US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-15/us-is-starting-to-see-heavy-job-losses-in-roles-exposed-to-ai

by elsewhen • 2 months ago

164 278 2 months ago

shevy-java• 2 months ago

Will the people wake up?

We need a modern take of the movie "They Live". Granted, any copy would not be anywhere near as good as the original, even for a B movie, but AI is really turning into skynet (but it sucks).

eli_gottlieb2• 2 months ago

They Live was a product of its time. We live in our time, so instead we've got Sorry to Bother You.

s_dev• 2 months ago

I'm not sure what 'film' America is trying to be but I've seen plenty of real life references that could have come straight from either the Handmaids Tale, Idiocracy, The Dead Zone or Civil War the past few years. Life does seem to imitate art sometimes.

new_account_1006• 2 months ago

If you're checking on open-registration internet forums (HackerNews in particular), you will never see "the people" wake up.

If you're arguing against "AI" on HackerNews, you might as well join the Washington Generals. You and your opinion are tolerated only as long as there is a more popular pro-AI opinion in the replies to your comment.

senordevnyc2• 2 months ago

In my observation, HN is rapidly turning into an extremely bitter and cynical anti-AI echo chamber.

daedrdev• 2 months ago

I think people are blaming AI for a recession caused by trump’s tarrifs and the oil crisis. Businesses fear that oil prices may explode until enough of the economy enters a recession that oil demand decreases, and are already feeling the supply crunch

agentifysh• 2 months ago

Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word. I also think the fixation on Trump is misleading and takes away from the actual structural side effects of dollar issuance via unbacked fiat. It's convenient scapegoating to take your attention away from the long lingering issue of US dollar dominance and debt that is now causing large social divide and standard of living.

The physics of a reserve currency is that it reverts to zero through endless supply to fuel the engine to accelerate inequality at home and abroad. You see that an increasingly smaller club of people are politically opposed yet benefit by creating a narrative that takes your attention away from it.

This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.

toomanyrichies• 2 months ago

Note for others - "ATH" => "All-Time High"

Forgeties793• 2 months ago

Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word.

It did under Biden as well yet nobody had any issues claiming the economy was in terrible shape and that we were entering a potential recession. Which frankly I agreed with! The stock market tells a fraction of the story. Especially because institutional investors now dominate investment in a way they didn’t only a few decades ago. A booming stock market does not benefit “the common man” like it once did unless one believes in trickle down economics or something. Employee pensions have become rare in the private sector, matched 401(k)s used for investment are also becoming more scarce. The stock market just isn’t tied to “the average person” like it once was, relatively speaking.

I do think Biden deserves immense blame for inflation getting out of control, but I also think as usual people overlooked what the Democrat president was handed, which was a Covid economy in this case. There was going to be fallout from that for years no matter what he did. No one blames Trump for the economy he handed off either.

marcosdumay3• 2 months ago

It shouldn't require pointing out, but asset prices are not a measure of economic activity. Rain amount and air temperature aren't either, if somehow somebody needs that pointed too. Those are independent things.

You are describing stagflation, that is a kind of recession. Despite all the fundamentals pointing towards it for a while, the US hasn't seen a lot of inflation (at least yet), so that's not what is happening.

b112• 2 months ago

This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.

Hardly. Those 'invented things' are invented for one purpose, to make the inventor money. That's how capitalism works.

Fun fact, let's say that tomorrow, all new credit was outlawed. And by law, all existing credit would require payments that took 3 years to pay off. In this fantasy world where we ignore mortgages, my point is that salaries would diminish.

Right now, the cost of everything a person buys is factored into salary costs. Take away interest, and all those 30% interest credit card debts would eventually no longer be part of your salary. This process takes years of course, but no one would issue credit cards, if every person defaulted on them, yet if you look at where salaries really go? With a lot of people, 30%+ goes to just holding debt.

rvz2• 2 months ago

Well said.

Although the stock market isn't a reflection of the economy, the most relevant concern is the staggering 40TN+ of debt that can't ever go down as long as the dollar is the reserve currency and have no choice but to endlessly supply more dollars.

The issue with oil rising will make it completely impossible for the Federal Reserve to cut any rates and instead will either hold or raise them.

Then the stock market will have a problem; and those that have properties tied to their RSUs will start panicking.

jjk1663• 2 months ago

The stock market isn't the economy. Note that stock prices are denominated in dollars. If the dollar price of a stock doubles, but in the same time period the value of the dollar halves, then the stock's value hasn't gone up at all. Compare the price of the Dow Jones to to gold and its value peaked in 1999, and has been nosediving for the past 18 months[0]. The ratio right now is the same as it was in late 2008. Obviously gold isn't a perfect standard candle, but given that inflation has obviously been rampant in recent years, we should obviously treat any economic metric that does not control for inflation with healthy skepticism.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-...

