41% of incendiary articles are purely written to gather clicks.
Think of the hilarity and irony of the title itself.
How could you, really, interview All of the employers Worldwide, and ask them an even relatively correct estimate of a 2030 figure, when they can't even predict what Q3 will look like accurately. "Oh but it's just trend gathering".
The World Economic Forum released its bi-annual survey on what employers worldwide expect their businesses to look like in the future and much of the attention is on generative AI. And while a majority (77%) expect to help train their existing staff to work with AI, 41% say they expect to reduce the number of staff they employ as AI automates more tasks on the job.
The survey includes 1,000 employers worldwide, which covers more than 14 million workers in 22 different industry clusters, according to the new report. One of the big problems that emerges from the survey is that employers believe many of their workers don’t have the skills needed to do their jobs as technology evolves.
While I share your skepticism about the viability or specificity of predictions, large think tanks do this sort of research all the time and provide at least some indication of where corporate weathervanes are pointing and trends in business management, be they fundamental or faddish.
This information was all laid out in the first 2 paragraphs. You could have critiqued their track record or methods rather than asserting such questions are meaningless. Why do you think it's so outlandish to survey ~1000 corporations, especially if that's your raison d'etre and you do it twice a year, every year?
41% of the business today won't exist by 2028.
You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic.
> You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic.
The average life span of a business is short. Even for S&P500 companies it's only 15 years[0], if we take in all the startup and small/individual businesses, parent's 3 year bet is aggressive, but not completely unreasonable.
I went to the referenced article about the 15 years (https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/42134/), but I'm very skeptical as to what that actually means without more info (I just read the abstract, don't have access to the full article). I'm sure a huge part of that is there is much more M&A than there was 80 years ago. I also don't even understand how the quote in the abstract can make sense, because it states "The average lifespan of a US S&P 500 company has fallen by 80% in the last 80 years", but that article was written in 2018 and the S&P 500 was only created in 1957. There were no "S&P 500 companies" 80 years ago.
I'm also guessing the WEF's survey list skews heavily, if not entirely, to large, established employers.
I think you are right about the M&A influence, just looking at one random company sitting at 434th of the S&P500, it has been around for only 16 years and the abstract mentions 5 other companies that had major influence on its trajectory.
I think this is still on point with what the parent was alluding to: if your company lives and dies by M&As, do you have a clear vision of what the future will be in even a few years ? When two company merges, one of the vision mechanically dies after all.
My impression is that bigger companies still come and go at a pace we're not used to.
It might be an extreme, but streaming services for instance are their own companies within a group, and outside of the biggest two or three ones they get merged/split way more than we'd expect.
I experienced the same in the restaurant field, where middle sized companies would get merged, become a business unit, then get spinned out again as independant entities, to get absorbed some other faceless blob. When enough money is involved these kind of operation are relatively fluid.
> You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic.
Not necessarily. When you look at the lifecycle of a company, the numbers are quite harsh[0]:
> 23.2% of private sector businesses in the U.S. fail within the first year. After five years, 48.0% have faltered. After 10 years, 65.3% of businesses have closed.
So the parent's figure is exaggerated but not by a large margin.
The year is 2029. The LinkedIn/Meta merger has resulted in a 100% rate of LLM recruiter agents and applicant agents sending emails with keywords set not to display via the “color” CSS consuming all Internet bandwidth.
The survivors envy the dead: what few resources remain are devoted to an arms race between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on building the tallest and most efficient phallus to nowhere.
The only way for anyone, wherever they were born, to be part of the rocket class is to apply for an H1B visa. The lowest rate of accepted applications is in East Palo Alto.
But a suspicious and perpetually young version of him, in the exact same office background and a weirdly off voice, regularly appears in video messages before every earnings call. He speaks of great opportunity and growth for the Meta Quest X, and assures the investors that the scant few humans remaining are perfectly targeted for the next wave of MetaM-8s to find them, corner them, then display enough ads on their chest screen until the victims give in and willingly max out their Bezos Card as each bot meticulously records their frantic taps through the checkout process.
In the distance, the next set of competing space rockets roar off into an orange sky choked with delivery drones.
I just wonder - don't these current billionaries see how their actions literally shape the world to be a worse place to live in? I believe Gates, in spite all the hate towards him, actually has this kind of conscience and good intention of wondering, "How could I actually help the world in an optimal way?" and choosing his way (saving lives through vaccines; whether these are happy lives or not it's another question).
But seeing that your businesses make the world worse and not doing anything seems completely short sighted. These folks have children, too - what kind of world they want to leave them?
Gates is one of the wealthiest and best-informed and most influential people in the whole scope of human history: if he wanted to architect a sustainable economic model for the next century he could probably do it single-handedly. He could certainly do it if he displayed his demonstrated ability to build a coalition around a purpose.
It’s borderline ridiculous that insulin could bankrupt a working family or that a retiree could be homeless or that home ownership among family-aged people could be in free fall with no bottom in sight or a thousand other things could even be possible if Bill Gates opposed them with any vigor.
But look at his actions and not his words: at every step for 50 years he has deployed ruthless, bare-knuckled brutality to centralize welfare and influence. He was so egregious that the Department of Justice took time off from chasing arms dealers, terrorist, human traffickers, and other assorted villains they go after to fuck with a domestic economic Cinderella story because it was so badly harmful to the broader welfare.
In the 90s when I started hacking seriously there was a meme before we even called it that of him in Star Trek Borg kit captioned: “Resistance is Futile”.
At what point do we take seriously the theory consistent with all the evidence?
This sentiment toward the likes of Bill Gates is the root of the problem. Someone builds a large company through massive advantage, luck, privilege, timing, and above average skill in a particular industry, and their starry-eyed wanna-bees think they can do anything, even single-handedly build a sustainable economic model for the next century. Even Bill Gates is smart enough to know that he can’t do that.
The idea that any of these tycoons want anything good for most people is the String Theory in eight compactified Calabai-Yau dimensions of politics and economics.
It’s an elegant idea that is just obviously false.
Your satire is better than mine! This is some dark shit and I’ll thank you for giving me a little humor to go with the Black Mirror screenplay happening in real time.
Not really, it's perfectly reasonable to describe a survey as they did. If I say "59% of Americans are satisfied with their commute", I wouldn't have to specify in the headline that I didn't actually ask every single American.
I'm not sure what's sillier, banking on 3rd party bullshit generators to handle work product or ignoring the likelihood that executive tier depravity extends to these kinds of depths when the prospect of cutting labor costs is presented.
You want to review the hiring slump in software development or perhaps the massive layoffs in middle management nationwide? We could also go take a look at what generative AI is doing to creatives income streams. Careful with that "we", it may not cover as much as you think. Edit: it occurred to me that I may not fully understand what your comment was meant to convey Are you saying labor is doing fine or work product created by generative AI is of acceptable quality?
Yeah. Even if generative AI assisted workers are not as productive as their managers imagine, craven managers will still cut or refuse to hire staff and tell their employees to just use more AI to get work done.
I think many of us on Hacker News underestimate the depths to which middle tier managers will go to appease higher ups.
Even in the case where AI productivity is total fiction, that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on the workload given to a single worker.
All the way back to Pharaoh in the Bible when he is quoted as saying, 'They are relaxing! Let them make bricks without straw!'
Hiring reduction doesn't require an entirely real productivity boost.
It only requires the MBA and Management Consulting led perception that hiring fewer humans is now the smart thing to do!
No you've got your head in the sand. 41% of firms having plans to reduce staff with AI as part of the reason - that figure 100% tracks for me from conversations with upper management and C-suite at client sites.
Whether they will all get around to it or not I don't know but they enthusiasm they have for it is tremendous. I have no plans to cut staff within my own company but I also see very little headcount growth as being necessary in the next few years.
The mechanisms here are simple and plausible,
1) The task now is to train people on how to use generative AI to get more done - if you think this trend doesn't exist you really do have your head in the sand, this is happening, now, today, some roles and people do better with it than others but it is happening.
2) The upcoming task will be to let go of the least efficient performers, who have not increased their productivity by incorporating generative AI into their workflow. It will work, a part of the staff will complete X% more tasks, this will translate into X% of jobs being made redundant. When this large cost cutting opportunity exists and execs are basically chomping at the bit to make it happen, it will be super hard to achieve a positive hiring climate.
Now in eras past this might have been blunted by a number of factors, but all these factors are on their last legs:
A) Quality is a real issue when you double someone's workload and tell them to get it done using GenAI. However the global economy is increasingly consolidated under large firms that possess a lot of market power - they are too big and entrenched to be unseated, so they don't really have to deliver quality, they know this, they can just be shitty monopolies, cut costs, and feast anyway because the barriers to entry for competition are too high, consumer switching costs are too high etc. Quality is just going to go down and that is just going to be the new world. Big tech understands this opportunity better than anyone else, every single one of them is a criminal enterprise, and due to weak government enforcement every single one of them is still posting amazing profits
B) Demographics are now working against us instead of for us -- turns out everyone has decided not to have kids, which means an end to population growth, consumption growth, ergo hiring growth. The nature of compounding numbers is that it's a slow burn until suddenly it isn't and if you look at a 10+ year horizon absolutely firms are thinking about this and they know there is no reversal to this trend, there is no gearing up for a future where everything suddenly doubles, long term the goal is to prepare for the shuttering of a lot of operations, adapting to markets being smaller, and this of course means managing a secular downward trend for your headcount, not upward.
