It is all almost making richer even more richer, instead of properly hiring people for HR, AI bots.
Instead of having more people at the supermarket, have the customers work as if they were employees, the only thing missing is fetching stuff from warehouse when missing on the shelves, but still pay the same or more.
Instead of paying to artists, do job ads using generated AI images with code magically showing off monitor's back.
Instead of paying translators, do video ads with automatic translations and nerve irritating voice tones.
Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
9rx · 1h ago
> except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
Do they? Money is simply the accounting of debt. You do something for me, and when I can't immediately do something in return for you, you extend a loan to me so that I can make good on my side of the bargain later. If we record that I owe you something at some point in the future, we just created money!
But if I don't need anything from you — because, say, magical AIs are already giving me everything I could ever hope and dream of — I have no reason to become indebted to you. Money only matters in a world where: You want/need people to do things for you, they won't do something for you without a favour returned in kind, and you cannot immediately return the favour.
pjmlp · 1h ago
Direct trading kind of died out towards the end of middle age, are we supposed to go back in time?
9rx · 55m ago
No, why?
If people still want other people to do things for them, accounting isn't going anywhere. It has already been invented. We don't have to un-invent it. But, if this our future, then humans remain relevant, so there is no concern about job loss or anything of that nature.
If, however, some future plays out where people aren't needed to work anymore, there will simply be no need for trade. The magical AIs, or whatever it is that someone has dreamt up that they think will eliminate the need to hire people, will provide instead. You only need people to buy things from you if you need to buy things from them as well.
pjmlp · 4m ago
Time to fight for fertile land then.
linker3000 · 2h ago
At least one of my local, out of town, supermarkets doesn't have a warehouse any more.
It's all Just in Time, with a residual amount above the main shelves. If you can't find what you want, they don't have it 'out back', because apart from an unloading area, there's no 'out back'.
chii · 1h ago
> they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
the goods ought to have become cheaper if the ai/mechanization/industrialization is cheaper than labour.
And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things, which spawns new luxury good industries.
Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
Of course, it is up to the individual to search and find their niche, and to produce value to sustain their own existence. The advent of AI is not going to be different.
Number of employees down (despite number of stores going up)
Profits up.
I'd make an argument here about the desperate need for critical thinking in economics, the typically upside down nature of discourse (topics in economics are often approached with "i must defend what i know" rather than "i must learn what i don't know")... but there's no point. You tellingly said "ought", David Hume warned us about the futility of trying to argue from logic against an ought.
mzhaase · 1h ago
The trickle down effect you mention here is simply not present in the data. Instead, wealth inequality keeps going up.
exceptione · 1h ago
> And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things, which spawns new luxury good industries.
That will be a rounding error. Economic growth comes from a large population that spends and innovates.
Wealth concentration buys policy and media, and after that all of sudden the following things happen: tax gap widens, public services deteriorates, innovation halting, etc.
Wealth concentration means the pie will shrink, and eventually the rich will have to fear the super rich. And how do you reach growth after a country is sucked dry?
pjmlp · 1h ago
One such kind of jobs have leaders like in those mythical Robin Hood stories.
Those jobs certainly never go out of fashion, as seen in poorer world regions, where you as well say, people find new jobs all the time.
piva00 · 1h ago
> And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things, which spawns new luxury good industries.
Absurd, they spend a fraction of their wealth on luxury goods (an industry which employs very few people anyway), the rest is on assets, keeping them locked into the financial market.
> Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
> Of course, it is up to the individual to search and find their niche, and to produce value to sustain their own existence. The advent of AI is not going to be different.
As in any upheaval of the labour market, there will be people who cannot or won't retrain, becoming detached from society. Those usually end up angry, left to their own devices, and lash out politically by voting on demagogues. In the end the whole of society bears the cost, is that really the best way we found to achieve progress? Leave people behind and blame the individual instead of seeking systemic approaches to solve systemic issues?
pydry · 1h ago
>And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things
In general those things that "the rich" buy are scarce assets - stocks, housing, land, etc. all of which keep getting bidded up in price. This does not generate jobs.
>spawns new luxury good industries.
Trickle down never worked.
>Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
The number of jobs available is politically not technologically determined. AI doesn't automatically destroy jobs in aggregate but this is what the economy is currently programmed to do (via the mechanism of higher interest rates), so this is what companies are chasing with AI.
wolvesechoes · 2h ago
> except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
As implied by the sibling comment, the final stage is that they do not need people to buy anything.
