The End of the Office

https://blog.andrewyang.com/p/the-end-of-the-office

by HR01 • 5 months ago

64 34 5 months ago

blog.andrewyang.com

ramon156• 5 months ago

Expect the Starbucks in your local suburb to become occupied with middle-aged former office workers who want to get out of the house. That’s a benign portrait,

Surprisingly positive thought. People barely go out because they're stuck in their pavlov ass routine. Go get a coffee, king.

willis936• 5 months ago

That pavlov ass routine funds regal coffee expeditions. We'll be touching grass after getting foreclosed on.

clay_the_ripper• 5 months ago

This view is now consensus, which is highly comforting as consensus is always wrong.

sgdfg22• 5 months ago

Consensus lacks the nuance and subtle stuff.

Its super annoying to read as someone who cares about that.

vaxman• 5 months ago

1. Yes, replacing millions of employees with autocomplete running on nuclear powered vector processing units is totally ridiculous on its face,

2. but Perception is Reality in business

3. and FOMO is real.

Hence, the AI money machine https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ppla7o/oc...

Even though many of these players are not publicly traded, they're clearly manipulating the public equity markets with their funky receivables and equity swaps, inadvertently creating what has become the largest "company" in the history of the World and setting us all up for a Greater Depression. https://d0k5l7l4820swi.archive.is/3GCs7/463302388f7f218ff374...

Like the USSR before it, China is a force to be reckoned with and certainly we need to increase national productivity and workforce participation in order to keep up with our debt, but this is not how we countered Sputnik as the memories of the 1930s and two World Wars were still top of mind. Look your children in the eyes and ask if the risk that's being put upon us is worth ...them. https://youtu.be/lNXTKVxOmfk

wavemode• 5 months ago

Consensus can be faulty yet still affect the system. If a large number of investors are expecting companies to replace workers with AI, then that's exactly what many CEOs are going to (try to) do. Since the CEO's boss is the shareholders.

thegrim000• 5 months ago

"This automation wave will kick millions of white-collar workers to the curb in the next 12 - 18 months"

Ok cool, so in a single year when this hasn't happened, we know never to listen to any grand claims he makes ever again.

sgdfg22• 5 months ago

I never understood why his stuff is well-regarded here lmao.

I took one look and was like - meh. Finally he put out a piece that makes this glaringly obvious.

A man with a way of talking/writing but underneath it all, not much.

pinewurst• 5 months ago

He had a taste of public visibility and now is looking desperately for the next passing bandwagon to climb onto.

elevation• 5 months ago

never understood why his stuff is well-regarded here.

He appealed to proponents of basic income.

Years ago, forward thinking identified the trend of decreasing ipv4 availability. Pundits built html clocks to countdown to the depletion of ARINs IPV4 pool, prominently warning of an epoch after which no business could function without fully implementing ipv6. The countdown clocks looked scary and the situation sounded believable, inevitable even, we all wanted to hear, but something would finally force the boss to upgrade.

But hubris blinded these pundits to the possibility that a few large businesses implementing IPv6 and reselling their v4 allotments would indefinitely sustain ipv4 as the internet’s source of truth. With a simple workaround, the old model held.

Like the IPv6 pundits of old, Andrew Wang has correctly identified a trend in AI, but he projects it will erase all jobs and require redefinition of social contract. This is a wild claim, yet proponents of “basic income” are excited to hear anything that bolsters the ideas they prefer to believe.

But I suspect in this case too that the old model will adapt, just as it did with every other increase in human office productivity.

pjmlp2• 5 months ago

I have seen CMS systems and asset management products, whose translation and designer teams are now mostly gone, thanks to AI taking care of their work.

How many translation jobs, or asset creation jobs are still available?

I also have witness backend teams being reduced, thanks to SaaS and iPaaS cloud products that remove the need of backend development, now one only needs to plug a couple of products, do some AI based integrations in Boomi, Workato, n8n,... create a frontend with Vercel's v0 and be done with it.

I am in no ilusion that it will come for me as well, and better slide into some other alternative skill set, at least I am closer to retirement, than hunting for my first job.

happymellon• 5 months ago

We also have IBM tripling job opening because they followed the promise of AI that hasn't fully been realised for them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009327

kj4211cash3• 5 months ago

Just commenting so I can come back in 12-18 months and laugh at this. Or, you know, reflect on why I didn't believe him in the unlikely event that he's correct.

dham2• 5 months ago

At worst, this would only be temporary. Yes, it will cause hardship, but once it trickles down to regular companies, that an LLM is a word predictor, workers will be back. Seems Andrew Yang has never used an LLM to the lengths we do as software developers.

The thing we have to worry about is what's after the LLM.

danielbln• 5 months ago

I don't understand why "it's just predicting words, bro" is still seen as a valuable argument. A LOT has to happen to accurately predict the next word(s) for any given topic.

If that supposed to be a dismissal, it's not a good one.

dham2• 5 months ago

Because people think it's "intelligent" because it's manipulating words and you get people like Andrew Yang and Elon Musk getting one-shotted by it.

Yes, it can solve a lot of things, but an LLM isn't going to put everyone out of work, the thing after the LLM will.

MichaelRo• 5 months ago

Referring to another article ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037628 ): "But Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. And Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, 'kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people'. This isn’t just a strange way of marketing a product, it is a completely psychotic one."

