Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive
economist.com
economist.com
I've applied to the same FAANG opening in Sydney 3x over the last 1.5 years. It's not a real job as apparently they're not eager to fill it for years.
On the one hand there is the problem that every job posting is flooded with hundreds of bogus AI resumes which, if they are not outright fabrications, stretch the truth enough to make it hard to tell who is qualified and who is not.
Anecdotally, it seems to me like directly applying to jobs is a waste. You either have to find some way to attract recruiter outreach, or network with people who can get you a foot in the door.
And recruiters are just flat out creating fake job listings on Indeed, with no pretense, describing them as "an opportunity to register your interest in similar roles", and Indeed are allowing it.
They have pretty uniformly wanted me to demonstrate using AI but then freak out and interrogate me for every prompt and then want me to demonstrate I can do the task by hand. And that’s only after getting through the AI run filtering that gives a different score everytime your unchanged resume is run through the model.
It’s dark times for employment currently unless you’ve got a rare nepotism path.
In the civilized society, we call that "recommendation".
The reason being that if you can’t then you probably can’t tell when the AI is wrong.
My company is strictly Cybersecurity/IR though so that may vary with other specialties.
I called them schizophrenic because the companies I’ve interviewed with seem like they desperately want to be on the AI bandwagon and want you to demonstrate the ability to effectively use AI, but they don’t currently know how to evaluate that and panic and default back to their old heuristics.
It is very difficult in 45-50 minutes to complete a task when the criteria change partway through.
I think schizophrenic is a great way to describe that.
I think the world has gone too crazy to make any such claim. They could be decades away, they could be a year away.
Remember that it doesn't have to be necessarily better than a human, it just needs to make economical sense. A robot that fails 20% of the time but costs 0.10$/h to run beats a person for many tasks.
Less than a decade with 99.999% certainty.
engineering (hardware, software) and data center construction are going through a boom cycle right now and will eventually bust, and so on and so forth
This statement is untrue. The people have the judgement, the AI does the rote work. The rest is marketing fluff and/or leadership fumbles. You can't get rid of judgement (unless of course leadership is fumbling).
With more AI, you got more radiology requests, and more radiologists [1] and better health results due to more abundant measurement. There is no evidence that the same isn't happening to the rest of the professions. And to support it all, we have more infrastructure construction (datacenters).
This is the textbook basics of a growing economy with growing productivity, even though it feels paradoxical [2]
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/f2e03bd9-af67-45c4-8e1e-79978b5bc...
Why are people so stupid?
E.g. take the radiology example. In the past people would not have been sent to a radiologist due to resource constraints.
But because of AI you now more capacity - therefore there is an INCREASE in radiology requests.
And this is going to be the common theme - there are lots of things that people are doing right now has an implicit constraint. AI will unlock new capacity so we will see MORE of it -> this will actually create a bizarre scenario of a labour shortage in many respects.
I know that's not what Amodei and Altman want to hear but... ha.
THis is why people are so bad at predictions - they look at one variable move and forget the rest / many 'unknowns' they did not foresee.
"This statement is untrue. The people have the judgement, the AI does the rote work. The rest is marketing fluff and/or leadership fumbles. You can't get rid of judgement (unless of course leadership is fumbling)."
Let me refine it more... now the same lawyer/marketing/software engineer can work just approving the work of AI, reviewing it's correct so the exact same lawyer/marketing/software engineer can now perform X more times the amount of work they previously did, IF we don't triple the amount of work, then the rules of "free market" means that offer now exceeds by X the demand and you can now depress wages as much as you want because you can fire (x-1)/x of the people doing the work and the pool of people willing or needing to do that is increased.
This does not contradict at all what I stated above.
The ultimate proof of this is how much the "calculator people" now earns now that calculators were created... and for reference this old ad about the effect of calculators on the number of engineers
[0]: https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...
But again, the opposite is happening. Radiologist salaries are up 9% YoY [1]. And you can now get your radiology done more cheaply [2]. Literal win-win.
Radiologists are not human calculators, neither are lawyers, accountants or insurance adjusters. As we learned very quickly, their job is judgement and human relationships and you can't cut that out
You did correctly lay out that if you can't grow your business by increasing demand, you are shrinking. And yes shrinking leads to layoffs regardless of AI.
