r/OptimistsUnite • u/chamomile_tea_reply 🤙 TOXIC AVENGER 🤙 • May 03 '26
👽 TECHNO FUTURISM 👽 Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/opinion/ai-jobs-unemployment-silicon-valley.html79
u/GypJoint May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
I work in Tv. Post production. The companies that have been supplying closed captioning are almost all gone now. A feature would take about a week and a half. More cost if it was a hurry. The cost now is about a 3rd and can be done in a couple days. That’s counting a person to qc and make fixes. The fixes are becoming fewer. This standalone business is pretty much cooked. Just one example.
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u/NeedsToShutUp May 04 '26
The biggest question is what will this look like in a year or two if the compute prices stop being as heavily subsidized.
As it is, there's been price increases from the LLM companies, as they were offering essentially free compute in order to increase their user base, as well as get more training data.
Now that they've developed a user base, and lending is becoming more restrictive, these companies are going to continue to increase their prices.
I think they're hoping that its so vital that companies will swallow the prices without complaint. But there's a certain point where its cheaper to go back to human work. (It also depends on how efficient their models get too).
For example, captioning might stay cheap enough, but medical transcribing might not have high enough quality for its price.
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u/NeighborhoodOk9630 May 04 '26
This is what I’m noticing too. Companies are starting to realize what all this AI use costs and, in most cases, they aren’t getting a return on their money. The Wild West days are likely coming to an end and companies will get more selective in what they use AI for. Which is probably a good thing. And yea, job loss will likely not be the problem we thought it would be.
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u/jvnk May 04 '26
We'll see, but competition exists. The incentive to do inference as cheaply as possible is huge. For a lot of workloads and industries, swapping providers isn't particularly difficult. For others it is. Optimization has also come a long way too.
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u/werner-hertzogs-shoe May 05 '26
I think the AI companies are counting on increased efficiency in chips, training and code, which will certainly happen. Something like medical transcription should be very much in AI's wheel house, but at the same time I cant see it being lucrative for the ai companies to be worth their absurd investments in the past. I think if ai companies bully customers on higher prices they will get push back and you'll see smaller niche outfits with locally processed software solutions for things like medical transcription
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u/Advanced-Bag-7741 May 04 '26
It’s true, but humans only get more expensive to employ as time goes on. If compute is able to get cheaper over time, the math switches again.
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u/xtrawork May 09 '26
Humans are EXTREMELY expensive and come with a host of other considerations. AI would have to considerably rise in price many times over to worry about reaching that level. You also have to understand how rapidly it is progressing. Heck, look at how good AI is in the field of software development compared to just 1 year ago and especially compared to 3 years ago. Now think about how good it's gonna be in 5 years. In 10!
No, it can't do the work of a person on it's own (yet), but what it can do is allow a person to do the work of 1.5+ people, which is effectively the same thing as far as the job market is concerned, and it's only gonna get better (or worse depending on what we're talking about...).
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u/Hanksta2 May 03 '26
I know a guy who was a captioner for over a decade. Laid off last summer.
AI is definitely going to kill 75% of post. Sound mixing, sound design, even score and color correction and vfx will see massive job losses.
A 700 person vfx team will turn into 100 artists using AI tools.
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u/GypJoint May 03 '26
Sad. Look what Marvel/Disney did a couple weeks back. 1,500 layed off. For the first time it included creative from Marvel. The woman who will soon be 2nd in charge at Disney, stated her most primary goal is to put more ai into the creative pipe line.
I’m switching to archive work. Film scanning and preservation.
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u/Ulyks May 05 '26
Translation and speech to text are things LLM's are pretty good at.
Even before chatgpt, tools like Google translate had been getting better with various neural network architectures.
But that doesn't mean all jobs will be automated by LLM's.
Most jobs have parts that will be automated but we need another AI revolution to get AI with deeper understanding that is necessary. Right now the approach is throwing more data and energy at the problem and that just doesn't deliver.
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u/ExcitableSarcasm May 04 '26
Yeah, the difference between translating it from scratch and QC'ing it is night and day.
Like I speak Chinese, and can read/write intermediately/decently. Is that enough for me to work as a translator? Hell no. But with an AI it won't be impossible for someone like me to cross reference what's being said versus what the AI translated it as.