Dead internet theory is too narrow in its vision.
nikolayasdf123 · 1h ago
> except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
this is why we having population collapse
PicassoCTs · 2h ago
Im half expecting the appearance of virtual people any day. Basically cooperate sponsored UBI - but for bots, so they can buy virtual goods and services, finally decoupling the economy from the desert of the real.
That is sadly a likely outcome. An evolution of the companies forcing/encouraging employees to buy the company’s goods.
askonomm · 2h ago
Does that mean that Company Towns are coming back?
ekianjo · 2h ago
on one hand people complain about sweatshops but on the other hand when the repetitive, soul crushing, low paid job is replaced by technology people complain as well. you can't have it both ways.
pjmlp · 1h ago
People forget that in some parts of the globe sweatshops are the only jobs people can get, where are they supposed to work instead?
There is a middle ground, no need to treat people like slaves, nor throw them into the street without alternative source of income.
pydry · 1h ago
The people telling us that sweatshops are a necessary thing are the same people telling all of us that we will be replaced by a robot shortly.
They're the same people that will proclaim that the sky will fall if you raise the retirement age due to a shortage of labor.
Their stories are not consistent, and all they really care about is the value of their stock portfolio.
Eisenstein · 1h ago
When did sweat shops get automated?
Garlef · 2h ago
Maybe we can get a counter-AI that does the AI interview for us?
Mordisquitos · 2h ago
I had the same thought.
The CEO of Braintrust, a company that offers AI interviewers, is quoted as saying “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,”. Let's see how they react to the founding of 'Trainbust', a company offering AI interviewees to respond to AI interviewers. The truth is, if they want to use AI interviewers, they’re gonna have to go through this thing.
yetihehe · 2h ago
> It should be noted that not all AI interviewers are created equal—there’s a wide range of AI interviewers entering the market.
Maybe someone will make an AI to interview the AI interviewers and see which one is the best? AI's interviewing human candidates gonna have to go through this thing.
nikolayasdf123 · 1h ago
nice idea actually. this might be happenign already
the real punchline is how jobs hiring with AI are hiring for positions which require the worker to pretend to be some kind of bot (follow a script, repeating the same actions cyclically)
yogsototh · 1h ago
I think this already exists and there are lot of them. Regarding stealth AI interview, there are many existing products.
Mainly they listen to the interview, and write down answers in an overlay for you to repeat. They ace leet code, etc...
I guess this is already pretty close.
afandian · 1h ago
That would be cheating!
glimshe · 57m ago
I don't know how to solve this in the current environment. A hiring manager friend said he's getting unprecedented number of application for a software engineering role.
Ultimately applicants will endure whatever companies put in front of them with a job market that is this bad.
If the government made this illegal companies would come out with ever increasingly silly filters, such as demanding specific college degrees, handwritten applications by snail Mail etc.
saagarjha · 2h ago
> “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune.
Man, what a ghoul.
Den_VR · 2h ago
Count ourselves lucky they haven’t lucky figured out how to make literal ghouls out of silica and the recently dead, because these people would.
Just what happened that caused employers to hold so much power in the employee-employer relationship? The collapse of collective bargaining, sure. But what else…
lemoncookiechip · 2h ago
Decades and decades of unfettered Capitalism.
- Labor protections getting weaker over time, plus courts usually siding with employers. Overtime laws got chipped away, and a lot of folks get called "contractors" when they're basically employees.
- Jobs can move overseas way easier now, so workers don't really have the same leverage they used to.
- Big companies buying everything up, regional monopolies forming, and those non-compete clauses making it harder for people to switch jobs.
- At-will employment, temp work, gig jobs, outsourcing, just makes job security pretty shaky.
- Decades of anti-union talk, pushing this whole "you're on your own" idea, and selling "flexibility" like it's some amazing benefit.
- More workplace surveillance, algorithm-based schedules, and automated tracking, just gives the employer more control.
People quite literally fought tooth and nail with blood sweat and tears to gain their rights over the course of years and years during the 18th and 19th century. Many quite literally died, and a lot more were beaten to pulp by the job owners who hired muscle to do it.
Those gains we made have slowly been eroded.
danaris · 21m ago
And, as usual, you can trace the majority of this back to Reagan.
Busting unions, vilifying poor people, weakening and removing regulations, and (very crucially) changing the basic philosophy behind antitrust.
