Every interaction I have with AI where I previously would’ve interacted with a person is worse. Whether that’s something mundane like scheduling an appointment, use at a doctor’s office, chat support. I imagine it’s cheaper for the company deploying it, but it’s all bad. It lines up with companies being more concerned with investors than actual users and customers though.
Ah, but it's cheaper. Replace "AI" with "auto parts" or "store food" and you see the same thing. Replace "AI" with "police force" or "contractors" and it's the same thing.
Why is everyone and everything getting worse? A sort of "Prisoner's dilemma" I suppose: no one wants to take a stand and lose their business edge just for principles sake.
Taxes on what? Corps are famously good at burying profits under expenditure and mergers.
And what are you retraining to? We've long abandoned serious manufacturing and mining. Most people's job is the application of knowledge and communication and LLMs are coming for them all. From retail and call centres through to doctors and lawyers.
We can't all retrain as plumbers, waiters and surgeons.
> Corps are famously good at burying profits under expenditure and mergers
Cool. Let's start with taxing those, or any other place where they bury or hide from taxes. Thanks for the suggestion.
We can also tax on the numbers of job losses vs capital expenditures. IE: if you spend a $Billion on stuff while firing tons of workers, you get taxed more.
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As far as retraining: easy solution. Whatever people want to retrain to. The details will work themselves out. The important tidbit is to have large scale mass retraining if this really is the future.
It's not like the government forced me into my current job. I'm more than capable of choosing a new field myself.
And if YOU can't see the possibilities, them you don't have to take the retraining program. But from my perspective, there's plenty of work needed in the USA to improve our country. Plenty of problems to solve.
yea, historically in the United States we have been successfully solving all our problems by collecting more taxes. nothing more efficient than giving money to our Government
What was our tax rate that got rid of our WW2 debt?
Taxes definitely solved that problem. And it even brought about the golden age of post WW2 US economy.
The correct taxes in the correct areas serve as an incentive structure to help encourage businesses and individuals to make good decisions. At least, that's what we did 80 years ago.
Taxes would not make top-10 reasons for post WWII “golden age.”
The US Government is at present (without any chances of this being fixed ever again) about the least efficient entity that exists on the Planet Earth and giving it more money will not solve any problem. It will be used though but one of the two political parties to win election(s) and kill any tax law that was previously put in place
I asked what was the tax rate that got rid of our WW2 debt.
The golden age thing is an aside. Just a reminder that you can't call 1950s America weak on the world stage.
> The US Government is at present (without any chances of this being fixed ever again) about the least efficient entity that exists on the Planet Earth and giving it more money will not solve any problem
Taxes directly solve the debt and deficit problem. Period.
Let's start with things one step at a time. Now that we've had 40 years of trying to drown the budget in a bathtub (and only ballooning our debt), we should seriously start trying something different.
much of our current economic and social problems stem from efforts to collect _less_ takes from corporations and the wealthy. So yeah, collecting more taxes -- from those who can afford it -- would make a big difference.
Couldn't think of a more incorrect diagnosis if I tried. State government budgets have been ballooning for the last decade; but political leaders don't give a shit about tracking outcomes, only celebrating starting things and how much money they spend.
except that it wouldn’t. this is just another type of political shit that was put together by politicians here to fuck with us.
if your family is running a budget deficit, there are two ways to mitigate it
- make more money (drive uber and pizza (at the same time to make double money at night) or get a higher paying job
- stop spending so much fucking money
it seems politically, the left-leaning part of the countries and political party will make you believe that we just need to make more money, give that money to the Federal Government and all our problems will magically disappear.
the right-leaning part of the country and its politicians will make you believe that rich already pay a lot more than most (they do) and that taxing corporations makes no fucking sense (it doesn’t in general).
neither party actually gives a shit about the fact that country is drowning in debt which will eventually be its undoing (those who study history know this as absolute certainty), they are just looking for where more votes are there to be had
Families don’t print the currency they owe their debt in, they don’t owe the their debt to themselves, and they also aren’t the largest employer and consumer in their economy, so the comparison doesn’t work.
Middle school economics is a simplified model that children can understand, but just like Newtonian physics, middle economics becomes less useful past a certain scale.
> make more money
> stop spending so much fucking money
I'm all in favor of this but part 1 has been made politically toxic for decades, and part 2 only seems to be taken seriously when the Other Guys are in power.
For example, in the US I simply cant take the Republican party's fiscal opinions seriously when they bleat about the debt on the one hand and yet dont blink when asked to fund another foreign war.
republicans are much much bigger spenders than democrats by miles. they are “anti socialism” publicly but are 2nd largest socialist party on the planet (behind china).
"Socialism is when the government gives tax breaks to the rich and destroys public institutions". And calling China "socialist" is rich when it's probably the most ruthlessly capitalistic nation on the planet, where worker unions are straight up illegal.
The West saw its golden age when redistributive taxation was maximum. We have to get back to that, or the country will continue to agonize under crumbling infrastructure and failing institutions.
What intervention could <roll back the industrial revolution>?
On the technical side, perhaps none. But countless people in the labor movement spilled blood for their rights and dignity. Maybe something similar will be needed here, too.
A lot of enshittification is driven by market consolidation. I really don't want my economic interactions to be with massive chains in a race to the bottom. The cure is to enable new competitors to offer alternatives. It starts with anti-trust but also includes reducing regulations and barriers to market entry. And maybe not so many billion-dollar, me-too AI investments and more focus on things like building delivering healthcare cheaply.
Mine hasn't. I've been subjected to the lowest common denominator of employable humanity because of cost savings measures from companies. I'd far rather interact with an "LLM" powered support agent than a human who cannot even comprehend the language and is just following a scripted prompt. The LLM has more agency at this point than the human support personnel.
I had a car dealership, used an AI agent to set up an appointment. It was so efficient. It's the only reason I asked if it were a real human. It was not. Far better than the norm
The reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.
I’ve had a longstanding belief that big tech purposely over-employed because it denied resources to competitors. This gave them a velocity edge despite being big and bureaucratic. In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.
I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.
Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.
This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable
Yes, they played a zero sum growth game and seeked acquisition and stock price increase. That ended. That explains most tech layoffs in the past few years.
This is very true and has been for a while. AI is just giving CEOs an excuse to just trim that fat.
Even after layoffs most of big tech could cut 50% of its workforce tomorrow and see minimal impact long term. Thats driving a lot of the present layoffs as CEOs go “oh crap we gotta look like we’re with the cool kids on this AI stuff”… and then just do a big cut and cite AI. Truth is they could have cut years ago but had no social pressure to do so.
Whenever articles like this come out, tons of the comments are just general zeitgeist responses about "corporate layoffs that blame AI". Which I think is a particular shame in this instance because I think the article narrows in with some actual good evidence that yes, there are vulnerable roles that AI is wholesale replacing and not leading to a "employees will just do more as they become more productive with AI" outcome.
Looking through the list of those professions, I would bet that nearly half of them won't even exist anymore except for some extremely niche cases. Paralegals, translators, credit authorizers, many types of secretaries - AI can basically do nearly all the work for many of these occupations.
Yeah, its basically a list of the subset of white collar busywork that was mechanical but for some reason not automatable with regular programming.
Some or them like translators or graphic designers are kinda risky. Translating instruction manuals for sure is going the way of the dodo, but there is a ton of work in translating literature that shouldn't go away, it's its own art form. No coincidence that we're still publishing new translations of the Odyssey.
I think the art world has a problem in that they were surviving by making art-adjacent material, where people wanted content more than art and won't care about the loss of quality. Corporate logos, ad jingles, etc.
I think Jensen Huang said this recently, and I've had a similar opinion for a while, but a lot of companies seem uncreative with how they use their employees. like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects :shrug:
> like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects
Wow, I really hope that you're just too young to remember when Google famously invested in tons of "let's see what happens" projects. Google X projects is still a thing: https://x.company/projects/. And important things like Waymo came out of these Google moonshot projects.
Still, I think your comment also just shows how much Google has changed in the past 15 years. A lot of those projects on that x.company website are dead, and of course Google is also famous for killing projects that don't become huge, even if they're useful to lots of people.
I bet Jensens thinks everyone working at Nvidia is crucial, and his reports hit the perfect balance of efficiency, continuity and growth. Classic Fundamental attribution error.
In principle it's possible to have a company with no employees and all work done by vendors / contractors. But in practice this usually turns out to be less optimized than having at least some regular employees due to transaction costs. Organizational optimization is always a balancing act.
Not an unreasonable question in isolation, but "greed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People's retirement accounts include shares in businesses because they expect those businesses to pursue profit and act in their interests as shareholders. If they didn't, people would rightfully pull their money and put it into more responsible businesses (or savings accounts, etc.). Charities and publicly funded social programs exist too, but those are different things.
Tech as a whole may not have too many employees, it's just Big Tech that has too many. If those employees were distributed among many more smaller companies the tech market as a whole would be much more competitive.
IMO, rather than hiring more people than necessary, we should have a safety-net so that our society isn’t structured around “work or die.” I bet we’d see much lower admin costs at that point, as people aren’t incentivized to find less-essential tasks.
As usual, there is a level of disconnect given the complexity and anonymity of the financial system.
"Shareholders" are often people who invested in fonds which invested in fonds and they are thus several steps of separation from the final invested corporation. They only want their pensions to be stable, and de-facto own tiny slivers of hundreds of corporations, maybe not even exactly knowing which ones.
That detaches them mentally from those corporations, much like when you go to a restaurant and eat the food without being particularly bothered whether the cilantro in your soup, supplied by a large-scale supplier and imported from another country, didn't originate in conditions worse than typical for that developing country.
Modern civilization is so complex that if you wanted to check conditions of every vendor of everything you consume, you'd simply not have enough time and energy to do so.
I am typing this on a Dell laptop; should I be particularly interested in what happens in every Dell supplier which contributed to building of that laptop? Are you? I just bought it and started working on it; we may certainly call this "complete disregard".
Each of those employees is a liability, for various reasons, not just financial. Even if their salaries were completely subsidized by the state, there are many problems that come from having a very large number of employees. Firstly, there is more coordination overhead, and that is not great. Secondly, people are very political and very envious, and that has a corrosive effect on, well everything. Thirdly, people are (justifiably) afraid of getting laid off, which results in decisions that are sub-optimal or even illogical. Fourthly, people tend to only spend a few years at companies before moving on (for a pay-increase), which disincentivizes companies to hire more, and it incentivizes companies/management (and even employees) to engage in a kind of performative conformity designed to signal replace-ability (this effectively means that many companies are going to choose to do whatever everyone else is doing, instead of the unusual thing that will likely work better -- think of it as cargo-cult entrepreneurship/management/engineering). Fifthly, those engineers that leave take with them the knowledge and technology that they built up at a different employer and launder[1] it to their next employer. Sixthly, larger teams tend to produce more code per feature, and tend not to abstract/compress aggressively (which requires actually having a holistic understanding of the product), which means that team-sizes are likely to keep growing until the company's revenues stop growing. Put differently, enshittification and sloppification naturally emerge from the dynamics of how the majority of the industry works, and LLMs have simply automated it[2].
