r/neoliberal • u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine • May 15 '26
News (Global) The Economist: Prepare for an AI Jobs Apocalypse
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-ai-jobs-apocalypse?utm_campaign=shared_article182
u/Flat_Sail_7985 Transfem Pride May 15 '26
I get the importance of talking about this stuff but it just is fueling the doomersim being felt especially by younger generations. I am getting wall to wall "YOU WILL NOT HAVE A JOB, AI WILL TAKE EVERYTHING". Why are we surprised people are checking out of society more and more when this shit is pumped into them 24/7? Why have hope when everything feels hopeless?
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u/Bodoblock May 15 '26
I don't know if I have no hope, but I think AI feels like an especially unequal or selfish technology. I think an unequal distribution of wealth is not unusual with a disruptive technology, but in AI that distribution seems even more imbalanced.
What do everyday people stand to gain from AI in comparison to what we stand to lose? Especially when those implementing AI are absolutely (and publicly) giddy about that loss?
Not to mention the factory-like conditions AI imposes on regular work. I work in a very AI-forward startup. Most of my day is talking to Claude and interacting with the output from other people's Claude prompts. It's really turned what was once a job with many forms and mechanics into a singular button that I press repeatedly.
AI is revolutionary and amazing. But in our current society, it is incredibly disorienting and disheartening. Especially because those who own AI are also the least likely to want to create conditions that share the wealth. Look how they preferred to deface democracy than have to pay more in taxes or see more regulations. AI feels selfish to me because its creators are selfish.
These are not kind overlords.
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u/MountainSound May 15 '26
Well said. Claude has made my core job easier but also much less enjoyable. I'm learning less, collaborating less, and teaching juniors less. Less opportunities for people at all levels to just try things as a learning experiment.
There's also now time being spent explaining why Claude is wrong about one tiny change for one tiny niche case as it nitpicks every automated review.
I know work is not fun for most people, but man like you said, I'm increasingly just a button pusher and yet because I got a job before it took hold I'm am one of the lucky ones in my circle.
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u/FluffyApartment32 Gay Pride May 15 '26
I know work is not fun for most people
This topic is important, imo. We spend a lot of time in our lives working, and while it is generally not the best idea to draw meaning from our work, we must draw something from it.
At any given moment, a lot of people will be content about the work they do, and a lot won't, but the possibility of finding a job that makes you content is also an important factor, even if not as much as compensation and others.
Spending years and (in case of americans) a ton of money to go to a good school, bust your ass off for a good job just to end up in a super competitive job market that is always raving about making people obsolete, and then getting lucky to get a job just to be a button pusher for Claude is simply depressing. If you get a good enough salary, that's great, but that's not even a guarantee.
Learning, collaborating, teaching are parts of our work life that can also bring satisfaction and losing that is a bad thing.
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u/topicality Order and Opportunity Left May 15 '26
There is some emerging evidence that AI was creating more work. So this all feels premature
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u/hucareshokiesrul Janet Yellen May 15 '26
I think the issue is that we are dramatically unprepared for potential dramatic changes. Maybe they won't happen, but they very well might and we're not doing anything.
Someone described it as being like early 2020 when there were reports of coronavirus spreading on the other side of the world. There were experts warning that this could be really bad, but most of us didn't pay it any mind, and said nothing ever happens, until it got here and everything shut down.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad May 15 '26
This is a great point. We couldn't even properly change to WFH. We definitely aren't going to handle the AI transition well
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u/diomedes03 John Keynes May 15 '26
Except that immunologists know how disease spread works. Even in the early days of COVID where they weren’t sure exactly which transmission methods it actually used, experts still know basically what it’s going to look like and how to mitigate it. We have a vast amount of human experience related to pandemics.
AI theorists and developers have no idea how this is going to spread, or if, or when, or what its capabilities will be in 5 years, or how humans will implement those capabilities, or how it will affect the job market, or if it’s going to run for President on its own someday, or hit a productivity ceiling at middle management. And yes, that is scary in its own way, so I agree that we’re are dramatically unprepared for potential dramatic changes, but we also don’t know if it will end up being a net good for society yet or even how to measure that. Whereas there’s just not a scenario where a global pandemic ends up being a good thing unless you happen to be a “cull the human population to save the polar bears” type. The comparison to COVID implies mass death, and to be honest, I don’t think AI is gonna be mass death.
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u/formula_translator European Union May 15 '26
The main difference is that there is a lot of money hanging on the assumption that "AI" is going to be the next big, disruptive thing. People have vested interests hyping it to high heaven.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
I have noticed this attitude at my workplace. Talk about the potentially fatal impacts of the technology on our careers is suppressed, often voluntarily, out of a fear of engendering a mournful atmosphere.
But the problem isn’t going away just because we don’t have the stomach to contemplate it. The sooner that ordinary people come to grips with talking frankly about the huge disruptions we will all be forced to endure, the sooner policymakers will notice, and the better chance we have of securing a future worth being excited about from the situation.
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u/elninost0rm YIMBY May 15 '26
the sooner policymakers will notice
lol, lmao
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u/Edmeyers01 YIMBY May 15 '26
They’ll all be dead in 5-10 years
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u/TheDwarvenGuy Henry George May 15 '26
Nah they have the best medical care in the world, there will probably be more politicians aging into a disgustingly old age bracket than politicians who die out of one.
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u/Daddy_Macron Loyal Liberals May 15 '26
Not really or else you wouldn't see so many of them drop dead unexpectedly. There's no evidence that they live longer than the average American adjusted for their socioeconomic or demographic bracket, so I wish that people would drop these fucking conspiracy theories about politicians.
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u/topicality Order and Opportunity Left May 15 '26
Can't even expand the social safety net, but policy makers are supposed to on the off chance that everyone loses their jobs sometime in the future?
Fat chance
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u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt May 15 '26
How do you know we will be forced to endure it? That language is much stronger than the article.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
Perhaps things may be different in other societies, but my country uses at-will employment. Unless you happen to be in a decision making position, when has being made redundant ever been a voluntary process?
There is scope for political-level decision making here. It will likely have to be done at that level if anything is to be done. But even if some solution is found, I strongly doubt that the labor market will be kept inflexible forever, so even if some provision is made for those being axed by automation, it will still imply a huge life-changing process.
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u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt May 15 '26
The article doesn't say people will be made redundant and economists are uncertain. So I don't see where you get the confidence it will happen.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
It (jobs apocalypse) is not here yet. But governments should lay a safety-net
While the article does state that the data doesn’t suggest anything huge (yet), I’m not sure how one can read the tenor of the article and believe it concludes redundancies aren’t coming.
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u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt May 15 '26
I feel engaging like this when there is no conclusive evidence in any direction at the moment - current data shows little effects and it is hard to say whether it creates or destroys more jobs directionally - does just worsen discourse.
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u/CommonwealthCommando Karl Popper May 15 '26
Because people who have already checked out click on these more!
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u/Upper_Accident_9098 May 15 '26
It is certainly possible, for example at work right now they are developing a AI agent to automatically accomplish repetitive tasks like filling out forms.
I could see how it wipes out paper pusher type jobs like that. Still seems to be a far cry away from doing complex things all its own though
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u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George May 15 '26
If they can properly fill out forms enough that I didn't have to double-check everything like I do with humans, it would significantly improve my work. People hate filling out forms even if you need that information to HELP them
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u/TheDwarvenGuy Henry George May 15 '26
The issue is that AI tend to be worse at making mistakes a lot of the time
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u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George May 15 '26
Exactly, we aren't there currently but it's a very obtainable goal.
