I've seen it affecting in a few ways: Less customer service employees at call centers, replaced by lengthy, egregiously pedantic AI systems. Some fast food places are replacing employees with an AI drive through. I've also seen AI health coaching services that removes the dietitian/nutritionist/health coach from the equation. Not quite AI, but getting there, are the self checkouts slowly replacing front line cashiers, etc.
So I think it is affecting the job market, but not in the white collar, higher paying jobs that people tend to notice.
overfeed 2 hours ago [-]
> Not quite AI, but getting there, are the self checkouts slowly replacing front line cashiers, etc.
There's some AI involved at some retailers - I bought 2 identical items and the second wouldn't scan at the self checkout, so I grabbed the first item and scanned it again, and the camera-watching, object-detection system threw a fit (and played back the video of me). I had to call a human to complete my purchase. My suspicion is it is smart enough to detect that I moved an "unscanned" item from my basket item into the bagging area, but not smart enough to figure out I wasn't trying to cheat.
bojan 2 hours ago [-]
That sounds dystopic and I'm not sure it'd even be legal where I live.
Here they simply have a + button so you can set the amount of the item. No need to scan all of them.
zerr 3 hours ago [-]
It's a horrible tendence. The first thing I ask to such AI customer service chats is to let me speak with a real human.
wombatpm 2 hours ago [-]
Walgreens is really pushing the AI phone system these days. It lies and says it can handle most requests, which I make and it tries to pawn me off on the website. The website which I had already been to, which recommended I speak with a pharmacist. I swear by the time it’s passed my call through it sounds like exasperated when it says “Just so you know, the pharmacy is open. . . .”
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
> Less customer service employees at call centers, replaced by lengthy, egregiously pedantic AI systems.
Is this actually worse than being on hold forever to talk to someone following a script?
> Some fast food places are replacing employees with an AI drive through.
What, as in it transcribes your order with Whisper and tries to upsell you through ChatGPT? One more reason I'm glad not to have a car-centric lifestyle, I guess. The kiosks inside the store might be vibe-coded now but at least I get a traditional UI that lets me specify things directly (even if the kitchen staff will ignore most requested customizations).
themafia 3 hours ago [-]
> Is this actually worse than being on hold forever to talk to someone following a script?
Yes. It means that common or sudden issues with the provider are not understood internally and huge amounts of customer time becomes wasted on a system with an out of date understanding of the service.
> as in it transcribes your order with Whisper and tries to upsell you through ChatGPT
> One more reason I'm glad not to have a car-centric lifestyle
I'm always amazed at this logic. It makes me wonder if you either have an incredible amount of free time or you don't rely on any service provided to you with a vehicle, or are you just not considering them when pondering this way openly?
> at least I get a traditional UI
That has almost no accessibility for the disabled or has accessible functionality that's terribly tacked on as an afterthought.
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
> I'm always amazed at this logic. It makes me wonder if you either have an incredible amount of free time or you don't rely on any service provided to you with a vehicle, or are you just not considering them when pondering this way openly?
Not really sure what you're getting at. Yes, I would get in an ambulance, or even a taxi, if I really needed one. That's not what "not car-centric" is about. No, I don't need things delivered to me and I don't need a car to access goods and services. I don't buy a lot in the first place; public transit works acceptably here; I'm capable of walking several km (and I'd spend the time on other forms of exercise otherwise); I mostly cook my own meals.
And there are parts of the world where public transit is actually good and it's often rational to take it even if trip time is your only consideration.
> That has almost no accessibility for the disabled or has accessible functionality that's terribly tacked on as an afterthought.
Yes, I didn't say it was good. But you can also still just talk to a cashier at the front counter here.
themafia 1 hours ago [-]
I was being a bit of a harsh hipster there; however, I always think about the sheer number of vehicles required just to keep your electricity or high speed internet running and how often I see that type of vehicle in a drive through. I think it's sometimes a little easy to forget why our lives are as convenient as they are.
semi-extrinsic 3 hours ago [-]
> > One more reason I'm glad not to have a car-centric lifestyle
> I'm always amazed at this logic.
Not OP and maybe it's just my European showing, but I own a brand-new car yet frequently go 4-5 days without actually driving it. Because going to work and dropping off kids at daycare using a bicycle is literally faster than doing it in a car.
cryptonector 1 hours ago [-]
> replaced by lengthy, egregiously pedantic AI systems.