Amfy• 2 months ago

^ this! And higher interest rates than before Over hiring from Covid is still an overhang

bobthepanda• 2 months ago

At this point, the interest rates have been around for quite a while and the ultralow rates after the GFC should not be treated as any kind of norm.

onlyrealcuzzo• 2 months ago

In economies that revolve around credit/debt (the US), once credit stops EXPANDING, that's a huge force pushing the economy down.

If everyone's already taken on as much debt as they can, and interest rates aren't consistently marching lower for ~25 straight years, it's going to be a little harder to grow.

Doesn't make it impossible, just harder.

We're paying for growth we got 25 years ago now.

Wish we invested that money better. You can't change the past. But you can change the future.

philipov• 2 months ago

The future will certainly change things, but who can change the direction of a tidal wave? It will go where it wants, not where we want. The best a single individual can do is flee to higher ground.

Unless you happen to have a media empire at your disposal. Maybe then you can change the future. The problem is that those people are changing things for the worse.

e402• 2 months ago

This is precisely why DJT wants to control the Fed and lower interest rates. It would be a short-term win for him and the economy.

paulddraper4• 2 months ago

GDP is not suffering — quite the opposite, 2% real annual growth in Q1 — so recession is definitionally inaccurate.

bombcar3• 2 months ago

We’ll need new terms if Musk and Altman make infinity GDP and everyone else is unemployable.

TurdF3rguson4• 2 months ago

2% is not the opposite of suffering. It's suffering-adjacent. It loses ground to China.

SilverElfin2• 2 months ago

GDP can be misleading. Lots of things are double counted.

hn_throwaway_993• 2 months ago

This comment is completely divorced from the facts given in the article.

The main point is that certain types of jobs like customer service reps, secretaries and sales people are being disproportionately affected. If it was just general fears about the economy overall one would expect a more broad-based impact.

smt88• 2 months ago

Those are the same roles that get axed first in any recession. Anything under “SG&A” is overhead that can be reduced.

themafia4• 2 months ago

If you replace customer service with LLMs I will look for a way to stop doing business with you.

jjk1663• 2 months ago

Are the jobs going away because of AI being applied or is AI being applied because those jobs are going away? You see lots of life jackets being worn as a ship is sinking; doesn't mean people putting on the life jackets made the ship sink.

notahacker• 2 months ago

Salespeople feels more like a leading indicator of concerns about a recession than AI getting good. They're a profit centre, not a cost centre and AI automating prospecting some aspects of leadgen and the necessary but low value add stuff like meeting notes and formatting proposals should make them more productive not redundant, if anyone's buying. And AI is somewhere between very bad and completely incapable of most other aspects of their job (product demos, networking, in-person meetings, negotiating)

Especially when it's actually "services sales jobs a little up, manufacturing a little down"...

thayne2• 2 months ago

I think it's more likely an interaction of both. Tariffs and recession lead to companies looking for ways to save money, and AI is both a convenient excuse for reducing headcount, and at least in some cases may actually reducing headcount without hurting productivity too much.

AnimalMuppet• 2 months ago

Wait, secretaries still exist? I would have figured in the era of word processors that such jobs would be few to nonexistent.

gdulli• 2 months ago

We have an invention that aims to replace labor and employers want nothing more than to replace labor. It's silly to pretend that AI isn't responsible. But you're right that an incompetent administration is piling on with additional factors.

LogicFailsMe6• 2 months ago

AI isn't ready to replace us but employers are more than ready to use it as cover for laying off all the dingdongs they hired during the pandemic. I give up. I'm rich and out of f***s and the hilarity of VC approaching me to invest in their idiocy will never be lost on me given they wouldn't spare a dime when I was a disruptive young turk.

nradov10• 2 months ago

The overall US economy is less impacted by higher oil prices than ever before. As a net oil exporter now in a way it's actually a positive, although the effects vary by sector.

fn-mote• 2 months ago

The fact that the US is a net exporter is irrelevant to the impact of much higher oil and gas prices across the economy.

Also, supply chain shortages will continue to impact us - they are not even beginning to reach our shores.

jesse_dot_id• 2 months ago

It is quite clear that AI is only as useful as the person piloting it and therefore, if the job losses are due to AI, they are temporary. The C Suite folks spreading the batshit idea that AI can replace humans on LinkedIn will eventually lemming their way back to the correct side of reality.

