Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
I appreciate your wholesome message, but I feel a bit is overlooked.
Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
>> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
Sounds amazing. How on earth did he go from shoeing horses to learning about the internal combustion engine? Seems quite the leap that not everyone would be capable of.
Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.
And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.
This happened to my grandfather (blacksmith to working on cars and motorcycles), who was illiterate. From what I gather, it was a lifetime of trial-and-error-and-keep-what-works.
Early automobiles were very simple machines. I you knew how to repair a carriage or a wagon, you were pretty close to being able to work on an early automobile. You should check them out.
Honestly I think people forget this fact. You don't have to go that far back to find vehicles that you absolutely could do anything to yourself with basic tools.
We're fixing up a 1987 Jeep Wrangler for our son. I could strip it down to the frame with 3 or 4 tools. It's kind of amazing how simple cars were, and that was in the late 80's.
Yeah as long as you ignore the engine (ECU/PCM/TCUs) in cars in the 80s, they're quite simple. Go back to the early 70s-before and it's mostly all analog or trivial electronics.
Shoeing horses properly is actually no joke and cars back then were laughably simple. I don’t see how any of that could feel relatable to people in software development now, when almost all jobs that require real smarts and competency require years of study and experience.
There is a quote from a CGP Grey video from a bit over a decade ago, "There isn't a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right." [1]
A couple hundred years ago, something like 70% of the population worked in agriculture. Technology replaced almost all of these jobs.
So far, we have reimagined old professions and created brand new ones. Is this ability of ours limitless?
The amount of consumption is largely dependent on income level. There's a recent study from Moody's that says that in the US, the top 10% income bracket now accounts for roughly half of consumer spending. As wealth inequality continues to worsen, it makes more and more sense to solely target high earners because you make the same or more as selling higher amounts of lower priced product but with less overhead.
> As wealth inequality continues to worsen, it makes more and more sense to solely target high earners because you make the same or more as selling higher amounts of lower priced product but with less overhead.
This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.
It works right up until some form of revolution, either politically or violently. We are far from anything like that but I'd rather not get close to the line. I think I'm a minority view though, despite being in the top 10% myself.
It is also shocking how little my life compares to the rich people I see. I don't own two houses or a yacht. We don't take yearly vacations to a chateau in France. The gap between the top 10% and the top 1% is insane. The gap between the 1% and the 0.1% is even larger still.
But hey... not like the rich getting richer and saying "screw you" to everyone else has ever led to negative consequences right? Nothing to see here, business as usual.
Your statement makes it seem like we had no problem losing professions to automation. I'd argue this isn't true.
There are plenty of poeple who have inadequate work the world over because there isn't enough paid work to do, and most professions are servicing wants, not needs, so the demand is very elastic, with many people now multi talented and still not making ends meet.
I know it's been talked to death already, but the fact that the video is so wrong on self-driving cars is mind-blowing. We can rationalize post-fact as much as we want - still it is shocking that popular belief never expected language models before self driving.
Popular belief never took the regulatory obstacles to self-driving cars seriously. If LLMs required insurance to use, they also wouldn't be available in public yet.
1. There are no rules of economics. Economists attempt to understand things that happen and use that understanding to predict future events, but frankly there’s not a lot of consensus.
2. Economics is a function of human behavior, not horse behavior. Economics is about coordinating human effort. Humans make economics, horses don’t. When economics change in a way that is bad for horses, the horses have no recourse. When economics change in a way that is bad for humans, the affected humans seek to change things.
Have any of these articles actually addressed HOW software developers are supposed to retrain for good jobs? Personally I have neither the money nor the years to go back to college to get a livable job.
I know some people whose work was already almost completely eliminated by AI (language translation) and they're not doing great. Reality is there's no-one out there looking out for you except yourself and very close family/friends.
So obviously each college is different. And your experience is not mine.
But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.
What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.
You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.
Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.
I don't know where you are, but when I hire mechanical engineers, I hire them from universities with accredited engineering programs. It's actually a legal requirement for the job in my jurisdiction. And if those engineers decide they want to become daycare teachers or knee surgeons, they do have to go back to university and re-train, even though they already learned how to think the first time.
Is that true for healthcare careers that don't have abysmal quality of life? All of the nurses I've known are working 60 hour weeks, night shifts, etc.
