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Zylokloto 1 days ago [-]
He clearly states that it worries him and he made a public letter.
The job disruption is real and it will be an job apocalypse for plenty of people.
If a company is now paying for ai tokens and you now have 5-20% higher cost but you are relevant more efficient, you will reduce your team by 5-20%.
It is already a job apocalypse for people who learned language and no longer get a job for translating or text analysis. People who want to be an illustrator have a job apocalpyse.
And we have not even SEEN what it will look like in 4-14 years. Physical AI / Robotic is progressing like crazy too.
polnoner 22 hours ago [-]
It is obviously too early for any of this. Technologist have a highly distorted view of the overall economy. Most things just don't move that fast outside of information technology.
I routinely talk to people at my current non-tech job who don't even know what Claude is.
Technologist talk about tokenmaxxing while I can't imagine more than 10% of the non-tech workforce could even explain what a token is.
This level of automation is going to have an extremely slow roll out because of regulatory and sociological reasons.
There is no equivalent to the contagion of AI coding agents outside of programming. I am still fighting just to get access to Claude Cowork at work. I have quite a few automation ideas but there is not much in it for my manager. They have to sign off on something they don't understand with the best outcome their department shrinks. I can understand from their perspective, the status quo is perfectly fine. The risk is long term to the whole business not being competitive but neither my manager or I will be at this company by the time that materializes.
There is this cultural sorting function too that if you don't like change you probably don't work in tech. The culture that creates is night and day different to the non-technology workforce culture. Most people outside technology hate change. Time and time again, I have seen that even the most simple and obvious changes don't get made, even if it makes the task easier because of this bias against change.
Zylokloto 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah I do think too but there are now effects going against this typical pattern:
Agentic AI Layer: moving more knowledge into the software stack itself will reduce the amount of people you need for 'software'.
And the second thing: We are now in a time of commoditisation: Everything which isn't optimized becomes optimized. That small company not being efficient at all? Another young person with automatisation / ai in mind will try to disrupt that market because we are so saturated.
With white collar job people getting dispersed, will lead to more pressure on blue collar
5gff3 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wildrice 1 days ago [-]
I think we are going to see a growing trend of communications opposite of what we've seen in the last 4 years; no more AI doomerism to avoid datacenter bans. Surly everyone is Dario's circle is telling him to keep his mouth shut.
alephnerd 24 hours ago [-]
As I've mentioned ad nauseum on HN for years yet no one listened - much of the time we as corporates in the tech industry used "AI" as an excuse for layoffs was for the same reason we used "COVID" as an explanation for layoffs before GPT4 was GAed.
The reality is, hiring severely overshot in 2021-22 with a degradation in quality. And 2-3 years of remote first showed that you can offshore with little-to-no operational impact.
Dario's messaging made sense as the underdog - which Anthropic was until a year ago. Their moat used to be FedRAMP until Emil Michael called their bluff.
5gff3 24 hours ago [-]
Tech is insanely bloated and much of the cash flows are coming from investments made yonks ago.
What firms are going to do now is probe deeper and disinvest in crappy projects that - many that most likely generated negative returns upon closer inspection.
alephnerd 24 hours ago [-]
> What firms are going to do now is probe deeper and disinvest in crappy projects that most likely generated negative returns
We've been doing this since 2022. Most layoffs overlap with Sales, Engineering, and Ops associated with cost centers.
Like, there was no reason Uber had 3 internally competing and built chat apps with dozens of engineers allocated as headcount.
> much of the cash flows are coming from investments made yonks ago
Not necessarily, but you can't train an old dog to do new tricks.
5gff3 24 hours ago [-]
"> much of the cash flows are coming from investments made yonks ago"
Yes they are.
The marginal ROIC for tech firms that are in mature growth is shit. Made shitter by continuing to field many people for no good reason.
alephnerd 24 hours ago [-]
What is the timeframe you are using? To me "yonks ago" means 15-20 years ago.