It is a very precarious time we are entering, we either need to start busting trusts and making babies again, or the way of life that we knew is going to end. AI if anything is what is going to help us limp along into the twilight without a complete collapse of the value chain. Either way there is going to be a pretty limited appetite for new hiring in the foreseeable future due to a confluence of trends.
> B) Demographics are now working against us instead of for us -- turns out everyone has decided not to have kids, which means an end to population growth, consumption growth, ergo hiring growth
Even in the case of population growth things will not look better especially because we are in the middle of a tragedy of the commons, we are exhausting the resources of the planet faster than what it takes to regenerate them. What's the plan for more consumption when there's nothing to produce? or that cost so much that only a few could afford that?
Speak bro. gen ai is the wet dream of mgmt types tired of ceding control to the pesky workers, not to mention highly paid entitled devs. How dare they poke fun at us suits. Now is the time for the managers of the world to wrest control back from labor - mgmt unites in strength with robots and ai. Let’s rule
> by 2022, 62% of organization’s information and data processing and information search and transmission tasks will be performed by machines compared to 46% today. Even those work tasks that have thus far
remained overwhelmingly human—communicating and interacting (23%); coordinating, developing, managing and advising (20%); as well as reasoning and decision-making (18%)—will begin to be automated (30%, 29%, and 27% respectively).
> we estimate that by 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms.
I run an accelerator out of a huge law firm in Canada. I'm not much involved with the firm outside of using the startup lawyers to get the work done for my founders, but lunch room chatting happens. It's been interesting to hear the discussion: inbound is actually increasing due to AI, AI is both giving bad advice (or more often, good advice badly) and drafting nonsense, or missing so much case law it build weak cases etc. I don't think we will hire less, I don't think we'll downsize, I think we'll just take on work we said no to perviously because it wasn't interesting or whatever, and I think client satisfaction will increase. (also AI tools for huge firm lawyers doing big client files are comically bad, one large legacy player recently turned on the AI feature and it kept telling the lawyers to consult a lawyer)
FYI, "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes." is literally the first rule of HN in the comments guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I apologize if I misinterpreted. An AI tool built for lawyers does not need to tell a lawyer to consult a lawyer, they're lawyers, especially a tool charing $5k a month that is supposed to... replace junior... lawyer. :)
I agree. One funny thing I observed happen was it seemed maybe last year we'd slow associate hiring, but they took a pretty measured wait and see approach, and they set up an AI team to basically very quickly end to end test every tool they could. Coming out of the year two things were clear: AI was still not great for the type of work they do (it's "enterprise law", think $1k/hr lawyers), but the EAs and Paralegals etc will be able to get way more done in a day (but ChatGPT or whatever is fine for their work) and 2025 was going to be a pretty busy year. I'm starting to think the firm will only grow as a result of AI.
a year ago I thought they would all be replaced, but as I spend time with them and see their work, I realized I knew nothing about big law, half the job is therapist and talking people out of being emotional and brash before you can even get to the lawyering. Lots of tacit knowledge too, this regulator has this guy who always rejects the application if the format isn't this way, or this judge never accepts that argument, or yeah I've negotiated against him 30 times, he hates yellow so wear yellow.
The legal system is a very fundamental human thing after all.
How many other people here had some “dazzling” in-house AI tool quietly fade away because it simply wasn’t useful? Where I work the AI hype faded and executive leadership went back to the tried and true “just outsource this to overseas contractors” method of trying to reduce staffing costs.
Agreed. I finally tried Github Copilot for a bit at work. It felt like babysitting a bad developer. I have no confidence in the correctness of the code it produces, so everything requires careful review. Sometimes it spits out very broken code on non trivial tasks.
I’m still figuring out if/how it can make me more productive.
First impression is it’s more a drain on productivity than not.
I have found it does a ok job of writing simple bash utility scripts.
Stuff like "I need a bash script that saves my current git branch into a temp file, then another script to create a new git branch based off the value in the file"
I get you hate writing unit tests (we all do), but in reality it's a more technically difficult and intricate problem than writing business logic code itself. Testing is the very last place I'd trust an AI.
I would guess most people in leadership have no actual clue how they would replace the human in the seat with AI. They are riding the hype that the companies who provide the tools are putting out, but when it comes time to execute they don't have a plan. The steps between generated code to running in production is completely being ignored.
Ironically, LLM’s seem most suited towards replacing many of the functions middle managers perform. But those folks would never allow their own role to be outsourced or automated away.
That's not really the dynamic. If director A used to oversee 3 teams, and she discovers that with AI she can now oversee 6 or 9 teams just as efficiently, she's not going to avoid doing it out solidarity with manager B who's looking for space to move up the ladder.
I'd say it's even more complex. Middle-level management exists because CXOs don't want to deal with their employees but at the same time want them to under control. I don't believe CXOs can trust machines to be as efficient at controlling people as managers. And then CXOs would have to deal with these machines that control people which introduces a new class of problems.
> have no actual clue how they would replace the human in the seat with AI
That's not how it works. It's not "your job is done by an AI now", it's "you have an AI to help with these specific tasks, so the team is now half the size and you each get twice as much work".
Nominal wages are basically never lowered, but real wages can be easily lowered by giving out annual raises that are below inflation. Since 2020 the CPI is up more than 18%. [1] So if you're not earning more than 18% than you were then, you're receiving a lower real wage.
This is one of the many reasons inflation is such a horrible system. It makes it really easy to invisibly abuse labor. People are trained not to spit on "gifts", but if you received a 2% raise each of the past 4 years, your real wages would now be down by nearly 10%.
>but real wages can be easily lowered by giving out annual raises that are below inflation. Since 2020 the CPI is up more than 18%. [1] So if you're not earning more than 18% than you were then, you're receiving a lower real wage.
If you looked around on the same st louis fed site, you'll see that real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages has not gone down.
Yeah real wages are the same as they were 4 years ago. At the same time real returns from the stock market are up 10%. [1] And this isn't an isolated event. Since 1979 (not cherrypicking, that's the first date of the FRED table you linked) real wages are up 10%, and real returns from the stock market are up 3200%.
There's something just not quite right about these things. Imagine telling somebody in 1979 that, with the current system, in 50 years they'd be earning 10% more but the stock market would be up 3200% more! Nobody would accept this (well unless they had a ton of money to dump into the markets), but with inflation and everybody thinking "wow I'm earning thousands more than last year - think of where I'll be in 20 years!", all of this is made invisible.
Inflation is a way to raise taxes without actually raising taxes. Gov't just creates more money. Gov't pays its bills, people's spending power declines, same as if they were taxed.
in order for inflation to be a tax, the tax brackets have to remain static so that your inflation wages grow without giving you any new purchasing power. Your taxes, however, gets bumped up to the new marginal rate, and thus the gov't raises more taxes silently.
Inflation by itself cannot help raise more taxes, because the spending by gov'ts will equivalently increase due to inflation.
Government spending itself drives inflation. When the government wants to raise money it sells treasuries that are largely purchased by organizations whose money was not in regular circulation. The most obvious example of this is the Federal Reserve who is (or was - they planned to reduce treasury holdings and I have not checked the latest numbers) the largest "private" holder of US treasuries.
The government then takes this money and sends it into circulation, which increases inflation leading to a reduction in spending power of people. It's the same outcome as a tax increase (government has more, people have less), without the negative PR typically associated with raising taxes, particularly this sort of tax which tends to hurt low earners the most as their discretionary income is a far smaller percent of their total income than for high earners, and they also tend to have far less invested in inflation resistant vessels.
Inflation is a tax because capital gains taxes aren't inflation adjusted. The higher inflation, the higher your nominal capital gains are, and you get taxed on nominal gains, not real gains.
That is a reason inflation sucks, but there are many reasons for why alternatives suck even more. Deflation strangles the economy, while basing your monetary supply off the amount of metal you dig out of the ground results in a tag-team of uncontrollable deflation and inflation taking turns.
Unless you're planning on doing away with money entirely, it's the best of all possible worlds.
The American economy was more stable and grew at a higher rate in the 100 years before persistent inflation policies were adopted than in the 100 years after.
It hasn't been 100 years since it left the gold standard, and in the hundred years prior, the country was industrializing and electrifying and experiencing exponential population growth, and picking all the other low-hanging fruit of easy economic gains.
But yes, if we focus on a single cherry-picked difference between two dramatically different time periods, we can spin any spherical-cow narrative we want.
Just have to read some history. A great example is the Gilded Age and what followed after the peak.
Why didn't the grand masters like Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan control where the story went? How did the system prop up an Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair or Teddy Roosevelt? Similarly when interesting characters like that don't emerge eg China or Russia the story goes in very different directions for the people who run Companies. Companies and what they are upto can look very mesmerizing but they really aren't. The British East India Company had more resources and land than the British Govt yet where are they today?
