The Coming Layoffs and the Revenge of the Measurers(hackyexperiments.com) |
The Coming Layoffs and the Revenge of the Measurers(hackyexperiments.com) |
I talk more about the gran future here
https://www.hackyexperiments.com/blog/machines-of-loving-emb...
Hands down the funniest comment on HN in a while. Love it:)
Similar for board/video and other kinds of games.
The author is this guy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/biltahir/
Bilal is not a writer he is a developer and founder. he founded a two person startup to use AI to produce podcasts. He calls himself a 'Product Engineer' which just means he is using claude and AI to develop..
The article he wrote has all the hallmarks of a lot of AI hyperbole and style. The author has some education in economics but no indication of any writing ability. so who knows what his real writing style is. I too can generate a similar article with Claude in about 30 seconds. Does that need to be read on top of HN too?
e.g this use of AI of the word 'line' is sooo annoying: The "they just overhired during COVID and are self correcting" line was the dominant"
So this ai article about ai is out there.. its out there influencing us even though it is largely speculation, hype and AI-content. The site he has is all AI written (which I am not opposed to but Bilal never worked at Meta, he never spoke with anyone in senior leadership.. So this is an opinion piece driven by AI influencer..that reaches the top of HN
Ok so what about its content here is the points he made (who knows how many he really thought of or that Claude created)
1. AI layoffs structural, not cyclical—"measurers" (middle management, finance, legal) hit hardest Only producers/sellers and top leadership safe; the coordinating middle gets cut (WHO knows if this is correct?)
2. Founder-led firms cut first—board trust buys 12–24 month head start (Everyone is laying off, economy sucks, AI Cap expenditure and uncertianty..)
3. "10x engineer" becomes "1000x"; token data makes leverage brutally measurable (not right now..yes for quickly built MVPs hardly as fast -1000x is just hyperbole)
4. Inequality explodes—first trillionaire soon, many to follow (Pure speculation) 5. 2028 political backlash predicted: anti-elite, anti-AI populism, plus xenophobia (sure maybe)
5. Regulation may cost U.S. the race vs. China (hype driven influencer speil - AI is barely speeding up as fast as VC Bros are predicting)
The "AI" we have right now seems to be able to replace at least 20%-30% of white collar jobs. Maybe more as it improves. The layoffs are underway. Now and then I remember going to the Burger King in SF next to the cable car turntable at Market Street, and hearing some homeless people talking about the good old days when they were printers and Linotype operators. That was a good union job once. Now it's gone.
We know what Universal Basic Income looks like. It looks like this.[1] I used to take a bus past those housing projects. Warehousing useless people is not a good solution.
What country seems to be preparing to handle AI unemployment well? Is there any model to copy?
The tools I'm referring to are well skilled Claude code / codex. I'm sure open weights are not far behind.
"To get AI, we need the people, which includes the measurers, on board. To get the people on board, we need to give them something: money, security, dignity, a credible story about where they fit. We do not have to figure out the long-run answer to what humans are for. We just have to manage the next five years."
The blogger otherwise experiments with gastown-like setups and is maybe afraid that his toy will disappear:
First and most importantly, it's not really about LLMs, it's about AGI, and the second does not necessarily follow from the first; LLMs in their current state are pretty clearly not AGI, and most of the LLM-world progression in the last few years has been about better tooling/interfaces, refinements in training data and techniques and people learning how to use LLMs effectively rather than the huge leaps in fundamental capability that we saw in earlier years. It seems more likely that at this point, when AGI comes, it will be something entirely new or something that LLMs are only a component of, rather than "we built an LLM with ten trillion parameters and suddenly it became God".
Second, it's not even really about AGI, it's about AGI superintelligence. And more than that, it's about affordable AGI superintelligence, assuming that such a thing won't cost billions a year to operate.
That depends a lot on definitions. It's artificial, it's very general, and by many measures it's intelligent - often superhumanly so, especially when compared to the average human.
