Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

This statement is untrue. The people have the judgement, the AI does the rote work. The rest is marketing fluff and/or leadership fumbles. You can't get rid of judgement (unless of course leadership is fumbling).

With more AI, you got more radiology requests, and more radiologists [1] and better health results due to more abundant measurement. There is no evidence that the same isn't happening to the rest of the professions. And to support it all, we have more infrastructure construction (datacenters).

This is the textbook basics of a growing economy with growing productivity, even though it feels paradoxical [2]

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/f2e03bd9-af67-45c4-8e1e-79978b5bc...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

engineering (hardware, software) and data center construction are going through a boom cycle right now and will eventually bust, and so on and so forth

They have pretty uniformly wanted me to demonstrate using AI but then freak out and interrogate me for every prompt and then want me to demonstrate I can do the task by hand. And that’s only after getting through the AI run filtering that gives a different score everytime your unchanged resume is run through the model.

It’s dark times for employment currently unless you’ve got a rare nepotism path.

On the one hand there is the problem that every job posting is flooded with hundreds of bogus AI resumes which, if they are not outright fabrications, stretch the truth enough to make it hard to tell who is qualified and who is not.

Anecdotally, it seems to me like directly applying to jobs is a waste. You either have to find some way to attract recruiter outreach, or network with people who can get you a foot in the door.

I've applied to the same FAANG opening in Sydney 3x over the last 1.5 years. It's not a real job as apparently they're not eager to fill it for years.

If you were charging $10 per month per user for your SaaS when GPT 4o was launched, you can easily charge $5 now and increase your profit.

I’m not sure why you believe things will become more expensive.

I think that's always been an issue in tech, but it feels like AI exacerbates the issue. I see people starting companies and services where their primary domain knowledge seems to be whatever their AI tells them. It's sometimes enough to get off the ground, but I wonder how long it takes for customers/clients who actually need the domain knowledge to bail.

Its just that in a gold rush, there are few winners and many losers. There used to be hundreds of car companies in the beginning, only a dozen or so survived long term.

Except that is hogwash, "attributed to AI" is basically the CEO screwing up something in the business and AI-washing their mistake because it's convenient.

What happened when they all pushed for metaverse things? Nothing. Shutdown quietly, move to the next big trend you’re not allowed to ignore.

That’s it. That’s the pattern. Here some companies will get a bit of value, most won’t. Though the job of software engineer has been transformed that’s the main real impact. But companies who didn’t get much value from all their AI projects will shut them down quietly, and LLMs will just became another tool in the standard company toolbox. Until a new trend comes along

It is entirely irrelevant to them how useful LLM tech is. It doesn't matter that productivity is the same as it ever was just with a 10-fold increase in costs due to token-maxxing behaviour. They don't care if their software is buggier than ever, or their workers unhappier than ever, because AI promises to replace them anyways

Not a super insightful article. The AI jobs apocalypse may or may not be real, but this article doesn’t provide any compelling evidence for its thesis.

When you say (and perhaps you might speculate across other businesses) "hiring extra people... To handle AI initiatives" does that mean you're hiring Very niche and specialized AI people to handle these initiatives? I'm curious because I have seen some versions of this sentiment on HN and it sort of feels like reading "at my company we're hiring more quantum physicists because of these initiatives".

Basically, how much of the general populace is actually going to have a shot at nabbing a slice of this meager pie?

"The housing construction jobs are temporary, we shouldn't count them."

There will always be CapEx to spend.

Many of the current DCs being built out are also being powered or tied with renewable energy projects that were funded by the IRA, as many DC builders with deep pockets do know the political dimension. If this is what keeps the CHIPS, IRA, and the IIJA alive I'm happy.

Every industry and career type goes through ebbs and flows. The 2010s was a white collar boom, and the 2020s is now a white collar bust. Meanwhile the 2010s was a skilled trades bust and the 2020s is now a skilled trades boom.

I'd be rich if I knew what the next big thing was but the economy has been running on the assumption that there will be a next big thing for many, many decades. Each cycle has the same rhymes of "what happens when it ends" questions but there has always something.