Don't forget hallucinating too.
beepbooptheory 3 hours ago [-]
What is AI providing in the drive through situation? It just feels to me like much of this is "AI" in the business buzz sense, not generative LLMs or whatever doing any kind of work. Like, we have all been struggling with call center "AI" for a long time before this, I personally have not experienced an LLM chatbot call, but plenty of things asking me "is this information correct?"
Like how would some of this even work in reality? Can you go through those drive throughs and ask it to recite a sonnet about chicken nuggets? Clearly no, but then it begs the question of what the idea, the purported advance, even is here with much of this. Like we have had relatively advanced speech recognition for a while, I don't see the added utility or need of being able to go through the drive through and saying: "the number of hotdogs I want is a prime number that is more than 2 but less than 5."
It just feels so clearly silly if you stop and think about it for two seconds. So many hammers, not enough nails... We are just banging at walls at this point.
lukevp 3 hours ago [-]
“I’d like 2 cheeseburgers, and 4 fries. No mayo or mustard. Actually make one of them a double, and one with bacon. Oh how much if I make the first a combo?”
You think this conversation could be handled with the tech of 4 years ago? Siri can’t even turn off the lights and tell me a joke in the same request. Humans do not deliver all information in order (eg. The all the instructions refer to the burgers not the fries, but you only know that because you understand the essential nature of fries and what they typically include). That’s what AI in the drive thru is for.
fluoridation 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure current tech could reliably take that order, honestly. There's essentially 0 chance it would try to disambiguate the meaning of "one of them", and from there it's a tossup whether you'll get a double cheeseburger, a double box of fries, or double mayo.
MontyCarloHall 9 minutes ago [-]
Current tech is pretty dang close. I gave the order to ChatGPT and it parsed it almost perfectly [0], even handling the ambiguity about what happens if you add a combo to an order that already includes several fries à la carte. The only thing it missed is that I didn't actually order the combo (but merely want to know how much the upgrade is), but I'm sure some fine-tuning could solve that. (Come to think of it, a fast food restaurant would consider this implicit upsell as a feature.)
The main challenge AI would face is people who come by at 3 AM drunk and stoned, indecisively slurring through their order, but I imagine there'd be a system to redirect these edge cases to an actual human.
It can't. Not reliably. I think every major chain that was trying it has ripped it out.
It'll definitely be a thing within 5 years, max, but it's not mature enough for production yet
kilroy123 8 minutes ago [-]
To be fair, this would trip up a lot of _humans_ as well.
echelon 3 hours ago [-]
I work in the media space. AI is absolutely ripping through film, TV, and advertising.
Several medium sized studios I've talked with are bidding $50k for projects (eg. Netflix, HBO, Proctor & Gamble are typical clients) they used to bid $400k on, and they're winning more contracts. They don't need to shoot in person in Venice for pharma ads or animate elaborate TV show intros anymore.
This is having a huge impact to the fundamentals of how they do business. They haven't laid anyone off yet, but they're talking about the ramifications if this gets cheaper.
bob1029 3 hours ago [-]
Have these studios actually shipped any of their projects to their customers yet? Do we have feedback from a quality perspective?
It's quite easy to promise dirt cheap services and get paperwork signed.
echelon 1 hours ago [-]
Yes. You wouldn't recognize them as AI.
These studios are doing a lot of roto and comp work. It's highly touched up and edited.
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
> Do we have feedback from a quality perspective?
... Have you watched YouTube (without attempting first-party ad blocking) recently? The ads created with AI are pretty obvious, and pretty bad.
ortusdux 3 hours ago [-]
Many people think all plastic surgery looks bad because, by definition, you don't notice the good examples.
zahlman 2 hours ago [-]
Even if every ad on YouTube were AI-generated now, there would be enough bad examples for me to be negative on the entire idea.
ortusdux 41 minutes ago [-]
There is tons of bad CGI, but that hasn't stopped its near universal adoption.
echelon 1 hours ago [-]
You're not the customer.
Also, if the viewer doesn't recognize or care, then it's a moot point.
Loughla 3 hours ago [-]
My local news has started using AI bullshit they would've used B roll for in the past. And it's obvious. And it's very jarring.
IMSAI8080 3 hours ago [-]
What component of the production process is the AI being used for? Is AI video now good enough for green screen backgrounds or something like that?
rcxdude 3 hours ago [-]
It's very powerful for various parts of VFX workflows. It's not gonna just be a full prompted shot, but more a means of creating and manipulating smaller elements in a shot with much less manual labor than before.
ToucanLoucan 3 hours ago [-]
I can't speak for the industry side but as a consumer, I've noticed many cable TV ads in hotel rooms now are clearly using AI generated video. It looks like shit.
