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Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

pseudolus

Comments (730)

  • neonate
  • Bukhmanizer
    I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.
  • ferguess_k
    What I worry a lot more instead is how knowledge of manufacturing and engineering could be lost due to our greed.Typical scenario: Industry I is not doing fine in country C (i.e. the fund managers are not happy about lack of growth of the public companies in this sector) due to reasons R1, R2, ..., Rn. Then management decided to outsource and eventually dismantle the factories to "globalize" it. Knowledge retained by the older generation of engineers, technicians and workers were completely lost when they passed away.
  • fullshark
    Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink, it was basically modified finishing school for rich capital owners, needing to make their children of proper class before they could take over their businesses.It then became a vocational degree for the working class, despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees. The only value is that you could talk the talk and become a member of the professional managerial class if you impressed the right hiring committee/individual.In spite of this, we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree, and be in debt for the rest of their working life.It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).
  • hgs3
    The vast majority of jobs that sustain our standard of living are blue-collar: farmers who grow our food, textile workers who make our clothes, construction workers who build our homes, plumbers, electricians, waste disposal workers, etc. I'd say it's white-collar work that became overinflated this past century, largely as a reaction to the automation and outsourcing of many traditional blue-collar roles.Now, with white-collar jobs themselves increasingly at risk, it's unclear where people will turn. The economic pie continues to shrink, and I don't see that trend reversing.It appears to me that our socio-economic model simply doesn't scale with technology. We need to have a constructive conversation about how to adapt.
  • apercu
    I'm guessing that the people who most espouse the virtues of AI do not "test" the output much and just let LLMs pump out errors.I use LLM's daily, but as a tool to brainstorm, mostly, or to write small parts of scripts (e.g., shell, not TV shows). But everything has to be verified.Last weekend I was using ChatGPT Music Teacher (or, trying to anyway) to prep some voice leading practices for guitar. I spent almost a half hour trying to get that model, then the base ChatGPT model to give correct information about inversions and the notes in the chords. It was laughably wrong over and over again.It would misidentify chords, say that a chord had the base attributes of a triad (tonic, third, fifth) while giving me a chord shape that had the root twice, and a third, and calling that a second inversion. Or giving incorrect fret/note information.If I didn't know theory and how intervals work on a guitar I would have been pretty screwed.As it was, I wasted a half hour and never got anything usable.I'm not saying that the technology isn't fairly amazing, but like, don't believe the hype.
  • bryanlarsen
    At least for the moment, AI still needs knowledge workers to spec and prompt and check. AI makes knowledge workers more productive, but it doesn't eliminate the need for them.And if knowledge workers are more productive, then knowledge work is cheaper. Cheaper knowledge work increases demand for knowledge work. So the number of workers required might actually increase. It also might not, but first order analysis that assumes decreased knowledge workers is not sufficient.C.f. garment makers. Partial automation of clothes making made clothes cheaper, so now people have closets full of hundreds of garments rather than the 2 sets our great-grandparents likely had. There are now more people making garments now than there was 100 years ago.
  • tangotaylor
    > A recent academic paper found that software developers who used an A.I. coding assistant improved a key measure of productivity by more than 25 percent, and that the productivity gains appeared to be largest among the least experienced developers.I dunno about this citation. I just read the paper and it considers "productivity" in this context to be the number of builds, commits, and pull requests in a developer week. Interestingly, there was no statistically significant difference in build success rate between those who used the AI tool (Copilot in this case) and those who didn't.https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566
  • Glyptodon
    Yes, but I'm not sure it's entirely related to AI. I think one of the real lessons of the pandemic was that you can outsource everything knowledge related because paying peanuts for something that's somewhere from 1/8 to 1/2 as good is better than not paying peanuts. And this effect is deeply multiplicative the less skilled and more entry level the role is, a factor AI only exacerbates. The precursor to this was tech jobs postings, year by year, mostly only being for, first, 3+ years of experience, and then 5+, and so on.That said, AI, as it improves, will only exacerbate. At least until it becomes so multiplicative that having an AI + pilot is so productive that you'd never not be happy to hire another one.
  • nopelynopington
    I flip flop daily on whether it has or not. Even the best AI engines write truly awful code, and it might not improve. But it also makes it easier for people to coast, and turn in half assed work, which is certainly a pathway to the decline of knowledge work
  • 7qW24A
    Corporations that over-hired over the past 10 years needed an excuse to cut the layers of fat and bureaucracy out, and AI came along at just the right time. It doesn’t matter if AI is increasing productivity; what matters is that people think it might be.
  • iambateman
    All knowledge work follows a distribution of skill…lots of people are in the middle of the curve when it comes to ability to do a varied set of tasks.If I quizzed someone in the middle of that curve on (1) basic keyboard shortcuts, (2) how to VLOOKUP in excel, (3) how to buy a domain, (4) how to make a presentation that truly looked good, (5) detect if an email is a phishing campaign, (6) make a secure password, (7) do research in their industry…You get my point…The skill of an average knowledge worker today is miles and miles away from elite levels.Knowledge work is not declining, we’re just watching the average ability of a typical worker go way up, over the course of a generation.