FirmwareBurner · 2h ago
He's saying the quiet part out loud but all companies think the same whenever they design the hoops their candidates have to jump through.
It's shocking to me people are offended of hearing people tell the truth.
Would you prefer if he lied to you and called you "valuable family members" instead?
Edit to clarify for all those below who misread: I meant "the truth" as in "transparency" from his perspective of how he runs his company and how he views the relationship with employees, not the holy ground truth of how things should ideally work. I imagined that was obvious when I made the statement that he's not sugarcoating it with valuable family member but just speaking his mind as in saying the truth.
dragonwriter · 1h ago
He’s not telling “the truth”, he is doing marketing propaganda trying to create an air of inevitability around his firms offering as a cognitive hack to get people (both potential buyers and people who might otherwise create pressure that potential buyers respond to) to be less likely to critically evaluate and respond to the offering, getting them to view it as simply a necessity for the future market that they need to adapt to rather than a choice with real costs beyond the sticker price that meed to be carefully weighed against demonstrable benefits.
saagarjha · 2h ago
I manage our interview pipeline and none of our hoops involve AI interviewers. You can just not do them; that remains an option.
Mordisquitos · 2h ago
That's shocking and irresponsible. Won't somebody please think of the shareholders' profits?
FirmwareBurner · 1h ago
What does this have to do with what I just said? Did you see me defending their hoops or defending their honesty?
Either reading comprehension has gone down or people are itching to go off topic arguments just to insert their own opinions.
dragonwriter · 1h ago
> What does this have to do with what I just said?
It literally directly contradicts the idea that what he is saying is, as you claim, “the truth”.
> Did you see me defending their hoops or defending their honesty?
Since the claim that you described as “the truth” is that product is simply an inevitability that everyone will have to deal with, defending their honesty is defending the hoops.
FirmwareBurner · 1h ago
>It literally directly contradicts the idea that what he is saying is, as you claim, “the truth”.
It's the truth from his perspective of how he runs his company and how he views the relationship with employees, not the idealist holy ground truth of how things should work. I imagined that was obvious when I made the statement with family.
tpoacher · 6m ago
You're misattributing abhorrence as offense.
If someone tells you they've commited [insert abhorrent act here], you're not offended by their beliefs, you're abhorred and disgusted by their actions.
Them telling the truth doesn't make it any less abhorrent. Hence "what a ghoul".
wongarsu · 1h ago
My issue with the statement is that it's completely ignoring the cost of friction in the interview pipeline.
In a job seeker applies to 20 jobs, 10 of which have a pleasant interview pipeline that respect the interviewee as a person as well as respecting their time, and 10 which don't (AI interviews, unreasonable at-home tasks, etc), they are more likely to end up in the former group. If you make your interview process worse you either have to make a better offer to entice people to put up with it, or you get worse candidates. No matter what you do there is almost always someone desperate enough to jump through all the hurdles you put up, but desperation is inversely correlated with quality
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> all companies think the same whenever they design the hoops their candidates have to jump through
Stop making hoops. Like what part of tech hiring do you really think you’ve innovated on enough to justify making new hoops?
Hell, you’d think with AI and everyone’s digital footprint you’d be able to reduce the number of hoops.
FirmwareBurner · 2h ago
Where do you see ME making the hoops or defending the hoops?
But every company has their own version of hoops that you need to get that job. Nobody is forcing you though. You can just avoid the companies who's hoops you don't like.
What part of that I just said is false?
watwut · 1h ago
He is not saying the truth of how it works. He is trying to build the world where it will be true.
okasaki · 2h ago
He's the CEO of a company that does AI interviews. He's promoting the company, not telling you uncomfortable truths.
ekianjo · 2h ago
I mean as a CEO you can imagine he would not admit "thats sucks, dont buy our product" in public.
doctor_radium · 2h ago
Shrug. I thought most HR people already are bots, and it's been this way for roughly the last 20 years.
My first thought too. If anything, taking HR out is a win for all mankind.
captain_coffee · 48m ago
Yes, of course, is anyone even remotely-surprised besides the "geniuses" that came up with these kind of dehumanizing ideas/practices?
Leynos · 1h ago
I'm a big proponent of AI as a tool for work, but unless you have a perfect received pronunciation accent, voice chat is painful. It's as if the AI chatbots were trained on Radio 4 and not much else.
djmips · 1h ago
Clearly the answer is your AI double.