This is going to be the "bad chromakey" of this particular time period in terms of weirdly prolific visuals in media. Or if you prefer, the ads you used to see on late-night TV that were clearly broadcast from a poor quality VHS.
Cheap bullshit has always hung around our media apparatus, and it's just that: cheap bullshit. Tbh I just note it in the same way I've always done: well, that's a company I'm going to avoid doing business with if at all possible.
IMSAI8080 3 hours ago [-]
Now you mention it, I can see there's a lot of demand for very cheap video ads on YouTube and such and I can see those kind of productions using AI slop and not really caring. I was just surprised by the calibre of client the poster above mentioned, such as HBO and Netflix and such. That sounded more like AI video making an impact in higher class professional work.
ToucanLoucan 2 hours ago [-]
I mean I'm sure they would LIKE to use AI. What sane company wouldn't explore the possibility? That said I think any serious creative team is going to run into headaches with it really, really quickly and give up on it.
alehlopeh 3 hours ago [-]
What are they doing with AI instead of eg. shooting in person in Venice?
3 hours ago [-]
MontyCarloHall 3 hours ago [-]
>Several medium sized studios […] don't need to animate elaborate TV show intros anymore.
What projects are these studios doing for HBO? Its shows generally have high enough production value that AI slop in intros would be a no-no (unless this has dramatically changed under Zaslav's leadership).
immibis 3 hours ago [-]
I once called a hotel. A suspiciously regular voice answered. I asked if it was a machine. It said yes, it's [AI marketing bullshit here]. I asked if it had a room. It said no, because it's [AI BS] and doesn't need a physical presence such as a room. I hung up and called another hotel.
freedomben 5 hours ago [-]
A couple of things. I'm not disputing the findings here, but I do think there are some caveats to be aware of.
Firstly, this doesn't seem to differentiate between fields/industries. It's entirely possible for AI to devastate a particular segment (like graphic design or software dev, etc) while still appearing low-impact on the overall.
Secondly,
> "Businesses reported a notable increase in AI use over the past year, yet very few firms reported AI-induced layoffs," New York Fed economists wrote in the blog.
Is this only relying on self-reporting? What company wants to be the lightning rod who comes out and says, "we laid off a bunch of people and replaced with AI"? Maybe for huge public companies that can't fudge it this would be ok, but relying on self-reports comes with an inherent risk of bias
missedthecue 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think AI is actively laying people off by replacing entire roles, but I think it is preventing hires that would have happened. In terms of employment figures, this can have a similar effect.
I'm in a small growing tech company and I can say as a matter of fact that in a world without AI we would have made several hires in the past 18 months. Because of LLMs and agents my team doesn't have the need to bring more people in. It's as simple as that.
physix 3 hours ago [-]
That's right. As a tech company, we can now do more with the people we have.
arthurcolle 5 hours ago [-]
Marc Benioff at Salesforce is saying exactly this
And Brian Armstrong at Coinbase
kevsim 5 hours ago [-]
Exactly. If they just lay people off, that's just cost cutting, and potentially seen as a bad sign. If they're saying they're laying people off because they're replacing them with AI, then they're innovative!
hobs 5 hours ago [-]
The question is how does the product outlook appear? Most large companies do layoffs constantly to appease investors and nobody blinks twice, why would they care if you made the P&L even better if it doesn't degrade the product in their eyes?
wombatpm 2 hours ago [-]
I really think layoffs and stock buybacks within 12 months of each other should be prohibited, if not downright make stock buybacks illegal. Have extra capital? Then pay a dividend.
arealaccount 8 minutes ago [-]
Would they be allowed to pay a dividend within 12 months of a layoff?
throwaway29812 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ericmcer 4 hours ago [-]
They aren't replacing people directly though, like an AI can't fill a seat that a person used to. The claim seems to be that individuals are more productive now so less people are needed.
Measuring productivity has been attempted by every big tech co. and has never really had amazing results. So to claim they can lay off 1,000 people because of "AI" means they must have measured some % increase in individual productivity and know they can function with less people.
Or it's just a big excuse to cut low performers and compensate for overhiring.
InsideOutSanta 4 hours ago [-]
> What company wants to be the lightning rod who comes out and says, "we laid off a bunch of people and replaced with AI"?
Isn't that precisely what all publicly traded companies want to say, and are often saying? I feel like I read a new headline of some sociopathic CEO bragging about how many people he managed to lay off thanks to AI every day.
