AI May Not Impact Tech-Sector Employment, Projects US Department of Labor (investopedia.com) 49
America's Labor Department includes the fact-finding Bureau of Labor Statistics — and they recently explained how AI impacts their projections for the next 10 years. Their conclusion, writes Investopedia, was that "tech workers might not have as much to worry about as one might think."
Employment in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector is forecast to increase by 10.5% from 2023 to 2033, more than double the national average. According to the BLS, the impact AI will have on tech-sector employment is highly uncertain. For one, AI is adept at coding and related tasks. But at the same time, as digital systems become more advanced and essential to day-to-day life, more software developers, data managers, and the like are going to be needed to manage those systems. "Although it is always possible that AI-induced productivity improvements will outweigh continued labor demand, there is no clear evidence to support this conjecture," according to BLS researchers.
Their employment projections through 2033 predict the fastest-growing sector within the tech industry will be computer system design, while the fastest-growing occupation will be data scientist.
And they also project that from 2023 through 2033 AI will "primarily affect occupations whose core tasks can be most easily replicated by GenAI in its current form." So over those 10 years they project a 4.7% drop in employment of medical transcriptionists and a 5.0% drop in employment of customer service representatives. Other occupations also may see AI impacts, although not to the same extent. For instance, computer occupations may see productivity impacts from AI, but the need to implement and maintain AI infrastructure could in actuality boost demand for some occupations in this group.
They also project decreasing employment for paralegals, but with actual lawyers being "less affected."
Their employment projections through 2033 predict the fastest-growing sector within the tech industry will be computer system design, while the fastest-growing occupation will be data scientist.
And they also project that from 2023 through 2033 AI will "primarily affect occupations whose core tasks can be most easily replicated by GenAI in its current form." So over those 10 years they project a 4.7% drop in employment of medical transcriptionists and a 5.0% drop in employment of customer service representatives. Other occupations also may see AI impacts, although not to the same extent. For instance, computer occupations may see productivity impacts from AI, but the need to implement and maintain AI infrastructure could in actuality boost demand for some occupations in this group.
They also project decreasing employment for paralegals, but with actual lawyers being "less affected."
But... (Score:2, Insightful)
The pollution generated by all the people wasting energy on this AI bullshit will impact everyone. Make the world worse for profit so you can afford to shield your child from learning about all this shitty things you do for, right?
Re: But...BIZX is paid to spew Al bullshit (Score:2)
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You're asking the wrong question. That's like asking what CowboyNeal has done to anyone. You can think of rsilvergun as being the lobotomized edition. It's not a grudge, or as rsilvergun calls it "living rent free in your head", rather he's just a random punchline. CowboyNeal is when you're punching up, rsilvergun is when you're punching down.
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The Cowboi Kneel jokes also got downmods back in the day.
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Some people just need to elevate themselves over others by bullying and badmouthing, because they are so pathetic themselves. You are answering to a shining example of that effect.
I beg to differ (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, it's pretty amazing. I use it too. But it's still far from being able to displace developers. The ones it can displace, won't be missed anyway.
Your example is small, it's a new piece of software you came up with over a few days. Most of us work with software that has been developed over many years, even decades. These things are complex beasts. AI can't even begin to digest all the code, much less do something intelligent with it. It's going to take humans to write anything non-trivial, for quite some time.
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Re:I beg to differ (Score:4, Insightful)
No, that's not why, in fact they're still built to this day. GP is right, you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. It's actually entertaining to watch AI try to write something even remotely complex. Even when you ask it to do something simple, the more code it needs to spit out, the more it fucks it up. It's actually fundamental problem with generative AI, very closely related to why you can't stop it from hallucinating. It won't even replace junior developers any time soon. The only reason you'd say something like this is if you either A) Don't understand software development B) Don't understand the problems inherent in LLMs.
