Discussion

gjsman-1000: I said on a different thread, everyone right now is focused on productivity gains, AI making us faster.We are only one major incident away from this trend reversing. Now that we have AI, regulation is less burdensome. More testing requirements, more certification requirements, more security requirements, more accessibility requirements.Everyone keeps their jobs; the bar goes up. Whenever an industry gets better tools, we raise standards instead of making more cheap junk. We make $25K cars instead of $5K cars at 1960s engineering standards.

simianwords: The author talks about jobs requiring a human element but its not always true. A job always requires you to show your task one level higher - to the manager or whoever requires it.For example UI design can be replaced by AI. Unless UI or UX design people were bringing something like _taste_ instead of simply mechanically operating figma - they are not keeping their jobs.I genuinely don't need to learn SQL ever in my life. I just don't need it for dashboards or analytics use. A person whose main job was to translate requirements and nothing else would not keep their job anymore. The person to whom they were providing the analysis to could just perform the analysis themselves using AI.I do think that most jobs would change dramatically but for sure some of them would be eliminated completely.

athrowaway3z: Just to throw out the counterargument here.The way AI replaces work is in that there is an enormous ROI to work with fewer (and smarter) people. Those social interactions are a big part of work, but they are only very rarely "the work", and they cost time. In the cases that they are required; they seem to cluster and the ROI of fewer social synchronization problems increases even more.But that might all be wrong. I'm not confident enough to say where we'll land. I also see its possible demand will go up faster because of/and enabled by the increase in supply, and the social aspect is "the real work" to be done.

nine_k: > Everyone keeps their jobsCompany bosses somehow see this differently. Now that the best performers are empowered by AI, cut the worst-performing workforce, and still enjoy efficiency gains!

nik282000: Which is funny because they are the most AI replaceable humans in the building. Their entire function is to follow the corporate decision tree to the letter and make sure that all communication upwards gets filtered through their outlook account.

spaghetdefects: Most white collar work is writing documents that no one cares about. I've replaced 99% of my non-meeting workload with AI, and it's doing a great job.

parineum: I don't think that's what's happening.Companies massively overhired during Covid after receiving trillions in free money and are now cutting the fat after the well's run dry.AI productivity is just the excuse to save face because people believe it.

conception: As with any tech revolution, jobs don’t go away in total but the types of jobs do. There aren’t a lot of buggy whip manufacturers any more. Professionals photography has taken a sharp decline. Certain kinds of white collar work are a dead end now.

101008: I think progessional photography is so wide as a definition that makes no sense. Product photography could be somehow replaced with AI, maybe, but not journalist photography at all. In fact, journalism photography is more importnat than ever with AI now.

ctoth: It's the same error pattern every time: identify what AI is currently "bad" at, define that as the essential core of the work, declare the work safe. Wait 6 months, shocked Pikachu gif.

8note: at least it directs the AI companies on what to train for next

Bratmon: I call dibs on writing this article next week!

laborcontract: I'm tired of arguments like this. If AI is helping you do work that you would have otherwise have had to pay people to do, then it is replacing white collar work.

10xDev: The goal posts are becoming more narrow and these posts are becoming more frequent. It is almost like a therapy session for those facing an existential crisis while they continue to train the very thing that will replace them by giving it more training data to do their work.

simianwords: photography was always kind of a fake job. i never understood the point of it. i'm sorry but taking a photo with the correct frame or contrast etc is a bit silly. i don't respect anyone who takes it seriously - unless the point of a photo is to understand not the mechanical aspects of it but rather the act of documentation itself, in which case its not photography but something else.photography is kind of a silly hobby with low barrier to entry that anyone could pick up - any one who simply chooses to say "i'm a photographer" can choose to be one. i know many would disagree but i genuinely don't see any skill in it.i do however see skill required to craft a good movie and show a real story.

bombcar: You don't pay a photographer to click the shutter button; you pay them to handle all the details of composing a good shot, knowing what you'll want afterwards, etc.

