r/Futurology • u/Aralknight • 13h ago
AI There Is Now Clearer Evidence AI Is Wrecking Young Americans’ Job Prospects
https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/ai-entry-level-job-impact-5c687c84[removed] — view removed post
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u/LadyTL 11h ago
I do wonder though what all this automation is going to cost us in the long run. How do you get senior devs without having jr devs. I've noticed a trend in games and software getting worse and worse, no optimization properly being done. We are standing on the shoulders of giants while sawing at their hamstrings.
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u/Yeet_Lmao 8h ago
It’s going to be devastating to society on a level never before seen. But who cares?? Thats THEN, the profit is NOW!
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u/Bitter-Good-2540 7h ago
The problems come after climate change hit, so it wont matter anyway.
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u/Pretend-Extreme7540 4h ago
Anything that climate change will cause will completely pale in comparison to future AI capabilities.
So it is climate change that wont matter anyway.... regardless wether AI turns out overall good or bad.
If it goes well - climate change will be solved.
If it goes bad - all humans dead.
If you now ask, how AI is going to solve climate change: new energy sources, new fuel types, less waste energy to transfer / transportation / conversion, better / lighter materials, more efficient aggriculture, higher yielding and faster growing crops, ...
If you now ask, how AI is going to kill everyone: the number of ways it can achieve this are literally countless. Nanotechnology, genetically enginieered viruses, mirror life, triggering nuclear war + nuclear winter, microplastic that bioaccumulates in mammals and slowly causes global infertility in men or women or both... or simply mass manipulation / subvertiion of politics or voters.
Dangerous AI will be here much sooner than severe climate change problems!
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u/PastTenceOfDraw 8h ago
There has been a trend for the last 10ish? years of focused hiring of mid level and up. With the intention of hiring people that can work independently and generate profits from the start. And not investing in junior talent. A further push to squeeze out any more value for the shareholders.
This just exacerbates the issue more.
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u/HP844182 7h ago
Same question though, where do mid levels come from without starting at low levels?
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u/PastTenceOfDraw 7h ago
I would love to get a chance to ask this to the people making these decisions but I think they have lost the ability to think past the next financial quarter.
The result is the mid and senior level roles are flooded with under qualified candidates because no-one is offering entry level roles.
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u/OriginalCompetitive 7h ago
If it actually becomes a real problem, businesses will solve it. The most likely solution will involve transforming our current performative education system, where instead of learning useful skills in college you waste time learning arbitrary skills that demonstrate that you are capable of learning stuff later on. Instead, you’ll spend a few years how to be a mid level.
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u/Marsman121 5h ago
This is all a direct consequence of corporate shortsightedness. No one wants the burden of training people when they know the person is immediately going to jump ship to a new (better) job. So they focus on poaching already trained people from other companies.
This is a result of the collapse of corporate benefits. The only way to get a decent pay raise and benefits is to get a new job outside the company you are at. If companies had better pay structures, benefits, and especially pensions, employees might be more inclined to stay.
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u/coke_and_coffee 5h ago
Meh, I’ve been hearing this same BS for 30 years. Just noise from people complaining.
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u/Cryptizard 7h ago
They are betting on not needing senior devs in the future, that AI will catch up and replace them as well.
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u/therealnumberone 8h ago
As long as companies only care about the next quarters profits, they won't give a shit.
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u/trimtab28 6h ago
Well that much is a perennial issue- companies want experienced employees and to pay as little as possible for them. Ultimately though, think there will be experienced people, just fewer of them and they’ll be people in the field who are uniquely gifted. It’s basically the change from using scribes to having professional writers- simply having a skill as a yes/no question won’t be enough, you need to be uniquely gifted to get the chance to use it professionally and develop experience.
