Astro Hacker News - Erik Brynjolfsson says an AI "job apocalypse" is unlikely

darkstarsys |next [-]

Brynjolfsson: an AI “job apocalypse” is unlikely.

Also Brynjolfsson: It will likely impact entry-level jobs. There are huge implications for business and the economy, including some increases in living standards, but also, potentially, job disruption. We must act now to address this gap. We can’t just sit back and wait for the tsunami to hit us.

Also Brynjolfsson: If companies don’t hire people at the base of the pyramid, then they’re not going to have those people later when they need them. Now, AI can do a lot of those basic tasks. Some companies, such as law firms and investment banks, are not hiring as many people at the base. In the short run, I can see that logic, but, in a few years, where are they going to have the most experienced people? So they need to think harder about that.

So there's that. Basically what he's hoping is if everyone does what he recommends re: regulation and policy, then maybe the job apocalypse will become unlikely.

pyrolistical |root |parent |next [-]

Yeah the base requirement has gone up. So more training/schooling is required.

Imagine when jobs started adding the requirement entry level positions require ability to read? That cut out so many people when that requirement was added yet the economy survived

a2ff6eeb0 |root |parent |next [-]

I think the base requirement to compete will keep going up. We already have AI models that can debug and audit code better than the best humans.

You used to have a career as a software engineer or devops person if you were good at debugging. Today, I challenge you to take any past production outages, toss the traces into Claude, and see if it finds the bug faster than humans can.

I think this is the way the rest of white collar labor goes.

pigpop |root |parent |next [-]

For some roles, I agree but I also think that there will be many new-ish roles that will have lower requirements right down to being a warm body capable of walking and talking. The lower requirements will be possible because these roles will essentially be proxies for AI agents that need a human to go somewhere and do something in the physical world, whether that's resetting a breaker or just being a human face and voice delivering a message.

And yes, before anyone brings it up, I've read Manna and if you haven't you probably should[0] but I don't think it will be as dystopian or utopian as that. Humanoid robots would obviously replace some of the proxy need but there will still be a lot of things that only a living human can do even if it's just purely for legal and regulatory reasons.

I also think there will be a lot more roles that are purely human in nature and which will have an entirely different set of requirements but that's a different topic.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120224063109/http://marshallbr...

pydry |root |parent |previous [-]

Ive dealt with tons of bugs Claude couldnt recognize. Have you not?

a2ff6eeb0 |root |parent [-]

Honestly? Not really, not since Fable came out. There's been a bunch of times it needed to ask for context, and I needed to deploy some additional tracing at its request.

(There have been a few times where it has refused to debug due to safeguards. This is actually the biggest risk.)

bogzz |root |parent |previous [-]

That requirement should probably make a comeback.

pydry |root |parent |previous [-]

Companies didn't like hiring entry level engineers even before AI came along because it took them such a long time to become productive and they had a habit of job hopping as soon as they did.

LLMs didn't really change anything about that but people like to give it credit for stuff.

In the long run it meant seniors commanded high salaries. It's the tragedy of the commons i guess except where the apocalypse is you need to build a free sushi restaurant and on site laundry for your spoiled developers.

wildrice |next |previous [-]

I think we are going to see a growing trend of communications opposite of what we've seen in the last 4 years; no more AI doomerism to avoid datacenter bans. Surly everyone is Dario's circle is telling him to keep his mouth shut.

alephnerd |root |parent [-]

As I've mentioned ad nauseum on HN for years yet no one listened - much of the time we as corporates in the tech industry used "AI" as an excuse for layoffs was for the same reason we used "COVID" as an explanation for layoffs before GPT4 was GAed.

The reality is, hiring severely overshot in 2021-22 with a degradation in quality. And 2-3 years of remote first showed that you can offshore with little-to-no operational impact.

Dario's messaging made sense as the underdog - which Anthropic was until a year ago. Their moat used to be FedRAMP until Emil Michael called their bluff.

5gff3 |root |parent [-]

Tech is insanely bloated and much of the cash flows are coming from investments made yonks ago.

What firms are going to do now is probe deeper and disinvest in crappy projects that - many that most likely generated negative returns upon closer inspection.

alephnerd |root |parent [-]

> What firms are going to do now is probe deeper and disinvest in crappy projects that most likely generated negative returns

We've been doing this since 2022. Most layoffs overlap with Sales, Engineering, and Ops associated with cost centers.

Like, there was no reason Uber had 3 internally competing and built chat apps with dozens of engineers allocated as headcount.

> much of the cash flows are coming from investments made yonks ago

Not necessarily, but you can't train an old dog to do new tricks.

5gff3 |root |parent [-]

"> much of the cash flows are coming from investments made yonks ago"

Yes they are.

The marginal ROIC for tech firms that are in mature growth is shit. Made shitter by continuing to field many people for no good reason.

alephnerd |root |parent [-]

What is the timeframe you are using? To me "yonks ago" means 15-20 years ago.

And marginal ROIC is just one metric amongst multiple to benchmark against.