Only $2.5K rent? That's like free these days. For what though. I rented a 4K sq ft house in Charlotte three years ago and now paying $3.5K for not a modern 2bdr in Miami proper.
I keep telling my 22y who graduated from a university last year to go to a trade school (HVAC/ electric, plumbing). Too late for me as these require apprenticeships in the US.
My HVAC contact in FL needs a $100 just to sniff the AC/boiler closet. That is, if I can get him to show up. I don't even know if he's licensed here, but he's definitely very experienced.
If you're unemployed, you won't need to pay 2 grand/month for someone else to watch your children, and you don't have to pay San Francisco rents if you're not working there.
I don't think "just give up your existing community and move" is a viable option. That defeats the whole point since at that point the retraining isn't allowing you to maintain your quality of life.
No, it isn't. This is an incredibly modern phenomenon. We see examples of peoples moving en masse throughout history, yes, but the idea that everyday individuals should expect to leave their community is an incredibly recent one. Such would have seemed monstrous to people even a few hundred years ago. Fun fact: Socrates wasn't actually sentenced to death, he was sentenced to death or exile, and chose death over having to leave his home behind.
It is a viable option. "Quality of life" is a luxury and programmers no longer belong to the class that can afford it. Do what everyone else does and go wherever the jobs are and live at whatever quality the market decides that you deserve.
San Francisco is where the jobs are, and dropping your entire social network on the floor at exactly the moment you need it the most to help you is not good advice.
Former tech workers can ask for advice from non-tech people who previously had to leave because they could no longer afford rising costs that happened due to influx of well paid IT jobs.
I think you are missing the point of the discussion. The idea behind "just retrain" rhetoric is effectively "new technology won't destroy people's quality of life because they can just retrain!". If quality of life isn't maintained, then there is no reason to retrain at all, people can just get a minimum wage job and live in poverty.
The rhetoric was a lie. Capitalists lie. That new technology always creates a surplus of newer, better jobs and quality of life always improves for everyone was a lie. That you can "just retrain" and everything will remain the same was a lie.
Even if you "retrain" your quality of life will go down because the market value of your life will go down as automation and AI improve, unless you're a member of the capitalist class. Which, if you need to work for a living at all, you aren't. No matter what you do unless you're personally wealthy your quality of life will go down. That's just what an efficient market does to most people, and AI is going to make the market brutally efficient.
I wonder how many sectors this will have to happen to until workers realize that nobody's safe. I was shocked to see journalists at major firms peddling the 'just learn to code' line a few years back, given how much their industry had contracted in the decades before.
This works if you're interested in running a business, but what well paying work doesn't require a degree or some kind of formal training certification?
People in tech change roles and careers all the time. The vast majority of role or career changes do not involve going back to college.
I would even recommend against going back to college unless someone has an extremely compelling case for a career change that requires it and the conviction to see it through.
I'm hesitant to give examples because I know every example I give will be met with objections from "But I don't want to do that job" or "What if that gets replaced by AI too?". Look around you and you can should be able to identify some adjacent roles where you at least have an understanding of what the works like and you could learn the rest by taking on gradually more responsibility.
There are a lot of jobs out there that aren't exciting, don't pay SWE level salaries, but nevertheless pay enough to support a family as evidenced by all of the people doing those jobs who support their families. Not every company or industry is interested in squeezing maximum efficiency out of their employees. I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
I don't think SWE is going to disappear either, but it will look a lot different in years to come. If you can't or won't adapt to the new normal, one of those boring alternative careers might be worth pursuing.
>The vast majority of role or career changes do not involve going back to college.
That was possible pre-2022 during the famous developer labor shortage. In the current market, companies expect seniority/experience in that specific stack they use for that, no more career changers.
They either take you as a senior/expert to contribute from day one, or as a young and cheap newgrad/junior out of uni they expect to train on the job, but no more in-betweeners switching careers as they're not as experienced as the seniors on the market, nor are they as cheap and malleable as newgrads/juniors.
Sure, in theory every developer can learn at home to do anything new related, but in the current job market, companies expect X-years of proven on the job experience with their stack, no more bootcampers, and no more self-taught-at-home types. The entry bar has risen significantly. At least where I live.
