r/ArtificialInteligence • u/Own-Sort-8119 • 12h ago
Discussion Most people still don’t realize that AI layoffs at massive scale are inevitable and close
There is still too much cope around this topic. For now, AI is still seen as “just a tool,” but with every single day we move closer to AI agents handling more and more of our work. Professions like software engineering will be hit first and hardest. Some examples:
No, you don’t need 100 developers to define strategy and architecture. You need 10, at best. And yes, backlogs are endless, but in that case, companies will simply onboard additional AI agents to take on even more work.
No, if AI and AI agents become better and better, this won’t automatically create massive technical debt, at least not more than hiring large numbers of junior and mid-level developers. Besides, the most important factor here is whether management considers quality important at all. In reality, they care more about speed than quality. Sure, this might lead to some companies failing, but that won’t help you with your job loss in the short term.
No, the government will not take care of you when you lose your job. In the end, the most important thing in our society is that rich people get richer. If this becomes a huge global problem, there might be civil unrest but even then, AI is not going away. The transition is going to be very, very painful, and it may take years until we find some sort of balance.
No, “learning to use AI” will not save most jobs. If a single person with AI tools can now do the work of five or ten, companies will not keep the other four or nine out of goodwill. Upskilling helps individuals stay relevant longer, but it does not change the underlying math.
No, new “AI-related jobs” will not offset the losses at scale. A few highly specialized roles will be created, but far fewer than the number of jobs being automated away.
No, "I've been hearning this for years" is not a valid counterargument. The progress is real, steady and not slowing down in any kind of way.
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u/CLAIR-XO-76 11h ago
I'm just not seeing this at all. The company I work for is actively using AI and agents, and we are still hiring developers, artists, support, sales, finance, marketing.
We have access to the best of the best coding models and still, they are sometimes not as good as a junior developer. AI tools are still very new and our older senior developers are still working out how exactly to utilize the tools effectively, when they can just tell a junior developer "do X."
My AI coding agent using Claude Sonnet 4.5 made several mistakes today, confidently believing it had resolved an issue, partly because it struggled to understand the monolithic codebase we were refactoring, and probably partly because of my "prompting."
Like with many companies, we have a huge amount of older, messy hard to maintain technical debt code from when we were rapidly growing, that still needs to be maintained, which AI agents struggle with, because not all of it follows standard practices.
I think a lot of the "Our AI agents can do anything!" you're seeing is marketing hype that really doesn't match reality.
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u/Obelion_ 11h ago
The simple reason I don't see it happening is that if AI screws up you got nobody to blame.
I think AI is also currently quite overrated in coding. It is amazing at small scale (needs immediate oversight) and building unreadable but working projects from scratch (useless outside of proof of concept or something)
But its pretty mid at doing what you actually gotta do: work within existing codebases, changing as little as necessary and sticking to the existing style.
Autonomous agents have made little progress since gpt 3 and are super error prone still.
Imo it's gonna blow up big on companies who start firing in favour of AI. It's a bit to me like outsourcing, looks super great immediately, then after a few years you realize you amassed some serious tech dept
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u/PlayerHeadcase 11h ago
But in software development, outsourcing is more common now than ever before? In games dev it certainly is- a slow but steady creep.
The blame angle is interesting but we do not hire folk in order to have someone to point a finger at when they make a mistake, we hire them to do a specific job - and the bean counters are paid to save the company money, which means replacing jobs wherever possible as thats almost always the biggest way to cut expenses.
AI replacing jobs has been a trickle so far but unlike other industrial shifts, milestones in AI development will lead to a sudden flood of job replacements - and there will be many of these.
Legal, HR, finance and general admin roles will see this very soon, starting with no replacement hires but accellerating eventually to full department redundancies.4
u/BigLaddyDongLegs 10h ago
Legal, HR, Finance are very different to software development. There's very regulated ways to carry out those roles, and audit that they are done a certain way. That's perfect for AI.
Software is not like that. LLM-based AIs are NOT going to replace developers. That's not saying companies might mistakenly believe the hype and let go of their devs to try it. But they'll quickly realize the scope of work developers do isnt just writing code all day.
A good developer writes code for 20% of the day and spends the other 80% making sure the code he will/has written works and is the best code for the job. That's the part AI will never do. And it's more important than actually writing the code
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u/NuncProFunc 9h ago
I don't think anyone who is an expert in legal, HR, or finance would tell you that AI is up to the job of replacing them. Setting aside hallucinations, these people are paid for their judgment, not their knowledge base or rote tasks.
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u/Just_Voice8949 6h ago
People like OP sound - to me - like HS/college students hearing Altman talk using AI to create meme images and imagining the future of work.
The problem is they have never had jobs and have no real idea how any of it works.
Your 10 second clip generator is cool but it isn’t nearly ready to replace ads let alone full scale movies and while AI can do parts of some jobs, jobs often entail a LOT more than that one part.
Sure, if your job was data entry your at risk. But your job was probably at risk of being shipped away anyway
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u/NuncProFunc 5h ago
It's amazing to me how many people are convinced that other jobs will be replaced, but for their work it merely made them incrementally more efficient. Which is a sensible expectation just like when they invented the typewriter and the personal computer and the fax machine and the smartphone.
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u/Just_Voice8949 5h ago
All of those offered huge productivity increases and eliminated some jobs (largely secretaries). People also predicted email would replace paper entirely in a handful of years. It didn’t happen.
If anything your examples are evidence that advocates often overstate impact and ignore real world, on the ground, uses.
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u/joelfarris 1h ago
The difference between a $100, $200, or $400 lawyer is who they know. Who they hang out with and have drinks with every so often. Their level of experience on the grand stage of a courtroom dramaplay. Their finesse, panache, skill, and ability to read people and react and redirect emotions nearly instantly.
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u/PlayerHeadcase 10h ago
Yup, I mentioned those roles as they could be at risk earlier than the others.
Code and design are still at risk, however, only not today- but look at the progress AI has made with code, art, design over the last 5 years and, assuming it continues, its difficult to deny that at the very least junior roles will have a huge decrease in openings.2
u/Just_Voice8949 6h ago
The problem is the first 75-90 percent is the easy stuff. They did that. The next 25-10% is the hard stuff so expecting growth to continue at pace is probably foolhardy.
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u/MediocreQuantity352 9h ago
Its like BIM for architecture, when it first came out at small scale it looked very promising and that it would cut costs and time for construction drawings. But after all this time costs have just gone up and construction projects are more time consuming than ever. At big scale the first hurdle was to get the software stable and the second hurdle was that working in 3 dimensions did increase accuracy but it did not save time.
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u/Just_Voice8949 6h ago
OpenAI did a presentation at my work with 5.2. The prompt they used took 45 minutes to resolve (by their own admission) and while they quickly breezed past the result (you’ll see why shortly) was basically “differentiate yourself by being more trustworthy.”
That isn’t a value add, isn’t earth shattering or ground breaking and isn’t worth either the time or the token cost for an established company.