I personally think that AI is being used as a convenient blanket to hide the plumes of smoke emanating from an economy engulfed in flames.

macintux• 2 months ago

The problem is that the C Suite folks can hang onto their delusions longer than most people can get by without gainful employment.

rvz2• 2 months ago

This is "AGI".

jvanderbot• 2 months ago

A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025, according to annual data published Friday. That compared with an increase in overall employment of 0.8% over the same period.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm

The article that flags AI risk still projects that the top 15 growth employment through 2033 contains software related jobs like Computer / Information Research Scientists, Data Scientists, Operations Research analysts.

nradov10• 2 months ago

Have past BLS predictions proved accurate?

mechagodzilla• 2 months ago

Relatively accurate (I think they're pretty close like 70%+ of the time). Significantly better than just projecting that the next five years will be like the last 5 years.

blakesterz• 2 months ago

Planet Money just did an episode on this. The answer is, at least according to this, yes, pretty accurate. At least in the past https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5815308

ls612• 2 months ago

Yes in the long term. Sometimes they will get surprised by unexpected events (Covid) but you can’t blame them when their tourism and hospitality numbers are wildly wrong when that happens.

spwa4• 2 months ago

What everyone probably wants to know:

Affected occupations: procurement clerks, credit authorizers, checkers, and clerks, customer service representatives, nonmedical secretaries and administrative assistants, sales engineers, insurance sales agents, other types of sales representatives, paralegals and legal assistants, translators and interpreters, graphic designers, models, technical writers, broadcast announcers and radio DJs.

Benefitting occupations: computer and information research scientists, data scientists, and software developers. It also says AI/cloud/data growth supports demand for data-related work such as operations research analysts and actuaries.

nurettin• 2 months ago

The demand for cushy white collar desk jobs (which weren't around 30 years ago) is crashing. Rest of the world, not so much.

elromulous• 2 months ago

Cushy white collar desk jobs were not around in the mid 90s?

new_account_1006• 2 months ago

Nope, Most American workers were just auto plant workers and soybean farmers until the internet was invented in 1991.

ralph84• 2 months ago

30 years ago was the middle of the .com boom and white collar jobs had been around for a century already. White collar employment started with the industrial revolution and really took off during the post-WWII boom.

dyauspitr• 2 months ago

Figure has been doing a 75 hour live stream of it actually replacing a real job and it has that AI magic where it has gestures and movements that seem emergent. They’re coming for anything manual in less than 2 years.

artninja1988• 2 months ago

Has anyone done the math on how many jobs AI has to replace in order to justify current valuations? Would be interesting to see imo

lispisok• 2 months ago

I think the goal is to replace workers who cost $10,000/mo with an AI agent that costs $8,000/mo

new_account_1006• 2 months ago

$8000/month is way too low. If you're only spending $8000/month on AI you're in drastic danger of being replaced by a more efficient AI firm.

marcosdumay3• 2 months ago

There's no public valuation of any AI company.

But by the investment contracts OpenAI announced, if they replaced every white collar job in the world and captured all of their salary, they would have a P/E of ~1/70. (Assuming no costs at all.)

You decide what return horizon you are comfortable with and solve the linear equation for it. (But my numbers are from the end of last year, I haven't seen any more recent compilation of their contracts.)

KoolKat233• 2 months ago

Could I please ask what stats you used? Intuition says the valuation is too large and implies replacement, would be interesting to see something backing it up.

jollyllama3• 2 months ago

My back of the napkin was a floor of five to ten percent just to break even with the physical buildout + a couple of years of energy bills.

awfulneutral• 2 months ago

That thing that reassures me is that I kind of think most people in software aren't doing much useful work anyway, so if the whole thing was really driven by hiring the fewest humans possible to get the work done, companies probably could have fired half of us even without AI.

AbbeFaria2• 2 months ago

This matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.

treis2• 2 months ago

Think this is the FAANGs entering their stodgy middle life phase like Oracle et al did decades ago. Except for Google they haven't done anything innovative in like a decade. It's time to wring money out of the monopoly and buy companies to add to that.

new_account_1006• 2 months ago

This is a conspiracy theory, but I suspect that VC-backed tech industry overhiring circa 2020/2021 was partially done to give this impression.

electrondood• 2 months ago

I don't think so. During that time the potential of LLMs to eliminate work wasn't obvious. That was pre-hype explosion.

vineyardmike• 2 months ago

I agree that a lot of people aren’t working at 100% and a lot of the work was probably needless busywork.