The solution may be to modify the incentives. Maybe federally cap all salaries to 90k or so, to filter out the serial job-hoppers and con-artists, and to also prevent poaching and "nerd-hoarding"[3]. Has the additional benefit of forcing rents and property prices to go down, and stops gentrification in its tracks (I mean I would expect this to be partially true, though it might force people to instead seek massive loans to compensate -- which should also be capped by salary to prevent it). And since we are already talking about federal limits, maybe a federal guarantee that covers healthcare and housing would further improve things.
[1]: This depends on context. If the IP is already open source, then there is no laundering. But I know people who have been building the same software system for the last 3 employers, and they do it (ostensibly) from scratch each time (but in fact they are permuting/improving the old version -- which does not actually belong to them -- and are over-reporting how much time they spent working on it). My point here is not that employees are ruthless rogues, but rather that the incentives are set up in a way that encourages the rapid dilution of the value of IP (it is effectively non-exclusive, which makes industrial espionage _unnecessary_), and discourages any kind of mutual responsibility between employer and employee (in a different knowledge-work field, I hear from a friend, seniors give juniors only minimal training because they do not expect to have to deal with them in two years -- and this was true since at least 2017, and has only gotten more true since 2020).
[2]: With or without LLMs, the biggest winners of this dynamic are the quasi-monopolies (or, more precisely oligopolies and duopolies), like MSFT, GOOG, META, etc. Everyone else will lose, and if they happen to win, they will get acquired (not for the tech, which is probably slop anyway and cannot run at hyperscales, but for the clients/customers/users -- why else would MSFT buy LinkedIn and GitHub, why else would startup incubators like YC be such a huge success (I doubt YC would have been possible in the 70s or 80s)). Software is awesome, and I love it, but the software _industry_ has always been an operation designed to extract money and data from the populace, using deceptive and predatory practices (see: Uber, Theranos, Celsius, Alameda for outright fraud, and Oracle for mere deception and plunder).
[3]: Sorry, could not think of a better term. The idea is basically the corporate equivalent of nerd-sniping, but instead of sniping by offering interesting problems/puzzles, you snipe by offering large paychecks and golden handcuffs.
I like your take and ideas. Not sure about capped income because that seems like a reward for the capital owning class.
I've seen the phenomena of people moving and redoing the same tech idea multiple times. I'm pretty convinced that is a negative for the industry. The seem to move on to get another chance at their idea after it becomes contaminated by reality at each employer, destroying a string of organizations with some "pure" vision of some architecture or another.
An alternative to a capped income, would be that every income gets "inflated" by as much as needed until it reaches parity with big-tech incomes, which would require a kind of transnational union, but would have the effect of reversing the direction of extraction. Also, printing that money to inflate the income, would also cause asset-inflation, which also benefits people who own a life-changing amount of capital/assets. But _if_ you could cap asset-prices, then the inflation strategy might work. Note that I have not modeled this particular scenario yet.
I'm at that point in my working life that I don't care about AI but I'd hate to be starting out or mid-career where I need to pay attention. I sometimes wonder if the glory years of tech are drawing to a close and it's time to draw a line under it before it changes too much. AI has tentacles into everything but the reason I do this career is that certain areas of work provide enjoyment. If AI takes that away then I would care less to do the job and be less invested to go the extra yard. I feel there's goodwill in employees that will get sucked out the more AI intrudes into our daily lives.
I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.
I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda
It actually makes me very skeptical of your thesis - broadly discussed facts don't usually need to be wrapped in "nobody wants to talk about this, but everyone knows it's true".
For a long time this was compounded by a "better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in" strategy, where you hired people to deny them to your competition and then invented things for them to do. If it turns out whole segments are in fact pointless then the endgame could be truly nuts.
That was never a major factor in employment statistics. Only a handful of the most profitable tech companies ever had the financial resources to even attempt that strategy, and only for a small fraction of their employees.
At FAANG it has been huge. Whole departments/products/divisions level, including many of the most expensive employees.
There are reasons so many products get made to go precisely nowhere, because no one ever seriously intended for them to do otherwise. There are even cases where things succeeded by accident which were not supposed to and then have to be redone properly.
As observed in another (more eloquent) comment here making the same point
> In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.
Even if your claim was true (and I don't really believe it) we're still talking about a tiny fraction of the overall tech labor market. The impact is insignificant.
> A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025, according to annual data published Friday. That compared with an increase in overall employment of 0.8% over the same period.
The article that flags AI risk still projects that the top 15 growth employment through 2033 contains software related jobs like Computer / Information Research Scientists, Data Scientists, Operations Research analysts.
But wasn't the BLS the organization that Trump fired and replaced all the leaders of recently, for putting out (accurate) reports that made him look bad?
Relatively accurate (I think they're pretty close like 70%+ of the time). Significantly better than just projecting that the next five years will be like the last 5 years.
Yes in the long term. Sometimes they will get surprised by unexpected events (Covid) but you can’t blame them when their tourism and hospitality numbers are wildly wrong when that happens.
Affected occupations: procurement clerks, credit authorizers, checkers, and clerks, customer service representatives, nonmedical secretaries and administrative assistants, sales engineers, insurance sales agents, other types of sales representatives, paralegals and legal assistants, translators and interpreters, graphic designers, models, technical writers, broadcast announcers and radio DJs.
Benefitting occupations: computer and information research scientists, data scientists, and software developers. It also says AI/cloud/data growth supports demand for data-related work such as operations research analysts and actuaries.
I think people are blaming AI for a recession caused by trump’s tarrifs and the oil crisis. Businesses fear that oil prices may explode until enough of the economy enters a recession that oil demand decreases, and are already feeling the supply crunch
This comment is completely divorced from the facts given in the article.
The main point is that certain types of jobs like customer service reps, secretaries and sales people are being disproportionately affected. If it was just general fears about the economy overall one would expect a more broad-based impact.
Salespeople feels more like a leading indicator of concerns about a recession than AI getting good. They're a profit centre, not a cost centre and AI automating prospecting some aspects of leadgen and the necessary but low value add stuff like meeting notes and formatting proposals should make them more productive not redundant, if anyone's buying. And AI is somewhere between very bad and completely incapable of most other aspects of their job (product demos, networking, in-person meetings, negotiating)
Especially when it's actually "services sales jobs a little up, manufacturing a little down"...
I think it's more likely an interaction of both. Tariffs and recession lead to companies looking for ways to save money, and AI is both a convenient excuse for reducing headcount, and at least in some cases may actually reducing headcount without hurting productivity too much.
Customer support? Clearly the first to be cut if there are fewer customers to support, and in any case considered completely expendable and optional. Internal support roles? Also extremely expendable from your average management's perspective.
Maybe I just don’t know how the business works. Many of the support calls that I make are for things or services that I’ve had for a while, not just purchased. So I expected that to be more of a trailing indicator rather than the first area hit.
Seniors in my org still have them and they make things happen, partly through being able to use the senior's name to open doors and force action but mostly though their deep organisational knowledge.
All a boss has to say is "I need everyone involved in Project X in a meeting in London next week" and it's done, the boss just gets told when and where to get into a car.
Why care if "unthinking execution of a generic customer service script" is performed by an interpreter made of silicon or flesh?
Neither has any free will to deviate from the script. Both are useless in any case that's not handled by the script. The silicon one has better wait times though.
because the customer doesn't get to pretend that if they got angry enough, a real live person could be made to suffer by being fired. if anything, making the humans follow the canned responses only encourages this thirst for revenge in the customer. now THAT'S efficiency!
People already have to bear with deeply customer-hostile "support". I'd love to think that companies can't make it any worse than it already is, but realistically I know they're going to do just that.
I mean, if you _want_ a customer base that hates you and will leave the very minute something better comes along, I guess you can choose to do that. I just have no idea why you would.
Are the jobs going away because of AI being applied or is AI being applied because those jobs are going away? You see lots of life jackets being worn as a ship is sinking; doesn't mean people putting on the life jackets made the ship sink.
In economies that revolve around credit/debt (the US), once credit stops EXPANDING, that's a huge force pushing the economy down.
If everyone's already taken on as much debt as they can, and interest rates aren't consistently marching lower for ~25 straight years, it's going to be a little harder to grow.
Doesn't make it impossible, just harder.
We're paying for growth we got 25 years ago now.
Wish we invested that money better. You can't change the past. But you can change the future.
The future will certainly change things, but who can change the direction of a tidal wave? It will go where it wants, not where we want. The best a single individual can do is flee to higher ground.
Unless you happen to have a media empire at your disposal. Maybe then you can change the future. The problem is that those people are changing things for the worse.
We have an invention that aims to replace labor and employers want nothing more than to replace labor. It's silly to pretend that AI isn't responsible. But you're right that an incompetent administration is piling on with additional factors.
AI isn't ready to replace us but employers are more than ready to use it as cover for laying off all the dingdongs they hired during the pandemic. I give up. I'm rich and out of f***s and the hilarity of VC approaching me to invest in their idiocy will never be lost on me given they wouldn't spare a dime when I was a disruptive young turk.
The overall US economy is less impacted by higher oil prices than ever before. As a net oil exporter now in a way it's actually a positive, although the effects vary by sector.
More like Dario rather than Musk and Altman. Anthropic is much more likely to be a monopoly, and they are also pushing hard for regulatory capture with their whole false superiority on ethics, safety, morals etc.
As a Brit, it seems hilarious that a single person with an income of $97k would be on the poverty line. That's more than double the median income for all households in the UK. A lot of Americans don't seem to realise how fantastically wealthy they are compared to the rest of the world.
That’s a completely absurd number. No single person making just under $100k a year is living in poverty. Even in a high cost of living area.
The article also repeatedly discussed median salaries, but average costs.
And it includes full time daycare costs for young children that only last for a few years.
Also housing prices are high but you can certainly afford an apartment as a single person making $100k a year. But if you want to save, having a roommate doesn’t mean you are living in poverty.
Comparing countries can be relatively pointless because of all the differences. It only matters if you can obtain money in one country and spend it in another.
The main way these numbers are gamed is by finagling with healthcare and post-secondary education, each of which can be as high or as low as you want, depending on what you’re torturing the numbers to confess.
$97k per year isn’t that much when health insurance premiums are $500 to $1,500 per person per month with $5k to $15k annual out of pocket maximums. You have to build up decent savings to ensure you can take care of yourself for when you lose your income.
This doesn't look like too expensive if you compare it with Switzerland or with Germany assuming similar annual income. In Switzerland unlike in US your children stay on your plan until they turn 18, not 26 like in US. In both Germany and Switzerland, health insurance is mandatory and not employer-based - so you cannot simply say "no". In fact, in Germany you pay much more than in US as a share of your income, especially if your income is at least like 30% more than a national median: 1000+ EUR is a minimum per person per month (probably higher today). It doesn't cover dental care - you will pay in full - that's why many people travel to Turkey, or Eastern Europe, or to Baltic countries - just to take some dental care - which is extremely expensive in any German speaking country - we are talking about multiple months of your income after taxes.