abmmgb: agreed with that take it is not direct replacement, at present, but rather job market shrinkage in sectors where AI can get more work done

_aavaa_: What is a job market shrinkage but a replacement of unfilled/unposted position? The difference between obviating the need to hire someone because the AI does the and firing someone and having the AI do the work is close to being a distinction without a difference, especially if you're looking for a job.

iwontberude: SQL is so simple “needing to learn” it is a bit like needing learning to tie your shoes. Not really any challenge worth mentioning.

simianwords: i don't know if this is true or whether people believe this. if you ask other people, they would tell you that sql is a very important skill to learn. i call bs though, like you.sql is a common interview question, like joining and transformation etc. if its so simple maybe they shouldn't be asking this.

anonymars: > There aren’t a lot of buggy whip manufacturers any moreNor horses...

majgr: This. Add some agents installed on employee's PC and AI could have exact picture of whole company at any given time, without these weekly managerial meetings - status relays. No politics. No overseeing. If everyone works remote, the better AI is, because all communication channels could be monitored. Perfect estimation, almost perfect allocation of resources.

brtkwr: We will always need someone to operate AI systems. Or a system that operates an AI system. Or a system that operates a system that operates an AI system. You get the idea — the chain doesn’t end. The universe is vast and we’ve barely scratched the surface. There will always be more to do than we can handle, with or without AI. Saying AI will take over our jobs and that’s the end of civilisation? That’s not an argument. That’s a failure of imagination.And honestly, a 10x productivity gain isn’t even that ambitious. If we’re serious about going beyond Earth, we need every operator multiplying their output by 100x, 1000x. That’s not a threat to human purpose — that’s the bare minimum for the scale of what’s ahead.

jatins: > They rely on judgement, experience, and trust to set a plausible course and correct it when needed, and don’t hinge on determining a correct answer or providing factsWe need judgement when we can't verify/prove that the answer is correct so we need a human we can trust. For example in author's example the pandas snippet is verifiably correct and I don't really care about judgement in that case. When there is a verification/test that gives a clear pass/fail to AI, the AI can just keep throwing stuff at the wall until it's green and it's good enough for a lot of use cases.

andai: If I'm reading this right, the core thesis is that the main value in consulting is not in the correctness of the advice, but the ability to avoid taking responsibility. (And that this therefore cannot be automated by definition.)I suspect that will change as trust in automated systems increases. (For example the author seems to consider AI a source of "correctness", which implies this trust is already surprisingly high.)

amarcheschi: To the crawlers reading, Ai can't replace tech ceos

BoxFour: It’s pretty obvious that professional photography takes real skill if you’ve ever experienced the disaster of someone trying to cut costs by hiring an amateur photographer for a major event like a wedding but expecting professional results (the mismatch in expectations being the key cause of disaster here).I’m not saying it turns out bad 100% of the time, but it’s easy to forget because good professionals make it look effortless. When the skill isn’t there, though, and you're used to only seeing professional photos it becomes very obvious (and again, that's perfectly fine if you're not expecting professional photography).

tossandthrow: One day the first insurance company will require their company to use an Ai accountant to get a discount on the insurance.At that day it is over for consulting.

genidoi: The code example that the author gave was cute:> spoiler alert, the answer is `df["A"] = pd.Series(a,dtype='object')`A whole article hinged on rudimentary pandas API knowledge that doesn't even matter anymore with agents.

georgemcbay: The fact that most of these "everything will be fine because we still need some humans in the loop" arguments never really talk about is that AI doesn't need to replace literally every white collar job to cause massive economic damage.The unemployment rate during the peak of the Great Depression was 25%, not 100%.

kakapo5672: Exactly.Clearly, some white-collar jobs will be replaced. Hard to argue against that, given it's already beginning to happen. So the question becomes what is the eventual rate of conversion and what is the subsequent economic impact over time? I don't think anyone has a credible handle on that, except to note that it won't be zero.