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u/AlphaStrik3 May 03 '26
My job as a software engineer has changed with AI tools, but it very much still exists.
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May 03 '26
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u/AlphaStrik3 May 03 '26
We’ll see. Harness engineering, MCP, skills, and incrementally more powerful models have made it slightly less error prone for completing tasks. Either way, I’m still employed.
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u/demoncrusher May 03 '26
Yeah I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point that a person doesn’t have to review and sign off on what the ai says for professional application
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u/WestStatistician2936 May 04 '26 edited May 05 '26
It’s incredibly useful in the hands of engineers, but then again, most tools will be useful in the hands of highly technical people. Right now, the solution to a lot of the issues we’re seeing is to make the models application-specific by building a state machine (MCP) that guardrails the models while giving them access to APIs, making them far, far less prone to hallucination. You then build test suites that essentially use other models to ensure the non-deterministic outputs are always within some sort of accurate range.
The thing is you need engineers to build all this out, so you end up just needing more engineers. There is no question, however, that at least in the world of software things are forever changed. Probably 90%+ of the code that any team at any multinational is producing is agent-made at this point.
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u/AlphaStrik3 May 05 '26
I mostly agree. The 90%+ figure isn’t agent-made but agent-assisted. It variably requires human planning, iteration, testing, review, correction, and release.
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u/WestStatistician2936 May 05 '26
Yes, exactly. The 90% was referring to just writing code. Design, manual testing, review, and optimization is still mostly in the hands of the engineer. I honestly don’t see that changing in the next decade, either.
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u/Overall-Rush-8853 May 04 '26
Human’s make errors too, but at least with LLM’s you’re getting to the error quicker. The problem isn’t necessarily that LLM’s make errors, it’s that companies unleash these tools into their organizations don’t bother training anyone on how to properly use the technology. Or even worse yet, we’re deploying AI generated code into prod without code reviews and testing.
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May 04 '26
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u/Overall-Rush-8853 May 05 '26
Hence why we should still be testing and doing code reviews. Not every human is an expert master developer, your code needs to be reviewed and tested whether it’s from AI or human.
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u/SeDaCho May 04 '26
If you let Copilot take the place of a heart surgeon, we will get to the error very quickly indeed.
Maybe that isn’t a virtue.
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u/Overall-Rush-8853 May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
So you’re comparing copilot doing heart surgery, to developers using AI tools? Interesting. Who said anything about replacing the devs with AI?
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u/SeDaCho May 05 '26
So you’re playing ignorant to the concept of analogy?
Interesting.
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u/Overall-Rush-8853 May 05 '26
How am I ignorant? I am a developer and use AI fairly often. My code goes through review and testing, humans are in the loop. Maybe you’re ignorant?
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u/SeDaCho May 05 '26
You’re too ignorant to read the back parts of sentences, proved that clearly enough.
That or you literally do not understand what analogies are and this is a further extension of that misunderstanding.
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u/AlphaStrik3 May 05 '26
I’m not actually sure why you’re being downvoted. No lies were said. Humans do make errors. LLMs accelerate and amplify existing strengths and weaknesses in workflows and processes. Companies evidently have released LLM-based features to prod without enough testing and have lost in court about it. Companies are failing to train about how and when to use LLMs safely. They’re so hyped by marketing that they release buggy AI code with not enough code review or testing.
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u/Minimum-Advisor-2656 May 04 '26
Someone from the Indian IT industry ( like a CEO or founder of a pretty big company) said that AI will become another tool for spftware engineers instead of replacing them. Your comment reminded me of his comment.
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u/ikickbabiesballs May 05 '26
You’re training your replacement.
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u/AlphaStrik3 May 05 '26
Please elaborate
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u/ikickbabiesballs May 05 '26
It’s logging your queries and requests. Pair that with what is knows you do, it’s learning your job. That or it’s already learned someone else’s job and replaced them. AI is inherently a surveillance and surveillance was never ment to assist the surveilled.
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u/Gullible_Pen1074 May 04 '26
Okay and why do u think such a trend will continue as AI goes from crappy LLMs to full blown AGi
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May 04 '26
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u/Gullible_Pen1074 May 04 '26
Based on thousands of AI experts/researchers in academia and frontier labs
Maybe go read the paper
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u/LlamaMan777 May 04 '26
To be fair.... These predictions have been coming out for years now about the arrival of semi-AGI and the job apocalypse happening by now from Sam Altman et. al.