MarkusQ 5 hours ago [-]
There are two levels here. It isn't affecting the actual job market (what the Fed's talking about), but it's having a huge impact on the narratives surrounding it and the pipelines feeding into it (e.g. resume spamming and slush pipe filtering).
Best as I can tell, and I'm just some guy, is there is a real problem with the job market, not just in the US. AI is mainly interesting for the media to report on and hype for CEOs and the kind of MBA airheads no one with any self respect should pay attention to. It's a fairly cool search, synthesis and retrieval tool with real value but it's not as impactful as 'thoughtleaders' want us to believe.
In the US as elsewhere it's a combination of factors, COVID overhiring and inflation, interest rates going up, market concentration and, US specific, the since Trump-reversed Trump-imposed tax changes. While this reversal probably helps the job market some in the immediate term the indicators of the fundamentals are flashing red everywhere and outside of the US it all just continues to be part of the same Omnirecession since 2008.
sheepscreek 2 hours ago [-]
AI may not affect tech jobs in NYC and other marquee locations and big city hubs in the near future. We could see a trend of smaller office locations get shuttered, and more people asked to relocate to major hubs/HQs. So I can understand the picture in NYC.
But if they’re talking about New York state as a whole, then I’d question their data/or inference. Companies in the area haven’t hired much in the last couple of years. Now we’ve got more layoff pressure on top of the non-existent hiring. The other day, Mark Benioff (Salesforce CEO) very clearly said on TV that his main problem is that he “need(s) fewer heads”.
Edit: Lightly updated my outlook to sound less decisive because I don’t really know anymore. So much is up in the air. Policy decisions at the government level could alter how it all plays out.
itqwertz 5 hours ago [-]
The AI hype seems to be a smokescreen for mass layoffs from the CoVid era. The increased attention on the H-1B visa’s hiring process and labor market impact reveals a far more underreported and significant contributor to job shortages. Also, a lot of these companies have existed way longer than they should have.
Be happy you’re not employed in tech course content creation or something that is directly replaceable TODAY, like language translation or low-level graphic design.
notahacker 5 hours ago [-]
> The AI hype seems to be a smokescreen for mass layoffs from the CoVid era
This. Better to tell markets "we can now downsize our workforce due to incredible efficiencies achieved by our AI initiative" than "we hired too many people, grew slower than expected and now we're making cuts"
oytis 4 hours ago [-]
Covid overhiring was quite a while ago, surely it has been long corrected?
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
As far as I can tell, it didn't start causing problems until the piper had to be paid (in the form of interest rate hikes), and even then probably a lot of businesses had a fair amount of runway.
j45 4 hours ago [-]
One way I had it explained to me (may be different now).. H-1B's are often a way of getting willing candidates who are overqualified to work tons of extra hours for years compared to other options.
the_real_cher 4 hours ago [-]
My anecdata is that all the ones I've worked with have been underqualified, not saying all are, but Indian managers primarily hire Indian staff.
j45 2 hours ago [-]
Fair they may be underqualified. Overworked probably.
underlipton 4 hours ago [-]
A little tinfoil birdie told me that even the Covid era itself (and the resultant mass layoffs during, mass hiring following, and mass layoffs following that) were a smokescreen for (bond?) market instability. I personally tend to think that both were more of a, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste," situation.
Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.
Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy, personnel you totally need in order to build a metaverse or whatever.
Money ran out + overleveraging during the boom + market changes caused by the rapid socioeconomic shifts (e.g., commercial real estate tanking)? You can cover the bottom line for now with a lot of firing and consolidation, say it's AI's fault.
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
> A little tinfoil birdie told me
I appreciate your willingness to consider possibilities like this, but I think it really is tinfoil in this case.
> Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.
This gets cause and effect wrong. Wikipedia reminds:
> The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, and first referred to it as a pandemic on 11 March 2020.[3][4]
Markets were doing well in Jan 2020 until people started noticing the case numbers and speculating about the WHO's judgement. They were on a bull run before that — up almost 29% in the 2019 calendar year — which was largely a recovery from problems at the end of 2018.
So the market was only hiccuping because of existing panic over the pandemic (including people reasonably pricing in risk that pandemic would be officially declared; the "social distancing" policies and business closures were quite telegraphed).
> Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy
This is just naturally what would happen.