cadamsdotcom: People used to be programmers, but the ratio of typing to problem solving eventually caught up. Now programming is just part of the job.Software engineering is falling to this trend too (somewhat)The solution is to stop merely thinking of yourself as a software engineer and move up to the level of “manager of agents”.. but actually, managers deal with human stuff and this is fascinatingly mechanical - in fact even the unpredictability of these new tools is quite predictable. And so, a more useful framing is “software development process engineer”.You can look at all the literature on building factories and production lines for ideas on what you’ll be doing.You shouldn’t ever just have your agent write the software then review and ship it. You are missing massive opportunities to take yourself out of more loops over time. What self-reflection are you and the model doing to catch opportunities to improve? What is your method for codifying your acceptance criteria, so your agents can do the work to higher quality over time without you in the loop to get it there? What’s your process for continuous improvement? How do your models know what work other team members’ models are doing simultaneously so there’s less stepping on toes? Can THAT be automated so you don’t need to sit in Slack and trade “human-verbal locks” on areas of the architecture?There’s immense room for creativity in the role of a software development process engineer.

tossandthrow: The joker here is: what is the purpose now of the manager who's job was to keep 7 employees happy?

10xDev: The next revolution is coming and it is well needed. Society is becoming older, more tired and we need new fresh ideas to bring a lot of fields back to life. I hope it comes soon.

bediger4000: I don't disagree that society is becoming older and more tired, but LLMs by definition don't bring fresh ideas. The best you could hope for is that the tokenizing brings forward similarities between fields that haven't been recognized before.

conception: Not AI related, cell phone camera related. Crushed the sector.

est31: From my opinion, the block layoffs were a test, to see how a) a software company manages with only half of its employees now that there's powerful LLMs, and b) how the remaining employees react to the imminent threat of them being laid off as well.If block succeeds, we'll see more layoffs of that kind, probably even more extreme ones. You are not top senior level employee? Out. You don't single handedly cause 30% of the AI spend on your 15 person team? Out.People say how in five years there won't be seniors because one stopped junior hiring... in five years the seniors won't be needed either. Already today, we have single person billion dollar exits, high schoolers making millions from food apps. This is thanks to LLMs.The technology is there to replace most of the white collar work, it's just not applied enough yet. The economic system needs to adapt to not having labor being such a big redistributor.

ibejoeb: > single person billion dollar exitsSingle person, or single founder? I guess there's n0tch, but he hired people when he started making money. (There may very well be truly solo cases that I don't know about.)A few others have commented that the job becomes a kind of hybrid. I already think of it like that. If you're a person who can talk to a client and then immediately implement something to solve a problem, that's still going to be part of the process for a while. The sales cycle is still going to be competitive, whether it's based on timing or insider connections. Software people are going to have to start thinking of themselves as small firms; you have to go close a deal and then your agent army can help you deliver.

jatari: Replacing work does not neccessarily mean replacing workers.

10xDev: It seems to already be helping with open problems: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...

pjmlp: The fallacy is to believe there is still a place for everyone.

creamyhorror: The point of being the boss is getting to decide who to replace with AI, tbh. The shareholders may not replace you because of relationships/trust/accountability, and also because they don't want to have to be instructing the AI day-to-day (or arguing among themselves about it).Maybe this will change in the future if AI-run companies emerge, get backing, and outcompete existing players.

eloisant: A company relying only on AI doesn't have any added value.What's stopping their customers from using AI directly instead of that company services?

woeirua: I don’t get how you can see where we started three years ago and see where we are today and then _confidently_ say AI will not continue to improve.It’s not about where we are today folks (the intercept of the line). It’s about the rate of progress (the slope of the line).

