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I've all of the sudden seen AI blackpilling break out into the normie space around me. Not so much about FOOM, and paperclipping, or terminator scenarios, but around the sudden disruptive nature, and especially around economic upheaval. Not exactly sure why. Veo3 has been part of it.
For example, coworkers suddenly aware that AI is going to completely disrupt the job market and economy, and very soon. People are organically discovering the @2rafa wonderment at how precariously and even past-due a great deal of industry and surrounding B2B services industries stand to be domino'd over. If my observation generalizes, that middle class normies are waking up a doompill on AI economic disruption, what is going to happen?
Let's consider it from 2 points of view. 1 They're right. and 2. They're wrong. 1. is pretty predictable fodder here - massive, gamechanging social and economic disruption, with difficult to predict state on the other side.
But is 2 that much less worrisome? Even if everyone is 'wrong', and AI is somehow not going to take away 'careers', people in mass worrrying that it's so will still manifest serious disruption. People are already starting to hold thier breath. Stopping hiring, stopping spending, running hail mary's, checking out.
Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact. (They keep framing 'If we can cut costs, we'll come out on top, instead of following the logical conclusion, if everyone stops spending the B2B economy collapses.) - I have a nontechnical coworker, who has recently recreated some complex business intelligence tool we purchased not long ago using readily available AI and a little bit of coaching. He had an oh shit moment, when he realized how cannibalized the software industry is about to get. The film industry seems about to completely topple, not because Veo3 will replace it immediately, but because, who's going to make a giant investment in that space right now?
I suspect the macro economic shock is going to hit faster than most are expecting, and faster than actual GDP gains will be made, but maybe I'm just an idiot.
My gut feeling is that this AI wave will be a short panic and then basically blow over. To predict massive job loss you have to assume that jobs are already distributed rationally, and that companies are good at adapting to and using new technology efficiently. Neither of these are even remotely true!
If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have. On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?
So the idea that just because there's a new technology coming out that can do a bunch of fancy new stuff, does not convince me that we'll have massive job loss at all. What will likely happen, and what has already been happening for a while, is that the people in white collar roles who can use these tools will just shift off more and more work to them privately, and pretend they are still just as busy. The roles might get a tad more competitive.
But we're not going to be in a doomsday scenario where everyone loses jobs, even IF AGI comes out tomorrow.
Citation needed.
I think that "tens of millions of dollars" is not a good measure for potential savings. A more appropriate way to look at savings would be to consider the fraction of the total costs of the company.
Software consultants and vendors of enterprise resource planning software have been
plaguingadvising all kinds of businesses since the early 90s. I find it very unlikely that there is any sector which could save ten percents of its costs by just using Excel. Stuff like electronic inventory management or customer relations databases are standard for pretty much any business larger than a lemonade stand.The lowest-hanging fruits left are probably more on the order of 1% of the total costs, and I think that it is reasonable for companies to be wary there. Consultants have been known in the past to overpromise and underdeliver, and that shiny ERP solution which is supposed to take care of all of your software needs might end up being a software hellscape which requires an expensive specialist to run and only does half of what you want it to do.
I will grant you that in large organisations, departments often become fiefdoms whose bosses employ a lot of people simply to show how important their department is, not because they are needed. But for most organizations, these oversized departments came to be long after the invention of spreadsheet software, and at the core they are indicative of a political, not a technological problem.
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Let me join the chorus of voices enthusiastically agreeing with you about how jobs are already bullshit. I've never been quite sure whether this maximally cynical view is true, but it sure feels true. One white-collar worker has 10x more power to, well, do stuff than 100 years ago, but somehow we keep finding things for them to do. And so Elon can fire 80% of Twitter staff, and "somehow" Twitter continues to function normally.
With that said, I worry that this is a metastable state. Witness how thoroughly the zeitgeist of work changed after COVID - all of a sudden, in my (bullshit white-collar) industry, it's just the norm to WFH and maybe grudgingly come in to the office for a few hours 3 days a week. Prior to 2020, it was very hard to get a company to agree to let you WFH even one day a week, because they knew you'd probably spend the time much less productively. Again, "somehow" the real work that was out there still seems to get done.
If AI makes it more and more obvious that office work is now mostly just adult daycare, that lowers the transition energy even more. And we might just be waiting for another sudden societal shock to get us over that hump, and transition to a world where 95% of people are unemployed and this is considered normal. We're heading into uncharted waters.