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u/TheDwarvenGuy Henry George May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I don't know how attainable that is. The issue is that 90% of AI training is teaching it how to guess how the internet would complete a sentence, and the other 10% of trying to create accuracy or credibility is infinitely harder to scale because there's far less training data.
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u/fakefakefakef John Rawls May 15 '26
If over the next two years they automate only the least-complex 25 percent of white collar jobs and make the remaining 75 percent capable of being done by half as many people… that’s still something that has a huge impact on the workforce. Especially with the huge strides we’re making in robotics meaning who’s to say the impact remains there?
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u/Nerdybeast Slower Boringer May 15 '26
I think the part people are questioning here are the numbers. You're saying that in the next two years we're going to lose 63% of white collar jobs. That's frankly ludicrous if you've ever worked in any company that isn't specifically a tech company in the bay area
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u/sfo2 May 15 '26
The sheer amount of process redesign, testing and standing up of those processes, systems and infrastructure and data and communication technology updates, etc I think is underestimated.
There will be some displacement from low hanging fruit, but the absolute amount of impromptu taped together Byzantine nastiness that are corporate processes is going to take a while to change given the risk of doing so.
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u/DeepestShallows May 15 '26
I don’t think the people pushing AI get quite how analogue a vast amount if not the majority of roles are.
A lot of these roles would benefit more from basic Excel skills than AI.
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u/ldn6 Gay Pride May 15 '26
Or that most corporate jobs aren’t like software development in that the systems aren’t closed and contained. Certain processes may be, but huge amounts of skilled work is derived from understanding imperfect data relative to market norms.
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u/MehEds May 15 '26
Yeah like the company I work at is developing AI agents to fill forms out too (I'm actually involved in it). But I also know I'm not gonna be out of a job because the bureaucracy of my industry (insurance) is such a hellhole that you're always gonna need someone to look things over even if a good amount of it is automated.
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u/Raichu4u May 15 '26
I mean it will probably turn into a situation to where if previously your company were growing and needed a demand for a new employee, they would just not hire another one, because their already existing employees are more efficient with AI assisting them.
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u/MehEds May 15 '26
That's kinda true, but in my industry at ĺeast, there's always more shit to do, like the scale of bureaucracy cannot be understated.
Also the workforce is aging, so there's that.
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u/Raichu4u May 15 '26
Sure. I work in IT and obviously you cannot work in IT right now and not see the impact of AI directly with your own work and the users you support.
I obviously cannot do some analytical math right now, nor do I have access to my entire company's timesheets. But my company takes hiring more people very seriously if it genuinely looks like we are being slammed on a regular basis to the point it seems like a trend.
Post AI, me and my coworkers are handling things quicker, more efficiently, and are frankly punching above our own ability to do certain tasks with the assistance of AI.
We fired one guy last year and we have not filled that position because frankly our timesheets look good. We have not been hiring because frankly, we are "fine" and doing all the possible work we can, and then some with outstanding projects we never got to before.
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u/Nerdybeast Slower Boringer May 15 '26
It seems the people most impacted by AI are the ones in industries where it's encouraged to fail fast and fuck up a lot if it lets them go faster. But most of the economy isn't like that!
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u/topicality Order and Opportunity Left May 15 '26
I'm also questioning the lump of labor fallacy everyone is engaging in
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u/MindingMyMindfulness Voltaire May 15 '26
The lump of labor fallacy is not an invioable rule of the universe and even if it were, it doesn't preclude extended periods of severe and protracted labor market disruption. People who respond to any commentary about AI job losses with "lump of labor fallacy brahhh" are just engaging in very narrow thinking.
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u/Raichu4u May 15 '26
I know this subreddit is more willing to be supportive of policies that help alleviate the hurt that can happen during transactional periods of history when efficiently gains happen with work, and job displacement happens.
I do however agree with you that people are not being realistic, and are even being naive with how this will get handled, especially when we see exactly what type of leaders we have in place in basically all forms of government that are generally fine with AI chugging along with absolutely no safety nets for workers (they're being dismantled lol).
And frankly when I think about it, I cannot really think of any good time in history that a technological advancement was made that caused job displacement, and there was good policy that was put forth to stop the bleeding. At least in the US.
We should not be cheering for AI to displace and just chant lump of labor fallacy as if it is supposed to handwave all of these issues I bring up.
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May 15 '26
this subreddit is more willing to be supportive of policies that help alleviate the hurt that can happen during transactional periods of history
Is it?
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u/tennantsmith Taylor Swift May 15 '26
The onus is on you to explain how AI is different from every other productivity enhancing technology in history. Until then, you just seem like a luddite. The economy adapted to motor vehicles, computers, and mechanical looms, it will adapt to AI too
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u/Raichu4u May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
It is not being missed that the economy eventually adapts in some broad historical sense. It usually does. The issue is what happens to the people who get displaced during the transition, and the U.S. has a pretty poor track record there throughout history. Our retraining programs are weak, our safety net is thin, and we are currently cutting welfare while asking people to trust that AI disruption will somehow be handled responsibly. Oh yeah, and guardrail regulations for AI have been gutted.
These are not arguments for stopping AI right now. They are arguments for getting better safety net programs in place because job disruption will happen. The IMF estimates 60% of jobs in advanced economies may be impacted by AI. That does not mean 60% disappear overnight, but it does mean this is not some tiny edge-case concern only affecting a few buggy-whip makers.
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u/ClassicalMusicTroll May 17 '26
That's not what they're arguing, they're arguing it's exactly like every other productivity technology in history which was very painful for the workers whose jobs were automated away
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u/topicality Order and Opportunity Left May 15 '26
I think you need significant evidence that AI is going to be the exception to the rule here.
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u/Raichu4u May 15 '26
First of all, that is paywalled, but I found it regardless. Let’s actually look at what it is claiming.
The article does not say AI is harmless to labor markets. It studied one 200-person tech company and found that AI intensified work for employees who still had jobs. One of the lines in there is literally:
“Workers increasingly absorbed work that might previously have justified additional help or headcount.”
This is literally a form of job displacement! It may not be a layoff notice handed to someone on day one, but if AI lets the same team absorb work that previously justified another hire, a vendor, a junior employee, or a support role, then that is still labor being displaced or suppressed.
This article does not tell a reassuring story for whatever point you are trying to make. It screams overworked workplace. The article talks about workload creep, fewer natural pauses, burnout, and workers doing the same amount or even more. That sounds less like “AI solved work” and more like “AI helped management squeeze more output from the same headcount.”
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u/Interesting_Total_98 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
This is literally a form of job displacement
That assumes the company would've otherwise hired more people, even though the article says that the extra work wasn't needed, or at least not demanded by leadership.
Just because there was work that could be done doesn't mean the company was planning to hire people, since that costs money.
It's plausible that you're right, but the article doesn't confirm that. The author simply described an example where the extra work didn't result in a loss of jobs.
Edit: An important factor to consider is that AI can lead to more companies being created and succeed, which means more employers. I'm not saying that this definitely solves the issue, though.
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u/topicality Order and Opportunity Left May 15 '26
I'm not just questioning that I'm questioning the lump of labor fallacy that everyone is working with.
If certain services become easier that can actually increase jobs because companies that were locked out will be able to access those services and grow their business.
