A lot of CEOs are saying do more with less. Basically they are saying, “If there are any requests to hire additional people the first thing I ask them is if any AI tools have been tried first.”

Then every 2-bit president, leader, manager, CEO out there regurgitates the same thing.

So yes, companies want to save money and do more with leas. It certainly won’t help job seekers or the economy.

I would expect something more convincing for such a (seemingly) popular article of this title. Seems like a relatively straightforward difference-in-differences or synthetic control could be applied to show something convinving, but this is just some dude's opinions as 'evidence'.

Part of the job downturn may be due to AI, not in the obvious way of LLMs doing peoples jobs but due to the money allocation:

>Companies will spend $375 billion globally in 2025 on A.I. infrastructure, the investment bank UBS estimates. (nyt)

which means they have less money to hire and train recruits.

Tax code changes & interest rate changes have been unfavorable. Secondly “learn to code” and vastly lowered CS standards have churned out a lot of young developers that are unskilled, much like in the .com bust. Lastly AI which at best has completely shut the unskilled out.

I'd wager that vast resources being spent in one very niche subfield is what's hurting job creation from young people.

Aside from this there simply doesn't exist another mechanism in which AI can meaningfully affect employment in the long term.

Demand will shift to AI-literate knowledge workers whose productivity will be increased.

It's striking that the decline in hiring started when ChatGPT was first demoed, but wasn't really good enough to do much useful.

If it wasn't working now, though, we would see those graphs going back up.

It's not AI replacing jobs. There is a hiring downturn due to economic conditions (reaction to covid over-hiring and subsequent interest increases) and the people on the bottom of the ladder get bumped off.

There's a sizable overlap between the anti-AI movement (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/) and self-identified socialists.

One thing that confuses me is that the anti-AI movement has adopted several talking points saying that nobody wants AI. (e.g. nobody wants it, the AI companies are pushing it on us, management is pushing it on us, it just creates low quality slop, the demand is fake, etc).

But if there's no demand, then there's no threat to jobs. On the other hand if there is a threat to jobs then there must be demand (since it competes with human labor in the job market). I'm not sure why they're taking this particular tactic, but it's going to lead to strange comment sections where people won't know how to stay on message as it becomes clearer that AI is impacting the labor force.

A lot of people intuitively imagine that to compete with humans there's some sort of 1:1 exchange ratio. But initially the calculus will be something like a 10 team with plus AI performs about on par with a 12 person team (or whatever the details work out to). So we will see AI impacting job numbers well before AI can do your entire job.

Does the ADP data include international employees in lower cost geos?