Very cliched now but: You are not being replaced by AI, you are being replaced by someone who's using AI, who is more productive with it. But specifically, this is true for individuals and company-wide. Less productive organizations will be pushed out if they can't lower their prices and meet the increasing demand, and the only way they do that for modern white-collar work (not rote 1950's calculator churning) is to hire more AI-ready staff.
FWIW, The IBM ad is literal marketing fluff. More engineers were employed in the immediate aftermath of the mainframe than anytime before.
EDIT: I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm trying to show you things most headline news refuses to show because it's boring and counter-narrative. Shoutout to the economist.
[1]: https://fortune.com/article/ai-godfather-radiologists-obsole...
At some point the token costs will increase so much, it will put all of these AI companies out of business.
Don't get me wrong. AI is definitely useful. The high costs are currently being subsidized by VC and other investors and unless there is a major breakthrough, it's just not going to work in the long-term.
1) "AI companies will go bust because tokens will cost too much" >> 2) "Don't let them build data centers that will sit empty" >> 3) Demand outstrips supply by a lot >> 4) Token costs too much.
This is no different from the NIMBY's that block all the housing then sit in a huff saying "see! everyone's leaving. good thing we didn't build anything!" when the rents go up.
It's how the cycle would go, and in the end the same people will complain about how AI "is only for rich people" (how high token prices will express itself in populist language)
The exact thing happened to housing.
I don't care what their dream is, I care about what's happening IRL. Please read the original article again, AI is clearly being used by workers to expand their productivity (and their earning capacity). The main thing that will screw that up is if token prices spike.
"AI is only for rich people, but this won't be due to token prices"
Statement doesn't make sense. Higher prices means unaffordability. I don't know why that would change for AI tokens. Higher token prices is what will make sure advanced models are only available to capital owners
This feels "unintuitive" only because it's not the dominant narrative, but that's not a measure of accuracy. "Everybody believe so" is not a good defense.
I truly believe the cost per token for most people will eventually go approximately to zero even in the absence of subsidy unless there is a dramatic state intervention to curtail free computing and hardware R&D and manufacturing.
Your premise of full token commoditization has a major wrinkle though. GPU-centric data centers with never allow tokens to go to zero since you have a 1.5 year technical deprecation and 5 year life on the GPUs. Maybe Cerebras or similar chip builders, after writing model weights to silicon, will improve those returns on capital and enabling the scaling you are envisioning.
From my perch, AI at the edge is severely underserved, and the GTM for the hyperscalers mostly ignore it. So if someone figures out how to scale AI at the edge (nvidia + HF perhaps) then I think your premise is on point.
People in this thread are discussing it as if it is a question of pure economics. It's not! It's a question of "how much do we think we can get away with charging"
LLMs have no lock in. Switching costs are zero. It's really not clear that instant will ever come
Its just that in a gold rush, there are few winners and many losers. There used to be hundreds of car companies in the beginning, only a dozen or so survived long term.
Most people and firms by extension don't actually A) know what people want B) re-design their operations for the technology to amplify productivity that translates into finished goods and thereby the financials and market-share.
I think that's always been an issue in tech, but it feels like AI exacerbates the issue. I see people starting companies and services where their primary domain knowledge seems to be whatever their AI tells them. It's sometimes enough to get off the ground, but I wonder how long it takes for customers/clients who actually need the domain knowledge to bail.
Everyone is obsolete. Just upload the MRI report to Claude and let it tell you what you should do.
When people talked about AI being a catastrophe to befall us, I thought people were picturing killer robots. What's happening instead is something else - the enablement of stupidity.
If you were charging $10 per month per user for your SaaS when GPT 4o was launched, you can easily charge $5 now and increase your profit.
I’m not sure why you believe things will become more expensive.
I'm not sure whether the salaries of the new jobs are on par with those of the lost jobs.
Except that is hogwash, "attributed to AI" is basically the CEO screwing up something in the business and AI-washing their mistake because it's convenient.
What about the loss of productivity of developers who are forced to entertain tons of noise about AI and take training and attend sessions which do not increase their productivity and instead takes time away from real work?
Are employers running a software shop or a church?