The US GDP per capita is still well ahead of China. The fact that China is catching up is not a problem for the US.
On its own terms, 2% isn't great. It's kind of the bare minimum. Anything less is losing ground in absolute terms, since that's the target for inflation as well.
That's also assuming the number is trustworthy. The number is a mediocre metric to start with, and I don't trust the administration to be calculating it correctly. They have shot the messenger more than once, after which the messages started to improve with no change in policy.
I would also not that China's numbers are even more opaque and less reliable.
China hasn't seen 10% GDP growth for 15 years. It will likely fall in the 4-5% range this year as it was last year. China has a self-inflicted population decline problem that the U.S. doesn't, which will weigh on China's future growth prospects.
Are China's numbers accurate? They've clearly had huge growth over the past few decades but the economic statistics are heavily manipulated at all levels and the raw data is kept secret. Top-down external estimates generally put real growth rates a bit lower.
Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word. I also think the fixation on Trump is misleading and takes away from the actual structural side effects of dollar issuance via unbacked fiat. It's convenient scapegoating to take your attention away from the long lingering issue of US dollar dominance and debt that is now causing large social divide and standard of living.
The physics of a reserve currency is that it reverts to zero through endless supply to fuel the engine to accelerate inequality at home and abroad. You see that an increasingly smaller club of people are politically opposed yet benefit by creating a narrative that takes your attention away from it.
This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.
It shouldn't require pointing out, but asset prices are not a measure of economic activity. Rain amount and air temperature aren't either, if somehow somebody needs that pointed too. Those are independent things.
You are describing stagflation, that is a kind of recession. Despite all the fundamentals pointing towards it for a while, the US hasn't seen a lot of inflation (at least yet), so that's not what is happening.
The stock market isn't the economy. Note that stock prices are denominated in dollars. If the dollar price of a stock doubles, but in the same time period the value of the dollar halves, then the stock's value hasn't gone up at all. Compare the price of the Dow Jones to to gold and its value peaked in 1999, and has been nosediving for the past 18 months[0]. The ratio right now is the same as it was in late 2008. Obviously gold isn't a perfect standard candle, but given that inflation has obviously been rampant in recent years, we should obviously treat any economic metric that does not control for inflation with healthy skepticism.
I’m as skeptical of fiat currencies as the next guy, but denominating in Bitcoin is the ultimate cherry pick.
The price of everything has crashed in the last 10 years when denominated in Bitcoin. If we measured GDP in Bitcoins, the statistics would show that we’re in an unprecedented depression.
Although the stock market isn't a reflection of the economy, the most relevant concern is the staggering 40TN+ of debt that can't ever go down as long as the dollar is the reserve currency and have no choice but to endlessly supply more dollars.
The issue with oil rising will make it completely impossible for the Federal Reserve to cut any rates and instead will either hold or raise them.
Then the stock market will have a problem; and those that have properties tied to their RSUs will start panicking.
This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.
Hardly. Those 'invented things' are invented for one purpose, to make the inventor money. That's how capitalism works.
Fun fact, let's say that tomorrow, all new credit was outlawed. And by law, all existing credit would require payments that took 3 years to pay off. In this fantasy world where we ignore mortgages, my point is that salaries would diminish.
Right now, the cost of everything a person buys is factored into salary costs. Take away interest, and all those 30% interest credit card debts would eventually no longer be part of your salary. This process takes years of course, but no one would issue credit cards, if every person defaulted on them, yet if you look at where salaries really go? With a lot of people, 30%+ goes to just holding debt.
> Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word.
It did under Biden as well yet nobody had any issues claiming the economy was in terrible shape and that we were entering a potential recession. Which frankly I agreed with! The stock market tells a fraction of the story. Especially because institutional investors now dominate investment in a way they didn’t only a few decades ago. A booming stock market does not benefit “the common man” like it once did unless one believes in trickle down economics or something. Employee pensions have become rare in the private sector, matched 401(k)s used for investment are also becoming more scarce. The stock market just isn’t tied to “the average person” like it once was, relatively speaking.
I do think Biden deserves immense blame for inflation getting out of control, but I also think as usual people overlooked what the Democrat president was handed, which was a Covid economy in this case. There was going to be fallout from that for years no matter what he did. No one blames Trump for the economy he handed off either.
Biden inherited COVID, which required a very accommodating policy response, but then had the AI/LLM spending/hiring boom surprise sort of overlap that, which turned out to be highly inflationary, but nobody was predicting that back in 2021. There really was no winning move to play without precise knowledge of future events. And Pandemic-era stimulus started under Trump (including Trump putting his name on the checks), and the Federal Reserve were the ones controlling monetary policy and financial sector support through the pandemic.
I don't see how you can say that he deserves "immense blame" for the inflation that we suffered. He was a passenger for most of it, and lacked a crystal ball to see the events of 2023 with the release of ChatGPT.
Unlike the current inflationary spike which is entirely due to an energy shock caused by a President starting a war of choice.
Maybe I need to go back and read some more there but my understanding was that the American Rescue Plan, in tandem with some of the stuff that you mentioned that I probably should’ve emphasized more, really drove inflation to new heights and arguably wasn’t necessary as Covid was winding down. Also a ton of spending on top of that.
You’re right though that I should emphasize Trump engaged a lot of the same behaviors. It’s certainly unambiguous that the current situation is entirely his fault.
Yeah, I probably grossly oversimplified that and forgot about a bunch of other factors. Stimulus was split about 50/50 between Trump and Biden. The ARP probably was a bit too large and contributed something like 1.5% to the eventual inflation spike. A lot of the inflation spike, though, was due to supply shocks, then energy shocks from Ukraine, then "revenge spending" demand shocks as society reopened with not enough goods and a lot of excess savings. Then we had the nascent AI tech hiring boom which was pushing up costs and housing in places like SF and Seattle. By 2024 we were well on our way into the current K-shaped economy with the hypersclar buildout driving inflation due to private sector spending (even in the face of the Fed hiking rates like crazy). Really it is likely that only about ~20% or less of the inflation under Biden was due to government spending.
It is true in 2024 that there was a hell of a lot of gaslighting going on that the economy was great for everyone and that we were having a "vibecession" and praising "Bidenomics" when the K-shaped economy was already appearing, and this DNC messaging effort clearly failed. But it also didn't have a lot to do with Biden, and arguably pushing the message that implicitly accepted that Biden was entirely responsible for the economic conditions of the previous 4 years was flawed and factually inaccurate messaging. Maybe it wouldn't have been possible to argue otherwise, but I do remember a lot of Democrats who argued that Trump's economy had relatively little to do with any of his policies in his first term. I similarly think that Biden had relatively little control over the economy in his term.
Currently, though, Trump pretty well owns this economy due to what his war with Iran is doing. He doesn't own the background of what is going on with AI and hyperscalar spending and the likely bubble and the inflationary pressure and K-shaped economy (although Republican tax cuts over the past 45+ years are cumulatively responsible for the K-shaped economy and Trump owns some of that), but Trump is doing his best to just pour gas over the economy and light it all on fire.
That thing that reassures me is that I kind of think most people in software aren't doing much useful work anyway, so if the whole thing was really driven by hiring the fewest humans possible to get the work done, companies probably could have fired half of us even without AI.
I think the bigger issue is that management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working. Output could be higher with less people but the situation that managers have crafted is the maximum number of people with minimum level of output. Not good.
The answer to every problem at my place is: more headcount, productivity drops further and further, more headcount, more headcount.
Because that's the incentive that management faces. Their promotion is dependent upon having more headcount under them. The key metric in their resume that determines which jobs they are qualified for is how many people did they manage. They don't personally pay for that headcount. If they meet some baseline of output people don't really ask questions (or are able to judge) whether that headcount was necessary. So of course they seek more headcount.
I suspect the economy would look very different if total headcount in a manager's org was the denominator in a manager's performance review, such that if you employ 10x as many people, you better have generated 10x as much profit. But this would also have lots of unintended consequences: management would be incentivized to employ as few people as possible, which means lots of people would be out of work and would be competing with your firm.
> management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working
they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest
This matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.
Think this is the FAANGs entering their stodgy middle life phase like Oracle et al did decades ago. Except for Google they haven't done anything innovative in like a decade. It's time to wring money out of the monopoly and buy companies to add to that.
This is the take nobody is ready for!
Everyone is under the illusion that growth is infinite and there are no periods where things jam to a halt and we get stagnation.
I agree that a lot of people aren’t working at 100% and a lot of the work was probably needless busywork.
I don’t think it’s reassuring the way this goes away from AI layoffs. Just like in life, you need downtime and boredom. This is when you learn and reflect and develop taste, this is where your team steals time when an “emergency” breaks out and someone gets paged over an outage. This is where you take time to mentor the younger employees.
Relatedly, it seems that AI is entrenching cumbersome processes because it’s easy to write that extra doc, compile those notes, etc. When you make a team more lean, you’re supposed to cut out the extra process and let people work in a high-trust environment. That’s why startups are fast - everything is low process and the business has to trust employees. As companies grow, they develop all sorts of bureaucracy as scar tissue. But layoffs and cuts fail if you keep that stuff along the way.
Most of the job losses are in tech and it all started back in late 2022 and early 2023 arguably before AI was perceived as a real threat. I think after 3 years of tech hiring melting because of all the economic uncertainty people can't see the forest for the trees anymore. Justy $0.02
There’s very little evidence of AI replacing jobs en mass.
There a ton of evidence that underperforming companies are trimming fat, with CEOs citing AI impacts rather than their own bad decisions that led to the fat that needed trimming.
Relative to the number of people they employ, yes they were underperforming. Most did rampant over-hiring during the pandemic and are simply correcting for that now.
AI is perfect for this because you get to sweep bad decisions you made under the rug and look like a forward-thinking visionary. Why would any CEO not blame their layoffs on AI, true or not?
This is intentional. Companies are actively trying to develop capabilities to replace humans. I am surprised there are not enough protests against this.
I am happy to see them replace humans with AI machines. However, housing, healthcare, and other insurances have become super expensive. Who is going to buy all the stuff these companies produce? Maybe, it will become a two tier economy: wealthy selling stuff to fellow wealthy people; under ground economy with bartering their trades for food, building shacks for living, flea market dentists, old Wild West style flea market medical doctors selling potions, elixirs, dry lizard oil, etc.
Exactly, the “economy” only matters because the ruling classes need the labor. If you could accomplish everything using machines you could have all the resources, beautiful vistas and global warming runway to yourself. Maybe some classical occupations exist like teachers, artisans, actors, sex workers so that the ruling class can still flex on each other.
Losses in job categories management can claim was related to AI.
Some management may even believe AI can fully replace all work done by those positions. In some of those cases they will learn they were mistaken. The eventual rehiring of some positions will happen unevenly over time, be attributed by management to "ongoing growth" and not be reported by the media.