Firms (or any large grouping) and what ever they believe, are a part of much larger systems. They are not The System but part of the Ecosystem.
People inside and outside the firm forget that all the time. History is full of examples of what happens after that. Another great example is why did Central Banks emerge all around the world? What do you think was happening before when the power to issue Currency was in the hands of individual Banks or Kings?
If AI does replace jobs massively we will get UBI type systems just like we got Central Banks whose goal is Ecosystem Stability.
> If AI does replace jobs massively we will get UBI type systems
wishful thinking. A more viable and realistic alternative is to let those who are useless post-ai to die.
UBI only works if the production of resources is "free", and i do not foresee such a future until the entire globe is united under one gov't, and we become a type I civilization capable of harvesting all energy on the planet.
I don't think that's an accurate framing. Businesses and employees are inherently in a relationship where they want pay to go in different directions, because they don't have the same shared interest. Exploitative labor practices are real, but it's not reasonable to argue that all lowering of labor costs is unfair, any more than it would be reasonable to argue that any employee getting his salary increased is unfair.
At this point in time in most US employment sectors, I believe employers have the upper hand over employees and are squeezing them. Under a different set of laws and courts, the balance could shift the other way. But we have seen a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy and from the young to the old over the last 40 years and the labor market in part reflects the inequality that wealth transfer creatwd.
And the US just voted back in the political party whose goals include increasing inequality, helping employers keep the upper hand, squeezing workers, and accelerating that transfer from the poor to the wealthy. It’s going to get much worse before it even has a chance to get better.
Companies will pay as much as the market requires them to, and they will even illegally collude to manipulate that market (eg Steve Jobs) and strive to atomize workers against coordinating for better pay and conditions (while themselves coordinating via C-level social groups, investors and wage & benefits consultancies for market research data and guidance)
As a small business (5 person) owner AI increased our productivity and our margin so I look forward to hiring more people. There is something strange with big companies only looking to reduce staff, are we unofficially in a recession?
Without looking at the actual report, it is a pretty meaningless statistic. Maybe it's more significant by job category, but if hiring can either go up or down, and you say about half think it's going down, you haven't suggested a non-trivial conclusion.
I've had "AI" regurgitate reddit and 4chan threads verbatim to me. What happens when this mine of free data runs out? (Basically it already has, in no small part due to the effects of "AI" itself.) Will we need to actually pay creators for content? Seems economically unfeasible, the cost of content creator + AI is more than just hiring the content creator directly.
The more compute you have to train your models the better the models become.
I've been working on a family of (new) deep learning models which outperform everything else that's been published, at between x1e3 to 1e9 the compute on the same data. If I had the GPT4 training cluster I'd be able to run it on cifar10 without having to make sacrifices, yes 32x32 color images solved with a trillion parameters.
Also no one knows what the main events/news drivers will be in 5 years: climate, water, energy, war, peace? AI and economics, employment are way too little of concern at this point.
Everyone in the world knows that with current AI, you need probably a quarter of content writers to deliver the same output.
To pretend that there is a possibility that there would be no effects on hiring is foolish. Not saying it would increase unemployment, just shift the work.
AI is death for people whose primary skillset was being proficient in modern western hemisphere English grammar, because now you can input a few messy sentences and have it output grammatically perfect, if not stylistically perfect, English.
It’s irrelevant whether they were writing filler or not, they had jobs, and someone was paying them, which means their produce had some value, both to the publisher and the consumer.
Otherwise, they’d simply be cut at some point, not replaced.
By this reasoning mob enforcers produce value to the society too. They have jobs, get paid and so on. So no, it's not true. Just because someone was paid it does not mean they produced some value.
The filler might have been a way to trick consumers into paying attention to ads. This is valuable for the company with the ad, but not the consumer.
They also predicted that the personal computer on everyone's desk, and every major software category, etc. would reduce employment. It just made more work
Those employers are going to have to find solutions for keeping themselves around. There’s always a tipping point where enough population is unemployed/impoverished that society starts to collapse. Of enough people are unemployed, who is going to buy all the stuff? Who is going to pay the taxes? Who is going to make sure the employed people can ensure their own safety?
CEOs won’t be the only people who would need bodyguards. All you have to do to understand what happens in these situations is to look at failed states across the world.
No it's not enough. It doesn't mean anything. A company cannot have an over abundance of desire for profit. A person cannot have an over abundance of desire for profit. They CAN commit crimes, and make morally reprehensible decisions. Talk about those.
The WEF is essentially the world chamber of commerce. This type of messaging is trying to convince the public that AI is inevitable and there’s nothing that can be done; The underlying message is the public should accept that they are useless for the most part and that being laid off so that existing companies can maximize their profits at the expense of the citizens is a logical conclusion. Similar to the widely held belief that manufacturing of goods in the cheapest place and sending them back to your home country is a good thing, even though it hollows out the middle class, creating poverty and misery for the citizens. Just look around in the US (and other countries) at how the average person lives, or the vast quantities of homeless people wandering around with little purpose.
The idea of UBI is another one of these operations. The idea is to keep the public Placid long enough till it’s too late. Most of the people reading this forum understand this even if you don’t publicly state it. People think, “it’ll be OK. I don’t need to have a job. The oligarchy will surely take care of the masses and provide us with enough to live a respectable life.“
Essentially we’re all frogs in a pot if we fall for this.
There is no group of people more fitting to be replaced by machines. Unfortunately, they have the means to ensure that they will be the last to be replaced.
I disagree. In fact they’ll be the FIRST to be replaced, as that is the richest target for replacement. Think about it. You wouldn’t build a robot (R+D costs) to do the job of someone cheap unless you can build many many robots and amortize the cost over millions.
Soldiers for instance are EXTREMELY expensive; so in modern theaters they’re being replaced with drones and missiles.
And executives are being replaced with automation in that there are less and less of them and the ones that remain have much higher leverage.
Executives are paid handsomely because of the value they bring to the company. Part of an executive's job is to meet with executives of other companies and make deals with executives of other companies. Those deals work, but they require the human element. Executives don't do their jet set lifestyle just for fun, they do it because human connection creates the best deals.
There is humans all around executives, they are in meetings with humans all the time, both inside and outside of the company. They even have humans to interact with computers for them because they are so busy interacting with other humans.
How many “executives” does meta need vs trad media companies in the 1900s - 2010. Those companies and by extension the execs that ran them have been entirely replaced by automation and AI. That’s just one example. I could name dozens of industries affected in this way. If you want to make a lot of money, look for something that’s really hard that only an “executive” does. Here’s another one: allocating capital. Investing is now increasingly run by ETFs and automated managers, not the corporate raiders of the 80s and 90s. Those people still may have monetary wealth, but not the means of production.
I think some jobs will definitely disappear / change due to LLMs. It's already happening, I can tell how I personally effectively elimitated 1-2 jobs around me in 2024 thanks to my $10/mo ChatGPT subscription.
I work at a large non-tech company. We have a lot of "Strategy people" and "Strategy teams". What these teams actually do is: create and submit to each other internal plans/KPIs/OKRs, quarterly updates, budgets, and so on. Strategy people are all ex-consultants (many are ex-McKinsey), they have have little domain knowledge.
Before ChatGPT, the way it would go is that they'd ask me something like, what is our annual plan for "AI", what is my quarterly update on "Data Platforms", etc. I'd give them some raw input, sometimes I have to do extra work to make it presentable, sometimes they do most of it. The final product is almost always some sort of PPT. Effectively there's 3 phases:
1. I write actual raw (semi-technical) content: usually about 5-10, maximum a page worth of condensed bullet points. I can do this very quickly, in 10-20-30 minutes, since I just have to throw down what I'm doing all day anyway (well, the teams I manage).
2. Convert those raw points into some sort of narrative (if it's a plan), or summary (if it's an update). What part is relevant for a non-technical exec? What part makes the org look good? etc.
3. Convert the narrative to a PTT.
Before ChatGPT, I would do 1 and some of 2, and the strategy people would do most of 2 and 3. After ChatGPT, I do 1, I use ChatGPT to do 2 (takes 20-60 minutes), and strategy people now only do 3. This means that in our org, ChatGPT has taken out about 1-2 jobs out of the strategy team (headcount was closed).
Once AI is good enough to make the PPTs (upload 2-3 older PPTs to pick up the template and style, plus upload the current narrative, to build new PPT), I will be able to make the whole deck in 1-2 hours, without any strategy people. (Not that I want this, because then I'd be on the hook for the whole process, emailing, etc.) Note that since this is a recurring internal exercise, actual quality doesn't have to be super high.
Perhaps once we reach this level of automation people will notice that the whole exercise is inefficient and look for better ways to manage the company.
I wonder what David Graeber would have made of this. Would he have said that the staff to be reduced were doing "bullshit jobs" anyway? Or is there even a significant overlap between the reduced staff and the bullshit jobs?
There will be more companies to absorb the labor force changes, think small boutique-size (read: nimbler too) companies; the greater number of companies will create further competition in the market and further raise standard-of-living for all besides initially raising standard-of-living due to making at least non-blue collar work easier due to AI.