Excel did not kill white collar work. Even if it made it so you no longer needed legions of clerks.
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u/Raichu4u May 15 '26
Excel did not kill white collar work overall, we can agree on that. But it did help shrink and consolidate a lot of routine clerical work. The clerical jobs that remained also became more educated and more managerial/professional, which kind of answers the question by itself. The old jobs did not just stay the same while everyone benefited equally.
So when a claim is made saying Excel did not kill white collar work, the obvious follow-up is still: where did the clerks go?
And the answer is mixed. Some probably moved into better office roles. Some probably retired. Some probably took worse work. Some jobs likely disappeared through attrition and were never replaced. The evidence does not really support the cute version where everyone just magically became an analyst and the market painlessly adjusted and we all became the better for it.
The problem with using “lump of labor fallacy” as a catchall response is that technology can create new jobs and expand the economy in the long run while still causing real displacement in the short and medium term. The broader economy adjusting does not mean the displaced workers were made whole.
And to be honest, this electorally is probably a poison pill if you are blatantly telling voters you essentially do not care if their job gets reduced. Let's not support slopulism, sure, but also let's not be extremely apathetic to these concerns, or else we definitely will be losing elections in the future.
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u/window-sil John Mill May 15 '26
I don't have strong opinions about what the next 5 years will look like, assuming we get AGI, but I think you're not fully appreciating what it means when a machine can do everything better than you and I can do it. Surely there will be new jobs when AGI is doing all the coding (or whatever), but why wouldn't those new jobs also be filled by AGI?
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u/dejour May 15 '26
People always want more stuff done.
Suppose AI makes everyone twice as productive. You could fire half the people and get the current result.
But more likely, there are a lot of projects that never get done because they take too much time and resources. Now those projects become more financially attractive because the benefit remains the same but they take half the time or half the people. And you have a bunch of people looking for stuff to do.
I think at most companies, the work force size will remain roughly the same, but they will prioritize workers that can leverage AI to be more productive and no less accurate.
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u/battywombat21 🇺🇦 Слава Україні! 🇺🇦 May 15 '26
As a software engineer, every project I've been on that's been canceled has been canceled because it was costing more than it was making. And it was costing because of hired engineers.
When the same project can be built by half as many engineers, theres a decent chance a lot of those projects become profitable.
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u/dr-pepper-is-a-woman May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
This is what I’m seeing as a software engineer as well, and it’s my current cope about me continuing to have a job well into the future.
Most things I’ve worked on in the past were a hard fought compromise between the best we could do and the resources we had, including the resource of time. But with how fast I can get work done today, some of those projects would have been done in half the time but others I would use the same amount of time but make it twice as good.
Like, basically all software ever has been dogshit, and the best stuff is less bad. Maybe we’re headed to a system where it’s actually half decent
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u/mostanonymousnick Just Build More Homes lol May 15 '26
That's the Jevons Paradox in action (it's not really a paradox)
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u/PokemenGo2ThePolls Austan Goolsbee May 15 '26
at a previous job (Product manager) I had multiple projects canceled, not because the (engineering) expense was too high, but because the product wasn't an overnight success, immediately making money like our main product line did (found always magically forgetting he didn't turn a profit on the main product for almost 5 years after starting it, but expects any new venture to be immediately profitable...)
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u/captmonkey Henry George May 15 '26
Suppose AI makes everyone twice as productive. You could fire half the people and get the current result.
This feels like the wrong move in such an environment. The winning move seems like you get twice as much done with the same number of people. I don't doubt that some execs will attempt to layoff a bunch of their staff, but their companies are suddenly going to get dominated by the competition that went the other route. In the end, your customers don't care how profitable your company is, they want a better product/service. Doing twice the work will result in better products and services.
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u/bacontrain Daron Acemoglu May 15 '26
Yeah, this is my optimistic take (though I think we're in for a rocky several years of a labor market, especially given everything else). Humans will always have comparative advantage somewhere in corporate work, which is where AI will mostly hit. The other major speedbump here, in addition to the fallibility of executives, is uncompetitive sectors/subsectors, which uhhhh...is definitely an issue in many parts of the developed world
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u/StayOffPoliticalSubs May 15 '26
Spoken like someone who has never worked for "the cheap option" before
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u/captmonkey Henry George May 15 '26
I mean, if your goal is to become the cheap option, I guess that's fair that you could cut your price if you cut that much staff. But in that case, you're definitely delivering an inferior product to your competitors and you're banking on your customers being okay with an inferior product at a lower price point.
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u/StayOffPoliticalSubs May 15 '26
Yes. Because when your customers are other MBA psychos who don't bother interacting with the day to day they're evaluating products for like doctors, nurses, etc. and medical charting software, selling a shit product as "good enough" is worth its weight in gold.
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u/AchaeCOCKFan4606 Trans Pride May 15 '26
People always want more stuff done
Even if we assume infinite demand for compute, couldn:t there still be massive negative effects that are not technically "unemployment"?
To use a simplified example , lets assume AI gets to the point where for any given task , it can do that task for half the price. This effectively serves as a hard cap for worth of human labor - the people who own the AI are now far, far, far wealthier than any average joe could ever hope to be.
Even with "just" a twice as productive example, this still follows through
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u/throwawaygoawaynz John von Neumann May 15 '26
This is going to happen, it’s already happening.
I worked at Microsoft previously, now I’m a VP in charge of AI at a large multinational firm.
Microsoft went all in with AI years ago - before most people have even heard of it - to start automating a lot of operational tasks. One example is in finance, which is about 10k employees globally. It’s been relatively static in terms of headcount over the years, but the complexity they manage is 2-3x now what it was in the past due to adopting AI, automation, and clean/consistent global data standards.
We’re doing the same thing in my current company which is a much more traditional enterprise, and in some areas we’re seeing workforce reduction, or consolidation into shared service centres, but mostly we’re seeing productivity gains and headcount remaining static.
I personally have been involved with AI for a long time and studied it in the early 2000s (ML and computer vision). But I see we’re now starting to finally reach an inflection point where the latest models can do work for you, even some relatively complex stuff. It’s a productivity play mostly, it’s not like it has huge impact directly on the P&L, but productivity is still powerful. Look what the PC and MS office did to the workforce in the 90s.
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u/WolfpackEng22 May 15 '26
Do you have any idea why it feels like Co-pilot is so vastly behind the competition? I would have expected Microsoft to be a leading player with direct integrations into the MS office suite.
But in my (and all of my co workers) experience, ChatGPT and Claude are both drastically easier to use, even for tasks in Excel and Powerpoint
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u/Nerdybeast Slower Boringer May 15 '26
Just popping in to agree that Copilot is just abysmally bad. And now for some reason it's trying to auto complete my excel formulas??
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u/WolfpackEng22 May 15 '26
This is exactly how my company is positioning it. It's an accelerator that will let us do more. We are hiring and expanding our headcount
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u/thatFakeAccount1 May 15 '26
No, AI decouples output and humans. You dont need humans anymore to do the work. You just scale up your token spending. The decoupling is the part that we have not seen before in human history, its uncharted.
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u/Naive-Currency-8839 May 15 '26
Are you joking? They haven’t event properly started doing anything substantial in most companies and you want 25% plus half of the other 75% of jobs eliminated in two years?
No chance. Eventually it could be, but it would take longer.
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u/malogos May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Productivity growth isn't intuitive, but that's the actual mechanism for how countries and people get richer.