When working from home, I find I'm more productive because I know I can block out my time the way I like, so there's no panic rush to try and get it all done in hour A to hour B. If I'm not busy (because there are times when there just isn't that much 'real' work to be done), I can go off and do housework or do personal things online, then the next batch of real work comes in via email or whatever and I work on that. There isn't the rush over "I have to get this done by X o'clock, because I have to be out of here by clocking off time, because I have to be home on time to make sure I don't miss the delivery" or whatever, so I can be more thorough.
In the office, if the 'real work' isn't enough to fill up the day, then I do waste time online or pretending to be busy or procrastinating so putting off work because I want to fill up those empty hours. The difference is that at home, I'll go and put on a load of laundry. At work, I'll have some tabs open and a spreadsheet and pretend to be 'working'.
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Hmmm these are reasonable points. But as someone else pointed out, part of the fact that we're in this state is that the government has strong incentives to keep the unemployment rate down.
Then again government dysfunction is increasing too!
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I haven't worked at very many firms but it has not been my experience that any of the office jobs in my department are perfunctory. Around 200 of us move billions of dollars in investments, originating and underwriting new construction investments, managing those investments over their lifecycle, inspecting them and eventually exiting them. As one of the tech guys that builds and maintains the tools used by the teams doing these various tasks I have a decent idea of what each group does and I just don't really think it's the case that any of the job categories are bullshit. How big each group is does have some politics to it, maybe originations could be run leaner and our tech team could run at either a lower headcount and need to focus on keeping things working or a higher headcount and build more tools in our backlog but ultimately that isn't arbitrary and the marginal employee will add more value even if it's not clear if the marginal value exceeds the marginal cost.
Some of our employees are very much doing email jobs, they interface with outside syndicators who hunt for deals for us to evaluate and then enter the deal information into our system. We even build tooling and imports to make this process smoother but someone actually does need to be the person to ask the syndicators what's going on when things aren't perfectly normal and build up the case for or against an individual investment.
I'm not sure what exactly people are imagining when they think about bullshit jobs, it's always some vagueness or pointing out that a lot of time is spent waiting around rather than hammering nails for the whole shift or whatever. But it actually is genuinely important that when the email comes in you have someone to evaluate what it's saying and pull the right levers in response. The act of coordinating these people is also itself a pretty complicated job and I can attest that automating these tasks is tricky and full of difficult process questions.
There are bullshit jobs, but only in fat companies.
E.g. I know of a bank that has a whole dozen person 'enterprise architecture ' department that's supposed to manage their IT architecture.
They manage, instead, an erroneous, mostly fictional model of the actual IT architecture.
"Bullshit jobs" strikes me as a massive motte and bailey.
There definitely are bullshit jobs. But a very common case of a "bullshit" job is one where the employee does work that's actually essential to a company or to societyy, but doesn't directly produce tangible things, so it feels like his job is useless.
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I once worked for a massive multinational company where I interacted relatively frequently with the enterprise architects. They were getting shit for their models being inaccurate, which they were, but this wasn't because they were creating erronous models but because the it architecture changed by the time they managed finish a model. When you have thousands of people constantly updating something, and not documenting what they're doing, it's hard to create an accurate up to date model.
You can of course create a high level model but that isn't very useful. What they realised had to be done was automating at least part of the model generation but since that couldn't get any budget for that (in part because they were behind on model creation!) they were stuck with manually updating their models and people not using their work.
Were their jobs bullshit? They were needed at the company but they things were structured in a way where they were unable to produce much value.
This isn't a truly massive company, it's a national one with maybe <50 in-house developers. There's a 35 year old system that's barely documented because management is, as always clueless and doesn't care about pushing it or even allocating workforce for it.
Short of cheap competent AGI agents, with the workforce is retiring, the entire company is inevitably headed to a systemic crash which will create a gigantic PR problem because it's the sort of business that needs to be reliably up at all times and has ~100,000s of customers. So far they haven't really had one longer than a few hours.