Aside from your point about developing experienced workers though, I worry about the societal ramifications of higher youth unemployment amidst high cost of living. Particularly given men go to college at lower rates, and now the more popular male dominated fields that require college degrees are undergoing dislocation. Large numbers of unemployed (and often unmarried) young men historically is a recipe for trouble and societal upheaval
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u/Enervata 8h ago
For large companies using AI to reduce their workforce, they are creating a market opportunity for any startup worth a damn. While large corporations can use it to save money, small companies can iterate quicker and compete faster. If anything large publicly owned companies will open themselves up to competition more than before. You’ll probably see more instances of Instagram sized companies competing with giants.
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u/FistFuckFascistsFast 8h ago
Have you simply not paid attention to tech for the last 30 years?
The big guys use their might to rest complacent and lean on regulators. They don't need to innovate because they just sabotage or buy out any competition.
The rare ones that succeed enshittify into adult corporations with ads on their paid plans.
There is no stopping this as long as 5 families own half the nation's wealth and billionaires are seen as gods instead of parasites.
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u/NotRandomseer 7h ago
Optimization was poor for a long time. People just have monster PC's now compared to then , and look back at things fondly. They compare the most intensive games of today , to the most performant ones of the past
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u/machine-in-the-walls 6h ago
When was the last time you met someone who could code assembly?
That’s your answer.
Stop being paranoid. This has happened before and it will happen again.
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u/SpaceyCoffee 5h ago
Fewer junior devs are being hired because just a few juniors with an LLM can be as productive as a whole team of junior devs were before.
When these new junior devs mature into senior devs they will have been baptized in the fire of AI and will likely be 10x more productive than a senior dev today.
It is no different from how the assembly line revolutionized manufacturing by allowing companies to build more with less.
SWE isn’t going anywhere. It is just a bad time to be an inefficient and/or complacent engineer.
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u/FuckingSolids 12h ago
Correlation is not causation. Companies have been in cost-cutting mode for decades, which for a time meant offering buyouts to the long-timers to make room for cheaper recent grads.
But the job market currently is the worst I've seen, and I'm in my 40s.
The issue isn't inherently "AI," it's that the methods of finding a job have broken down. Advertised positions that don't actually exist, whether to impress investors that they're in growth mode or to just get a pile of resumes that'll get sifted before any human interaction after getting inundated with automated applications.
Finding a stable job with decent income shouldn't be treated with all the superficiality of a dating app. LLMs are a scapegoat.
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u/FistFuckFascistsFast 8h ago
Fellow xennial. My whole life it felt like a tunnel was collapsing behind me even through school. All the changes to standardized tests, common core, no child left behind, all that garbage was constantly rolled out for the classes behind me.
We entered the workforce after Y2K, 9/11, and the dotcom bubble only to run face first into the housing bubble, OWS, Bush wars on credit cards for bullshit wmds, tea party fervent racism because Obama was part black, into Trump.
M2, the amount of money in the economy tripled between 2008 and now while minimum wage remain the same. Single job boomers had higher qualities of life than couples now working 2-4 jobs.
GDP and the stock market are basically the worst indicators to celebrate if you're a real person in the real economy. But if you want living wages or to be treated like a human being you're just being entitled.
I'm pretty sure the reason therapy is so hard to get in the US is because they don't want people trained to see how constantly they're being gaslit, abused, and propagandized from every direction all day long.
When the global intelligence agencies all said Trump was a compromised asset, Republicans rejected it as a conspiracy. Democrats collectively ridiculed Republicans for believing the media would lock step on falsehoods.
Meanwhile, every media outlet is owned by right-wing billionaires yet they all uphold the "Democrats are leftist" bullshit despite contemporary Democrats being right wing Reaganites.
The media does work together to actively lie to everyone. There is no representation of the left in the US because leftists are staunchly against capitalism. Democrats are corporate sycophants that eagerly sell their constituents to their donors.
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u/coke_and_coffee 5h ago
What kind of job do you have?
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u/FistFuckFascistsFast 5h ago
One increasingly likely to be laid off and replaced by AI that can't actually do the work but by the time the company collapses the executives will have their bonuses and be on to the next infinite growth scheme.
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u/king_rootin_tootin 11h ago
I said the same except things when I saw this study.