Thats been mostly straightened out for years. This is tariffs, oil, and uncertainty more than anything.
When I worked in finance the thing that made the analysts happiest was a split election wherein neither side could accomplish much. We now have the opposite of that, and worse a capricious leader who makes huge changes without much justification or explanation. Pressing "shuffle" on the economic policy doesn't help anyone.
To finance the best government is the least effective government.
you just keep right on believing that but I'm on the front lines and we still have plenty of people that need to be laid off and we need a reason so AI is as good a reason as any other.
"Most" means "the greatest amount", or to be pedantic more than the alternative. In common usage it implies a number closer to 100%.
I believe I'm accurate in saying that most employers who overhired during COVID corrected long ago. Especially in tech. The layoffs have been ongoing since 2022. Wih more than 127k just in tech last year.[0] For most people COVID ended half a decade ago. Though technically the WHO called it in May of 2023, three years ago.
That's modern logic, sure, but Aristotelian logic argues otherwise.
I know it's not true yet of Amazon, Meta, and Google. They may say otherwise. TLAs say lots of things and hope you forget they ever said them when they are proven wrong, but all my idiot canaries for my claim remain in place in all three companies. Layoffs are a blunt force weapon and little warms the cockles of my heart more than knowing they are still draining that shareholder value(tm).
Yeah, the more data that comes out on the "AI employment disruption" the more it becomes apparent that AI is just an investor-friendly excuse to do the layoffs they were going to do anyway.
No executive will ever want to say they made poor decisions that resulted in overhiring.
Instead, someone else's fault.
The same way for awhile the failings of certain businesses "those damn millennials refusing to spend money here" instead of "we priced ourselves out of the market".
But by the investment contracts OpenAI announced, if they replaced every white collar job in the world and captured all of their salary, they would have a P/E of ~1/70. (Assuming no costs at all.)
You decide what return horizon you are comfortable with and solve the linear equation for it. (But my numbers are from the end of last year, I haven't seen any more recent compilation of their contracts.)
Could I please ask what stats you used?
Intuition says the valuation is too large and implies replacement, would be interesting to see something backing it up.
> A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025
A 0.2% drop seems more like too small to tell from statistical noise more that heavy.
It is quite clear that AI is only as useful as the person piloting it and therefore, if the job losses are due to AI, they are temporary. The C Suite folks spreading the batshit idea that AI can replace humans on LinkedIn will eventually lemming their way back to the correct side of reality.
I personally think that AI is being used as a convenient blanket to hide the plumes of smoke emanating from an economy engulfed in flames.
> saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025
So, the "AI job losses" just happen to be before AI started to boom, during the kickoff of largest trade war in 100 years?
They don't mention the trade war at all in the piece? And no analysis whatsoever of what other factors could have resulted in "customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople" being let go. Who the hell writes this crap? What was the point?
Not to worry. I've been assured many, many times that automation only ever creates more, better and higher paying jobs than it removes, and that no one but talentless bottom-feeding hacks are losing jobs to AI anyway, not the elite crème de la crème of HN. So the good times are on their way gentlemen!
We need a modern take of the movie "They Live". Granted, any copy would not be anywhere near as good as the original, even for a B movie, but AI is really turning into skynet (but it sucks).
If you're checking on open-registration internet forums (HackerNews in particular), you will never see "the people" wake up.
If you're arguing against "AI" on HackerNews, you might as well join the Washington Generals. You and your opinion are tolerated only as long as there is a more popular pro-AI opinion in the replies to your comment.
I'm not sure what 'film' America is trying to be but I've seen plenty of real life references that could have come straight from either the Handmaids Tale, Idiocracy, The Dead Zone or Civil War the past few years. Life does seem to imitate art sometimes.
30 years ago was the middle of the .com boom and white collar jobs had been around for a century already. White collar employment started with the industrial revolution and really took off during the post-WWII boom.
Figure has been doing a 75 hour live stream of it actually replacing a real job and it has that AI magic where it has gestures and movements that seem emergent. They’re coming for anything manual in less than 2 years.
It does not matter at this stage is an excuse for layoffs or not. The entire world should impose sanctions on the US for the largest IP theft in history until the laundering companies are illegal (and the waterways closed due to US wars are open).
If this administration works against its people and the whole world, maybe there should be a regime change. Peaceful version of Jan 6th. All the unemployed have little to lose.
Discussions about this topic need to separate "AI" and aAI.
- "AI" is a tool which workers use - usually to produce outputs of the same or lower quality faster. It needs a human to be constantly monitoring, steering and verifying it.
- aAI is actual AI - what sci-fi authors imagined and what ML companies promise. You ask aAI a question and it either gives you a complete, unbiased and correct answer or says why it cannot do that (insufficient information, not enough computing power, etc.). It doesn't ignore instructions or get stuck in a loop. It doesn't delete your database or exfiltrate secrets.
Obviously, this is a spectrum, not a hard division.
Crucially, "AI" is a tool for workers. aAI is a tool for owners - it replaces workers. Owners give aAI control over a company or some other form of capital and it monitors, steers and verifies humans, who will still be economically valuable for manual work, at least until robots catch up.
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All the people hyping AI either still see it as a tool ("AI", not aAI), not believing it will mature into aAI and replace them; or they are the owner class who will benefit from not having to pay wages while maintaining their passive income.
If most of your income comes from work (as opposed to passive income from ownership), you have 0 reason to be excited by AI. Your life will not be better if you lose your economic value.
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EDIT: If you disagree, you should be able to express why and we can have a rational discussion about it.
If you cannot express why, consider not participating in the discussion at all, not even by reducing the visibility of my opinion by downvoting it.
Non-paywall:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/us-is-starting-to-see-...
Every interaction I have with AI where I previously would’ve interacted with a person is worse. Whether that’s something mundane like scheduling an appointment, use at a doctor’s office, chat support. I imagine it’s cheaper for the company deploying it, but it’s all bad. It lines up with companies being more concerned with investors than actual users and customers though.
Ah, but it's cheaper. Replace "AI" with "auto parts" or "store food" and you see the same thing. Replace "AI" with "police force" or "contractors" and it's the same thing.
Why is everyone and everything getting worse? A sort of "Prisoner's dilemma" I suppose: no one wants to take a stand and lose their business edge just for principles sake.
This is why a political solution is the only way forward. I’m optimistic that people are finally fed up but who knows.
What sort of political solution is there? What intervention could roll this back?
Taxes.
If these companies can afford $trillions, then the government can collect some dues that can fund retraining programs or whatever.
Taxes on what? Corps are famously good at burying profits under expenditure and mergers.
And what are you retraining to? We've long abandoned serious manufacturing and mining. Most people's job is the application of knowledge and communication and LLMs are coming for them all. From retail and call centres through to doctors and lawyers.
We can't all retrain as plumbers, waiters and surgeons.
> Corps are famously good at burying profits under expenditure and mergers
Cool. Let's start with taxing those, or any other place where they bury or hide from taxes. Thanks for the suggestion.
We can also tax on the numbers of job losses vs capital expenditures. IE: if you spend a $Billion on stuff while firing tons of workers, you get taxed more.
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As far as retraining: easy solution. Whatever people want to retrain to. The details will work themselves out. The important tidbit is to have large scale mass retraining if this really is the future.
It's not like the government forced me into my current job. I'm more than capable of choosing a new field myself.
And if YOU can't see the possibilities, them you don't have to take the retraining program. But from my perspective, there's plenty of work needed in the USA to improve our country. Plenty of problems to solve.
yea, historically in the United States we have been successfully solving all our problems by collecting more taxes. nothing more efficient than giving money to our Government
What was our tax rate that got rid of our WW2 debt?
Taxes definitely solved that problem. And it even brought about the golden age of post WW2 US economy.
The correct taxes in the correct areas serve as an incentive structure to help encourage businesses and individuals to make good decisions. At least, that's what we did 80 years ago.
Taxes would not make top-10 reasons for post WWII “golden age.”
The US Government is at present (without any chances of this being fixed ever again) about the least efficient entity that exists on the Planet Earth and giving it more money will not solve any problem. It will be used though but one of the two political parties to win election(s) and kill any tax law that was previously put in place
That's not what I asked
I asked what was the tax rate that got rid of our WW2 debt.
The golden age thing is an aside. Just a reminder that you can't call 1950s America weak on the world stage.
> The US Government is at present (without any chances of this being fixed ever again) about the least efficient entity that exists on the Planet Earth and giving it more money will not solve any problem
Taxes directly solve the debt and deficit problem. Period.
Let's start with things one step at a time. Now that we've had 40 years of trying to drown the budget in a bathtub (and only ballooning our debt), we should seriously start trying something different.
As opposed to unleashing tech folks on institutions to destroy them, increase costs and cause hundreds of thousands of deaths?
much of our current economic and social problems stem from efforts to collect _less_ takes from corporations and the wealthy. So yeah, collecting more taxes -- from those who can afford it -- would make a big difference.
Couldn't think of a more incorrect diagnosis if I tried. State government budgets have been ballooning for the last decade; but political leaders don't give a shit about tracking outcomes, only celebrating starting things and how much money they spend.
except that it wouldn’t. this is just another type of political shit that was put together by politicians here to fuck with us.
if your family is running a budget deficit, there are two ways to mitigate it
- make more money (drive uber and pizza (at the same time to make double money at night) or get a higher paying job
- stop spending so much fucking money
it seems politically, the left-leaning part of the countries and political party will make you believe that we just need to make more money, give that money to the Federal Government and all our problems will magically disappear.
the right-leaning part of the country and its politicians will make you believe that rich already pay a lot more than most (they do) and that taxing corporations makes no fucking sense (it doesn’t in general).
neither party actually gives a shit about the fact that country is drowning in debt which will eventually be its undoing (those who study history know this as absolute certainty), they are just looking for where more votes are there to be had
Families don’t print the currency they owe their debt in, they don’t owe the their debt to themselves, and they also aren’t the largest employer and consumer in their economy, so the comparison doesn’t work.
yes it does, if you understand middle school economics
Middle school economics is a simplified model that children can understand, but just like Newtonian physics, middle economics becomes less useful past a certain scale.
> make more money > stop spending so much fucking money
I'm all in favor of this but part 1 has been made politically toxic for decades, and part 2 only seems to be taken seriously when the Other Guys are in power.
For example, in the US I simply cant take the Republican party's fiscal opinions seriously when they bleat about the debt on the one hand and yet dont blink when asked to fund another foreign war.
republicans are much much bigger spenders than democrats by miles. they are “anti socialism” publicly but are 2nd largest socialist party on the planet (behind china).
"Socialism" isn't just "the government spending money".
In order to be socialism, it has to be spending money specifically to help the people, and broadly to reduce inequality.
Republicans do not do that, by any stretch of the imagination.
"Socialism is when the government gives tax breaks to the rich and destroys public institutions". And calling China "socialist" is rich when it's probably the most ruthlessly capitalistic nation on the planet, where worker unions are straight up illegal.