And marginal ROIC is just one metric amongst multiple to benchmark against.
Also, if you had the Benoit [0] you should use your normal HN account instead of a throwaway created for this topic.
Touched a nerve did I? Not used to being outclassed eh? Youre an amateur.
Imagine thinking 'yonks ago' is 15-20 years in the technology game. Stop editing your posts bro.
alephnerd 23 hours ago [-]
> Touched a nerve did I
In a way, but mostly because discourse on this platform has gone to shit because no one is restricting throwaways and no one is calling this out.
> Imagine thinking 'yonks ago' is 15-20 years in the technology game. Stop editing your posts bro
Give a number and the timeframe. I'm open to chatting collaboratively with you because we might be modeling differently with different priors.
But I don't like unsubstantiated hot takes being used to launder throwaway accounts - the noise to signal ratio is shit enough on HN in 2026.
NoelJacob 1 days ago [-]
So a guy who runs worker displacement company tries to say we're not bad? It literally has a page where it shows how much of your company can be automated.
matteoraso 1 days ago [-]
Something that gets ignored is that we're already facing a serious decline in the workforce as a result of the fertility crisis. If we can automate some jobs at the same time as people leave the workforce en masse, we can avoid a catasrophe.
amelius 1 days ago [-]
Those are the wrong jobs. AI cannot yet be a nurse, for example.
kulahan 19 hours ago [-]
No, but it can do nurse thinking. It's just continuous Bayesian reasoning.
boogieknite 15 hours ago [-]
it can do nurse thinking at an accuracy certain to get sued into the sun
pydry 24 hours ago [-]
AI can't write code properly either to be honest but if it could then I guess many software engineers would retrain as nurses.
1 days ago [-]
ares623 1 days ago [-]
Talk about learning the wrong lesson
kulahan 24 hours ago [-]
Or maybe he’s making decisions based on an existing system, rather than pretending to exist in a vacuum
darkstarsys 1 days ago [-]
Brynjolfsson: an AI “job apocalypse” is unlikely.
Also Brynjolfsson: It will likely impact entry-level jobs. There are huge implications for business and the economy, including some increases in living standards, but also, potentially, job disruption. We must act now to address this gap. We can’t just sit back and wait for the tsunami to hit us.
Also Brynjolfsson: If companies don’t hire people at the base of the pyramid, then they’re not going to have those people later when they need them. Now, AI can do a lot of those basic tasks. Some companies, such as law firms and investment banks, are not hiring as many people at the base. In the short run, I can see that logic, but, in a few years, where are they going to have the most experienced people? So they need to think harder about that.
So there's that. Basically what he's hoping is if everyone does what he recommends re: regulation and policy, then maybe the job apocalypse will become unlikely.
pyrolistical 1 days ago [-]
Yeah the base requirement has gone up. So more training/schooling is required.
Imagine when jobs started adding the requirement entry level positions require ability to read? That cut out so many people when that requirement was added yet the economy survived
bogzz 24 hours ago [-]
That requirement should probably make a comeback.
a2ff6eeb0 24 hours ago [-]
I think the base requirement to compete will keep going up. We already have AI models that can debug and audit code better than the best humans.
You used to have a career as a software engineer or devops person if you were good at debugging. Today, I challenge you to take any past production outages, toss the traces into Claude Fable, and see if it finds the bug faster than humans can.
I think this is the way the rest of white collar labor goes.
pigpop 24 hours ago [-]
For some roles, I agree but I also think that there will be many new-ish roles that will have lower requirements right down to being a warm body capable of walking and talking. The lower requirements will be possible because these roles will essentially be proxies for AI agents that need a human to go somewhere and do something in the physical world, whether that's resetting a breaker or just being a human face and voice delivering a message.
And yes, before anyone brings it up, I've read Manna and if you haven't you probably should[0] but I don't think it will be as dystopian or utopian as that. Humanoid robots would obviously replace some of the proxy need but there will still be a lot of things that only a living human can do even if it's just purely for legal and regulatory reasons.