They just looked at numbers, and not if AI was actually implemented
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u/raehn 10h ago
AI fking sucks and isn't taking jobs on jobs. Corps are just cost cutting huge because they have no idea what the future brings with a dip ass in office. They'll blame AI any chance they get, but a LLM isn't taking everyone's jobs.
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u/wizpiggleton 7h ago
Ai and cost cutting can pretty much be in the same breath. AI doesn't need to be perfect at all, just good enough to replace the productivity a good portion of people who do the job. The rest just refine the work while putting in some overtime.
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u/coke_and_coffee 5h ago
Ok, but that describes any labor-saving technology. Why aren’t people complaining that tablet POS systems are taking jobs away from servers? Why aren’t they complaining that more efficient EVs take jobs away from oil and gas? Why aren’t they complaining that fireproofing systems take jobs away from firefighters?
And on and on and on…
The answer is that this is just internet-stoked paranoia.
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u/wizpiggleton 4h ago
I'm not sure what you're talking about, people do complain about the scenarios you presented consistently. We're not treading new ground here... that other stuff is just not front page news material (I'll skip the firefighter analogy because that one is a different discussion altogether).
The only difference with AI is that it threatens to replace the entirety of the labor dynamic. We cannot even argue that you would retrain the workforce to adapt to the new technology, since the endgoal here is to replace the workforce element entirely.
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u/coke_and_coffee 3h ago
The only difference with AI is that it threatens to replace the entirety of the labor dynamic. We cannot even argue that you would retrain the workforce to adapt to the new technology, since the endgoal here is to replace the workforce element entirely.
Marx said the same shit about factories 170 years ago.
Unemployment is lower than it’s ever been.
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u/braundiggity 6h ago
This needs to be higher. It’s not AI, this is just shoddy journalism and a study that hasn’t even been peer reviewed.
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u/coke_and_coffee 5h ago
But the job market currently is the worst I've seen, and I'm in my 40s.
Lmao, this dude just completely memory-holed 2008-2012.
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u/Mobius_Peverell 6h ago
Finding a stable job with decent income shouldn't be treated with all the superficiality of a dating app.
Dating shouldn't either, but that's a topic for a different post.
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u/Sweet_Concept2211 12h ago
You know what is making young Americans' job prospects even more precarious?
Having a President who keeps launching grenades at the country's economic foundations, as the Republican-led Supreme Court and Congress enable him to do it.
We are heading for a deep recession, and "AI" is not to blame, despite what Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal would have us believe.
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u/thethiefstheme 11h ago
They can both be to blame you know; it's not a dichotomy.
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u/Sweet_Concept2211 10h ago
AI is not even close to Trump's economic sabotage in the competition to wreck young Americans' job prospects.
Billionaires deliberately crashing the economy so they can buy up everything on the cheap and grab more power is a far more immediate danger to our collective wellbeing than "intelligent" machines.
AI is the hot new scapegoat for a rigged economy.
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u/Koksny 10h ago
Ok, but this article is about AI, and Trump has nothing to do with less jobs for junior devs.
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u/Sweet_Concept2211 10h ago edited 10h ago
Ok, but Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal lacks credibility, and you're not paying attention if you think the Trump Administration's economic policies are not having an impact on the job market for all entry level skilled trades.
Sharp revisions of government data show the U.S. created just 33,000 jobs total in May and June, while July’s number came in soft, too.
AI is not the root of the problem.
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u/coke_and_coffee 5h ago
Billionaires deliberately crashing the economy so they can buy up everything on the cheap and grab more power is a far more immediate danger to our collective wellbeing than "intelligent" machines.
This is not a real thing.
It’s possible to recognize the stupidity of the current admin without making up pathetic unfounded conspiracy theories. You sound like a dumbass right-winger.
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u/Sweet_Concept2211 3h ago
It abso-fucking-lutely is a real thing.
Recessions make the rich even wealthier.
Wealthy people know this.
Wealthy people have captured our government with the goal of gaining more weath.