The amount of faith that laypeople put into LLMs is insane. Even after that first, widely reported fiasco where some law firm got into trouble for using AI to submit legal briefs and it generated bogus case law, we've seen more lawyers make the same stupid mistake multiple times. What's worse is these lawyers could have at least verified that the cases cited actually existed because they can at least read English, but they didn't even do that. What makes you think a middle-manager PHB with no programming skills is going to be able to validate code written in a language he doesn't even understand? What makes you think he's even going to be able to adequately test it? You do need to be able to write actual code to do that.
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...at least not until you want to retire and there's no one trained to replace you.
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That's already a common problem, with or without AI. There will be someone who can step in and replace me when I retire. Nobody is *that* irreplaceable.
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When AI can reliably create 'modern code' from COBOL systems, with zero errors, you got a deal. Until then, it's a very clever and deep IDE.
ps - I did specify COBOL 'systems'. Converting the terminal interface to Rust does not count.
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Interesting)
And you're right about the junior and mid-level developers being let go. While they can use the same AIs as senior developers, they don't have the experience to know when the AI is wrong. They also have a hard time decomposing the problem space down to something they can then use the AI for. I've found myself more productive with AI myself, and other people say it's shit. But when I tell them how I use the AI, and they try it they realize that AI is not as bad as they thought it was.
With the current AI, you can't tell it: Build me an application to do X. And expect a good result. But you can tell it: Build me a function that does A, B, and C and takes inputs X, Y, and Z. You can get fairly good results from it. Enough that you can build up on that to do the job that would take a week in a couple of hours.
A junior developer doesn't have the experience to know how to do this, because they haven't had to deal with junior developers. Senior developers who've had to work with junior developers and help them grow know how to work with AIs because it's almost the same thing. Except the AIs don't argue with you and produce code much faster. Of course, not having someone argue with you and tell you that your shit does smell is a problem in itself. I am worried about the industry as a whole when I retire, and there are no junior developers left in the experience pipeline to take my place.
Re: I beg to differ (Score:2)
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I've really only used it for writing test code. Since I don't like the idea
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The C-level execs think that AI will help them save on costs and have been holding off hiring more developers because AI is just around the corner.
I don't know where you're getting this idea from, but this is total nonsense, and it's not at all how executives think. Hiring is a tactical decision to meet current market demand, not a strategic one, unless it's part of creating a new business unit altogether where mass hiring is part of the plan. Making moves on what you expect to happen in the future is a strategic decision.
Think about it for a second. You've got customers demanding product X, but you don't currently have the staff that you need to prod
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What is probably happening is that companies that usually have a hard time competing for the better IT people are now scooping them up. The ones that are holding back now are the ones that will have a massive problem tomorrow.
Please let me know what you work on (Score:2)
So I can make sure to never use it. At best, you want to destroy the pipeline of junior programmers. At worst, you're so incompetent you don't realize you're just copying and pasting from stack exchange and probably don't understand whatever subtle bugs you've introduced into your codebase.
Re: Please let me know what you work on (Score:2)
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Right now you still have these experienced people but what happens when you no longer train new juniors?
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Well, if your retarded idiot dog manages for once to not poop on your couch, that is "astounding" as well.
The reality is that LLMs are, for most purposes, still toys that cannot be trusted. And that will not change anytime soon.
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The progress that AI has made over the previous year is astounding. A year ago Github copilot was a bit of a gimmic. It got things wrong more often than it got thigns right. I have just spent the weekend playing with the preview of Github Copilot agent mode - and completed the amount of work it would have taken me a whole working week a year ago in just a few hours, with only minor edits to generated code. And even these could have probably been avoided if I worded my tasks better. The primary programming language that I have used is english. With this - we can probably let go 80% of our junior and mid level developers and still be more productive than a year ago.
Hope you are checking that code *very* carefully if that is a production size system you are making these edits in. In my experience these tools work good (or ok-ish) on toy projects but for actual production sized products they can make really insidious errors that are hard to catch.
As for improvement, if you didn't use something like Cursor earlier, then yes you probably saw improvement in the past year in terms of tooling. GH Copilot definitely seemed to get worse for a while before it got better again.