> Money ran out
It's more that people started devaluing money because of how much was printed, so interest rates were controlled to avoid a hyperinflationary spiral. It could have gone much worse (see: early 70s until early 80s). Powell did an impressive job to engineer the desired "soft landing", but I personally was surprised and displeased that they waited that long to reach for the brakes. (It came across that there was a reluctance to trust early vague inflation signals, despite what should have been a high prior on their correctness given recent policy.)
immibis 2 hours ago [-]
Markets hiccuped because they were already running too close to the red line. Good markets can rake disruption, rebalancing rather than crashing the entire thing.
muldvarp 5 hours ago [-]
If AI with the current capabilities and within this short timeframe would have already had a big impact on the labor market, we'd be in big trouble.
5 hours ago [-]
disillusionist 5 hours ago [-]
i can only speak to my personal experiences and not the entire "Job Market" but i have seen qualified, competent team members let go during "positive transformations" and expectations that their workload will be covered by others while corporate crows about how using AI will be such a force multiplier for those who remain.
> Salesforce forecast third-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Wednesday, signaling lagging monetization for its highly-touted artificial intelligence agent platform as clients dial back spending due to macroeconomic uncertainty.
> The cloud software provider also announced a $20 billion increase to its existing share buyback program, but that was unable to allay investors' concerns, sending Salesforce's shares down over 5% in extended trading.
throwaway29812 5 hours ago [-]
I seem to recall a vague statement about AI doing half of his company's work, which was never really defined either.
Salesforce revenue growth has decelerated from ~24% in FY 2021 to just over 8% for the trailing 12 months.
A company that was tuned to double revenue in 3 years transforming in one expecting to double in 9 years is definitely carrying too many people. It made sense for them to reduce headcount to align with their much slower growth curve.
Side note: Benioff also said earlier this year that they were done hiring programmers because AI. I'll let their careers page put the lie to that.
visarga 2 hours ago [-]
Companies can choose to reduce costs by firing people, or to improve outcomes using both humans and AI. When they fire people they are saying they have no idea what to do with them. But people have AI too, we are no worse than AI.
11101010001100 3 hours ago [-]
Benioff is making the same bet uber did with self driving cars, maybe this time it will be different?
josho 5 hours ago [-]
4k jobs across the economy is far less than random variation in the stats.
Salesforce reduced their headcount in 2023 by 8-10%. Another reduction by 5% attributed solely to AI could be a half truth and the reality could simply be Salesforce driving an efficiency agenda.
Personally, I believe it will take a few more years for systems to be built. Once those systems are in place, then headcount reductions are going to come fast and wide. Or putting it simply think of it as exponential growth. Currently AI job displacements are small, but it's growing, and will continue accelerating in its growth.
fkyoureadthedoc 4 hours ago [-]
shame, because what he really needed was fewer heads
atleastoptimal 4 hours ago [-]
There seems to be wishful thinking on HN where people seem very biased in general against any article that claims AI is taking jobs, and supportive by default of any article that claims it isn't. For some reason many people just refuse to accept that AI could even just be one of many reasons leading to job loss.
causal 4 hours ago [-]
You're absolutely right about the HN bias, but we're also a crowd with a lot of experience in some of the jobs supposedly being replaced and with the tools supposedly replacing us, and it's a little hard to buy.
The data about new grads not being hired isn't lying, but if AI is to blame we should be seeing a flood of data and stories on how roles X, Y and Z were obliterated by AI. But I have yet to see a single solid example, so I find it hard to believe it's a massive shift.
If anything, I would expect AI to be replacing older, expensive workers with young, tech-savvy workers who can put the AI to use. But that is clearly not the case.
physix 4 hours ago [-]
Well, this one isn't that rosy
> The New York Fed blog noted that the modest impact on jobs so far may not hold in the future. "Looking ahead, firms anticipate more significant layoffs and scaled-back hiring as they continue to integrate AI into their operations," New York Fed researchers wrote.
spongebobstoes 4 hours ago [-]
can you share some of the evidence showing that AI has caused job loss? I haven't seen any
cyanydeez 4 hours ago [-]
especially when theres reports that suggest only 5% of businesses have leveraged AI for value.
The "AI revolution" seems as a cover story for covid related job cuts and likely includes losses stemming from over investing in AI supplements.
But regardless, real business data is nigh impossible to penetrate because private business is now a first class citizens and the rest of us are at it's mercies.
ivewonyoung 4 hours ago [-]
The best indication I've seen so far is the the study and discussion in the linked article in this HN post[1].
At least in western Europe it doesn’t look like ai is taking over anything. Maybe in the US it is different
FirmwareBurner 4 hours ago [-]
EU doesn't have the fixed number cap that H1Bs have in the US, so they can hire unlimited people from abroad to suppress wages, no need for AI.
j45 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe not that they can see?