It looks like you and knows everything about you and how to ace AI interview!
andrewstuart · 2h ago
Employers only fix this sort of thing when they’re short of candidates.
When there’s plenty of candidates they happily shove them all down a terrible recruiting pipeline.
xacky · 2h ago
This is why we need more "job creator" schemes. Why work for a terrible company when you can be a good company creating jobs for everyone. We need more entrepreneurs than ever, especially when in 2050 we will need jobs for 10 billion people.
nikolayasdf123 · 1h ago
probably we just need start charging companies for our application/interview time.
crinkly · 1h ago
I had AI interview recently and I was a little offended considering the level of position so I decided to go off script and complain about the perception it gave them rather than answering the questions. It neatly transcribed this and sent it to an HR drone who actually called me the next day and apologised as it was new technology that they had decided to use. But it turned out the advertised position didn't exist and they were trying to get someone who was qualified but desperate to take a lower position. Assholes all the way down.
Instead of having more people at the supermarket, have the customers work as if they were employees, the only thing missing is fetching stuff from warehouse when missing on the shelves, but still pay the same or more.
Instead of paying to artists, do job ads using generated AI images with code magically showing off monitor's back.
Instead of paying translators, do video ads with automatic translations and nerve irritating voice tones.
Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
Do they? Money is simply the accounting of debt. You do something for me, and when I can't immediately do something in return for you, you extend a loan to me so that I can make good on my side of the bargain later. If we record that I owe you something at some point in the future, we just created money!
But if I don't need anything from you — because, say, magical AIs are already giving me everything I could ever hope and dream of — I have no reason to become indebted to you. Money only matters in a world where: You want/need people to do things for you, they won't do something for you without a favour returned in kind, and you cannot immediately return the favour.
If people still want other people to do things for them, accounting isn't going anywhere. It has already been invented. We don't have to un-invent it. But, if this our future, then humans remain relevant, so there is no concern about job loss or anything of that nature.
If, however, some future plays out where people aren't needed to work anymore, there will simply be no need for trade. The magical AIs, or whatever it is that someone has dreamt up that they think will eliminate the need to hire people, will provide instead. You only need people to buy things from you if you need to buy things from them as well.
It's all Just in Time, with a residual amount above the main shelves. If you can't find what you want, they don't have it 'out back', because apart from an unloading area, there's no 'out back'.
the goods ought to have become cheaper if the ai/mechanization/industrialization is cheaper than labour.
And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things, which spawns new luxury good industries.
Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
Of course, it is up to the individual to search and find their niche, and to produce value to sustain their own existence. The advent of AI is not going to be different.
Counter-factual: https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...
Cost of food up.
Number of employees down (despite number of stores going up)
Profits up.
I'd make an argument here about the desperate need for critical thinking in economics, the typically upside down nature of discourse (topics in economics are often approached with "i must defend what i know" rather than "i must learn what i don't know")... but there's no point. You tellingly said "ought", David Hume warned us about the futility of trying to argue from logic against an ought.
That will be a rounding error. Economic growth comes from a large population that spends and innovates.
Wealth concentration buys policy and media, and after that all of sudden the following things happen: tax gap widens, public services deteriorates, innovation halting, etc.
Wealth concentration means the pie will shrink, and eventually the rich will have to fear the super rich. And how do you reach growth after a country is sucked dry?
Those jobs certainly never go out of fashion, as seen in poorer world regions, where you as well say, people find new jobs all the time.
Absurd, they spend a fraction of their wealth on luxury goods (an industry which employs very few people anyway), the rest is on assets, keeping them locked into the financial market.
> Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
> Of course, it is up to the individual to search and find their niche, and to produce value to sustain their own existence. The advent of AI is not going to be different.
As in any upheaval of the labour market, there will be people who cannot or won't retrain, becoming detached from society. Those usually end up angry, left to their own devices, and lash out politically by voting on demagogues. In the end the whole of society bears the cost, is that really the best way we found to achieve progress? Leave people behind and blame the individual instead of seeking systemic approaches to solve systemic issues?
In general those things that "the rich" buy are scarce assets - stocks, housing, land, etc. all of which keep getting bidded up in price. This does not generate jobs.
>spawns new luxury good industries.
Trickle down never worked.
>Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
The number of jobs available is politically not technologically determined. AI doesn't automatically destroy jobs in aggregate but this is what the economy is currently programmed to do (via the mechanism of higher interest rates), so this is what companies are chasing with AI.