I also think there will be a lot more roles that are purely human in nature and which will have an entirely different set of requirements but that's a different topic.
Of course. For a great deal of software, the main skills needed are vaguely speaking the jargon so you can understand Claude, and doing manual debugging.
devmor 23 hours ago [-]
> We already have AI models that can debug and audit code better than the best humans.
I'd love to see one someday.
a2ff6eeb0 23 hours ago [-]
Did you try my suggested experiment? Which issues did Fable take longer than a human to diagnose once you started to describe the symptoms?
mike741 20 hours ago [-]
He was quoting the claim you made. Shouldn't you have your own justification for it? Which tests did you run with both Fable as well as the best human programmers?
a2ff6eeb0 19 hours ago [-]
I see -- so you'd rather not know if it works in your situation?
mike741 19 hours ago [-]
"I see the problem now - wait, let me ask some clarifying questions."
a2ff6eeb0 18 hours ago [-]
...you can quibble about the chat transcript, but it spits out answers pretty reliably. "But you don't have to take my word for it".
devmor 17 hours ago [-]
I “try your suggested experiment” several times per month at work. Usually when I’m on call.
It’s great at being a search engine for our docs and communications. It can also find bugs quickly in small repos with static analysis and coverage tools.
But when it comes to larger projects or interconnected systems, the time it takes to correct its “assumptions” is often longer than the time it takes to solve the entire problem myself.
pydry 24 hours ago [-]
Ive dealt with tons of bugs Claude couldnt recognize. Have you not?
a2ff6eeb0 24 hours ago [-]
Honestly? Not really, not since Fable came out. There's been a bunch of times it needed to ask for context, and I needed to deploy some additional tracing at its request.
(There have been a few times where it has refused to debug due to safeguards. This is actually the biggest problem.)
pydry 24 hours ago [-]
Companies didn't like hiring entry level engineers even before AI came along because it took them such a long time to become productive and they had a habit of job hopping as soon as they did.
LLMs didn't really change anything about that but people like to give it credit for stuff.
In the long run it meant seniors commanded high salaries. It's the tragedy of the commons i guess except where the apocalypse is you need to build a free sushi restaurant and on site laundry for your spoiled developers.
Incipient 20 hours ago [-]
AI is definitely eating jobs as no one would disagree with, I guess the question is more at what point does it go from low, medium, high, or apocalyptic job loss?
throwyawayyyy 1 days ago [-]
AI companies: give us money, think of all the jobs will be able to destroy and whose value we will somehow manage to capture!
General society: [notices this is what AI companies are explicitly trying to do.]
AI companies: don't worry about it bro, it'll all be fine -- better than fine in fact. And not just for us, promise! Actually we'll somehow create even more jobs, while still being able to massively increase productivity, even though this is contradictory and impossible. Because nothing is impossible with AI!
ares623 1 days ago [-]
Zombocom is proof of a time traveling AI god being real.
mixmastamyk 6 hours ago [-]
The only limit… is yourself.
mrwaffle 1 days ago [-]
There's so many issues piling up on this mountain of steaming issues. I can't even tell you what a nightmare it is to try to get each company's idea of agentic support working, it's truly dystopian confusion/psychosis.
surfingdino 24 hours ago [-]
I am still recovering from a project where everything that could go wrong, did. People without experience coding in Python vibing Python code. People cosplaying software architects. People vibing specs, Jira tickets based on the code they vibed... architects telling devs to "upload the zip file into Claude and figure out what the code does" because there is no design, no spec, no requirements... madness.
seanclayton 22 hours ago [-]
Sounds like my job as well
5gff3 24 hours ago [-]
The reality is, a lot of economic activity is fake in the sense that it is highly-discretionary.
And this will continue to go on and on and on. This means that this idea of large scale AI lay offs is complete delusion.
polnoner 22 hours ago [-]
I think it is because we haven't had a real recession now in a generation.
