People who graduated in June are having a real struggle finding a job. Companies haven't laid many people off (outside of the ones that over-hired recently, like Meta and IBM) but they're not hiring. That's just the breeze that's heralding the storm. LLMs are going to make "any degree" jobs an increasingly rare thing as time goes on.
Out of curiosity, If that storm comes, what do you predict will happen? I've been very curious what folks think is going to happen if the above becomes very true.
It seems like jobs that require you to do something with your hands will be relatively more valuable than they are today. There will always be white collar jobs, but I suspect the pay and status associated will go down.
We go the road of the UK. At some point the billionaires finish their ransacking and all flee the US. GDP plummets, we hit a depression. We recover but pretty much lose the de facto superpower status.
Things keep creeping on but the struggle is real. And then we go the Germany route (again). We have the second coming of Donald Trump voted in promising to bring prosperity, but this one isn't just satisified with stroking his ego. So we initiate WWIII.
Depending on how that escalates or not is well beyond my abilities to guess. We could end up with a mass extinction that ends this era of civilization, we could be taken over by the rest of the world and have land diverted to various parts of the EU and Asia.
As I am retired, I can assure you beyond any doubt I cannot be replaced by an LLM in the workplace. If you don't realize that's going to happen you don't realize just how many people come to work shuffle proverbial paper from one side of their desk to another, making sure forms are filled out correctly or this month's TPS cover sheets are attached. If you're in programming or engineering you tend to think office jobs require a lot of context and invention. But most of them don't.
Ten years ago if you graduated with a law degree and went to work for one of the big NYC law firms, the first place they would put you is in a big room with dozens of other new lawyers doing discovery. You'd get a stack of documents to read, looking for relevance to the particular case that firm was working on. Those jobs are already gone, for the most part.
And didn't someone high up in Microsoft say 95% of the programming in the future will be done by LLMs? Do you expect Microsoft intends to keep the 95% of programmers it doesn't need anymore?
> As I am retired, I can assure you beyond any doubt I cannot be replaced by an LLM in the workplace.
That makes sense. Being removed from today’s workforce makes it easier to believe the narrative that AI is causing these shifts, when in fact they’re really the result of the end of historically low interest rates and other broader economic conditions.
> If you don't realize that's going to happen you don't realize just how many people come to work shuffle proverbial paper from one side of their desk to another, making sure forms are filled out correctly or this month's TPS cover sheets are attached
These people are not the entirety of the white collar market.
> And didn't someone high up in Microsoft say 95% of the programming in the future will be done by LLMs?
Moronic Microsoft executives have said a lot of things. It doesn't make them right.
> 'Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer scoffed at Apple's glass-and-metal gadget, telling USA Today that "there's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."'
> Do you expect Microsoft intends to keep the 95% of programmers it doesn't need anymore?
I expect like most things that come out of their mouth, it's obvious bullshit because they are involved in peddling AI and would desparately love you to buy some.
There is still studies that show that graduating in 2007-2009 permantly stunted your career earnings. Those gradutes were very much screwed, statistically speaking.
Also there wasn't a narrative in 2008 about trying to automate your white collar work away. The powers that be do now want the white collar jobs to come back. It may not succeed, but it's going to create a sub-generation of people who completely lost faith in the country the reside in. That sort of population is dangerous, to say the least.
>If you actually believe this, it makes you one of the rare few who likely could actually be replaced with an LLM.
What's your interpretation then? LLM crashes and burns and Google just goes back to using humans again? Everything lives happily ever after?
> There is still studies that show that graduating in 2007-2009 permantly stunted your career earnings. Those gradutes were very much screwed, statistically speaking.
Sure, but that’s not the claim being made here, so it’s irrelevant. Also, my earnings are just fine. So again, seems like some made out ok, and others didnt. It certainly wasnt a permanent white collar apocalypse.
> Also there wasn't a narrative in 2008 about trying to automate your white collar work away.
That depends on where you were. Plenty of people I started with were automated out of their original roles and ended up in entirely different careers. In my industry, one person today can do what used to take ten.
> What's your interpretation then?
The same as it's always been. I'll live in reality and not a fantasty land sold by executives trying to sell me on their AI turd, or hide behind AI as a smokescreen for employment activities they were going to carry out either way.
> LLM crashes and burns and Google just goes back to using humans again?
It’ll settle into its place. Some jobs will get knocked out, the same way automation reshaped mine. But this idea that AI is about to replace the entire white collar workforce?
Come back to me when this stuff isn’t confidently spitting out nonsense half the time because until then as far as I can see, this stuff at best lets people do more, it doesnt magically replace a workforce.
LLMs don’t seem to be destroying jobs en masse—though they do seem to be eliminating some jobs in copywriting and graphic design —but they also don’t seem to be creating jobs the way previous levels of investment in technology have.
