alt Hacker NewsThe jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here
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I can’t read the article but in my group, which is not terribly AI exposed due to its hands-on nature, we are in fact hiring extra people into next year to handle additional AI initiatives that I am confident will succeed. In subsequent years, the plan as I have heard it is to let headcount go down by attrition.
I would not take extra hiring now as evidence that AI is preserving job numbers.
While I'm still catastrophically worried about what AI means for my career, I've noticed that my current employer - very AI forward, and growing the team - is still facing an ever expanding backlog.
High productivity is generally good for the employee, unless you're productive enough you run out of work to do. So how much code is needed?
I hope this results in a rebalancing of the social and economic power of high-IQ versus average-IQ workers. We will need construction workers and tradespeople to build and maintain these AI data centers. Probably even with robots. But we won’t need as many engineers, lawyers, and other people whose job it is to consume and generate bits. If we tax the proceeds of AI generated productivity sufficiently, this could be the beginning of returning to the dynamics of the 1940s-1960s, where economic power was more concentrated among skilled blue collar workers than it is now.
> AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow.
This is not reassuring
AI boosters: "look, AI is creating jobs, all of these doomers scaring you with job loses, don't listen to them"
also AI boosters: "we are going to build a million robots, and the robots will build factories producing robots, there will be infinite abundance, nobody will need to work anymore"
Paywalled
> On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations.
Good news that ought to be taken with a pinch of salt given how the current administration responds to unfavorable BLS data -
> On Friday, August 1, [2025] President Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer from her role as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In social media posts announcing and confirming her firing, he said that he believed the jobs report released by the agency earlier that day included numbers that were “rigged in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
https://www.epi.org/policywatch/firing-bls-commissioner-erik...
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The Economist, Silicon Valley's primary submarine, dispels the notion that AI causes unemployment because SV has realized that the peasants get unruly.
The Economist is one of the most curious advertising platforms. No one reads it (it would be detrimental to portfolio performance) but the elites pretend to read it and memorize headlines like the above.
If most of the jobs its creating are related to construction of infrastructure then that's not really positive news as these jobs are temporary, once demand settles then why kind of jobs are going to be created?
It might be benefiting other areas, but I think as the technology improves a lot of those are going to start looking like what's happening in software development (which is arguably what the technology is best at right now).
So yeah, idk.