There is all this accumulated, inefficient structure we are maintaining.
The next recession will have a strong amount of economic autophagy because of the amount of structure to eat through.
I suspect this is how automation materializes too at scale. It materializes in the leanness of companies on the other side of a recession. We are viewing LLMs as not producing this autophagy as proof of something not working. I don't think this is reality.
I think it is related to this childish view of instantaneous market efficiency. A recession is what will perturb the system and start the automation chain reaction. Inside the current economic regime, automation is just a risk and a cost because the tools were derived inside this long expansive regime. Nothing much happens until the shock and regime switch. Then we never come back to this regime.
I woke up everyday thinking how someday I will look back on today with such fond memories of being the good old days. The regime switching is going to be quite miserable.
hugodan 23 hours ago [-]
Can't wait to see what will happen to all those frontend developers that the market is flooded it...
Havoc 22 hours ago [-]
Door dash
23 hours ago [-]
rrmdp 23 hours ago [-]
Some jobs are going to disappear and others will be created... same like in all eras in the past.
add-sub-mul-div 1 days ago [-]
If the number of jobs stays constant but a lot of those jobs have been downgraded to gig labor without benefits, that's bad.
If the number of jobs stays constant but a lot of those jobs have been downgraded to fungible operators of AI, that's very bad.
unified101 12 hours ago [-]
Gig labour has existing before AI, infact techies built it. Where was the "that's very bad" then?
Smells of hypocricy. And if the world didn't really change for gig workers before, why would it now?
bespokedevelopr 1 days ago [-]
Paper owned by billionaire who is trying to wipe out pesky humans publishes article saying trust us you’ll be fine
jmclnx 1 days ago [-]
>Brynjolfsson predicts that demand for experienced workers such as senior coders will still be high even if AI takes on more routine knowledge and coding work in the future
All well and good, but the age old question. How will people get experience if entry level is AI ? But maybe for a preview look at COBOL, there is huge demand for experience people.
esikich 1 days ago [-]
You get experience by having an active interest, doing projects on your own, and not needing it spoonfed to you. When I was in college we learned some basic data structures and made an employee time clock program. I learned far more from the stuff I fiddled around with on my own time. I started tinkering in elementary school. The students that had done nothing with comp sci their entire lives and just wanted to make video games dropped out in 2 weeks.
lovich 23 hours ago [-]
> You get experience by having an active interest, doing projects on your own, and not needing it spoonfed to you.
Aka, pushing training costs onto labor instead of capital.
We’ve been doing this in an accelerated fashion for decades and this is the next step on that treadmill.
US companies used to hire at entry level and train employees in the high level skills they needed.
You’ll find many people wailing and gnashing their teeth about how those entry levels will jump ship as soon as they get trained. Nothing is stopping them from paying market rate for those newly trained people.
Nothing is also stopping them from making a contract that you have to work for them for X years post training or return the training costs other than the allergy US firms have with making any sort of contract with labor that doesn’t let them fire them at a moments notice.
ekidd 1 days ago [-]
> But maybe for a preview look at COBOL, there is huge demand for experience people.
Is there? I actually looked into this once, and nearly all the Cobol work I saw mentioned was being outsourced to software consulting companies in India. And it didn't sound like an especially good job there, either.
If anyone is genuinely paying disgusting amounts of money for deep Cobol expertise, I'd love to see any public evidence that this is happening on any significant scale!
geodel 1 days ago [-]
To this age old question the answer is between the lines that by the time seniors are gone AI would be fully taking over, at least by their assumptions.
And maybe due to falling population by then whoever left would have something useful to do nonetheless.
seanclayton 22 hours ago [-]
You're right, it's going to be an AI bubble pop job apocalypse. Good luck finding jobs when no one is hiring after a crash.
The job disruption is real and it will be an job apocalypse for plenty of people.
