White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

https://martynasm.com/2026/03/22/white-collar-ai-apocalypse-narrative-is-just-another-bullshit/

by mmiliauskas • 4 months ago

59 104 4 months ago

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive.

Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

Madmallard3• 4 months ago

Are you sure about that one?

What exactly will these agents be able to do with enough consistency, accuracy, and reliability that people will want to hire them over humans?

In my experience with even the most basic implementation of agents, i.e. customer service chat bots, I literally cannot stand interacting with them even once. They are extremely unhelpful and I will hang up or immediately ask to speak to a human.

edu• 4 months ago

Obviously your support chatbot with talk to your flavor of clawd that will call Claude Code that will code a solution that will be reviewed by Codex that will merge and release it and then will ping clawd that will send an email to the user announcing that their issue has been fixed. /s just in case

exitb2• 4 months ago

Most support agents lack... well, agency. If you connect a chatbot to an FAQ, that's exactly what you get. Just another instance of enterprise software being badly designed, badly written etc. It doesn't mean that it's actually an impossible problem.

Stromgren• 4 months ago

I’ve been involved in building a system that reads structured data from a special form of contracts from a specific industry. Prices, clauses, pick up, delivery, etc. A couple hundred datapoints per contract. We had many discussions around how to present and sell an imperfect system. The thing is, the potential customers are today transcribing the contracts manually and we quickly realized that people make a ton of mistakes doing that. It became obvious when we were working on assertion datasets ourself. It’s not a perfect system and you have to consider how you use the data (aggregating for price indexing for instance), but we’re actually doing better than what people are achieving when they have to transcribe data for hours a day.

robotswantdata2• 4 months ago

The voice agents in development right now feel 100x the current chatbots deployed by companies.

I had same opinion till a few months ago, now would prefer the [redacted company so as to not give free marketing] AI agent. You’ll start seeing this wave in around 3-6 months as most are in trial

badgersnake4• 4 months ago

The next AI I’m working on is going be amazing and change the world. Please back my series A you won’t regret it.

(Let’s not talk about my blockchain startup and my VR startup and my NFT startup). My house is nice though.

chrz• 4 months ago

Lets go back to waterfall even harder and write the super correct and detailed design doc.

CodeCompost• 4 months ago

You jest but this is precisely what we have done. Our customers have downright rejected SCRUM. It is considered a waste of money.

ares623• 4 months ago

Well ain't this a chronological oddity. Always 6 months away!

I don't want Codex dammit! I'm a Claude Code man.

askl• 4 months ago

It's always different this time. It always will only take a couple more months or years. And then people move on to the next hype topic.

tripledry• 4 months ago

It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

True, but also there are perception biases that lead us to believe progress is exponential, even though it might as well be an S-curve.

I'm having a hard time finding the right terms, but I'm sure there is some bias to think that "the line goes up".

bluegatty• 4 months ago

It's already been an apocalypse for some jobs, and that will continue on. But probably not broadly.

mmiliauskas4• 4 months ago

Yes indeed, there is an ongoing apocalypse for Food & Serving jobs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPFOPRSE. It is one of the most AI-proof professions according to Anthropic.

intellectronica2• 4 months ago

Every morning the turkey rejoiced and said to himself "oh joy, I'm such a lucky turkey, I don't have to do anything, the food is plentiful, I just eat and shoot the breeze the whole day long, what an awesome life!" Until one morning, the day before thanksgiving, the turkey rejoiced about the awesome day he's about to have ... just to be picked up 5 minutes later and dragged to the slaughterhouse.

odyssey73• 4 months ago

It’s a compelling story; but what you’re describing is, to the turkey, a black swan event, rather than an obvious inevitability that all the other turkeys keep telling the turkey is going to happen.

mikkupikku5• 4 months ago

Years ago when you went into computers, you didn't have normies warning you that one day computers will program themselves? 20 years ago, nobody could tell you if this would happen in 20 years or 200 years, but I do believe there has been a general sense of this sort of thing happening eventually.

intellectronica2• 4 months ago

Yeah, and the lesson is ... don't be a turkey :D

It's not a certainty, but if you're not prepared for an extreme event, it can be ouch.

windward3• 4 months ago

So I get to continue the hedonistic life without having to plan for a long slaughter? That's not such a bad way to go.

guzfip2• 4 months ago

No you don’t get the hedonistic life. The turkey gets a hedonistic life because its value is in its consumption. It’s worth more to its owner fattened up as much as possible.

You on the other hand, are not bred to be consumed. And in fact the fatter you are, the more expensive and less useful you become.

