Utopia Talk / Politics / The economy:K shaped, AI etc.

Habebe rank	Fri Feb 06 03:15:47 So wjen do you all think AI will change the downstream economy? What jobs will it limit to oversear? I seen Neurologists offered $300/hr to train AI bots. What skills/Jobs will be more in demand? Rory Sutherland seems to think people skills will be in higher demand. Learn to code seems to be out the window, Nvidia for example wants none of its engineers to code, thats AIs job.
Habebe rank	Fri Feb 06 05:13:11 I mean it makes sense though, relatively, small businesses out employ big companies, so the stock market can go well (although investments have been iffy the last few days) And good jobs can still lag behind. 1 in 4 US 18-34 year olds have started a small business. Now Trump has barred greencard holders from SBA loans (sounds retarded) AI will help small businesses is my presumption, but while I don't think it will eliminate jons completely, I could see getting rid of teams of employees and replacing them with a few humans supervising a bot.
jergul rank	Fri Feb 06 10:37:05 Learning to code is still important. AI needs overseers and not fewer overseers than there are currently human coders. We have seen this before. How computers were supposed to revolutionize the office and lead to far fewer white collar jobs. How did that play out?
Seb rank	Fri Feb 06 14:27:55 I think it's overcooked. Increasingly what I'm seeing is that AI is being used to replace bureaucratic process that are designed to demonstrate thinking and accountability. These processes are often indeed far less efficient than they should be in themselves, but make the overall system more efficient. However LLM automation often fundamentally throws the baby out with the bath water and gets you to high system inefficiency, while also transferring labour cost to what will become software licensing costs. For example: Yes, writing a business case for £1m investment is often a bureaucratic and annoying process (whenever I can I tend to insist these are stripped back to being no more than 10 pages absolute maximum including appendices). However, the point isn't producing the case (in theory at least) is to make sure that the problem is understood and well defined, that multiple ways is solving the problem have been considered and that the one being pursued is the best value for money, and that it's actually feasible and affordable to implement. Making an 800 page document full of plausible ideas an LLM came to with, and then summarising it down to one page with another LLM doesn't actually serve the purpose. And banking the efficiency by taking the senior responsible officers access to the team and skills to do that planning and appraisal just means what you get is GIGO and lots of badly thought out pet projects and wasted money. That's just one example, but I'm seeing loads like this. There's also a lot of studies showing most firms (as much as 90%) aren't seeing the benefits. I think deployed in the right way, you'll see some interesting things. It's worth noting that studies on tech like electricity show there's a long time between invention, industrialisation and the development of mature models for how great to use it (about 80 years iirc, but it's a process itself that's speeding up) A lot of the knowledge work stuff people are acting like it's a full substitute enabling a genuine cashable saving for - I think will turn out not to be. It's better for improving the productivity of an existing worker; so you'll still need people with those skills and there's a question as to whether that results in greater competition for fewer positions pushing down wages, or the same or greater demand for labour because what can be achieved increases unlocking latent demand that couldn't get satisfied at old price points.
Seb rank	Fri Feb 06 14:31:52 If the balance is in the short term (cf. Salesforce whoopsie) and long term is more towards displacing white collar rather than just lowering output costs creating an explosion of more service offerings and thus demand for white collar labour despite AI. Well, then what it may well do though is rebalance skilled manual labour and white collar work. People will still need their roof fixed etc.
williamthebastard rank	Fri Feb 06 15:35:16 I should have been hit directly in my line of work and there was a dip last spring, but this spring so far is one of my better ones. January is always slow but not this year. After personally being impressed by LLMs initially and using it myself all the time, Ive found it doesnt actually save much time, really. It provides me with more ideas to choose between without having to sweat it, but sifting between different options, plus adjusting issues that crop up, end up taking roughly the same time as starting from scratch. My clients also seem to have realized that AI is not reliable enough to replace people en masse. It probably has reduced employment in my field in that most of my clients now send over rough drafts created by AI and my job is now more about editing than creating, which is usually - but not always - quicker. (In my field, one guy writes the original document, then it gets sent to at least one more guy for copying and usually finally a 3rd guy for final review, before it gets sent back to the client. This is how the quality assurement process is secured in this area, and LLMs havent replaced that process at all so far)
williamthebastard rank	Fri Feb 06 15:44:39 Interestingly, it still produces mechanical and unnatural language to a large extent. If I just copied and pasted LLM text and sent off after correcting obvious errors, I'd receive an email saying, Hi, this sounds like AI, could you make it sound more natural please?
williamthebastard rank	Fri Feb 06 15:55:24 Whats most dangerous about it at the moment is the Elons lying to customers about its capabilities and customers believing their lies and using it inappropriately, just like he lies about what his cars are capable of and people dying as a result.
Paramount rank	Fri Feb 06 16:27:06 ” What skills/Jobs will be more in demand? Rory Sutherland seems to think people skills will be in higher demand.” OnlyFans
Habebe rank	Fri Feb 06 18:30:43 Seb, Yeah, repairs of all sorts IMHO will be one of the hardest to replace. WTB, I suspect all AI ceos hype the product to justify the valuation of said company. NVIDIA is valued now at nearlt 5 Trillion with a T, eclipsing Apple and Aramco.
Rugian rank	Fri Feb 06 18:38:22 "Yeah, repairs of all sorts IMHO will be one of the hardest to replace." Mind you, technology will eventually replace a lot of those jobs as well - but that's more on the 25-100 year timeframe. Not something policymakers need to worry about for now. For white collar jobs, the prediction I think is most credible is that it will initially hit entry-level jobs the hardest, as those employees are most engaged in easily-replicates rote assignments that don't required qualitative decision-making. Those replacements will make financial sense to companies in the short term, but ultimately it will create a talent deficit because companies are no longer training the next generation of leaders as they do the traditional rising up the corporate ranks. At some point, AI will get to the point where it can start reliably doing comprehensive analysis and decision recommendations for senior management. At that time, it'll be the mid-level employees that start seeing their jobs get wiped out, while (lower-paid) entry-level employees start getting new opportunities again to work alongside the AI in crafting products, investment strategies, etc. I guess I'm more pessimistic than Seb here - I do see AI being used alongside rather than in place of employees, but at the same time it absolutely will wreck havoc on overall headcount needs.
Habebe rank	Fri Feb 06 18:47:31 What happens to coders when 100x as many people are able to code apps? Who rises to the top? The people who can solve problems and not just code.
jergul rank	Fri Feb 06 18:50:05 What happens to professional baseball players when so many other people can throw a ball?
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