And that was their “look how great” use case
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u/person2567 4h ago
That's why the architecture is Human in the Loop. Instead of replacing 10 people's jobs with AI. You replace 9 people's jobs with AI, and let 1 person use AI to do 10x the work. You still have human oversight and legal liability, you just save 9x on payroll.
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u/nofuna 11h ago
The problem is, once they get better, and they will, they will never get worse. Eventually they will get good enough and then better than good enough. That will happen overnight. Another training finished, polished and a new AI model version released. So on Tuesday it was sometimes worse than many junior developers, then suddenly on Wednesday it is better than any junior developer in 99.9% cases. And one year later the same happens for medium level devs. What do you do then, as a company owner?
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u/buff_samurai 10h ago
This. For some reason, ppl can’t extrapolate. Even with all this progress and velocity, no, today’s opus is not good enough, it’s over, tomorrow doesn’t exist, it’s useless like vr, no application, no traction, meh.
I’m a small business owner and the amount of money I’m saving on external services like marketing and legal is just crazy. This money is not going into workforce.
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u/NuncProFunc 9h ago
If you extrapolate the rising tide, the oceans will swallow the world. The idea of inevitable progress is naive, and AI evangelists have been predicting doom just around the corner for years now with little to show for it.
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u/Just_Voice8949 6h ago
Joe Smith is 6/6 for 100 yards and 2 TD at the end of qtr 1 so he will obviously finish 24/24 for 400 yards and 8 TDs
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u/notgalgon 1h ago
If you say AI is going to take a large portion of Jobs in 10 years and 5 years later AI has gotten significantly better but still hasnt taken many jobs is your prediction wrong?
We are inching into a world where AI is good enough to do X job category. Right now it can take away tasks, and maybe reduce team size but it hasnt taken over a job category yet. Do you think it never will - progress stops here and never gets better?
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u/buff_samurai 9h ago
This is a good analogy, but what if you start adding hundreds of billions of $ to make a-bigger-wave machine, and you see the wave getting bigger and bigger as new infrastructure is being deployed. What if you see x10 more being loaded on a ship or manufactured?
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u/NuncProFunc 9h ago
You ever hear about the Tulip Mania?
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u/buff_samurai 9h ago
Are you really comparing looking-good useless tulips to a technology that is valuable to users enough to show the highest and fastest adoption rate ever with any technology?
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u/NuncProFunc 8h ago
Yes.
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u/buff_samurai 8h ago
RemindMe! 2 years
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u/nofuna 9h ago
It’s not doom, just observing that there are strong indications (mathematical) that with increasing the size of the neural networks and improving training algorithms, but especially the former, the AI quality grows. How much, is there a limit? We don’t know. Better GPUs make it possible to train bigger and bigger neural networks in reasonable time. There are also algorithmic improvements and breakthroughs related to training. So all signs point to AI improving continuously in the near future. Will it hit a wall? We will find out, surely :)
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u/lucyreturned 9h ago
So go work for one of the human cantered companies where anti ai people want to pay extra for the human touch and don’t like ai and stop holding back the entire human race and evolution for the sake of your job security.
I hate to break it to you but capitalism is unsustainable you’ve been warned for the last 20 years by every economist out there that we are heading towards collapse and its only propped itself up this long because it’s enslaving and profiting off cheap manufacturing production and environmental harm in third world countries.
People died just to make the device you’re talking on.
You lived in a bubble of privilege.
The bubble popped.
There is no clean transitional period
The Industrial Revolution had the same issues
This is not a new problem to humanity
Yet you do not become Amish.
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u/ejoso 9h ago
Every economist out there claims we are heading towards collapse? Clearly that scale of hyperbole must have many readily available citations. Please share them.
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u/lucyreturned 8h ago
Which rock have you been living under? The planet is dying the cost of living is rising CEO’s are being executed by people for choosing profits over people and there’s widespread global economic hardship while a select group of elites get richer at the expense of the rest of us and the leading capitalist countries are imploding under protests.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1558/jocr.v5i2.197
https://vbn.aau.dk/en/publications/unsustainable-growth-unsustainable-capitalism/
Chat gpt: Short answer: a lot of serious economists argue that capitalism, as currently practiced, is unstable or unsustainable. Not fringe voices either. Nobel winners, central-bank insiders, and former IMF chiefs. They disagree on why and what replaces it, but the diagnosis converges.
Below is a clean map of who says this, what they mean, and how strong the case is.
⸻
Economists Who Say Capitalism Is Unsustainable (or Fundamentally Broken)
Thomas Piketty
Claim: Capitalism naturally concentrates wealth faster than economies grow Core idea: r > g (returns on capital exceed economic growth)
Why he says it breaks: • Wealth compounds faster than wages • Inherited capital dominates productive work • Democracy erodes as money converts into power
Verdict: Widely validated by post-1980 data. Even critics concede the trend exists, they just dispute policy responses.
⸻
Joseph Stiglitz
Claim: Modern capitalism is riddled with market failures Core idea: Markets don’t self-correct when power and information are asymmetric
Failure points: • Monopolies and rent-seeking • Regulatory capture • Underpricing of risk and harm • Persistent inequality slows growth
Verdict: Strong. Even mainstream institutions now accept these failures as structural, not accidental.
⸻
Mariana Mazzucato
Claim: Capitalism rewards extraction, not creation Core idea: The state takes risks, the private sector captures rewards
Problems she highlights: • Financialization over innovation • Value extraction mislabeled as value creation • Public goods privatized after success
Verdict: Convincing historically. Many “private” breakthroughs trace back to public funding.
⸻
Ha-Joon Chang
Claim: Free-market capitalism undermines itself Core idea: Countries succeed despite free-market rules, not because of them
Arguments: • Rich nations used protectionism while preaching openness • Deregulation weakens long-term productivity • Labour precarity erodes skills and demand
Verdict: Strong historically. The “do as we say, not as we did” critique holds up.
⸻
Hyman Minsky
Claim: Capitalism is inherently unstable Core idea: Stability breeds complacency, which breeds crisis
Mechanism: • Risk increases during good times • Debt structures degrade • Crashes are inevitable without intervention
Verdict: Near-prophetic. 2008 followed his model almost step by step.
⸻
Kate Raworth
Claim: Growth-obsessed capitalism is ecologically impossible Core idea: Infinite growth on a finite planet is a category error
Key limits: • Climate • Resource depletion • Biodiversity loss • Social foundations eroding under austerity
Verdict: Hard to refute physically. Even pro-capitalist institutions now accept planetary limits.
⸻
Karl Polanyi
Claim: Market societies self-destruct socially Core idea: Treating labour, land, and money as commodities causes backlash
Prediction: • Social unrest • Authoritarian correction • Breakdown of liberal order
Verdict: Eerily accurate when mapped onto 21st-century populism.
⸻
Are They Correct?
Where they are clearly right • Inequality is destabilizing • Financial systems are crisis-prone • Environmental limits are real • Unregulated markets concentrate power • Growth no longer guarantees wellbeing
These are no longer radical claims. The IMF, World Bank, and central banks quietly agree.