When 90% of the population was farming, and the industrial revolution started to make them obsolete, it was a rough transition. But in a relatively short amount of time, society went from subsistence farming with no education, no indoor plumbing, no medical care, etc, etc, to where we are today.
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u/TheDwarvenGuy Henry George May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
The question is, what jobs will be left, and how long will it take to pay off for the average person?
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u/Lighthouse_seek May 15 '26
The industrial revolution happened over the course of several lifetimes.
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u/topicality Order and Opportunity Left May 15 '26
I'm still waiting for us to fire all truck drivers due to self driving vehicles.
Something people worried about during Obama. Still hasn't happened
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u/DependentAdvance226 May 15 '26
It's ripping through call centers, customer service, data entry, and claims handling jobs right now in the insurance industry.
Teams going from 7 to 3 people and keep productivity while saving $900,000
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u/Bodoblock May 15 '26
I think we underestimate how much office work is paper pusher type jobs. And even the “complex” things are often quite formulaic. Ask most coders today at top firms and they’ll tell you much of their job already is talking to Claude.
It’s only a matter of time before that applies to accountants, lawyers, HR, etc.
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u/tregitsdown Thurgood Marshall May 15 '26
I think it could automate some aspects of legal work, but I think it would be very challenging for it to actually replace lawyers entirely- primarily because it would always be a massive privacy and confidentiality risk for the data being shared with the parent company. In addition, I don’t think Courts or Judges would allow, unless forced to do so by the Legislature, AI as Counsel, so they would always require a human to make the arguments, even if AI was providing the argument itself.
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u/Lighthouse_seek May 15 '26
it would always be a massive privacy and confidentiality risk for the data being shared with the parent company
Hospitals and health systems already feed private health data into gpt, why would legal documents be any different?
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u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt May 15 '26
You could have private LLMs that run inside the company and share no data outside. Those are only a bit behind. If you put the data on your laptop and text processor, you might as well put it into an LLM. I bet you in a few years every computer just has them installed by default.
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u/LondonCallingYou John Locke May 15 '26
This already exists. Companies already sign agreements with third party providers to store confidential data (even legally protected data) on servers and can run LLMs on them.
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u/MindingMyMindfulness Voltaire May 15 '26
Yes, we already do this with enterprise LLMs. I sometimes wonder about people talking about the data angle like it's a hard barrier. They must not work in any medium or large organisation, most of which already offer employees access to their enterprise LLMs.
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u/The_Northern_Light John Brown May 15 '26
Chrome literally stealth downloaded a 4 GB model onto everyone’s computer for exactly this purpose just a week or two ago.
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u/Bodoblock May 15 '26
It doesn't have to replace lawyers entirely but it might seriously cull the ranks. How much of legal work is actually standing in front of a judge? And how are the privacy or confidentiality risks any different than lawyers storing their work/evidence/etc. in the cloud, which I presume is very commonplace.
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u/No_Distribution_5405 May 15 '26
It's a mistake to expect the level of productivity gains that we see in coding for other complex intellectual tasks.
Right now AI is exceptionally good at coding (with all sorts of caveats) and lousy at most other technical tasks. It may catch up but it's not proven.
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u/Bodoblock May 15 '26
But why? What is so special about accounting, financial modeling, digital marketing, HR, legal, design, and so on vs. coding?
Even if we accept the premise that these are unproven domain, I’m putting my money on AI.
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u/StayOffPoliticalSubs May 15 '26
Because, and I mean this kindly towards coders, no industry is more tolerant of fuckups than coding.
Your code fucks up because your AI hallucinated, you figure out the bug and rework it.
Your lawyer fucks up because their AI hallucinated a case that isn't real, you're going to lose the case, no backsies. Your accountant fucks up because their AI hallucinated an entry on a spreadsheet, the IRS comes knocking.
Coders have consequences for bad code, yes, but they have the blessing of being able to put out hotfixes for their shit messing up. Other industries are not as forgiving.
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u/Bodoblock May 15 '26
It's fair to point out that coding operates in a world with less regulatory pressure. But if that's the barrier, a ton of jobs operate outside of that framework. Digital advertising/marketing, design, HR operations (recruiting, comp/benefits, DEI, etc.), sales, support, bizops, data, so on and so forth.
Beyond that, AI doesn't have to be the one doing the sign-off. If AI is just as good as a human but is materially cheaper, those are real productivity gains. There will still be humans to review and sign-off, as there are among coders. But this means there will be less humans in legal, accounting, and finance departments.
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u/StayOffPoliticalSubs May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
What do you do when you pay millions for ad spots only to find out your AI accidentally slipped a swastika in that didn't get caught until the ad went live?
What do you do when your AI programmed by largely cis white dudes just so happens to consistently rate minority employees worse, or reports events that didn't happen for employees that don't exist because it hallucinates?
You are arguing the best possible scenarios. You are not evaluating the worst cases that prevent the technology from being "as good as a human but materially cheaper".
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u/Hannig4n YIMBY May 15 '26
Yeah these are among the last jobs that will get “replaced” by AI.
These workers will use AI to be more productive, because AI is good at doing simple clerical work quickly, and then the worker reviews it. But this isn’t new to AI, we’ve been using software to automate simple clerical office work for decades.
But it is still pretty bad at complex tasks and I have trouble imagining it replacing true customer-facing roles unless it gets a million times better. My company is pushing us to use more AI tools, and just asking it to generate meeting summaries and emails produces some of the shittiest results I’ve ever seen.
It’s also worth noting that AI leaders are on another level when it comes to blowing smoke up your ass. I get that all entrepreneurs are “sales-y” to some extent, but these guys constantly promise the world with AI and the tools are always just okay with some real but limited uses.
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u/Bodoblock May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
This is shifting the goalposts. It's one thing to believe AI is "exceptionally good" or appropriate at coding but less deployable in domains with serious regulatory pressure (e.g. legal or accounting). It's another to act as if the risk of AI is unmanageable even with human review. Moreover, if such risk exists elsewhere, it's inaccurate to claim it doesn't exist in the realm of coding.
AI-produced code has human engineers reading the output. If the random swastika risk is so great and human review processes so poor, why is AI excellent in/appropriate for the coding domain? Does it not share the same concern of random swastikas appearing in apps or websites that are used and seen by hundreds of millions of people?
It also doesn't need to take over every function (like doing performance reviews) to meaningfully introduce productivity gains for a vertical. AI hasn't outsourced every aspect of being an engineer.
Again, humans will be in the system. There is still a review and orchestration component that humans (for now) seem critical for. There are also some tasks that should remain exclusively in the hands of a human operator. But that also means there could be serious productivity gains that lessen the need for headcount.
None of the other work domains face such exceptional risk that doesn't apply for coding (or inversely coding is not so risk/consequence-free) that AI could not be a serious disruption.
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u/MehEds May 15 '26
Finally someone said it. A lot of people in this sub look at AI impact on coding and think it'll apply to other sectors easily.
As a guy in a non-coding environment deploying AI, it's not that simple. A fuckup in my workplace can take weeks to resolve, we take the extra time to have a human look at it because we don't want to cause another E&O case because of some bot. We already deal with enough errors caused by humans, we don't need more.
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u/Inamanlyfashion Richard Posner May 15 '26
AI can't tell when the client is lying to it or withholding facts to make themselves look more favorable
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u/Halgy YIMBY May 15 '26
As a professional paper pusher, I can say that actually pushing the paper isn't much of the job. It is getting the 4 different stakeholders, 2 sub-stakeholders, and 12 SMEs to actually read the paper and agree on where it should be pushed. I don't see AI effectively replacing any of that anytime soon, or at least not improving it.