The West saw its golden age when redistributive taxation was maximum. We have to get back to that, or the country will continue to agonize under crumbling infrastructure and failing institutions.
What intervention could <roll back the industrial revolution>?
On the technical side, perhaps none. But countless people in the labor movement spilled blood for their rights and dignity. Maybe something similar will be needed here, too.
Datacenters.
A lot of enshittification is driven by market consolidation. I really don't want my economic interactions to be with massive chains in a race to the bottom. The cure is to enable new competitors to offer alternatives. It starts with anti-trust but also includes reducing regulations and barriers to market entry. And maybe not so many billion-dollar, me-too AI investments and more focus on things like building delivering healthcare cheaply.
If you're competitors are doing it and your clients keep returning there's no downside.
So long as it achieves something and saves money, great.
I do feel from my own anecdotal experience, they're getting better, it's hit and miss but still some terrible implementations out there.
Mine hasn't. I've been subjected to the lowest common denominator of employable humanity because of cost savings measures from companies. I'd far rather interact with an "LLM" powered support agent than a human who cannot even comprehend the language and is just following a scripted prompt. The LLM has more agency at this point than the human support personnel.
I had a car dealership, used an AI agent to set up an appointment. It was so efficient. It's the only reason I asked if it were a real human. It was not. Far better than the norm
They’re ok at routing you to a human when you pester them repeatedly. My parents are in their 60s and loathe dealing with it.
The reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.
I’ve had a longstanding belief that big tech purposely over-employed because it denied resources to competitors. This gave them a velocity edge despite being big and bureaucratic. In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.
I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.
Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.
This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable
Yes, they played a zero sum growth game and seeked acquisition and stock price increase. That ended. That explains most tech layoffs in the past few years.
Dose AI really raise productivity floor that much? Do we have some good example of that?
No because these people were held back by a lack of vision and poor project selection. Not this other stuff that people think.
Vision cannot be bought (thankfully).
A small team led by a real visionary can achieve much more than these bloated tech firms.
This is very true and has been for a while. AI is just giving CEOs an excuse to just trim that fat.
Even after layoffs most of big tech could cut 50% of its workforce tomorrow and see minimal impact long term. Thats driving a lot of the present layoffs as CEOs go “oh crap we gotta look like we’re with the cool kids on this AI stuff”… and then just do a big cut and cite AI. Truth is they could have cut years ago but had no social pressure to do so.
Have you read the article? This is about professions like paralegals or translators, not engineers.
Whenever articles like this come out, tons of the comments are just general zeitgeist responses about "corporate layoffs that blame AI". Which I think is a particular shame in this instance because I think the article narrows in with some actual good evidence that yes, there are vulnerable roles that AI is wholesale replacing and not leading to a "employees will just do more as they become more productive with AI" outcome.
Looking through the list of those professions, I would bet that nearly half of them won't even exist anymore except for some extremely niche cases. Paralegals, translators, credit authorizers, many types of secretaries - AI can basically do nearly all the work for many of these occupations.
Yeah, its basically a list of the subset of white collar busywork that was mechanical but for some reason not automatable with regular programming.
Some or them like translators or graphic designers are kinda risky. Translating instruction manuals for sure is going the way of the dodo, but there is a ton of work in translating literature that shouldn't go away, it's its own art form. No coincidence that we're still publishing new translations of the Odyssey.
I think the art world has a problem in that they were surviving by making art-adjacent material, where people wanted content more than art and won't care about the loss of quality. Corporate logos, ad jingles, etc.
I didn't say anything about engineers. Big tech over employs across all professions.
But in any case the primary source mentions tech: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...
I think Jensen Huang said this recently, and I've had a similar opinion for a while, but a lot of companies seem uncreative with how they use their employees. like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects :shrug:
> like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects
Wow, I really hope that you're just too young to remember when Google famously invested in tons of "let's see what happens" projects. Google X projects is still a thing: https://x.company/projects/. And important things like Waymo came out of these Google moonshot projects.
Still, I think your comment also just shows how much Google has changed in the past 15 years. A lot of those projects on that x.company website are dead, and of course Google is also famous for killing projects that don't become huge, even if they're useful to lots of people.
I bet Jensens thinks everyone working at Nvidia is crucial, and his reports hit the perfect balance of efficiency, continuity and growth. Classic Fundamental attribution error.
Okay but - if an industry can afford more employees than it has is there a real reason not to have them? Aside from shareholder greed etc.
Yes because the most optimized company builds the most wealth and power and puts you out of business or destroys you.
If this was true, the big tech companies would be the most optimized. Maybe efficiency isn't the biggest factor.
Power is the biggest factor. Efficiency helps. I bet they're more efficient than most people think, it just doesn't scale linearly.
Most optimized company would have 0 employees and only shareholder value.
In principle it's possible to have a company with no employees and all work done by vendors / contractors. But in practice this usually turns out to be less optimized than having at least some regular employees due to transaction costs. Organizational optimization is always a balancing act.
Not an unreasonable question in isolation, but "greed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People's retirement accounts include shares in businesses because they expect those businesses to pursue profit and act in their interests as shareholders. If they didn't, people would rightfully pull their money and put it into more responsible businesses (or savings accounts, etc.). Charities and publicly funded social programs exist too, but those are different things.
Tech as a whole may not have too many employees, it's just Big Tech that has too many. If those employees were distributed among many more smaller companies the tech market as a whole would be much more competitive.
Adds more coordination…
IMO, rather than hiring more people than necessary, we should have a safety-net so that our society isn’t structured around “work or die.” I bet we’d see much lower admin costs at that point, as people aren’t incentivized to find less-essential tasks.
What is "shareholder greed"? They're not running a charity.
This a ridiculous view. It’s literally everywhere. Wanting to make money is one thing. Complete disregard for how you make it is another.
As usual, there is a level of disconnect given the complexity and anonymity of the financial system.
"Shareholders" are often people who invested in fonds which invested in fonds and they are thus several steps of separation from the final invested corporation. They only want their pensions to be stable, and de-facto own tiny slivers of hundreds of corporations, maybe not even exactly knowing which ones.
That detaches them mentally from those corporations, much like when you go to a restaurant and eat the food without being particularly bothered whether the cilantro in your soup, supplied by a large-scale supplier and imported from another country, didn't originate in conditions worse than typical for that developing country.
Modern civilization is so complex that if you wanted to check conditions of every vendor of everything you consume, you'd simply not have enough time and energy to do so.
I am typing this on a Dell laptop; should I be particularly interested in what happens in every Dell supplier which contributed to building of that laptop? Are you? I just bought it and started working on it; we may certainly call this "complete disregard".
They're not doing anything illegal.
Naive at best; Your statement doesn’t exclude greed as a driving factor. The legality of actions have nothing to do with the morality underlying them.
There's nothing immoral here. Shareholders aren't morally obligated to provide extra jobs for people who aren't adding value.
If your only guide to ethics is the law, you have utterly failed at ethics.
One reason would be that if they can create more value in another industry
Each of those employees is a liability, for various reasons, not just financial. Even if their salaries were completely subsidized by the state, there are many problems that come from having a very large number of employees. Firstly, there is more coordination overhead, and that is not great. Secondly, people are very political and very envious, and that has a corrosive effect on, well everything. Thirdly, people are (justifiably) afraid of getting laid off, which results in decisions that are sub-optimal or even illogical. Fourthly, people tend to only spend a few years at companies before moving on (for a pay-increase), which disincentivizes companies to hire more, and it incentivizes companies/management (and even employees) to engage in a kind of performative conformity designed to signal replace-ability (this effectively means that many companies are going to choose to do whatever everyone else is doing, instead of the unusual thing that will likely work better -- think of it as cargo-cult entrepreneurship/management/engineering). Fifthly, those engineers that leave take with them the knowledge and technology that they built up at a different employer and launder[1] it to their next employer. Sixthly, larger teams tend to produce more code per feature, and tend not to abstract/compress aggressively (which requires actually having a holistic understanding of the product), which means that team-sizes are likely to keep growing until the company's revenues stop growing. Put differently, enshittification and sloppification naturally emerge from the dynamics of how the majority of the industry works, and LLMs have simply automated it[2].
The solution may be to modify the incentives. Maybe federally cap all salaries to 90k or so, to filter out the serial job-hoppers and con-artists, and to also prevent poaching and "nerd-hoarding"[3]. Has the additional benefit of forcing rents and property prices to go down, and stops gentrification in its tracks (I mean I would expect this to be partially true, though it might force people to instead seek massive loans to compensate -- which should also be capped by salary to prevent it). And since we are already talking about federal limits, maybe a federal guarantee that covers healthcare and housing would further improve things.
[1]: This depends on context. If the IP is already open source, then there is no laundering. But I know people who have been building the same software system for the last 3 employers, and they do it (ostensibly) from scratch each time (but in fact they are permuting/improving the old version -- which does not actually belong to them -- and are over-reporting how much time they spent working on it). My point here is not that employees are ruthless rogues, but rather that the incentives are set up in a way that encourages the rapid dilution of the value of IP (it is effectively non-exclusive, which makes industrial espionage _unnecessary_), and discourages any kind of mutual responsibility between employer and employee (in a different knowledge-work field, I hear from a friend, seniors give juniors only minimal training because they do not expect to have to deal with them in two years -- and this was true since at least 2017, and has only gotten more true since 2020).
[2]: With or without LLMs, the biggest winners of this dynamic are the quasi-monopolies (or, more precisely oligopolies and duopolies), like MSFT, GOOG, META, etc. Everyone else will lose, and if they happen to win, they will get acquired (not for the tech, which is probably slop anyway and cannot run at hyperscales, but for the clients/customers/users -- why else would MSFT buy LinkedIn and GitHub, why else would startup incubators like YC be such a huge success (I doubt YC would have been possible in the 70s or 80s)). Software is awesome, and I love it, but the software _industry_ has always been an operation designed to extract money and data from the populace, using deceptive and predatory practices (see: Uber, Theranos, Celsius, Alameda for outright fraud, and Oracle for mere deception and plunder).
[3]: Sorry, could not think of a better term. The idea is basically the corporate equivalent of nerd-sniping, but instead of sniping by offering interesting problems/puzzles, you snipe by offering large paychecks and golden handcuffs.
I like your take and ideas. Not sure about capped income because that seems like a reward for the capital owning class.
I've seen the phenomena of people moving and redoing the same tech idea multiple times. I'm pretty convinced that is a negative for the industry. The seem to move on to get another chance at their idea after it becomes contaminated by reality at each employer, destroying a string of organizations with some "pure" vision of some architecture or another.
An alternative to a capped income, would be that every income gets "inflated" by as much as needed until it reaches parity with big-tech incomes, which would require a kind of transnational union, but would have the effect of reversing the direction of extraction. Also, printing that money to inflate the income, would also cause asset-inflation, which also benefits people who own a life-changing amount of capital/assets. But _if_ you could cap asset-prices, then the inflation strategy might work. Note that I have not modeled this particular scenario yet.