  • quux
  • owenpalmer
    Jonathan Blow has been talking about this problem for a while now. I especially love his talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?si=HgGG5PWyu7CBxYxt
  • stuaxo
    Productivity keeps going up, now to the point where there is less and less work.Instead of paying people more and reducing hours we let enough be taken by some at the top it unbalanced the whole system.We should be working 3 day weeks on the same wages by now.4 day week would be a start, it would give parents enough time to do chores and have a weekend.
  • phendrenad2
    I wish that articles like this didn't have such a US-centric limited view of the world. It's possible that knowledge work is booming elsewhere in the world, yet this is not explored or considered.
  • Animats
    Demand for college graduates peaked long ago. Only about half of US workers with college degrees have jobs which require them.
  • zkmon
    "an M.I.T. economist who was a co-author of the paper, said in an interview that a software developer’s job could change over the longer term, so that the human coder became a kind of project manager overseeing multiple A.I. assistants"Really? An economist has the authority and understanding to say that? People are getting carried away by projecting the gains seen from AI assistants. They need to understand that they can't simply project some trends so linearly.The same people saw cars and aeroplanes and said that we are going to have flying cars very soon. Nice projection of the trends!
  • schnitzelstoat
    No, it's just that interest rates are higher.
  • jongjong
    Unfortunately, knowledge and intelligence has been losing a lot of value over the past couple of decades.Aside from tech making information more accessible, centralization and monopolization likely played the biggest part. Driven by the design of our monetary system. Most new money enters the economy backed by endless streams of real estate debt (mortgages), public debt and corporate debt... All these well-moneyed areas (real estate, government, corporations) have become monopolized and highly political. There's just no room for real knowledge work. It's all about status games and BS internal politics. People who benefit from Cantillion effects have no interest in bringing nerds into their organizations to compete against them for their spot in front of their easy money printer.Insiders are mostly hiring people who are dumber than themselves; people whom they can control.
  • carabiner
    If you look at fields like mechanical engineering, no, it hasn't, because there isn't much training data for that type of work available on the internet. (CAD isn't engineering.) It's locked up in corporations like Ford, SpaceX, Toyota. There isn't open source mechanical analysis work available at a professional level, which might be an FEA output that references 5 messy spreadsheets that gets written up in a 20 page report with charts, and that references 20 other internal docs, specs. And every company does analysis differently so I'm not sure you could adequately train a model that can generalize it well.
  • karaterobot
    I don't see any clear examples in this article of people being laid off due to AI. I see one anonymous source who suspects his team was halved and that the higher-ups expect them to do twice the work using AI assistants. But, teams were slashed in half and expected to do more with less before AI, so I'm not sure that counts. I'm not naive enough to think AI companies wouldn't come after knowledge workers, but I'm waiting for confirmation that they are capable of doing that yet. If not, Betteridge's Law is confirmed in this case.
  • yuppii
    Could that also be, because the money is fake now? It does not actually follow the value, created out of thin air (?)
  • tootie
    Everybody is commenting about AI, but that's barely mentioned in the article. In particular there is this quote:> The gap in wages between those with a college degree and those without one grew steadily beginning in 1980, but flattened during the past 15 years, though it remains high.I suspect there's a lot of factors at play and the expansion of access to college is part of it. The value of secondary education is somewhere diluted. There is the end of the zero interest era. There is massive layoffs of federal workers which skew heavily towards knowledge work. And some of it is was Starbucks cites as "removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more nimble teams" which is a pretty normal cyclical thing where an era of expansion and promotions makes your org to top-heavy and bureaucratic so you trim aggressively and probably end up rehiring some as needed. Like a controlled burn of an overgrown forest. And if some of those are permanently lost to AI then that's a bonus.I think a lot of business leaders are just expecting a recession and want to be on good footing before it hits.
  • KurSix
    Still, I wouldn't say we're seeing the death of knowledge work, more like a redefinition. The bigger issue is whether our current education system and workforce training are keeping up.
  • anon
    undefined
  • squigglydonut
    If you want better than AI you must demand it as if life depended on it.
  • natmaka
  • glitchc
    Is this anything more than just supply and demand? As a society, we have shunned physical labour as an effective means to earn a living. In the education system, we insist that everyone graduate from high school, regardless of the attained level of achievement.As a result, we have a huge supply of young people who are college educated and have eschewed the trades because they believe that physical labour is below their standing. They're not wrong, since that's what they've been told their entire lives. They're all looking for white-collar work, but we simply don't have enough jobs for all of them.
  • coolThingsFirst
    Yes, it has for a very long time I just got the memo too late.I will focus on making small startups(will clamor around for ideas since I'm not very creative) since getting a job is ALMOST impossible. I've GitHub projects, degree, don't expect anything crazy since COL is low in EE but it feels like unless you are Jeff Dean nowadays is auto-rejection.Very low number of callbacks. I do have a multi-year gap since graduation which I know it impacts but this market is INSANE and has been for years.For comparison, just with HS degree while in uni, I had more callbacks for orders of magnitude better companies than I do now. It's like instead of progressing my career prospects have winded down. Crazy times.
