Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months (andrewyang.com)
- Reference: 0180823160
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/18/1740202/andrew-yang-warns-ai-will-displace-millions-of-white-collar-workers-within-18-months
- Source link: https://blog.andrewyang.com/p/the-end-of-the-office
Yang cited a conversation with the CEO of a publicly traded tech company who said the firm is cutting 15% of its workforce now and plans another 20% cut in two years, followed by yet another 20% two years after that. The U.S. currently has about 70 million white-collar workers, and Yang expects that number to fall by 20 to 50% over the next several years.
Underemployment among recent college graduates has already hit 52%, and only 30% of graduating seniors have landed a job in their field. Yang's proposed remedy remains the same one he ran on in 2020: Universal Basic Income.
[1] https://blog.andrewyang.com/p/the-end-of-the-office
Re: (Score:2)
The study to which you refer is outdated, despite having been published just this month. Because while you were reveling in your superiority to AI, on Feb. 5th, Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex were released. Your coding abilities are suddenly vastly inferior to that of AI. And these tools are absolutely being used right now to build the next generation.
Re: Orly? (Score:2)
You're trolling, right?
Re: (Score:2)
You haven't tried Opus 4.6, right? Or you don't code for a living. I was like you... and then Feb. 5th.
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Look at the post history of this use and see if you notice a pattern.
that's his evidence? (Score:3, Interesting)
His evidence for a AI white collar armageddon is a single unnamed tech company that plans 50% staff cuts over the next few years? Sorry, but during a recession a 50% staff cut for a tech company is basically a normal tuesday. And recessions happen almost every decade like clockwork, regardless of AI.
I'm not losing any sleep about my job. At least, not in the 18 month period. The AI revolution will unfold over decades.
Re: (Score:3)
My fear is that many companies believe they can replace workers with AI to start mass layoffs which could have huge ramifications to the economy. Later when they realize the limitations of AI, it would another upheaval. Stability will be the sacrifice.
Re: (Score:2)
Who are these companies though? Even the tech companies that were supposedly eliminating people with AI turned out not to be eliminating those people for those reasons.
Re: (Score:3)
> My fear is that many companies believe they can replace workers with AI to start mass layoffs which could have huge ramifications to the economy. Later when they realize the limitations of AI, it would another upheaval. Stability will be the sacrifice.
If they do host a mass layoff because of AI, they'll most likely hire everybody back a few months down the line, but of course at a vastly lower pay rate. The true motivation for the AI hype is suppression of wages by any means necessary. If the fear mongering over losing your job doesn't work, they'll just shove you out and bring you back later when you're desperate enough to accept even lower standards.
The future's so bright, I need 20,000 SPF sunscreen.
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't even matter if they believe, so long as they can use it as a plausible rationale.
The layoffs are coming either way, I know quite a few higher ups that know they hired folks they didn't actually need due to FOMO during the big 2021 hiring craze for tech folks. I'm sure they are happy to have some industry wide rationale as to why it makes sense instead of admitting they hired a significant number of folks with no particular plan/business objective in mind.
At the very least, to reset some salaries
I'll be more worried when LLMs can tell what (Score:2)
f*cking day it is. We're talking about - static data....
So I think the problem folks ignore (Score:3)
Is that there's a tipping point in the economy where there isn't enough high wage workers to support the service sector economy that we need because we are mostly using robots to do all of our manufacturing. If you want to find a place that's not using robots to do manufacturing you pretty much got to go to the kind of place where people don't have reliable access to food and water.
So we've got lots of people making reports that are mostly being ignored. Those reports could be done by ai and I don't thi
Man selling UBI overstates the need for it (Score:1)
Are any people *without* a vested interest in AI taking over warning us, or is it just politicians and salesmen with something to push ?
Re: (Score:2)
Who knows? How do we know who's vested and who's not? But we do know that UBI, as pushed by Yang, won't be solving any AI problem.
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But that's the thing: AI doesn't have to work particularly well to displace hundreds of thousands of white collar jobs. It just has to create the appearance of working, while being cheaper.
It's already there in places where, even at minimum wage, it wouldn't be cost-effective to have a person perform the task, but an AI can do it cheaply enough. Even if it doesn't do it particularly well. That it can do it at all is enough.