I personally have been using LLMs as coding aids for 1-2 years for my personal fun/toy projects (at work I'm a pure manager these days), and there's just no question that they make me way more effective at churning out higher quality code [than I could write on my own, without the LLM]. I don't have a scientific figure, but I feel I'm getting at least a 2-3x productivity boost, and if I were to invest more time into injecting LLMs into more workflows it would be even more.
If I were to boostrap my own startup today, I feel I'd definitely need to hire less juniors to churn out code, instead I'd invest my own time to leverage LLMs increase my own efficiency to be more productive.
My hope is 2030 sees more organizations that are each smaller. It implies more services provided by the economy thanks to greater specialization. For example today, SaaS tools exist for so many things you’d have had to hire for in the past. Thanks to SaaS you can get started really easily - take payments, get a storefront, send email newsletters..
If the trend of increasing specialization crosses over and starts to include services that require intelligence, it will be a net good on a scale we can’t imagine.
The megaliths of today also have more market power than optimal, hence so much anti-consumer shenanigans.
> For example today, SaaS tools exist for so many things you’d have had to hire for in the past. Thanks to SaaS you can get started really easily - take payments, get a storefront, send email newsletters..
By definition, SaaS is something you hire a company to do - you're paying for a service
> it will be a net good on a scale we can’t imagine
Why?
> megaliths of today also have more market power than optimal, hence so much anti-consumer shenanigans
Are you suggesting that large corporations will shrink market-share because they can all increase automation? How would that work?
Perhaps you underestimate the amount of protection that this class of people provide for themselves. There’s a reason that these groups have golden parachutes and other such protection mechanisms that allow them to exist well beyond any individual contributors. Observe the number of incompetent executives and politicians at the highest level that effortlessly fail upwards.
No problem, they will all find new employment at Nvidia, or building new datacenters to house nvidia cards, or digging coal necessary to power those datacenters.
Interesting article but sounds like lobbying and fear mongering. Previously, blockchain and crypto currency would kill the banks and give control to the people again, visa/mastercard/whatever would be replaced by executives and businesses to save massive txn costs. Sadly, these articles somehow disappeared now and nearly impossible to find.
AI is a solution looking for a problem and some of the best minds had been hired to dumb-down new generation into trusting these bots, so eventually they become reliant and can’t live without AI. See TikTok/FB/Insta in context, how new generation can’t live without these.
I've been ad-homimeming anybody who is bullish on AI, easy money syndrome (VC) CEOs in usury or other traditional industries, giant software consultancies, bootcamp sellers, AI model companies and wrapper companies etc. The serious reports tend to report a handful of AI job losses.
I remember seeing an uptick in HN job posts, of which a large percentage (30%?) were AI startups. Now, will they still be there in 5 years? 10? Who can say. But technically, right now, they are jobs.
It does make sense that AI would empower smaller groups, but is important to keep in mind that these AI tools themselves like the LLM models and training, etc. will not be in the hands or created by small groups. Small groups will be beholden to these AI models and the subscription price may go up or even take the model of commercial real estate where they get a percentage of the revenue that’s generated using these tools. The data used to train these models is key. We all need to be very aware of this.
Headline makes no sense because companies all want to grow. Reducing staff to do the same amount of work isn't the goal. IMO this is just clickbait and stuff to get people riled up. In reality when AI becomes that useful we'll just be outputting more, expectations will be higher, probably not being paid more for our new efficiency.
In "In Praise of Idleness", theres an interesting point made, if technology that made us more efficient actually allowed us to work less, we would be doing it already, instead were expected to be more productive with the same amount of working hours
Most companies on earth are small lifestyle businesses and don't want to infinitely grow. They will fire people if they get to make the same money and pay no salaries, instead a few bucks to Microsoft for gpt trained on people they fired.
If you think the world is just wanna be conglomerates and startups you spent too much time with silicon valley type people...
I, for one, look forward to interest rates staying stuck at zero for a long, long time should this be true should the implication of "no more jobs" be true.
Should the implication of "59% of employers are holding or increasing staffing" hold true, then it's time to work another day.
Brought this up 4 days ago as soon as Sam Altman posted his "Reflections" blog post. [0] as AI agents will be "joining the workforce" and it is linked to the WEF 2025 Agenda of the "Intelligent Age".
Now we have the WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 with employers admitting that they will accelerate the replacement of jobs even before 2030 with AI. [1]
The main takeaway is that this is inevitable, yet the massive problem is that there is no alternative for the destruction of all these jobs.
And yes, THAT is exactly what I am preparing for every year before 2030. [2] it will only accelerate faster every single year from now.
No, the main takeaway is that this might be ATTEMPTED. Success is not inevitable and to take such guarantees from those most motivated to sell AI is foolish.
This is written by the same people who claim that 80% or whatever companies will use AI by 2030 etc. I hate to break it to you folks, but this shit is entirely made up, like much of the rest of the clickbait you read online. There's a reason trust in media is at record lows and keeps sliding further.
But let's be generous and say this was not made up and it's really something WEF did a survey for. What were those ESG drones supposed to tell WEF? That they're not "progressive"? That they're going to keep their employees or (the horror!) hire more of them? That'd revoke the membership in the cool kids club right away.
Go ahead and do it. Let's see how their precious AI datacenters compete against the Molotov cocktails of the unemployed.
Unless there's a plan to prevent poverty as a result of mass unemployment, there will be another Luddite movement.
For what it's worth, the original Luddite movement was 100% right. They were slandered as being irrationally afraid of technology, when the reality is that they valued human outcomes over corporate profits, and didn't take well to being replaced by machines.
Let's just hope the next Luddite movement isn't defeated the same way the original Luddite movement was defeated (by murdering the Luddites). There's a growing attitude in America right now to rid society of exploitive ruling class elites. I foresee a "let them eat cake" moment coming soon.
No there isn’t. We just collectively elected a billionaire real estate developer from NYC to be our president. He’s friends with other members of the ownership class, and has demonstrated, before even taking office, that their elite interests are far more important than those of the average American.
I guess I can see why you’d think this because of the UHC killing, but you need to zoom out and see the big picture. We are headed full throttle towards oligarchy and plutocracy, while the masses cheer gleefully.
41% of incendiary articles are purely written to gather clicks.
Think of the hilarity and irony of the title itself.
How could you, really, interview All of the employers Worldwide, and ask them an even relatively correct estimate of a 2030 figure, when they can't even predict what Q3 will look like accurately. "Oh but it's just trend gathering".
41% of the business today won't exist by 2028.
And reduce, reduce staff by what? 2%, 10%, 50%?
This is just so silly.
The World Economic Forum released its bi-annual survey on what employers worldwide expect their businesses to look like in the future and much of the attention is on generative AI. And while a majority (77%) expect to help train their existing staff to work with AI, 41% say they expect to reduce the number of staff they employ as AI automates more tasks on the job.
The survey includes 1,000 employers worldwide, which covers more than 14 million workers in 22 different industry clusters, according to the new report. One of the big problems that emerges from the survey is that employers believe many of their workers don’t have the skills needed to do their jobs as technology evolves.
While I share your skepticism about the viability or specificity of predictions, large think tanks do this sort of research all the time and provide at least some indication of where corporate weathervanes are pointing and trends in business management, be they fundamental or faddish.
This information was all laid out in the first 2 paragraphs. You could have critiqued their track record or methods rather than asserting such questions are meaningless. Why do you think it's so outlandish to survey ~1000 corporations, especially if that's your raison d'etre and you do it twice a year, every year?
41% of the business today won't exist by 2028.
You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic.
> You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic.
The average life span of a business is short. Even for S&P500 companies it's only 15 years[0], if we take in all the startup and small/individual businesses, parent's 3 year bet is aggressive, but not completely unreasonable.
[0] https://www.ey.com/en_gl/insights/consulting/how-businesses-...
I went to the referenced article about the 15 years (https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/42134/), but I'm very skeptical as to what that actually means without more info (I just read the abstract, don't have access to the full article). I'm sure a huge part of that is there is much more M&A than there was 80 years ago. I also don't even understand how the quote in the abstract can make sense, because it states "The average lifespan of a US S&P 500 company has fallen by 80% in the last 80 years", but that article was written in 2018 and the S&P 500 was only created in 1957. There were no "S&P 500 companies" 80 years ago.
I'm also guessing the WEF's survey list skews heavily, if not entirely, to large, established employers.
I think you are right about the M&A influence, just looking at one random company sitting at 434th of the S&P500, it has been around for only 16 years and the abstract mentions 5 other companies that had major influence on its trajectory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyworks_Solutions
I think this is still on point with what the parent was alluding to: if your company lives and dies by M&As, do you have a clear vision of what the future will be in even a few years ? When two company merges, one of the vision mechanically dies after all.
Hmm I guess it's a good point that a lot of those 1000 companies are not startups and will be around in 3 years
My impression is that bigger companies still come and go at a pace we're not used to.