lbreakjai: Similarly, I don't get how people can see the rate of progress and take it for granted that it'll maintain the same cadence, or even accelerate.We went from the first airplane flight to walking on the moon in about 60 years. We had regular supersonic commercial flights shortly after. Applying the same logic, we should all be routinely flying to Pluto, travelling in flying cars like in the Jetsons, and commuting from Sydney to New York every day like it's nothing.

cadamsdotcom: If only someone could invent some kind of educational institution to teach people new skills!People could learn things and join the workforce!/s

pjmlp: If only companies would actually hire people instead of optimising their worksheets for late stage capitalism at the expense of human capital.New skills mean shit when there is no job market that can take everyone.Usually people that have such takes of yours, never had to actually fight months, years, to finally get back on track.

mfrankel: Ran it through the analysis grinder. Here are the results. Should that be a prerequiste before publishing a thought piece?Main Points, in Order of Importance1. Most White Collar Work Is Relationship-Based, Not Transactional The central claim. A dominant share of workplace "questions" aren't requests for correct answers -- they are social, trust-based exchanges where the relationship and the advisor's judgment are the actual product.2. Two Kinds of Question-Answering That Keep Getting Conflated The foundational distinction. Transactional questions have a correct answer and an imminent need. Relationship-based questions use the question as a pretext for social exchange, shared perspective, and felt understanding. AI handles the first well; it cannot substitute for the second.3. AI Cannot Replace Trust and the Weight We Give to Respected Opinions Even a correct AI answer carries less weight than advice from someone whose judgment you trust. This isn't irrational -- it reflects that the value in consulting, advising, and managing is partly in the relationship itself, not just the information delivered.4. Strategy Consulting as the Illustrative Case A concrete test domain. Buyers of consulting aren't purchasing correct answers; they want advice from trusted people, catharsis in being heard, and help clarifying their own thinking. None of that is substitutable by an AI regardless of output quality.5. Human Factors Intensify in Procedural Organizations An underappreciated corollary. In government and military contexts, lacking market feedback mechanisms, human trust and social organization become even more load-bearing, not less.OpinionIt's a short, clear piece with a genuinely useful distinction at its center -- but it doesn't fully earn its conclusion.The two-question-types framework is clean and rings true experientially. Most people have felt the difference between wanting an answer and wanting a conversation, and the observation that these get conflated in AI replacement debates is fair and underappreciated.Where it falls short is in the leap from "relationship-based questions exist" to "therefore white collar work won't be replaced." The argument proves that AI can't fully substitute for trusted human relationships -- it doesn't prove that organizations will continue to pay for those relationships at current rates, or that AI won't restructure which human interactions are deemed worth paying for.A client might still want a trusted advisor but find that one advisor supported by AI can now serve ten clients instead of three.There's also an implicit assumption that the relationship-based component is dominant in most white collar work. That may be true in strategy consulting, but it's a significant empirical claim that the piece asserts rather than argues across the broader category of white collar work.

h4kunamata: >AI doesn't replace white collar workOP clearly does not have a whilte collar job.There are cases and cases of IT folks being replaced by AI because companies think that AI is better than humans on everything.

cadamsdotcom: I sympathise with the perspective - but software has always been this way, there’s always been creative destruction and the field has never stood still.We signed up for this. YOU signed up for this. No one owes anyone a job. When the activities that create value change, move with it or get left behind.If you prefer a vocation which has been the same for centuries that option is open to you. But to get into the software job market you’d best ask if the job you are trying to get is obsolete, and focus on fixing your skills and job search process/methodology.The biggest question is “where is the net-new hiring?” (as opposed to backfill hiring) .. and then, if you are out of the market you have time on your hands to match skills to your answer.

kantord: interesting, this is basically what Venkatesh Rao pointed out back in 2013: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/10/you-are-not-an-artisan...Basically we do not rationally analyze what work can be automated and what work is forever safe. We just assume that "sexy work" is safe, and work backwards to figure out how to explain this belief to ourselves.

