Hacker News Reader

Comment by dakolli | Hacker News Reader

When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs.

LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a limited number of jobs. LLMs are not creating new jobs, they only create "AI automate {insert business process} SaaS" that are themselves heavily automated.. I suppose there are more datacenter jobs (for now), and maybe some new ML researcher positions.. but I don't really see job growth.. Are we supposed to just all go work at a datacenter or in the semiconductor industry (until they automate that too)?

View on HN

Creative destruction is a fundamental component of economic growth and has been happening since economies were part of humanity.

You are thinking too linearly. When the price of goods and services go down because the cost to produce those goods are services decreases, that means things are cheaper. Now that things are cheaper we have more money to spend on other goods or services.

Who knows what industries will be created because of this alleged release of human labor.

When the refrigerator was invented we didn’t just replace an industry of shipping ice, we created new industries that relied on refrigeration. That’s creative destruction. That’s economic growth.

This is not to mention that I find the scope and scale of AI displacement to be highly dubious and built on hype.

So why did are companies laying of 100s of thousands of people, 400k in SWE alone in 16 months during a bull market where equities and profits are at all time highs? How come the January jobs report was so terrible, January is historically the best month for jobs, its downhill from here.

Do you walk around with a blindfold on? Are you extremely privileged? Sounds like it. Tell this to the 25% of new college grads that have been unemployed for 12 months, or working as a barista with 100k in debt. Eventually they'll be knocking on your penthouse/mansion door.

People tend to vastly underestimate how much a functioning governmental model lead to the companies of 60 years ago not repeating what's happening now. And forget the blood shed to reverse the actions from the last time this tried to happen. The largest attack on US soil from the past century was from union busting attempts.

At best, some people expect all this to work out, so they sit back unaware of weight of these battles. Worst case is plain ol' ignorance of what's going on around them.

How much of the big tech layoffs were because of over-hiring and, in some orgs at least, large numbers of employees "resting and vesting"? Elon took an axe to Twitter and his chums saw that it chugged along well enough so Google, Amazon and friends did the same.

I haven't seen the same firing sprees outside of FAANG and their wannabees.

The problem with this "creative destruction" hand-wave is:

- there's no thought given to what happens in the interim. Forget the welfare of those displaced, consider what acts the desperation will lead them to.

- these replacement roles may very well never exist or will pay much, much lower than they do now.

- this disruption happens entirely in services, LLMs are not improving agricultural yield, most industries steeped in physical reality will mostly cut overhead for generating text.

- the gains from automation do not necessarily have to diffuse over us all, the capital can simply accumulate in the hands of the firms.

You cannot keep pointing to the past when you are suggesting an entirely new never before seen moment is upon us.

Automations do create jobs, but fewer jobs. Businesses wouldn’t invest so much money if they had to keep the same number of workers. Automation necessarily reduces the number of humans working in aggregate at one task.

What DOES go up with automation is demand. Fewer farmers today than 100 years ago, but significantly more mouths to feed.

What also increases is new kinds of jobs; entirely new fields. The automobile shrank the number of buggy whip makers, but taxi drivers increased. Then the internet increased Uber drivers on top of taxi drivers.

This type of automation does not create jobs, and we are seeing that in jobs numbers. You're right it does reduce the amount of labour needed, hence why we are seeing equities rise why people's wages/opportunities shrink.

Get ready for french revolution v2, but global, the ruling class only exists because the working class tolerates them. This just won't work.

Hence the need for an AI panopticon. Monitor and squish rebellions while they’re still in the planning phase.

Neither datacenters nor chip manufacturing employ a whole lot of people. But I think you're looking at it wrong. Jobs come from people with money wanting to pay for jobs. That's not going to change.

The jobs of the future may be that you're a court jester for Larry Ellison, or that you do something else that's fundamentally pointless but happens to be something that a person with money wants. Companion, entertainment, errands. Now, that may sound dystopian, but on some level, so are most white collar jobs today. Microsoft employs 200k people. How many of these are directly involved in shipping money-making products - five percent? Ten? The rest is there essentially for the self-sustaining bureaucracy itself. And there's no reason for that bureaucracy to exist except the whims of people with money and power - delegation, empire-building, pet projects, etc.

The examples you give for jobs of the future don't sound appealing or very numerous. It seems like you're saying that people will be employed as personal assistants to the uber wealthy. But there aren't a lot of uber wealthy - certainly not enough to employ large amounts of the economy.

I mean, there's always the job of building pyramids. But no, seriously, I don't think it's just about the ultra-wealthy. Basically, anyone better off than you. Which is basically what's going on today: you effectively work for your boss, they work for their boss, and their boss (possibly after some extra hops) works for the ultra-rich CEO.

Lmao, you need to go read up on the french revolution. This is the craziest comment I've read on this site in a long time.

And I know datacenters and semiconductor manufacturing don't employ a lot of people, thats my point, the advent of llms replaces more jobs than it creates.

> french revolution.

A bunch of revolutionaries who carried a campaign of murder that ultimately had little bearing on the economic standing or job prospects of French citizens?

I'm not saying that people will be content or that there will be no revolutions in the future. There might be. But most jobs are a social construct. A relatively small fraction of employed people are essential to the well-being of mankind. For every construction guy, there are office managers, assistants to the office manager, municipal form-pushers, etc. It's not that these jobs are completely pointless, but we could do without them and the damage would be probably less than the cumulative payroll.

:clown:

Disagree. The input to output ratio is ridiculous. With the latest LLMs you can input very few words to generate a lot of production usable output.

How does that create jobs? This makes no sense, also I wouldn't consider 99% of what it outputs worthy of production, it just satisfies some low standards of a certain subset of modern business.

This take is atleast 6 months old. I would say 90% of the stuff my team puts out now comes straight out of Claude and coverage, performance, latency, MTTF, velocity have never been better.

You make slop, congrats. Your father's pacemaker isn't made by Claude, the software in your phone that keeps the battery from catching on fire isn't made with Claude. Sorry the world of software isn't just http handlers.

It isn’t but 70-80% of corporate software is essentially “http handlers”. If it can replace that much of software development today, I don’t see why it can’t do highly performant stuff in the future.

> Are we supposed to just all go work at a datacenter or in the semiconductor industry (until they automate that too)?

Datacenters are very automated. They already don't require many people and they're going to be needing less and less humans in them going forward.

Semiconductor manufacturing is also very heavily automated.

Datacenters were very automated when RAM was infinite. As the world becomes compute-constrained, the economics may increase the demand for smart hands mixing-and-matching server components to turn two broken servers into one working server.

That is my point, llms replace more jobs than they theoretically create (datacenter/semiconductor manufacturing demand).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com