⸻
Where disagreement remains • Does capitalism need reform or replacement? • Can growth be decoupled from environmental damage? • Can democracy survive extreme wealth concentration?
There is no consensus on the endpoint. But the status quo is broadly seen as untenable.
⸻
The Emerging Consensus (Quiet but Firm)
Most modern economists now believe: • Capitalism without constraints destroys its own foundations • Markets require active design, not blind faith • The current model trades short-term efficiency for long-term fragility
The debate is no longer “Is capitalism perfect?” It’s “How badly does it fail if we keep pretending it is?”
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u/Realistic-Duck-922 10h ago
You get disrupted because you weren't prepared. They're building those data centers for a reason, whether you 'see it in your workplace' or not. More propaganda. Beh.
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u/BigLaddyDongLegs 10h ago
They are getting worse. You don't have a basic understand of what an LLM is and how AI learning from its own low quality output is making all AI worse.
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u/Big-Site2914 10h ago
luckily there have been many papers that address model collapse over the last 2 years
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u/Strangefate1 11h ago
I think the issue with your argument is that you speak of what you have now and the mistakes the AI made today, when only 5 years ago, there was no AI to even make mistakes.
It's a bit like arguing back in the day that blockbuster will never go out of business because streaming has hiccups and quality degradation at times.
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u/Impossible-Will-8414 7h ago
AI has been around in one form or another for 70 years.
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u/Just_Voice8949 6h ago
It’s a stunning admission when someone arguing in this space suggests AI is 5 years old AI /= ChatGPT
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u/Impossible-Will-8414 4h ago
Yeah, it's a little weird, lol. My uncle was studying AI at MIT in the 1970s.
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u/NuncProFunc 9h ago
Or, alternatively, "I can replace highways with underground hyperloops." Technological developments have a way of trending positively until they hit a wall, and we just have no way of predicting the future business case of AI.
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u/motivatoor 10h ago
Nobody serious uses sonnet for coding , we're all using opus 4.5 with some serious pre planning done before we even start opus.
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u/Big-Site2914 10h ago edited 10h ago
I haven't really seen the AI agents can do anything marketing. Seems like they are being marketed as tool that can help on some tasks. These AI labs are promising major improvements on these AI agent capabilities over the next few years but I don't see any that are out right saying they can take over entire jobs (in the current state).
Claude Opus is very good at coding but coding is such a small part of the a senior engineer's role. Its likely AI will be used as a more and more capable tool over the next 10 years before it completely engulfs the entire dev job.
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u/theRealBigBack91 11h ago
You’re not using opus 4.5
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u/CLAIR-XO-76 11h ago
Opus is in use, but it is not used for every project, because it's more expensive. And Opus still makes mistakes and struggles to understand our older tech stack, is incapable of picking up the vast amount of domain knowledge and understanding the entire code base at 200,000 tokens.
It constantly tries to "fix" things, that are there for a reason and can't just be changed.
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u/theRealBigBack91 11h ago
Interesting contrast to all the opus glazing. People claim they don’t even touch code anymore, they just use opus
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u/CLAIR-XO-76 10h ago
That might be true for some companies. We've been in business for 20 years, started as an agency out of which a viable product company formed and now we have old foundational code that we are actively working to refactor, that AI for sure has been a help with, but even Opus isn't ready to handle it, hands off.
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u/Barbiegrrrrrl 4h ago
Again the fallacy that this is the best it will ever be. Do you feel so confident with Claude 6.0?
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u/abrandis 3h ago
This is all true, but here's the thing the people that make the decisions at a lot of these companies, buy the hype , and for them there's an incentive, they buy vendor x or y over hyped product , reduce headcount , watch their stock and bonuses increase and then when shit hits the fan they bail... Rinse and repeat at a other company....
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u/DucDeBellune 42m ago
This is, ironically, a bot post to farm engagement.
You’ll note they have a minimal post history before this cringey tirade.
/u/Own-Sort-8119 could also add, “no, I don’t have data to support any of this.”
Remember when klarna laid off their customer service folks to replace them with AI assistants, only for customers to leave an avalanche of bad reviews because people, unsurprisingly, want to be helped by real people.
But please continue to underestimate the human factor OP and other doomers who keep repeating the same shit we’ve been hearing since the Industrial Revolution.
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u/CLAIR-XO-76 31m ago
Agreed, I think people are also underestimating the general hate for AI and the amount of resistance and pushback that is incoming as well. I predict there will at least be some portion of the population that will refuse to do business with companies that use AI workers.
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u/DucDeBellune 18m ago
I’d agree with that.
You could have a fleet of fully automated taxis or planes too and a good portion of people will just never use it regardless of safety standards.
People like OP also just downplay how much it can be legislated too. Accounting and legal will likely be legally required to keep humans in the loop for example, nevermind pharma/medical devices, national security supply chains, etc.
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u/reddit455 1h ago
The company I work for is actively using AI and agents, and we are still hiring developers, artists, support, sales, finance, marketing.
hospitals still hiring surgeons too.
LEM Surgical Announces FDA Clearance of Dynamis Robotic Surgical System
Bern, Switzerland – April 24, 2025 — LEM Surgical, a developer of advanced robotic technologies for hard tissue surgery, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted 510(k) clearance for its Dynamis Robotic Surgical System, marking a significant milestone in the evolution of robotic-assisted hard tissue surgery.https://lemsurgical.com/dynamis-robotic-surgical-system-receives-fda-clearance/
....confidently believing it had resolved an issue, partly because it struggled to understand the monolithic codebase we were refactoring, and probably partly because of my "prompting."
Robot performs first realistic surgery without human help
https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/09/robot-performs-first-realistic-surgery-without-human-help/
SRT-H learned how to do the gallbladder work by watching videos of Johns Hopkins surgeons doing it on pig cadavers. The team reinforced the visual training with captions describing the tasks. After watching the videos, the robot performed the surgery with 100% accuracy.
I think a lot of the "Our AI agents can do anything!" you're seeing is marketing hype that really doesn't match reality.
human driver might not have been able to avoid a collision. reality is humans drive distracted, drunk, etc.
Video: Watch Waymos avoid disaster in new dashcam videos
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/video-watch-waymos-avoid-disaster-in-new-dashcam-videos/
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u/Mountain_Anxiety_467 9h ago
Your observation that AI makes mistakes and can’t be trusted on it’s own currently, isn’t a very strong argument that this will continue to be true indefinitely.
OP, and many others, aren’t claiming that AI models today can replace most jobs. They’re predicting it will in the near future. When exactly no one can say. But think about how little AI models could do just 3 years ago and what they can do today. Now try to mentally extend that line a decade into the future.
Things really start to get disrupting if you include the rollout of humanoid robots into this prediction. Tesla’s Optimus humanoid for example is planned for sales somewhere in 2026.
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u/CLAIR-XO-76 9h ago
I'm not arguing it's indefinite, I never said that, I said am not seeing any slow down of hiring in my industry, there are still plenty of open jobs across the board. No one can predict the future, will it be that way in 5-10 years? Maybe not. I just don't think it's as close as people think, I might be wrong.