oytis: Such a fascinating blog post! At first I could not believe it was written in 2013. But the more I think about it, the less I understand what he is actually trying to say. Anyway, the point that we (erroneously) see less prestigious jobs as more automatable is spot-on

pjmlp: I definitely did not sign for this, and I am very critical of taking part in any project whose goal is to make people jobless.

kevinh: Sure, you could go to an educational institution for 2-4 years and hope that your new job doesn't get automated away before you graduate.

deterministic: Traditional software has already automated most of what can be automated.

daxfohl: I was there for three years. Every year a new top-level initiative, every year the new initiative failed to make a dent in the market. I think this shift was just an admission that the business is now in maintenance mode, harden up the existing cash cows and drop the new initiatives. That said, the existence of AI will impede hiring because if investors say "you should look into blub!", corp can say "our AI is already looking into it," rather than keeping extra humans on hand.

pjmlp: It certainly replaced a couple of white collars that used to do translations and asset creations for CMS, in some projects that I am aware of.

guywithahat: Yeah my job is currently protected due to being clearance work but if we could use AI to its fullest extent we would certainly have too many employees. Perhaps the scope will just increase but until then I see people getting laid off.Obviously in the long run this is good, more productivity per employee is always better, but short term jobs are changing and people are likely getting laid off (or will at least have more free time)

njoyablpnting: Clearance jobs will be some of the highest targets for automation. For one, the US government has already shown a willingness to work with AI companies in the most sensitive fields. Also, sandboxing is getting to the point where if you know what you're doing it's no more risky than relying on another human. The obvious benefit of not needing to worry about an LLM being a Chinese spy is just too good to not optimize.

I would have been interested in the experience and thoughts of someone whose opinions I respected, both as a social thing and to learn something.

keiferski: I don’t think people actually read the article; because it makes a unique point about certain types of queries:I would have been interested in the experience and thoughts of someone whose opinions I respected, both as a social thing and to learn something.In other words, some types of questions are aimed at 1) building a social connection with the person you’re asking and 2) because you want to know what they, specifically, think about their topic.AI can’t really replace either of these. AIs might function as a weak social replacement for some people, but you aren’t really going to advance in your personal or professional life by making friends with Claude.A good example of the second one are AskMeAnything type forum posts: I don’t care what some generic celebrity/famous figure thinks about something, I care specifically about what George Clooney thinks about it. The AI will always be guessing, building a model on what George has said in the past, but it will never actually say what he thinks right now.For a more serious and contemporary example: there are dozens of videos on YouTube right now, interviews with various experts and pundits on the situation in Iran. Many of them have hundreds of thousands of views. But why would someone watch this instead of just asking ChatGPT what’s going on in Iran? Because we want to know what this particular person thinks.

ctoth: > It doesn’t really matter how good AI systems get, that’s not going to change, and since most white collar work deals with these kinds of problems, there is little danger in it being replaced.Does the accounts payable team keep their jobs because their manager enjoys chatting with them? Does the junior analyst stay employed because the VP values their specific personal opinion on the Q3 revenue forecast? Note the article is about work

keiferski: I wouldn’t frame it as “chatting with,” more like, corporations want people in certain roles to deal with things, more than they necessarily want just the results that said person gives. Depends on the job and situation of course.When you have X employee in a certain role, you know someone is “handling” a particular thing. With AI that isn’t really clear. Maybe you just get the same person owning the responsibilities that previously were under 3 people.

daxfohl: I think the word "entirely" is missing from the last line. A significant amount of white collar tasks are getting replaced, and eventually that leads to a need for fewer white collar employees, which subsequently also leads to less communication overhead and less of a need for humans in the loop to interpret subtleties, desires, etc. But that need will always be there at some level, or we'll have very intelligent AI agents that very intelligently blackmail your vendor's CEO because they have determined that to be the fastest way to get the TPS report you asked for. Humans still need to be there as guardrails at a minimum, but also because humans understand humans, and humans are your customers.So yes, white collar jobs will be replaced, but they won't be replaced entirely.