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Comment by dalyons | Hacker News Reader

They’ll still lose their job to AI, whether they’re paying attention or not.

I don't get this take. Once a modern corporation starts making money, all the people in it diligently work to expand their influence by starting new projects and hiring as many people as possible. That seems to be human nature. Why will AI tools change that? Nobody is feeling important because they manage 50 AI agents. They feel important because they manage 50 people.

What percentage of the jobs in a modern office are truly necessary? If automation had the ability to kill jobs over the long term, we'd all have been idle since the industrial revolution. But instead we keep inventing new things that we need.

There is a possibility that the agents become better at managing the company than the people and businesses become as automated as farms did during the industrial revolution.

Yeah and you’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with the term agents.

Billions have been poured into agents and there’s no sign that they will get to a place where they on the path toward generating returns to justify more good money being invested into chasing bad.

You don't have any idea what job they have, how good they are at it, what their company does, what industry they work in, whether their income is backed by labour, knowledge work, emotional connection, government relationships, capital investments, ...

See above.

I’m assuming their job is one at least somewhat in the firing line for AI, otherwise it’s a pointless anecdote. “My friend is a plumber and doesn’t worry about AI” isn’t particularly interesting because of course.

Your point is understandable but not knowing makes it worse for purposes of discussion since we have to assume the most likely case rather than an exceptional one.

Who said AI taking your job is "the most likely" case? Even by those extreme estimates of 30% unemployment or whatever - that still leaves ~65% of jobs not lost to AI.

I was referring to the job

I am not saying you are wrong, just that your comment reads as "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you".

Haha. I meant it as more like… people who say “I don’t pay attention to politics at all it never actually affects me”. Well, that’s true until it suddenly isn’t. You might get away with sticking your head in the sand, you might not, hard to say it’s a wiser choice.

If AI actually becomes good enough to replace intelligent people. Which, outside the online world of AI hype, is not at all a commonly accepted fact.

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