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Discussion (164 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/us-is-starting-to-see-...
Why is everyone and everything getting worse? A sort of "Prisoner's dilemma" I suppose: no one wants to take a stand and lose their business edge just for principles sake.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm
The article that flags AI risk still projects that the top 15 growth employment through 2033 contains software related jobs like Computer / Information Research Scientists, Data Scientists, Operations Research analysts.
Even after layoffs most of big tech could cut 50% of its workforce tomorrow and see minimal impact long term. Thats driving a lot of the present layoffs as CEOs go “oh crap we gotta look like we’re with the cool kids on this AI stuff”… and then just do a big cut and cite AI. Truth is they could have cut years ago but had no social pressure to do so.
Vision cannot be bought (thankfully).
A small team led by a real visionary can achieve much more than these bloated tech firms.
In retrospect look at the graveyard filled with projects - this is a reflection of over hiring and poor project selection.
IMO, rather than hiring more people than necessary, we should have a safety-net so that our society isn’t structured around “work or die.” I bet we’d see much lower admin costs at that point, as people aren’t incentivized to find less-essential tasks.
the group got hit the hardest is gen-z tech graduates, no fixes ahead for them,sigh
The main point is that certain types of jobs like customer service reps, secretaries and sales people are being disproportionately affected. If it was just general fears about the economy overall one would expect a more broad-based impact.
Especially when it's actually "services sales jobs a little up, manufacturing a little down"...
Neither has any free will to deviate from the script. Both are useless in any case that's not handled by the script. The silicon one has better wait times though.
If everyone's already taken on as much debt as they can, and interest rates aren't consistently marching lower for ~25 straight years, it's going to be a little harder to grow.
Doesn't make it impossible, just harder.
We're paying for growth we got 25 years ago now.
Wish we invested that money better. You can't change the past. But you can change the future.
Unless you happen to have a media empire at your disposal. Maybe then you can change the future. The problem is that those people are changing things for the worse.
Anybody reading hackernews that cares about GDP growth is profoundly misinformed.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-needed-get-ahead-145k-ha...
On its own terms, 2% isn't great. It's kind of the bare minimum. Anything less is losing ground in absolute terms, since that's the target for inflation as well.
That's also assuming the number is trustworthy. The number is a mediocre metric to start with, and I don't trust the administration to be calculating it correctly. They have shot the messenger more than once, after which the messages started to improve with no change in policy.
I would also not that China's numbers are even more opaque and less reliable.
2% is average for past decade+.
The physics of a reserve currency is that it reverts to zero through endless supply to fuel the engine to accelerate inequality at home and abroad. You see that an increasingly smaller club of people are politically opposed yet benefit by creating a narrative that takes your attention away from it.
This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.
You are describing stagflation, that is a kind of recession. Despite all the fundamentals pointing towards it for a while, the US hasn't seen a lot of inflation (at least yet), so that's not what is happening.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-...
Although the stock market isn't a reflection of the economy, the most relevant concern is the staggering 40TN+ of debt that can't ever go down as long as the dollar is the reserve currency and have no choice but to endlessly supply more dollars.
The issue with oil rising will make it completely impossible for the Federal Reserve to cut any rates and instead will either hold or raise them.
Then the stock market will have a problem; and those that have properties tied to their RSUs will start panicking.
Hardly. Those 'invented things' are invented for one purpose, to make the inventor money. That's how capitalism works.
Fun fact, let's say that tomorrow, all new credit was outlawed. And by law, all existing credit would require payments that took 3 years to pay off. In this fantasy world where we ignore mortgages, my point is that salaries would diminish.
Right now, the cost of everything a person buys is factored into salary costs. Take away interest, and all those 30% interest credit card debts would eventually no longer be part of your salary. This process takes years of course, but no one would issue credit cards, if every person defaulted on them, yet if you look at where salaries really go? With a lot of people, 30%+ goes to just holding debt.
It did under Biden as well yet nobody had any issues claiming the economy was in terrible shape and that we were entering a potential recession. Which frankly I agreed with! The stock market tells a fraction of the story. Especially because institutional investors now dominate investment in a way they didn’t only a few decades ago. A booming stock market does not benefit “the common man” like it once did unless one believes in trickle down economics or something. Employee pensions have become rare in the private sector, matched 401(k)s used for investment are also becoming more scarce. The stock market just isn’t tied to “the average person” like it once was, relatively speaking.
I do think Biden deserves immense blame for inflation getting out of control, but I also think as usual people overlooked what the Democrat president was handed, which was a Covid economy in this case. There was going to be fallout from that for years no matter what he did. No one blames Trump for the economy he handed off either.