It might be an extreme, but streaming services for instance are their own companies within a group, and outside of the biggest two or three ones they get merged/split way more than we'd expect.
I experienced the same in the restaurant field, where middle sized companies would get merged, become a business unit, then get spinned out again as independant entities, to get absorbed some other faceless blob. When enough money is involved these kind of operation are relatively fluid.
> You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic.
Not necessarily. When you look at the lifecycle of a company, the numbers are quite harsh[0]:
> 23.2% of private sector businesses in the U.S. fail within the first year. After five years, 48.0% have faltered. After 10 years, 65.3% of businesses have closed.
So the parent's figure is exaggerated but not by a large margin.
[0] https://www.lendingtree.com/business/small/failure-rate/
> 41% of incendiary articles are purely written to gather clicks.
Agreed. This is just fear-baiting.
The year is 2029. The LinkedIn/Meta merger has resulted in a 100% rate of LLM recruiter agents and applicant agents sending emails with keywords set not to display via the “color” CSS consuming all Internet bandwidth.
The survivors envy the dead: what few resources remain are devoted to an arms race between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on building the tallest and most efficient phallus to nowhere.
The only way for anyone, wherever they were born, to be part of the rocket class is to apply for an H1B visa. The lowest rate of accepted applications is in East Palo Alto.
Surfer Zuck hasn’t been seen in decades.
> Surfer Zuck hasn’t been seen in decades.
But a suspicious and perpetually young version of him, in the exact same office background and a weirdly off voice, regularly appears in video messages before every earnings call. He speaks of great opportunity and growth for the Meta Quest X, and assures the investors that the scant few humans remaining are perfectly targeted for the next wave of MetaM-8s to find them, corner them, then display enough ads on their chest screen until the victims give in and willingly max out their Bezos Card as each bot meticulously records their frantic taps through the checkout process.
In the distance, the next set of competing space rockets roar off into an orange sky choked with delivery drones.
I just wonder - don't these current billionaries see how their actions literally shape the world to be a worse place to live in? I believe Gates, in spite all the hate towards him, actually has this kind of conscience and good intention of wondering, "How could I actually help the world in an optimal way?" and choosing his way (saving lives through vaccines; whether these are happy lives or not it's another question).
But seeing that your businesses make the world worse and not doing anything seems completely short sighted. These folks have children, too - what kind of world they want to leave them?
Gates is one of the wealthiest and best-informed and most influential people in the whole scope of human history: if he wanted to architect a sustainable economic model for the next century he could probably do it single-handedly. He could certainly do it if he displayed his demonstrated ability to build a coalition around a purpose.
It’s borderline ridiculous that insulin could bankrupt a working family or that a retiree could be homeless or that home ownership among family-aged people could be in free fall with no bottom in sight or a thousand other things could even be possible if Bill Gates opposed them with any vigor.
But look at his actions and not his words: at every step for 50 years he has deployed ruthless, bare-knuckled brutality to centralize welfare and influence. He was so egregious that the Department of Justice took time off from chasing arms dealers, terrorist, human traffickers, and other assorted villains they go after to fuck with a domestic economic Cinderella story because it was so badly harmful to the broader welfare.
In the 90s when I started hacking seriously there was a meme before we even called it that of him in Star Trek Borg kit captioned: “Resistance is Futile”.
At what point do we take seriously the theory consistent with all the evidence?
This sentiment toward the likes of Bill Gates is the root of the problem. Someone builds a large company through massive advantage, luck, privilege, timing, and above average skill in a particular industry, and their starry-eyed wanna-bees think they can do anything, even single-handedly build a sustainable economic model for the next century. Even Bill Gates is smart enough to know that he can’t do that.
The idea that any of these tycoons want anything good for most people is the String Theory in eight compactified Calabai-Yau dimensions of politics and economics.
It’s an elegant idea that is just obviously false.
Your satire is better than mine! This is some dark shit and I’ll thank you for giving me a little humor to go with the Black Mirror screenplay happening in real time.
You don't need to interview all employers. It's called sampling.
Sure, but the title of the article blatantly states otherwise in order to give grandiose impression.
Not really, it's perfectly reasonable to describe a survey as they did. If I say "59% of Americans are satisfied with their commute", I wouldn't have to specify in the headline that I didn't actually ask every single American.
I'm not sure what's sillier, banking on 3rd party bullshit generators to handle work product or ignoring the likelihood that executive tier depravity extends to these kinds of depths when the prospect of cutting labor costs is presented.
I don’t know, we manage all right with the 1st party bullshit generators.
You want to review the hiring slump in software development or perhaps the massive layoffs in middle management nationwide? We could also go take a look at what generative AI is doing to creatives income streams. Careful with that "we", it may not cover as much as you think. Edit: it occurred to me that I may not fully understand what your comment was meant to convey Are you saying labor is doing fine or work product created by generative AI is of acceptable quality?
I’m making a joke that a lot of existing work product is already bullshit that has to be generated by humans so we may as well automate that.
Makes sense. Let’s maximize the bullshit generation.
You've got me boxed in there.
Yeah. Even if generative AI assisted workers are not as productive as their managers imagine, craven managers will still cut or refuse to hire staff and tell their employees to just use more AI to get work done.
I think many of us on Hacker News underestimate the depths to which middle tier managers will go to appease higher ups.
Even in the case where AI productivity is total fiction, that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on the workload given to a single worker.
All the way back to Pharaoh in the Bible when he is quoted as saying, 'They are relaxing! Let them make bricks without straw!'
Hiring reduction doesn't require an entirely real productivity boost.
It only requires the MBA and Management Consulting led perception that hiring fewer humans is now the smart thing to do!
Totes bro.
No you've got your head in the sand. 41% of firms having plans to reduce staff with AI as part of the reason - that figure 100% tracks for me from conversations with upper management and C-suite at client sites.
Whether they will all get around to it or not I don't know but they enthusiasm they have for it is tremendous. I have no plans to cut staff within my own company but I also see very little headcount growth as being necessary in the next few years.
The mechanisms here are simple and plausible,
1) The task now is to train people on how to use generative AI to get more done - if you think this trend doesn't exist you really do have your head in the sand, this is happening, now, today, some roles and people do better with it than others but it is happening.
2) The upcoming task will be to let go of the least efficient performers, who have not increased their productivity by incorporating generative AI into their workflow. It will work, a part of the staff will complete X% more tasks, this will translate into X% of jobs being made redundant. When this large cost cutting opportunity exists and execs are basically chomping at the bit to make it happen, it will be super hard to achieve a positive hiring climate.
Now in eras past this might have been blunted by a number of factors, but all these factors are on their last legs:
A) Quality is a real issue when you double someone's workload and tell them to get it done using GenAI. However the global economy is increasingly consolidated under large firms that possess a lot of market power - they are too big and entrenched to be unseated, so they don't really have to deliver quality, they know this, they can just be shitty monopolies, cut costs, and feast anyway because the barriers to entry for competition are too high, consumer switching costs are too high etc. Quality is just going to go down and that is just going to be the new world. Big tech understands this opportunity better than anyone else, every single one of them is a criminal enterprise, and due to weak government enforcement every single one of them is still posting amazing profits
B) Demographics are now working against us instead of for us -- turns out everyone has decided not to have kids, which means an end to population growth, consumption growth, ergo hiring growth. The nature of compounding numbers is that it's a slow burn until suddenly it isn't and if you look at a 10+ year horizon absolutely firms are thinking about this and they know there is no reversal to this trend, there is no gearing up for a future where everything suddenly doubles, long term the goal is to prepare for the shuttering of a lot of operations, adapting to markets being smaller, and this of course means managing a secular downward trend for your headcount, not upward.
It is a very precarious time we are entering, we either need to start busting trusts and making babies again, or the way of life that we knew is going to end. AI if anything is what is going to help us limp along into the twilight without a complete collapse of the value chain. Either way there is going to be a pretty limited appetite for new hiring in the foreseeable future due to a confluence of trends.
> B) Demographics are now working against us instead of for us -- turns out everyone has decided not to have kids, which means an end to population growth, consumption growth, ergo hiring growth
Even in the case of population growth things will not look better especially because we are in the middle of a tragedy of the commons, we are exhausting the resources of the planet faster than what it takes to regenerate them. What's the plan for more consumption when there's nothing to produce? or that cost so much that only a few could afford that?
Speak bro. gen ai is the wet dream of mgmt types tired of ceding control to the pesky workers, not to mention highly paid entitled devs. How dare they poke fun at us suits. Now is the time for the managers of the world to wrest control back from labor - mgmt unites in strength with robots and ai. Let’s rule
[dead]
WEF 2018, https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...
> by 2022, 62% of organization’s information and data processing and information search and transmission tasks will be performed by machines compared to 46% today. Even those work tasks that have thus far remained overwhelmingly human—communicating and interacting (23%); coordinating, developing, managing and advising (20%); as well as reasoning and decision-making (18%)—will begin to be automated (30%, 29%, and 27% respectively).
WEF 2020, https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...
> we estimate that by 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms.
Asymptotic Intelligence is almost here!