Someone had better tell the E-suites quick (Score:5, Insightful)
Execs are going to need to re-staff back 500K software engineering jobs they've culled since 2022 ASAP.
Let's dissect this, "the impact AI will have on tech-sector employment is highly uncertain", fair enough, it's hard to predict the future. Next point, "Employment in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector is forecast to increase by 10.5% from 2023 to 2033", wait what? So we don't know what the impact on tech sector employment will be, but we'll forecast rainbows and sunshine for tech sector employment while other sectors will eat all the job losses. Makes complete sense, no hidden agenda here, the 500K layoffs of tech sector jobs are fake news, didn't really happen, hiring is going strong?
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Execs are going to need to re-staff back 500K software engineering jobs they've culled since 2022 ASAP.
I doubt it. At the height of COVID you saw a massive shift in consumer demand for digital services. Executives responded by hiring more staff. Some of them (I'm looking in Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Google's direction) overdid it by assuming this was going to be a long-term thing rather than just a bubble, mainly because they've had their sights set on cloud growth for so long that they more or less just assumed that it would never really die down. Until it did. And when it did, rsilvergun and drinkypoo
Re: Someone had better tell the E-suites quick (Score:2)
Never trust any study that attempts to predict the unpredictable.
What did they predict before AI came along? (Score:2)
Someone go back 5 years ago, to see what their predictions were about the growth of the tech job market, and see how it is now.
No one saw AI, in its current disruptive form, coming. That is why it is disruptive. And yet these predictions are based around the status quo of this disruption continuing in its current state.
What if generative AI is actually capable of managing these systems? Why would we not think they could not do so, if AI advances as we predict it might? WOuldn't this completely fuck up th
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Just yesterday Slashdot literally posted that [slashdot.org].
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That's a very big "what if".
Cars have been able to drive themselves now for a decade or more. Self-driving taxis have been available since 2017, when Waymo entered the Phoenix market. Are Uber drivers out of work? No, hardly.
Just because a technology exists, doesn't mean it can immediately displace an entire workforce.
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> Are Uber drivers out of work? No, hardly.
"Waymo’s share gains have mostly come at the expense of Uber. The early moving Uber controlled 63% of San Francisco’s ride share dollars at the end of 2023. However, as of January 2025, Uber controls less than 55%. Lyft also lost some share, falling to 31% from 35% in the same period."
https://www.earnestanalytics.c... [earnestanalytics.com]
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Yes, of course. But losing a few percentage points to Waymo, is a lot different from wiping out Uber and Lyft drivers. The claim being made about AI is that it will "wipe out" software engineering jobs. As Waymo illustrates, just because the technology exists, doesn't mean it will displace humans en masse.
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Are LLMs disruptive or is it (currently) a toy that most people think can do more than it can, and is only disruptive in the sense that businesses keep trying to use it for things and then finding it doesn't actually work or replace people?
I know we'll get the usual gaggle of "I was able to build a mobile app with the help of AI!" who'll then describe something that isn't entirely unlike being helped by StackOverflow, but would any of those people say they actually cost someone their job by using an LLM to
Start from a current deflated figure... (Score:2)
Fire a bunch of people back in 2017, and yeah... forecasts from today may look rosy too.
But lets play the game. AI is just better tools. Meaning if we used to pay someone to do it before, we might use AI to do it instead. And why not sell what the AI created afterward? Why force AI to recreate the wheel every time?
Just Yesterday... (Score:2)
You posted back-to-back stories:
#1 [slashdot.org]
#2 [slashdot.org]
You need to make up your fucking mind which narrative editorials you're going to post, because this mix-and-match shit has got to stop.
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Clearly, there is no consensus on which direction AI is going to lead us. It's hardly a done deal that AI will suddenly wipe out the entire tech sector.
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> It's hardly a done deal that AI will suddenly wipe out the entire tech sector
That could happen, but it would mean that it would also wipe out all other sectors. Because if you have an AI that can replace any programmer, you have an AI that can write any software, meaning you can ask it to create a robot to replace a worker in any profession.
