People aren't getting fired and 1-1 replaced by an AI agent. It's making people more productive so you can do more with less. I don't know why this needs to be constantly repeated.
Can you answer my question about an "AI native" company that never even had people to replace?
(You're Alice btw) :
Alice's response has a few issues:
Shifts the Goalpost:
Bob's point was about AI's impact on existing jobs—he's arguing that AI increases productivity, not that companies like OpenAI don't need people. Alice shifts the discussion to whether OpenAI, an AI company, is hiring people, which isn't directly relevant to Bob's claim.
Strawman Argument:
She implies that if AI is truly productive, OpenAI shouldn't need to hire. But OpenAI is in a high-growth phase, likely hiring to build and maintain the technology, not to replace traditional roles with AI. AI productivity doesn't mean zero hiring—it often means hiring in different areas or scaling faster.
Burden of Proof Misstep:
Alice demands proof from Bob while making her own claim ("baseless assertion") without providing evidence that AI is directly causing 1:1 replacements.
Weak "AI Native" Point:
The question about "AI native" companies might sound clever, but it doesn't address Bob's core argument about existing companies using AI to do more with fewer people.
Most software developers don't work for Google. They don't need a degree. They are making basic crud applications or some other apps that are chaining APIs or libraries together.
The difference between a junior and a senior in these kind of jobs is productivity and code quality/ maintainability. If you don't think current gen LLMs help with that you are delusional
Tell that to all the customer service AI chatbots. They don't need as many real CS agents anymore because one chatbot can reply to hundreds or thousands of tickets with useless garbage copy-pasted from the FAQ. Given that even most real CS agents also only do that nowadays anyway, yeah they've been replaced.
This tends to be incredibly effective at CS's real job, which is to make customers with problems go away from being able to make it to bothering the actual consumer-unfriendly-decision-makers. If you start looking for this you will see it absolutely everywhere. Chatbots are really really good at making people too frustrated and exhausted to pursue other routes.
There are a few companies whose CS actually still is good (like Mila Cares!!!) but in my experience most CS just wants to get rid of the annoying customer.
Also, sort of related (to me, blame my autism), I've heard that the practical effect of a suicide hotline can be annoying the caller enough for them not to do the thing. I've had at least one or two friends told me that this was the effect it had on them. (they're doing better nowadays)
Most anti-AI arguments can be dispensed with by recasting them in terms of the broken-window fallacy. This is certainly one of them.
Could you explain how and what fits the broken-window fallacy here? Is it the AI abolitionists? (I know at least one person who violently hates AI and anything relating to AI and firmly believes that there is absolutely no place for AI or LLMs anywhere in the world and that any usage at all for any reason whatsoever is utterly deplorable. I don't talk to this person since they tend to flame at others for using or talking about AI for any reason.)
That's where the broken-window fallacy comes in. It's not just a matter of paying someone to break all the glass in town to make work for the glaziers, it's like responding to the invention of cheap shatterproof glass with the same flawed zero-sum reasoning.
(I'm rate-limited so can't reply, but my position is basically that 100% unemployment is a good thing, not a bad one. We can't get to a post-scarcity society by doing things the same way we've been doing them, or by retrying the same alternatives that have failed before.)
I keep seeing cashiers replaced by self-checkout machines at stores, fast food jobs might be too complicated for certain people (like me - I couldn't do it), places like say the Apple Genius Bar require you to know what you're doing, etc. Maybe I'm super naive and first-world by missing something super obvious, but if I am then maybe I could learn something today.