That covers the A, the G, and the I. So why is it "clearly not AGI"?
That's the source of hallucinations. A path can be found between A and B, even if A is the 12th century Chinese royal court and B is the Easter bunny.
Interpolation and rote knowledge are still very useful. Most cognitive tasks are like this.
The thing that LLMs are not presently good at is extrapolation. You can train an LLM on pre-1904 literature, but you won't get special relativity from it, at least not without a human to prompt it in just the right way.
You can have an LLM provide a "novel math proof", but you are necessarily discarding 100 or 1,000 "novel math mistakes". The process is more like a guided walk (like the A* algorithm), with human supervision and intervention, not an autonomous math genius.
"They" are, of course, working on it. But the present implementation has some severe structural limitations (such as an inability for new or discovered information to affect model weights) that make LLMs as a human replacement incomplete.
Who, and how, will the gains be redistributed?
[1] - (by everyone I mean any one with retirement like assets in major indexes)
We have to handle this phase transition process deftly.
We have so many problems to solve and we need people to solve them. AI will aid them in that.
Let's say there are there are only 1 million people in the world and all the money is concentrated under 1 person. There will be no economy at all. This implies some form of UBI is coming. This is the main reason why Christian tradition had the concept of Debt Jubilee
If UBI is not coming, youths will force the rich to share the abundance because they now a concentrated target to attack. ie Data centres. Concentration works both ways. Rich can accumulate power. But that power has a physical manifestation. And that could get attacked.
An employee allegedly burned down a 1.2 million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark toilet paper warehouse in Ontario, California, causing an estimated ($500) million in damage. The massive 2026 Ontario Warehouse Fire was set on April 7, 2026.
This doesn't make sense to me. "A clearer signal of leverage" implies an objective way to measure software engineering output, which has been the white whale of engineering management for the last 50 years.
Because of course they are. This is true of every tool up to AI and it’s true for AI.
If you know what you’re doing you’re going to do a better job of getting the AI to produce good output. Isn’t that obvious?
… ie token use ~= productivity output
unfortunately measuring the number of tokens used is about as useful as a measure of productivity/performance as is measuring the number of times i hopped around on one foot last week (less time hopping ~= more time coding).
it’s just a measure of the number of tokens that an engineer used. it doesn’t necessarily mean that engineer is more productive. they might be doing more tokens because they ended up re-doing one minor feature a hundred times because they don’t understand the language / requirements etc. it could even be a negative relationship to productivity / performance!
pretty sure that’s what gp was getting at. see LoSC.
That's extremely reductive. It's perfectly possible for an engineer to be both a fantastic engineer, and bad at using AI. The opposite also exists, the great AI user, who is a terrible engineer.
The idea that these two "skills" are somehow 100% correlated or there's a causation link between them is completely unfounded. The person who becomes a fine engineer with AI, might have been an absolutely terrible engineer without it.
Too late, for that. From what I hear, account suspensions with Google are basically the "love scene" from Deliverance.
The future is bleak for many, but jobs lost is the least of our problems.
Regarding the idea of a rise of “trillionaires”, gobal wealth is about $470T. Unless there is a gigantic expansion of the middle class from formerly poor people, it is impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires.
The idea of a 1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable. Any business doing that much turnover is going to be hiring lots of vendors and contractors. I guess they could decide to outsource nearly all operations to keep headcount low, but the idea of one singular person generating a billion dollars of value from labour alone with no assistance from capital of an employer is likewise laughable.
I would say an absolutely non-trivial amount, especially in the developed world.
As for your points, global wealth is not a fixed pie, so it's not "impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires". Re:"1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable" - it is difficult but not impossible. Currently, the company ranked at the bottom of the Fortune 500 (No. 500) is Vulcan Materials, with a revenue of ~$8 billion. I can imagine a company combining domain expertise with amazing AI/engineers to achieve superlative product-market fit and hit this revenue number.
The rest of this article doesn’t. HR is going to measure what? No they aren’t.
