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Also Brynjolfsson: It will likely impact entry-level jobs. There are huge implications for business and the economy, including some increases in living standards, but also, potentially, job disruption. We must act now to address this gap. We can’t just sit back and wait for the tsunami to hit us.
Also Brynjolfsson: If companies don’t hire people at the base of the pyramid, then they’re not going to have those people later when they need them. Now, AI can do a lot of those basic tasks. Some companies, such as law firms and investment banks, are not hiring as many people at the base. In the short run, I can see that logic, but, in a few years, where are they going to have the most experienced people? So they need to think harder about that.
So there's that. Basically what he's hoping is if everyone does what he recommends re: regulation and policy, then maybe the job apocalypse will become unlikely.
Imagine when jobs started adding the requirement entry level positions require ability to read? That cut out so many people when that requirement was added yet the economy survived
You used to have a career as a software engineer or devops person if you were good at debugging. Today, I challenge you to take any past production outages, toss the traces into Claude, and see if it finds the bug faster than humans can.
I think this is the way the rest of white collar labor goes.
I'd love to see one someday.
And yes, before anyone brings it up, I've read Manna and if you haven't you probably should[0] but I don't think it will be as dystopian or utopian as that. Humanoid robots would obviously replace some of the proxy need but there will still be a lot of things that only a living human can do even if it's just purely for legal and regulatory reasons.
I also think there will be a lot more roles that are purely human in nature and which will have an entirely different set of requirements but that's a different topic.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120224063109/http://marshallbr...
LLMs didn't really change anything about that but people like to give it credit for stuff.
In the long run it meant seniors commanded high salaries. It's the tragedy of the commons i guess except where the apocalypse is you need to build a free sushi restaurant and on site laundry for your spoiled developers.
The reality is, hiring severely overshot in 2021-22 with a degradation in quality. And 2-3 years of remote first showed that you can offshore with little-to-no operational impact.
Dario's messaging made sense as the underdog - which Anthropic was until a year ago. Their moat used to be FedRAMP until Emil Michael called their bluff.
What firms are going to do now is probe deeper and disinvest in crappy projects that - many that most likely generated negative returns upon closer inspection.
We've been doing this since 2022. Most layoffs overlap with Sales, Engineering, and Ops associated with cost centers.
Like, there was no reason Uber had 3 internally competing and built chat apps with dozens of engineers allocated as headcount.
> much of the cash flows are coming from investments made yonks ago
Not necessarily, but you can't train an old dog to do new tricks.
The job disruption is real and it will be an job apocalypse for plenty of people.
If a company is now paying for ai tokens and you now have 5-20% higher cost but you are relevant more efficient, you will reduce your team by 5-20%.
It is already a job apocalypse for people who learned language and no longer get a job for translating or text analysis. People who want to be an illustrator have a job apocalpyse.
And we have not even SEEN what it will look like in 4-14 years. Physical AI / Robotic is progressing like crazy too.
Do you even go out and talk to industry leaders? No you do not.
And this will continue to go on and on and on. This means that this idea of large scale AI lay offs is complete delusion.
General society: [notices this is what AI companies are explicitly trying to do.]
AI companies: don't worry about it bro, it'll all be fine -- better than fine in fact. And not just for us, promise! Actually we'll somehow create even more jobs, while still being able to massively increase productivity, even though this is contradictory and impossible. Because nothing is impossible with AI!
If the number of jobs stays constant but a lot of those jobs have been downgraded to fungible operators of AI, that's very bad.
All well and good, but the age old question. How will people get experience if entry level is AI ? But maybe for a preview look at COBOL, there is huge demand for experience people.
Is there? I actually looked into this once, and nearly all the Cobol work I saw mentioned was being outsourced to software consulting companies in India. And it didn't sound like an especially good job there, either.
If anyone is genuinely paying disgusting amounts of money for deep Cobol expertise, I'd love to see any public evidence that this is happening on any significant scale!
And maybe due to falling population by then whoever left would have something useful to do nonetheless.