Like I just saw on linkeidn a job posting from a large bank that was an hour old and it already had 100 applications, which probably means most applications are now AI botted, meaning yours will get lost in the noise and getting a call back for an actual interview is like rolling a dice.
Not saying it's impossible to change(I did a couple of times), just that's it's much more difficult than in the good times, and will most likely also come with a paycut.
I guess where I'm coming from is that I currently am trying to change careers. Everything I'm finding is either a 50% pay cut or is simply unwilling to consider anyone without 5-10 years of experience in that particular industry. Since I've already built a life here I can't really just move and a 50% pay cut isn't enough to live anywhere near a comfortable life; particularly since I have medical expenses that aren't covered by insurance.
> I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
I think these jobs are actually the most likely to be replaced by AI. They have resisted automation to date because there's too much fuzz in the inputs/outputs to make it feasible to computerize. LLMs solve exactly that problem.
The same way clerical and manufacturing workers retrained when their jobs were replaced by computers/the Internet and robots. That is to say, most won’t.
Just like everyone else. I have a feeling your definition of “livable” is not in line with the reality that most people face. You share more in common with a stay-at-home mom going back to school to become a phlebotomist than you think. It’s just pride gets in the way
Not enough buffer to take 3-5 years to rebuild a career is not the same as no buffer at all. Personally I have about a year of buffer which is no where near enough to meaningfully retrain.
I don't get it. Didn't you live way below your means so you can save up money for retirement? I've got enough money saved to get away with being jobless for about a decade.
If the stock market drops 80% and stays there for longer than a year it's Great Depression 2.0. Retraining won't do jack shit. There'll be breadlines, governments paying people to dig ditches and build trails in national parks.
Not everyone's had the luxury of saving for years and years. Some people just got into the industry (remember 'learn to code'? not to mention recent graduates), others had to work their way up through lower-wage roles (e.g. contracting) just to get to a place from where they could hope to save. Other people have family to take care of and can't just throw everything into their savings.
Even back when I had to make do with $400 a month I was saving. Live out of a van to save on rent if you have to. There's always a way to live below your means and save.
Of course there are exceptions, but I don't expect those to apply to anyone commenting here.
It's possible to make low 6 figures, but a lot of pay is dependent upon length of time teaching and/or which district to get into. Good districts rarely have openings.
I'd say (not a teacher myself, but related to several) teaching is a lot more difficult than people give it credit for.
Actually that's not generally true. Janitors at least work 12 months a year, many schoolteachers are paid ~9 despite being expected to work through them (on lesson prep &c).
Not really sure what I should be doing on the side since AI seems to be automating a lot of work that I do as an analytics engineer. Maybe in 10 years all I'm doing is feeding in markdowns and project specs to an LLM and reading test outputs. At what point are you just a technician?
Lately I've been just thinking of hitting ALT+F4 on life for good, as a big FU to the megacorps (not that they would care, but it would give me the satisfaction at least)
There’s so much more you can do to get back at megacorps that will hurt them more than that. 1 less person in the world to oppose them is a win for them.
I’ve never met you but based on your last 10 HN comments I think the world would be worse off without you in it.
If you jump from a bridge, all it does, is that relatives of yours will receive the bill for cleaning up the blood and remains (on top of funeral etc).
I think of doing this except for suicide (which you shouldn't do) I fantasize about becoming a monk. That's a life role that can't be replaced with AI, provides meaning to yourself and to the community and guarantees you a certain amount of happiness – probably more than most jobs.
Monasteries are wary about people inquiring because they can't hack it in the world. And because monasteries are businesses of a sort, they are concerned with what a middle-aged inquirer can bring to the table financially.
That's a very broad statement; the reality depends on the specific order and monastery in question. To be sure monasteries are wary about all who inquire, thus the usual two-year neophyte period. Beyond that some will expect more from novices, other less, but there are many stories of broken people retreating to monastic life even today. Indeed many (within the Church) expound that as a key role of monasteries, providing a place for people to escape from the world. If you just want to live a Godly life, you can do that in society; monasteries are precisely the place you go to do so outside of it.
A pithy saying in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions is that people shouldn't consider monasticism if they want to run away from the world, but rather only if they want to run towards Christ. A significant part of the discernment process is weeding out the former.
well, I suppose the same way that other people whose jobs were lost due to automation over the years were supposed to retrain for good jobs? I doubt they had the money or years to go back to college to get a livable job either.