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If you find your work meaningful and seeing that it is not bullshit, well good for you. I've also been mostly lucky in that aspect that I've done very little bullshit through the years. But I've ended up recently in "Bullshit Jobs" territory by doing stuff is that essentially specializing to tech that is designed for scaling to millions of concurrent users and applying it for B2B that is going to see tops of a couple of thousands users if they capture the majority of the market. There is very little wrong with the tech in itself, and it is useful... but the thing that I'm using it for is not benefiting the business, improving the world or making me happy because it is being misapplied. I quit my last job for the very reason, thought I was out of it and all of a sudden I got transferred back to doing the same thing at the new place.
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You say this is because of political/irrational reasons but I think it's because the human capital available to them is too stupid to use a spreadsheet to (e.g.) predict when they need to restock the warehouse. Something intelligent agents should be very useful at!
Currently, you can either have Pete walk the warehouse every week and plan a re-order list based on his vibes, or you can buy an expensive business intelligence package, which is risky because it requires you to switch a ton of your existing workflow over. The smart simple solution a college grad in hard sciences with a spreadsheet can come up with is not available to most businesses because that grad doesn't want to work in an import-distribution business.
I've worked with this type of business before, and I think you've diagnosed the problem correctly. I don't see them being able to get AI to automate any of these steps though for the same reasons that they couldn't get spreadsheets to help them.
With current AI, sure, but we might not be too far away from AI bridging that gap from the other side.
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Well said.
I’m inclined to take the indictment of economic inefficiency even further, and point out that jobs at major companies are also created on an EXTERNAL political basis. As @hydroacetylene says, the government has a variety of incentives (which may or may not include his schizo one) to keep the (formal) employment rate high. While I am skeptical that LLM-based AI will ever get good (or at least reliable) enough to make mass unemployment a realistic possibility, even if we grant the hypothetical that it actually will, I fully expect the government to disrupt the disruption by just writing some legislation which obliges corps to employ human rubber-stampers (“supervisory oversight”) on AI processes, thereby neatly regenerating all the white-collar jobs which have been automated. Legal compliance hits startups just as much as it hits status quo inc.
Absolutely. Agreed on all points here. Even if we do get mass automation, social pressure won't allow for mass unemployment.
What if we get decent UBI though? Or enough promises of a socialist utopia where no one has to work the masses buy into.
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The year is 2050. Humans have long since ceased to do productive work. Amazon and Walmart are giant government contractors competing to provide unemployed people with ‘basic’- a groceries, clothes, household goods, etc ration. The two mega corps keep lobbying for basic to increase; their primary bargaining tool is offering to hire more ‘process supervisors’ and ‘account managers’ to sit in rubber rooms.
The year is 2050. Mass unemployment has been forestalled by government revenue per employee maximums. Practically speaking, this means the vast majority of jobs are sinecures, but the social prestige of being sinecured to a particular firm or brand has skyrocketed in value, and likewise the PR cost of sinecured associates can potentially be Bud-Light-level apocalyptic. As a result, sinecures at highly-desirable firms often take on substantial relations efforts on behalf of the firm for free, both to maintain their sinecure, acquire additional sinecures, and potentially rake in social media influencer consulting fees), but also to increase the social prestige of the firm overall, and by proxy, themselves. Having multiple sinecures is possible for people who are motivated to do things that increase brand value or mindshare, and people with exceptional social desirability may acquire many more. Income supplementation via gig work will still be possible for things that can't be done as well by computers and robots or require the human touch, though naturally the returns will be low since the supply is huge. Of course, anyone with valuable sinecures must be on good behavior in public, for bringing disrepute or negative reaction to the firm will mean instant termination, and potential blackballing.
Those who have been blackballed or otherwise unable to merit a sinecure on the basis of their social worthiness must provide by going and doing actual labor, probably many hours of grinding gig work, or finding a valuable contracting niche. Most actual work below executive level done at the firms is performed by independent contractors, who supplement their sinecures (if they have one) with hourly contracting fees. And of course, there's always welfare, but which only provides at sustenance levels.
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schizopost: Maintaining a high female employment rate in white collar labor is the end all be all of western governments, sufficiently big corporations are being blackmailed into not automating these tasks to prop it up. The SEC, IRS, and EEOC exist to make sure the government always has a hammer to drop.
/schizopost
It’s probably just economic inefficiency.
Why?
If your reply is "because WIMMEN RULE THE WORLD and they force the government to go along and prop them up with bullshit jobs to be 'equal' to men" then I say you are mistaken.