A 1000x engineer? Really?
> 1. The producers and marketers (PMs/Sales). [...]
> 2. The leadership (CEO/VPs). [...]
I'm sorry, what? Product managers are producers and executive leadership are innovators, but engineers are just waste?
So much of what's currently wrong with our society can be narrowed down to two things: risks and incentives.
We have incentivized mass layoffs with the erasure of any and all duties a company might have outside of those to shareholders. Fewer people working, lower costs in the next ninety days. Long-term costs remain to be seen, but that's not what finance bros care about. They want to know the quarterly outlook.
Second, we've eliminated all risk once you get past a certain level of wealth and success. There's nothing "brave" about firing hundreds or thousands of people if you're in the c-suite, at least not in the United States. Like I said before, the shareholders are happy, and you'll be rewarded for meeting the target that the board (which was elected by the shareholders) met for profit. You may very well be given a multiple of the average American's lifetime earnings in a single year for your performance. The people who got laid off - assuming that it doesn't destroy their mental health to the point where they attempt/succeed with self-harm - will bury yet another round of financial dreams and hopes and try to find something else to pay off their debts. Will it be as good? Probably not, but we've started calling that the "creative destruction of capitalism", so they buy into that and move on, apathetically, with their lives. The c-suite and shareholders are effectively isolated from any sort of negative outcome through articles of incorporation, government bailouts, and sheer financial inertia.
This directly contradicts the old saying "with great reward comes great risk". The people getting the reward - the massive bonuses, the kiss-ass articles in the media, a life effectively free of financial consequence - aren't the ones assuming the risk. The rank-and-file are.
That hasn't been a real problem until now. AI as we're now implementing it has the potential to cause real damage to the financial futures of massive chunks of the population. Knowledge work is going to get less and less valuable. The people who worked in knowledge work fields often went into debt to be able to do so, sometimes for the first 10-20 years of their careers. Some have put off emotionally-meaningful things like starting families for the promised payout that now might not come at all.
That being said, the author thinks that UBI is a potential salve. It's not. Over the last 40 years, more and more people were told that they should find a job that means something to them, that gives them at least some measure of fulfillment. They're not going to get that from a check delivered once a month from an expanded OASDI scheme. They're going to look at life as effectively a game we all play by a set of rules, and the rules have now been changed several times, each one screwing them more and more. Those at the top are the ones making the rules, and they keep gaining more and more. Instead of giving people the chance to work their way up the latter in a career, the rulemakers have now said that the best you can hope for is essentially welfare that will be unlikely to let you meet your long-term goals for your life. If you maybe put off having children until a later time to buy them more financial stability, you effectively blew your best parenting years for nothing.
This could see a great realignment of risk-vs-reward back to where it's said it should be. If you're going to use AI to become a part of the first class of trillionaires, you can bet that a lot of social ire produced by what I've described above will be directed directly your way. In a society like the US, you can bet at least some of the malcontents will resort to violence to express their ire.
> a company might have outside of those to shareholders.
Leadership must do this by law. Fix the laws to fix the behavior. How? I'd say we need to fix corporate governance issues (shareholders need more rights to pay leadership less). Share buy backs need to be fixed, right now a leader can take investors dividends/profit and use it to reduce the outstanding shares, making their options in the money. Companies need to be barred from buying back their own shares and should be required to distribute _all_ profit back to the investors. They can issue shares if they want more capital to "reinvest", i dont think we'll overflow int64s for share counts xD.
> pay off their debts
Too many people are buried in consumer debt (not asset/school debt). They've made themselves vulnerable by keeping up with the times / jones / hedonic treadmill.
> Those at the top are the ones making the rules,
We (the people) voted for citizens united, it has to go. I'd love to see Andrew yang's[1] idea of giving every voter $5 to $25 as a political campaign funding. It would easily drown out the corporate lobby profitability. America is very corrupt the past 15+ years with interest group lobby, politician insider trading etc.