So if the psychopathic AI overlords succeed in making us destitute, no problem. They'll have about the same level of success selling Meta glasses and Netlfix subscriptions as currently in Africa, who's ahead of us in terms of AI disruption of jobs and life standard, that is, they are already there :)

sumedh• 5 months ago

Post your predictions below and let’s come back to this thread in 2 years to see who nailed it.

I dont think it will be as dramatic as he is predicting.

squeefers2• 5 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&vl=en

this same thing was predicted 15 years ago, and im sure before that. its nothing new. anyone can claim tech progress eliminates jobs, its almost a truism.

kj4211cash3• 5 months ago

Bubble will have burst. Tech co stocks will be way down and job market will be rough but starting to improve. Overall employment in tech jobs will be down slightly but starting to improve. Employment in other job functions will be more or less unchanged by AI. Let's see!

pu_pe• 5 months ago

It's no wonder people are scared of AI. The "thought leaders" pushing it forward can only provide scenarios of despair and societal collapse.

As the saying goes, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

ksec• 5 months ago

It is not as bad, but it is happening. Most people on HN if not All, as I haven't read a single comment hinting otherwise, looks at it as some coding / tech scenario. And do not realise how many Bull Shit Job [1] there are within a large organisation, especially in Government. Nearly all Western Government are actively trailing AI/ LLM to replace certain task or job. This roll out is faster than what I have seen before, from PC, Internet to Smartphone. And it is yielding decent results. Some departments are planning 50% head count reduction over next 2 - 3 years. They will of course rehire some for different role of task, but in net numbers it will still be 30%+.

One could argue the more bureaucratic it is, i.e Government organisation, the more apparent this will be.

There are some Bull Shit jobs where LLM still haven't figure it out, mostly due to work flow and inter department / government working together. Once this could be solved I would not be surprised if we could get another 20%. The rest of it will be people much more productive and people who specialise in human interaction and relationship skills.

But even if this isn't end of office, it will be much smaller office. And huge number of people made redundant. Those who claims blue collar jobs are safe dont realise some of these group of people will have to flow into their industry. And that is ignoring robotics. Just look at Unitree recent Lunar new year demonstrations.

It may not be "the end", but it certainly feels like it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

squeefers2• 5 months ago

il give him credit, at least he makes partly verifiable claims. they wont come to pass however, but at least he tried.

erelong• 5 months ago

I'm curious what an ai optimist article looks like in contrast to this pessimistic (even if possibly realistic) take

y-curious• 5 months ago

Let me add some constraints: AI optimists that aren’t selling me “how to use vercel to make $1M per week in 10 minutes”

I love AI, I enjoy using it at work. I fear AI, the amount of work it does for me feels existentially threatening. We live in exhilarating times.

lunias2• 5 months ago

I'm not sure the people writing these articles actually use AI outside of trivial benchmarks. Sure, it can create "a website" in minutes, but what does that website do? I've found (I'm working on vehicle routing and maintenance scheduling) that you very much have to have a plan in your head and an understanding of what's going on in order to build towards reasonable results effectively. There is no replacement for knowing what you want, how to ask for it, and how to verify the implementation. That takes expertise. You cannot tell AI, "We fired the engineers. Take over their jobs and do them better." That's a non-starter.

kj4211cash3• 5 months ago

It sounds like you are an Operations Researcher. I am too friend. The talks I've seen on people using AI for Operations Research have been ... underwhelming. I wonder if the vast majority of us are just in niches narrow enough that AI just isn't that helpful.

lunias2• 5 months ago

Lack of training data in narrow domains is definitely true. I'm hopeful though, AI seems like it should mesh well with the problem. One of the biggest wins for me so far is just how quickly I can build and iterate on visualizations of the data. It has cut down enormously on the amount of time that I'm asking myself, "but why is this the schedule?".

kjellsbells• 5 months ago

Correctness like this doesn't really matter, if you are some EVP at BigCorp: you don´t really need AI to be genuinely superior to your human workers. You need AI to appear to be useful enough for two or three quarters, max. It gives you cover to justify eliminating jobs and still have the stock price rise. It gives you exposure to the people who might hire you for your next golden gig ("thought leader", "visionary" etc). And you'll be bailing shortly anyway, before reality comes knocking.

H1Supreme• 5 months ago

Something I never see answered in articles like this: What are all these corporations going to do when the AI companies who are handling all their operations raise rates by 10x, 20x, 100x? Outside of "pay up", of course.

Also, shouldn't they be worried about AI providers launching competitors? If these predictions come true, and AI handles most of a company's workload, wouldn't the company itself be something that could be automated away by AI?

yesfitz• 5 months ago

Vendor management is a risk that every business deals with to some capacity. What keeps Microsoft from charging more for Windows licenses? Linux, MacOS, even Chromebooks. A business who puts all their eggs in one vendor's basket without any exit strategy will either have to pay up, sell, or fold, but that kind of behavior from a vendor will have their other customers looking for a door.

Launching competitors? Maybe so, but this too has existing analogs pre-AI[1]. The fact that many start-ups today are created with the explicit goal of being acquired rather than growing organically or existing in perpetuity tells me that the only thing that may change is the cost of Sherlocking a startup will come down below the cost to acquire. But if the cost of creating a start-up and using a lawyer-bot to protect its intellectual property also come down, then the math isn't settled.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...

The End of the Office

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