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Comment by xiaoyu2006 | Hacker News Reader

xiaoyu2006

It's not about "this time's different" but rather "the recovery will take too long to an individual" if AI is indeed replacing humans as currently hyped by the model companies.

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This seems a bit like a corollary to "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". On the timescales that matter to an individual it won't matter if the eventual conclusion is that AI can't fully replace workers, because companies are going to do their damnedest to try.

There's no evidence that AI is replacing human jobs to any real extent. We're just seeing AI being blamed for ordinary layoffs that have more to do with broad economic instability.

Actually you can for entry level jobs. You also shouldn't just look at unemployment but underemployment.

>Overall, 42% of recent college graduates were classified as underemployed, the highest level since 2020.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unem...

Entry-level jobs are the easiest to get rid of in any layoffs. This doesn't look like anything genuinely new.

Haven't swe layoffs usually targeted more experienced devs?

Yes they have. They cost more. Why keep the senior curmudgeon employee around when the Jr who costs half as much is deemed sufficiently competent? And the Jr isn't going to quit in solidarity either, they're just happy to have not gotten cut.

Junior employees are not sufficiently competent.

Competency doesn't matter for corporations.

Competency isn't the layoff criterion, cost is

I mean you could have written this article for mechanization word for word, I think the difference is that its coming for the white collar folks this time, who also are the folks writing the think pieces and media.

You couldn't have. Mechanical machines couldn't organise themselves into human-free supply chains that are economically productive for the owners of capital. AIs could.

Any machine with an on-off switch is functionally an organized and automated work flow.

If I understand correctly youre talking about reactive adjustments, but thats not completely accurate either. There is a lot of projection that this MAY happen, but currently, the capital owner/stewards are going to constantly watch outputs and adjust to them based on the results. You're probably correct in that they will spend far less time doing so, but anyone with a vested outcome is going to have to adjust these things as the responsiblity for the outcome will always land on the owner not the machine.

I just meant that if I value, say, the security afforded by land that's been cleared of humans, and between them my owned AIs can deliver this as a 'surplus' outcome, just by processing resources available at low or no cost (sunlight, atmospheric gases, processed carcasses, etc.) then letting them run amuck is still 'economically valuable' to me, but doesn't require any human input, or a human counterparty. Very reductive example, but you can imagine a much more complex economy where a multitude of similar arrangements interact/compete to deliver outcomes of this type.

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