black Swan by Nassim Taleb?
That book however you mentioned, I just looked it up and it seems interesting. Might put on my read list.
They use wording -- just like this article does -- like "X happens as Y also happens".
The keyword being "as" and not "because" or "due to".
It implies causality, by coupling both in the same title, without technically linking the two.
E.g. "Stocks fall as rate increase looms"
They're basically just saying two things happened at the same time, or one after the other, but one didn't necessarily cause the other.
IOW, they know they can't link the two -- i.e. they can't user words like "because" or "due to" -- but they also know that by coupling them in the same headline, readers will still infer causality.
“President announces crackdown on immigration amid ongoing success of Taylor Swift’s new album”.
“My God, you’ve actually seen people looting, raping and eating each other?”
“No, we haven’t actually seen it Tom, we’re just reporting it.”
But specifically this is probably mostly driven so far by tech support industries. "IT" being customer service reps who use a computer to respond to chat messages, in some cases.
Or actual tech support that's had its entire entry system stripped and replaced by an AI-guided walkthrough of predefined steps customers are required to take before they talk to a human. This will certainly have impact on the amount of support staff needed, even if a portion of that is simply frustrating customers into searching for answers themselves.
How much tech support was still in the US though? Outside of small onshore teams, frontline tech support for the major players was already all in India/SEA. You could replace those people with AI, yes, but it wouldn't reflect in US unemployment stats.
They are replacing second tier people with people overseas who interact with chatbots and a limited number of staff in the US. So one dude can access customer data, but he’s servicing a dozen agents.
Also as you flatten organizations and use cloud services you can discard lots of people. Every large company had a storage team. I worked for a big company that probably had 250 FTEs just running storage. Not anymore.
There’s also a ton of uncertainty in the US. Everyone is banking on a significant correction.
I’d have like a quarter. Which isn’t a lot. But man, you’d think I’d have learned by now huh?
Also, man do I understand Ye Wenjie from [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(nove...]. I don’t support, but holy shit do I understand.
Don’t get murdered pointlessly trying to do the right thing, eh? At least make it count for something useful. Try not to be dead right.
Reality is reality, and in the end you are right, but by that time it won't matter; the damage will have already been done. This is the nature of cascading failures, and delusion, and there are far more delusional people today in positions of power than ever before.
Edit: On a separate thing. As an FYI in case you didn't know, but it looks like your blog is now directing to a bad link on google, or they were hosting it and took your blog down.
"Another reason for January’s tech job losses was that companies began implementing some intended spending cuts for this year, Janulaitis said, and many slashed budgets based on what the economy looked like during fiscal planning last year."
It works like this. Find whatever is hot that day, week or month then put it after the "as".
Stock market down as Trump holds another signing. Stock market up big as Musk slashes government spending.
* Something A (probably) happened
* Something B (probably) happened
* The author/publisher are slimy weasels and I'm not going to give their stupid article any more time
In our company we're not seeing any major impact on productivity yet and no jobs were lost. Yet.
There are several important things to look at that show this. First and foremost, IT has about a 40 year history now, with corresponding economic data.
In its entire history, its been uncorrelated with interest rates and other assets. These correlated assets are what most people refer to when they speak of wider economic circumstance. The IT industry is uncorrelated with this, with 40 years to back that up.
IT labor markets are however strongly correlated with advances in information technology. This correlation is found throughout that dataset as well, in both the boom and bust cycles.
The deep unemployment which we are seeing here, which doesn't include the first batch of laid off employees two years ago [18 mo], is only correlated and impacted by Information Technology advances.
There is only one such major advance that has been made in this time period... Artificial Intelligence.
AI has improved dramatically from a modular swappable design, and it can replace entry level positional tasks completely. It probably won't ever be able to take over the senior level positions, or the mid level positions, but that doesn't matter.
The companies involved in integrating these things into the production environment have mislead most of their customers, and in the process burnt all the bridges. Many of these companies market towards replacing workers with AI, grossly negligent of the whipsaw they are creating with that misleading narrative. In the short term they make lots of profit, while destroying the environment they need to sustain themselves.
By choking off the professional development pipeline which is a sequential pipeline in developing talent, this leaves few opportunities to progress to mid and senior level positions, which were few and far between to begin with.
When there is no economic incentive to go into any specialized field because AI has burnt the only bridge for a long-term career, people don't go into these jobs. Worse, those caught surprised by this change in circumstance, who actually have sufficient experience to perform at these mid-level ranges, may abandon the profession causing exponential brain drain. As anyone knows, people age and eventually die. Senior level people are at greater risk to this than others.
This inevitably creates a tsunami of cost in those irreplaceable positions which cannot be addressed by the market, and balloons far above what the market can bare. The forward looking expectations have made any labor in this industry worth less than AI services, and IT as a general rule is a labor multiplier where changes here eventually expand and infect everywhere.
Business is not constrained in hiring people because many business receive operations funding upfront from their financial engineering which often comes from money printers. By the time they notice the problem, it will be too late to solve it, in many respects its already too late because you have people who are incredibly competent, near geniuses, and they see no future in the industry and are retraining ahead of the curve.
AI threatens society because it disrupts the core pillars of society, which is indirect but immeasurably important to sustained organization of labor and food production. Agriculture is dependent on something like 64 different intermediate producers to maintain production levels sufficient to feed people.
Failures back to pre-modern industrial technology would mean half the people alive today starve to death, no matter how much they work.
These are the issues which the article doesn't really touch on correctly but its WSJ so what do you expect. Their journalism has never really been up to snuff.
It is right there, in the headline, sir. The economy is so good, like never before. /s