[tavavex]

Sometimes it almost feels like there's more than one person on HN holding more than one opinion.

I'm from the younger, lower end of the job market, far from the average HN user. You could accuse me of being excessively cynical. That's what happens when the systems you assumed would be there tell you to get bent the moment it's your turn to enter the job market. There's very few people my age I know who aren't angry at something. What you can't accuse me of is hypocrisy. I was never in the ranks of the SV money-above-all billionaire-loving population that's so common here, and I never wanted to join them. All I wanted was a career in something I enjoyed doing and an ability to sustain myself. I really don't understand why I am the one person you decided to turn your snarky, enraged tirade towards.

And it doesn't matter that LLMs can't act on their own. You don't need to literally replace every worker to the last one to get to the place I was talking about. A productivity boost that leads to 20-30% of all white collar workers losing their job would be horrific, and it would only get worse from there. That seems entirely possible to me. Nothing I'm talking about is particularly insane, it's all just a continuation of what's already been happening, with the same people ruling over it.

[keybored]

I don’t have a problem with people being very negative and cynical. I have a problem with people being very negative and cynical and also defeatist. The things that I alluded to were examples of fighting back. Not just dreading the hypothetical future.

That I brought up things that cannot be automated right now was to demonstrate that we won’t go from the status quo—which is after all not a white collar automation wipeout, right now we just have layoffs from big firms that are arguably struggling but pinning it on the “Agentic Era”—to freaking mass employment + killer robots. And maybe that won’t last forever. So maybe we should fight back while we can.

[tavavex]

> I have a problem with people being very negative and cynical and also defeatist.

Why? Does it honestly seem like there's a serious possibility that this will turn out well, that there's something people will do to stop it? Can you name a time in recent history when something like this had happened and the crisis was averted? I'm not saying I've given up, but I can't influence the situation and, with what has happened so far in my life, expecting things to get worse seems like a pretty safe guess to me.

> The things that I alluded to were examples of fighting back.

Can you spell them out for me? I read the comment again, but most of it was just rallying up against my perceived hypocrisy as a supposed representative of the tech elite. I honestly can't see any allusions to actions or anything of the sort.

The status quo right now isn't just mass layoffs, it's a very noticeable sag in the job market, especially the junior job market. I don't know if it has ever been this bad, even in past crises that affected this field. Large-scale unemployment seems like a reasonable possibility because even seasoned professionals who aren't AI salesmen are all saying that the tooling skyrockets their productivity, and because we know there's a good chunk of white collar workers doing relatively simple work that would be low-hanging fruit for automation. Also, where did I mention killer robots?

[keybored]

I’m sorry. I thought that I alluded to it but I didn’t.

The fact that I have a 40-hour workweek is because Labor (not any political party) fought for it. The Weekend also. And getting enough income to be “middle class” rather than proletarian.

What would the modern Westerner say if they uniformly had to work 12-hour days? Probably something about Orwell’s boot stomping on a face forever and then getting back to work.

Also America’s 1950’s middle class boom.

[keybored]

And this part.

> LLMs are brains in a vat and therefore cannot by themselves do any tasks that goes beyond simulating keyboard & mouse in front of a computer screen.

Meant to imply that (a bit obtuse writing style?) even if LLMs cHaNge evEryThing for white collar work... you still need embodiment in order to do many “human” jobs. Thus even with the maximalist take-our-jobs outlook, labor itself will not be wiped out in one fell swoop. Which means that those who are left can fight back. Because they have their labor as leverage.

I didn’t feel like spelling that out because replying to two-sentence defeatism with multiple paragraphs is a lot of work.