It is entirely irrelevant to them how useful LLM tech is. It doesn't matter that productivity is the same as it ever was just with a 10-fold increase in costs due to token-maxxing behaviour. They don't care if their software is buggier than ever, or their workers unhappier than ever, because AI promises to replace them anyways
What happened when they all pushed for metaverse things? Nothing. Shutdown quietly, move to the next big trend you’re not allowed to ignore.
That’s it. That’s the pattern. Here some companies will get a bit of value, most won’t. Though the job of software engineer has been transformed that’s the main real impact. But companies who didn’t get much value from all their AI projects will shut them down quietly, and LLMs will just became another tool in the standard company toolbox. Until a new trend comes along
I would not take extra hiring now as evidence that AI is preserving job numbers.
Not a super insightful article. The AI jobs apocalypse may or may not be real, but this article doesn’t provide any compelling evidence for its thesis.
When you say (and perhaps you might speculate across other businesses) "hiring extra people... To handle AI initiatives" does that mean you're hiring Very niche and specialized AI people to handle these initiatives? I'm curious because I have seen some versions of this sentiment on HN and it sort of feels like reading "at my company we're hiring more quantum physicists because of these initiatives".
Basically, how much of the general populace is actually going to have a shot at nabbing a slice of this meager pie?
It might be benefiting other areas, but I think as the technology improves a lot of those are going to start looking like what's happening in software development (which is arguably what the technology is best at right now).
So yeah, idk.
Many of the current DCs being built out are also being powered or tied with renewable energy projects that were funded by the IRA, as many DC builders with deep pockets do know the political dimension. If this is what keeps the CHIPS, IRA, and the IIJA alive I'm happy.
Every industry and career type goes through ebbs and flows. The 2010s was a white collar boom, and the 2020s is now a white collar bust. Meanwhile the 2010s was a skilled trades bust and the 2020s is now a skilled trades boom.
For better or worse, it looks more like that we're gonna tile the whole damn planet in data centers, at a faster and faster clip.
"The housing construction jobs are temporary, we shouldn't count them."
There will always be CapEx to spend.
Datacenter construction jobs though are very very temporary and not really the kind of thing where we can keep building for no reason and then just tear down to rebuild again.
The reason we have so many "infrastructure" bills that are basically just build more roads is that there are so many temporary road construction jobs. If they don't keep building and those workers lose their jobs it's going to be a major crisis.
They are 5-6 year long builds with full support of the unions[1], let's just put this all aside. The jobs are good. Most people citing narratives around "what's the point of doing anything if the jobs are temporary" are people who don't have those jobs.
[1]: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/building-trade-...
I'd be rich if I knew what the next big thing was but the economy has been running on the assumption that there will be a next big thing for many, many decades. Each cycle has the same rhymes of "what happens when it ends" questions but there has always something.
For AI startups there eventually may be no tomorrow
How many of these startups are profitable
Perhaps the greatest "AI"-related job losses will be failed "AI" startups
More BS "jobs" created from throwaway investment capital instead of business success
High productivity is generally good for the employee, unless you're productive enough you run out of work to do. So how much code is needed?
I mean I use it every day of course, but the velocity of work doesn’t really seem to be budging lol. And frankly a lot of time wasted on AI made gadgets, and meetings about those gadgets (look at this dashboard Claude made! etc)
The joke is at the level of developers, the constant sharpening of AI merge-requests reviewing (sometimes too much) has made the new job of AI speedriding & reviewsfighting a serious brain squeeze.
The value of conscienciousness has skyrocketed, and the value of openness is still the same as it ever was.
Stealing this, will use instead of AI slop!
I will agree that some of the savings has been eaten up elsewhere. Lots of trivial but not wrong PR comments ther lead to churn as an example.
And a breakdown of it that gives a bit of an alternate explanation of their numbers (and more closely matches what we're seeing IMO): https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap
Short version is that what you, I, and other responses to you are seeing is backed up by the numbers: AI code generation leads to significant bottlenecks, burnout, increased bugs, insane code churn (rewrites), and decreased feature deployment (presumably due to dealing with the bugs and bottlenecks). And as of when this was done, increased AI did not improve the situation, it generally made it worse.
The code churn stat is what bothers me the most: People keep portraying the whole "quickly rewrite/re-generate code with AI" thing as a feature, but looking at it over time, it actually means you lose your battle-tested code and no longer have a stable foundation to build on top of. That's where I think the major problems will show up as code needs to be maintained - and, seemingly, already has been.