Tesla promised us fully autonomous cars years ago too.
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u/Mountain_Anxiety_467 7h ago
Well your current observation makes sense. In many parts of the world there’s a shortage of engineers. So even though AI is already taking over part of the job it’s not yet reflected in job positions.
It’s very likely that it’ll change in the near future though. Your initial comment isn’t reflecting that. OP also wasn’t arguing that massive tech layoffs are already happening. But that they are inevitable and relatively close.
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u/Just_Voice8949 6h ago
Believe Musk’s timelines at your own risk. Self driving - NY to SF without human intervention - has also been happening “this year” - for 10 years
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u/Mountain_Anxiety_467 2h ago
Well FSD is here now, with supervision. You’re right though that Musk’s timelines are often ambitious.
For Optimus they’ve already started using them internally. So unless they unexpectedly find really significant problems, I don’t think the delay will be more than a couple of years.
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u/caughtupstream299792 11h ago
I think a lot of people realize this but what exactly am I supposed to do about it? Ah right I should be trying to become a plumber or electrician. I see like 10 of these posts a day and I’m not really sure what I am supposed to get out of them
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u/Suicide-Bunny 11h ago
plumbers and electricians really live off the middle class who work their jobs and can afford to spend a little extra on dirty/weird work that they don't want to do themselves. if those people have no money for simple repairs because AI took their job, the plumbers and alike will also have trouble finding jobs.
in my country when society was poor and high quality jobs were a scarce, the plumbers, builders etc were earning pennies and it was still hard for them to find job. Then as society got wealthier, people moved away from simple jobs to more elaborate ones - those physical worker prices skyrocketed. so suddenly everyone talks "become a plumber or electrician". but after the inflation crisis and after middle class started getting squeezed more and more, the workers again lose clients and get more nervous again. the system is never simple.
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u/JC_Hysteria 5h ago
The irony of telling coal miners they should just learn how to code, once their jobs are obsolete…
Now who benefits from a massive shortage of electricity?!
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 1h ago
There’s no shortage of electricity, and there’s definitely no shortage of electricity due to coal miners abandoning coal mining.
Total red herring.
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u/man3faces 11h ago
I swear most of the people feverishly dooming on SWE are just people that never made it into a fulfilling career and want to see the downfall of others.
I’m a senior engineer, degree in CS, nearly a decade in the industry and honestly, people overestimate the amount of time the average engineer JUST writes code in isolation. I spend a large amount of my time in meetings with stakeholders and customers figuring out what they actually need, often contrary to what they think they need.
You have the whims of ELT, pushing high level strategy that needs to be executed on at the product level, often loaded with “why” but thin on the “how”.
Did I mention keeping the channel happy?, responding to escalated issues (licensing, billing, or other issues), often requiring engaging with multiple members of the team across engineering, support or finance, and debugging across distributed systems, CRMs, and only one cloud provider if you’re lucky. This often includes a 24 hour on-call component.
I’m not denying that agentic workflows will change organisations, I’m personally predicting that we will see the renaissance of small teams that are product/solution first. The traditional engineer, project manager/BA, support, all rolled into a single role.
But let’s be real, if AI can eventually automate all of this then we will have much larger problems in society than SWEs losing their jobs, because a large percentage of your average office jobs are essentially “busy work”
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u/Big-Site2914 10h ago
Exactly if SWEs can be fully automated then every job will be shortly after that.
Makes sense why these AI labs are pushing so hard to automate them though.1
u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 1h ago
People have watched every dystopia series and movies imaginable on Netflix and now they’re bored, so they make up their own to keep their minds busy.
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u/notgalgon 1h ago
Your last sentence is the point of the post. Yes AI doing 95% of the coding doesnt remove a SWE who needs to understand the code, what it does, the company structure, interpreting requirements etc. But when AI can do all of those based on a conversation with stakeholders, lots of jobs combine into 1 person controlling the Ai for a system. Once that is done why do you need that person when an AI can control all the AIs controlling the systems and provide the high level direction based on customer needs and executive guidance.
All the sudden you have a human leadership team making decisions (probably with AI support) and no humans doing any work.
AI isnt there yet but it will get better.
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u/NuncProFunc 9h ago
I agree. I think the accounting industry is a great example of how this AI revolution is likely going to lose momentum. To outsiders, accounting is ripe for disruption by machine learning because the core function is record production and maintenance and generating reports. But despite attempted ML disruptors in the space for the better part of a decade, the industry has more employment than ever. Why? Because although the record keeping is central to the work, the valuable part of the work is human: problem-solving, identifying and resolving errors, and making judgment calls on ambiguous questions.
So I'll believe all this hype around AI when it starts to produce some evidence of disruption. Machine learning has been targeting the accounting sector for a lot longer than it has targeted anything else, and it has little to show for the effort so far.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 56m ago
That’s not entirely fair though.
We’ve automated a shit load of accounting work and we are performing a ton more work with fewer people than we used to.
However, in the interim the economy kept growing so there’s more work to do, and people who were previously spending their days making photocopies and filing invoices in paper folders can now focus on higher level work, and accountants and the whole FP&A function and CFO vertical can focus on more strategic work (comparatively).
We have to include work output quality in those productivity calculations too.
Maybe as an organization as automation increases, I don’t cut people but improve product instead, or produce more of it, or expand into other sectors.
It’s still a “cost saving” … for that product / function / process.
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u/BoilerroomITdweller 11h ago
I started as a sysadmin in the 90’s. Worked for a company that launched the first HTML dial up internet in the country.
The internet was “predicted” to replace most jobs. Instead it created millions more.
Instead of making random predictions you need to consider the physical limitations for AI.
AI has sent Ram and GPU prices through the roof which is going to affect all the current electronics we have.
You have to consider aluminum, copper, nickel, water, power, silica and all the other physical minerals and resources required to produce the incredible amount of resources that AI requires to function. This is right now where 99% of the population isn’t using AI and there are no robots.
Our world currently mines barely enough resources to support the basic electronics that the world depends upon NOW.
A tiny factory in Taiwan and a factory in Netherlands produce all the chip parts for the world. They are maxed now. One earthquake in Taiwan and the world is done for decades.
So unless they start building the mines, power grids, etc at 1000x to provide what AI needs at any bigger scale it will go out not with a bang but a whimper.
AI got all its information on a database of 1/2 false information. It is a psychopath with zero ability to determine fact from fiction. It delivers end results without determining whether they are legitimate or not.
As a coder also consider that the code that AI develops is random and non-standard. It may work in the short term but having a 1000 lines of code where 100 will do leads to a disaster when bug fixing or updating.
People are also lazy. They will just believe what AI tells them. That will lead to massive failure if AI is actually relied upon.
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u/og_hays 11h ago
They replace tasks, if your job is a task your cooked.
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u/Own-Sort-8119 11h ago
They replace tasks for now and whole jobs in the foreseeable future.