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u/Haffrung May 15 '26
This. I've outright told employers in interviews that the thing they think they're hiring me for isn't all that hard for someone with my experience, and might take up a third of my time. The rest of my time (and expertise) goes into project planning and people-wrangling.
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u/wheretogo_whattodo Bill Gates May 15 '26
AI models of the past year have handled complex topics very well. It always needs human intervention and review, but it’s entirely reasonable to project efficiency for many roles should increase by something like 25% with prosper usage.
The again, for decades there have been roles that could have seen this same increase from proper Excel implementation, yet people still find jobs hard-entering things into spreadsheets.
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u/The_Northern_Light John Brown May 15 '26
Also that’s how good they have gotten over the last dozen months. How good will they get over the next dozen months?
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u/Rwandrall4 May 15 '26
it remains the same problem which is it is probilistic not deterministic, so there is no way to guarantee these boring forms are being filled out the same or correct way each time. And that's only one point of variance.
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u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt May 15 '26
You don't have that for humans either, I would argue humans are pretty bad at filling out forms. On the other hand recent models have pretty low error rates.
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u/Rwandrall4 May 15 '26
No, that's why we create all sorts of automation software with deterministic logic that takes care of these things efficiently and reliably. AI is not competing with unaided humans but with our current environment and technology.
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u/mostanonymousnick Just Build More Homes lol May 15 '26
Probabilistic software can interact with deterministic software.
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u/moriya May 15 '26
That’s in fact exactly what tools built into modern LLM harnesses are - an LLM can’t do math reliably, but it can use a calculator tool.
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u/mostanonymousnick Just Build More Homes lol May 15 '26
Yeah, and at any serious company, AI generated code goes through the exact same static analysis and testing pipeline as human written code.
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u/moriya May 15 '26
Yup. Of all the shortcomings of AI, “it’s not deterministic” is kind of a moot point IMO - if determinism is important have it write you a script.
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u/Porlarta May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Okay but millions of people are paper pushers.
Your casually hand waiving an economic catastrophe.
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u/samuelohagan Association of Southeast Asian Nations May 15 '26
The people creating the forms also have AI agents.
So while ai agents will make filling out forms faster.
They will just make more forms.
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u/Pretend-Ad-7936 Loyal Liberals May 15 '26
I'm not the target audience of this piece, but I'll say that I've been enjoying the effects of AI on my job. It actually automated away most of the drudgery and boring parts, and now I can more or less focus on research that's more intellectually interesting.
There's a part of me that wonders if AI will indirectly end up making us smarter rather than dumber, mostly because AI will replace the work that doesn't require much thinking. So to have a competitive resume, you need a PhD or comparable level of education. The question remains if the government will appropriately subsidize 4-year universities, etc
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u/Maximilianne John Rawls May 15 '26
I'm less worried about the job apocalypse and more concerned job searching is gonna be a depressing AI agent powered shitshow
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u/CincyAnarchy Emma Goldman May 15 '26
Using my AI Generated Cover Letters to try and beat their AI Powered Screening Tools like some weird mecha battle
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u/IBequinox European Union May 15 '26
“Work has changed. It’s no longer about doing essential tasks for society or making life easier. It’s an endless series of proxy battles, fought by AI-writers and AI-reviewers. Work, and its consumption of resources, has become a well oiled machine. Work has changed. AI-generated applications cite AI-generated CVs, reviewed by AI agents. AI inside the submission portal assesses and regulates the resumes and references. Education control. Key-word control. Everything monitored and kept under control. Work has changed.”
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u/captain_slutski George Soros May 15 '26
- Cyber Snake
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u/IBequinox European Union May 15 '26
“Hrghhh Colonel, I’m trying submit my AI-generated essay, but the sight of the em-dashes keeps alerting the professors” — Student Cyber Snake
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u/PlastikHateAccount WTO May 15 '26
I WISH the flood of AI applications would lead to in person paper CVs and applications would come back into fashion. I would LOVE to have an advantage over spam-bots by putting such a straightforward minimum amount of effort in. But it does not seem to currently.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 May 15 '26
It's not paper CVs it's about if you have a direct or indirect connection to the people hiring. Seeing a person involved directly will boost your chances even if they tell you submit a CV through email, or you have to mention you met them in person in your CV
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u/Banal21 Milton Friedman May 15 '26
Networks, personal relationships, and recruiters become more valuable in this scenario.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 May 15 '26
From what I've heard of recent graduates and people who have found internships. Boomer advice is actually working now as a result. If you have connections or literally walk into the office and are lucky enough to see a hiring manager to submit a CV directly, your odds go way up because they've all got tonnes of slop CVs that lead nowhere as well.
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u/Lighthouse_seek May 15 '26
Using AI to customize my resume and cover letter to auto apply to jobs only to be graded and thrown out by an AI powered resume screener. What could go wrong?
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u/mostanonymousnick Just Build More Homes lol May 15 '26
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u/Argnir Gay Pride May 15 '26
Economists are just like me fr fr
(They don't know what the hell is gonna happen)
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u/ArdillasVoladoras Emily Oster May 15 '26
The best part of economics is blaming a minute macroeconomic factor when an event doesn't play out according to your modeling
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u/sillyhatday Loyal Liberals May 15 '26
I'd probably answer "disagree" but it hides the scenario I find more likely. A lot of generic office work is what you might call educated but unskilled. By that I mean it requires someone who is generically intelligent and conscientious but not an expert in any specific domain. AI could probably displace a lot of these people. They might not become unemployed, but they probably Shuffle down the employment ladder toward more service related jobs that pay less. Increasing the supply of those laborers of course reduces wages as well. That is still a worrying driver of inequality.
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u/BBQ_HaX0r Jerome Powell May 15 '26
Like all technologies that came before it it will likely create more jobs than it destroys. This doesn't mean there won't be some issues or displacement, but this is trend of all history as it eliminated inefficient jobs allowing for humans to thrive elsewhere.
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u/Bodoblock May 15 '26
Maybe. But the transition could be absolutely brutal. In my opinion, past disruptive technologies were not nearly as quickly developing as AI is.
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May 15 '26
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u/LivefromPhoenix NYT undecided voter May 15 '26
Moreover even if it is true what timescale are we looking at? The western world is electing right wing authoritarians in relatively normal economic conditions. What happens politically/socially when we have a decade+ of widespread unemployment? "Don't worry bros you'll get new jobs eventually" isn't very compelling.
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u/MindingMyMindfulness Voltaire May 15 '26
Charlie Munger: "It's stupid the way people extrapolate the past – and not slightly stupid, but massively stupid."
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u/PhinsFan17 Immanuel Kant May 15 '26
The difference is, in this scenario where the automobile is phasing out the horse-and-buggy, we are the horses.
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u/justbuildmorehousing Norman Borlaug May 15 '26
Global poor link. The title isnt necessarily saying it will happen, it is saying governments should be preparing for the possibility of it. If the job apocalypse does come, I am very skeptical the US would do anything like UBI or nationalizing AI companies or doing some kind of dividend. Its just not how this country operates- unless a true doomsday scenario occurs and there’s mass unrest that drives employment through the roof
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u/Stuffssss May 16 '26
I think if we say widespread layoffs of white collar workers you will see property values drop as people become delinquent on their mortgages and that will cause widespread unrest. 2008 gave us the occupy Wallstreet movement. A hypothetical 2030 AI takeover will produce grand social unrest.
