Hacker News Reader

Comment by saez | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s interesting that AI is in itself compressing the length of time it takes to move through its phases to reach maturity. It’s a lot faster than for example the dotcom phase. Humans don’t much like change, and fast change worries them even more. The dotcom bubble didn’t really threaten jobs in the same way that the AI shift is. It’s closer to the industrial revolution / the industrial loom where people lost their jobs in waves. It’s going to be interesting to see if we end up with another Luddite push back.

View on HN

Luddite would imply people are burning data centers down to fight back. I don't think we're quite there yet.

Sure, but sentiment is harder to compare. People can't just go burn down a data center so simply. I think if "AI" was just a machine in the field outside, people would be destroying it.

I can't wait for it personally. I'm expecting the backlash against tech to be massive and terrible. It will be well deserved

I agree partly with your comment, but I want to add this perspective:

The dot-com era treatened and killed many jobs in banking (bank tellers and such). AI is now doing the same, but now it is threatening the jobs of consultants.

This. The internet killed high-street retail.

The tech industry is just eating itself. Other fields seem nowhere near as impacted.

Artists for one are impacted by AI, teachers are impacted too combined with the whole education system and the job market is really weird in all industries not just tech because all of these factors combined with all others

One can argue that hard labour is the one which isn't impacted but even those dont pay enough to break your body completely over unless you own your business, and even then, to say that AI/Robotics companies are definitely going to or are already trying to position themselves here too.

My point is that a lot of industries feel unsafe right now because of AI, but its just that tech has the most direct impact.

I've personally used Codex to reconcile financial data, and met a guy who basically built his own AI inference engine to help him fight a custody battle for his daughter (semantic search over gigabytes of documents).

I'm not saying lawyers and accountants are going to all be out of a job (at the end of the day, they do more than just comb over documents to find the needle in the haystack), but a lot of the manual grunt work can be automated there too.

This. AI is augmenting normal work and eating engineering/security/research work alive. Eventually it will eat normal work. We'll be prompting no matter the role.

I would say there's basically zero chance lawyers go out of a job. As soon as it looks like lawyers will be replaced by AI, the people who run the government (who are lawyers!) will pass laws to make it illegal to cut the human out of the loop.

There are licensing laws already protecting the lawyers whose names appear on motions and briefs, but not much protection for the junior lawyers who will be impacted most. Big law, like the fancy consultancies, was historically built like a pyramid, with an army of 1st-3rd year associates doing due diligence and document reviews. The bottom was cut out of that in the 2000s by offshoring and automation. AI is contributing to another wave, but not dropping off a cliff.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPLEGA

This is likely to happen but would be disastrous. Our experience show that when you cannot afford a lawyer that using AI helps equal the battle field. You can self represent and use all the case history and laws that AI has searched for. We have been successful doing this in cases where we may have lost without the use of AI and gained some form of justice as a result. Even before AI became prevalent we found we got better results with researching manually than the free lawyers who did not care and seemed not to understand the law themselves. With AI the advantage is saving time. You can live your life without sending weeks working on it fully.

The only way they can make it illegal to take the human out of the loop is if they ban self representation. Otherwise people will do research with AI and just present their findings in court. But the free/cheap lawyers are actually so much worse.If laws prevent self representation we would increase the inequality even more.

Oh, 100%. To clarify, the AI inference engine that the guy uses doesn't _replace_ lawyers, it's just used to answer the lawyer's questions and check for things like sneaky changes in contracts. Still impressive, though!

Gemini helped me a lot for my tax return. It actually did a better job than Deloitte, it found several mistakes in previous returns they filled for me.

It may not be as big as tech layoffs but my wife negotiated a relocation. We used a broker and a lawyer for the first time. We did consultation with a new set of brokers and lawyers. My wife felt they were not aggressive enough. She negotiated EVERYTHING with the landlord (a very large regional landlord). She got more than what she would get and everything was in her favor.

Not only did she gain $50k more in tenant improvement/free rent/et and other freebies that the brokers/lawers she did not get, but easily saved $10k to paying these "professionals".

Your average person is never going to do this. Sure, some people can do their own plumbing but the average person will just pay to get it done.

So far the responses are more about anecdotes than general trends.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com