This has been true for many years though
It’s been true since pre llm’s.
In retrospect look at the graveyard filled with projects - this is a reflection of over hiring and poor project selection.
I'm at that point in my working life that I don't care about AI but I'd hate to be starting out or mid-career where I need to pay attention. I sometimes wonder if the glory years of tech are drawing to a close and it's time to draw a line under it before it changes too much. AI has tentacles into everything but the reason I do this career is that certain areas of work provide enjoyment. If AI takes that away then I would care less to do the job and be less invested to go the extra yard. I feel there's goodwill in employees that will get sucked out the more AI intrudes into our daily lives.
I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.
I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda
I've been reading this same comment non-stop for the last five years.
No surprise, it has been true for a while.
It actually makes me very skeptical of your thesis - broadly discussed facts don't usually need to be wrapped in "nobody wants to talk about this, but everyone knows it's true".
Almost like the whole “learn how to code” thing was a play. Commoditize your complement and all.
h1b and outsourcing will also go down on the tech side.
the group got hit the hardest is gen-z tech graduates, no fixes ahead for them,sigh
And yet up until a few years ago there were all these forecasts about how we would be short xxxx SWEs
For a long time this was compounded by a "better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in" strategy, where you hired people to deny them to your competition and then invented things for them to do. If it turns out whole segments are in fact pointless then the endgame could be truly nuts.
That was never a major factor in employment statistics. Only a handful of the most profitable tech companies ever had the financial resources to even attempt that strategy, and only for a small fraction of their employees.
At FAANG it has been huge. Whole departments/products/divisions level, including many of the most expensive employees.
There are reasons so many products get made to go precisely nowhere, because no one ever seriously intended for them to do otherwise. There are even cases where things succeeded by accident which were not supposed to and then have to be redone properly.
As observed in another (more eloquent) comment here making the same point
> In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.
This is completely right.
Even if your claim was true (and I don't really believe it) we're still talking about a tiny fraction of the overall tech labor market. The impact is insignificant.
> A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025, according to annual data published Friday. That compared with an increase in overall employment of 0.8% over the same period.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm
The article that flags AI risk still projects that the top 15 growth employment through 2033 contains software related jobs like Computer / Information Research Scientists, Data Scientists, Operations Research analysts.
Have past BLS predictions proved accurate?
Planet Money just did an episode on this. The answer is, at least according to this, yes, pretty accurate. At least in the past https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5815308
But wasn't the BLS the organization that Trump fired and replaced all the leaders of recently, for putting out (accurate) reports that made him look bad?
Relatively accurate (I think they're pretty close like 70%+ of the time). Significantly better than just projecting that the next five years will be like the last 5 years.
Yes in the long term. Sometimes they will get surprised by unexpected events (Covid) but you can’t blame them when their tourism and hospitality numbers are wildly wrong when that happens.
What everyone probably wants to know:
Affected occupations: procurement clerks, credit authorizers, checkers, and clerks, customer service representatives, nonmedical secretaries and administrative assistants, sales engineers, insurance sales agents, other types of sales representatives, paralegals and legal assistants, translators and interpreters, graphic designers, models, technical writers, broadcast announcers and radio DJs.
Benefitting occupations: computer and information research scientists, data scientists, and software developers. It also says AI/cloud/data growth supports demand for data-related work such as operations research analysts and actuaries.
I think people are blaming AI for a recession caused by trump’s tarrifs and the oil crisis. Businesses fear that oil prices may explode until enough of the economy enters a recession that oil demand decreases, and are already feeling the supply crunch
This comment is completely divorced from the facts given in the article.
The main point is that certain types of jobs like customer service reps, secretaries and sales people are being disproportionately affected. If it was just general fears about the economy overall one would expect a more broad-based impact.
Salespeople feels more like a leading indicator of concerns about a recession than AI getting good. They're a profit centre, not a cost centre and AI automating prospecting some aspects of leadgen and the necessary but low value add stuff like meeting notes and formatting proposals should make them more productive not redundant, if anyone's buying. And AI is somewhere between very bad and completely incapable of most other aspects of their job (product demos, networking, in-person meetings, negotiating)
Especially when it's actually "services sales jobs a little up, manufacturing a little down"...
I think it's more likely an interaction of both. Tariffs and recession lead to companies looking for ways to save money, and AI is both a convenient excuse for reducing headcount, and at least in some cases may actually reducing headcount without hurting productivity too much.
Those are the same roles that get axed first in any recession. Anything under “SG&A” is overhead that can be reduced.
Indeed, it's exactly what you'd expect if more people quit buying stuff.
Sales people sure, but secretaries and support staff?
Customer support? Clearly the first to be cut if there are fewer customers to support, and in any case considered completely expendable and optional. Internal support roles? Also extremely expendable from your average management's perspective.
Maybe I just don’t know how the business works. Many of the support calls that I make are for things or services that I’ve had for a while, not just purchased. So I expected that to be more of a trailing indicator rather than the first area hit.
Wait, secretaries still exist? I would have figured in the era of word processors that such jobs would be few to nonexistent.
A good secretary is huge force-multiplier.
Seniors in my org still have them and they make things happen, partly through being able to use the senior's name to open doors and force action but mostly though their deep organisational knowledge.
All a boss has to say is "I need everyone involved in Project X in a meeting in London next week" and it's done, the boss just gets told when and where to get into a car.
Facts, the last installment (6) of "Secretary's Day" came out in 2013.
If you replace customer service with LLMs I will look for a way to stop doing business with you.
Why care if "unthinking execution of a generic customer service script" is performed by an interpreter made of silicon or flesh?
Neither has any free will to deviate from the script. Both are useless in any case that's not handled by the script. The silicon one has better wait times though.
because the customer doesn't get to pretend that if they got angry enough, a real live person could be made to suffer by being fired. if anything, making the humans follow the canned responses only encourages this thirst for revenge in the customer. now THAT'S efficiency!
Why care if I spend my money with you or someone I perceive to provide better service?
I mean, it's my money, you need to justify your reasons for deserving it.
Competitors will be using LLM too.
You will probably be in the minority, and that minority will keep shrinking as AI keeps improving.
People already have to bear with deeply customer-hostile "support". I'd love to think that companies can't make it any worse than it already is, but realistically I know they're going to do just that.
Oh no. My decisions are unpopular. This has zero bearing on them.
Your other comments seem to imply that you believe that your decisions are popular, i.e. a customer base that hates you.
The number of businesses you can switch to is quickly diminishing.
True; however, that will not stop me from trying.
I mean, if you _want_ a customer base that hates you and will leave the very minute something better comes along, I guess you can choose to do that. I just have no idea why you would.
Are the jobs going away because of AI being applied or is AI being applied because those jobs are going away? You see lots of life jackets being worn as a ship is sinking; doesn't mean people putting on the life jackets made the ship sink.
In economies that revolve around credit/debt (the US), once credit stops EXPANDING, that's a huge force pushing the economy down.
If everyone's already taken on as much debt as they can, and interest rates aren't consistently marching lower for ~25 straight years, it's going to be a little harder to grow.
Doesn't make it impossible, just harder.
We're paying for growth we got 25 years ago now.
Wish we invested that money better. You can't change the past. But you can change the future.
This is precisely why DJT wants to control the Fed and lower interest rates. It would be a short-term win for him and the economy.
At the expense of much worse inflation..
Unfortunately we get the inflation anyway from military action in/around Iran.
The future will certainly change things, but who can change the direction of a tidal wave? It will go where it wants, not where we want. The best a single individual can do is flee to higher ground.
Unless you happen to have a media empire at your disposal. Maybe then you can change the future. The problem is that those people are changing things for the worse.
We have an invention that aims to replace labor and employers want nothing more than to replace labor. It's silly to pretend that AI isn't responsible. But you're right that an incompetent administration is piling on with additional factors.
AI isn't ready to replace us but employers are more than ready to use it as cover for laying off all the dingdongs they hired during the pandemic. I give up. I'm rich and out of f***s and the hilarity of VC approaching me to invest in their idiocy will never be lost on me given they wouldn't spare a dime when I was a disruptive young turk.
The overall US economy is less impacted by higher oil prices than ever before. As a net oil exporter now in a way it's actually a positive, although the effects vary by sector.
The fact that the US is a net exporter is irrelevant to the impact of much higher oil and gas prices across the economy.
Also, supply chain shortages will continue to impact us - they are not even beginning to reach our shores.
^ this! And higher interest rates than before Over hiring from Covid is still an overhang
At this point, the interest rates have been around for quite a while and the ultralow rates after the GFC should not be treated as any kind of norm.
GDP is not suffering — quite the opposite, 2% real annual growth in Q1 — so recession is definitionally inaccurate.
We’ll need new terms if Musk and Altman make infinity GDP and everyone else is unemployable.
How about "permanent underclass"?
More like Dario rather than Musk and Altman. Anthropic is much more likely to be a monopoly, and they are also pushing hard for regulatory capture with their whole false superiority on ethics, safety, morals etc.
Let's use percentage of people below the poverty line ( the actual poverty line is estimated between 97k(single) - 145k(family with children)
Anybody reading hackernews that cares about GDP growth is profoundly misinformed.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-needed-get-ahead-145k-ha...
As a Brit, it seems hilarious that a single person with an income of $97k would be on the poverty line. That's more than double the median income for all households in the UK. A lot of Americans don't seem to realise how fantastically wealthy they are compared to the rest of the world.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
That’s a completely absurd number. No single person making just under $100k a year is living in poverty. Even in a high cost of living area.
The article also repeatedly discussed median salaries, but average costs.
And it includes full time daycare costs for young children that only last for a few years.
Also housing prices are high but you can certainly afford an apartment as a single person making $100k a year. But if you want to save, having a roommate doesn’t mean you are living in poverty.
But they need to pay for college for their non-existent kids!!!
Sometimes these puff-pieces blow my mind.
It's more than most Americans make by a large margin.
Comparing countries can be relatively pointless because of all the differences. It only matters if you can obtain money in one country and spend it in another.
The main way these numbers are gamed is by finagling with healthcare and post-secondary education, each of which can be as high or as low as you want, depending on what you’re torturing the numbers to confess.
$97k per year isn’t that much when health insurance premiums are $500 to $1,500 per person per month with $5k to $15k annual out of pocket maximums. You have to build up decent savings to ensure you can take care of yourself for when you lose your income.
This doesn't look like too expensive if you compare it with Switzerland or with Germany assuming similar annual income. In Switzerland unlike in US your children stay on your plan until they turn 18, not 26 like in US. In both Germany and Switzerland, health insurance is mandatory and not employer-based - so you cannot simply say "no". In fact, in Germany you pay much more than in US as a share of your income, especially if your income is at least like 30% more than a national median: 1000+ EUR is a minimum per person per month (probably higher today). It doesn't cover dental care - you will pay in full - that's why many people travel to Turkey, or Eastern Europe, or to Baltic countries - just to take some dental care - which is extremely expensive in any German speaking country - we are talking about multiple months of your income after taxes.