  • anonfordays
    Considering the crumbling infrastructure, high demand for trades, increasing deportations, etc. blue-collar workers will likely see their compensation increase while white-collar workers see theirs decrease. The next industry for SV to disrupt needs to be construction. White-collar workers will see a demand for software tools that increase the efficiency of the trades.
  • ctrlp
    Many "white collar" jobs are bullshit makework for college grads. There is nothing intrinsically valuable in them but they are necessary to keep the population occupied. When the economics become favorable again, there will be another iteration of creating these jobs with subtle ways to make the "career" seem meaningful when in truth they are just made up sinecures.
  • MrMcCall
    It's the natural result of having more and more of our population being complete morons. The truth never goes away, but societies can shift closer to or futher away from being willing to learn and accept new concepts, attitudes, and behaviors.History is rife with examples: Galileo, St. Francis of Assisi, Boltzmann, Einstein, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eugene Parker, Bernie Sanders ... the list goes on and on.Most every tradition in Earth's various societies consists solely of excuses to keep doing the same stupid crap, for the same stupid reasons, with the same willfully ignorant disregard to better ways of doing things.Only compassion gives us the clear perspective on how we can best apply our energy to lift everyone's boat, without harm or misery to either ourselves or our blessed Earth."Same as it ever was." --Talking Heads
  • CokeFaultSoyuz
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  • hoaxminion
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  • curtisszmania
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  • fireburning
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  • nukem222
    [dead]
  • trod1234
    [flagged]
  • alecco
    Musk showed 80% were useless hires and AI gave the rest of the CEOs the excuse.So now they are downsizing and moving teams to India. From Google to American Airlines. What could possibly go wrong.
  • deadbabe
    The truth many will not want to admit is that knowledge work is essentially the “rentier income” version of labor.You secure an asset (specialized knowledge), and then you just live off of it while doing the minimal work you can, by turning yourself into an asset.Even though this affords many people a comfortable life, much like being a landowner of a vast portfolio of properties, it contributes to the inequality and degradation of society, splitting people between those who must labor physically and those who look down at them comfortably from high balconies.Society will not be worse off with most people doing physical labor. It was that way for thousands of years and humanity flourished. People may not like it, but humanity can only truly relax and do nothing when it has reached its peak and every problem is solved, and we are just not there yet. Back to work.
  • talkingtab
    One could wonder if perhaps, as is usual, We people have it all wrong about this new technology.Perhaps AI is the death of corporations. Corporations are designed to extract money by charging as much as possible while spending as little as possible. That seems fair to me, right? We do not expect a corporation to understand the concept of common good. What AI does is to make it appear as though people are not needed, you can just replace them all with AI & machines. Profits go up, yes? Corporations make more and more money. What could go wrong.The first thing that is going wrong - currently - is that if you do not pay people enough money to buy things, then guess what happens to your business? Goodbye Apple. Goodbye Google. Goodbye moon. Oops, sorry. This is already happening. If the wolves on Isle Royale get too good at catching and eating deer, guess what happens?Secondly and perhaps most importantly is that corporations are good at exploiting. If you know how to make a car, a corporation can make one so easily that you do not need to pay any people. Exploit. If you see a corporation pursuing lock-in (here's looking at you Apple, Walmart, etc) then you see a corporation that has no good business model. This does not mean they are dead or not going to be around, it just means they are a dinosaur waiting for some event. But the question is whether they can invent the next car? And what if the thing in short supply is not in the category of commodities. We still do not really understand what we can do with computers, the internet or block chains. Corporations know how to exploit those technologies. After all we still have windows. But is that the best we can do? Track people? Wow.So if you are a person who can actually think, and do. If you can figure out how to cross a stream in the winter, or make sour dough bread or even just raise chickens, there is going to be a massive new opportunity. For you. Because AI cannot create new concepts that are people based and even if they can, then corporations will fire them if they do.If your job is however a corporate pablum thing, like for example if you write pablum pieces for the NYT, then my advice is to run for the hills. And run fast.
  • austin-cheney
    It’s a natural reckoning that industries are still figuring out. For a long time software has seen vast over employment. Even with all the layoffs there is still a lot of fat left to trim.Look, the only purpose of software is automation and the only purpose of automation is labor elimination. This used to be common knowledge when software jobs were far fewer and still has not realistically sunk in with the modern work force. People that don’t fully embrace this as a value consensus are ripe for elimination.A lot of software employment has also seen rising wages inversely proportional to return on investment until so many of the layoffs started. There are many people employed to write software that aren’t very good and cannot independently qualify a return on investment without considerable help. That is a problem of poor candidate selection and improper/insufficient training. For years employers have attempted to short circuit this problem with open source helpers like Spring Boot, jQuery, React and so forth. Now they are doubling down with AI. You still have a population of people unqualified and insufficiently to perform the work assigned.All of these things mean software employment is a liability of declining worth that employers are still not willing to accept.