alt Hacker NewsI can't find the article anymore but I remember reading almost 10 years ago an article on the economist saying that the result of automation was not removal of jobs but more work + less junior employment positions.
The example they gave was search engine + digital documents removed the junior lawyer headcount by a lot. Prior to digital documents, a fairly common junior lawyer task was: "we have a upcoming court case. Go to the (physical) archive and find past cases relevant to current case. Here's things to check for:" and this task would be assigned to a team of junior (3-10 people). But now one junior with a laptop suffice. As a result the firm can also manage more cases.
Seems like a pretty general pattern.
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Isn't this literally just "productivity growth". You (and I think the article) are describing the ability to do more work with the same number of people, which seems like the economic definition of productivity.
We have an infinite capacity in 'making' work. It just shifts from real productivity to make-work overhead.
Pfiefdoms and empires will be maintained.
This is like a mini parallel of the industrial revolution.
A lot of places starting with a large and unskilled workforce, getting into e.g. textile industry (which brings better RoI than farming). Then the automation arrives but it leaves a lot of people jobless (still being unskilled) while there's new jobs in maintaining the machinery etc.
I don't know about lawyering, but with engineering research, I can now ask ChatGPT's Deep Research to do a literature review on any topic. This used to take time and effort.
Copilot found this based on your description:
https://impact.economist.com/projects/responsible-innovation...
Without junior positions there is no future senior positions.
The Productivity Paradox is officially a thing. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?
Definitely. When computers came out, jobs increased. When the Internet became widely used, jobs increased. AI is simply another tool.
The sad part is, do you think we'll see this productivity gain as an opportunity to stop the culture of over working? I don't think so. I think people will expect more from others because of AI.
If AI makes employees twice as efficient, do you think companies will decrease working hours or cut their employment in half? I don't think so. It's human nature to want more. If 2 is good, 4 is surely better.
So instead of reducing employment, companies will keep the same number of employees because that's already factored into their budget. Now they get more output to better compete with their competitors. To reduce staff would be to be at a disadvantage.
So why do we hear stories about people being let go? AI is currently a scapegoat for companies that were operating inefficiently and over-hired. It was already going to happen. AI just gave some of these larger tech companies a really good excuse. They weren't exactly going to admit their make a mistake and over-hired, now were they? Nope. AI was the perfect excuse.
As all things, it's cyclical. Hiring will go up again. AI boom will bust. On to the next thing. One thing is for certain though, we all now have a fancy new calculator.
You either believe that companies are trying to grow as much as possible within their current budget, or not.
Automation is one way to do that.
When the economic reports say ‘gains were due to improvements in economic efficiency’ that is exactly what they are describing.
Bullshit Jobs, both the article and the subsequent book explore this theme a lot
https://libcom.org/article/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gr...
15 years ago I created my own LLC, work experience from some contracts, and had a friend answer the reference checks
I skipped over junior positions for the most part
I don’t see that not working now
Dwarkesh had a good interview with Zuck the other week. And in it, Zuck had an interesting example (that I'm going to butcher):
FB has long wanted to have a call center for its ~3.5B users. But that call center would automatically be the largest in history and cost ~15B/yr to run. Something that is cost ineffective in the extreme. But, with FB's internal AIs, they're starting to think that a call center may be feasible. Most of the calls are going to be 'I forgot my password' and 'it's broken' anyways. So having a robot guide people along the FAQs in the 50+ languages is perfectly fine for ~90% (Zuck's number here) of the calls. Then, with the harder calls, you can actually route it to a human.
So, to me, this is a great example of how the interaction of new tech and labor is a fractal not a hierarchy. In that, with each new tech that your specific labor sector finds, you get this fractalization of the labor in the end. Zuck would have never thought of a call center, denying the labor of many people. But this new tech allows for a call center that looks a lot like the old one, just with only the hard problems. It's smaller, yes, but it looks the same and yet is slightly different (hence a fractal).
Look, I'm not going to argue that tech is disruptive. But what I am arguing is that tech makes new jobs (most of the time), it's just that these new jobs tend to be dealing with much harder problems. Like, we''re pushing the boundaries here, and that boundary gets more fractal-y, and it's a more niche and harder working environment for your brain. The issue, of course, is that, like a grad student, you have to trust in the person working at the boundary is actually doing work and not just blowing smoke. That issue, the one of trust, I think is the key issue to 'solve'. Cal Newport talks a lot about this now and how these knowledge worker tasks really don't do much for a long time, and then they have these spats of genius. It's a tough one, and not an intellectual enterprise, but an emotional one.