For better or worse, it looks more like that we're gonna tile the whole damn planet in data centers, at a faster and faster clip.

I mean I use it every day of course, but the velocity of work doesn’t really seem to be budging lol. And frankly a lot of time wasted on AI made gadgets, and meetings about those gadgets (look at this dashboard Claude made! etc)

I'm not disagreeing that some manual work require forms of intelligence that are undervalued in our society, and don't get me started about nurses, but still: What the Jeff Bezos!

That's not going to happen.

As a programmer, but working in two non-SWE roles, I have turned job A 70% over to AI, and job B 90%.

Where systems and scaffolds can be put in place to manage various aspects of a job, would this not be considered, partially, an "AI job"?

If you work in government grants and R&D, what if agents can now triage 100-1000x the opportunity count that you could ever handle alone, and you had a pipeline system in place to manage said opportunities and relationships? And then you, as the human, become the mouthpiece and reviewer of hoards of filtered output? Is that Federal Grants & R&D position now not mostly an AI job?

I'd say a large percentage of digital-based jobs can be considered varying percentages of AI jobs.

Maybe.

> nobody will need to work anymore

If we define "nobody" as very wealthy people who partake in that abundance while everyone else ... goes away.

Messenger 3: My Lord, news…

King: What?

Messenger 3: Lord Wessex is dead.

King: This news is not so good.

Messenger 3: Pardon, My Lord?

King: I like it not. Bring me some other news.

Messenger 3: Pardon, My Lord?

King: I LIKE NOT THIS NEWS! BRING ME SOME OTHER NEWS!!!

Messenger 3: Yes, My Lord!

(Messenger 3 leaves; King tosses things around angrily; Messenger 4 enters — actually just Messenger 3 pretending to be a new messenger delivering new news.)

Messenger 4: My Lord, news…

King: What?

Messenger 4: Lord Wessex is not dead.

King: Ah, good news! Let there be joy and celebration; let jubilation reign!

Trust me I do the same.

The current head of the BLS seems well qualified. Here are some select quotes from a NYT article [1]:

  “Erica Groshen, who was commissioner during the Obama administration, also praised the selection. “He’s a B.L.S.-er, he’s a data nerd,” she said.”

  “The firing, and Mr. Antoni’s subsequent nomination, raised concerns that Mr. Trump would seek to interfere in the agency’s operations and perhaps try to skew its estimates to his political advantage. “
  
  “There is no evidence that has happened so far. The agency has been run since August by William Wiatrowski, its longtime deputy commissioner, who also led the bureau on an interim basis under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Economists continue to view the numbers the agency produces as reliable.”

Can you cite any specific examples of wrongdoing? Or inaccurate numbers or figures outside of normal revisions?

When I see bad numbers from the BLS I say yes that’s probably true. When I see good numbers from the BLS I say yes that’s probably true.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/business/trump-bureau-of-...

If the software isn't downright free – today, you can slap a $349 RTX 5060 [†] into any POS surplus computer and have an offline assistant, running Llama or Ornith, via Ollama in linux (i.e. the LLM and OS are FREE open-source software) [∑]

I have a working demo of this that has been shown/leant to several friends, and they're all surprised that it "all works so well, without being online, for only a few hundred dollars."

When I've demonstrated Mistral-small on my 5070Ti... that has been a real jaw dropper. I haven't shown anybody qwen3.8:27b, yet... but dammmmm, what a month of learning it's been.

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A friend that was going through wifecancer confided in me that "you can ask it anything, without feeling embarassed" – and that has stuck with me (that so many smart people are afraid to ask simple questions [*], out of perceptional worries).

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[†] (8GB DDR7) brand new from Wal-Mart

[∑] My first linux/LLM machine was built with setup help from Perplexity.ai (with a dozen "assists" - I am bluecollar, non-coder). This used an obsolete i5 (and $200 used VEGA64 GPU) to create a decent Llama3.1 LLM machine (~100wpm typeback, perhaps 70 tokens/s).

[*] even to their own detriment, of shame, when simple solutions often do exist

Temporarily. Token price will rise sharply when the bills finally come due.

???

From a few months ago: https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260516_DE_...