I don’t think it’s reassuring the way this goes away from AI layoffs. Just like in life, you need downtime and boredom. This is when you learn and reflect and develop taste, this is where your team steals time when an “emergency” breaks out and someone gets paged over an outage. This is where you take time to mentor the younger employees.

Relatedly, it seems that AI is entrenching cumbersome processes because it’s easy to write that extra doc, compile those notes, etc. When you make a team more lean, you’re supposed to cut out the extra process and let people work in a high-trust environment. That’s why startups are fast - everything is low process and the business has to trust employees. As companies grow, they develop all sorts of bureaucracy as scar tissue. But layoffs and cuts fail if you keep that stuff along the way.

skippyboxedhero• 2 months ago

I think the bigger issue is that management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working. Output could be higher with less people but the situation that managers have crafted is the maximum number of people with minimum level of output. Not good.

The answer to every problem at my place is: more headcount, productivity drops further and further, more headcount, more headcount.

nostrademons• 2 months ago

Because that's the incentive that management faces. Their promotion is dependent upon having more headcount under them. The key metric in their resume that determines which jobs they are qualified for is how many people did they manage. They don't personally pay for that headcount. If they meet some baseline of output people don't really ask questions (or are able to judge) whether that headcount was necessary. So of course they seek more headcount.

I suspect the economy would look very different if total headcount in a manager's org was the denominator in a manager's performance review, such that if you employ 10x as many people, you better have generated 10x as much profit. But this would also have lots of unintended consequences: management would be incentivized to employ as few people as possible, which means lots of people would be out of work and would be competing with your firm.

matrix873• 2 months ago

management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working

they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest

izacus2• 2 months ago

That sounds like a statement from a pig that hopes they've been nice and useful enough to their farmer to avoid being tasty bacon.

insane_dreamer4• 2 months ago

The article isn't about people in software.

It's about professions like paralegals, translators, office type jobs.

And no, those people can't just be fired without some replacement -- they do actual work that is necessary for these companies to function.

But now they are being replaced, and it's not like they'll find some other job because the "other jobs" are also threatened by AI.

Not a good outcome.

djoldman• 2 months ago

Non-paywall:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/us-is-starting-to-see-...

eli_gottlieb2• 2 months ago

This is going to be horribly embarrassing when it turns out that AI can only outcompete human labor in some roles. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers

sakopov• 2 months ago

Most of the job losses are in tech and it all started back in late 2022 and early 2023 arguably before AI was perceived as a real threat. I think after 3 years of tech hiring melting because of all the economic uncertainty people can't see the forest for the trees anymore. Justy $0.02

achierius• 2 months ago

Is that the case? The article says that the losses were

led by customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople.

matltc• 2 months ago

Would like to see the numbers if we exclude healthcare jobs. I think job growth has been net-negative across the board when healthcare is excluded.

0xbadcafebee• 2 months ago

saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025

So, the "AI job losses" just happen to be before AI started to boom, during the kickoff of largest trade war in 100 years?

They don't mention the trade war at all in the piece? And no analysis whatsoever of what other factors could have resulted in "customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople" being let go. Who the hell writes this crap? What was the point?

amazingamazing3• 2 months ago

The reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.

hnav2• 2 months ago

Almost like the whole “learn how to code” thing was a play. Commoditize your complement and all.

lbrito2• 2 months ago

This has been true for many years though

iejwjw4• 2 months ago

It’s been true since pre llm’s.

In retrospect look at the graveyard filled with projects - this is a reflection of over hiring and poor project selection.

cmiles84• 2 months ago

This is very true and has been for a while. AI is just giving CEOs an excuse to just trim that fat.

Even after layoffs most of big tech could cut 50% of its workforce tomorrow and see minimal impact long term. Thats driving a lot of the present layoffs as CEOs go “oh crap we gotta look like we’re with the cool kids on this AI stuff”… and then just do a big cut and cite AI. Truth is they could have cut years ago but had no social pressure to do so.

torben-friis2• 2 months ago

Have you read the article? This is about professions like paralegals or translators, not engineers.

hn_throwaway_993• 2 months ago

Whenever articles like this come out, tons of the comments are just general zeitgeist responses about "corporate layoffs that blame AI". Which I think is a particular shame in this instance because I think the article narrows in with some actual good evidence that yes, there are vulnerable roles that AI is wholesale replacing and not leading to a "employees will just do more as they become more productive with AI" outcome.