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u/ambush_bug_1 8h ago
I have been trying to use different versions of AI to generate the code. They suck and cannot replace humans.
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u/thethiefstheme 1h ago
That won't always be the case. It's foolish to assume technology won't improve, when 5 years ago, there was no such AI. you have to look at the trajectory.
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u/daishi55 6h ago
Skill issue. Works great for me
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u/ambush_bug_1 6h ago
Yeah, right
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u/daishi55 4h ago
2 possibilities: either every single person who says that these tools work well for them is lying, or you are just bad at using them. Which do you think is more likely?
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u/SpeshellED 6h ago
The greedy rich would rather pay for a machine than pay a person. This is a flawed scheme. Technology has a shortage of wisdom.
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u/jackshiels 12h ago
Time to le drumpf reference: 12 seconds. New record!!!
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u/SandysBurner 11h ago
Do you think the other commenter is wrong? Are you able to articulate why?
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11h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Spike-Rockit 11h ago
Ignoring the impact of the president's decisions does not make you more intelligent, friend
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10h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SoCalLynda 10h ago
The actual fact is that opinions are not facts (and that your opinion clearly comes from losers worshipping someone who presents himself as something more than the con man who was given more than $600 million from his father and who squandered that money in one failed business after another).
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u/MiaowaraShiro 5h ago
I do not get how conservatives just absolutely love this "haha you talk about the president" thing as if it's some amazing observation?
We talked about Obama too y'know? They're the president.
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u/scooby_doo_shaggy 11h ago
I literally had a conversation with Meta AI yesterday where it tried to tell me AI displacing 57% of workers in the US by 2030 wasn't a majority.
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u/awesomedan24 Best of 2018 7h ago
I'm not confident AI can replace the skills of many human workers for a while, but I am confident that companies will quickly replace competent workers with shitty AI as a cost saving move
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u/DaStompa 6h ago
Hirer here
it seems like young americans are also using AI on their resumes to the point where you can't filter out inappropriate applicants anymore because they are all lies and AI slop. interviews become a huge time sink, which will become the next thing to be automated one would assume.
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u/datascientist933633 7h ago
There's even clearer evidence that AI actually costs more than just hiring young people. If you hired five young people at a salary of like 50K over a year, they would have more productivity than AI would. Hey I cost millions, billions, and we pay for it in our local community too! So we are paying double maybe triple for AI. Whereas if we just had more decently paid young people working, that money would actually go back into our economy
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u/creaturefeature16 8h ago
LLMs are not "automating software development". Not even close. Hard stop. What a seriously trash ass article.
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u/Cryptizard 7h ago
As a computer scientist, yes they are. Not fully, not for every application, but enough to seriously impact career opportunities.
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u/creaturefeature16 6h ago
Yes, we can automate tasks, not jobs, but people often conflate the two. And if your job is really just a series of tasks (which software development is most certainly not), then sure, the writing was on the wall for that role well before LLMs.
There's far too many other variables to say it's LLMs influence alone that is impacting career opportunities. The most influence I've seen is decision makers overestimating capabilities of these systems and freezing hiring or making due, but those are already starting to thaw as the dust is settling.
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u/daishi55 7h ago
Let me tell you I’m shocked. No one could have seen this coming. Except everyone who did. Somebody do a wellness check on Ed Zitron.
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u/Aralknight 13h ago
Artificial intelligence is profoundly limiting some young Americans’ employment prospects, new research shows.
Young workers are getting hit in fields where generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT can most easily automate tasks done by humans, such as software development, according to a paper released Tuesday by three Stanford University economists. They crunched anonymized data on millions of employees at tens of thousands of firms, including detailed information on workers’ ages and jobs, making this one of clearest indicators yet of AI’s disruptive impact.
“There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” said Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who conducted the research with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen.
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u/Gawkhimmyz 6h ago
Technological Advancements always guarantees better and more jobs for horses = False, but if you say;
Technological Advancements always guarantees better and more jobs for Humans, then some will believe it to be true...
