upvote
There’s a middle road where AI replaces half the juniors or entry level roles, the interns and the bottom rung of the org chart.

In marketing, an AI can effortlessly perform basic duties, write email copy, research, etc. Same goes for programming, graphic design, translation, etc.

The results will be looked over by a senior member, but it’s already clear that a role with 3 YOE or less could easily be substituted with an AI. It’ll be more disruptive than spell check, clearly, even if it doesn’t wipe it 50% of the labor market: even 10% would be hugely disruptive.

reply
I think you're really overstating things here. Entry level positions are the tier at which replacement of senior positions happen. They don't do a lot, sure, but they are cheap and easily churnable. This is precisely NOT the place companies focus on for cutbacks or downsizing. AI being acceptable at replacing unskilled labor doesn't mean it WILL replace it. It has to make business sense to implement it.
reply
Not really though:

1. Companies like savings but they’re not dumb enough to just wipe out junior roles and shoot themselves in the foot for future generations of company leaders. Business leaders have been vocal on this point and saying it’s terrible thinking.

2. In the US and Europe the work most ripe for automation and AI was long since “offshored” to places like India. If AI does have an impact it will wipe out the India tech and BPO sector before it starts to have a major impact on roles in the US and Europe.

reply
To think companies worry about protecting the talent supply chain is to put your fingers in your ears and ignore your eyes for the past 5-10 years. We were already in a crisis of seniority where every single role was “senior only” and AI is only going to increase that.
reply
I actually think the opposite will happen. Suddenly, smart AI-enabled juniors can easily match the productivity of traditional (or conscientious) seniors, so why hire seniors at all?

If you are an exec, you can now fire most of your expensive seniors and replace them with kids, for immediate cash savings. Yeah, the quality of your product might suffer a bit, bugs will increase, but bugs don't show up on the balance sheet and it will be next year's problem anyway, when you'll have already gone to another company after boasting huge savings for 3 quarters in a row.

reply
1. Sure they will! It's a prisoner's dilemma. Each individual company is incentivized to minimize labor costs. Who wants to be the company who pays extra for humans in junior roles and then gets that talent poached away?

2 Yes, absolutely.

reply
The cost of juniors have dropped enough where it's viable now.

You can get decent grads from good schools for $65k.

reply
As far as 1 goes, how do you explain American deindustrilization and e. g. its auto industry.
reply
Part of the problem is the word "replacement" kills nuanced thought and starts to create a strawman. No one will be replaced for a long time, but what happens will depend on the shape of the supply and demand curves of labor markets.

If 8 or 9 developers can do the work of 10, do companies choose to build 10% more stuff? Do they make their existing stuff 10% better? Or are they content to continue building the same amount with 10% fewer people?

In years past, I think they would have chosen to build more, but today I think that question has a more complex answer.

reply
1 you are massively assuming less than linear improvement, even linear over 5 years puts LLM in different category

2 more efficient means need less people means redundancy means cycle of low demand

reply
1 it has nothing to do with 'improvement'. You can improve it to be a little less susceptible to injection attacks but that's not the same as solving it. If only 0.1% of the time it wires all your money to a scammer, are you going to be satisfied with that level of "improvement"?
reply
It doesn’t have to replace us, just make us more productive.

Software is demand constrained, not supply constrained. Demand for novel software is down, we already have tons of useful software for anything you can think of. Most developers at google, Microsoft, meta, Amazon, etc barely do anything. Productivity is approaching zero. Hence why the corporations are already outsourcing.

The number of workers needed will go down.

reply
Well done sir, you seem to think with a clear mind.

Why do you think you are able to evade the noise, whilst others seem not to? IM genuinely curious. Im convinced its down to the fact that the people 'who get it' have a particular way of thinking that others dont.

reply
And why would it materialize? Anyone who has used even modern models like Opus 4.6 in very long and extensive chats about concrete topics KNOWS that this LLM form of Artificial Intelligence is anything but intelligent.

You can see the cracks happening quite fast actually and you can almost feel how trained patterns are regurgitated with some variance - without actually contextualizing and connecting things. More guardrailing like web sources or attachments just narrow down possible patterns but you never get the feeling that the bot understands. Your own prompting can also significantly affect opinions and outcomes no matter the factual reality.

reply
The great irony is this episode is exposing those who are truly intelligent and those who are not.

Folks feel free to screenshot this ;)

reply
It sure did: I never thought I would abandon Google Search, but I have, and it's the AI elements that have fundamentally broken my trust in what I used to take very much for granted. All the marketing and skewing of results and Amazon-like lying for pay didn't do it, but the full-on dive into pure hallucination did.
reply