True, that's the other side of it: my daily work has lost the fun reward loop and I'm being alienated from my colleagues. But I still have colleagues!
That's not going to happen.
Transparent pixels harm the environment because they use energy and don't even do anything
I'm not disagreeing that some manual work require forms of intelligence that are undervalued in our society, and don't get me started about nurses, but still: What the Jeff Bezos!
It depends on how you define “spoils.” People define it to include notional paper wealth, and I think that doesn’t reflect the actual mechanics of economic imbalance. On paper, NVIDIA’s shareholders have increased their wealth by $4.8 trillion in five years, enough to buy all the residential real estate in New York City and LA combined. But $5 trillion in notional AI wealth isn’t actually the same as owning NYC and LA. The paper wealth doesn’t affect the average person meaningfully until someone actually buys something with it.
Given that, it’s more useful to define “spoils” in terms of finite goods and services and look at spending on those goods and services. That is what directly affects the average person—it’s what makes housing or education or Disney tickets or whatever harder to access.
And on that front, the income growth of the top 10% has had a much more significant impact on the average person. The top 10% accounts for half of consumer spending today, up from 35% in the 1990s. And that spending is coming from the upper middle class, not billionaires. Bezos might be worth a million times more than the average person, but he’s not buying a million times more housing or Disney tickets or hotel rooms. Instead, the average person is competing directly with the increasingly affluent top 10% for access to those finite resources.
That is also a big part of why wealth has become so concentrated at the top. If there were ten real cloud competitors, eight GPU makers, or several serious Office competitors, those companies would have a much harder time keeping such a large share of the profit. Instead, concentrated markets create enormous profits, and concentrated ownership turns those profits into enormous fortunes.
In my opinion, that has a bigger impact on the bottom 90%, and even on the upper middle 10% you are talking about, than the direct consumption of the top 10% ever could. It would be much better to raise the purchasing power of the bottom 90% than to reduce the consumption of the top 10%.
I get that the king does multiple things per day that used to be admin ending but we shouldn’t forget his machinations that are related to the topic at hand.
The data probably isn’t 100% false but it also definitely as trustworthy as it was a year and a half ago.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/trump-fired-bls-c...
I mean no disrespect, but I have been following this story, as I am very interested in the quality of official statistics.
He did fire the BLS head, then tried to appoint a toady, but basically the big IB and investors threw a fit (along with some Senators) and it didn't happen.
So I regard most of the weirdness in these numbers since Covid as an artifact of the seasonality models breaking down, rather than some nefarious actions.
also AI boosters: "we are going to build a million robots, and the robots will build factories producing robots, there will be infinite abundance, nobody will need to work anymore"
Maybe.
> nobody will need to work anymore
If we define "nobody" as very wealthy people who partake in that abundance while everyone else ... goes away.
Okay...
This is not reassuring
Until we saturate the demand for software which may very well be infinite
The same resume, just with a few less years experience at the same place, just a few years ago got recruiter pings.
It's insane and I'm very worried about the future of our jobs. I also don't think AI is legitimately replacing people, as at work people are producing terrible slop and having my team review it. That's not less work, that's more work.
Has Idiocracy reached our industry?
Humans were simply nowhere near answering all the useful questions they had which software could answer. The problem was that software was expensive.
Now, software is cheaper and so people who couldn't afford to answer questions they've long wondered about can afford to answer them.
Temporarily. Token price will rise sharply when the bills finally come due.
That provides continuous downward pressure on token prices even if it isn’t Astra level
If the software isn't downright free – today, you can slap a $349 RTX 5060 [†] into any POS surplus computer and have an offline assistant, running Llama or Ornith, via Ollama in linux (i.e. the LLM and OS are FREE open-source software) [∑]
I have a working demo of this that has been shown/leant to several friends, and they're all surprised that it "all works so well, without being online, for only a few hundred dollars."
When I've demonstrated Mistral-small on my 5070Ti... that has been a real jaw dropper. I haven't shown anybody qwen3.8:27b, yet... but dammmmm, what a month of learning it's been.
----
A friend that was going through wifecancer confided in me that "you can ask it anything, without feeling embarassed" – and that has stuck with me (that so many smart people are afraid to ask simple questions [*], out of perceptional worries).
