Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
blltprfmnk | on: America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy. That may change in time, but we aren’t seeing massive losses as a result of AI, despite some C suites using that as an excuse to lay off after over hiring.

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-re...

esafak | parent | next
Change comes slowly, then all at once.
jasomill | root | parent | next
Sometimes. And often in unanticipated directions.
card_zero | root | parent
So for instance like if AI becomes slowly less relevant, then is discarded all at once. Change will be surprising! That much is likely.
groundzeros2015 | root | parent | next
I'm a pretty big AI skeptic, but can't get behind this comment.

It is changing the economy. It is changing how work is done. We are not going back, even if the emphasis in the workplace and role it performs matures.

card_zero | root | parent
"Matures", like fades into the background. That's kind of the null hypothesis.

I'm not making a serious prediction that it will go away! I'm making an anti-prediction against the reflexive assumption of a massive increase in importance, to say that for all any would-be oracle knows, we could get the opposite, just as easily as their fortune-telling.

adrianN | root | parent
I'm still patiently waiting for this whole "Internet" thing to become less relevant too. It surely is just a fad with no economic benefits.
shruggedatlas | parent | next
This is my first time seeing this publication. It was insightful -- thank you for sharing.
georgemcbay | parent | next
> Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy.

Economists (including but not limited to Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Arthur Levitt) also spent a decade arguing against Brooksley Born's 1998 warnings that unregulated over-the-counter derivatives would inevitably lead to a financial crisis.

Economists can be spectacularly wrong and short-sighted (and blinded by prior assumptions of how things work) until suddenly the thing that should have been obvious the whole time is no longer ignorable.

blltprfmnk | root | parent | next
You are talking about ignoring predictions. I am talking about measured effects. There are lots of people commenting here about massive disruption they believe has occurred, and although things have certainly been disrupted so far it hasn’t been measurable at an macroeconomic level, at least to the degree people here are claiming. It appears any effect is within the noise, although certainly on the scale of a certain industry it might have had impacts (eg on hiring new college grads for software engineering positions).

The supposed massive GDP growth and jobs losses just aren’t there at this time, whatever the future may bring.

jasomill | root | parent
True. But it's also true that "the thing that should have been obvious the whole time" may turn out not to be so obvious after all. For example, the inevitability of poor working conditions leading to a worldwide socialist revolution and the collapse of capitalism.
WalterBright | root | parent
The economies that have collapsed are the socialist ones.
rylando | parent
Breaking news, frog in pot says water isn’t too hot yet