Why are some people here downplaying AI's potential impact on job market?

[Anonymous]

Why are some people here downplaying AI' potential impact on the job market. Our capital owners have shown time and time again that they want to maximize their earnings.

GS is testing a fully automated software engineer. Of course he won't be ready for prime time, but how about in 2 years?

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/goldman-sachs-autonomous-coder-pilot-marks-major-ai-milestone.html

This remind me of last fall when some people were mocking DOGE saying no job cut will be happen etc

[Anonymous]

because they cannot face the truth. head in the sand approach

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why are some people here downplaying AI' potential impact on the job market. Our capital owners have shown time and time again that they want to maximize their earnings.

GS is testing a fully automated software engineer. Of course he won't be ready for prime time, but how about in 2 years?

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/goldman-sachs-autonomous-coder-pilot-marks-major-ai-milestone.html

This remind me of last fall when some people were mocking DOGE saying no job cut will be happen etc

I do not know anyone who discounted DOGE, every fed I knew was truly worried about it.

I’m actually not as paranoid about AI, but it will be transformative and change how we work. But think back 50 years when we used punchcards and paper files for data management, a lot of jobs were transformed and new jobs were created to use the tools in new ways and I believe AI will be similar.

We do not yet actually have general AI , these are still just big statistical models that mimic human thought very well, but true reasoning, rational, and morality need to be managed by humans

[Anonymous]

Because every time there is a new innovation people ran around screaming the sky is falling and it didn’t fall.

[Anonymous]

I don’t think people can accurately predict how these things will work out. History shows us that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because every time there is a new innovation people ran around screaming the sky is falling and it didn’t fall.

Exactly.

Regardless, what am I supposed to do about it? I'm not changing jobs unless I have to, not with this advanced degree. It would do me no good to waste the time using it that is open to me. I'm not going to get stirred up just because an OP is either delusional, or weirdly invested in making people feel shitty without offering anything remotely like an actionable point.

What this recent OMG AI!!! slate of screeds reads like is that there is a poster with a mental health issue or who isn't terribly bright, but who has fixated on this point. And now they're trying other make fetch happen.

Sure thing, champ. Go on off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because every time there is a new innovation people ran around screaming the sky is falling and it didn’t fall.

Exactly.

Regardless, what am I supposed to do about it? I'm not changing jobs unless I have to, not with this advanced degree. It would do me no good to waste the time using it that is open to me. I'm not going to get stirred up just because an OP is either delusional, or weirdly invested in making people feel shitty without offering anything remotely like an actionable point.

What this recent OMG AI!!! slate of screeds reads like is that there is a poster with a mental health issue or who isn't terribly bright, but who has fixated on this point. And now they're trying other make fetch happen.

Sure thing, champ. Go on off.

I agree with all this - my job is highly susceptible to AI replacement in some ways but I'm twenty years in, no point in pivoting to subsistence agriculture until everything comes crashing down!

[Anonymous]

It's human nature. First people will say it won't affect. Second if affect them they will downplay it.

I graduated with a CS degree in 2002, a long time ago. I don't wrote any code for work these days but I do some freelancing writing code when I am not very busy. I'll say this. Its much easier to write code today because we have automated toll that can actually write software than make semantic sense. AI was always around writing automating code with correct syntax but incorrect semantic. The semantic part has vastly improved.

Will this lead to mass layoffs? I honestly don't know. What I do know though is that Wall Street will always seek to minimize cost and maximize profit.

Having said we can't discount the potential disruption of AI. Reinforcement learning was always waiting for chips to catch to its potential and they have.

The issue is that we tend to compare every new technology with last technology and say things like at one point in time we had lunch card and now we shall survive etc. it's a bit different now if you look at the trend of jobs in the white collar sector in particular over the past decade. You can look at it on many different ways and draw your own conclusions. I will simply conclude by saying that depending on your industry you will certainly face steeper completion. The question then becomes where do you pivot?