It's economics. In order to grow the economy, business and government wanted a larger pool of workers. Here are all these stay-at-home women, get them into the workforce (and if that has the happy side-effect of depressing wages and reducing our labour costs well that's nice too). Social expectations shifted, helped along by feminism, that women who didn't go out to work were "wasting" their education and were somehow being parasitic on society. Economic expectations around two-income families meant that things like mortgages were calculated on the basis "both of you are earning, right?" Tax revenue is also based on "everyone who can work is working" and that includes working-age women. A lot of service industry jobs (and I'm including things like nursing and teaching here) are now female-dominated.
Economic necessity also means that women need jobs (no more staying at home being supported by parents if single).
Youi can try having "the man is the breadwinner, the women is the homemaker and child raiser" system back, but unless the guy is making very good money, it won't be economically feasible, and for low-income households, given government supports, the woman is probably better off being unmarried and raising the kid, with a live-in boyfriend or a boyfriend who lives elsewhere and just visits. Is that ideal? No. Is that what we've got now? Yes. Okay, take all the women out of the workforce, raise men's wages accordingly. And every cost-cutting management rule goes "so now we need cheap immigrant labour or automation instead".
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I agree with this -
...but this would suggest to me that the disruption will come from new entrants (startups and scaleups) who can effectively leverage AI tools to transform workflows. If Status Quo Inc don't incorporate AI effectively and sell their services for $1000/hour, but Insurgent Inc are able to sell materially equivalent goods for $100/hour, then clients and customers will eventually switch suppliers. Obviously this won't apply as strongly in industries with very strong incumbent advantages, but even here I would expect some disruption - see e.g., Palantir making inroads in military procurement.
I do think that disruption is happening, but again it's much more difficult than it seems. Startups typically take a few years just to get off the ground with a viable product, and then it takes like a decade for them to eat a whole industry.
And often before they eat the whole industry, they end up getting acquired by big Corpo and their value gets absorbed and spread out to all the people not doing a super efficient job lol.
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Everything that requires extensive capital investments and permitting will be very slow to change, as will the government, and areas where there are natural monopolies.
Disruption isn't really possible for the majority of the economy.
For sure there are sectors less prone to disruption, but I don't know about the majority of the economy. Finance alone is 20% of the US economy and there's huge potential for disruption there. Professional scientific and technical services are another 10%, and many of those (e.g., management consultancy) are also vulnerable to AI transformation. Healthcare (20%) obviously has massive legal barriers in place but AI will increasingly nibble around the edges (e.g. in healthcare administration, AI therapy).
The financial sector is both highly regulated and employs a disproportionately small number of people compared to it's share of GDP. While it accounts for 20% of GDP it only employs some 4% of the workforce, which is about half of manufacturing (which is supposedly dead in America) or less than a third of healthcare.
Even if the finance industry would be disrupted it would affect relatively few people, despite it's large share of GDP and would therefore not lead to wider scale panic. At best/worst we're looking at a mild upward pressure on unemployment.
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Ah. You've met both my employer and the department that employs them at the State level, I see.
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In the last couple of year you can see in the gaming industry that small teams deliver great games and rake massive profit s - not that it hadn't happen before, but they are encroaching on AAA territory. If you can deliver the same as a massive bloated company at fraction of the costs - eventually someone will displace it.
On the other hand there are other parts of the gaming industry where the big breakthrough came from taking something relatively niche and low-budget and dumping huge amounts of money into it. To name two examples, Monster Hunter was fairly sizable as a franchise but was ticking over on PS2-era budgets by developing primarily for handhelds, then decided to go AAA for World and massively succeeded. Genshin Impact arrived in what was previously a low-budget Gacha gaming landscape and singlehandedly reshaped it, with a pricetag of $100m upfront and estimated $200m more a year since.
Returnal did pretty well by dumping a AAA budget into the roguelike genre.
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Yeah Clair Obscur is amazing. I also do see this but that being said, most market share is still with massive games. There is more room for indie but these behemoth business aren't going to go under overnight.
Didn't Clair Obscur receive funding from multiple sources? Allegedly the list of backers included Microsoft, a French government program, etc. Not exactly "indie".
Also, the team was like 40 people + contractors. Thats AA on the smaller side, not indie.
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It's not unusual for foreign games to be funded by that government (one example that comes to mind is The Long Dark).
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Ok fair! I don't know the formal definitions of indie. They're small though for sure.
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