Looking through the list of those professions, I would bet that nearly half of them won't even exist anymore except for some extremely niche cases. Paralegals, translators, credit authorizers, many types of secretaries - AI can basically do nearly all the work for many of these occupations.

amazingamazing3• 2 months ago

I didn't say anything about engineers. Big tech over employs across all professions.

But in any case the primary source mentions tech: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...

frm88• 2 months ago

Broadcast announcers and radio discjockeys -20.8 - this doesn't sound like AI related, more like a social/political phenomenon. Same with sales engineers.

interstice• 2 months ago

Okay but - if an industry can afford more employees than it has is there a real reason not to have them? Aside from shareholder greed etc.

winrid6• 2 months ago

Yes because the most optimized company builds the most wealth and power and puts you out of business or destroys you.

buu700• 2 months ago

Not an unreasonable question in isolation, but "greed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People's retirement accounts include shares in businesses because they expect those businesses to pursue profit and act in their interests as shareholders. If they didn't, people would rightfully pull their money and put it into more responsible businesses (or savings accounts, etc.). Charities and publicly funded social programs exist too, but those are different things.

engineer_22• 2 months ago

One reason would be that if they can create more value in another industry

bee_rider• 2 months ago

Adds more coordination…

IMO, rather than hiring more people than necessary, we should have a safety-net so that our society isn’t structured around “work or die.” I bet we’d see much lower admin costs at that point, as people aren’t incentivized to find less-essential tasks.

robhlt• 2 months ago

Tech as a whole may not have too many employees, it's just Big Tech that has too many. If those employees were distributed among many more smaller companies the tech market as a whole would be much more competitive.

nradov10• 2 months ago

What is "shareholder greed"? They're not running a charity.

nz2• 2 months ago

Each of those employees is a liability, for various reasons, not just financial. Even if their salaries were completely subsidized by the state, there are many problems that come from having a very large number of employees. Firstly, there is more coordination overhead, and that is not great. Secondly, people are very political and very envious, and that has a corrosive effect on, well everything. Thirdly, people are (justifiably) afraid of getting laid off, which results in decisions that are sub-optimal or even illogical. Fourthly, people tend to only spend a few years at companies before moving on (for a pay-increase), which disincentivizes companies to hire more, and it incentivizes companies/management (and even employees) to engage in a kind of performative conformity designed to signal replace-ability (this effectively means that many companies are going to choose to do whatever everyone else is doing, instead of the unusual thing that will likely work better -- think of it as cargo-cult entrepreneurship/management/engineering). Fifthly, those engineers that leave take with them the knowledge and technology that they built up at a different employer and launder[1] it to their next employer. Sixthly, larger teams tend to produce more code per feature, and tend not to abstract/compress aggressively (which requires actually having a holistic understanding of the product), which means that team-sizes are likely to keep growing until the company's revenues stop growing. Put differently, enshittification and sloppification naturally emerge from the dynamics of how the majority of the industry works, and LLMs have simply automated it[2].

The solution may be to modify the incentives. Maybe federally cap all salaries to 90k or so, to filter out the serial job-hoppers and con-artists, and to also prevent poaching and "nerd-hoarding"[3]. Has the additional benefit of forcing rents and property prices to go down, and stops gentrification in its tracks (I mean I would expect this to be partially true, though it might force people to instead seek massive loans to compensate -- which should also be capped by salary to prevent it). And since we are already talking about federal limits, maybe a federal guarantee that covers healthcare and housing would further improve things.

[1]: This depends on context. If the IP is already open source, then there is no laundering. But I know people who have been building the same software system for the last 3 employers, and they do it (ostensibly) from scratch each time (but in fact they are permuting/improving the old version -- which does not actually belong to them -- and are over-reporting how much time they spent working on it). My point here is not that employees are ruthless rogues, but rather that the incentives are set up in a way that encourages the rapid dilution of the value of IP (it is effectively non-exclusive, which makes industrial espionage _unnecessary_), and discourages any kind of mutual responsibility between employer and employee (in a different knowledge-work field, I hear from a friend, seniors give juniors only minimal training because they do not expect to have to deal with them in two years -- and this was true since at least 2017, and has only gotten more true since 2020).

[2]: With or without LLMs, the biggest winners of this dynamic are the quasi-monopolies (or, more precisely oligopolies and duopolies), like MSFT, GOOG, META, etc. Everyone else will lose, and if they happen to win, they will get acquired (not for the tech, which is probably slop anyway and cannot run at hyperscales, but for the clients/customers/users -- why else would MSFT buy LinkedIn and GitHub, why else would startup incubators like YC be such a huge success (I doubt YC would have been possible in the 70s or 80s)). Software is awesome, and I love it, but the software _industry_ has always been an operation designed to extract money and data from the populace, using deceptive and predatory practices (see: Uber, Theranos, Celsius, Alameda for outright fraud, and Oracle for mere deception and plunder).