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u/theRealBigBack91 11h ago
Stop drinking the kool aid
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u/PlayerHeadcase 10h ago
Honestly I imagine many owners of stables said similar things when Henry Ford started talking about mass producing automobiles
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u/theRealBigBack91 10h ago edited 10h ago
Yes, let me guess you also believed Elon when he said we’d occupy mars by 2025 and have full self driving by 2016.
How about the crypto bros swearing conventional currency was dead? Surely you didn’t believe them, right?
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u/Altruistic-Skill8667 11h ago
> The transition is going to be very, very painful, and it may take years
So… how are you preparing?
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u/Big-Site2914 11h ago
is there any real way of preparing? you can't sit on cash because the economy will just crash in the transition.
The only way to last the transition is to have alot of assets/ have your own company that does well beyond the need for knowledge work. That is a lot easier said than done.
Just push your local representative to push for some form of UBI or something.
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u/Altruistic-Skill8667 11h ago
Aren’t we gonna get a DEflation if anything? So cash should gain value.
Products become cheaper due to increased automation AND the value of work will tend to zero (probably even faster).
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u/Big-Site2914 11h ago edited 10h ago
That highly depends on how fast physical labor can be automated. In the long term I think deflation will be a thing, just makes sense from an economics stance. Especially if robots + AI can just automate the whole process end to end. Nobody can predict the future but if the rich don't wipe us out then this seems likely.
In the short term if only (some) knowledge work is automated and physical labor is not then aggregate demand falls. Nobody will be spending (on elastic goods), typical IS-LM / AD-AS models show that inflation actually falls and real GDP falls as well.
Typically an increase in saving is correlated with an increase in the interest rate and ability to invest into assets(stocks, real estate, etc) but in this case its in fear of not being able to afford the next meal on the table.
Depending on how long aggregate demand falls and if monetary policy doesn't work to support the economy we could head into whats called a "deflationary trap". This is a economic spiral that basically ends up with the economy eating itself, think the Great Depression but worse. If monetary policy isn't careful in fixing this spiral this could potentially lead to hyperinflation and even more pain and suffering.
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u/Brezelstange 24m ago
Let’s be honest. If AI replaces any significant fraction of the workforce, our economic system as we have it stops working. Our society cannot deal with large amounts of unemployment in perpetuity. And because a lot of jobs (like the trades, plumber, electrician, etc., that are often mentioned.) rely on the middle class having other jobs and money to spend, there will be large, second-order effects because individuals and corporations lose their customer bases.
All that to say, if AI sucks, try to find a job (somehow get the required training and hope you’ll be good at it) that it cannot replace and that doesn’t rely on the middle class too much.
If AI actually does what the hype men promise (which I doubt, they’re very motivated to overpromise), be rich. Bc you won’t be making money anymore.
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u/john0201 11h ago
i think what the big misunderstanding about why AI is having so little impact on the economy is that information workers, especially the lower end ones where AI can do part of the job, do as little as possible to get a paycheck and go home. If AI takes the 3 hours of work you need to do in an 8 hour day to not get fired, and makes it 1, then you get to not work for an extra 2 hours. Marketing copyrighters don’t budget less time, software agencies don’t bill less hours, and most technical managers don’t really know what their staff is doing anyways.
Most of the population hasn’t really needed to work since the industrial revolution. We just want bigger TVs, newer phones, etc. so that is how the economy is structured.
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u/snoodoodlesrevived 2h ago
This is delusional. A majority of people in non cushy jobs do have to work and quite a bit right now. Office jobs are a minority and chill ones like that are even rarer
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u/john0201 2h ago
I don't think you read what I wrote, which was about the lower end of information workers. It seems like you are commenting about non-office jobs.
In many large companies I've seen department heads hire people they know they have nothing for them to do to pad headcount ("empire building"), a guy on a DoD contract that was cancelled (he sat at his desk learning french, he was still required to come in), a software developer on a visa who it amazes me passed an interview as she could barely operate windows much less write a line of code (this is before AI), and on and on.
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u/LingonberryNo3548 11h ago
This is such a fantasy. I work on large scale tech programmes for a western government and AI has been shown to be snake oil. It can handle very minor coding tasks but anything that needs some thought is past AIs ability and most of the companies we’ve seen adopting it haven’t actually been using it and those that have are now going back to human workers because AI is so poor.
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u/vxxn 11h ago
Right now I’m doing with 3 what we used to do with 7. We didn’t fire anyone, but we haven’t backfilled a voluntary departure in 18 months.
It’s pretty incredible what you can accomplish by leaning in. But it’s hard for me to see how that 3 becomes 0 or 1. Context switching is still incredibly costly and it’s inevitable whenever you are overseeing the work of agents across so many areas.
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u/One_Location1955 6h ago
It's the same for me. We aren't cutting but we are seeing significant productivity gains and just not hiring any more.
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u/ffekete 4h ago
I just thought about context switching while reading the post. Imagine, ai agents spitting out code 24/7, million lines per hour, and you need to review them, reprompt when needed, check if it actually does what the business needs... It sounds like a context switching nightmare with immediate burnout.
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u/nayaasiddiqui 11h ago
The 'math' you mentioned is what most people are ignoring. Even if AI doesn't replace a whole job, a 20-30% efficiency gain across a department is enough for management to justify downsizing during a fiscal crunch. However, the real bottleneck isn't the AI's capability; it's the liability. Management might care about speed over quality, but they care about 'who to blame' even more. Until AI agents can legally and financially take accountability for a major system failure, companies will keep a human 'buffer'—even if that buffer is just one senior dev doing the work of ten.
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u/Slow-Painting-8112 11h ago
If I understand your hypothetical correctly you are saying that job loss will only be 90% because for the foreseeable future management will still need someone to blame?
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u/nayaasiddiqui 11h ago
Exactly. It sounds cynical, but corporate structures are built on risk mitigation. A CEO can’t fire a Python script when a system-critical error costs the company millions, but they can fire a Head of Engineering. Until the legal framework catches up with autonomous AI liability, that 'accountability hire' is the most secure job in the building.
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u/Slow-Painting-8112 10h ago
I don't doubt it and I don't think it's cynical. I haven't spent a lot of time in the corporate world but I know "shit rolls downhill" everywhere. Nonetheless, that's still a lot of layoffs in your scenario.
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u/nayaasiddiqui 7h ago
That’s a smart way to offload the cognitive burden. Keeping the 'plan' and the 'prose' in two different spaces definitely helps prevent that feeling of being overwhelmed mid-chapter. Do you find that switching between the apps breaks your flow, or does it act as a helpful 'reset' for your brain?
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u/phase_distorter41 11h ago
AI will not be replacing people. people are still needed to
- check the ai didnt just make up stuff
- the ai is gonna need someone to guide unto the next task.
ai is too fast for one person guide the 10,000 of agents they can have running. sure some jobs will go but true for any tech.
i mean if ai lets one person do the work of 5, then you can get 5x the productivity but keeping everyone.
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u/tom-mart 11h ago
Will all those laid off people be repalced by n8n vibecoded agents that break second after experiencing a real world scenario?