Also, if you had the Benoit [0] you should use your normal HN account instead of a throwaway created for this topic.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-XWgoJT1xPU

5gff3 |root |parent [-]

Hahahaaha

Touched a nerve did I? Not used to being outclassed eh? Youre an amateur.

Imagine thinking 'yonks ago' is 15-20 years in the technology game. Stop editing your posts bro.

alephnerd |root |parent [-]

> Touched a nerve did I

In a way, but mostly because discourse on this platform has gone to shit because no one is restricting throwaways.

> Imagine thinking 'yonks ago' is 15-20 years in the technology game. Stop editing your posts bro

Give a number and the timeframe. I'm open to chatting collaboratively with you because we might be modeling differently with different priors.

But I don't like unsubstantiated hot takes being used to launder throwaway accounts - the noise to signal ratio is shit enough on HN in 2026.

Zylokloto |next |previous [-]

He clearly states that it worries him and he made a public letter.

The job disruption is real and it will be an job apocalypse for plenty of people.

If a company is now paying for ai tokens and you now have 5-20% higher cost but you are relevant more efficient, you will reduce your team by 5-20%.

It is already a job apocalypse for people who learned language and no longer get a job for translating or text analysis. People who want to be an illustrator have a job apocalpyse.

And we have not even SEEN what it will look like in 4-14 years. Physical AI / Robotic is progressing like crazy too.

5gff3 |root |parent [-]

Oh cringe.

Do you even go out and talk to industry leaders? No you do not.

matteoraso |next |previous [-]

Something that gets ignored is that we're already facing a serious decline in the workforce as a result of the fertility crisis. If we can automate some jobs at the same time as people leave the workforce en masse, we can avoid a catasrophe.

|root |parent |next [-]

amelius |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Those are the wrong jobs. AI cannot yet be a nurse, for example.

pydry |root |parent [-]

AI can't write code properly either to be honest but if it could then I guess many software engineers would retrain as nurses.

ares623 |root |parent |previous [-]

Talk about learning the wrong lesson

kulahan |root |parent [-]

Or maybe he’s making decisions based on an existing system, rather than pretending to exist in a vacuum

NoelJacob |next |previous [-]

So a guy who runs worker displacement company tries to say we're not bad? It literally has a page where it shows how much of your company can be automated.

mrwaffle |next |previous [-]

There's so many issues piling up on this mountain of steaming issues. I can't even tell you what a nightmare it is to try to get each company's idea of agentic support working, it's truly dystopian confusion/psychosis.

surfingdino |root |parent [-]

I am still recovering from a project where everything that could go wrong, did. People without experience coding in Python vibing Python code. People cosplaying software architects. People vibing specs, Jira tickets based on the code they vibed... architects telling devs to "upload the zip file into Claude and figure out what the code does" because there is no design, no spec, no requirements... madness.

5gff3 |root |parent [-]

The reality is, a lot of economic activity is fake in the sense that it is highly-discretionary.

And this will continue to go on and on and on. This means that this idea of large scale AI lay offs is complete delusion.

add-sub-mul-div |next |previous [-]

If the number of jobs stays constant but a lot of those jobs have been downgraded to gig labor without benefits, that's bad.

If the number of jobs stays constant but a lot of those jobs have been downgraded to fungible operators of AI, that's very bad.

bespokedevelopr |next |previous [-]

Paper owned by billionaire who is trying to wipe out pesky humans publishes article saying trust us you’ll be fine

throwyawayyyy |next |previous [-]

AI companies: give us money, think of all the jobs will be able to destroy and whose value we will somehow manage to capture!

General society: [notices this is what AI companies are explicitly trying to do.]

AI companies: don't worry about it bro, it'll all be fine -- better than fine in fact. And not just for us, promise! Actually we'll somehow create even more jobs, while still being able to massively increase productivity, even though this is contradictory and impossible. Because nothing is impossible with AI!

ares623 |root |parent [-]

Zombocom is proof of a time traveling AI god being real.

jmclnx |previous [-]

>Brynjolfsson predicts that demand for experienced workers such as senior coders will still be high even if AI takes on more routine knowledge and coding work in the future

All well and good, but the age old question. How will people get experience if entry level is AI ? But maybe for a preview look at COBOL, there is huge demand for experience people.

esikich |root |parent |next [-]

You get experience by having an active interest, doing projects on your own, and not needing it spoonfed to you. When I was in college we learned some basic data structures and made an employee time clock program. I learned far more from the stuff I fiddled around with on my own time. I started tinkering in elementary school. The students that had done nothing with comp sci their entire lives and just wanted to make video games dropped out in 2 weeks.

ekidd |root |parent |next |previous [-]

> But maybe for a preview look at COBOL, there is huge demand for experience people.

Is there? I actually looked into this once, and nearly all the Cobol work I saw mentioned was being outsourced to software consulting companies in India. And it didn't sound like an especially good job there, either.

If anyone is genuinely paying disgusting amounts of money for deep Cobol expertise, I'd love to see any public evidence that this is happening on any significant scale!

geodel |root |parent |previous [-]

To this age old question the answer is between the lines that by the time seniors are gone AI would be fully taking over, at least by their assumptions.

And maybe due to falling population by then whoever left would have something useful to do nonetheless.