2% is not the opposite of suffering. It's suffering-adjacent. It loses ground to China.
The US GDP per capita is still well ahead of China. The fact that China is catching up is not a problem for the US.
On its own terms, 2% isn't great. It's kind of the bare minimum. Anything less is losing ground in absolute terms, since that's the target for inflation as well.
That's also assuming the number is trustworthy. The number is a mediocre metric to start with, and I don't trust the administration to be calculating it correctly. They have shot the messenger more than once, after which the messages started to improve with no change in policy.
I would also not that China's numbers are even more opaque and less reliable.
GDP per Capita is average which is also misleading.
To be clear, the 2% number was real growth, ie accounting for inflation
Real GDP growth in Q4 was 0.5%, so it’s a heck of a lot better than that.
2% is average for past decade+.
Sure but China had double digit numbers for decades. 2% doesn't cut it unless you want your grandkids speaking Mandarin.
China hasn't seen 10% GDP growth for 15 years. It will likely fall in the 4-5% range this year as it was last year. China has a self-inflicted population decline problem that the U.S. doesn't, which will weigh on China's future growth prospects.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
Are China's numbers accurate? They've clearly had huge growth over the past few decades but the economic statistics are heavily manipulated at all levels and the raw data is kept secret. Top-down external estimates generally put real growth rates a bit lower.
GDP can be misleading. Lots of things are double counted.
Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word. I also think the fixation on Trump is misleading and takes away from the actual structural side effects of dollar issuance via unbacked fiat. It's convenient scapegoating to take your attention away from the long lingering issue of US dollar dominance and debt that is now causing large social divide and standard of living.
The physics of a reserve currency is that it reverts to zero through endless supply to fuel the engine to accelerate inequality at home and abroad. You see that an increasingly smaller club of people are politically opposed yet benefit by creating a narrative that takes your attention away from it.
This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.
It shouldn't require pointing out, but asset prices are not a measure of economic activity. Rain amount and air temperature aren't either, if somehow somebody needs that pointed too. Those are independent things.
You are describing stagflation, that is a kind of recession. Despite all the fundamentals pointing towards it for a while, the US hasn't seen a lot of inflation (at least yet), so that's not what is happening.
The stock market isn't the economy. Note that stock prices are denominated in dollars. If the dollar price of a stock doubles, but in the same time period the value of the dollar halves, then the stock's value hasn't gone up at all. Compare the price of the Dow Jones to to gold and its value peaked in 1999, and has been nosediving for the past 18 months[0]. The ratio right now is the same as it was in late 2008. Obviously gold isn't a perfect standard candle, but given that inflation has obviously been rampant in recent years, we should obviously treat any economic metric that does not control for inflation with healthy skepticism.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-...
Cool. Now use the value of a dollar denominated in Bitcoin. Or do you only like cherry picking your statistics?
I’m as skeptical of fiat currencies as the next guy, but denominating in Bitcoin is the ultimate cherry pick.
The price of everything has crashed in the last 10 years when denominated in Bitcoin. If we measured GDP in Bitcoins, the statistics would show that we’re in an unprecedented depression.
Note for others - "ATH" => "All-Time High"
Also the IATA code for the Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos, could have meant one or the other, no way to know which.
Well said.
Although the stock market isn't a reflection of the economy, the most relevant concern is the staggering 40TN+ of debt that can't ever go down as long as the dollar is the reserve currency and have no choice but to endlessly supply more dollars.
The issue with oil rising will make it completely impossible for the Federal Reserve to cut any rates and instead will either hold or raise them.
Then the stock market will have a problem; and those that have properties tied to their RSUs will start panicking.
This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.
Hardly. Those 'invented things' are invented for one purpose, to make the inventor money. That's how capitalism works.
Fun fact, let's say that tomorrow, all new credit was outlawed. And by law, all existing credit would require payments that took 3 years to pay off. In this fantasy world where we ignore mortgages, my point is that salaries would diminish.
Right now, the cost of everything a person buys is factored into salary costs. Take away interest, and all those 30% interest credit card debts would eventually no longer be part of your salary. This process takes years of course, but no one would issue credit cards, if every person defaulted on them, yet if you look at where salaries really go? With a lot of people, 30%+ goes to just holding debt.
> Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word.
It did under Biden as well yet nobody had any issues claiming the economy was in terrible shape and that we were entering a potential recession. Which frankly I agreed with! The stock market tells a fraction of the story. Especially because institutional investors now dominate investment in a way they didn’t only a few decades ago. A booming stock market does not benefit “the common man” like it once did unless one believes in trickle down economics or something. Employee pensions have become rare in the private sector, matched 401(k)s used for investment are also becoming more scarce. The stock market just isn’t tied to “the average person” like it once was, relatively speaking.
I do think Biden deserves immense blame for inflation getting out of control, but I also think as usual people overlooked what the Democrat president was handed, which was a Covid economy in this case. There was going to be fallout from that for years no matter what he did. No one blames Trump for the economy he handed off either.
Biden inherited COVID, which required a very accommodating policy response, but then had the AI/LLM spending/hiring boom surprise sort of overlap that, which turned out to be highly inflationary, but nobody was predicting that back in 2021. There really was no winning move to play without precise knowledge of future events. And Pandemic-era stimulus started under Trump (including Trump putting his name on the checks), and the Federal Reserve were the ones controlling monetary policy and financial sector support through the pandemic.
I don't see how you can say that he deserves "immense blame" for the inflation that we suffered. He was a passenger for most of it, and lacked a crystal ball to see the events of 2023 with the release of ChatGPT.
Unlike the current inflationary spike which is entirely due to an energy shock caused by a President starting a war of choice.
Maybe I need to go back and read some more there but my understanding was that the American Rescue Plan, in tandem with some of the stuff that you mentioned that I probably should’ve emphasized more, really drove inflation to new heights and arguably wasn’t necessary as Covid was winding down. Also a ton of spending on top of that.
You’re right though that I should emphasize Trump engaged a lot of the same behaviors. It’s certainly unambiguous that the current situation is entirely his fault.
Yeah, I probably grossly oversimplified that and forgot about a bunch of other factors. Stimulus was split about 50/50 between Trump and Biden. The ARP probably was a bit too large and contributed something like 1.5% to the eventual inflation spike. A lot of the inflation spike, though, was due to supply shocks, then energy shocks from Ukraine, then "revenge spending" demand shocks as society reopened with not enough goods and a lot of excess savings. Then we had the nascent AI tech hiring boom which was pushing up costs and housing in places like SF and Seattle. By 2024 we were well on our way into the current K-shaped economy with the hypersclar buildout driving inflation due to private sector spending (even in the face of the Fed hiking rates like crazy). Really it is likely that only about ~20% or less of the inflation under Biden was due to government spending.
It is true in 2024 that there was a hell of a lot of gaslighting going on that the economy was great for everyone and that we were having a "vibecession" and praising "Bidenomics" when the K-shaped economy was already appearing, and this DNC messaging effort clearly failed. But it also didn't have a lot to do with Biden, and arguably pushing the message that implicitly accepted that Biden was entirely responsible for the economic conditions of the previous 4 years was flawed and factually inaccurate messaging. Maybe it wouldn't have been possible to argue otherwise, but I do remember a lot of Democrats who argued that Trump's economy had relatively little to do with any of his policies in his first term. I similarly think that Biden had relatively little control over the economy in his term.
Currently, though, Trump pretty well owns this economy due to what his war with Iran is doing. He doesn't own the background of what is going on with AI and hyperscalar spending and the likely bubble and the inflationary pressure and K-shaped economy (although Republican tax cuts over the past 45+ years are cumulatively responsible for the K-shaped economy and Trump owns some of that), but Trump is doing his best to just pour gas over the economy and light it all on fire.
I think this is the first nuanced conversation about Biden and Trump I’ve had in years and I greatly appreciate it
That thing that reassures me is that I kind of think most people in software aren't doing much useful work anyway, so if the whole thing was really driven by hiring the fewest humans possible to get the work done, companies probably could have fired half of us even without AI.
I think the bigger issue is that management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working. Output could be higher with less people but the situation that managers have crafted is the maximum number of people with minimum level of output. Not good.
The answer to every problem at my place is: more headcount, productivity drops further and further, more headcount, more headcount.
Because that's the incentive that management faces. Their promotion is dependent upon having more headcount under them. The key metric in their resume that determines which jobs they are qualified for is how many people did they manage. They don't personally pay for that headcount. If they meet some baseline of output people don't really ask questions (or are able to judge) whether that headcount was necessary. So of course they seek more headcount.
I suspect the economy would look very different if total headcount in a manager's org was the denominator in a manager's performance review, such that if you employ 10x as many people, you better have generated 10x as much profit. But this would also have lots of unintended consequences: management would be incentivized to employ as few people as possible, which means lots of people would be out of work and would be competing with your firm.
> management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working
they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest
This matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.
Think this is the FAANGs entering their stodgy middle life phase like Oracle et al did decades ago. Except for Google they haven't done anything innovative in like a decade. It's time to wring money out of the monopoly and buy companies to add to that.
This is the take nobody is ready for! Everyone is under the illusion that growth is infinite and there are no periods where things jam to a halt and we get stagnation.
I agree that a lot of people aren’t working at 100% and a lot of the work was probably needless busywork.
I don’t think it’s reassuring the way this goes away from AI layoffs. Just like in life, you need downtime and boredom. This is when you learn and reflect and develop taste, this is where your team steals time when an “emergency” breaks out and someone gets paged over an outage. This is where you take time to mentor the younger employees.
Relatedly, it seems that AI is entrenching cumbersome processes because it’s easy to write that extra doc, compile those notes, etc. When you make a team more lean, you’re supposed to cut out the extra process and let people work in a high-trust environment. That’s why startups are fast - everything is low process and the business has to trust employees. As companies grow, they develop all sorts of bureaucracy as scar tissue. But layoffs and cuts fail if you keep that stuff along the way.
The article isn't about people in software.
It's about professions like paralegals, translators, office type jobs.
And no, those people can't just be fired without some replacement -- they do actual work that is necessary for these companies to function.
But now they are being replaced, and it's not like they'll find some other job because the "other jobs" are also threatened by AI.
Not a good outcome.
That sounds like a statement from a pig that hopes they've been nice and useful enough to their farmer to avoid being tasty bacon.
This is a conspiracy theory, but I suspect that VC-backed tech industry overhiring circa 2020/2021 was partially done to give this impression.
I don't think so. During that time the potential of LLMs to eliminate work wasn't obvious. That was pre-hype explosion.
I think some attentive VCs couldve predicted this.
Paper from OAI 2020 about scaling laws: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361 The idea that you can make a system smarter by just putting in more money is very appealing. The earliest OAI coding model is here (Aug 2021): https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
Most of the job losses are in tech and it all started back in late 2022 and early 2023 arguably before AI was perceived as a real threat. I think after 3 years of tech hiring melting because of all the economic uncertainty people can't see the forest for the trees anymore. Justy $0.02
Is that the case? The article says that the losses were
> led by customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople.