As implied by the sibling comment, the final stage is that they do not need people to buy anything.
Dead internet theory is too narrow in its vision.
this is why we having population collapse
There is a middle ground, no need to treat people like slaves, nor throw them into the street without alternative source of income.
They're the same people that will proclaim that the sky will fall if you raise the retirement age due to a shortage of labor.
Their stories are not consistent, and all they really care about is the value of their stock portfolio.
The CEO of Braintrust, a company that offers AI interviewers, is quoted as saying “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,”. Let's see how they react to the founding of 'Trainbust', a company offering AI interviewees to respond to AI interviewers. The truth is, if they want to use AI interviewers, they’re gonna have to go through this thing.
Maybe someone will make an AI to interview the AI interviewers and see which one is the best? AI's interviewing human candidates gonna have to go through this thing.
Mainly they listen to the interview, and write down answers in an overlay for you to repeat. They ace leet code, etc...
I guess this is already pretty close.
Ultimately applicants will endure whatever companies put in front of them with a job market that is this bad.
If the government made this illegal companies would come out with ever increasingly silly filters, such as demanding specific college degrees, handwritten applications by snail Mail etc.
Man, what a ghoul.
Just what happened that caused employers to hold so much power in the employee-employer relationship? The collapse of collective bargaining, sure. But what else…
- Labor protections getting weaker over time, plus courts usually siding with employers. Overtime laws got chipped away, and a lot of folks get called "contractors" when they're basically employees.
- Jobs can move overseas way easier now, so workers don't really have the same leverage they used to.
- Big companies buying everything up, regional monopolies forming, and those non-compete clauses making it harder for people to switch jobs.
- At-will employment, temp work, gig jobs, outsourcing, just makes job security pretty shaky.
- Decades of anti-union talk, pushing this whole "you're on your own" idea, and selling "flexibility" like it's some amazing benefit.
- More workplace surveillance, algorithm-based schedules, and automated tracking, just gives the employer more control.
People quite literally fought tooth and nail with blood sweat and tears to gain their rights over the course of years and years during the 18th and 19th century. Many quite literally died, and a lot more were beaten to pulp by the job owners who hired muscle to do it.
Those gains we made have slowly been eroded.
Busting unions, vilifying poor people, weakening and removing regulations, and (very crucially) changing the basic philosophy behind antitrust.
It's shocking to me people are offended of hearing people tell the truth.
Would you prefer if he lied to you and called you "valuable family members" instead?
Edit to clarify for all those below who misread: I meant "the truth" as in "transparency" from his perspective of how he runs his company and how he views the relationship with employees, not the holy ground truth of how things should ideally work. I imagined that was obvious when I made the statement that he's not sugarcoating it with valuable family member but just speaking his mind as in saying the truth.
Either reading comprehension has gone down or people are itching to go off topic arguments just to insert their own opinions.
It literally directly contradicts the idea that what he is saying is, as you claim, “the truth”.
> Did you see me defending their hoops or defending their honesty?
Since the claim that you described as “the truth” is that product is simply an inevitability that everyone will have to deal with, defending their honesty is defending the hoops.
It's the truth from his perspective of how he runs his company and how he views the relationship with employees, not the idealist holy ground truth of how things should work. I imagined that was obvious when I made the statement with family.
If someone tells you they've commited [insert abhorrent act here], you're not offended by their beliefs, you're abhorred and disgusted by their actions.
Them telling the truth doesn't make it any less abhorrent. Hence "what a ghoul".
In a job seeker applies to 20 jobs, 10 of which have a pleasant interview pipeline that respect the interviewee as a person as well as respecting their time, and 10 which don't (AI interviews, unreasonable at-home tasks, etc), they are more likely to end up in the former group. If you make your interview process worse you either have to make a better offer to entice people to put up with it, or you get worse candidates. No matter what you do there is almost always someone desperate enough to jump through all the hurdles you put up, but desperation is inversely correlated with quality
Stop making hoops. Like what part of tech hiring do you really think you’ve innovated on enough to justify making new hoops?
Hell, you’d think with AI and everyone’s digital footprint you’d be able to reduce the number of hoops.
But every company has their own version of hoops that you need to get that job. Nobody is forcing you though. You can just avoid the companies who's hoops you don't like.
What part of that I just said is false?
When there’s plenty of candidates they happily shove them all down a terrible recruiting pipeline.