[protocolture]

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.

[somenameforme]

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]

I't has been very good as suppressing wages.

[Retric]

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.

[protocolture]

>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.

[Retric]

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

Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster.

Your farming productivity numbers are also very exaggerated. The actual percentage of the population was very high because of food spillage, and inconsistent productivity due to weather etc. They often needed ~90% of the adult population to be farmers or people starved, and famine was still common. Right before industrialization that number started to drop which is largely what caused industrialization. You got a positive feedback loop of increased productivity when a vastly larger percentage of the population could do something other than produce food.

[protocolture]

>Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster.

Didnt I address that explicitly?

[Retric]

Not in your post, if you did you could quote an actual rebuttal that larger populations don’t inherently need more food, increase the need for banking services, etc etc.

You also found it odd I didn’t “remove non participants” but preindustrial societies didn’t necessarily have formal jobs for people. You’ll note I didn’t exclude modern stay at home parents as non workers because labor is the metric not if you have formal employment.

[protocolture]

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

Net Jobs can increase while their percentage of all jobs drops. These things aren't necessarily linked or related. There isnt really a built in expectation that banking for 10 million people needs 10 times less staff than banking for 100 million people.

[nok22kon]

> 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

[bigfatkitten]

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]

~20% outsorced workforce in places like India, Vietnam and Philipines nowadays

[protocolture]

An outsourced job is still a job.

Its just for the government to rebalance the economy if those jobs are desirable to reshore.

[bigfatkitten]

I’m only counting the Australian FTE. The numbers are up if you count the outsourcing.

[jorisw]

> 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?

[Retric]

Programming/engineering may be of supreme concern to you, but they made a much wider claim.

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

Requires all automation to have zero effect on net jobs long term. Meanwhile the percentage of people working is down so that’s clearly not true.

[watwut]

> 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.

[realusername]

> That is not what historical record shows

It's not the first industrial revolution, we've been in a good dozen of them now and absolutely none have resulted in large unemployment.

The only large unemployment we've experienced until now were linked to economic crisis which had nothing to do with industrial revolutions

[protocolture]

>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 proponents of the claim not the proponents of LLMs.

[nok22kon]

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