There’s very little evidence of AI replacing jobs en mass.
There a ton of evidence that underperforming companies are trimming fat, with CEOs citing AI impacts rather than their own bad decisions that led to the fat that needed trimming.
Underperforming? Big tech companies are reporting record profits and major layoffs in the same press releases.
Relative to the number of people they employ, yes they were underperforming. Most did rampant over-hiring during the pandemic and are simply correcting for that now.
AI is perfect for this because you get to sweep bad decisions you made under the rug and look like a forward-thinking visionary. Why would any CEO not blame their layoffs on AI, true or not?
That’s exactly what’s happening.
Problem is though that nobody is really buying that narrative anymore.
This is intentional. Companies are actively trying to develop capabilities to replace humans. I am surprised there are not enough protests against this.
Instead of protesting they are all getting together on Monday mornings in sf and hiking
Ha I've been following that group for a while now and it gets bigger every week!
I am happy to see them replace humans with AI machines. However, housing, healthcare, and other insurances have become super expensive. Who is going to buy all the stuff these companies produce? Maybe, it will become a two tier economy: wealthy selling stuff to fellow wealthy people; under ground economy with bartering their trades for food, building shacks for living, flea market dentists, old Wild West style flea market medical doctors selling potions, elixirs, dry lizard oil, etc.
Exactly, the “economy” only matters because the ruling classes need the labor. If you could accomplish everything using machines you could have all the resources, beautiful vistas and global warming runway to yourself. Maybe some classical occupations exist like teachers, artisans, actors, sex workers so that the ruling class can still flex on each other.
why should I protest not needing to work for money? Isn't post scarcity a great goal to have?
These companies are going to destroy jobs and do nothing to help the people displaced by said destruction.
i tried to protest forced-ai use at my company on the basis of it being a workplace hazard and was promptly emailed by their lawyers
Losses in job categories management can claim was related to AI.
Some management may even believe AI can fully replace all work done by those positions. In some of those cases they will learn they were mistaken. The eventual rehiring of some positions will happen unevenly over time, be attributed by management to "ongoing growth" and not be reported by the media.
Honey, I overhired during the pandemic and I need a scapegoat for the layoffs!
Thats been mostly straightened out for years. This is tariffs, oil, and uncertainty more than anything.
When I worked in finance the thing that made the analysts happiest was a split election wherein neither side could accomplish much. We now have the opposite of that, and worse a capricious leader who makes huge changes without much justification or explanation. Pressing "shuffle" on the economic policy doesn't help anyone.
To finance the best government is the least effective government.
Fun fact the US government was designed to be ineffective on purpose. It's not supposed to do much by design
you just keep right on believing that but I'm on the front lines and we still have plenty of people that need to be laid off and we need a reason so AI is as good a reason as any other.
I'm sure there are some organizations that have yet to correct. Most already have.
In a world where most is logically equivalent to few or some, and it is, this is a weak flex.
"Most" means "the greatest amount", or to be pedantic more than the alternative. In common usage it implies a number closer to 100%.
I believe I'm accurate in saying that most employers who overhired during COVID corrected long ago. Especially in tech. The layoffs have been ongoing since 2022. Wih more than 127k just in tech last year.[0] For most people COVID ended half a decade ago. Though technically the WHO called it in May of 2023, three years ago.
[0] https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs/
That's modern logic, sure, but Aristotelian logic argues otherwise.
I know it's not true yet of Amazon, Meta, and Google. They may say otherwise. TLAs say lots of things and hope you forget they ever said them when they are proven wrong, but all my idiot canaries for my claim remain in place in all three companies. Layoffs are a blunt force weapon and little warms the cockles of my heart more than knowing they are still draining that shareholder value(tm).
Yeah, the more data that comes out on the "AI employment disruption" the more it becomes apparent that AI is just an investor-friendly excuse to do the layoffs they were going to do anyway.
It is an executive friendly excuse.
No executive will ever want to say they made poor decisions that resulted in overhiring.
Instead, someone else's fault.
The same way for awhile the failings of certain businesses "those damn millennials refusing to spend money here" instead of "we priced ourselves out of the market".
Pandemic was 4-5 years ago. That’s no longer an excuse.
according to you.
Well, it might be according to you, but it's still wrong.
Whatever happened to the "AI won't replace you; someone who uses AI will" narrative?
AI replaced the guy who wrote it.
When is that moment gonna come that boosters keep saying - wherein those who get left behind will be chopped at their legs and consequently laid off?
Many ego’s are gonna be battered after all this fizzles out
Would like to see the numbers if we exclude healthcare jobs. I think job growth has been net-negative across the board when healthcare is excluded.
Has anyone done the math on how many jobs AI has to replace in order to justify current valuations? Would be interesting to see imo
There's no public valuation of any AI company.
But by the investment contracts OpenAI announced, if they replaced every white collar job in the world and captured all of their salary, they would have a P/E of ~1/70. (Assuming no costs at all.)
You decide what return horizon you are comfortable with and solve the linear equation for it. (But my numbers are from the end of last year, I haven't seen any more recent compilation of their contracts.)
Could I please ask what stats you used? Intuition says the valuation is too large and implies replacement, would be interesting to see something backing it up.
I think the goal is to replace workers who cost $10,000/mo with an AI agent that costs $8,000/mo
$8000/month is way too low. If you're only spending $8000/month on AI you're in drastic danger of being replaced by a more efficient AI firm.
You should replace a team of 7 costing $70,000/mo with a team of 2 costing $30,000/mo and $100,000/mo in ai tokens.
If you replace 100 then that's 800k/mo spend. Would that do?
My back of the napkin was a floor of five to ten percent just to break even with the physical buildout + a couple of years of energy bills.
> A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025
A 0.2% drop seems more like too small to tell from statistical noise more that heavy.
Here's a real-time layoffs tracker for anyone interested: https://jobs.voxos.ai/us/layoffs
not very balanced if it doesn't also track new hires
It is quite clear that AI is only as useful as the person piloting it and therefore, if the job losses are due to AI, they are temporary. The C Suite folks spreading the batshit idea that AI can replace humans on LinkedIn will eventually lemming their way back to the correct side of reality.
I personally think that AI is being used as a convenient blanket to hide the plumes of smoke emanating from an economy engulfed in flames.
The problem is that the C Suite folks can hang onto their delusions longer than most people can get by without gainful employment.
Looks like this data only goes until May 2025, so it's a year out of date. Also, overall employment is still up 0.8%
> saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025
So, the "AI job losses" just happen to be before AI started to boom, during the kickoff of largest trade war in 100 years?
They don't mention the trade war at all in the piece? And no analysis whatsoever of what other factors could have resulted in "customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople" being let go. Who the hell writes this crap? What was the point?
If its because of AI we should see a similar trend across other developed countries, no? And maybe even a correlation with how much they adopt AI https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ai-adoption-rates-by-countr...
Not to worry. I've been assured many, many times that automation only ever creates more, better and higher paying jobs than it removes, and that no one but talentless bottom-feeding hacks are losing jobs to AI anyway, not the elite crème de la crème of HN. So the good times are on their way gentlemen!
Will the people wake up?
We need a modern take of the movie "They Live". Granted, any copy would not be anywhere near as good as the original, even for a B movie, but AI is really turning into skynet (but it sucks).
If you're checking on open-registration internet forums (HackerNews in particular), you will never see "the people" wake up.
If you're arguing against "AI" on HackerNews, you might as well join the Washington Generals. You and your opinion are tolerated only as long as there is a more popular pro-AI opinion in the replies to your comment.
In my observation, HN is rapidly turning into an extremely bitter and cynical anti-AI echo chamber.
They Live was a product of its time. We live in our time, so instead we've got Sorry to Bother You.
I'm not sure what 'film' America is trying to be but I've seen plenty of real life references that could have come straight from either the Handmaids Tale, Idiocracy, The Dead Zone or Civil War the past few years. Life does seem to imitate art sometimes.
Plenty of Do Not Look Up in there as well on a lot of topics.
No, the art is calling out what’s always been there but you didn’t notice.
Some might be interested in the Iceberg Index: https://iceberg.mit.edu/report.pdf
Basically, AI is replacing tasks of jobs, not jobs per se. There's a study by folks from MIT on what tasks, and which roles are most at risk.
Am I meant to pretend that companies weren't for years beforehand using RTO to drive layoffs? They are always doing it, AI is just the cover.
This is going to be horribly embarrassing when it turns out that AI can only outcompete human labor in some roles. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers
"Follow me: a day in the life of a soup line influencer"
The demand for cushy white collar desk jobs (which weren't around 30 years ago) is crashing. Rest of the world, not so much.
30 years ago was the middle of the .com boom and white collar jobs had been around for a century already. White collar employment started with the industrial revolution and really took off during the post-WWII boom.
Cushy white collar desk jobs were not around in the mid 90s?
Nope, Most American workers were just auto plant workers and soybean farmers until the internet was invented in 1991.
Figure has been doing a 75 hour live stream of it actually replacing a real job and it has that AI magic where it has gestures and movements that seem emergent. They’re coming for anything manual in less than 2 years.
It does not matter at this stage is an excuse for layoffs or not. The entire world should impose sanctions on the US for the largest IP theft in history until the laundering companies are illegal (and the waterways closed due to US wars are open).
If this administration works against its people and the whole world, maybe there should be a regime change. Peaceful version of Jan 6th. All the unemployed have little to lose.
Why just US and not China, France and UK? They all trained on internet text.
because it's a green account probably from China or Russia
because it's bs sensationalism
Let the entire world impose sanctions on China first if they care about intellectual theft
Discussions about this topic need to separate "AI" and aAI.
- "AI" is a tool which workers use - usually to produce outputs of the same or lower quality faster. It needs a human to be constantly monitoring, steering and verifying it.
- aAI is actual AI - what sci-fi authors imagined and what ML companies promise. You ask aAI a question and it either gives you a complete, unbiased and correct answer or says why it cannot do that (insufficient information, not enough computing power, etc.). It doesn't ignore instructions or get stuck in a loop. It doesn't delete your database or exfiltrate secrets.
Obviously, this is a spectrum, not a hard division.
Crucially, "AI" is a tool for workers. aAI is a tool for owners - it replaces workers. Owners give aAI control over a company or some other form of capital and it monitors, steers and verifies humans, who will still be economically valuable for manual work, at least until robots catch up.
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All the people hyping AI either still see it as a tool ("AI", not aAI), not believing it will mature into aAI and replace them; or they are the owner class who will benefit from not having to pay wages while maintaining their passive income.
If most of your income comes from work (as opposed to passive income from ownership), you have 0 reason to be excited by AI. Your life will not be better if you lose your economic value.
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EDIT: If you disagree, you should be able to express why and we can have a rational discussion about it.
If you cannot express why, consider not participating in the discussion at all, not even by reducing the visibility of my opinion by downvoting it.
This is "AGI".