Technology of any kind evolves all societies.
oceanplexian 4 hours ago [-]
Expecting the Fed to know anything about AI would be like asking your pet dog to express his opinions on astrophysics.
g42gregory 6 hours ago [-]
Same people who say inflation is under control?
chad_strategic 5 hours ago [-]
The same people who didn't see the financial crisis of 2008.
daveguy 5 hours ago [-]
They very specifically say inflation is not "under control" which is why they have not lowered interest rates recently. It was almost under control until Trumpty Dumpty started his corrupt monkey wrenching with tariffs.
g42gregory 5 hours ago [-]
As I recall, they were saying the inflation was under control 2019-2024, during which real inflation was around 40% (not annual but aggregate for 4 years).
recursive 3 hours ago [-]
2019 to 2024 is five years, not four.
Not sure if the 40% is real, but if so, it annualizes to 6.96% across five years. I don't know if that's considered high or not.
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
> I don't know if that's considered high or not.
The target has been a 2% long-term average (although there has been recent language indicating a shift towards "just try for 2% going forward"). It peaked at something like 9%, which hadn't been seen in decades. Nothing compared to e.g. Weimar Germany, Brazil circa 1990, or even modern-day Argentina; but undesirable and concerning.
dgfitz 3 hours ago [-]
If we’re being pedantic, it’s actually somewhere between 4 years and 2 days, to 5 years and 364 days, 2024 was a leap year.
I sure don’t feel like I added anything to the discussion. Do you?
daveguy 5 hours ago [-]
Not sure if you don't know the difference between say and said or that inflation is measured as a yearly rate and not aggregate. Maybe a language barrier issue. 2019 and 2020 inflation was under 2% (target) each year. I agree with Elizabeth Warren and most other observers that they were late to raise interest rates. But they did start raising interest rates in early 2022 (but later and slower than they should have -- peaked early 2023). Regardless, have a great day!
4 hours ago [-]
5 hours ago [-]
deadbabe 4 hours ago [-]
AI hasn’t don’t anything. It hasn’t eliminated jobs. It hasn’t increased revenues. It’s just another shiny toy for people to play with and buy some mental laziness. It’s a nothing technology, empty calories.
Rendered at 23:45:42 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
So I think it is affecting the job market, but not in the white collar, higher paying jobs that people tend to notice.
There's some AI involved at some retailers - I bought 2 identical items and the second wouldn't scan at the self checkout, so I grabbed the first item and scanned it again, and the camera-watching, object-detection system threw a fit (and played back the video of me). I had to call a human to complete my purchase. My suspicion is it is smart enough to detect that I moved an "unscanned" item from my basket item into the bagging area, but not smart enough to figure out I wasn't trying to cheat.
Here they simply have a + button so you can set the amount of the item. No need to scan all of them.
Is this actually worse than being on hold forever to talk to someone following a script?
> Some fast food places are replacing employees with an AI drive through.
What, as in it transcribes your order with Whisper and tries to upsell you through ChatGPT? One more reason I'm glad not to have a car-centric lifestyle, I guess. The kiosks inside the store might be vibe-coded now but at least I get a traditional UI that lets me specify things directly (even if the kitchen staff will ignore most requested customizations).
Yes. It means that common or sudden issues with the provider are not understood internally and huge amounts of customer time becomes wasted on a system with an out of date understanding of the service.
> as in it transcribes your order with Whisper and tries to upsell you through ChatGPT
Essentially. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfz2EtWWPcQ
> One more reason I'm glad not to have a car-centric lifestyle
I'm always amazed at this logic. It makes me wonder if you either have an incredible amount of free time or you don't rely on any service provided to you with a vehicle, or are you just not considering them when pondering this way openly?
> at least I get a traditional UI
That has almost no accessibility for the disabled or has accessible functionality that's terribly tacked on as an afterthought.
Not really sure what you're getting at. Yes, I would get in an ambulance, or even a taxi, if I really needed one. That's not what "not car-centric" is about. No, I don't need things delivered to me and I don't need a car to access goods and services. I don't buy a lot in the first place; public transit works acceptably here; I'm capable of walking several km (and I'd spend the time on other forms of exercise otherwise); I mostly cook my own meals.
And there are parts of the world where public transit is actually good and it's often rational to take it even if trip time is your only consideration.
> That has almost no accessibility for the disabled or has accessible functionality that's terribly tacked on as an afterthought.
Yes, I didn't say it was good. But you can also still just talk to a cashier at the front counter here.
> I'm always amazed at this logic.