We already have artificial super intelligence that can beat 100% of humans in a narrow tasks, like predicting protein folding or playing go. What we are missing is
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No, you have an AI that can write the software for that robot. We're well behind the curve for robotics hardware. That said I think the pace will pick up once the software is there and waiting for the hardware.We need:
DOGE Was Here (Score:2)
Says all 3 people remaining at the USDOL.
Well ... (Score:2)
AI May Not Impact Tech-Sector Employment
Certainly not in the C-Suites anyway.
What? THIS Labor Dept? (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone who believes any stats issued by this Dept. of Labor is believing in fantasies. This administration will lie just like their leader. Remember he redirected a hurricane with Sharpie and now claims Ukraine started the war. And Elmo is claiming "waste, fraud, and abuse" that does not exist. They are also taking down sites reporting gov. data that they do not like.
In the Georgia town hall, Rep. Rich McCormick, who represents a deep red district, got an earfull from the voters. When asked why the administration was pumping a tax reduction when it would cost the Treasury money according the Congressional Budget Office, he claimed he was not using CBO's stats but was relying on "dynamic scoring". The current plan by the Maggots is to add another 5 years to the tax reduction. This was written into the legislation and why it is coming up now.
If you recall in la Presidenta's previous administration, they invented "dynamic scoring" for their tax reduction because CBO was telling them it would cost money. "Dynamic scoring" means to include all the economic effects of a tax reduction. The Maggot's trumpeted the "macro economic effects" but as usual, blew them out of proportion. So the CBO redid their 2017 figures and put out a new report in 2018. This included the macro economic effects but not the contrived ones from the "dynamic scoring" the Maggots were promoting. End result, the tax reduction would cost the Treasury $1.854 trillion. That's $1.854 trillion going to the rich folks who paid for the Congress critters and la Presidenta:
From https://www.cbo.gov/publicatio... [cbo.gov]
"In the same report, CBO also estimated the macroeconomic feedback resulting from the tax act. CBO estimated that the economic changes resulting from the act—not including its effects on debt service—would reduce primary deficits by $0.571 trillion over the 2018–2028 period. The main reason was that the act would boost taxable income and thus federal revenues. (Through 2028, the 2017 tax act was estimated to boost GDP by a cumulative $2.562 trillion.) But the act would also lead to larger deficits and higher interest rates, raising debt-service costs. Once that effect was included as well, CBO estimated, macroeconomic feedback from the act would reduce budget deficits by $0.461 trillion over the 2018–2028 period, bringing the net deficit increase down to $1.854 trillion. Macroeconomic feedback over the period thus offsets about 30 percent of the projected impact on the primary deficit and 20 percent of the projected impact on the total deficit."
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I understand where you're coming from, but it's been a month, and Trusk* has been culling departments and firing people rather than getting them to actively do anything. So far as I can see the nearest thing there's been to Trusk-lead action so far has been the vague threats the DOJ is throwing at Musk critics.
So there's a very low probability this report is as a result of work by Trusk loyalists. More likely, it's a report the DOL was already working on before Trump took over, whose results do not actively
Maybe They Need AI To Do The Reporting (Score:2)
It seems that they are behind the times. It's no longer a question of whether or not it may impact tech-sector jobs.
AI has already impacted tech-sector jobs and will continue to disrupt the sector at an accelerating pace for the foreseeable future.
Maybe the Department of Labor needs to use some AI to catch up on its reporting.
Wonderful! (Score:2)
I am so glad we get this news after we get a fully trustworthy, unbiased, and beyond reproach administration in place.
I am glad we can all rest easy now.
If I were 20 years younger... (Score:2)
I would be totally committed to AI. In the datacenter, rackin' and stackin', hands-on, making the s*&t run.
Can't AI yourself out of that, at least not for the foreseeable future. Then the robots will need more robots, machines making machines, and we should all learn to write bad novels.
So Says Musk's AI (Score:2)