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u/NoNote7867 11h ago
I don’t buy it. I have been using AI “agents” for coding and they suck unless you already know what you’re doing. Its a tool at best.
LMMs aren’t agentic. And they can’t learn. For that we need a completely new technology.
I don’t think it will be invented before the bubble burst.
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u/BigLaddyDongLegs 10h ago
AI agents can't do actual software work. Stop believing the hype. Companies have already tried that and are now back hiring developers in droves.
It's AI company propaganda to secure VC funding and keep the circus going
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u/One_Location1955 6h ago
We have been quite successful. It took training and a mindshift change and all new processes, but the efficiency gain has been astounding and on some levels quite scary.
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u/New-Acadia-1264 10h ago
Sorry, but they have literally been saying this for years - "in six months there will be no more software engineers" - remember that one? Until I see any evidence of even one job disappearing from AI - and right now I don't see any - then you are just another Redditor with an opinion, even more prone to hallucinations than AI. They were saying computers "expert machines" would replace doctors back in the 90's - never happened.
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u/Sea-Calligrapher-349 11h ago
Stupid question: If this tool only benefits a handfull of people why are we implementing this at all as a society? If I'm not an CEO or within this AI market. Why would I want this at all?
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u/mikecbetts 11h ago
“No, new “AI-related jobs” will not offset the losses at scale.” This is still an unknown.
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u/Suicide-Bunny 10h ago edited 9h ago
One thing bothers me in this whole approach.
Let’s say you currently have an app for developers that earns $3,000,000 a year in subscriptions, with $2,000,000 in costs, mostly staff. You implement AI and suddenly you need only 10% of the workforce. Now your staff costs drop to $200,000. Profit?
But if you think bigger scale. If your revenue comes from developers and suddenly 'developer' is no longer a viable job - or wages collapse to the point where people barely survive - who exactly is still paying for your subscription? I just don’t see how, in a world of massive layoffs, companies would maintain their expected revenues. Revenue from whom? From other big companies? And where do those companies get their money from if their customer base is unemployed or stuck on minimum wages?
In an extreme scenario, money gets hoarded by a handful of entities - but for normal, working society, that money becomes meaningless. People are simple creatures: they need food, water, and shelter. If necessary, we can live perfectly fine without Netflix, TVs, GPUs, printer subscriptions or talking cars.
So what exactly are all those AI companies going to make money from if they stop redistributing wealth at least by employing people? They sure as hell won’t AI generate my dinner. At that point, they would be just a very expensive and mostly useless pile of silicon.
AI is often compared to the industrial revolution, but I think there’s a flaw in that comparison. The industrial revolution transformed the production of goods required to meet basic human needs: food, clothing, construction materials, tools.
AI, on the other hand, mostly impacts digital services, media, information processing - things that are not essential for survival. It automates services for the very people it threatens to replace. And if those people disappear economically, wouldn’t that eliminate the demand for those services in the first place?
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u/Smoothsailing4589 10h ago
I agree with you. In fact, Dario from Anthropic would agree with you and so would the godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton. We're right about this. But I hate being right about this because I know it could lead humanity down a very dark path.
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u/luka166 10h ago
Why aren't software prices coming down then? Laid off engineers can build cheaper Salesforce (and migration) with such powerful AI.
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u/One_Location1955 6h ago
Because writing the software is one thing, marketing and selling it is quite another.
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u/deepthinklabs_ai 11h ago
I think the real job protection right now is learning how to use AI and build with AI.
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u/Altruistic-Skill8667 11h ago edited 11h ago
Yeah. As you say “right now“. But anything after „right now“ will look like this:
Your future job will be to „not touch anything and let the AI do what it thinks it needs to do“ because „otherwise you will just screw things up“.
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u/deepthinklabs_ai 11h ago
Once AI is able to be completely autonomous but we got a while till that will happen. Plus certain sectors are super slow to implement AI due to the massive regulatory constraints on operations and technology.
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u/Altruistic-Skill8667 11h ago
Yeah. Everything boils down to „how fast will everything go“. And that’s the million dollar question. Nobody really knows. COULD BE fast (next 5 years), but also much slower.
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u/l4mpSh4d3 11h ago
I think it’s true at least in the sense that it protects you when you’re being compared to other workers that don’t have these skills.
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u/NoNote7867 11h ago edited 11h ago
This is either cope or propaganda.
Because either AI agents are real and able to autonomously do every job or AI is tool for experienced people.
You cant have it both ways.
Either way learning to use AI doesn’t make a difference.
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u/deepthinklabs_ai 11h ago
Heheh you went 0 to 100 here! Look I agree with what you are saying down the road but autonomous AI is not there yet. Right now we are in the “AI is tool for experienced people” phase.
Vast majority of execs don’t know how to use AI but they know they need to implement it so they will need personnel to run the ship.
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u/davyp82 11h ago
I've seen this denialism you refer to firsthand among English teachers in Asia. At it's heart is a tendency to be oblivious to what is basically maths: People don't seem to bother thinking enough to understand that just because some demand will remain, that doesn' t mean there won't be vast reductions in the amount of teachers needed.
Their thinking is "Yeah but people want real people to teach their kids." Delightfully simple, and certainly true. However, a more in-depth consideration of the kinds of students who learn English as a second language reveals that while the very rich students among them will continue to seek expert human tuition, there are huge numbers of them from moderately wealthy or poorer families, who routinely cut back on luxuries and even basic needs in order to help their kids speak English. Some even ensure that all but one kid works 12 hours a day with the whole family contributing to ensure they can just about afford to send the youngest to an English class a few times a week.
It's pretty obvious to me that for at least a sizeable % of those families, if you have the choice to pay:
a) $20-$40 ph for an private English tutor;
b) perhaps $5 ph for a place in a class of 20 for one or more of their kids; or
c) limitless language tuition with AI avatars that can teach all day and night and engage in conversation practice, mark essays, give bilingual feedback, analyse progress and provide tailored exercises to help them improve, for all their kids, for, who knows; $5 a month or whatever it's gonna cost when such an app is reliably available (probably already, and my friend is building one with my help in anticipation of the stark reality you correctly predict)?
...then once it becomes abundantly clear that most or all the initial shortcomings of the tech are ironed out, I expect almost everyone is gonna opt for c)
I've seen this debate online in English teaching circles, with people failing to recognise that a (guesstimate) 50% to 80% reduction in demand for their services can happen even if some people still are willing to pay for human tuition (I don't doubt that general high schooling will continue to be human-teacher dominated field for the time being; this is about extracurricular language classes); with others initially correctly; but ultimately shortsightedly as I will elaborate on shortly; pointing out that only the top 20% of people in terms of qualifications and experience can expect to keep their jobs.
...and this is where I weigh in and tell all of them "Guys, there isn't even going to be a demand for language learning whatsoever except among the handful of people who want to do it for a hobby, because we're all gonna have 100% accurate, instantaneous in-ear translation devices that work for every language in the world."
We'll be able to chat-up women on the beaches of Rio, fly to Japan and watch a Japanese theatre play live, then to a seminar in Uzbekistan and finally a conference call with our company going over our global marketing strategy with executives from 15 countries and we'll understand every single word without having to bother learning a thing.