Not OP and maybe it's just my European showing, but I own a brand-new car yet frequently go 4-5 days without actually driving it. Because going to work and dropping off kids at daycare using a bicycle is literally faster than doing it in a car.
Don't forget hallucinating too.
Like how would some of this even work in reality? Can you go through those drive throughs and ask it to recite a sonnet about chicken nuggets? Clearly no, but then it begs the question of what the idea, the purported advance, even is here with much of this. Like we have had relatively advanced speech recognition for a while, I don't see the added utility or need of being able to go through the drive through and saying: "the number of hotdogs I want is a prime number that is more than 2 but less than 5."
It just feels so clearly silly if you stop and think about it for two seconds. So many hammers, not enough nails... We are just banging at walls at this point.
You think this conversation could be handled with the tech of 4 years ago? Siri can’t even turn off the lights and tell me a joke in the same request. Humans do not deliver all information in order (eg. The all the instructions refer to the burgers not the fries, but you only know that because you understand the essential nature of fries and what they typically include). That’s what AI in the drive thru is for.
The main challenge AI would face is people who come by at 3 AM drunk and stoned, indecisively slurring through their order, but I imagine there'd be a system to redirect these edge cases to an actual human.
[0] https://chatgpt.com/share/68ba2233-9f48-8011-905a-c69cc5e91b...
It'll definitely be a thing within 5 years, max, but it's not mature enough for production yet
Several medium sized studios I've talked with are bidding $50k for projects (eg. Netflix, HBO, Proctor & Gamble are typical clients) they used to bid $400k on, and they're winning more contracts. They don't need to shoot in person in Venice for pharma ads or animate elaborate TV show intros anymore.
This is having a huge impact to the fundamentals of how they do business. They haven't laid anyone off yet, but they're talking about the ramifications if this gets cheaper.
It's quite easy to promise dirt cheap services and get paperwork signed.
These studios are doing a lot of roto and comp work. It's highly touched up and edited.
... Have you watched YouTube (without attempting first-party ad blocking) recently? The ads created with AI are pretty obvious, and pretty bad.
Also, if the viewer doesn't recognize or care, then it's a moot point.
This is going to be the "bad chromakey" of this particular time period in terms of weirdly prolific visuals in media. Or if you prefer, the ads you used to see on late-night TV that were clearly broadcast from a poor quality VHS.
Cheap bullshit has always hung around our media apparatus, and it's just that: cheap bullshit. Tbh I just note it in the same way I've always done: well, that's a company I'm going to avoid doing business with if at all possible.
What projects are these studios doing for HBO? Its shows generally have high enough production value that AI slop in intros would be a no-no (unless this has dramatically changed under Zaslav's leadership).
Firstly, this doesn't seem to differentiate between fields/industries. It's entirely possible for AI to devastate a particular segment (like graphic design or software dev, etc) while still appearing low-impact on the overall.
Secondly,
> "Businesses reported a notable increase in AI use over the past year, yet very few firms reported AI-induced layoffs," New York Fed economists wrote in the blog.
Is this only relying on self-reporting? What company wants to be the lightning rod who comes out and says, "we laid off a bunch of people and replaced with AI"? Maybe for huge public companies that can't fudge it this would be ok, but relying on self-reports comes with an inherent risk of bias
I'm in a small growing tech company and I can say as a matter of fact that in a world without AI we would have made several hires in the past 18 months. Because of LLMs and agents my team doesn't have the need to bring more people in. It's as simple as that.
And Brian Armstrong at Coinbase
Measuring productivity has been attempted by every big tech co. and has never really had amazing results. So to claim they can lay off 1,000 people because of "AI" means they must have measured some % increase in individual productivity and know they can function with less people.
Or it's just a big excuse to cut low performers and compensate for overhiring.
Isn't that precisely what all publicly traded companies want to say, and are often saying? I feel like I read a new headline of some sociopathic CEO bragging about how many people he managed to lay off thanks to AI every day.
Maybe it hasn’t come for jobs that are not entry level yet.
Evidence that AI is destroying jobs for young people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45121342 - Sept 2025 (313 comments)
AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 - Aug 2025 (629 comments)
In the US as elsewhere it's a combination of factors, COVID overhiring and inflation, interest rates going up, market concentration and, US specific, the since Trump-reversed Trump-imposed tax changes. While this reversal probably helps the job market some in the immediate term the indicators of the fundamentals are flashing red everywhere and outside of the US it all just continues to be part of the same Omnirecession since 2008.