[3]: Sorry, could not think of a better term. The idea is basically the corporate equivalent of nerd-sniping, but instead of sniping by offering interesting problems/puzzles, you snipe by offering large paychecks and golden handcuffs.

synergy20• 2 months ago

h1b and outsourcing will also go down on the tech side.

the group got hit the hardest is gen-z tech graduates, no fixes ahead for them,sigh

bobmarleybiceps2• 2 months ago

I think Jensen Huang said this recently, and I've had a similar opinion for a while, but a lot of companies seem uncreative with how they use their employees. like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects :shrug:

overfeed• 2 months ago

I bet Jensens thinks everyone working at Nvidia is crucial, and his reports hit the perfect balance of efficiency, continuity and growth. Classic Fundamental attribution error.

hn_throwaway_993• 2 months ago

like google probably has >10k people working on stuff like "ensure gmail refresh button is the correct size", but why not fund teams to take on new and more risky projects... maybe part of it is that the type of people who work at big tech companies are not interested in risky projects

Wow, I really hope that you're just too young to remember when Google famously invested in tons of "let's see what happens" projects. Google X projects is still a thing: https://x.company/projects/. And important things like Waymo came out of these Google moonshot projects.

Still, I think your comment also just shows how much Google has changed in the past 15 years. A lot of those projects on that x.company website are dead, and of course Google is also famous for killing projects that don't become huge, even if they're useful to lots of people.

fidotron2• 2 months ago

For a long time this was compounded by a "better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in" strategy, where you hired people to deny them to your competition and then invented things for them to do. If it turns out whole segments are in fact pointless then the endgame could be truly nuts.

nradov10• 2 months ago

That was never a major factor in employment statistics. Only a handful of the most profitable tech companies ever had the financial resources to even attempt that strategy, and only for a small fraction of their employees.

hysan• 2 months ago

I’ve had a longstanding belief that big tech purposely over-employed because it denied resources to competitors. This gave them a velocity edge despite being big and bureaucratic. In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.

machinekob• 2 months ago

Dose AI really raise productivity floor that much? Do we have some good example of that?

bentt• 2 months ago

Yes, they played a zero sum growth game and seeked acquisition and stock price increase. That ended. That explains most tech layoffs in the past few years.

matrix873• 2 months ago

I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.

Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.

This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable

Timon32• 2 months ago

I've been reading this same comment non-stop for the last five years.

amazingamazing3• 2 months ago

No surprise, it has been true for a while.

insane_dreamer4• 2 months ago

And yet up until a few years ago there were all these forecasts about how we would be short xxxx SWEs

sys_64738• 2 months ago

I'm at that point in my working life that I don't care about AI but I'd hate to be starting out or mid-career where I need to pay attention. I sometimes wonder if the glory years of tech are drawing to a close and it's time to draw a line under it before it changes too much. AI has tentacles into everything but the reason I do this career is that certain areas of work provide enjoyment. If AI takes that away then I would care less to do the job and be less invested to go the extra yard. I feel there's goodwill in employees that will get sucked out the more AI intrudes into our daily lives.

matrix873• 2 months ago

I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.

I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda

robberat7• 2 months ago

This is intentional. Companies are actively trying to develop capabilities to replace humans. I am surprised there are not enough protests against this.

hammock• 2 months ago

Instead of protesting they are all getting together on Monday mornings in sf and hiking

kingbiz• 2 months ago

Ha I've been following that group for a while now and it gets bigger every week!

raincom• 2 months ago

I am happy to see them replace humans with AI machines. However, housing, healthcare, and other insurances have become super expensive. Who is going to buy all the stuff these companies produce? Maybe, it will become a two tier economy: wealthy selling stuff to fellow wealthy people; under ground economy with bartering their trades for food, building shacks for living, flea market dentists, old Wild West style flea market medical doctors selling potions, elixirs, dry lizard oil, etc.

hnav2• 2 months ago

Exactly, the “economy” only matters because the ruling classes need the labor. If you could accomplish everything using machines you could have all the resources, beautiful vistas and global warming runway to yourself. Maybe some classical occupations exist like teachers, artisans, actors, sex workers so that the ruling class can still flex on each other.

rsoto23• 2 months ago

i tried to protest forced-ai use at my company on the basis of it being a workplace hazard and was promptly emailed by their lawyers

deepserket• 2 months ago

why should I protest not needing to work for money? Isn't post scarcity a great goal to have?

cdrnsf4• 2 months ago

These companies are going to destroy jobs and do nothing to help the people displaced by said destruction.

sdaHwtr• 2 months ago

It does not matter at this stage is an excuse for layoffs or not. The entire world should impose sanctions on the US for the largest IP theft in history until the laundering companies are illegal (and the waterways closed due to US wars are open).