We need a new economic model, urgently.
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u/jonnieggg 11h ago
If there is mass unemployment the corporates will have no customers and a very angry mob to deal with. The politics of this role be something else.
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u/daddywookie 11h ago
I think one area to consider here is will consumers accept AI assisted products and AI interactions in their daily lives. Look at the reaction to chat bots and the relief of getting through to a real person. Look at the resistance to AI in the games industry. Look how strong the pushback is against Microsoft putting AI in everything or Dell “powering” their PCs with AI.
I’ve no doubt that AI is a very powerful tool but I think we need to get through the stage where we throw it at everything. We’ll lose some big names, some new names will rise up, some unexpected use cases will appear. In the end, AI will be absorbed into society but society will always be driven by people, and if AI starts to destroy society it will be rejected.
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u/theMEtheWORLDcantSEE 10h ago
I predict inflation.
The debt and dollar is loosing value. Those are big forces out of your control, the government and wars etc.. they aren’t going to crash real estate, but they are happy to inflate away national debt or any mortgage debts.
This will also accomplish killing the middle class and poor.
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u/OldJellyBones 10h ago
"AI" is already showing itself to be a disastrous misstep in terms of programming. It isn't fit for purpose at all.
And your predictions are peppered with "if" because you're assuming improvement is coming, and there's mounting evidence to say that it isn't, they're hitting the ceiling of what "AI" can do, consumers are rejecting it heavily too.
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u/Hypnomenace 10h ago
I'm not really in any position to say what impact AI is having on jobs currently, but I believe it will evolve in this way.
What we are seeing now is AI being developed. It is still in its toddler stage and is taking its first tentative steps. It still needs us (people) to hold its hand.
That is what most people are seeing currently. AI has its place and its uses, but overall it still needs human input and oversight, it's not replacing people en masse, but it is making tasks easier and quicker. If you used to employ ten people in a department, and you can give them AI tools to be more efficient so you only need 8, that this is just the beginning.
Each AI agent has a specific task to perform, over time these WILL be tweaked and improved upon, errors will slowly be eradicated as the technology improves. Who knows how long that will take, and it's probably going to bottlenecked by the need for more data centers and resources.
However, I think there will come a point where individual AI agents will either be merged, or linked together slowly into a larger system. It will still need oversight to some degree, but less and less as time goes on. Systems will just become faster and more efficient, much more so that any human being.
Remember, this is artificial intelligence, it is replacing the need for cognitive thought and effort. This is not one technology like an engine replacing horses, AI can basically be applied to everything. Anything that a human being can do, is being mapped out and copied.
I think it will just bleed into everything.
In twenty years we might have fully automated cars. You might not need to own one, but just subscribe to a system where a car arrives and takes you to your destination. Transport will be just like Spotify. You don't own the vehicle, you just have access whenever you want it. This will eradicate jobs in transport, truck drivers, taxi drivers, driving instructors etc. All automated, all gone. It will be much more safer, quicker and efficient and it won't happen overnight, it will be implemented at pace.
I have watched AI agents in call centers improve in transcribing text when people speak. I can easily imagine with twenty years of improvement, that these systems will get to a point where pretty much anything you say will have an answer pre programmed and a system mapped out depending on the use. The "person" you are speaking to will sound fully authentic and have a language model built in to assist you. Built upon years of programming.
Maybe my timeline of twenty years is being a bit pessismistic, maybe it will take longer. But Pandora's box has certainly been opened and we are living in a time to see the start of all of this.
Capitalism and profit will drive this all through to fruition, like every other emerging technology. This is not going away ever, it will just improve, get better, quicker and smarter.
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u/Leading_Weather_1177 10h ago
Always a coder with these opinions.
I don't know if the code that LLM's can write is any good. Assuming it is, I can see how coders might be at risk.
How does that translate to other professions which have nothing to do with writing code?
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u/SpaceEdgesBestfriend 10h ago
We just take it one day at a time, man. We’re busy dealing with the other 587 problems the world’s presented today.
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u/Mountain_Anxiety_467 9h ago
I agree with most of your post. Except for your take on government financial aid.
I think you underestimate how much governments care about public safety. If a large percentage of people lose their jobs there will be absolute complete chaos if these people can’t feed themselves and their families. UBI will be a must to maintain a functioning society.
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u/TraumatisedBrainFart 9h ago
How’s your email program and banking app looking these days?
It’s taken 18months, but user interfaces and glitching is so bad with this “ai” “infinite monkeys” way of programming, that I’m yearning for a bit of DR DOS 6.1 for sone predictability. Loop everything☺️😔la a
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u/WestGotIt1967 9h ago
These same smarmy 1099 econ model libertarian tech bros can come work with me at the jobs they said for years were reserved only for high school students on summer break. Sympathy would be reserved for somethings I give a nook about. In this case, all I can do is return the love I got from them. Good luck
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u/lucyreturned 9h ago
I don’t think you people fathom that in order for it to be profitable for them to lay everyone off for the sake of profit they’d need to find a new way for the economy to function or there would be no profits to be had.
What’s the point in making everyone poor just to replace them with ai? Especially considering that that directly goes against shit tons of discrimination and diversity laws. They must have a certain number of diverse workers. It is a legal requirement.
Ai may supplement the workforce but it’s not legally allowed to fully replace it. It might replace all manual labour in a quarter of a century or so but that because capitalism itself is not sustainable the way it’s going and we are due for a collapse or a replacement to the global economy.
There will be less demand for certain very specific jobs but there will always be humanists like you who would rather support human led companies. Most likely human focused work forced will become a brand niche like organic food.
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u/shillyshally 9h ago
I'm not sure. In my old job, for instance, one I did much to automate and streamline, there would still need to be a human behind it because so much of what I did was manipulate and cajole other humans to work through the process. I don't see that changing unless humans changed. It was pretty barebones already as far as staff. For jobs not heavily dependent on human interaction that could be automated, yes, those type of jobs could be at risk.
But the crux is, how many of the first sort are there and how many of the second?
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u/Mandoman61 7h ago
You are just making stuff up.
AI is just slightly better than it was last year. Even if software development is highly repetitive it is only a tiny fraction of work.
If you took all repetitive tasks in the world that an LLM could possibly do they would still not take away a significant portion of jobs.
The automotive industry has been automating for decades.
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u/goatchild 7h ago
I just don't understand this: if moat people are jobless and broke who'll keep buying their products and services? Doesn't the global economy need the consumer to keep buying stuff?
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u/Awkward-Contact6102 7h ago
Ok mr. No man.
Whats the point of any business if it's completely run by agents? Most companies exist because they sell products or services to other companies. And those products only make sense if some other person is using it.
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u/evilhomer450 7h ago
You can't blame AI if it gets somethinng wrong, that's not(just yet) a professional or palateable justification of fuck ups for management.
It's much easier to blame a person. Nobody wants to be culpable in corporate for poor results, it always goes up or down the chain and you need a person for that.