So what you get is more likely starvation, if you aren’t culled to free resources.

thrance• 4 months ago

The good thing with stories is you can make them say anything you like.

Every morning the dog rejoiced and said to himself "oh joy, I'm such a lucky dog, I don't have to do anything, the food is plentiful, I just eat and shoot the breeze the whole day long, what an awesome life!". And the dog went on to have an awesome life of plentiful food, shooting breeze and leasure. The end.

kensai• 4 months ago

Just watch this for some depressive vibes: https://x.com/TechLayoffLover

Ygg2• 4 months ago

No posts found.

cess11• 4 months ago

https://xcancel.com/TechLayoffLover works for me.

rob743• 4 months ago

That's probably for the best, really, prevents you from wasting your time reading lots of AI slop...

rob743• 4 months ago

Is this based on anything real or just AI-generated slop meant to trigger angry reactions? It doesn't quote any sources for any of the stories, so as far as I can see, they're probably 100% made up...

monegator2• 4 months ago

I love how the comments are always full of doomposting.

Get prepared. Something is coming *soon*

And how any even slightly skepctical commend gets downvoted to hell. One may start thinking there are bots promoting the narrative.

mikkupikku5• 4 months ago

Nobody thinks this way, so all the posts saying it must be bots. Wow, look at all the posts saying the thing, there must be a lot of bots.

Or maybe you're choosing to perceive bots when actually a lot of people disagree with you?

monegator2• 4 months ago

I mean, looking around in social media i would describe most of LLM preachers and worshippers as either conmen or non-tech guys that still have no clue about the technology behind.. the kind that worship elon and his kind, without questioning every new absurd sales pitch that comes from that bunch as the future, no matter how little is that based in reality.

On the other side the doom posters tend to be awfully mediocre professionals (or again, conmen leveraging FOMO). Skeptics like in the article tend to be dismissed. I'm also a skeptic, and someone who you would define as a 10x i think, except a few years ago i would have just been, you know, good at my job?

Please let me know when i'm going to be automated so i can start becoming good at something else. The future may not be bright for a number of reason, but i still have not submitted to doom.

faangguyindia2• 4 months ago

wait what? I am in india and jobs are being lost by thousands everyday in IT field.

infact, i go and implement dumb AI models in many companies and executives immediately show "how many people they can fire with this advancement".

qsera2• 4 months ago

Where is the news that say this?

faangguyindia2• 4 months ago

why would these private consultancy firms leak news?

skywhopper2• 4 months ago

There is such a mind-bogglingly huge amount of waste in IT services worldwide, particularly in the consulting and offshoring areas, that big swings, up and down, in that area don’t actually have anything to do with what works well or doesn’t. Decisions are made to offshore work or drop offshore contracts based on the latest hype cycle, not whether it is effective or worthwhile.

So while there may be lots of consultants losing their jobs, that’s not because AI tools do the work better. It’s because management thinks investors will accept the story that AI tools will do the work better and save money. Management, and investors, don’t know, can’t judge, and honestly don’t actually care if it’s better or worse. And they run things so poorly it would be impossible to tell anyway.

mkbkn• 4 months ago

What do you think of the Indian IT companies? Will they survive the AI onslaught? Where do you see them in the next five years?

rando77• 4 months ago

It's worth taking actions that take large scale job losses due to AI in the future into consideration, even if now is not the time

aurareturn4• 4 months ago

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was strategic to not provide good service in order to gain an advantage somewhere else in the business.

But now, you can hire 1 customer service person, who could then use AI agents to provide the top quality customer service. Previously, you needed to hire 5 people, which wasn't worth it.

So you went from no customer service employee to 1.

I suspect that this is what will happen. Many companies will hire their first customer service person or more. Many big companies will layoff most of their customer service people. The net effect might actually increase total customer service employment.

I suspect that job openings for customer service employees will actually be higher than now but companies won't be able to find enough AI-skilled people to fill the job. We're going to read about how there are more job openings than ever but companies can't find the AI skillset they need. This is why I think people who adopt AI now, learn it, understand it, get good at it, will be in high demand.

truetraveller2• 4 months ago

"Top customer service" and AI do not mix. People hate an AI response more than a late, real response.

aurareturn4• 4 months ago

Don't get lost in the customer service example. Focus on the idea instead which can be applied to many other professions.

People thought AI being better than a human at reading medical images would put radiologists out of a job. But instead, radiologists had more demand than ever because it made getting a scan more affordable, more accurate which led to more customer demand.

