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points by tonyedgecombe 1 day ago | 0 comments
> A large population of extremely skilled and talented people are being laid off by their employers to make space for AI investments.

Outside of programming and a couple of other sectors I’m not sure that is true. It isn’t visible in the unemployment figures.

[–] lnkdinsuxs 1 day ago
> Outside of programming and a couple of other sectors I’m not sure that is true. It isn’t visible in the unemployment figures.

The unemployment figures is mostly a political projection, like CPI.

In 2026 everything fron sewage to chickens to oil to education is now tied to AI. The entire economy is now, for good or bad tied to AI.

What most people either didn't notice or understand is that the U.S. was entering a recession and would have been in one if it hadn't been AI

[–] torginus 1 day ago
> In 2026 everything fron sewage to chickens to oil to education is now tied to AI. The entire economy is now, for good or bad tied to AI.

Tied how? How strong is the corellation between these? I'd say very weak, other than everything having to compete with AI for resources.

The same is true of any technology tied to powerful personal computers or the internet - people built and designed beatiful houses, great cars, airliners, wrote books and ran restaurants without computers or the internet.

It has even become a meme how putting smart features and lcd screens into things like washing machines have made them strictly worse.

[–] bluefirebrand 1 day ago
> What most people either didn't notice or understand is that the U.S. was entering a recession and would have been in one if it hadn't been AI

Is it maybe more accurate to say that the US is in a recession, outside of the industries that are fueling AI?

Life's pretty recession-y for everyone else imo

[–] torginus 1 day ago
That's a pretty damning statement - this implies companies don't see a return on AI at best, and it's actively destroying their businesses at worst, so there's not only job loss, but businesses themselves are not becoming more efficient.
[–] thereader12 1 day ago
Yeah, pretty much spot on.
[–] qlte 1 day ago
Everything is tied to the internet or electricity before that, yet the Mag 7 isn't all ISPs and utility companies.
[–] origini 1 day ago
The capabilites are here though.

Even if it takes them 3-6 Month to open up a new field, its going to happen steadily now and were it started, the AI investments will be recuped by layoffs.

Artists -> Translators -> Journalists -> Software engineers -> mathematicians -> lawyers -> Accountants -> ...

Its already disruptive

[–] gamblor956 1 day ago
Lawyer, accountants, doctors, architects, and engineers won't be replaced.

We're not paid just for what we do, we get paid because we accept liability for our mistakes. Professional liability insurance is a large part of why licensed professionals charge so much money for their services.

[–] origini 1 day ago
If a lawyer can just sign off of a lot of basic inquries with just reading and approving, you will need less.

If a lawyer needs less people preparing everything, the industry will also shrink.

Lawyer as SaaS companies will just introduce some insurance and will clean up from the bottom until AI can do all of it.

We will see if we will have one expert ai lawyer per topic or type of lawsuite or if they will get generic good enough that it will not matter.

Even people defending or suing by (successful) themselves became a thing already last year.

[–] gamblor956 1 day ago
A lawyer can't just sign off on basic inquiring with "just reading". They're legally obligated to actually review the response and verify the answer (including any citations or references).

Lawyers already need less people to prepare things. That revolution happened several decades ago when computers and word processors became normal.

Lawyers as SaaS companies has been a thing for 2 decades, and remains a tiny niche of the market because it's not the kind of lawyering most clients need. A lawyer SaaS is basically just the equivalent of an underpaid, underresourced public defender and will yield about the same quality of work and results.

We will see if we will have one expert ai lawyer per topic or type of lawsuite or if they will get generic good enough that it will not matter

LLMs are only as good as their training set. In order to be a topic expert, they'd have to be retrained at least every week to account for changes in statutory law and case law. It would be trivial for a human lawyer to outmanuever an outdated LLM when the laws changed...and in the real world this happens all the time between human lawyers when one side hasn't done its research on changes to the applicable laws.

Even people defending or suing by (successful) themselves became a thing already last year.

People successfully defending or suing without a lawyer has been a thing for over a century. It's fewer than 0.1% of legal proceedings. Most people don't handle their own legal cases for the same reason most people hire a plumber, or electrician, or order DoorDash instead of cooking their own dinner. Also...almost all of the people using LLMs in the past 2 years lost their cases, because their LLMs hallucinated laws or facts and they didn't know enough to catch it. Even lawyers dumb enough to use LLMs to draft their documents got caught because they were too lazy to review the output. Courts were willing to forgive those mistakes a few years ago before it was common knowledge that LLMs make things up, but now they're no longer willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

[–] origini 22 hours ago
The biggest advantage of an LLM is the interface and reading text.

Whatever we had before on full text search, LLMs are a lot better. And i'm not just feeling this, i read plenty of articles about exactly this.

A LLM doesn't need to be retrained every week, it needs to have a base corpus of the field and strategies on how to find current text. They will load it into context and argue.

Then another LLM will take this and formats it for the court.

We will see but i think you overestimate how much automatisation and co current lawyers have and use.

[–] CamperBob2 1 day ago
... accountants ... won't be replaced.

Mine already has been.

[–] gamblor956 1 day ago
You'll be going back to a human when the IRS audits you and you owe them a few thousand in back taxes.
[–] CamperBob2 1 day ago
When's the last time someone making this sort of argument turned out to be right?
[–] slyzmud 1 day ago
Do you really see lawyers being replaced? I don't see anything special in their work but since it's a regulated industry I doubt it will be so affected.

At best some layers will work faster, but automating their work or people not requiring them? Usually when you contact one there's a lot at stake. Same with accountants.

Software engineering and translators is a different story. Most of the times if something goes wrong nobody cares.

[–] origini 1 day ago
Some lawyers (the worst ones?) might just do the easy or normal things like writing a 'lawyer' letter to someone not paying. This is no risk to automate away.

The avg Lawyers might do more complex but again a lot of 'normal' things. Day to day things the next SaaS AI company wants to 'fix' and they might also accept basic liability.

Then you have the 'tv lawyers' the ones who do non normal things, they have A LOT of apprentices and young lawyers going through papers, research etc.

They will for sure have the expert as a human, but that person will need a lot less support.

You shouldn't need an accountant today already. If you have an digital order and a digital bill and a digital signed delivery note, it can be booked automatically. AI will find risks, summarize them etc.

AI is already helping here closing the gap with better OCR etc.

I really think, that when big companies introduce the agentic layer to their products, there will be less people needed and if you need people, they get less paid because they will need to understand less.

[–] cmiles8 1 day ago
Somewhat ironically it would appear most CEOs believe the only jobs AI is replacing are developers since they built an app last weekend. Every CEO is saying why do we have so many devs and why are we paying them so much… so devs blew up the market for devs but beyond that there doesn’t seem to be much impact.