I run an accelerator out of a huge law firm in Canada. I'm not much involved with the firm outside of using the startup lawyers to get the work done for my founders, but lunch room chatting happens. It's been interesting to hear the discussion: inbound is actually increasing due to AI, AI is both giving bad advice (or more often, good advice badly) and drafting nonsense, or missing so much case law it build weak cases etc. I don't think we will hire less, I don't think we'll downsize, I think we'll just take on work we said no to perviously because it wasn't interesting or whatever, and I think client satisfaction will increase. (also AI tools for huge firm lawyers doing big client files are comically bad, one large legacy player recently turned on the AI feature and it kept telling the lawyers to consult a lawyer)
> one large legacy player recently turned on the AI feature and it kept telling the lawyers to consult a lawyer
So, the AI spoke the truth and it is criticized?
FYI, "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes." is literally the first rule of HN in the comments guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Your application of this rule is misplaced. So I’ll be curious. How did you get this interpretation? It seems that your comment is the snark.
The AI spoke the truth. It’s application for this purpose was meaningless and the AI even told the user that.
I apologize if I misinterpreted. An AI tool built for lawyers does not need to tell a lawyer to consult a lawyer, they're lawyers, especially a tool charing $5k a month that is supposed to... replace junior... lawyer. :)
The tools will get better in time, with human assistance.
They will learn how to get better at providing results.
Nowadays, there's confusion, however, there is room for improvements.
I agree. One funny thing I observed happen was it seemed maybe last year we'd slow associate hiring, but they took a pretty measured wait and see approach, and they set up an AI team to basically very quickly end to end test every tool they could. Coming out of the year two things were clear: AI was still not great for the type of work they do (it's "enterprise law", think $1k/hr lawyers), but the EAs and Paralegals etc will be able to get way more done in a day (but ChatGPT or whatever is fine for their work) and 2025 was going to be a pretty busy year. I'm starting to think the firm will only grow as a result of AI.
a year ago I thought they would all be replaced, but as I spend time with them and see their work, I realized I knew nothing about big law, half the job is therapist and talking people out of being emotional and brash before you can even get to the lawyering. Lots of tacit knowledge too, this regulator has this guy who always rejects the application if the format isn't this way, or this judge never accepts that argument, or yeah I've negotiated against him 30 times, he hates yellow so wear yellow.
The legal system is a very fundamental human thing after all.
"They'll just get better" is a huge non sequiter.
"we're just 10 years away from fusion bro"
Have they used GC.AI? Heard some buzz about it but kinda skeptical myself of these tools
No, but it doesn't look very good to me at all, tbh.
The best thing I've seen is https://www.spellbook.legal/ but our firm is too big for them right now.
Is that Relativity?
How many other people here had some “dazzling” in-house AI tool quietly fade away because it simply wasn’t useful? Where I work the AI hype faded and executive leadership went back to the tried and true “just outsource this to overseas contractors” method of trying to reduce staffing costs.
The company I work at went all in on ChatGPT subscriptions to help programmers. They tried to get us to use it for debugging and everything.
People went from using it nonstop to maybe using it once a week. All subscriptions were canceled and it's basically relegated to toy status now.
It's just not that good beyond basic tasks.
Agreed. I finally tried Github Copilot for a bit at work. It felt like babysitting a bad developer. I have no confidence in the correctness of the code it produces, so everything requires careful review. Sometimes it spits out very broken code on non trivial tasks.
I’m still figuring out if/how it can make me more productive. First impression is it’s more a drain on productivity than not.
I have found it does a ok job of writing simple bash utility scripts.
Stuff like "I need a bash script that saves my current git branch into a temp file, then another script to create a new git branch based off the value in the file"
>> It's just not that good beyond basic tasks.
A ton of dev work is basic tasks, esp writing unit tests.
It’s not even good at writing unit tests. It’s good at writing bad unit tests but that’s not the same thing.
Have you tried o1-pro or o1-2024-12-17?
Actually writing tests often requires more contextual knowledge than writing code itself.
I get you hate writing unit tests (we all do), but in reality it's a more technically difficult and intricate problem than writing business logic code itself. Testing is the very last place I'd trust an AI.
The hard part is knowing what to test. Once I do, AIs do a pretty good job at doing most of the typing for me.
writing useful unit tests is not basic at all. it's only basic if it's purpose is to lift the test coverage.
IME the tests these tools write are complete shit and need to be rewritten by hand.
I would guess most people in leadership have no actual clue how they would replace the human in the seat with AI. They are riding the hype that the companies who provide the tools are putting out, but when it comes time to execute they don't have a plan. The steps between generated code to running in production is completely being ignored.
Ironically, LLM’s seem most suited towards replacing many of the functions middle managers perform. But those folks would never allow their own role to be outsourced or automated away.
That's not really the dynamic. If director A used to oversee 3 teams, and she discovers that with AI she can now oversee 6 or 9 teams just as efficiently, she's not going to avoid doing it out solidarity with manager B who's looking for space to move up the ladder.
I'd say it's even more complex. Middle-level management exists because CXOs don't want to deal with their employees but at the same time want them to under control. I don't believe CXOs can trust machines to be as efficient at controlling people as managers. And then CXOs would have to deal with these machines that control people which introduces a new class of problems.
> have no actual clue how they would replace the human in the seat with AI
That's not how it works. It's not "your job is done by an AI now", it's "you have an AI to help with these specific tasks, so the team is now half the size and you each get twice as much work".
I'm hoping the work in fixing AI hype projects is just as lucrative as fixing overseas contracting projects has been.
No one in the world knows within an order of magnitude what the effects of AI will be on hiring in 2030.
To pretend otherwise is foolish.
I can guarantee that AI will be used as an excuse to lower wages.
Nominal wages are basically never lowered, but real wages can be easily lowered by giving out annual raises that are below inflation. Since 2020 the CPI is up more than 18%. [1] So if you're not earning more than 18% than you were then, you're receiving a lower real wage.
This is one of the many reasons inflation is such a horrible system. It makes it really easy to invisibly abuse labor. People are trained not to spit on "gifts", but if you received a 2% raise each of the past 4 years, your real wages would now be down by nearly 10%.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
>but real wages can be easily lowered by giving out annual raises that are below inflation. Since 2020 the CPI is up more than 18%. [1] So if you're not earning more than 18% than you were then, you're receiving a lower real wage.
If you looked around on the same st louis fed site, you'll see that real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages has not gone down.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Yeah real wages are the same as they were 4 years ago. At the same time real returns from the stock market are up 10%. [1] And this isn't an isolated event. Since 1979 (not cherrypicking, that's the first date of the FRED table you linked) real wages are up 10%, and real returns from the stock market are up 3200%.
There's something just not quite right about these things. Imagine telling somebody in 1979 that, with the current system, in 50 years they'd be earning 10% more but the stock market would be up 3200% more! Nobody would accept this (well unless they had a ton of money to dump into the markets), but with inflation and everybody thinking "wow I'm earning thousands more than last year - think of where I'll be in 20 years!", all of this is made invisible.
[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...
Inflation is a way to raise taxes without actually raising taxes. Gov't just creates more money. Gov't pays its bills, people's spending power declines, same as if they were taxed.
in order for inflation to be a tax, the tax brackets have to remain static so that your inflation wages grow without giving you any new purchasing power. Your taxes, however, gets bumped up to the new marginal rate, and thus the gov't raises more taxes silently.
Inflation by itself cannot help raise more taxes, because the spending by gov'ts will equivalently increase due to inflation.
Government spending itself drives inflation. When the government wants to raise money it sells treasuries that are largely purchased by organizations whose money was not in regular circulation. The most obvious example of this is the Federal Reserve who is (or was - they planned to reduce treasury holdings and I have not checked the latest numbers) the largest "private" holder of US treasuries.
The government then takes this money and sends it into circulation, which increases inflation leading to a reduction in spending power of people. It's the same outcome as a tax increase (government has more, people have less), without the negative PR typically associated with raising taxes, particularly this sort of tax which tends to hurt low earners the most as their discretionary income is a far smaller percent of their total income than for high earners, and they also tend to have far less invested in inflation resistant vessels.
Inflation is a tax because capital gains taxes aren't inflation adjusted. The higher inflation, the higher your nominal capital gains are, and you get taxed on nominal gains, not real gains.
That is a reason inflation sucks, but there are many reasons for why alternatives suck even more. Deflation strangles the economy, while basing your monetary supply off the amount of metal you dig out of the ground results in a tag-team of uncontrollable deflation and inflation taking turns.
Unless you're planning on doing away with money entirely, it's the best of all possible worlds.
The American economy was more stable and grew at a higher rate in the 100 years before persistent inflation policies were adopted than in the 100 years after.
It hasn't been 100 years since it left the gold standard, and in the hundred years prior, the country was industrializing and electrifying and experiencing exponential population growth, and picking all the other low-hanging fruit of easy economic gains.
But yes, if we focus on a single cherry-picked difference between two dramatically different time periods, we can spin any spherical-cow narrative we want.
I can guarantee the opposite will happen.
Just have to read some history. A great example is the Gilded Age and what followed after the peak.
