Why hasn't AI increased unemployment?
twitter.com
twitter.com
When stakeholders cite statistics, they can always shape the modeling to fit their narrative. I'm not sure if this is a general trait of statisticians, but they tend to interpret overall indicators in ways that favor their own school or affiliation.
One possible interpretation of why the overall job market looks stable, despite AI eroding employment, is that macroeconomic forces are strong enough to keep unemployment from rising. But that interpretation might have been excluded precisely because the speaker is affiliated with Anthropic.
Predictive statistics are also subjective. Surveys can be manipulated depending on how you select the sample group. This is really a mix of hope and bias, framed as objective prediction. The public tends to think of technological change as a single 'event,' while technologists experience it gradually in real time. But the public only notices it when it suddenly appears. Nokia employees probably felt safe too, right up until Steve Jobs walked out with the iPhone.
Curious about this, I looked into the US BLS survey. I found that working just one hour counts as being employed. So I wonder if they've looked into whether quality jobs are disappearing while bad jobs are increasing.
And the real impact of AI will likely show up not as layoffs, but as a freeze on new hires. That is, existing employees, because of company-specific tacit knowledge, might be kept, but the hiring rate for new workers, especially younger ones, will drop in roles highly exposed to AI. So instead of looking at total unemployment, we should look at youth employment as a leading indicator.
Of course, this could just be the limit of my knowledge. I'm self-taught with no formal degree. I could be wrong. But honestly, it doesn't take much digging to see that what this person is saying doesn't hold up.
One of the skills I've developed most while reading HN is learning how to present statistical truths in a polished way, even when the content isn't actually true.
Until that day, we can just say what we all know: 1) AI will absolutely decimate white-collar office jobs in the future, 2) composition of the workplace will change (more women will elect not to participate), and 3) we're in a capital boom where both successful and incompetent spending on AI occurred.
I suspect the reason people are hesitant to admit the obviousness of the future reality of white collar job loss (or replacement at the very least) is ego.
And I suspect that will be the last thing to finally implode, with interesting and positive social consequences.
What? Why on earth would it specifically hit women?
The one that puts government in the place of a father?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelletravis/2026/01/29/women...
Edit:
"Based on this grid, what is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year."
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-dsa-sweet-spot-highly-educa...
Additionally, as working becomes worse and worse, anyone who has an exit path will take it. We'll see an uptick in the lumpenproletariat in the Marxist sense of the term (I'm not a Marxist, but the term is useful) as well. Straight and bisexual women have more of an ability to opt out of capitalism directly than straight and bisexual men do in broad generalities.
Additionally, a lot of the resistance to a more traditional family setup on the women's part is because it places us in a precarious situation where, if the person you depend on financially is abusive, you're screwed. If work gets to a point where most employment involves abusive conditions, it's a better deal to chain yourself to a potentially abusive husband than a potentially abusive employer. The legal system is greatly biased towards an employer and the odds of help or redress are low. If you have to pick an abusive situation, pick the one where it's concentrated in one person and you can poison him if you need out. Your husband can have a 'heart attack'. Much harder to pull that off against a megacorp.
In short: the opt out/traditional path is likely to become a better deal, and selfishness will always win.
If, as you call it, the "OP's right wing nonsense" is wrong, where are the competing statistics? Where is the competing claim?
It's very clear, whether or not people want to admit it, that a large percentage of jobs in modern society are provided for and sustained by the government or its proxies. People would not pay for these things voluntarily, and the degrees backing them are knowledge work replaceable by AI. No one needs another policy paper.
We can apply this logic liberally to much routine art or marketing production, HR, "news" (almost all of it unoriginal and syndicated), support services work, routine charting and BI functions.
Indeed, it can be applied entirely to the wide swath of "bullshit jobs" [1] in the economy. When that term originated, people laughed because everyone knew it was true. Now people are frightened because AI will always be better and cost effective at bullshit. A fitting repose.