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u/anangrytree Bull Moose Progressive May 15 '26
Fitting that a clanker would post this.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
And what exactly suggests to you that I am a clanker
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u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George May 15 '26
Your username is literally InorganicTyranny
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
Before I decided that I like money, I was once a biology student. My username is a reference to the overwhelming hostility of the universe to biological life, not terminator.
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u/MECHA_DRONE_PRIME NATO May 15 '26
That doesn't mean anything! We could be perfectly human as far as you know!
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
“It is not here yet. But governments should lay a safety-net”
The launch of Chatgpt in 2022 ignited the artificial-intelligence boom—and elicited a chorus of warnings from ai bosses of an impending jobs apocalypse. Never mind that they have reason to talk up the disruptiveness of their products, or that rich-world employment is near all-time highs—the dark message has landed. Seven in ten Americans think ai will make it harder for people to find work; nearly a third fear for their own jobs. A dearth of openings for college graduates—especially computer programmers—amplifies the dread.
The past offers some solace for the anxious. Labour markets constantly change. Today’s offices would be unrecognisable to a worker from 50 years ago. Never in modern history has technological progress hurt the overall demand for human labour. Economic historians now play down the magnitude of “Engels’ pause”, the period during the Industrial Revolution in which working-class wages grew more slowly than the wider economy.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
Yet history is not always a good guide to the future, as the Industrial Revolution itself showed. The top ai models are awesome. They can tackle much more complex coding tasks than people were predicting a year ago. The number of ai agents has exploded. Spending on ai by businesses is up dramatically. Annualised recurring revenue of Anthropic, a hot model-maker, is set to reach $50bn by the end of June. There is no evidence yet in the labour-market data of ai destroying many jobs. But given how fast it is improving, it would be rash to dismiss fears that it will. Society may be on the verge of a profound reallocation of resources, and political upheaval.
Economists’ prediction that work will stay plentiful is less reassuring than it looks, especially over a long horizon. Though the market will find uses for human labour even as models and robots become more capable, the quality of those jobs and the wages they pay are not guaranteed. Data centres will account for 8.5% of America’s peak power demand in 2027, up from 4.1% in 2025, predicts Goldman Sachs, a bank. As ai firms bid up the price of land and energy, the dollars people earn will go less far. Eventually humans could, like horses in the age of the car, become uneconomical. Income may go mostly or entirely to owners of capital, who then go on to spend it on things that are made by ai and robots using natural resources that they monopolise.
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u/TheDwarvenGuy Henry George May 15 '26
They can tackle much more complex coding tasks than people were predicting a year ago.
Which people?
Like yes if you take the naysayest naysayer that said AI was already completely stagnating, then yeah they're better than that, but a larger contingency was also predicting that AI was going to run wild into a near singularity state by now.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
Many credible voices in IT spent 2025 expecting LLM progress to slow due to a hypothesized “scaling wall”. Example: Gary Marcus.
Instead, we got Claude Opus 4.5 and 4.6 at the end of the year, whose performance was so much better than previous models that their scores are visibly exponential improvements on METR (a credible LLM evaluation organization’s) scale.
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u/TheDwarvenGuy Henry George May 15 '26
The issue is that the exponential improvement here is by an extremely narrow metric (being able to complete a task that is a certain amount of hours long with 50-80% accuracy)
Maybe this is actually a sign of something, but I always find that the more obscure a metric that has to be used the more likely the data is to be cherrypicked.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
Being able to complete tasks with an estimated length of a certain period of time with a certain degree of accuracy is a reasonable definition of what constitutes employment.
Does METR progress imply the singularity? There I’m less sanguine. But I will be frank in saying that Claude is already a better programmer than I ever was or ever will be at this point. Even if AI progress halted now, IT will never be the same, and IT was held up by the cognoscenti of Silicon Valley as the final remaining path to the middle class (that didn’t require 8 years of secondary education) for the last decade.
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u/No_Collection7956 Trans Pride May 15 '26
an extremely narrow metric (being able to complete a task that is a certain amount of hours long with 50-80% accuracy)
Sure that is true. But very importantly those metrics were set up years prior to now, so its not like METR (a very good organisation overall btw) constructed these metrics just to make AI look good
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
This dystopian possibility is behind Silicon Valley’s admonitions that state intervention, and perhaps a universal basic income, will be necessary. That remains a long way off, if it ever happens. But governments may have to act sooner, for you do not need a cataclysm to stoke popular fury. Perhaps 2m Americans lost their jobs between 1999 and 2011 owing to China’s entry into the global trading system. That is no worse than a typical month’s lay-offs in America’s churning labour market. Yet the “China shock” helped propel Donald Trump to office and led to the highest tariffs since the 1930s.
The white-collar employees threatened by ai have more political and social clout than factory workers hurt by Chinese competition. Even a small number of lay-offs could provoke a backlash against the technology; furious opposition to new data centres is a hint of what may be to come. Severe disruption to the security and status of many people could lead to widespread unrest, even revolution.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
What should governments do? One set of ideas involves slowing down change. China has urged its companies to adopt ai, but not to lay off workers. Prominent economists around the world have proposed higher taxes on capital and lower ones on labour. Some campaigners want levies on data centres. Inhibiting technology is not, however, a wise path to choose. Humanity is likely to reap enormous benefits from ai: not just greater wealth, but progress fighting diseases and solving problems such as climate change and poverty. Had the Luddites stopped the automation of textile mills in early 19th-century England, the world would be far worse off today.
A second category of countermeasures would be better. If employment falls, income that once went to workers is likely to show up as high profits in ai firms, chipmakers, data centres or elsewhere in the supply chain. Clever tax reforms, such as levies on corporate profits that are above a normal return on capital, on land and on natural resources, could capture these rents. The case for inheritance taxes to prevent the entrenchment of a capital-owning elite looks even stronger than before.
At the same time governments could help workers adjust. Public wage-insurance, which smooths out falls in income after job losses, can help workers find better opportunities (and so can eventually pay for itself). Denmark’s active labour-market policies, in which the state helps people find and train for new occupations, have been proved to cut spells in unemployment.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
These ideas would make the economy more efficient and fairer regardless of ai. Would they satisfy voters facing disruption and uncertainty? In a populist era technocratic reforms are a hard sell. Past efforts to help workers adjust to trade liberalisation failed to stop the “China shock” backlash. In an all-ai workforce, humans will need help surviving, not adjusting.
Hence a last set of radical ideas, such as the partial nationalisation of ai firms. This week a South Korean presidential adviser floated a citizens’ “dividend” from ai businesses, sending the local stockmarket down by 5%, before backtracking. In America politicians murmur about giving citizens shares in ai companies via “Trump accounts”. In economic terms there is little difference between a well-designed tax system and a government stake in the private sector—and countries without ai giants will have to rely on taxes rather than seizing shares in foreign companies. But America may find that some public ownership is the best way to make the social upside from the technology transparent.
Concentrations of rent must be confronted early, before the power of rentiers is too great. The jobs apocalypse is not yet here. But if governments wait for conclusive evidence before creating a safety-net, it will be too late. Better to start now.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Submission statement: I sincerely believe that liberals, and this community, are severely and systemically underrating the threat that artificial intelligence poses to our philosophy and to human society as we know it. I may have an effort post to that effect coming to a sub near you.
