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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Literally no jobs are going away due to AI.

I've lost consulting work because I'm a lot more expensive than $20 a month. I've literally had clients say, "yeah, I would have called you, but I was able to figure out that bug with ChatGPT."

Once the bugs stack up, they'll call you back and it will be lots of billable hours. At least, that was the case for me; only took a few weeks before the clients own inconsistent requirements bite them in the ass. Gotta have a business+tech expert to make many products. AI is neither; and many folks can't prompt for shit (and can't spec for shit; and can't test for shit).

Not to discredit anyone else's experiences, but I have one client, who admittedly has gotten pretty good at "vibe coding", and he has been tasking me with all kinds of stuff that would have probably remained just as idea.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like AI. I don't like that I have to use it sometimes, and I think we were better off without it, but so far it hasn't hurt me. It's definitely made me way less employable in the traditional sense. I feel sorry for the new grads/self taught people trying to get jobs.

That an interesting perspective, about working on a lot of your client's vibe coded fever dreams. Yeah, I'm don't envy 19 year olds looking for software work right now. God help them.

Well, I moved into a more conservative role, which I think was a good move considering the economy and the job market.

This is easily, demonstrably false. The Washington Post ran an article over 2 years ago of specific, documented instances where people lost their jobs due to ChatGPT: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki...

As per your article:

“But Mollick said it’s too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. ”

I’d like a follow up article when I’m guessing a good chunk of these writers were hired back when their managers realized ChatGPT can’t help replace real creative writing output. It can only create more dead internet spaces that don’t make money long term.

There will always be bad managers making shitty decisions and journalists and CEO's eager to confirm a narrative, AI or no-AI

Source: Building an AI production studio myself and the first thing we had to do was hire writers to drive the creative effort.

When a manager prefers AI over a proven-performing employee, I would expect a lot if times it is becuse the AI is more intelligent than the manager, not the employee.

Looking at things in the micro scale and expecting it to translate directly into a macro scale is stupidity.

Maybe you should say that directly to the grandparent comment who did that.

Sure, in total probably there will be even more and better jobs. Just like with the auto industry or the other industries that turned from producing stuff into designing stuff and telling to Chinese to produce it like this.

That's not the whole picture. There are less positions available where you tell someone else what to do and more competition for those positions.

Define “jobs.” A lot of the “jobs” created by offshoring production involved being service workers for the 25% of knowledge workers who benefit from offshoring.

AI has already replaced thousands of jobs. Plenty of stories about that appear on HN. Plenty of anecdotes from people who have lost work or clients to AI. People here have stated their intention to fire their entire workforce and replace them with AI as soon as possible. AI companies have put up billboards saying "stop hiring humans." A single Google search would disabuse you of this notion.

I don't understand being this willfully naive, especially if you support AI, because using it to replace jobs is the entire selling point. No company wants AI for any other reason, and every company wants AI.

Of course there will be. There will be instances where a company has 4 people working in a role but with AI 2 people can do the same job and they can therefore let 2 people go. (and then there will be other places where even more jobs are created because of AI).

This is just an admission you don't know where work comes from. Like you think there's a fixed size of pie of work.

If the company has a legal monopoly that prevents competition, sure. Otherwise, unless they're dumb and want to risk the other two leaving, they'll task all 4 of them to use the AI to accomplish things that were infeasible or uneconomical before, to try win market share or increase margins.

You are assuming human resources are hired based on budget only instead of need. Your assumption is: "we have 400,000$ to spend on something. Oh okay let's spend them on hiring 4 engineers at 100k each" and with AI they just happen to be as efficient as 8 engineers. Yay. They'll just do more things.

This might be the case at startups.

For mid to larger size companies very often it is though: "we have X amount of work/projects/maintenance/support to do. How many people do we need and how much do we need to budget for that? Oh we need about 4? Will 400,000$ do? Okay let's go". In this case yes. If a $200/month AI subscription can bring those 4 people down to 3 or even 2 of course the company will lay off.

How do you square your comment with the fact that companies routinely engage in mass layoffs when they are profitable already?

> How do you square your comment with the fact that companies routinely engage in mass layoffs when they are profitable already?

Not op, but…

Just because a company is profitable doesn’t mean that they make good decisions around hiring.

Art jobs got destroyed everything else AI was just a excuse

The word “literally” is doing a LOT of work here.

"Jobs going away due to AI" really tracks two different outcomes:

- The type of job is eliminated due to AI

- The amount of people doing a type of job is substantially reduced because AI increases the productivity of people in that role and companies can do the same amount of that work with less people

I think the former is extremely limited so far, but the latter is pretty substantial. I didn't downvote you, but I imagine the people that did probably did so to reject the former argument.

The most common one is simply we wanted to cut heads and used ai as an excuse. Also AI spend is probably a huge drag on a lot of companies that are getting nothing off value but burning a lot

helpdesk

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