If this administration works against its people and the whole world, maybe there should be a regime change. Peaceful version of Jan 6th. All the unemployed have little to lose.

drstewart4• 2 months ago

Let the entire world impose sanctions on China first if they care about intellectual theft

visarga• 2 months ago

Why just US and not China, France and UK? They all trained on internet text.

nenadg• 2 months ago

because it's bs sensationalism

drstewart4• 2 months ago

because it's a green account probably from China or Russia

martin-t• 2 months ago

Discussions about this topic need to separate "AI" and aAI.

- "AI" is a tool which workers use - usually to produce outputs of the same or lower quality faster. It needs a human to be constantly monitoring, steering and verifying it.

- aAI is actual AI - what sci-fi authors imagined and what ML companies promise. You ask aAI a question and it either gives you a complete, unbiased and correct answer or says why it cannot do that (insufficient information, not enough computing power, etc.). It doesn't ignore instructions or get stuck in a loop. It doesn't delete your database or exfiltrate secrets.

Obviously, this is a spectrum, not a hard division.

Crucially, "AI" is a tool for workers. aAI is a tool for owners - it replaces workers. Owners give aAI control over a company or some other form of capital and it monitors, steers and verifies humans, who will still be economically valuable for manual work, at least until robots catch up.

---

All the people hyping AI either still see it as a tool ("AI", not aAI), not believing it will mature into aAI and replace them; or they are the owner class who will benefit from not having to pay wages while maintaining their passive income.

If most of your income comes from work (as opposed to passive income from ownership), you have 0 reason to be excited by AI. Your life will not be better if you lose your economic value.

---

EDIT: If you disagree, you should be able to express why and we can have a rational discussion about it.

If you cannot express why, consider not participating in the discussion at all, not even by reducing the visibility of my opinion by downvoting it.

Devasta• 2 months ago

Am I meant to pretend that companies weren't for years beforehand using RTO to drive layoffs? They are always doing it, AI is just the cover.

rundef• 2 months ago

Whatever happened to the "AI won't replace you; someone who uses AI will" narrative?

TurdF3rguson4• 2 months ago

AI replaced the guy who wrote it.

iejwjw4• 2 months ago

When is that moment gonna come that boosters keep saying - wherein those who get left behind will be chopped at their legs and consequently laid off?

Many ego’s are gonna be battered after all this fizzles out

LogicFailsMe6• 2 months ago

Honey, I overhired during the pandemic and I need a scapegoat for the layoffs!

mapontosevenths5• 2 months ago

Thats been mostly straightened out for years. This is tariffs, oil, and uncertainty more than anything.

When I worked in finance the thing that made the analysts happiest was a split election wherein neither side could accomplish much. We now have the opposite of that, and worse a capricious leader who makes huge changes without much justification or explanation. Pressing "shuffle" on the economic policy doesn't help anyone.

To finance the best government is the least effective government.

winrid6• 2 months ago

Fun fact the US government was designed to be ineffective on purpose. It's not supposed to do much by design

LogicFailsMe6• 2 months ago

you just keep right on believing that but I'm on the front lines and we still have plenty of people that need to be laid off and we need a reason so AI is as good a reason as any other.

t-writescode• 2 months ago

Pandemic was 4-5 years ago. That’s no longer an excuse.

LogicFailsMe6• 2 months ago

according to you.

setsewerd• 2 months ago

Yeah, the more data that comes out on the "AI employment disruption" the more it becomes apparent that AI is just an investor-friendly excuse to do the layoffs they were going to do anyway.

delfinom• 2 months ago

It is an executive friendly excuse.

No executive will ever want to say they made poor decisions that resulted in overhiring.

Instead, someone else's fault.

The same way for awhile the failings of certain businesses "those damn millennials refusing to spend money here" instead of "we priced ourselves out of the market".

Papazsazsa• 2 months ago

"Follow me: a day in the life of a soup line influencer"

cmiles84• 2 months ago

There’s very little evidence of AI replacing jobs en mass.