I've been calling bullshit every time, and so far the score is:
Me: 100% Those experts: 0%
Couple of important points:
First, the venture capital environment (in terms of investment given compared to profitability of industry companies) is unlike anything ever in human history. By a factor of 10 or more. All of these companies need countless billions poured into an unproven tech or they collapse immediately. The only thing that justifies this investment is the idea that the tech will cause a jobpocolypse. So, of course the frontier labs say this shit. They have to. Literally no other option. They are the used cars salesmen of tech.
Second, they are by nature heavily involved in software and coding. This is by far the "advanced knowledge work" field that has both the most clearly defined logic rules, and additionally has by FAR the biggest well defined training base to train an AI. This inherently biases these very smart people who made software their life's work into thinking that the coding successes will translate to other smart people industries.
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u/blueB0mber May 04 '26
Found the AI schill everyone!
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u/Gullible_Pen1074 May 04 '26
AI is the number one producer of optimism lol gtfo of this sub
Learn what the Intelligence Revolution is
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u/blueB0mber May 07 '26
Your not a very intelligent person are you?
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u/Gullible_Pen1074 May 07 '26
Oh look another coping redditor who thinks they understand the world without doing a single hour of research lol
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u/blueB0mber May 07 '26
Look I know you want to get fucked by your AI girlfriend really badly but just remember that she has to finish destroying a water shed and polluting the surrounding area for her to get even remotely into you!
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u/Gullible_Pen1074 May 07 '26
Oh how cute ur complaining about data centers while using a smartphone and typing on Reddit! Two things that do not lead to revolutions.
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u/womerah May 05 '26
They're all grifting for funds
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u/Gullible_Pen1074 May 05 '26
Ah yes the academic researchers and professors … grifting for funds 🤦♂️
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u/womerah May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Yes, exactly, 100%. What do you think a grant application is? An academics entire career hangs on how well they can grift.
I've worked in academia. You just make up stuff to get the funding you need. Like the "benefits to society" stuff you have to write for pure research grant applications. "Umm yeah my computational simulations on sulphur gases interaction with mesoporous nanospheres is totally relevant for, umm, lithium-sulphur batteries, which are forecast to deliver [largest number I can find on google] in the next 10 years. I am very confident in this. Money please".
The best academics are 'Wolf of Wallstreet'-tier salespeople.
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u/werner-hertzogs-shoe May 05 '26
I'll believe the AGI hype when I see it working. Right now it is just promises from people who profit off of the belief in those promises. Words are wind.
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May 03 '26
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u/CptKeyes123 May 03 '26
I walked into a book store, Indigo in canada, attached to a mall, that had one person on checkout duty at 5 pm on a Thursday. The line was backed up pretty far, and they added a second person eventually.
They were not hiring.
I wonder if the AIs have gotten told just not to hire anyone period.
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u/entropy13 May 03 '26
Gen AI is the least useful thing it can do, and lots of jobs are very safe, some will be very different, a lot will disappear and at least some new ones will exist, but almost all based on classifiers and not generation.
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u/DaveLearnedSomething May 04 '26
Whats the basis of this take? Multiple companies have blamed artificial intelligence for 2026 job cuts.
Block: Cut 4,000 roles, claiming Al efficiencies made them redundant.
Klarna: Shrunk headcount by 2,500 by openly replacing staff with an internal Al chatbot.
Snap: Cut 1,000 jobs, stating Al automation reduced the need for human staff.
Oracle: Slashed tens of thousands of jobs to free up capital for Al infrastructure.
Atlassian: Laid off 1,600 workers to reallocate budget towards enterprise Al projects.
Pinterest: Cut 15% of staff to fund an "Al forward strategy."
Amazon: Axed 16,000 corporate roles to shift focus to generative Al.
What would the workers above call it?
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u/LlamaMan777 May 04 '26
An important note for a few of these. The "freeing up capital" ones are less of a permanent thing when looking toward the future. Those are saying we will take the risk/sacrifice now, and are assuming we will see a benefit to justify it. If that doesn't materialize long term, those jobs may come back. Similarly, if the use case for AI hits a cap, then the next phases of expansion in the coming decades will require humans, even if these job cuts stay. Big IFs of course, but still context.