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u/SnoozingBasset 6h ago
Every time there has been automization, there have been shifts in worker demand. Factories making shoes caused unemployment in shoemakers. Hydraulic machinery drastically cut the need for ditch diggers. Spreadsheets diminished the need for bookkeepers. Satellite & GIS are replacing old school surveying as you read this. Will drones replace package delivery services? All the old shoemakers had to learn another skill. Same for the rest of us.
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u/AntonioVivaldi7 11h ago
We need UBI, so we can just party all day everyday.
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u/chiefceko 10h ago
And who will serve you drinks? Who will produce the drinks? Who will develop the drink? Who will germent or squeeze the fruit, that was picked by who? Who planted the trees/roots? Who provides the energy to light for the party? The music boxes? Who build the sound system? How did you get to the location, by which means and built by who? Who will take away the trash bags after the party and who will dispose of it properly? Who will make you the hangover food and how did those ingreedients get there? Who will make the device from which you wrote this bullshit nonsense?
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u/Silverlisk 7h ago
I think a mandatory minimum payment would be better than introducing UBI at first. That if AI is actually replacing jobs and this isn't just an excuse to cover their asses.
But let's say this isn't because the economy is doing shite right now under poor management and these guys aren't just saying this so they don't need to call that out, let's say AI is really gonna replace a ton of non physical jobs.
Introducing a mandatory minimum payment and then reducing hours to create more jobs out of regular jobs may be the way forward, so everyone who can work keeps working, just less, but with enough money to keep going.
The problem is if AI really does cause mass layoffs and all that, what other choices are there?
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u/ExpensiveAd8413 11h ago
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/there-is-now-clearer-evidence-ai-is-wrecking-young-americans-job-prospects/ar-AA1Le5yY?ocid=BingNewsBrowse <-- For those who don't subscribe to Wall Street Journal. lol. - Direct employment will be gone in 3-5 years. People must monetize their skills via their own sole proprietorship (1099) or form heir own corporations. W2 situations will be extremely rare. Crony capitalism is never going away, so figure it out. On the plus side, if you're an LLC or LLP you can get away with just about anything in a snake oil economy. So that's nice...
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u/ale_93113 11h ago
This WILL happen, soon we WILL have all jobs automated and well before that youth unemployment will rise
But an US only phenomenon, remember that is only ONE of the countries of the planet, seems like a lot of extrapolation
When Ai starts to seriously affect the employment, which I expect to be soon, it won't be a US thing only
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u/tinny66666 12h ago
That's the plan - that was always the plan, as any futurist should know. First the low-skilled, then everyone else as it improves. It is our destiny to be free from wage-slavery. Labor isn't what defines humans. Creativity and socializing is what defines us. Accelerate!
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u/SilverMedal4Life 12h ago
I wish I had your optimism. Genuinely.
I don't see how this is going to lead us to anywhere but a lot of poverty and suffering. I wish I could see otherwise, but the people in charge will drive this system into the ground before considering giving up their positions.
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u/tinny66666 11h ago
Sure, pain is guaranteed now but I think that if this happens slowly the pain will last much longer and it will be weaponized by the billionaires/oligarchs to further control us. If it happens quickly the people actually have an opportunity to take back our power and freedom through political momentum. It's inevitable now but we want the best outcome. Ripping off the bandaid is the best solution even though it briefly stings more.
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u/cpufreak101 12h ago
Then why is creativity one of the first things AI makers went after with AI art?
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u/tinny66666 11h ago
Well, it was a surprise to everyone including those who built them that they were as good as they are at creating things we describe to them, but AI isn't really creative. The creativity still comes from humans and shows in the results. AI art and music that is actually good isn't just telling an AI to make an artwork. It involves having a creative vision and using AI as a tool to bring it to life and to tell the story. Anything less is the slop we see too much of. Humans are still the king of creativity.
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u/darkscyde 13h ago
Not as much as H1B sooooooo.... What should we focus on? AI isn't a real threat.