Jobs are going to be given to AI, even if the AI does a worse job of it, simply becau
Re: (Score:2)
There's a reason I phrased it "appearance of working" - you're assuming that enough people will be able to tell the difference between "working right" and "not working right." As long as it looks to be working properly for the majority of use cases, that's good enough. For most of these tasks, it isn't a simple binary between "doesn't work" and "does work," there's a whole spectrum.
In fact, I would argue this ultimately makes AI more dangerous, because it does a very good job of appearing to work while fail
Baloney (Score:2)
AI will increase the number and diversity of jobs. It creates more and more bullshit for people to do. Until we have free food delivery service and mansions for all, there will be jobs.
UBI isn't a solution (Score:2, Insightful)
For a moment, let's ignore the economic elephant in the room that is inflation and pretend UBI will work as advertised. You're still stuck living on a fixed government income, which only lets you participate in capitalism in a very limited manner. UBI offers no upward mobility if you really can't find work because the robots took all the jobs you'd be qualified for.
Sure, Yang likes to imagine that UBI would free you to do some side hustle, but you have to remember, just like that inflation we're not suppo
Re: (Score:3)
"...which only lets you participate in capitalism in a very limited manner..."
Not sure what you intend that to mean. Everyone participates in a "very limited manner" and most participate by being exploited. That won't change. The problem with AI, if it fulfills these "promises", is that capitalism will no longer work and UBI, however implemented, doesn't address that. A greed-based, destruction of the commons economic system does not work in a resource-constrained climate where labor is not valued. We
If UBI is not a solution, what is ? (Score:3)
No frankly, I keep saying people this is not a solution , citing a (IMO minor) negative effect. I am sorry, then what IS your solution ? Mass starvation ? Another modest proposal of eating the children ? If job are being replaced on a massive scale, then the government, responsible for the well being of those citizen OVER the well being of corps, will have to implement *something*. What do you suggest ? Ask people to dig hole in one shift and then the next alternating shift can fill it in, and vice versa ?
Re: (Score:2)
The solution appears to be discouraging vaccination and encouraging survivors to invest their money in crypto ponzi schemes. The next step is presumably to draft the excess into the infantry and soak up some FPV drones some place.
UBI won't impact inflation as much as tax cuts do (Score:2)
> For a moment, let's ignore the economic elephant in the room that is inflation and pretend UBI will work as advertised.
That's a childish assessment. We have inflation across the board and most of it has nothing to do with poor people having extra money. Inflation only accounts for things with limited production, like housing, which are more greatly impacted by hoarding by the ultra-wealthy. It doesn't apply very strongly to manufactured goods, like iPhones. When the next iPhone release goes up in price, it will have a lot more to do with massive RAM shortages brought on by AI hype. When your rent goes up, it has a lot
Real story (Score:2)
Try to think of this stuff from the point of view of a Silicon Valley CEO. You're responsible, above else, to make the share price goes up, and in particular to convince all your investors that the high price of the stock is justified because you're growing fast. You don't have a lot of income to justify this, but you used to be able to justify this with clicks, views, eyeballs, and the fact that you employ a lot of technical people.
The problem is that your company was growing based on borrowing money rea
Re: (Score:2)
> But ask yourself... if it's all true and AI is so amazing, where are all the success stories?
You can use AI to make songs that are more or less on par with the level of quality that the pop music industry churns out recently. The reason people aren't becoming financially successful doing that, is because anyone can also generate their own unending piles of AI slop, too.
[1]In 1996, this was an expensive, impressive shot to film [reddit.com], today, you could recreate the same thing (and arguably, in better quality) with consumer hardware from DJI. Where are all the success stories of people getting rich with thei
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1j9tzyq/the_2_minute_opening_sequence_of_the_birdcage/
Re: (Score:2)
"You can use AI to make songs that are more or less on par with the level of quality that the pop music industry churns out recently. "
Carefully worded to sound like praise for AI while relying on the terrible state of talent in the pop music industry.
"In 1996, this was an expensive, impressive shot to film [reddit.com], today, you could recreate the same thing (and arguably, in better quality) with consumer hardware from DJI. Where are all the success stories of people getting rich with their drones?"