The answer to every problem at my place is: more headcount, productivity drops further and further, more headcount, more headcount.
I suspect the economy would look very different if total headcount in a manager's org was the denominator in a manager's performance review, such that if you employ 10x as many people, you better have generated 10x as much profit. But this would also have lots of unintended consequences: management would be incentivized to employ as few people as possible, which means lots of people would be out of work and would be competing with your firm.
I don’t think it’s reassuring the way this goes away from AI layoffs. Just like in life, you need downtime and boredom. This is when you learn and reflect and develop taste, this is where your team steals time when an “emergency” breaks out and someone gets paged over an outage. This is where you take time to mentor the younger employees.
Relatedly, it seems that AI is entrenching cumbersome processes because it’s easy to write that extra doc, compile those notes, etc. When you make a team more lean, you’re supposed to cut out the extra process and let people work in a high-trust environment. That’s why startups are fast - everything is low process and the business has to trust employees. As companies grow, they develop all sorts of bureaucracy as scar tissue. But layoffs and cuts fail if you keep that stuff along the way.
A 0.2% drop seems more like too small to tell from statistical noise more that heavy.
There a ton of evidence that underperforming companies are trimming fat, with CEOs citing AI impacts rather than their own bad decisions that led to the fat that needed trimming.
Problem is though that nobody is really buying that narrative anymore.
> led by customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople.
Some management may even believe AI can fully replace all work done by those positions. In some of those cases they will learn they were mistaken. The eventual rehiring of some positions will happen unevenly over time, be attributed by management to "ongoing growth" and not be reported by the media.
When I worked in finance the thing that made the analysts happiest was a split election wherein neither side could accomplish much. We now have the opposite of that, and worse a capricious leader who makes huge changes without much justification or explanation. Pressing "shuffle" on the economic policy doesn't help anyone.
To finance the best government is the least effective government.
No executive will ever want to say they made poor decisions that resulted in overhiring.
Instead, someone else's fault.
The same way for awhile the failings of certain businesses "those damn millennials refusing to spend money here" instead of "we priced ourselves out of the market".
But by the investment contracts OpenAI announced, if they replaced every white collar job in the world and captured all of their salary, they would have a P/E of ~1/70. (Assuming no costs at all.)
You decide what return horizon you are comfortable with and solve the linear equation for it. (But my numbers are from the end of last year, I haven't seen any more recent compilation of their contracts.)
Many ego’s are gonna be battered after all this fizzles out
I personally think that AI is being used as a convenient blanket to hide the plumes of smoke emanating from an economy engulfed in flames.
So, the "AI job losses" just happen to be before AI started to boom, during the kickoff of largest trade war in 100 years?
They don't mention the trade war at all in the piece? And no analysis whatsoever of what other factors could have resulted in "customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople" being let go. Who the hell writes this crap? What was the point?
Basically, AI is replacing tasks of jobs, not jobs per se. There's a study by folks from MIT on what tasks, and which roles are most at risk.
We need a modern take of the movie "They Live". Granted, any copy would not be anywhere near as good as the original, even for a B movie, but AI is really turning into skynet (but it sucks).
If you're arguing against "AI" on HackerNews, you might as well join the Washington Generals. You and your opinion are tolerated only as long as there is a more popular pro-AI opinion in the replies to your comment.
If this administration works against its people and the whole world, maybe there should be a regime change. Peaceful version of Jan 6th. All the unemployed have little to lose.
- "AI" is a tool which workers use - usually to produce outputs of the same or lower quality faster. It needs a human to be constantly monitoring, steering and verifying it.
- aAI is actual AI - what sci-fi authors imagined and what ML companies promise. You ask aAI a question and it either gives you a complete, unbiased and correct answer or says why it cannot do that (insufficient information, not enough computing power, etc.). It doesn't ignore instructions or get stuck in a loop. It doesn't delete your database or exfiltrate secrets.
Obviously, this is a spectrum, not a hard division.
Crucially, "AI" is a tool for workers. aAI is a tool for owners - it replaces workers. Owners give aAI control over a company or some other form of capital and it monitors, steers and verifies humans, who will still be economically valuable for manual work, at least until robots catch up.
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All the people hyping AI either still see it as a tool ("AI", not aAI), not believing it will mature into aAI and replace them; or they are the owner class who will benefit from not having to pay wages while maintaining their passive income.
If most of your income comes from work (as opposed to passive income from ownership), you have 0 reason to be excited by AI. Your life will not be better if you lose your economic value.
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EDIT: If you disagree, you should be able to express why and we can have a rational discussion about it.
If you cannot express why, consider not participating in the discussion at all, not even by reducing the visibility of my opinion by downvoting it.