Same can happen for customer service. AI makes customer service cheaper, better, faster. More companies offer good customer service in order to stay competitive. More customers demand customer service because it's better now and they expect it since all companies big or small can afford quality customer service.

chinathrow• 4 months ago

You sure could let the agent try to do the task and supervise it before sending of replies to customers. Similar to as to that I still check the code produced by an agent.

If you remove the human from the loop in customer service, you won't gain a thing.

mikkupikku5• 4 months ago

AI needn't respond, it can instead be used to sort the meaningless noise from the actionable complaints, where previously all would have been ignored. Raise only the issues that matter and can be addressed to the human.

InfinityByTen• 4 months ago

Spot on! I hate being sucked into an "accountability sink", where delay/bad treatment/ tangential answers are ok (somehow acceptable) and justified because it's not personal, "it's just the process".

senordevnyc• 4 months ago

I run a small SaaS business that both sells a super niche AI product to a non-technical audience of small businesses, and also is built and run by AIs, managed by me. I'm the only human in the mix.

I do all the sales and customer service myself, because it's a genuine selling point for my customers that they can talk to the owner if they have issues, and because these customers are the lifeblood of my company, and I want to stay as close to them and their needs as I can.

But it's still time-consuming.

On the customer service side, my next crack at automation will just be having an agent triage inbound requests, queuing up the actions that need to be taken in response (cancel account, upgrade, split team, whatever), and then giving me the whole thing for approval and replying to customer. That alone should easily cut my time spent on CS by 80%, while keeping a more personal touch. I should also note that some of the customer support burden will be lifted by having more self-serve options to do things, better docs, etc. But given that my customers are non-technical, there are always going to be some of them that just want to dash off a text or email because they hate tech and don't want to hassle with it.

On the sales side, I've thus far been 100% sales driven, but I'd like to introduce a self-serve signup flow that targets the 80% of customers who have simpler needs and could probably sign up on their own, and save the sales calls for bigger or more complicated deals.

pydry• 4 months ago

Of the companies that I've worked with that made significant use of call centres they generally fall into three groups:

* Customer wants the human touch

* The company's systems were broken and the customer wouldnt have called at all if they could quickly and easily do what they wanted online.

* Customers are routinely furious and want to complain and/or understand and the company wants to brush them off.

AI doesnt help the first two, it only helps with deflection (what they call the last one).

gloxkiqcza• 4 months ago

In some ways AI sounds almost utopian. I theory it could redistribute manpower more evenly between small and large businesses, allowing them to compete more fairly and improving the efficiency of capitalism (the idealistic model, not the real world state). However, than you remember that the AI tech is currently almost fully in control by the big tech (and its next generation) and you have to ask whether they’ll be able to sabotage that improvement because they will do their worst for sure since liberating the market is not beneficial to them. Let’s hope that despite all odds and current trends we actually reach a state where AI is possible to run on-prem/locally and there are still SOTA models at least as open as they are today.

aurareturn4• 4 months ago

Whoever has compute, will have the power. This is why big tech is plowing $1t into data center capex in 2026.

Disclaimer: I'm an AI compute investor.

guzfip2• 4 months ago

who could then use AI agents to provide the top quality customer service

I’m actually ROFL. Are you brain damaged? Or have you simply been in a coma over the past decade when businesses have outsourced their support to automation.

Hint: the result nearly universally has been closer to bottom quality support, if it even exits.

fastforwardius• 4 months ago

Or more likely - you are a large business.

You provide customer support but think it's just a cost center so you happily reduce workforce by 90% and count on AI to cover the workload.

The non-trivial cases end up with the remaining workforce. They get burned out, but luckily there is plenty of people looking for any job.

fabian2k2• 4 months ago

I think the argument here is a bit of a strawman, though there is a good point in there as well. AI will not automate all customer support, but it has the potential to automate a large fraction of it.

The anecdote in there is about complex B2B enterprise software. That's not the majority of customer support, and is very heavy on escalating to actual experts.

You don't have to remove 100% of the jobs to have huge effects. Automating large parts of a few sectors would already create significant disruptions.

motbus3• 4 months ago

Not putting names but a company I know closely had 20 engineers and now has only 4. And I feel like they plan for less

windward3• 4 months ago

And I feel like they plan for less

I think this mentality must have its own imminent apocalypse. Gifted with an enormous increase in potential productivity, the decision is to do the same but cheaper? Who allocates capital to such spiritless commodification? It all feels like using a printing press to make one bible a month.

