Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months (andrewyang.com) 85
Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling "the Fuckening."
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.
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.
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.
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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
Re: Orly? (Score:2)
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https://shumer.dev/something-b... [shumer.dev]
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[this is only a joke] (Score:1)
Nah Opus freed up his workday so now he has time to post about opus!
If you haven't tried it then you're ignorant! Hurry up and get a FREE account!
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that's his evidence? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not losing any sleep about my job. At least, not in the 18 month period. The AI revolution will unfold over decades.
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How'd you get modded -1 Gullible?
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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.
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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
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Oh yeah they overhired and yet every company has a Jira backlog worth years of story points.
Re: that's his evidence? (Score:2)
I've encountered this scenario across a number of teams, people pointing to a large backlog and asserting that, obviously, they need more people because that's just so much to do.
The biggest problem is that a large backlog doesn't really say anything about value of those items. Someone at some point tossed it in the pile because it's usually "free" to do so but the request really does not represent work of value to be done. A business leader sees that metric with a request for more resources, but a health
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That's a thing too but not what's happening here.
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oh this is absolutely happening already. Layoffs and then everyone cuts corners and uses slop code to make up the difference. Documentation gets pushed to the wayside, fake tests for nothing get pushed into codebases, all this stuff takes awhile to add up before the wheels fall off the cart.
The other day I saw official microsoft github docs with nonsensical AI diagrams making the rounds, Youtube just had the first outage I've ever noticed, it was so unusual I thought maybe my youtube channel got mass rep
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genAI is new so the recession comparison is not relevant.
jobs are and will be replaced further by AI. no one knows how bad is it going to get though. amazon stock is nearly 20% down ytd and we are still in february
I'll be more worried when LLMs can tell what (Score:2)
So I think the problem folks ignore (Score:3)
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
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So what LLM doesn't get that right? ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok all answer correctly. (I know you're being wry, but this is the kind of LLM problem that has been solved for quite some time.)
Man selling UBI overstates the need for it (Score:1)
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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
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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
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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.
There will be managers of these things. Judging from all the return to office stuff, many managers can't manage workers who are remote or the company culture can't support remote work. How are they going to manage a worker with no physical presence?
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:4, 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 supposed to be talking about, everyone else on UBI would have exactly the same idea. Gig work offers would go *poof* quicker than you can accept them, as 1,000s of others would also be trying to supplement their government stipend income.
Hilariously, Yang was once asked during one of his interviews a few years back about how people could afford housing on UBI, since it clearly wouldn't be enough for a mortgage payment in any market. He unironically suggested getting roommates. That alone should tell you what a joke of a concept this is, because if most people were okay with buying a house as a partnership with a bunch of strangers, we'd already be doing this now.
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"...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
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Just because Yang's ideas for UBI suck doesn't mean every concept of UBI does
Ah yes, the old "communism works, if only you'd really try it right," argument. Spare us. Be it the case billionaires want you in poverty or not is irrelevant. Pwrnctrl is right about the economic reality of UBI, and how inflation works. In absence of price controls inflation will occur. Inflation is what happens when you put money in the pockets of people who will spend it vs into the coffers of banks or under the mattresses of people who already have to much of it.
inflation will occur even if the mone
If UBI is not a solution, what is ? (Score:3)
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Robot-assisted Food Farms (Score:1)
The economy ( & cities) don't want or need people anymore.
So those people are "out to pasture" literally: they're peasant farmers.
So they use their UBI to group-buy farmable land (after all, the city doesn't want or need them), and they farm it.
As technology improves, their UBI buys & services robots that will do an increasing amount of the work.
It's the same premise of off-grid solar: use the system to leave the system.
Eventually as UBI and the economy implodes from its successfully putting no buyi
UBI won't impact inflation as much as tax cuts do (Score:3)
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
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The inflation is a result of the "U" in UBI. You're giving it to everyone, including the people who don't actually need it.
Really, if you wanted to avoid most of the inflationary problems inherent to UBI, you could just extend unemployment benefits indefinitely. Can't find a job? You get to collect your pittance so you don't starve. The question then becomes though, how many people would actually be happy living like that? Most of the ire against so-called government handouts is usually focused on anim
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I have yet to see a well thought out thesis on how UBI would work in a national scale. Minimally convincing the folks who are working for paychecks to agree to this plan which blah, blah, blah is "universal" but basically is taxing them to pay for others UBI would be quite a challenge. Current fiscal state of government also makes this a non-starter.
