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Comment by xlayn | Hacker News Reader

No they are not, try to change jobs and if you can't or takes a really long time you know this is some of the finest baloney. And no, it's not creating a lot of jobs, one one of the kind that will be destroyed by AI no, and that's the point... you built something that removes the pricey laywer, software developer, insurance policy writer, designer, etc... and replace it with a ONE TIME go work under the sun with no ac in the middle of nowhere as a contractor of the contractor of the contractor... So sure, I'm a dooms-scroll-lover, sure the 10000000 new part time possitions with no benefit of any kind will be the biggest work boom EVER... you will just go to compete with all the other people already doing that... and you know what happens when there is a queue of 100 to flip burgers or "highly technical non AI replaceable work like weld or electricist" right??

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"you built something that removes the pricey laywer, software developer, insurance policy writer, designer"

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...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Jevons Paradox doesn't say more radiologist will have more work and will be paid at the same price, it says that there will be more work for radiologists because now they are paid less and because of that people is able to afford more radiologists.

"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...

"radiologists because now they are paid less and because of that people is able to afford more radiologists."

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...

[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10986240/

Exactly spot on.

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.

if you're going by anecdata, myself and a few of my colleagues (senior ics) switched jobs relatively easily for a solid pay increase within the last year. definitely easier than post-covid

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

AI has completely broken interviewing as well. The asks I am getting in the few interviews I can achieve are schizophrenic.

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.

I don’t know if those companies are doing it for the right reasons but I’ve implemented a policy of showing me that you can do the job manually as well.

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.

If the interview was specifically about doing it manually that’s one thing.

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.

Oh yeah no that’s just a terrible interview process.

I think schizophrenic is a great way to describe that.

It was always better to find job via recommendations. Both for companies and candidates. Old leetcode style interviews were no better at identifying good candidates for given job.

> It’s dark times for employment currently unless you’ve got a rare nepotism path.

In the civilized society, we call that "recommendation".

And the robots are just a few years away. I thought that spatial reasoning was going to be a lot harder for AI, but Astra is showing that progress on that front is also moving very rapidly.

humanoid robots are decades away, and they are not going to be good or cheap for a long time.

> humanoid robots are decades away

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.

"humanoid" robots are as relevant to commercial robotics as AGI to LLM, that is, not at all. As long as they can move on wheels and operate 2 hands (doesn't matter how many fingers), the application is huge already.

Decades? Or less than a decade?

Less than a decade with 99.999% certainty.

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