alt Hacker NewsInitial effects of AI technology on employment look positive
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I was laid off as a senior product manager in December of 2025. I’ve been looking for a new job in clean energy (which is supposedly “having a moment” due to data centers) since then. There is no “jobs boom”. There are certainly job openings — black holes into which you can lodge your resume. Occasionally, multiple rounds of interviews that go nowhere. I’ve been paying my bills as an art fabricator and live event electrician, the kinds of blue collar jobs that are supposed to make up for the destruction of “knowledge work”. The work is inconsistent, and the pay is less than half of what I made before. There is no “jobs boom”, of any kind.
I'm a consultant and I've already worked for multiple AI companies that shut down over the last two years. I think the main problem is that they all are relying on the big token providers and trying to capture value with various services.
At some point the token costs will increase so much, it will put all of these AI companies out of business.
Don't get me wrong. AI is definitely useful. The high costs are currently being subsidized by VC and other investors and unless there is a major breakthrough, it's just not going to work in the long-term.
> The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them. (...) That building spree requires armies of workers: electricians to wire them, HVAC specialists to stop racks from overheating, grid engineers to hook them up to the power supply and technicians to install and maintain the machines.
I'm not sure whether the salaries of the new jobs are on par with those of the lost jobs.
But what happens when the exec level managers are done with all these AI training sessions and rollouts and realize nothing has improved?
What about the loss of productivity of developers who are forced to entertain tons of noise about AI and take training and attend sessions which do not increase their productivity and instead takes time away from real work?
Are employers running a software shop or a church?
If most of the jobs its creating are related to construction of infrastructure then that's not really positive news as these jobs are temporary, once demand settles then why kind of jobs are going to be created?
It might be benefiting other areas, but I think as the technology improves a lot of those are going to start looking like what's happening in software development (which is arguably what the technology is best at right now).
So yeah, idk.
I can’t read the article but in my group, which is not terribly AI exposed due to its hands-on nature, we are in fact hiring extra people into next year to handle additional AI initiatives that I am confident will succeed. In subsequent years, the plan as I have heard it is to let headcount go down by attrition.
I would not take extra hiring now as evidence that AI is preserving job numbers.
While I'm still catastrophically worried about what AI means for my career, I've noticed that my current employer - very AI forward, and growing the team - is still facing an ever expanding backlog.
High productivity is generally good for the employee, unless you're productive enough you run out of work to do. So how much code is needed?
> AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow.
This is not reassuring
"AI startups are hiring like there's no tomorrow."
For AI startups there eventually may be no tomorrow
How many of these startups are profitable
Perhaps the greatest "AI"-related job losses will be failed "AI" startups
More BS "jobs" created from throwaway investment capital instead of business success
I hope this results in a rebalancing of the social and economic power of high-IQ versus average-IQ workers. We will need construction workers and tradespeople to build and maintain these AI data centers. Probably even with robots. But we won’t need as many engineers, lawyers, and other people whose job it is to consume and generate bits. If we tax the proceeds of AI generated productivity sufficiently, this could be the beginning of returning to the dynamics of the 1940s-1960s, where economic power was more concentrated among skilled blue collar workers than it is now.
Does anyone here question the integrity of the US government’s jobs report two months away from a mid-term election?
I would argue that AI tooling does not have a moat and would be subsumed by the Big Two labs themselves, but then Cursor happened.
AI boom for jobs has always been here. Companies want to be on top of this stuff more then ever. Especially if they can replace more workers with it.
Remind me what percentage of the workforce works “AI jobs”?
Paywalled
> On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations.
Good news that ought to be taken with a pinch of salt given how the current administration responds to unfavorable BLS data -
> On Friday, August 1, [2025] President Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer from her role as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In social media posts announcing and confirming her firing, he said that he believed the jobs report released by the agency earlier that day included numbers that were “rigged in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
https://www.epi.org/policywatch/firing-bls-commissioner-erik...
AI boosters: "look, AI is creating jobs, all of these doomers scaring you with job loses, don't listen to them"
also AI boosters: "we are going to build a million robots, and the robots will build factories producing robots, there will be infinite abundance, nobody will need to work anymore"
I've spent 10 years implementing new technology into businesses from all over the world and the thing that has killed the most projects at the proof of concept phase has not been whether it works. It's whether the cost of going to production from PoC produces a significant ROI. AI is absolutely changing the economics there.
Humans were simply nowhere near answering all the useful questions they had which software could answer. The problem was that software was expensive.
Now, software is cheaper and so people who couldn't afford to answer questions they've long wondered about can afford to answer them.
So the lore of capitalism was on point this time -- whenever one market closes, resources (you) are freed to form a new market.
Interesting how we got frank propaganda on the front page now. Pretty sad. There are no jobs. Not real jobs.
Blatant propaganda is not an effective remedy to the severe public anti-AI sentiment, sorry.
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No they are not, try to change jobs and if you can't or takes a really long time you know this is some of the finest baloney. And no, it's not creating a lot of jobs, one one of the kind that will be destroyed by AI no, and that's the point... you built something that removes the pricey laywer, software developer, insurance policy writer, designer, etc... and replace it with a ONE TIME go work under the sun with no ac in the middle of nowhere as a contractor of the contractor of the contractor... So sure, I'm a dooms-scroll-lover, sure the 10000000 new part time possitions with no benefit of any kind will be the biggest work boom EVER... you will just go to compete with all the other people already doing that... and you know what happens when there is a queue of 100 to flip burgers or "highly technical non AI replaceable work like weld or electricist" right??