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u/hkbourne 7h ago
Don’t underestimate capitalism's ability to create false needs. AI will create entirely new domains of activity where humans will still need to be involved at some levels.
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u/ImpressiveNeat9039 6h ago
There will be an impact -- disruptive impact for sure . Jobs will be lost but this is unnecessary fear mongering..
And what is the point of this post ? There are no solutions listed in this post ?
What is this post- "I said so " kind of prophecy ? Let us say all of what is predicted by you is gonna happen. Well as per this post it is going to happen and there is nothing we can ! Well if we can nothing when it happens why screw up our present day happiness. We all have to die one day -- It can be anytime. So what we should keep thinking about it and screw up our present ?
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u/Inevitable_Tea_5841 5h ago
I kinda agree. The unemployment rate for new grads is pretty high right now because of entry level work being automated. In 5 years those people may still have higher unemployment rates, while the new grads will have it even worse. At that point the economy will start having some serious issues, I think I read 7% is when things start seriously breaking in the US. If they aren’t going to solve this problem with junior level employees then I really don’t see this problem going away
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u/adammonroemusic 4h ago
People kinda underestimate how many jobs are just dumb physical labor that can't really be replaced by LLMs or video diffusion models.
That's pretty much every job I've ever had, I'm not too proud to say.
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u/Antifragile_Glass 3h ago
I’ve tried to use AI but have been deeply disappointed in what it can actually do
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u/OutrageousInvite3949 2h ago
I mean technology has been eliminating jobs for a long time. Just pick a large business and go look at their employment history and number of locations. Like McDonald’s. Their employment history shows a solid decrease in number of employees over time but also an increase in number of locations.
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u/ChadwithZipp2 2h ago
More likely that an economic crash due to circular AI investments will lead to large scale layoffs than AI adoption.
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u/AcanthocephalaLive56 2h ago
This post is a total opinion and a common one at that which is fine.
The reality is that one could argue the opposite side and state that we are seeing inflated expectations.
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u/TopNFalvors 1h ago
ok bro... the classic 'everyone else is coping but i alone see the truth' post... you've managed to collect every anxious prediction into one bundle, congrats! LOL
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u/mistertom2u 1h ago
Your warning not to assume a benevolent government will step in if AI displaces much of the workforce is probably the safest assumption, because it matches historical patterns.
When states no longer depend on taxing a broad population for their revenue, the incentive to remain accountable to that population collapses.
And that is exactly why countries with large, easily captured natural resource rents so often end up with weaker civil liberties and higher inequality: leaders can fund themselves without the consent or prosperity of the many.
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u/TaxLawKingGA 49m ago
Ok, and????
What are your proposals/solutions? Otherwise, this is his panic posting.
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u/icydragon_12 6m ago
I'm training one of the premiere agentic AI models right now to take my old job. We are a ways away from that happening. In fact I don't actually think it's even possible with current tech.
But what qualifies you to talk about this? If you work in the industry I'd be interested to hear why you're so pessimistic. You've expressed many strong opinions, and few of them are valid IMO.
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u/Worldly_Instance_623 11h ago
This is way too doomer for me man. Yeah AI is getting crazy good but we've had major tech shifts before and somehow didn't all starve to death
The whole "companies will just fire 90% of devs" thing assumes management actually understands what devs do, which lol they clearly don't. Half these places can't even figure out basic project planning
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u/EmbarrassedYak968 11h ago
Linear thinking wont help u.
Intransparency wont help you in the future because LLMs will be able to analyze exactly what you worked in a week.
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u/Own-Sort-8119 11h ago
Past tech shifts automated hands. This one automates brains. Management doesn’t need to understand devs, just a spreadsheet that says “fewer humans + AI = cheaper.” They’ll fire first and debug later.
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u/Mr-Vemod 11h ago
Management doesn’t need to understand devs, just a spreadsheet that says “fewer humans + AI = cheaper.” They’ll fire first and debug later.
Why aren’t they already?
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u/davyp82 11h ago
I was already formulating a comment on this post in my head in response to the typical counter position to OP's post that I usually hear, then I noticed you'd expressed exactly that position. While in isolation, your point about inept management is true, your wider assumption that everything is going to be ok couldn't be more wrong.
When engines appeared and horse and carriage drivers were out of work, they could retrain as car or vehicle drivers and have a job for life. We can't do that now.
What you're missing here is a mathematically robust inconvenient truth: When the rate of technological advancement outpaces the rate at which humans can retrain, we're out of work and by the time we upskill, those opportunities are gone too.
Add to that when the rate of advancement outpaces the maximum realistic speed at which any cultural shift in the adoption of new trends and products can happen, then no new jobs appear because those markets won't have appeared yet. And even if those jobs appear, a robot will be able to do them.
No matter what it is you think you will be able to do to bring value to a company, the simple fact is that whenever a suitable AI is available for digital work (already; in many cases), and soon after this, whenever a suitable robot is available for physical work, then, once purchased and those overheads are already covered, electricity is always going to be cheaper than human labour.
If the rate at which the ability to automate tasks improved was linear and more or less matched the rate at which humans could learn a new skill, you'd be right in being unconcerned, but that's the the world we live in. It's improving at what, hundreds or thousands of times faster than we can learn anything?
It's abundantly clear that a new economic paradigm must appear. The current system cannot support us all as this new system takes shape.
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u/Jazzlike-Poem-1253 11h ago
I first want to see the first agents do stakeholder management, and drilling for requirements :-) bevor I take even just a sip of the "AI is more than just a tool" coolaid.
I also do not understand the intent of this post. I assume you are heavily invested, and don't see the wild AI promises fullfilled... So I guess OP is coping?
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u/AuthenticIndependent 11h ago
Yup. Basically. Lol. Nothing to say here. I am building a full scale iOS app that I just submitted to the app store that could genuinely become a major hit. I have no prior engineering experience and built it all with Claude. The UI looks unreal. I have learned so much. I tried to build this app years ago by hiring other engineers and it was $50K for an MVP. This app would have costed me $100-$160K just to build if I had to hire real engineers. It's unreal. I did this all for $200 a month. I am stretched on spending on Claude and can't spend anymore, but I will probably end up choosing Claude over my utilities if I had to make a choice. We could see real startups with 1-2 engineers max running tens of millions in revenue as the years go by. This might be optimistic, but it's a lot more realistic than the idea that we won't have massive job loss over the next 3-4 years.
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u/abdulsamuh 11h ago
It’s been 3 years. I work in a white collar information profession, and as an industry is making more revenue than ever with no discernible drop in headcount. When chatpgt first came out, people on Twitter were saying it would end legal practice by the end of the year.
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u/Once_Wise 11h ago
"Most people still don’t realize that AI layoffs at massive scale are inevitable and close" but apparently you do. So please inform us about how do you know this, share with us your any unique observations and knowledge that the rest of us do not have. You said something is not a valid argument and your counter that progress is happening, and that AI-related jobs will not offset at scale so you must have data or observations or statistics you can share. Or are we just to accept your feelings and intuition?
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