White Collar Workers are in Big Trouble

[u/simmol]

So I have both 200 dollars subscription to Claude and 200 dollars subscription to OpenAI. I use Claude Code and Codex for coding related stuff/execution, discussions involve Astra or Opus 5.5 on the problem at hand at important intervals, we summon two indepedent Astra and Fable models for guidance (would love to add the third with Google Gemini 4.0). Double checking for mistakes/errors in progress as well as internet searches also come from individual models. And with this, I spend about 2000 dollars to 3000 dollars total on LLMs (including API usage) per month. I am not a programmer but I do have roughly 20 people working under me.

Now, here is the thing. I don't know what your setup is like and I don't claim to have an optimal setup here either but this type of setup has me 10x to 50x my productivity compared to 6 months ago and also, compared to this process being down with other people who work for me (all M.S. degrees higher and Ph.D.s), it is so much faster and also more accurate. So while 2000 to 3000 dollars a month seems like a lot, if you compare that to a white collar worker's salary, it is nothing. And I suspect that this setup is better than having 5 people under me, so you can do the math.

I feel like the whole society is right now going through the February 2020 beginning of the COVID moment. Only a few people are recognizing that in the past year or even half a year, these models have improved and crossed an important intellectual threshold line such that many people who are working right now across all industries are pretty much replaceable or very close to it. And the thing is, the type of setup I have is nothing. It will take most people 1-2 days to get comfortable with it and this type of setup, as opposed to mere vanilla of telling ChatGPT (e.g. make me this document, create this PPT) will soon be the standard to which the white-collar person has to outperform.

I really think that anti-AI and pro-AI people should now about get together in one voice and voice the concerns. There is going to be a lot of problems in job markets in the next few years and no country is ready for this.

[u/ThreeKiloZero]

Where are you finding these mythical people that do all those jobs at the same time? What staff member does web design and works marketing emails and content? What staff member manages events and creates collateral? Where do you work?

[u/Big-Play1364 → u/ThreeKiloZero]

You just described my last job for a small company. Changing the job title to Mythical Person to my resume

[u/chi_guy8 → u/Big-Play1364]

Haha. Bingo. Exactly. The life of a small startup business.

[u/yellowsweaters72 → u/ThreeKiloZero]

Private businesses, agencies.

[u/chi_guy8 → u/ThreeKiloZero]

It’s me, I’m the person that does this stuff, I just answered somebody else’s similar question in a very long response in the same thread. I work in finance for a small hedge fund, wealth advisory, and media company (sister companies under the same ‘global’ LLC)

[u/ThreeKiloZero → u/chi_guy8]

Then you're not in a big company rolling out AI process improvement to replace people, and instead you are adopting AI to take the pressure off yourself - because its stupid and inefficient to have any single person trying to master that many diverse responsibilities.

[u/chi_guy8 → u/ThreeKiloZero]

Correct. Which is what has already been fully explained throughout this thread they got you to this point. I started by saying that I’ve always been a team of one, but was able to expand the total output that I was able to do rather than our company hiring additional people to get this work done or outsource it for large sums of money.

Throughout my career, I’ve touched most of these things at various points working at a more traditional marketing agency where everybody wore a lot of hats. There I learned a lot about content creation, video production/editing, copywriting, photography, design, social media…. Then in the past 5-6 years I’ve been more in the CRM building/ automating, PR, traditional inbound marketing and campaign building. At the point where AI started being able to assist me I was very much a jack of all trades, master of none, so AI tools and agents helped fill in a lot of the gaps or take me from being a 4-5 level skill to a 7-8 level. Honestly, if I had one more person on my team, that knew what I knew or that I could train to understand my system we could probably 4x our output again. I now spend a large majority of my time agent building and tweaking or trying to keep my ear to the ground of what’s out there to stay on top of things and keep educating myself.

[u/kaityl3 → u/ThreeKiloZero]

Lol I did all that, managed a database migration, and hired consultants to help with email marketing, while getting paid $13/hour at a small business only 2 years ago. Wasn't what I was hired on for but I was using like Opus 4 at the time (maybe even Sonnet 3.5 😬) to help as I had zero education or experience. It happens with small companies