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The mood is already turning against AI even while the labor market is strong, it’s hard to believe that won’t get much worse as large scale layoffs start to bite. As we know, corporations exist primarily to serve their employees rather than shareholders or customers, so (as @RandomRanger says below) this is more likely to be in the ‘the guy next door opens a factory with a tenth of the workers and half the prices’ form of creative destruction. That will force widespread changes in the labor market absent extreme political intervention1 , which necessitates politics, and could happen in a matter of months (or not). I also think it’s clear by now that a Chernobyl or at least Three Mile Island (although I expect the former) level casualty event is imminent, at least from my dilettante’s understanding of the HF attack, which will only make the backlash stronger.
The Chinese, of course, have much less of a social safety net than any Western country, a hypercompetitive entrepreneurial culture used to driving down margins, and a competition between provinces for subsidies that essentially encourages lossmaking businesses. All this means that even if CCP directives ban layoffs (and they will), that would not contain a labor crisis in most sectors. Inertia can only take you so far.
I don't think "large scale layoffs" is necessarily the only future here. I'll certainly admit it's possible, but historically automation hasn't always gone that way. A century ago, we had lots of accountants, and most of their time was spent manually balancing arithmetic, maybe with a mechanical adding machine. Along came the personal computer (earlier for large businesses with mainframes), and most of that work can be automated pretty trivially. Yet there are more accountants today than there were a century ago. What changed is that they're not doing arithmetic, and the complexity of what they do has grown substantially. For all the complaints about the growth of the tax code (and frequent related stunts by politicians), we are able to handle that complexity because we can offload the line-by-line balancing to software. Some of that complexity is probably wasteful, but some of it is also better auditing and accountability, or targeted governmental incentives — some, again, is probably wasteful, but some seems reasonable.
I don't have quite as coherent an argument (still a work in progress), but it's also the case that "recession caused by mass AI-driven unemployment" is actually a self-own by corporate AI overlords in limiting their upside. If you replaced half of human workers tomorrow at a cost savings, any not-truly-essential business is going to lose customers who can't afford their wares: tech companies fit pretty high on Maslow's pyramid, and most of the base ones are long-commodified — at one point, most of us were farmers, then along came the tractor. Nobody in the West is starving because they can't get a farmhand job. The cratering of farm employment is, in fact, why I get to work an office job, rather than out in the fields somewhere, and I'm not sure I'm worse-off for it.
But that latter part is, again, a half-formed argument.
Of the job categories listed in the 1960 US Census, supposedly only one has disappeared completely: elevator operator.
Nevertheless, I think the complexity argument might fail for accountants. Complexity actually favors AI. They are good at it.
When you talk to rich people, everyone is looking for an accountant. They all think that their accountant is bad and want a better one. I've only had bad ones personally. Now I just do things myself because I don't want to deal with errors. AI has been a godsend. I think it's likely that AI will do my taxes in April 2028.
But there is a silver lining for accountants: knowing which rules to bend or break. If it treats taxes like it treats code, AI will happily fill out a 500 page form so you can pay $0.04 to the state of Arkansas for some K1 you got from an oil services company. The accountant knows to throw it in the trash. They can tell you to ignore that letter from IRS because it doesn't get serious until the nth notice. They know how to ignore the rules that contradict the other rules. They know that certain tax dodges are okay because all their clients do them and never get audited.
I think it's somewhat similar to driving. The system only works because people know when to break the rules. Will AI break the rules? If so, will they be liable for that? Humans might stay in the loop just so they can break/bend the rules.
AI fails for accounting not because of complexity but because of care. Accountants have to get the numbers right, and occasionally hallucinating shit isn't going to cut it. Maybe it would work for mob accounting, but I suspect the mob wants their made-up shit to be less random.
The hallucination argument is losing power. Harnesses will fix hallucination much like they have for coding.
I'm not going to straight up ask Astra to do my taxes, but I'm fully confident that Astra+harness is capable. So now we just wait for the harness. No doubt lots of smart people are working on it.
Accountants don't get the numbers right anyway which is why I do my own taxes now. It's a boring, frustrating job and attracts people who like money more than having interesting work with predictable effects.
Harnesses fixing hallucinations is news to me. I just spent an hour today putting a Junior's head on straight after codex sent them down the garden path for a day and a half.
It's not really about "harnesses" as some dedicated tooling, it's about meta-instructions and models generally becoming good at following instructions over long horizons. Like, I just wrote in my AGENTS.md some stuff to the effect of "periodically spawn subagents for independent blind audits, create teams with different scopes and domain-customized personas, check with web access, sometimes step back, iterate until you get clean results", and even the latest DeepSeek will diligently execute all that and massively improve its reliability. Astra Ultra won't even need such handholding. They'll still make mistakes, rabbithole into irrelevant minutiae, perform suboptimally on cost, but for labs this is all easy to improve with More RL, and humans are flawed too. I am sure that a junior's level can be automated today.
And yet.
ChatGPT Sol absolutely.
insists on
writing.
Like this.
In a shitty.
broken up.
style.
If I ask it to demonstrate a writing concept or somesuch and there are people in the scene. It will happily tell what the problem is and how to supposedly prompt it away but will then keep on writing like that. So much for "good at following instructions".
ChatGPT Astra is meaningfully better than Sol. I of course agree it's still disgusting. It's also nice news for me because literally Fields Medal winners are getting automation anxiety before I have to worry about competition in bespoke shitposts.
The issue with writing style is that they're not built to write for humans. These are agents. The process by which they output almost every given token over their training is getting rewarded conditional on its contribution to the final outcome of a programming (or programming-shaped) task.
Be thankful you don't have to deal with raw CoTs (unreadable now).
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