U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025

Re:U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025 by jimmaswell on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:37PM (#46978062)

Anyone lumping AI in with gambling and crypto scams has their head firmly in the sand. The value in making it easier to make computers do things for you is plainly obvious. People all across the tech literacy spectrum are seeing benefits, from coding projects that took days or weeks taking minutes to hours to finish to soccer moms telling their phones to fix up family photos and find them the email from the doctor's that's buried in their inbox. Competent doctors are getting help catching things from scans/symptoms that would take House MD to connect but are a breeze for an LLM, and there are numerous reports of people figuring out their own longstanding obscure medical issues by asking an LLM to speculate on their symptoms after a hundred doctors failed to diagnose it. Someone who can't afford to get ripped off by a mechanic and doesn't have the spare hours in the day and technical knowledge to Google it the old-fashioned way has a decent chance of solving simple car problems instantly on their own by asking ChatGPT or Gemini. It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from.

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Re:U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025 by giantg2 on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:51PM (#46978283)

"Anyone lumping AI in with gambling and crypto scams has their head firmly in the sand."

I disagree. While some AI related stuff is promising, much of it is consumerist or data harvesting. Many people are basically gambling on any sort of stock related to AI (vs diversifying). Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.

"It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from."

Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle. It's just an expanse on neural nets and the other predecessors from 30 years ago. In my experience, it has trouble following basic directions such as keeping a summary to a single page.

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Re:U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025 by jimmaswell on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:57PM (#46978375)

> Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.

I highly doubt this will be the case. This common viewpoint is almost certainly no more than another iteration of Plato decrying the invention of books.

> Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/miracle

    2: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment. "The bridge is a miracle of engineering."

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Re:U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025 by giantg2 on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @01:25PM (#46978737)

Books and calculators still required knowledge of concepts and application. That's vastly different from students today asking AI to write a book report for them and retaining no knowledge from it.

I don't consider AI to be outstanding. Maybe that bridge they're talking about was. Seems that this comes down to opinion.

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Re:U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025 by TimorousBestie on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:59PM (#46978407)

On the other hand, it’s not clear if any of it is sustainably profitable. Zitron has done a lot of reporting in this area, but since he’s “controversial” let’s stick with Forbes and the case of Sora (2025):

https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/11/10/openai-spe...

As far as I can tell, the math isn’t getting any better. The financial costs of running an AI service are enormous and it’s not clear where sufficient revenue is going to magically come from once the aggressive loss-leading ends.

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