There must be a role that can be more productive. It might not necessarily be our skillsets that fit those roles - and the roles might be more stratified - but someone is going to be able to be do more, be paid more.

skywhopper2• 4 months ago

The article literally addresses this point. The easily automated stuff doesn’t save that much money. The big costs of support are the hard things you can’t automate.

fabian2k2• 4 months ago

For this specific business. I don't think that is true for every business or field.

mmiliauskas4• 4 months ago

Finally. Thank you! This was indeed my point that everyone seem to have missed.

jdalsgaard• 4 months ago

Because the remaining 10% is what required most of the CS team’s time. They built an FAQ you can talk to.

These days it's hard to get people to read an email longer then 5 lines - yet people are super excited about abundant masses of text generated by LLMs. It does not compute....

jonathanstrange• 4 months ago

My biggest worry currently isn't even job-related, it's that corporations and authorities will use AI for customer/client relations but that this AI will not be allowed to make any significant changes and is therefore an utter waste of time. In many places, this could turn an already dire situation into an absolute nightmare. What might make it even worse is that authorities - and probably also corporations - will likely ban or block user AI agents, so you cannot even use your own AI to negotiate with their AI.

That's something that needs to be addressed by lawmakers ASAP. There needs to be a right to speak to a human, or (the perhaps overly tech optimistic route) a prohibition of AI that doesn't have adequate decision-making power.

rspoerri4• 4 months ago

People tend to forget how fast technological development advances. Even if you lived trough it you tend to forget how recently the world looked very different.

- before 2012 there was no smartphone

- before 2001 there was no wikipedia

- before 1995 less then 10 percent of the rich country home users had internet

- before 2023 there was no ai available to home users.

Hardware has been getting faster by a factor of 100 in 10 years and ~10‘000 in 20 years. Ai currently develops faster because of a combination of software and hardware improvements. Even if the best current system is only right 1/100 times right now, its likely nearly allways accurate in 10 years.

I also like to remind people that the phone i am writing this on (iphone 12), has the same computing power as the earth simulator in 2003. that was the fastest computer on the earth back then.

Imagine this development and think what changes might come.

jaen2• 4 months ago

Not quite, the Earth Simulator in 2003 had 35.86 Linpack TFLOPS, 10TB of RAM and 700TB of disk.

That's still almost three orders of magnitude from the iPhone 12 (0.02 Linpack TFLOPS, 4GB RAM, 256GB storage).

rspoerri4• 4 months ago

https://www.tnhh.net/posts/phone-power.html

edit: you are right, this source is wrong, but we are getting closer fast.

A19 seems to be getting 2.3 tflops (still only 10%, but still a whole floor of computers vs a smartphone is crazy!).

guytv• 4 months ago

Correction:

- before 2012 there was no smartphone

- by 2011, 35% of US adults had smartphones, iPhone released June, 2007

rspoerri4• 4 months ago

sorry i got the date wrong, my first text where i researched it properly got deleted accidentially.

wilkystyle• 4 months ago

Technology advances quickly, but the apocalypse narrative is still bullshit. The reality is much closer to what it has always been: technological advances are a way to enhance what humans can do, not replace them. Being adaptable and adopting a spirit of learning and growth is (as it always has been) a key factor in a successful career trajectory.

Through a sufficiently narrow lens, any technological advancement can be perceived as a threat. If your job was to perform calculations for your company using a microscope and calculator (computer, the job title) then the invention of the computer (the machine) was absolutely a threat to your job security. That's not to say that there aren't challenges to adapting or considerations for how to do it well, but it has always been the case that the old way is a casualty of the new way.

I am neither anti-AI nor an AI evangelist but I think a more productive viewpoint is to think about how these advancements could open the door to new opportunity. For example, democratization of learning. It has never been easier for anyone in the world with an Internet connection and a computing device to have access to a personal math tutor or nutrition coach.

rspoerri4• 4 months ago

Why is it an apocalypse if people don't have jobs anymore? Why is it an apocalypse if the most intelligent being in the world isn't a human anymore.

It will be a major change, but only to people that see it as a thread to their existence - to not work anymore - are in real danger. There are tons of people in our society that are fine without working. We could tend to our children, we could tend to our elders. We could do arts and improve our world instead of competing and being better then others.

ctoth2• 4 months ago

Okay. So you talk to your personal math tutor and you learn math. That the AI knows. Are you gonna get paid to use that? I don't understand "there is a machine which will teach you everything, so you'll be fine" when "there is a machine that will teach you everything and will work cheaper than you" is also true. Please explain?

danaris• 4 months ago

But we also hit serious diminishing returns effects—in the last decade for hardware, in the last 2-3 years for LLMs.