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[†] (8GB DDR7) brand new from Wal-Mart
[∑] My first linux/LLM machine was built with setup help from Perplexity.ai (with a dozen "assists" - I am bluecollar, non-coder). This used an obsolete i5 (and $200 used VEGA64 GPU) to create a decent Llama3.1 LLM machine (~100wpm typeback, perhaps 70 tokens/s).
[*] even to their own detriment, of shame, when simple solutions often do exist
As a programmer, but working in two non-SWE roles, I have turned job A 70% over to AI, and job B 90%.
Where systems and scaffolds can be put in place to manage various aspects of a job, would this not be considered, partially, an "AI job"?
If you work in government grants and R&D, what if agents can now triage 100-1000x the opportunity count that you could ever handle alone, and you had a pipeline system in place to manage said opportunities and relationships? And then you, as the human, become the mouthpiece and reviewer of hoards of filtered output? Is that Federal Grants & R&D position now not mostly an AI job?
I'd say a large percentage of digital-based jobs can be considered varying percentages of AI jobs.
AI is also creating a new class of white-collar jobs. Engineers build the models, data annotators label their inputs and judge their answers, “forward-deployed” engineers adapt them for customers, and newly minted “heads of AI” decide what companies should do with the technology.
I saw an article here about the job market for writers. I can't recall, but I think it was a blog post saying like "AI is bad and has annoying prose so GOOD writers will thrive". The comments rightfully pointed out that not everything requires good writing and many companies will "buy" writing for llm prices as good enough to save money.
I bring it up because that is where someone simply articulated the obvious point I hadn't really thought through: the cascade. What happens when millions of copywriters, non famous journalist, average graphic designers, etc. get laid off. Millions of people will drive the price of labor WAY down as this wage bubble wanders through industries popping every few months. If the supply if labor becomes massive, we will have this debt spiral or stagflationary labor market that causes chaos. Ultimately, capital owners accrue the most value and can buy tons of assets for cheap. Unless, it turns out a middle classes consumption is like...important for our country to function.
> On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations.
Good news that ought to be taken with a pinch of salt given how the current administration responds to unfavorable BLS data -
> On Friday, August 1, [2025] President Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer from her role as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In social media posts announcing and confirming her firing, he said that he believed the jobs report released by the agency earlier that day included numbers that were “rigged in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
https://www.epi.org/policywatch/firing-bls-commissioner-erik...
Messenger 3: My Lord, news…
King: What?
Messenger 3: Lord Wessex is dead.
King: This news is not so good.
Messenger 3: Pardon, My Lord?
King: I like it not. Bring me some other news.
Messenger 3: Pardon, My Lord?
King: I LIKE NOT THIS NEWS! BRING ME SOME OTHER NEWS!!!
Messenger 3: Yes, My Lord!
(Messenger 3 leaves; King tosses things around angrily; Messenger 4 enters — actually just Messenger 3 pretending to be a new messenger delivering new news.)
Messenger 4: My Lord, news…
King: What?
Messenger 4: Lord Wessex is not dead.
King: Ah, good news! Let there be joy and celebration; let jubilation reign!
The current head of the BLS seems well qualified. Here are some select quotes from a NYT article [1]:
“Erica Groshen, who was commissioner during the Obama administration, also praised the selection. “He’s a B.L.S.-er, he’s a data nerd,” she said.”
“The firing, and Mr. Antoni’s subsequent nomination, raised concerns that Mr. Trump would seek to interfere in the agency’s operations and perhaps try to skew its estimates to his political advantage. “
“There is no evidence that has happened so far. The agency has been run since August by William Wiatrowski, its longtime deputy commissioner, who also led the bureau on an interim basis under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Economists continue to view the numbers the agency produces as reliable.”
Can you cite any specific examples of wrongdoing? Or inaccurate numbers or figures outside of normal revisions?
When I see bad numbers from the BLS I say yes that’s probably true. When I see good numbers from the BLS I say yes that’s probably true.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/business/trump-bureau-of-...
Last month got revised to being positive, at the same time that this month was being released.
Trust me I do the same.
I haven't had a job in 4 years. Well okay I am an old piece of shit of 49 yrs old with a Stanford degree. So obsolete for this new AI world of imaginary bullshits. So I deserve it