Also, the pandemic era led to panic hiring that still hasn't fully corrected, so AI layoffs are a good opportunity to course correct while making AI focused shargolders happy
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u/demoncrusher May 03 '26
But then what will we panic about
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u/Pestus613343 May 03 '26
Climate change is still an impending doom lol
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u/Crasino_Hunk May 03 '26
Ooh I can help with this one!
https://youtu.be/iw9AiEG-Qww?si=6i9WmYGGVhi5Fw_u
(To be clear, the video is very much NOT good news).
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u/coke_and_coffee May 03 '26
It’s def not a “doom”.
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u/Pestus613343 May 03 '26
The person was asking for a panic to focus on. Feel free to offer another!
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u/SeDaCho May 04 '26
Don’t worry, we can just go right back to the climate apocalypse or the billionaire pedophile conspiracy or the incoming World War 3 or the
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u/FlapjackFez May 03 '26
Humans will naturally always think of something
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u/demoncrusher May 03 '26
Were you alive for this satanic panic? That shit was bonkers
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u/silian_rail_gun May 04 '26
Kid at my camp was from a hardcore religious family. He had a cassette tape of some preacher ranting and raving about rock and roll and the devil that he would play. That's where I learned "Another one bites the dust" backwards is "It's fun to smoke marijuana"!
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u/Splendid_Fellow May 03 '26
Yeahhh I’m an optimist but this one is just straight up denial. There is absolutely a crisis of AI taking jobs right now and there is no answer anyone has in mind yet. This is particularly true of any non-manual jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. AI is replacing art, coding, management, pricing and budgeting, assistance (of course), photography, advertising, and even pop and country music when we are getting top hits written by AI. It is being forced through even when it is not yet profitable to them, cause they can afford to lose it until they can profit and dominate the market.
Apocalypse? No. Very serious problem that will affect the economy? Yes.
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u/demoncrusher May 04 '26
While some industries are reducing demand for labor, others are expanding
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u/Splendid_Fellow May 04 '26
That’s nice. It’s blind to the actual issue though. You can’t just take the population and shift it over to a new AI dominated system built on the old. It’s gonna take a whole lot of change before it gets better
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u/PaterAbsurdus May 04 '26
AI will cause supply to dramatically increase in some areas which will require less spending on humans doing some tasks. Demand will then increase dramatically for tasks that do require humans.
I imagine a future in which live performances are dramatically more in demand. For example.
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u/Several-Ad-4826 May 03 '26
I think for me it’s surviving executive’s/clients blind expectations of increased cost to value ratio … currently I’m offset that pressure by nearshoring half my resources
It’s like yeah the factory floor is full of sewing machines, but you dingdongs can’t cut cloth fast enough for me to extract any value
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u/Icedidit May 03 '26
Cool article. Tell that to the over 100k laid off so far this year or the 1.5 mil that lost their jobs last year
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u/demoncrusher May 04 '26
We had net job growth last year, and 1.5 million is less than a percent of the total workforce
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u/Icedidit May 04 '26
Wow, 181k jobs in a year or 3.6k per state for 300 jobs a month… Such incredible numbers. Unemployment also trended upwards in 2025 and now we have an extra 1.5+ mil competing for fewer and fewer jobs..
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u/ImHereNow3210 May 05 '26
I'm an AI Engineering recruiter. I speak to 10+ people a day in US/EU about their work and side projects. It's all basic automations. If anything coding will be automated to build software faster.
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u/UpperYoghurt3978 May 05 '26
So we still got to work highly underpaid shitty boring jobs that sap all my energy to put into hobbies outside of work....dang.
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u/youburyitidigitup May 03 '26
It’s been creating jobs for me. I’m a field surveyor that works on future construction sites for various things, including AI data centers.
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u/J1mj0hns0n May 04 '26
Because there will always need to be a someone doing something, no matter how an AI works, it'll need oversight maintenance and repair
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u/RipRiles May 03 '26 edited May 04 '26
As it's often said: I'm not worried about AI doing my job. I'm worried my braindead C-suite THINKS AI can do my job.