But if they’re talking about New York state as a whole, then I’d question their data/or inference. Companies in the area haven’t hired much in the last couple of years. Now we’ve got more layoff pressure on top of the non-existent hiring. The other day, Mark Benioff (Salesforce CEO) very clearly said on TV that his main problem is that he “need(s) fewer heads”.
Edit: Lightly updated my outlook to sound less decisive because I don’t really know anymore. So much is up in the air. Policy decisions at the government level could alter how it all plays out.
Be happy you’re not employed in tech course content creation or something that is directly replaceable TODAY, like language translation or low-level graphic design.
This. Better to tell markets "we can now downsize our workforce due to incredible efficiencies achieved by our AI initiative" than "we hired too many people, grew slower than expected and now we're making cuts"
Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.
Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy, personnel you totally need in order to build a metaverse or whatever.
Money ran out + overleveraging during the boom + market changes caused by the rapid socioeconomic shifts (e.g., commercial real estate tanking)? You can cover the bottom line for now with a lot of firing and consolidation, say it's AI's fault.
I appreciate your willingness to consider possibilities like this, but I think it really is tinfoil in this case.
> Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.
This gets cause and effect wrong. Wikipedia reminds:
> The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, and first referred to it as a pandemic on 11 March 2020.[3][4]
Markets were doing well in Jan 2020 until people started noticing the case numbers and speculating about the WHO's judgement. They were on a bull run before that — up almost 29% in the 2019 calendar year — which was largely a recovery from problems at the end of 2018.
So the market was only hiccuping because of existing panic over the pandemic (including people reasonably pricing in risk that pandemic would be officially declared; the "social distancing" policies and business closures were quite telegraphed).
> Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy
This is just naturally what would happen.
> Money ran out
It's more that people started devaluing money because of how much was printed, so interest rates were controlled to avoid a hyperinflationary spiral. It could have gone much worse (see: early 70s until early 80s). Powell did an impressive job to engineer the desired "soft landing", but I personally was surprised and displeased that they waited that long to reach for the brakes. (It came across that there was a reluctance to trust early vague inflation signals, despite what should have been a high prior on their correctness given recent policy.)
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says his company has cut 4,000 customer service jobs as AI steps in: ‘I need less heads’
seems not true ?
> Salesforce forecast third-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Wednesday, signaling lagging monetization for its highly-touted artificial intelligence agent platform as clients dial back spending due to macroeconomic uncertainty.
> The cloud software provider also announced a $20 billion increase to its existing share buyback program, but that was unable to allay investors' concerns, sending Salesforce's shares down over 5% in extended trading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208081
A company that was tuned to double revenue in 3 years transforming in one expecting to double in 9 years is definitely carrying too many people. It made sense for them to reduce headcount to align with their much slower growth curve.
Side note: Benioff also said earlier this year that they were done hiring programmers because AI. I'll let their careers page put the lie to that.
Salesforce reduced their headcount in 2023 by 8-10%. Another reduction by 5% attributed solely to AI could be a half truth and the reality could simply be Salesforce driving an efficiency agenda.
Personally, I believe it will take a few more years for systems to be built. Once those systems are in place, then headcount reductions are going to come fast and wide. Or putting it simply think of it as exponential growth. Currently AI job displacements are small, but it's growing, and will continue accelerating in its growth.
The data about new grads not being hired isn't lying, but if AI is to blame we should be seeing a flood of data and stories on how roles X, Y and Z were obliterated by AI. But I have yet to see a single solid example, so I find it hard to believe it's a massive shift.
If anything, I would expect AI to be replacing older, expensive workers with young, tech-savvy workers who can put the AI to use. But that is clearly not the case.
> The New York Fed blog noted that the modest impact on jobs so far may not hold in the future. "Looking ahead, firms anticipate more significant layoffs and scaled-back hiring as they continue to integrate AI into their operations," New York Fed researchers wrote.
The "AI revolution" seems as a cover story for covid related job cuts and likely includes losses stemming from over investing in AI supplements.
But regardless, real business data is nigh impossible to penetrate because private business is now a first class citizens and the rest of us are at it's mercies.
I agree with you in a general sense though.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45121342
Technology of any kind evolves all societies.
Not sure if the 40% is real, but if so, it annualizes to 6.96% across five years. I don't know if that's considered high or not.
The target has been a 2% long-term average (although there has been recent language indicating a shift towards "just try for 2% going forward"). It peaked at something like 9%, which hadn't been seen in decades. Nothing compared to e.g. Weimar Germany, Brazil circa 1990, or even modern-day Argentina; but undesirable and concerning.
I sure don’t feel like I added anything to the discussion. Do you?