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Comment by Eridrus | Hacker News Reader

> In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from.

I think this is an extremely pollyannaish view of how technological revolutions have happened. In fact, it is always the exact opposite, people always fail to predict where new jobs would come from.

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I'll just speak for myself then. The "PC revolution" launched in the 80s. A primary goal of the PC (from a business perspective) was to allow individual workers to do much more by themselves, e.g. in the 60s and 70s you had legions of secretaries and assistants for basically every mid level or higher worker.

It was completely obvious in the 80s, and I say this because I lived it, that you would need tons of people building software and in tech generally as PCs and related tech killed off a slew of those admin assistant jobs.

I'm careful to not make any assumptions here - as it might very well "be different this time" - but by the same logic, you could say it's totally obvious that we will need tons of people to build and diffuse AI systems and workflows into large orgs and SMEs. I have so many friends (in traditional industries) who could easily 5x their efficiency with AI but they have no idea and they need help. I don't see this changing nearly as quickly as AI becoming more capable.

I mean, in the very short term I could buy that scenario - there are a host of "AI consultants" selling their wares.

But even then, I would only buy that for the very short term, because AI is designed to (eventually) implement that step, too. As an analogy, I always wonder who is paying for these "how to use agentic AI" courses I see pop up all the time now. Literally just ask it! I asked Claude to build a course for me to get comfortable understanding agents and harnesses and it did a fantastic job.

I think it was obvious that more programmers would be necessary, but if you look at BLS forecasts from 1985, they expected +~250k programmers/computer analysts each over 10 years, which is basically what happened. Secretarial employment was 3m at the time and predicted to stay basically flat, which is basically what happened.

Typists and data entry work cratered, but overall admin support actually went up.

There are hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and about 5 million computing professionals right now. There are 3.5m workers in admin assistant roles.

The growth in computing employment is totally overshadowed by parts of the workforce. BLS' "Management, business and finance" grouping grew by 19m since the early 80s.

Nobody knows what the equivalent to this is going to be until the economy starts reorganizing itself.

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