If a company is now paying for ai tokens and you now have 5-20% higher cost but you are relevant more efficient, you will reduce your team by 5-20%.
It is already a job apocalypse for people who learned language and no longer get a job for translating or text analysis. People who want to be an illustrator have a job apocalpyse.
And we have not even SEEN what it will look like in 4-14 years. Physical AI / Robotic is progressing like crazy too.
I routinely talk to people at my current non-tech job who don't even know what Claude is.
Technologist talk about tokenmaxxing while I can't imagine more than 10% of the non-tech workforce could even explain what a token is.
This level of automation is going to have an extremely slow roll out because of regulatory and sociological reasons.
There is no equivalent to the contagion of AI coding agents outside of programming. I am still fighting just to get access to Claude Cowork at work. I have quite a few automation ideas but there is not much in it for my manager. They have to sign off on something they don't understand with the best outcome their department shrinks. I can understand from their perspective, the status quo is perfectly fine. The risk is long term to the whole business not being competitive but neither my manager or I will be at this company by the time that materializes.
There is this cultural sorting function too that if you don't like change you probably don't work in tech. The culture that creates is night and day different to the non-technology workforce culture. Most people outside technology hate change. Time and time again, I have seen that even the most simple and obvious changes don't get made, even if it makes the task easier because of this bias against change.
Agentic AI Layer: moving more knowledge into the software stack itself will reduce the amount of people you need for 'software'.
And the second thing: We are now in a time of commoditisation: Everything which isn't optimized becomes optimized. That small company not being efficient at all? Another young person with automatisation / ai in mind will try to disrupt that market because we are so saturated.
With white collar job people getting dispersed, will lead to more pressure on blue collar
The reality is, hiring severely overshot in 2021-22 with a degradation in quality. And 2-3 years of remote first showed that you can offshore with little-to-no operational impact.
Dario's messaging made sense as the underdog - which Anthropic was until a year ago. Their moat used to be FedRAMP until Emil Michael called their bluff.
What firms are going to do now is probe deeper and disinvest in crappy projects that - many that most likely generated negative returns upon closer inspection.
We've been doing this since 2022. Most layoffs overlap with Sales, Engineering, and Ops associated with cost centers.
Like, there was no reason Uber had 3 internally competing and built chat apps with dozens of engineers allocated as headcount.
> much of the cash flows are coming from investments made yonks ago
Not necessarily, but you can't train an old dog to do new tricks.
Yes they are.
The marginal ROIC for tech firms that are in mature growth is shit. Made shitter by continuing to field many people for no good reason.
And marginal ROIC is just one metric amongst multiple to benchmark against.
Also, if you had the Benoit [0] you should use your normal HN account instead of a throwaway created for this topic.
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-XWgoJT1xPU
Touched a nerve did I? Not used to being outclassed eh? Youre an amateur.
Imagine thinking 'yonks ago' is 15-20 years in the technology game. Stop editing your posts bro.
In a way, but mostly because discourse on this platform has gone to shit because no one is restricting throwaways and no one is calling this out.
> Imagine thinking 'yonks ago' is 15-20 years in the technology game. Stop editing your posts bro
Give a number and the timeframe. I'm open to chatting collaboratively with you because we might be modeling differently with different priors.
But I don't like unsubstantiated hot takes being used to launder throwaway accounts - the noise to signal ratio is shit enough on HN in 2026.
Also Brynjolfsson: It will likely impact entry-level jobs. There are huge implications for business and the economy, including some increases in living standards, but also, potentially, job disruption. We must act now to address this gap. We can’t just sit back and wait for the tsunami to hit us.
Also Brynjolfsson: If companies don’t hire people at the base of the pyramid, then they’re not going to have those people later when they need them. Now, AI can do a lot of those basic tasks. Some companies, such as law firms and investment banks, are not hiring as many people at the base. In the short run, I can see that logic, but, in a few years, where are they going to have the most experienced people? So they need to think harder about that.