The problem as I see it is that the the AI-promotion machine is going to affect jobs well before the actual AI is capable of replacing those jobs. That leav
Yes it is. (Score:2)
If you want to prevent overbooking and greed on any resource still limited, ubi is the right way to go if 70%+ of everything else is post scarcity. UBI is a transitional thing until we get matter compilers. So it's actually a good thing in a situation that is 70%+ pure functioning Marxism.
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To add to this, the tech which would be used to fund the automation is currently making the vices and tech used to placate the UBI masses entirely unaffordable.
Real story (Score:3)
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 really cheaply, and it worked for decades. But the flow of low (or zero) interest capital you were funding your company with has dried up. Interest rates are higher, and the pool of investment capital that had flooded the markets for so long is moving to safer investments (because boomers are entering retirement) and because there's a lot of infrastructure spending eating up a lot of that investment, after the US slowed down outsourcing all manufacturing to China.
Now you have to stop spending so much. How do you cut spending but keep reassuring your investors and shareholders that you're still growing? Simple: Deus Ex Machina! Yes, we're laying off our tech people, but that's not because we're slowing down... it's because we're replacing them with AI. We're still producing as much output as we were before, but with fewer people. In fact, we're producing even more now!
Andrew Yang came from New York but he was definitely in the startup company scene. He hangs with these people. This is the kool-aid he's been drinking. But ask yourself... if it's all true and AI is so amazing, where are all the success stories? Where's the kid who created a competitor to Photoshop in his basement? Where's the actual vibe-coded AI-driven stock trading platform that some young finance guy created over a weekend? There are none and that's because it's all BS. If it were real, we'd be able to see the results.
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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.
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
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"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
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As though that has anything to do with AI.
AI is still just a tool, and while tools can certainly make work that was once difficult and/or tedious easier, that doesn't extrapolate to your work potentially having the same value as it did before the tool made it easier. I doubt the OP would've asked why drones haven't made everyone who owns one into a successful aerial videographer, or why chainsaws haven't resulted in successful lumberjacks as far as the eye can see.
Re: Real story (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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And I got tired of spending all day writing the same report every two weeks, so I also turned it into an Excel spreadsheet. Then rather than working up a full presentation of that report, I automated sending it to Word where it could be prettied up in under an hour. Once it got to that point, I was compelled to share it with everyone else but I had never intended to accommodate everyone else's workflow, and next thing I know, supporting the tool I developed for myself had become half my job.
And then the com
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)
Something big is happening (Score:2, Informative)
https://shumer.dev/something-b... [shumer.dev]
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You first Big Boy (Score:2)
Expect a corresponding 20% to 50% drop in sales (Score:2)
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)
A cure in search of a disease (Score:2)
The two slashdot posts after this one are:
* A rural newspaper finds AI automation saves reporters one day of work per week (20% productivity boost.)
* An EU survey shows AI boosts productivity an average of 4%.
The AI changes are coming slowly. Like past historical innovations, jobs are being lost, producivity is being boosted, and new jobs are being created. The sky is not falling.
Yang's UBI is a cure in search of a disease. He needs to greatly exaggerate the dangers of AI in order to sell his "cure". Whethe
A Challenge: when will AI improve the ER? (Score:2)
All over the continent, Emergency Rooms are backlogged and overworked. Doctors claim that paperwork steals a lot of their time, drags their efficiency.
And "medical paperwork" isn't about re-inventing a company, or building a new factory, or anything else that requires creativity and New Ideas: it's mostly the same 100-odd tasks over and over, the most, ah 'popular' diseases and injuries.
So doctors should be able to just do their medical treatments in an age of AI, narrate their day into a microphone as the
AI is just code for the next recession (Score:2)
2008? Subprime loans
2020? SARS-Cov2
2026? AI
It will all bounce back magically, just like every other time.
Consistent, at least (Score:2)
Yang has been consistently wrong - seemingly intentionally so - due to his personal ideals:
- Grossly understating the cost of UBI
- Strongly opposes automation due to job loss which was actually caused by offshoring and deindustrialization
- Claimed that Amazon pays zero in taxes (which, while at least directionally correct, also false).
- Saying UBI would create jobs (zero basis in what has happened, just feels)
- Consistently overstates how many jobs have been lost due to automation, because UBI
AI is no diffe
Based on viewing Youtube ... (Score:2)
Bill Gates is right - AI will destroy 100% of Microsoft jobs - it is well on the way already.
But companies providing decent goods and services will probably flourish if the competition is totally focused on flogging AI slop.