To pretend otherwise is foolish.
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
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%.
Unless you're planning on doing away with money entirely, it's the best of all possible worlds.
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.
If you looked around on the same st louis fed site, you'll see that real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages has not gone down.
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...
This comparison makes no sense. Wages describe a flow of money. Stock prices describe a lump sum amount of money. They're not comparable.
>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!
This would basically always be the case unless you have runaway inflation. Any sort of investment is subject to compound interest. Even if labor and capital both grew at 10%, capital would outpace labor because it has compound returns. It might be tempting to add compound returns to labor as well, but that'd just be hyperinflation.
Inflation by itself cannot help raise more taxes, because the spending by gov'ts will equivalently increase due to inflation.
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.
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.
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 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.
AIs write noise, not signal.
Otherwise, they’d simply be cut at some point, not replaced.
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.
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 will get here eventually, but barely within my lifetime and only if hardware keeps advancing the way its been for decades.
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.
If we want to mitigate (and we have to), we talk about the crimes and the legal structure that enables those. If we want to mitigate further (because that is not fixable), we need to talk about greed and lust that is ingrained in us, and that is both the weakness and the cause of this absurd derailment of capitalism without democratic oversight.
A company can't have desires, but the persons, owning this company, definitely can, and have. And that is not mitigated enough in some countries where fiscal and legal regulations are, let's say, tainted by "rich people's interest".
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.
A ton of dev work is basic tasks, esp writing unit tests.
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.
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"
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".
Brace yourselves for technofeudalism...
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.
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?
please.
We will start to see entire AI driven companies. The change doesn't happen with incumbents it happens with what replaces the incumbents.
> 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!
They will learn how to get better at providing results.
Nowadays, there's confusion, however, there is room for improvements.
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.
The best thing I've seen is https://www.spellbook.legal/ but our firm is too big for them right now.
So, the AI spoke the truth and it is criticized?
The AI spoke the truth. It’s application for this purpose was meaningless and the AI even told the user that.
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.
I don't really know why they voted for him, but it wasn't for this.
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.
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!
Agreed. This is just fear-baiting.
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.
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.
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?
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?
It’s an elegant idea that is just obviously false.
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.
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'm also guessing the WEF's survey list skews heavily, if not entirely, to large, established employers.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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?
Or perhaps a boom in small businesses as AI makes it more feasible for entrepreneurs to get leaner?
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!
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?
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...
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.
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
If you think the world is just wanna be conglomerates and startups you spent too much time with silicon valley type people...
And working for even a glorified clippy would be a better experience than some we’ve all probably encountered.
They aren't going to replaced by their own, that is for sure.
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.
Should the implication of "59% of employers are holding or increasing staffing" hold true, then it's time to work another day.
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.
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.
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.
41% of middle managers will be replaced in 2030 due to AI.
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.
And if everyone is dumping employees then we'll have a recession and everyone will blame it on AI and start hiring new talent to pivot for shareholders.
From what I see so far, AI has not been able to reduce work force so far, almost always they need skilled worker’s intervention on the results genAI produced.