So there's that. Basically what he's hoping is if everyone does what he recommends re: regulation and policy, then maybe the job apocalypse will become unlikely.
Imagine when jobs started adding the requirement entry level positions require ability to read? That cut out so many people when that requirement was added yet the economy survived
You used to have a career as a software engineer or devops person if you were good at debugging. Today, I challenge you to take any past production outages, toss the traces into Claude Fable, and see if it finds the bug faster than humans can.
I think this is the way the rest of white collar labor goes.
And yes, before anyone brings it up, I've read Manna and if you haven't you probably should[0] but I don't think it will be as dystopian or utopian as that. Humanoid robots would obviously replace some of the proxy need but there will still be a lot of things that only a living human can do even if it's just purely for legal and regulatory reasons.
I also think there will be a lot more roles that are purely human in nature and which will have an entirely different set of requirements but that's a different topic.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120224063109/http://marshallbr...
I'd love to see one someday.
It’s great at being a search engine for our docs and communications. It can also find bugs quickly in small repos with static analysis and coverage tools.
But when it comes to larger projects or interconnected systems, the time it takes to correct its “assumptions” is often longer than the time it takes to solve the entire problem myself.
(There have been a few times where it has refused to debug due to safeguards. This is actually the biggest problem.)
LLMs didn't really change anything about that but people like to give it credit for stuff.
In the long run it meant seniors commanded high salaries. It's the tragedy of the commons i guess except where the apocalypse is you need to build a free sushi restaurant and on site laundry for your spoiled developers.
General society: [notices this is what AI companies are explicitly trying to do.]
AI companies: don't worry about it bro, it'll all be fine -- better than fine in fact. And not just for us, promise! Actually we'll somehow create even more jobs, while still being able to massively increase productivity, even though this is contradictory and impossible. Because nothing is impossible with AI!
And this will continue to go on and on and on. This means that this idea of large scale AI lay offs is complete delusion.
There is all this accumulated, inefficient structure we are maintaining.
The next recession will have a strong amount of economic autophagy because of the amount of structure to eat through.
I suspect this is how automation materializes too at scale. It materializes in the leanness of companies on the other side of a recession. We are viewing LLMs as not producing this autophagy as proof of something not working. I don't think this is reality.
I think it is related to this childish view of instantaneous market efficiency. A recession is what will perturb the system and start the automation chain reaction. Inside the current economic regime, automation is just a risk and a cost because the tools were derived inside this long expansive regime. Nothing much happens until the shock and regime switch. Then we never come back to this regime.
I woke up everyday thinking how someday I will look back on today with such fond memories of being the good old days. The regime switching is going to be quite miserable.
If the number of jobs stays constant but a lot of those jobs have been downgraded to fungible operators of AI, that's very bad.
Smells of hypocricy. And if the world didn't really change for gig workers before, why would it now?
All well and good, but the age old question. How will people get experience if entry level is AI ? But maybe for a preview look at COBOL, there is huge demand for experience people.
Aka, pushing training costs onto labor instead of capital.
We’ve been doing this in an accelerated fashion for decades and this is the next step on that treadmill.
US companies used to hire at entry level and train employees in the high level skills they needed.
You’ll find many people wailing and gnashing their teeth about how those entry levels will jump ship as soon as they get trained. Nothing is stopping them from paying market rate for those newly trained people.
Nothing is also stopping them from making a contract that you have to work for them for X years post training or return the training costs other than the allergy US firms have with making any sort of contract with labor that doesn’t let them fire them at a moments notice.
Is there? I actually looked into this once, and nearly all the Cobol work I saw mentioned was being outsourced to software consulting companies in India. And it didn't sound like an especially good job there, either.
If anyone is genuinely paying disgusting amounts of money for deep Cobol expertise, I'd love to see any public evidence that this is happening on any significant scale!
And maybe due to falling population by then whoever left would have something useful to do nonetheless.