Why didn't the grand masters like Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan control where the story went? How did the system prop up an Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair or Teddy Roosevelt? Similarly when interesting characters like that don't emerge eg China or Russia the story goes in very different directions for the people who run Companies. Companies and what they are upto can look very mesmerizing but they really aren't. The British East India Company had more resources and land than the British Govt yet where are they today?
Firms (or any large grouping) and what ever they believe, are a part of much larger systems. They are not The System but part of the Ecosystem.
People inside and outside the firm forget that all the time. History is full of examples of what happens after that. Another great example is why did Central Banks emerge all around the world? What do you think was happening before when the power to issue Currency was in the hands of individual Banks or Kings?
If AI does replace jobs massively we will get UBI type systems just like we got Central Banks whose goal is Ecosystem Stability.
> If AI does replace jobs massively we will get UBI type systems
wishful thinking. A more viable and realistic alternative is to let those who are useless post-ai to die.
UBI only works if the production of resources is "free", and i do not foresee such a future until the entire globe is united under one gov't, and we become a type I civilization capable of harvesting all energy on the planet.
To be fair, businesses will use any excuse they can find to lower wages.
To be unfair, you mean.
I don't think that's an accurate framing. Businesses and employees are inherently in a relationship where they want pay to go in different directions, because they don't have the same shared interest. Exploitative labor practices are real, but it's not reasonable to argue that all lowering of labor costs is unfair, any more than it would be reasonable to argue that any employee getting his salary increased is unfair.
At this point in time in most US employment sectors, I believe employers have the upper hand over employees and are squeezing them. Under a different set of laws and courts, the balance could shift the other way. But we have seen a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy and from the young to the old over the last 40 years and the labor market in part reflects the inequality that wealth transfer creatwd.
And the US just voted back in the political party whose goals include increasing inequality, helping employers keep the upper hand, squeezing workers, and accelerating that transfer from the poor to the wealthy. It’s going to get much worse before it even has a chance to get better.
I also shop around for lower prices. I think many people do, at both work and at home.
Companies will pay as much as the market requires them to, and they will even illegally collude to manipulate that market (eg Steve Jobs) and strive to atomize workers against coordinating for better pay and conditions (while themselves coordinating via C-level social groups, investors and wage & benefits consultancies for market research data and guidance)
As a small business (5 person) owner AI increased our productivity and our margin so I look forward to hiring more people. There is something strange with big companies only looking to reduce staff, are we unofficially in a recession?
Without looking at the actual report, it is a pretty meaningless statistic. Maybe it's more significant by job category, but if hiring can either go up or down, and you say about half think it's going down, you haven't suggested a non-trivial conclusion.
The more I work with Ai the more I feel like a programmer in 1950 dreaming about the www.
It will get here eventually, but barely within my lifetime and only if hardware keeps advancing the way its been for decades.
I'm not sure hardware is the bottleneck here.
I've had "AI" regurgitate reddit and 4chan threads verbatim to me. What happens when this mine of free data runs out? (Basically it already has, in no small part due to the effects of "AI" itself.) Will we need to actually pay creators for content? Seems economically unfeasible, the cost of content creator + AI is more than just hiring the content creator directly.
Hardware is very much the limit.
The more compute you have to train your models the better the models become.
I've been working on a family of (new) deep learning models which outperform everything else that's been published, at between x1e3 to 1e9 the compute on the same data. If I had the GPT4 training cluster I'd be able to run it on cifar10 without having to make sacrifices, yes 32x32 color images solved with a trillion parameters.
Also no one knows what the main events/news drivers will be in 5 years: climate, water, energy, war, peace? AI and economics, employment are way too little of concern at this point.
Everyone in the world knows that with current AI, you need probably a quarter of content writers to deliver the same output.
To pretend that there is a possibility that there would be no effects on hiring is foolish. Not saying it would increase unemployment, just shift the work.
Mostly blogspam.
AI is death for people whose primary skillset was being proficient in modern western hemisphere English grammar, because now you can input a few messy sentences and have it output grammatically perfect, if not stylistically perfect, English.
Blogspam and clickbaity content is not niche. What's your point?
Or you write four times as much content to keep up with your competitors who are doing the same.
If you could replace 3 of your 4 writers with gen AI then they weren't writing content they were writing filler.
AIs write noise, not signal.
It’s irrelevant whether they were writing filler or not, they had jobs, and someone was paying them, which means their produce had some value, both to the publisher and the consumer.
Otherwise, they’d simply be cut at some point, not replaced.
By this reasoning mob enforcers produce value to the society too. They have jobs, get paid and so on. So no, it's not true. Just because someone was paid it does not mean they produced some value.
The filler might have been a way to trick consumers into paying attention to ads. This is valuable for the company with the ad, but not the consumer.
YUP
They also predicted that the personal computer on everyone's desk, and every major software category, etc. would reduce employment. It just made more work
Those employers are going to have to find solutions for keeping themselves around. There’s always a tipping point where enough population is unemployed/impoverished that society starts to collapse. Of enough people are unemployed, who is going to buy all the stuff? Who is going to pay the taxes? Who is going to make sure the employed people can ensure their own safety?
Maybe they'll hire some people back as bodyguards for the CEO?
CEOs won’t be the only people who would need bodyguards. All you have to do to understand what happens in these situations is to look at failed states across the world.
There is literally an infinite amount of work for tech to do. I think there is a deeper issues going on.
I think it's called greed.
Greed is a lazy excuse. Why not just say badness or villiany?
That is putting intent where it is neither needed nor in capacity. Greed is enough.
No it's not enough. It doesn't mean anything. A company cannot have an over abundance of desire for profit. A person cannot have an over abundance of desire for profit. They CAN commit crimes, and make morally reprehensible decisions. Talk about those.
The WEF is essentially the world chamber of commerce. This type of messaging is trying to convince the public that AI is inevitable and there’s nothing that can be done; The underlying message is the public should accept that they are useless for the most part and that being laid off so that existing companies can maximize their profits at the expense of the citizens is a logical conclusion. Similar to the widely held belief that manufacturing of goods in the cheapest place and sending them back to your home country is a good thing, even though it hollows out the middle class, creating poverty and misery for the citizens. Just look around in the US (and other countries) at how the average person lives, or the vast quantities of homeless people wandering around with little purpose.
The idea of UBI is another one of these operations. The idea is to keep the public Placid long enough till it’s too late. Most of the people reading this forum understand this even if you don’t publicly state it. People think, “it’ll be OK. I don’t need to have a job. The oligarchy will surely take care of the masses and provide us with enough to live a respectable life.“
Essentially we’re all frogs in a pot if we fall for this.
Wouldn’t mind seeing 41% of executives unemployed…
Imo the best case scenario for AI is that it allows almost anyone to become an executive. AKA a small business boom.
There is no group of people more fitting to be replaced by machines. Unfortunately, they have the means to ensure that they will be the last to be replaced.
Brace yourselves for technofeudalism...
I disagree. In fact they’ll be the FIRST to be replaced, as that is the richest target for replacement. Think about it. You wouldn’t build a robot (R+D costs) to do the job of someone cheap unless you can build many many robots and amortize the cost over millions.
Soldiers for instance are EXTREMELY expensive; so in modern theaters they’re being replaced with drones and missiles.
And executives are being replaced with automation in that there are less and less of them and the ones that remain have much higher leverage.
The managerial class has class consciousness, the working class doesn't. That's why they will be safe, they will all protect each other.
Executives are paid handsomely because of the value they bring to the company. Part of an executive's job is to meet with executives of other companies and make deals with executives of other companies. Those deals work, but they require the human element. Executives don't do their jet set lifestyle just for fun, they do it because human connection creates the best deals.
There is humans all around executives, they are in meetings with humans all the time, both inside and outside of the company. They even have humans to interact with computers for them because they are so busy interacting with other humans.
Where do you see executives being replaced?
How many “executives” does meta need vs trad media companies in the 1900s - 2010. Those companies and by extension the execs that ran them have been entirely replaced by automation and AI. That’s just one example. I could name dozens of industries affected in this way. If you want to make a lot of money, look for something that’s really hard that only an “executive” does. Here’s another one: allocating capital. Investing is now increasingly run by ETFs and automated managers, not the corporate raiders of the 80s and 90s. Those people still may have monetary wealth, but not the means of production.
> they do it because human connection creates the best deals.
please.
We will start to see entire AI driven companies. The change doesn't happen with incumbents it happens with what replaces the incumbents.
I think some jobs will definitely disappear / change due to LLMs. It's already happening, I can tell how I personally effectively elimitated 1-2 jobs around me in 2024 thanks to my $10/mo ChatGPT subscription.
I work at a large non-tech company. We have a lot of "Strategy people" and "Strategy teams". What these teams actually do is: create and submit to each other internal plans/KPIs/OKRs, quarterly updates, budgets, and so on. Strategy people are all ex-consultants (many are ex-McKinsey), they have have little domain knowledge.
