The Coming Layoffs and the Revenge of the Measurers

trollbridge

I’d be more impressed if this article weren’t obviously written by AI. Regarding the idea of a rise of “trillionaires”, gobal wealth is about $470T. Unless there is a gigantic expansion of the middle class from formerly poor people, it is impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires. The idea of a 1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable. Any business doing that much turnover is going to be hiring lots of vendors and contractors. I guess they could decide to outsource nearly all operations to keep headcount low, but the idea of one singular person generating a billion dollars of value from labour alone with no assistance from capital of an employer is likewise laughable.

ChrisMarshallNY

> Due process for account suspensions. Too late, for that. From what I hear, account suspensions with Google are basically the "love scene" from Deliverance .

Insanity

Reads like more AI fearmongering because it fits a convenient narrative.

hazard

> Some engineers, given a fixed token budget, generate exponentially more (and better) output. Other engineers waste their tokens. The variance is enormous, and unlike most performance variance, it is now directly measurable. HR has never had a clearer signal of leverage. This doesn't make sense to me. "A clearer signal of leverage" implies an objective way to measure software engineering output, which has been the white whale of engineering management for the last 50 years.

and_ls

That is just the latest adaptation of AI boosting. List the downsides, be empathetic but close with the real strategy: "To get AI, we need the people, which includes the measurers, on board. To get the people on board, we need to give them something: money, security, dignity, a credible story about where they fit. We do not have to figure out the long-run answer to what humans are for. We just have to manage the next five years." The blogger otherwise experiments with gastown-like setups and is maybe afraid that his toy will disappear: https://www.hackyexperiments.com/experiments/agent-order

coffeebeqn

This is so hyperbolic I don’t even know what to say. A 1000x Engineer? Have you actually used these tools?

bilater

Author here. Seeing comments that this is a doomer article for some reason. I'm an AI optimist. It's humans that scare me. The article is about managing the transition to Valhalla. My toy projects and my job can disappear and I'm fine with it. I talk more about the gran future here https://www.hackyexperiments.com/blog/machines-of-loving-emb...

js8

Most of finance and IT runs on arbitraging complexity. If humans were a rational species, we would have no soldiers and wars. Will AI change it, and reduce the complexity? It could, but I doubt it. The future is bleak for many, but jobs lost is the least of our problems.

putzdown

You know, anyone can say things. Rants are cheap. What we need, though, is critical thinking. Not just, “Look, three stars are in alignment; it’s the constellation Triangulum.” This article expresses many opinions. It draws lines between stars. But many other lines could be drawn. Maybe we should believe this analysis because it sounds passionate? “He uses cuss words! He must be invested! He talks about CEOs! He must be an insider!” No. Anyone can point out obvious, insignificant data and rant about it. We need facts and logical arguments, not rants. Less of this.

ofjcihen

I’ve been saying the next step for companies is to try to cut token cost while maintaining output. That makes sense. The rest of this article doesn’t. HR is going to measure what? No they aren’t. A 1000x engineer? Really?

d4t4

I wish there were more creativity in AI “thought leadership” than “replace all white collar workers.”

lenerdenator

> Founders have the board's trust to make decisions that look brutal in the short term. Hired CEOs do not. A hired CEO cutting 20% of headcount in a single round risks getting fired by a board nervous about optics. A founder cutting 20% writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and gets called brave. So much of what's currently wrong with our society can be narrowed down to two things: risks and incentives. We have incentivized mass layoffs with the erasure of any and all duties a company might have outside of those to shareholders. Fewer people working, lower costs in the next ninety days. Long-term costs remain to be seen, but that's not what finance bros care about. They want to know the quarterly outlook. Second, we've eliminated all risk once you get past a certain level of wealth and success. There's nothing "brave" about firing hundreds or thousands of people if you're in the c-suite, at least not in the United States. Like I said before, the shareholders are happy, and you'll be rewarded for meeting the target that the board (which was elected by the shareholders) met for profit. You may very well be given a multiple of the average American's lifetime earnings in a single year for your performance. The people who got laid off - assuming that it doesn't destroy their mental health to the point where they attempt/succeed with self-harm - will bury yet another round of financial dreams and hopes and try to find something else to pay off their debts. Will it be as good? Probably not, but we've started calling that the "creative destruction of capitalism", so they buy into that and move on, apathetically, with their lives. The c-suite and shareholders are effectively isolated from any sort of negative outcome through articles of incorporation, government bailouts, and sheer financial inertia. This directly contradicts the old saying "with great reward comes great risk". The people getting the reward - the massive bonuses, the kiss-ass articles in the media, a life effectively free of financial consequence - aren't the ones assuming the risk. The rank-and-file are. That hasn't been a real problem until now. AI as we're now implementing it has the potential to cause real damage to the financial futures of massive chunks of the population. Knowledge work is going to get less and less valuable. The people who worked in knowledge work fields often went into debt to be able to do so, sometimes for the first 10-20 years of their careers. Some have put off emotionally-meaningful things like starting families for the promised payout that now might not come at all. That being said, the author thinks that UBI is a potential salve. It's not. Over the last 40 years, more and more people were told that they should find a job that means something to them, that gives them at least some measure of fulfillment. They're not going to get that from a check delivered once a month from an expanded OASDI scheme. They're going to look at life as effectively a game we all play by a set of rules, and the rules have now been changed several times, each one screwing them more and more. Those at the top are the ones making the rules, and they keep gaining more and more. Instead of giving people the chance to work their way up the latter in a career, the rulemakers have now said that the best you can hope for is essentially welfare that will be unlikely to let you meet your long-term goals for your life. If you maybe put off having children until a later time to buy them more financial stability, you effectively blew your best parenting years for nothing. This could see a great realignment of risk-vs-reward back to where it's said it should be. If you're going to use AI to become a part of the first class of trillionaires, you can bet that a lot of social ire produced by what I've described above will be directed directly your way. In a society like the US, you can bet at least some of the malcontents will resort to violence to express their ire.

booleandilemma

I just can't get excited about a technology whose sole purpose is to replace me.

CommieBobDole

This article suffers from two things: First and most importantly, it's not really about LLMs, it's about AGI, and the second does not necessarily follow from the first; LLMs in their current state are pretty clearly not AGI, and most of the LLM-world progression in the last few years has been about better tooling/interfaces, refinements in training data and techniques and people learning how to use LLMs effectively rather than the huge leaps in fundamental capability that we saw in earlier years. It seems more likely that at this point, when AGI comes, it will be something entirely new or something that LLMs are only a component of, rather than "we built an LLM with ten trillion parameters and suddenly it became God". Second, it's not even really about AGI, it's about AGI superintelligence. And more than that, it's about affordable AGI superintelligence, assuming that such a thing won't cost billions a year to operate.

asd88

Goddammit, you can tell this is AI slop from the first two sentences.

block_dagger

I vibe with the article but I think the disruption period is going to be closer to 15 years instead of 5. The idea of billionaires giving up 20% now or 100% later is powerful.

sharadov

Plenty of competent engineers - who are clearly builders have also been let go. Enough with your trite analysis.

rdksu

I find takes like this weird for the primary economic conundrum of 'who' exactly will this increased productivity be for , to produce what , to render what service , when everyone is out of their jobs ?

mansilladev

"It requires the people losing their jobs not burning the system down before the system has time to redistribute the gains." Who, and how, will the gains be redistributed?