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Comment by sfblah | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, people who make fun of AI's ability to eliminate white-collar work are exactly the same people who are white-knuckling it, hoping they can make another $300k next year to buy that Rivian.

People who don't need a salary look at the situation more objectively and, in general, can see that a lot of white-collar work is in peril.

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I think that is tied to the general trend that people see themselves as far less replaceable than others. And I’m not sure that people who don’t need a salary are exactly objective about it - unless you mean people who live off the state or something, those are people who need their capital reserves to continue to appreciate in order to sustain their lifestyles, and are thus relying on the destruction of white collar work to justify the valuations of the technology companies which are underpinning the strength of the markets. It’s like saying in the 19th century that only the propertied classes should be allowed to make decisions about labor policy, because the laborers themselves have their judgment clouded by their position.

But I take your point, and I only brought up the o3 example to emphasize that people on both sides of the booster/doubter debate can be prisoners of the moment. There are boosters eternally convinced that the utopia (or armageddon, for the doomer-inclined) is either already here or imminent, and there are doubters eternally convinced that we have reached the peak. One of them will eventually be right, but neither has been yet. You can’t fault one of them for calling their shot if you’re not willing to see it happening on the other side.

> I think that is tied to the general trend that people see themselves as far less replaceable than others.

What if (almost) everyone is right, that their work really is more difficult to automate than others realize?

This could be the lesser minds problem. Based on it I am doubtful most knowledge workers are as immediately replaceable as everyone suspects.

The flip side of that is that at least half of all white-collar work was already useless before AI. If it hasn't already been eliminated, there's no reason to assume a-priori that AI can eliminate it.

If half of all white-collar work was useless before AI, and AI can replace those workers, then one can logically conclude that AI is useless.

Not completely. It just means you can have an AI do the useless busywork instead of a human. Something can be economically useful but still have proponents in a firm.

A lot of the "useless work" is busywork you do being a part of an executive's empire so they can claim they managed X number of people.

How can it do that?

Call your project Gas Town, write a blog about it, and investors will be swarming all over it thinking managing agents is even more impressive than managing people.

>In my experience, people who make fun of AI's ability to eliminate white-collar work are exactly the same people who are white-knuckling it, hoping they can make another $300k next year to buy that Rivian.

In my experience, people who believe that some white collar industry can easily be automated with AI usually don't work that same role or even that industry, and suffer from Dunning-Kruger bias. In my line of work, I'm desperate for Claude to actually do a better job at not producing a big mess, and it's failing terribly.

I don't work in law, but I feel like I barely need a lawyer if I can ask an LLM to interpret a contract for me. I don't work as a physician, but why can't I just cut and paste an MRI report and ask Claude what to do. I'm no plumber, but it I take a picture of some fixtures I am thinking about replacing, Claude will give me some items to add to the shopping cart from a plumbing supply store.

In all cases Claude was super confident and it wrote what felt really rational.

But in my experience it gets things right, in some amazing ways, but it gets things wrong, in shocking ways.

Everyone thinks it's someone else's job that it'll automate.

IME many of the people who truly believe it's replacing white collar workers are being replaced are invested in the stock market bubble.

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