Before ChatGPT, the way it would go is that they'd ask me something like, what is our annual plan for "AI", what is my quarterly update on "Data Platforms", etc. I'd give them some raw input, sometimes I have to do extra work to make it presentable, sometimes they do most of it. The final product is almost always some sort of PPT. Effectively there's 3 phases:
1. I write actual raw (semi-technical) content: usually about 5-10, maximum a page worth of condensed bullet points. I can do this very quickly, in 10-20-30 minutes, since I just have to throw down what I'm doing all day anyway (well, the teams I manage).
2. Convert those raw points into some sort of narrative (if it's a plan), or summary (if it's an update). What part is relevant for a non-technical exec? What part makes the org look good? etc.
3. Convert the narrative to a PTT.
Before ChatGPT, I would do 1 and some of 2, and the strategy people would do most of 2 and 3. After ChatGPT, I do 1, I use ChatGPT to do 2 (takes 20-60 minutes), and strategy people now only do 3. This means that in our org, ChatGPT has taken out about 1-2 jobs out of the strategy team (headcount was closed).
Once AI is good enough to make the PPTs (upload 2-3 older PPTs to pick up the template and style, plus upload the current narrative, to build new PPT), I will be able to make the whole deck in 1-2 hours, without any strategy people. (Not that I want this, because then I'd be on the hook for the whole process, emailing, etc.) Note that since this is a recurring internal exercise, actual quality doesn't have to be super high.
Perhaps once we reach this level of automation people will notice that the whole exercise is inefficient and look for better ways to manage the company.
Original source The Future of Jobs Report 2025 (2 points, no comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42637456
I wonder what David Graeber would have made of this. Would he have said that the staff to be reduced were doing "bullshit jobs" anyway? Or is there even a significant overlap between the reduced staff and the bullshit jobs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
There will be more companies to absorb the labor force changes, think small boutique-size (read: nimbler too) companies; the greater number of companies will create further competition in the market and further raise standard-of-living for all besides initially raising standard-of-living due to making at least non-blue collar work easier due to AI.
I personally have been using LLMs as coding aids for 1-2 years for my personal fun/toy projects (at work I'm a pure manager these days), and there's just no question that they make me way more effective at churning out higher quality code [than I could write on my own, without the LLM]. I don't have a scientific figure, but I feel I'm getting at least a 2-3x productivity boost, and if I were to invest more time into injecting LLMs into more workflows it would be even more.
If I were to boostrap my own startup today, I feel I'd definitely need to hire less juniors to churn out code, instead I'd invest my own time to leverage LLMs increase my own efficiency to be more productive.
Sounds great!
My hope is 2030 sees more organizations that are each smaller. It implies more services provided by the economy thanks to greater specialization. For example today, SaaS tools exist for so many things you’d have had to hire for in the past. Thanks to SaaS you can get started really easily - take payments, get a storefront, send email newsletters..
If the trend of increasing specialization crosses over and starts to include services that require intelligence, it will be a net good on a scale we can’t imagine.
The megaliths of today also have more market power than optimal, hence so much anti-consumer shenanigans.
Bring on the layoffs!
> For example today, SaaS tools exist for so many things you’d have had to hire for in the past. Thanks to SaaS you can get started really easily - take payments, get a storefront, send email newsletters..
By definition, SaaS is something you hire a company to do - you're paying for a service
> it will be a net good on a scale we can’t imagine Why?
> megaliths of today also have more market power than optimal, hence so much anti-consumer shenanigans
Are you suggesting that large corporations will shrink market-share because they can all increase automation? How would that work?
C-suite is a pretty huge salary expense. Seems like prime target for AI replacement.
And working for even a glorified clippy would be a better experience than some we’ve all probably encountered.
C-suite and middle management are at a much larger risk of replacement than ICs.
Perhaps you underestimate the amount of protection that this class of people provide for themselves. There’s a reason that these groups have golden parachutes and other such protection mechanisms that allow them to exist well beyond any individual contributors. Observe the number of incompetent executives and politicians at the highest level that effortlessly fail upwards.
41% of employers won't be here by 2030 due to AI.
41% of middle managers will be replaced in 2030 due to AI.
No problem, they will all find new employment at Nvidia, or building new datacenters to house nvidia cards, or digging coal necessary to power those datacenters.
Do we have any similar articles from the late 90s?
Interesting article but sounds like lobbying and fear mongering. Previously, blockchain and crypto currency would kill the banks and give control to the people again, visa/mastercard/whatever would be replaced by executives and businesses to save massive txn costs. Sadly, these articles somehow disappeared now and nearly impossible to find.
AI is a solution looking for a problem and some of the best minds had been hired to dumb-down new generation into trusting these bots, so eventually they become reliant and can’t live without AI. See TikTok/FB/Insta in context, how new generation can’t live without these.
Why shouldn’t we replace managers and executives with AI, and let the rest of us actually get some work done?
I've been ad-homimeming anybody who is bullish on AI, easy money syndrome (VC) CEOs in usury or other traditional industries, giant software consultancies, bootcamp sellers, AI model companies and wrapper companies etc. The serious reports tend to report a handful of AI job losses.
Are there any examples of new jobs that are being created because of AI?
Or perhaps a boom in small businesses as AI makes it more feasible for entrepreneurs to get leaner?
I have seen jobs for AI Engineering Managers, the description is a bit vague but its mostly use AI to deliver faster.
I remember seeing an uptick in HN job posts, of which a large percentage (30%?) were AI startups. Now, will they still be there in 5 years? 10? Who can say. But technically, right now, they are jobs.
theres going to be a lot more of small business stealing big business cookies than people are currently thinking
It does make sense that AI would empower smaller groups, but is important to keep in mind that these AI tools themselves like the LLM models and training, etc. will not be in the hands or created by small groups. Small groups will be beholden to these AI models and the subscription price may go up or even take the model of commercial real estate where they get a percentage of the revenue that’s generated using these tools. The data used to train these models is key. We all need to be very aware of this.
Headline makes no sense because companies all want to grow. Reducing staff to do the same amount of work isn't the goal. IMO this is just clickbait and stuff to get people riled up. In reality when AI becomes that useful we'll just be outputting more, expectations will be higher, probably not being paid more for our new efficiency.
In "In Praise of Idleness", theres an interesting point made, if technology that made us more efficient actually allowed us to work less, we would be doing it already, instead were expected to be more productive with the same amount of working hours
Most companies on earth are small lifestyle businesses and don't want to infinitely grow. They will fire people if they get to make the same money and pay no salaries, instead a few bucks to Microsoft for gpt trained on people they fired.
If you think the world is just wanna be conglomerates and startups you spent too much time with silicon valley type people...
I, for one, look forward to interest rates staying stuck at zero for a long, long time should this be true should the implication of "no more jobs" be true.
Should the implication of "59% of employers are holding or increasing staffing" hold true, then it's time to work another day.
By 2030? They'll be out of business by 2028 if they aren't mostly AI.
This report from WEF is anything but surprising.
Brought this up 4 days ago as soon as Sam Altman posted his "Reflections" blog post. [0] as AI agents will be "joining the workforce" and it is linked to the WEF 2025 Agenda of the "Intelligent Age".
Now we have the WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 with employers admitting that they will accelerate the replacement of jobs even before 2030 with AI. [1]
The main takeaway is that this is inevitable, yet the massive problem is that there is no alternative for the destruction of all these jobs.
And yes, THAT is exactly what I am preparing for every year before 2030. [2] it will only accelerate faster every single year from now.
5 years is not a long time.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606771
[1] https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42563239
> The main takeaway is that this is inevitable
No, the main takeaway is that this might be ATTEMPTED. Success is not inevitable and to take such guarantees from those most motivated to sell AI is foolish.
This is written by the same people who claim that 80% or whatever companies will use AI by 2030 etc. I hate to break it to you folks, but this shit is entirely made up, like much of the rest of the clickbait you read online. There's a reason trust in media is at record lows and keeps sliding further.
But let's be generous and say this was not made up and it's really something WEF did a survey for. What were those ESG drones supposed to tell WEF? That they're not "progressive"? That they're going to keep their employees or (the horror!) hire more of them? That'd revoke the membership in the cool kids club right away.
Go ahead and do it. Let's see how their precious AI datacenters compete against the Molotov cocktails of the unemployed.
Unless there's a plan to prevent poverty as a result of mass unemployment, there will be another Luddite movement.
For what it's worth, the original Luddite movement was 100% right. They were slandered as being irrationally afraid of technology, when the reality is that they valued human outcomes over corporate profits, and didn't take well to being replaced by machines.
Let's just hope the next Luddite movement isn't defeated the same way the original Luddite movement was defeated (by murdering the Luddites). There's a growing attitude in America right now to rid society of exploitive ruling class elites. I foresee a "let them eat cake" moment coming soon.
> a growing attitude.. to rid society of.. elites
No there isn’t. We just collectively elected a billionaire real estate developer from NYC to be our president. He’s friends with other members of the ownership class, and has demonstrated, before even taking office, that their elite interests are far more important than those of the average American.
I guess I can see why you’d think this because of the UHC killing, but you need to zoom out and see the big picture. We are headed full throttle towards oligarchy and plutocracy, while the masses cheer gleefully.