As th
Re: Real story (Score:2)
AI can replace Yang seeking attention parroting the AI CEOs. AI CEOs are amplifying their products since they need customers to pay for their huge investments. AI will evolve and displace administrative functions in due time but not that fast. Factory automation has been slowly increasing but the capital investments are very high so need scale. Small mid size businesses still need Welders materials handling etc
Much of it should have happened pre-AI (Score:2)
I've worked with a lot of white collar workers who basically fill out forms, shuffle forms, collate form data into reports, etc.. As a db guy, I made a lot of their work easier by interconnecting databases and providing live reports.
Only bureaucratic inertia prevented me from going further - there was no 'fuzzy thinking' required. You have rules for collecting the data, rules for extracting what you want from it. Rules, rules, rules. No AI required.
Re: (Score:2)
> I've worked with a lot of white collar workers who basically fill out forms, shuffle forms, collate form data into reports, etc.. As a db guy, I made a lot of their work easier by interconnecting databases and providing live reports.
> Only bureaucratic inertia prevented me from going further - there was no 'fuzzy thinking' required. You have rules for collecting the data, rules for extracting what you want from it. Rules, rules, rules. No AI required.
Too true.
Heck, over twenty years ago I used VBA with Excel, Word, and Adobe to automate something that one guy spent an entire day doing once a week. Replaced with a one click of a button.
chicken little (Score:2)
Okay, Chicken Little, what should we do?
Print money and give it away? Great plan, I wonder how that will work out.
Money for UBI has to come from somewhere. The notion that we can inflate our way out of debt and into the future is a recipe for disaster.
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It's paid for by taxes.
There may be problems with UBI but nobody is suggesting that it is printing money.
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"The notion that we can inflate our way out of debt and into the future is a recipe for disaster."
Not sure who you're suggesting is offering that "notion" but it would be a disaster. However, inflation does erase debt bigly, proportional to the disaster.
UBI as a bolt-on to unregulated capitalism and grotesque wealth inequality is not only useless, it is an insult to the public. Why should anyone give a shit was Andrew Yang says?
It can't think for you though (Score:2)
The big problem with AI as I see it is you have to tell it very specifically what you want. Leaders often know the outcome they want but not how to get there. AI can weigh pros and cons if you give it a comprehensive list, but it can't replace the experience gained over years and help identify blind spots to keep leadership out of trouble. I think it probably will take place in some companies. Within 6 months after several bad decisions based on AI the board is going to say "this isn't working out" try
Re: (Score:2)
You haven't tried Opus 4.6, released on Feb. 5th. Prompts for writing code can be casual and brief.... and it will still respond with code that addresses many/most/all of the concerns you had but couldn't be bothered to formulate in writing. Be sure to challenge it with a problem you'd hate to tackle.
Something big is happening (Score:2)
This is happening sooner than probably everyone here would've imagined.
[1]https://shumer.dev/something-b... [shumer.dev]
[1] https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
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Reads like a shill because you can't imagine AI has improved that much overnight. You should try Opus 4.6. It's mind-blowing. Shumer's description pretty much matches my experience.
You first Big Boy (Score:2)
Hopefully it will first replace the "Yang Gang's" fatuous sycophantic work along with Yang's own dumb-ass role as purveyor of useless and weird failed libertarian progressive political slop intended to advance Yang's "personal journey" and his big stupid ego and personal power.
Expect a corresponding 20% to 50% drop in sales (Score:2)
If workers do not have money, then the 70% of the US economy that relies on consumers will lose sales. You reap what you sow.
Don't worry (Score:1)
The reason the government is deporting undocumented workers by the millions isn't just because of racism. All the white collar workers made redundant by AI will soon be doing the jobs they used to do: picking crops, driving taxis, working as maids and nannies for the wealthy.
Clearly the weekly memo has gone out, lol (Score:2)
This must be talking point #2, right under the super plausible "Republicans want to disenfranchise married women" ...
But will it displace dupes? (Score:2)
Slashdot seems to be safe.
No no, that was an AI exec claiming that (Score:3)
This is merely the guy he talked to about AI and how they're planning on laying off people because the AI is so much better at continvoucly morging featues back to the rel, branch.
Re: (Score:2)
While they've since deleted it, Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, exhibited the greatest achievement of AI to date... a diagram with words and letters that have never existed... included in some GitHub flows tutorial.
Re:Slashdot seems to be safe. (Score:2)
Slashdot editors are being replaced with DupeGPT