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u/CankleDankl 13h ago
AI isn't a real threat
Tell that to the thousands upon thousands of people out of work because they got replaced by AI
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u/Sweet_Concept2211 12h ago
"Actually Indians".
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u/darkscyde 12h ago
This part. I have seen the real damage that "AI" is doing to the tech industry. Exploitation of indian coders and fucking over US workers in the process.
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u/wizpiggleton 12h ago
AI is a permanent replacement so yes it's a real threat short term and longterm at a fraction of the cost.
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u/darkscyde 12h ago
I literally doubt this is the case as much as people are pushing this. I have yet to see AI seriously disrupt any industry and most successful AI startups turn out to be scams that offer NO value to their customers.
So I really, really doubt it... but I am okay to be proven wrong.
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u/wizpiggleton 12h ago
I have seen it in the gaming industry and some of my old peers (I do not work in the industry anymore thankfully) at all levels have been impacted. It may just be that we're butting heads with anecdotes but the research data seems to back my current experience with AI atm.
H1B visas are also not new in any sense, ironically AI facilitates the integration of foreign workers into the workforce so there's that as well. It's the new variable in this equation in all aspects.
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u/darkscyde 10h ago
I have personal director-level experience from some major gaming companies (top 5 worldwide) and I can say that all of the AI initiatives are a money sink and most are being downscaled or entirely rolled back.
I did have an entire team get replaced by an Indian company and we also cut ties with them due to scaling costs and difficulties working in a distributed manner. On my teams we are now focused on hiring home grown and focusing on expertise.
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u/cogit2 12h ago
This sounds like a negative, but the truth is not every generation has an easy start to their careers, and everyone, absolutely everyone, will experience hardships and setbacks in their careers. We will all experience challenges in our career, and they can happen at the start, or any time thereafter.
If this doomy claim that AI will take jobs turns out to be true, people will have to embrace hustle, will have to get creative. They will have to remember that getting a job isn't the only career one can have. They will have to start companies or new ventures. The AI companies don't want any smaller firms starting up in the AI world right now, which is why they are trying to occupy all the mindshare and communicate "AI is expensive and only huge companies can do it". They want all the revenue and want to absorb all the innovation, rather than seeing more companies start up and innovate. Are you going to let them shut you out all because they scared traditional employers into slowing recruitment? IBM fired 8000 people, believing it could replace them with AI; it's busy trying to rehire a lot of those people right now because it messed up.
Companies will also have to make some tough decisions: would they rather reduce their talent and save money, or keep that talent and do more than ever? If you need fewer customer service people, do you let those people go or put them through sales training and use employees who know your products better than external hires, put them to work in sales, or customer retention, or marketing? How will companies ensure a future for themselves if they don't keep pools of employees earlier in their careers who learn the corporate ropes? Companies will not be able to ignore these questions, nor will they be able to only go for the lowest-cost answers, they will be forced to confront their future and any company that doesn't hire young people will eventually experience a generational collapse in labour force. We still have the Baby Boomer retirement underway, right now, too, they occupy the top jobs and that means everyone will move up.
Do the fundamentals: learn everything you can, become a specialist, hustle hard, always be respectful to hiring people, and always look for pains you experience as a customer, or passions you have and how they might turn into a business. Your best career might be the one you start up for yourself.
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u/SandysBurner 11h ago
They will have to start companies or new ventures.
And those who can't can just die in the gutter.
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u/FuturologyBot 12h ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Aralknight:
Artificial intelligence is profoundly limiting some young Americans’ employment prospects, new research shows.
Young workers are getting hit in fields where generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT can most easily automate tasks done by humans, such as software development, according to a paper released Tuesday by three Stanford University economists. They crunched anonymized data on millions of employees at tens of thousands of firms, including detailed information on workers’ ages and jobs, making this one of clearest indicators yet of AI’s disruptive impact.
“There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” said Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who conducted the research with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1n1a8m7/there_is_now_clearer_evidence_ai_is_wrecking/nawnzsx/