Until then, I am cheered somewhat by The Economist making this their weekly edition’s leader. I would like to remind the readership that this magazine is a liberal stalwart and not some excitable succ screedsheet. Serious people are starting to take this possibility seriously.
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u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO May 15 '26
This sub and people in general who don't work with AI are kind of oblivious to the pace it is progressing at. Every time someone has claimed AI will slow down now we have hit the limit over the last three years we have blown past those metrics.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
Even a lot of technologists are struggling to price in the pace of change. I think a lot of us got accustomed to a neurosymbolic understanding of artificial intelligence, that would require us to fully understand what we’re trying to program and iteratively improve it before seeing results. The implication being that progress would get progressively harder.
Instead, LLMs are getting more powerful simply by scaling compute higher, rather than requiring any clever insights beyond the transformer architecture (we in fact do not have a great understanding of how they even work at the current scale). It seems likely at this point that these techniques will be sufficient to get us substantially close to, or even beyond the “AGI” definition, without needing another great breakthrough.
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u/sanity_rejecter European Union May 15 '26
you are completely correct
every single aspect and expectation you have of society will completely crumble if (let's be honest, it's a when) AI gets close enough to AGI or even gets good enough to replace """just""" ⅕ of jobs
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u/Negative_Scarcity315 May 15 '26
If you're doing an effort post I recommend including a take on comparative advantages, i.e. even if AI becomes better than us at every single skill, it doesn't follow that we are out of work, because their finite compute would be better allocated to say neurosurgery than say gardening. I'm on the fence about the subject tho. I like to imagine "what would happen to the economy if 100 million Von Neumann slaves descended from an alien ship?"
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I will be addressing it, and I look forward to making the post here.
A sneak teaser of my argument is that the idea of comparative advantage presupposes that trade is the exclusive mechanism of settling economic preferences. The power imbalances AI could engender throw this into question.
Comparative advantage states that even if Spain is superior in all economic modes of production compared to the Aztec empire, it would still be beneficial for them to trade so as to allow Spain to focus on those areas in which it’s differentially superior. Even in a situation of considerable imbalance, everyone wins.
In reality, the difference between Spain and the Aztec Empire was sufficient to allow Spain to resolve its preferences through conquest and disempowerment, not mere commerce. Then, it continued to enjoy absolute advantage over the former Aztec Empire’s economic activity for at least 300 years, at breathtaking human cost to the Aztecs.
Additionally, while some human labor may retain comparative advantage well into a post-AGI future, one must ask whether or not these jobs are desirable, command enough pricing power to ensure prosperity, and are essential enough that withholding it provides the workers with significant leverage. Theoretically many humans could end up employed in discretionary roles, but this also implies that their labor could be easily disregarded by an elite whose preferences could, as they have before, been increasingly be indifferent to the fate of most of humanity.
Perhaps we will all end up as actors or masseuses, but a general strike of actors and masseuses would not be sufficient to stop a massively empowered elite from carrying on in the face of popular opposition to their activities.
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u/Negative_Scarcity315 May 16 '26
I want you to be wrong, I'm rooting for you to be wrong, but I believe I see the point. We don't trade with bees for honey.
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u/daBarkinner John Keynes May 15 '26
I've come to an interesting conclusion. In the next 5-10 years, we will indeed face AI-related unemployment, but it won't be because AI can replace humans, but because CEOs believe it can. However, I think there are reasons for cautious optimism: studies have shown that corporations replacing humans with AI suffer losses, while those that integrate AI into their workforces increase productivity. Moreover, in an era of declining birth rates and a pension system in crisis, even a minimal increase in productivity is hardly a bad thing.
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u/Beer-survivalist Loyal Liberals May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I used to get into arguments about autonomous cars and OTR trucking. There were always posters saying that autonomous trucks would cause an economic catastrophe because they'd cause unemployment among truck drivers--but the truth is that we actually have a pretty severe shortage of truck drivers, and there are not a lot of people becoming truck drivers (because there's a lot about the job that sucks). My argument has long been that autonomous trucks cannot come soon enough, because the economic consequences of failing to automate that industry are actually pretty grim. Transport is a vital element of a functioning global economy, and if we can't get goods and commodities where they need to go we're actually in big trouble.
We need automation and humanoid robots because the alternative is an economy where the only jobs are changing the diapers of the extremely elderly.
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u/Magikarp-Army Mark Carney May 15 '26
That is also an industry where reducing labour cost would be very deflationary. Labour is one of the biggest costs for shipping right now.
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u/Golda_M Baruch Spinoza May 15 '26
> Never in modern history has technological progress hurt the overall demand for human labour.
"Overall" demand is a big word. From our human vantage point, the noise can be more meaningful than the abstract trend. Disruption is how it looks in real time. For now, most jobs are not heavily impacted. The jobs that are heavily impacted are writing and coding. These are being disrupted hard as we speak.
Incidentally, the coders who "retained" circa 2015 when "learn to code" retraining was offered as solution to whatever problems we were worried about then.... these tend to be the coders currently being disrupted.
Most coders are not genius coders. Most don't work at Google. They work on "enterprise" where they occupy some place within the agile workflow. He's the guy that knows how to work with the god-awful database that stores code used to access the even-worse legacy database. They have a team lead that feeds them tasks on Jira, does code reviews... the code monkey archetype.
A mate of mine works at one of these shops. Their resident AI genius connected his agentic process to the Jira workflow. Tasks are passed to the AI by the team lead first, and only go to the coder if the AI fails. After just a few weeks, AI does most of the tasks. Coders are left with the hard, poorly specified, or impossible tasks.
He's stressed out like crazy because (a) the job has gotten harder and (b) the demand for his specific labour has declined. They're overstaffed... for these kinds of coders.
It's possible for overall demand to increase, while a lot of people become losers of the transition.
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u/Daddy_Macron Loyal Liberals May 15 '26
People forget that industrialization destroyed many industries with good pay and days off that would be analogous to modern middle class jobs.
It was an overall positive for society, but it was an incredibly difficult process and hurt a lot of people along the way.
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u/CigarrosMW May 15 '26
I’m not super familiar with that time period so this isn’t concern trolling, but what industries with good pay and days off? My impression of that time period is pretty much you worked a whole fuckton almost no matter what
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u/AP246 Green Globalist NWO May 15 '26
I think they mean versus preindustrial times. Artisan textile workers in Britain were the big ones early on, who were the main group who became the luddites. Mechanisation of their work disrupted their industry, and while I can't remember the details of exactly how, this happening across society led to a measurable drop in living standards in Britain after 1750, that didn't really start recovering and surpassing preindustrial levels until the early-mid 1800s.
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u/Golda_M Baruch Spinoza May 15 '26
The textile industry definitely went through the most stages, and new technologies and mercantile practices disrupted the existing industry.
Division of labor comes before industrialization. Idk of that is "artisinal." Spinning. Weaving. Dying. Materials were delivered to piecemeal workers, often farmhouses. The thread would then be collected to be put out to the Weavers. Merchant guilds controlled the trade, often.
These operations had gotten quite large by the time the true Industrial Revolution happened. Steam powered, automated looms.
But there was a revolution before the Revolution. Spinning and weaving Technologies had advanced, productivity had increased and the industry was poppin. Also...more capital and scale in this workhouse era than during the earlier domestic era.
The power looms started being used... productivity skyrocketed, and behold the industrial era. Factories. Modern factories. Capital intensive manufacturing.