When I say 'right wing nonsense', I mean nonsense that is right wing, not that right wing inherently = nonsense. I thought that was worth clarifying. I'm left, sort of, in the sense that I'm more left than right, but a lot of my views are so far outside the Overton Window that categorizing them in either way is a futile endeavor. (And there are many instances where I 'cross the aisle' in my opinions: guns and administrative legal theory are two.)
It isn't the statistics that people object to when you present your case: it's the framing and the ideological assumptions behind them.
In writing your post(s) as you did, you embedded the following assumptions along with your statistics:
1.) That the government is 'acting in the place of a father', indicating that there is a specific natural place for a man in the world as it relates to his spouse and children, specifically that he should wield authority and care along the line of traditional roles (versus using the phrasing 'acting in the place of a parent' or 'acting in loco parentis', which would indicate a different critique centering around the amount of external authority in people's lives without prescribing how people should live otherwise).
2.) That we should organize society around/value what people willingly pay for. I disagree. Particularly in modern America, where we've all been raised from birth to be selfish babies and assholes with no ability to look beyond three months down the road (to be generous). Half of this country would throw a tantrum if you asked them to contribute to the roads they drive on. They're definitely not going to pay for cancer research, or to create any strategic resource reserves, if it means they have $5 less now.
3.) That 'bullshit jobs' are more likely to be taken by women and that as a class they're more likely to be impacted by AI than men. I don't agree with that. I think that white collar bullshit jobs are held pretty equally by both sexes: the devastation of the IT/tech job market + all the conversation around what AI means for tech suggests that white collar men are far from immune. In my opinion, pretending that women are going to be more impacted is a cope. They're going to be equally impacted, but women have more of an exit strategy. I also think they've got better non-white collar options, honestly. Pink-collar is going to be more resistant to robotics and AI than blue-collar. I'm betting that construction labor can be automated before hair dressers, and the fastest growing job sector is healthcare services. Or consider in home childcare and jobs like elementary teachers. We'll let robots drive our trucks, but letting them take care of our 4 year olds is going to be a much bigger hurdle.
Overall, I think your case would be stronger and better received if you dropped the gendered element. Discussions happen in a particular context (the Internet's attempts at collapsing that aside), and adding the gender aspect aligns you in the audience's mind with certain positions (just as I did deliberately when I described myself as a leftist woman - I did that specifically so I could present that I agree that women are likely to exit white collar work without aligning myself with other gender positions which in turn makes it easier to discuss the idea on its own merits, or when I started this message by walking back some of my flippancy wrt your message because I appreciate that you took the time to respond and are open to a conversation and therefore am also stepping forward to try to find common ground and reciprocate that I'd like a productive conversation).
The tl;dr is it's not the statistics that are putting people off and earning you downvotes, it's the rhetoric and presentation. Knowing your audience and the context in which an argument is being made is crucial. Like... if I posted this comment in any kind of sapphic group, I'd be run out with pitchforks.
And also because the people making the arguments for why they should force people to pay for their jobs are indifferent as well. I take joy in knowing that reality is reality, men are men, women are women, and reality is objective and indifferent to subjective voting patterns.
You can simply overlay that Nate Silver chart in the other post with DSA voting and "bullshit jobs." It's the same exact people.
I would like to also point out it was the "Occupy Wall Street" left who most championed criticism of said bullshit jobs. A true irony.
You don't want a conversation at all.
Yeah, no it's not, Trump just fired anyone that said the truth. The massive amount of homes in foreclosure right now because their owners can't find jobs says a completely different story.
That said, the savvier firms are looking to eliminate the army of low-quality, and “cheaper” contractors and consultants.
The idiotic ones are doubling-down on the cheaper labor while shoring up on spending.
Here: https://xcancel.com/PeterMcCrory/status/2079979321607745905
also not to be rude to anyone who still uses it but i dont know anyone under the age of 40 that uses twitter still -- unless they do porn -- and a lot of people i know have begun to joke that it's the new facebook because it's like 99% racist old people and bots.
not saying this to be mean but more just to inform people that hey; careful about admitting you're still using it since at best you're convincing the room you're a porn addict and at worst you're an alt-right fascist.