There a ton of evidence that underperforming companies are trimming fat, with CEOs citing AI impacts rather than their own bad decisions that led to the fat that needed trimming.

khuey• 2 months ago

AI is perfect for this because you get to sweep bad decisions you made under the rug and look like a forward-thinking visionary. Why would any CEO not blame their layoffs on AI, true or not?

cmiles84• 2 months ago

That’s exactly what’s happening.

Problem is though that nobody is really buying that narrative anymore.

plantwallshoe• 2 months ago

Underperforming? Big tech companies are reporting record profits and major layoffs in the same press releases.

cmiles84• 2 months ago

Relative to the number of people they employ, yes they were underperforming. Most did rampant over-hiring during the pandemic and are simply correcting for that now.

mrandish• 2 months ago

Losses in job categories management can claim was related to AI.

Some management may even believe AI can fully replace all work done by those positions. In some of those cases they will learn they were mistaken. The eventual rehiring of some positions will happen unevenly over time, be attributed by management to "ongoing growth" and not be reported by the media.

krapp• 2 months ago

Not to worry. I've been assured many, many times that automation only ever creates more, better and higher paying jobs than it removes, and that no one but talentless bottom-feeding hacks are losing jobs to AI anyway, not the elite crème de la crème of HN. So the good times are on their way gentlemen!

Falimonda• 2 months ago

Here's a real-time layoffs tracker for anyone interested: https://jobs.voxos.ai/us/layoffs

TurdF3rguson4• 2 months ago

not very balanced if it doesn't also track new hires

CamelCaseName• 2 months ago

Looks like this data only goes until May 2025, so it's a year out of date. Also, overall employment is still up 0.8%

sofixa• 2 months ago

Some might be interested in the Iceberg Index: https://iceberg.mit.edu/report.pdf

Basically, AI is replacing tasks of jobs, not jobs per se. There's a study by folks from MIT on what tasks, and which roles are most at risk.

cdrnsf4• 2 months ago

Every interaction I have with AI where I previously would’ve interacted with a person is worse. Whether that’s something mundane like scheduling an appointment, use at a doctor’s office, chat support. I imagine it’s cheaper for the company deploying it, but it’s all bad. It lines up with companies being more concerned with investors than actual users and customers though.

Xeoncross• 2 months ago

Ah, but it's cheaper. Replace "AI" with "auto parts" or "store food" and you see the same thing. Replace "AI" with "police force" or "contractors" and it's the same thing.

Why is everyone and everything getting worse? A sort of "Prisoner's dilemma" I suppose: no one wants to take a stand and lose their business edge just for principles sake.

roxolotl• 2 months ago

This is why a political solution is the only way forward. I’m optimistic that people are finally fed up but who knows.

readthenotes1• 2 months ago

I had a car dealership, used an AI agent to set up an appointment. It was so efficient. It's the only reason I asked if it were a real human. It was not. Far better than the norm

cdrnsf4• 2 months ago

They’re ok at routing you to a human when you pester them repeatedly. My parents are in their 60s and loathe dealing with it.

KoolKat233• 2 months ago

If you're competitors are doing it and your clients keep returning there's no downside.

So long as it achieves something and saves money, great.

I do feel from my own anecdotal experience, they're getting better, it's hit and miss but still some terrible implementations out there.

tstrimple• 2 months ago

Mine hasn't. I've been subjected to the lowest common denominator of employable humanity because of cost savings measures from companies. I'd far rather interact with an "LLM" powered support agent than a human who cannot even comprehend the language and is just following a scripted prompt. The LLM has more agency at this point than the human support personnel.

hodgesrm• 2 months ago

A lot of enshittification is driven by market consolidation. I really don't want my economic interactions to be with massive chains in a race to the bottom. The cure is to enable new competitors to offer alternatives. It starts with anti-trust but also includes reducing regulations and barriers to market entry. And maybe not so many billion-dollar, me-too AI investments and more focus on things like building delivering healthcare cheaply.

8note• 2 months ago

chat support can be great, if the chat is knowledgeable and fast.

not sure if it really needs to have the power to act too, but if it can escalate with a really good description of my problem, and then the human support can take action, thats just fine by me

omgwtfbyobbq• 2 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9_d6-HFpfqE

Epa095• 2 months ago

If its because of AI we should see a similar trend across other developed countries, no? And maybe even a correlation with how much they adopt AI https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ai-adoption-rates-by-countr...

tim333• 2 months ago

A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025

A 0.2% drop seems more like too small to tell from statistical noise more that heavy.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 months ago

Text-only,^1 no Javascript, HTTPS optional:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23iPFc

1. For example,

   links https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23iPFc

US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

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