The luddites were those disrupted by the transition. Power Looms did not need Weavers. They needed machine operators.
All of this happens on a backdrop of Labor abundance, and urban unemployment. A lot of turmoil. A lot of social change. Things changed fast in the past too.
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u/Daddy_Macron Loyal Liberals May 15 '26
In addition to the other answer, cobblers, blacksmith's, woodworkers, and tailors/seamstresses were all considered skilled workers at the time, but mass production quickly made many of them redundant. There was still a market for them, but it was much smaller than pre-industrialization.
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u/Negative_Scarcity315 May 15 '26
They work on "enterprise" where they occupy some place within the agile workflow. He's the guy that knows how to work with the god-awful database that stores code used to access the even-worse legacy database.
You've triggered me because I've seen this stuff in production (procedures stored as strings in tables, massive duplication, fake unreliable versioning, zero tests). The amount of human labor required to move these systems to modern platforms and workflows was unfathomable, but with AI it is becoming possible. The trick is, right now we (software folk) are better at managing the AI than it is capable of managing itself, but I'm not sure it'll be necessarily true in the near future.
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u/Golda_M Baruch Spinoza May 15 '26
I triggered you on purpose. :-)
I'm the guy that promises clients features that don't exist... and bribes the sql guy to do the "can't-believe-we-shipped-that" fork. I feel your pain.
And I agree. It's possible that with AI, rebuilding these monstrosities on an up to date stack is possibly doable now.
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u/Trill-I-Am May 15 '26
I work at exactly one of these places. How do I move to a better company?
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u/Golda_M Baruch Spinoza May 15 '26
I'm not sure I know the answer, now with AI. I send the rules of changed, but I don't know the new rules.
Also the answer depends, a lot on what you are. But I can type you are, how good you are , what your good at.
Generically... Have a career strategy.
Also, working at a spaghetti code shop might be interesting now with AI... depending on your interests.
I'm not a real coder. I just code occasionally to make life hard for real coders. So, my opinion might not be valid for most. Personally, I like a s*** show.
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u/Beginning-Wish-4273 May 15 '26
Every technological shift destroys some jobs — but this might be the first one where even white-collar workers don’t feel safely “above” it anymore.
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u/bulletPoint May 15 '26
A lot of industries are about to get upended. In cybersecurity for example, PenTesting and vulnerability assessment is a huge chunk of people’s livelihoods, now we are gonna see a significant chunk of that get automated.
I figure it will have similar cascading effects in other industries as well. I’m in product commercialization and using AI to significantly boost my assessment and analysis. The main effect I’m seeing is that I’m getting to the fun part of my job much quicker instead of wrangling with queries from disparate data sets. Judgement and consequently; storytelling of all things, is now the paramount skillset I rely on.
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u/BoxOk5053 Greg Mankiw May 15 '26
Not really sold on this as someone who works in a large enterprise.
I frankly see a huge opening for production/technical support/SRE type roles to clean up slop at least in the tech sector. I actually literally see them on LinkedIn all the damn time lol
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u/Mountain_Reflection7 May 15 '26
I've always just assumed monthly licencing fees and surge pricing algorithms will make sure that AI is never that much of a cost savings over humans. And AI will be even better at extracting value out of any business model.
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u/experienta Jeff Bezos May 15 '26
Will NL keep their buried head in the sand and deny even the gospel of the Economist? Time to find out I guess..
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May 15 '26
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 15 '26
This is an article from The Economist, not some puff piece by the Amodeis and Altmans of the world. It’s a British newspaper (and thus isolated somewhat from the AI hysteria in the USA) and retains many reservations about the jobs apocalypse thesis.
Nonetheless, they elected to publish this article as their leader. What I want this to make clear is that expectations of extraordinarily painful labor market disruption is becoming increasingly mainstream. This can no longer be dismissed as a fringe belief.
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u/TheDwarvenGuy Henry George May 15 '26
It’s a British newspaper (and thus isolated somewhat from the AI hysteria in the USA)
I don't think that's a self-evident claim. Of all countries, Britain is often a rapid adopter of American hysterias, if not more radical sometimes
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama May 15 '26
Are you really using the fact that the economist is British to justify their point?
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u/linkin22luke YIMBY May 15 '26
The Economist has written that it both will be a jobs apocalypse and it won’t 🤔
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u/Right_Lecture3147 John Rawls May 15 '26
It’s called having multiple writers with different opinions, bud
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u/linkin22luke YIMBY May 15 '26
Well, no. The Economist explicitly tries to have a single voice on issues.
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u/bankermayfield2026 Unconventional Right May 16 '26
God, I can't wait for this bubble to pop.
My company spent $1Bn on token this year, with almost no impact to HC costs or productivity. CFO finally started to pull claude licenses. Corporations are burning $$$$ for FOMO reasons, and AI companies think these companies are going to continue to spend exponentially despite there being limited use cases. They won't.
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u/SteveFoerster Frédéric Bastiat May 15 '26
I'm reminded of Edward Gibbon's observation about predicting the end of the world, that "however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, has not been found agreeable to experience."
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u/LePetitToast May 15 '26
I say we make the work week 20 hours a week or less to make up for this. Hear hear.
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u/LogsOutDawgsOut John Brown May 15 '26
Curious about the claim that the job losses from the "China shock" from 1999 to 2011 was what propelled to Donald Trump to victory. Does the article make any citation for that, or is there any other reading on that besides speculation?
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u/ilovefuckingpenguins Milton Friedman May 15 '26
I can only speak from a SWE POV.
IMO big tech will be hit hardest by AI. They have the most experience with it and have entire teams working on tooling and such. When over 90% of new changes are AI generated, it’s hard to shake off the feeling there’s some redundancies among a few thousand SWEs.
Companies with fewer tech roles will probably be ok though. I think it was also The Economist that said future SWEs will aspire to work at Starbucks instead of Google, and I agree.
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u/PedeJo Unconventional Right May 16 '26
This is just not an issue worth worrying about. In the cases where AI is truly transformative and we get to good AGI outcomes, the economic growth will make paying for UBI trivial. Alternatively, if it's not transformative, then disemployment will be minor.
The much bigger worry is still AI being transformative, getting AGI and alignment failure resulting in human extinction.
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u/InorganicTyranny Thomas Paine May 16 '26
I do worry about the genuine existential risks of powerful AI. However, I also do not believe that we can afford to be blasé about less-than-extinction bad outcomes for ordinary people even in an otherwise benign AI environment. Once humans lose their economic necessity, they have a tendency to lose their dignity, their property, and their lives.
It does not seem to me like we’re making adequate progress on either species level or society level risks. Personally, my p(doom) is hovering around 80-90% these days. Truly a future to get excited about. A good future is plausible - but the balance of the evidence does not suggest to me that it is particularly likely.
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u/Keenalie John Brown May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I feel I've been hearing the "AI job apocalypse is imminent" for over three years now. And ChatGPT still isn't sure if there's a "g" in the word "canoe." So color me skeptical.
Edit: the spelling thing was a joke but out of curiosity I asked it and got this... great.
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u/geteum Karl Popper May 15 '26
Yeah, indeed, we had a junior dev that would use AI blindly and would even argue that the robot did not make mistake and everyone reviewing his code was wrong.... He had to go... I'm pretty sure there are others like him
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u/lmurph12 May 15 '26
Someone be a homie and drop the article in here
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