[Anonymous]

It's an issue that's very very triggering because nobody wants to be the one to be impacted. So it's easier for your mental health to ignore it for now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think people can accurately predict how these things will work out. History shows us that.

+1

The AI I've seen so far is quite underwhelming. It's a helpful tool for me in my job but since it doesn't actually "think," I am not worried about my job. It is helpful for more tedious tasks. It is like an intern (ok maybe better than an intern) that can do helpful things under close supervision.

We'll see how things shake out in the next few years but yeah I'm just not worried about being able to finish out my career over the next couple of decades (or hopefully less). I am concerned about helping guide my DC into a career path that will be sustainable but DC is quite young at this point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think people can accurately predict how these things will work out. History shows us that.

+1

The AI I've seen so far is quite underwhelming. It's a helpful tool for me in my job but since it doesn't actually "think," I am not worried about my job. It is helpful for more tedious tasks. It is like an intern (ok maybe better than an intern) that can do helpful things under close supervision.

We'll see how things shake out in the next few years but yeah I'm just not worried about being able to finish out my career over the next couple of decades (or hopefully less). I am concerned about helping guide my DC into a career path that will be sustainable but DC is quite young at this point.

+2. AI isn’t that great. Even for the things it’s good for, people still like the human connection.

[Anonymous]

I can see how AI will reduce the need for more entry level workers who do the simple stuff, but if we don't have entry level workers, then who is going to replace the mid level people who move up to replace those who retire? It will be an upside down triangle, and those aren't very stable.

[Anonymous]

I say at least 1/3 of my company is stupid people who just create numbers and reports that are analyzed by others. They dont have any ability or desire to look at their own reports.

Think Accounting Clerks, Auditors, Operations, Compliance, Marketing Data.

With AI those reports just appear. My prior job at a fully remote start up I was Head of a Department for two years with zero staff. Data was all automated, we had queries, dashboards, reports autopopulated and I acted on the data. Prior to that at same size company I had a staff for four creating those reports And we had a ton of chat bots and people in god forsaking countries making peanuts coding and writing queries and automating things.

I would say they can do the work of 10,000 times my current company as all automated

Imagine Telsa have robots building cars, customer orders car on line then car drives itself to your house after you bought it vs a Chevy production line of the 1950s

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's human nature. First people will say it won't affect. Second if affect them they will downplay it.

I graduated with a CS degree in 2002, a long time ago. I don't wrote any code for work these days but I do some freelancing writing code when I am not very busy. I'll say this. Its much easier to write code today because we have automated toll that can actually write software than make semantic sense. AI was always around writing automating code with correct syntax but incorrect semantic. The semantic part has vastly improved.

Will this lead to mass layoffs? I honestly don't know. What I do know though is that Wall Street will always seek to minimize cost and maximize profit.

Having said we can't discount the potential disruption of AI. Reinforcement learning was always waiting for chips to catch to its potential and they have.

The issue is that we tend to compare every new technology with last technology and say things like at one point in time we had lunch card and now we shall survive etc. it's a bit different now if you look at the trend of jobs in the white collar sector in particular over the past decade. You can look at it on many different ways and draw your own conclusions. I will simply conclude by saying that depending on your industry you will certainly face steeper completion. The question then becomes where do you pivot?

I too, am an old-school programmer, worked with assembly and remember having to worry about pointers and memory management! Now it’s all magical trash collection automatically.

My point was more that they’ll be new innovations that these empowering tools allow, it won’t just be the elimination of jobs, but also the creation of a different kind of work.

Maybe we can also move to a 30 hour work week, and there’s supposed to be a demographic crunch where there are less workers which represents a certain problem, but also may dovetail with the productivity from AI

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's an issue that's very very triggering because nobody wants to be the one to be impacted. So it's easier for your mental health to ignore it for now.

There’s really nothing much to be done, if there is a slaughter of white collar jobs, then there will be no one to pay for all the plumbers and electricians that everyone is talking about becoming. The only solution will be UBI and universal healthcare, or we will have violence in the streets.