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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   27460 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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I mean if you take tasks off the lap of your workers you don’t need so many of them. If you can take half of my job away, you can just give me double the workload of tasks that only a human can do and therefore you need half the staff. And while you didn’t get rid of everyone, you’re saving a lot of money, while also putting significant downward pressure on the wages of those who remain.

Do the above over most of the kinds of jobs normies have, and it is an apocalyptic loss of jobs. If 70% of normie jobs reduce headcount by 50%, that’s a lot of people. And since nobody needs to hire them, they’re either trying to retrain for new jobs or they’re simply dropping out of the labor market.

I cannot speak for others but at my own software company it would be a mistake to assume all the work we currently get done is all the work there is to do. We have a long and constantly growing backlog of things we would like to do to improve our product but must constantly prioritize due to much less capacity. If all our productivity doubled with AI the result would likely not be "the same work done with fewer people" but "much more work done with the same people."

The C++ and Javascript creators foresaw that this day would come and made sure you can never get rid of technical debt.

I keep hearing stories of COBOL programmers getting paid insane amounts of money...

If you can take half of my job away, you can just give me double the workload of tasks that only a human can do and therefore you need half the staff.

But now you have half the staff, and your competitors have half the staff, so presumably the market price of the stuff you are selling will face downwards pressure. It could be that your existing clients will want to buy more your stuff as its now cheaper and you get now clients who previously were not able to afford your product, perhaps you find out you need to hire more people...? But if half the workforce got fired at step 0, that is much less people able to buy any products despite their cheaper price...?

It will be nightmarishly complicated to adapt to when its happening, let alone predict.

People make comparisons to horses and combustion engine. True, many horses got "unemployed", yet traffic increased a lot. There are probably more people involved in logistics and industries enabled by it than ever were in "horse service industry". And horses were never the presence on the demand side of the equation, they never bought anything.

It also reduced the need for horses, who have been reduced mostly to glorified pets.

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