The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs. There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise.

The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. It would suit their worldview for this time to be different, and so thats the message they push.

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somenameforme 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not entirely sure that's the claim or conclusion. Like they said the companies increasing headcount are also being pumped full of $$$. That's a non-permanent state of affairs because it's heavily fueled by speculation about possible future scenarios which may or may not come to pass.

I think the bigger conclusion is that LLMs are, for now, having a minimal effect on the labor market. And I think this makes sense. In spite of individual claims of 10x productivity boost or whatever, their effect on the bottom line of companies seems to remain quite unclear, at best. On the contrary the token-maxing catastrophe seems to have resulted in companies becoming far more price conscious towards LLM usage.

	▲	Shitty-kitty 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I't has been very good as suppressing wages.

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Retric 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s not supported by the evidence. Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.

In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education, retirement, prison, disability, etc.

The only way jobs have kept up with automation is when you ignore population growth, but more people naturally increases the required workforce. You inherently need more police, food, etc when you have more people.

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jorisw 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> That’s not supported by the evidence. Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.

What evidence?

Wasn’t employment in engineering down before all this could’ve gotten enough widespread traction to actually displace jobs?

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protocolture 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.

Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing.

>In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education which may be investing in their future but isn’t directly producing anything. Retirement as a percentage of the population similarly exploded etc.

The first thing anyone does in employment statistics is remove non participants. Bringing them back in is weird. If you don't need or want a job its kind of a non sequitur to be lumped in with the employment seeking population. AI doomers aren't suggesting that its going to gainfully retire the population.

>preindustrial societies

Pre industrial societies can be loosely grouped into "People farming to make 3-5 times the food they need" and "city dwellers". Now that a single person can farm for 100s of people, we do have hundreds more city jobs going. We dont have a huge number of out of work farmers sitting around doing nothing. Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. Likewise cloud didnt leave IT people lining up at the dole office, but it just moved them from cleaning up on prem messes to cleaning up cloud messes and onprem messes.

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nok22kon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before.

that's a common trope, and its both true and false

true: more bank employees after ATM's

false: less bank employees after smartphone banking

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bigfatkitten 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The big 4 Australian banks (Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, National Australia Bank and Westpac) all employ pretty much the same number of people now as they did 25 years ago, but their workforce composition has changed. More software developers, fewer branch staff.

	▲	monjedetonsura 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		~20% outsorced workforce in places like India, Vietnam and Philipines nowadays

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nok22kon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

there never has been a nuclear war, so why do some people worry about it, I dont understand, probably they have some axes to grind

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watwut 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc.

No, they are mostly right wing capitalists. LLM is not a left wing project. UBI is something they talked about, but super hard to believe it is anything but a way to shut up critics.

> The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs.

That was definitely not the common claim last 4 years.

> There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise.

That is not what historical record shows. In the short term, larger unemployment are to be expected. Over long term, it evens out.