Just because things have advanced in leaps and bounds for X amount of time does not mean they will continue to do so at the same (or increasing) rates indefinitely.

The problem is that just what will end up being the thing that advances dramatically in the next few years is often very unpredictable, especially if one is looking at surface-level trends over the last few years.

Given what we, who have a better understanding of them than "wow, look how far they've come since 2018", can see, LLMs seem unlikely to advance by another 100x over the next several years. Frankly, another 100% seems unlikely. (Though of course, quantifying LLM performance is a tricky proposition to begin with...it is, to a large extent, a qualitative endeavor.)

mmiliauskas4• 4 months ago

No technological improvement will make the halting problem decidable.

keiferski• 4 months ago

Bifurcation is the right model and it’s already happening:

For things where the end customer doesn’t care if they’re interacting with an AI, reading content by an AI, etc. – or if the company doesn’t care what the customer thinks (see: automated phone customer support lines for the last twenty years) – the work will be replaced by AI work. Examples are any kind of rote documentation, generic digital asset creation like blog images, low level customer support, and most things where the company doesn’t really care about the customer, because the company is getting paid regardless.

If it does matter what the end customer thinks, the role will become increasingly humanistic in nature. Examples are high-end enterprise sales, personality and expertise-driven media and content, and anything where being “revealed” as an AI is perceived negatively.

lelanthran6• 4 months ago

To be perfectly honest, the majority of work is going to see a restructure soon anyway.

"Triaging by LLM before sending task to any human" can work for almost anything, not just support calls. On another story I saw someone mention that they'd like something like an ad-blocker, but for content - a "content-blocker". Not too hard running even a local model that, via a browser extension, scnas the current page and places it into one of several bins: Read verbatim, summarise with ChatAI, Ignore completely, Read and mark for re-reading.

Software dev? Bin a ticket into "complex", "simple", "talk to lead dev".

Software proposal? Bin the proposal into "CotS available", "FOSS available", "Quick dev", "Too costly to proceed".

Bookkeeping? Accounting? They all have tasks that can be binned.

What does this all mean, I hear you ask? Well, you no longer need as many employees if some of the bins are "ChatAI and/or agent can complete this" with human review.

So, yeah, a lot of people are going to be out of work if this works like they say it does.

mjd3• 4 months ago

Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it.

If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable. Why would tbe company get rid of them just at that moment?

Well, some will, because some companies are badly-run. Others will take advantage of the opportunity.

lelanthran6• 4 months ago

Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it.

You're assuming unbounded demand for whatever product the company is producing. If demand for their product is bounded, having 1 dev produce the output of 5 devs means that the company is going to have devs simply sitting around doing nothing for most of the day.

If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable.

I don't follow this argument - there is a practical limit to how much development a company requires. In the past they may have had a team of 10 to satisfy that limit. If the limit is satisfied by a team of 2 the company... does what exactly?

After all, a limit is a limit.

mikkupikku5• 4 months ago

I implemented HN article triage years ago using nothing more than naive Bayesian classification on the text of the headlines. Worked surprisingly well, you might try that.

flanked-evergl• 4 months ago

Managed decline policies of western governments are much more threatening to white-collar workers and everyone else than AI will ever be.

AI will enable significantly faster economic growth, which is something the EU has been making impossible with legislation designed to destroy Europe's economic advantage.

rob743• 4 months ago

Right, so it's time to dismantle environment/climate protection, worker safety/rights, employee protections etc. etc. like the Trump administration is currently doing over in the US, and make Europe great again?!

(actually, MEGA would be a great acronym, but Trump's friends in the EU are more focused on dismantling it rather than making it great)

tamimio• 4 months ago

Of course it is, it’s just a scapegoat to lower the wages, another power dynamic trick pulled on employees. I have noticed a lot of managers going with coop+AI combo or outsourcing+AI, thinking it’s the ultimate goldmine to minimize expenses and maximize profits, and they soon hit a reality check. And when they do, unfortunately, instead of resolving the root cause issue, they go and hire only one senior in the team and overload and overwork him, while praising the AI how it increased the productivity and all.

badgersnake4• 4 months ago

AI bros flagged it to death

badgersnake4• 4 months ago

TBF it could be the word ‘bullshit’. Some people on here will flag anything a bit sweary.

odyssey73• 4 months ago

The fact that a work of satire that stimulated interesting discussion has been flagged is telling.

badgersnake4• 4 months ago

We can’t have dissent around here.

White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

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