In the past there was always demand for "unskilled" (manual) labor where displaced workers could land to without long (re)training, and possibly even gain skills on the job. But that job marked has dramatically diminished especially in the west; there are only so many burgers to be flipped. Somewhat famously during industrial revolution displaced agricultural workers (e.g. farmhands) ended up mass-migrating to cities doing factory work under extremely exploitative conditions. And that never truly got resolved, we just brushed the issue under the rug by pushing manual labor to third world countries where the problems could remain out of sight.
You retrain the same way that we told workers when we decimated the garment and manufacturing industries. You'll get the same amount of government support too.
It used to be you could just buy (for example) jeans made in America for $20. I bought such a pair back in the late 1990s. There was no need to be busy trying to "support the traditional garment industry".
Nowadays you'll be spending $40 (same price after adjusting for inflation) for something definitely not made in America, and probably of inferior quality too. Since the domestic garment industry has shrunk so much, the supply chains an economies of scale don't exist anymore to buy domestically-made garments of decent quality at those prices.
Many of us on this site have worked directly on projects where the efficiency gains ultimately reduced or eliminated positions. If you want to exit the development field, I think the answer is probably the same as for the people whose jobs we helped eliminate.
How can you not see that this time its actually different? The very need for labor is being obviated. Every technological change we had before still required a need for labor often an massive need that justified an entire city population. That is the difference. For the first time in human history, economic output is being severed from requiring maintenance of a labor pool. Considering we are that labor pool, things do not bode so well for us. As you state, look at the relative lack of abundance of candlestick makers and horeshoe makers and basket weavers and other colonial jobs. We are essentially making ourselves extinct and we don't even realize this.
There's an off-color joke that could be made here but the real question is the speed of change - we gloss over it but there have been major changes that took centuries, and others that were quite fast, this one seems to be closer to the fast end.
Because I've been looking for a new job for several months and all of them either require significant retraining or don't pay nearly enough to maintain even a similar quality of life. I don't just mean they don't pay enough for luxury. I mean they don't pay enough to live in my community without a roommate.
In my experience, AI has given far more leverage to software engineers than anyone else, because they have a feel for what computers can do, what's easy, what's hard, what's performant, or poorly specified, etc. Therefore I think retraining is mostly about being willing to experiment with AI-assisted workflows and not being too tied to old ways of doing things. As long as you are focused on the problems you are solving, I think you'll do okay.
What I'm more concerned about are the younger generation where all the learning tasks have been automated. I have faith that the strong, naturally curious engineering types will still learn to do great engineering, and honestly without some of the mental blocks and calcified assumptions that us greybeards have. But how do they get in the foot in the door and the reps needed to develop senior-level judgment is another question.
In some sense we need the current mania to die down and the long-term maintenance implications of heavy AI assistance to become more apparent. Basically I think we need the AI bubble to pop and then 1-2 years for things to stabilize, and then we'll recalibrate on hiring expectations and best practices for AI usage. The current AI maximalist and doomer views I think are both basically driven by capitalist incentives and wishful thinking from investors and a reality check is going to come in some form (whether technically, socially or politically).
We are all going to learn the hard way, this is what the economy is like for many people. Always on the precipice of losing everything and thus willing to do anything like the capital owners want it.
Whatever cushy career path you think is safe now will probably not be so safe by the time you go to university, train, land a job in it etc. The job of the future is nurse, diaper-changer, cleaner, prostitute for elderly retirees. Welcome to the aging fascist AI technoutopia.
The internet has made it easier than ever to learn new skills. You don't need college unless you're targeting a career that requires, or expects, a degree.
Maybe there will be an inversion. Lots of white collar office jobs can be partially automated, or have their efficiency greatly increased by AI. But we still don't seem to be near widely deployed robots that finish drywall
You think the drywall company is going to hire you? Why would they hire someone in middle age with no experience when there are no shortage of 20 year olds who already know the trade?
I’ve been coding for over 20 years. I may not be the perfect coder, but for me, the real goal has always been solving problems and coding is just a side effect. If I could solve an operational problem with Excel, I would! Code, once created, is a liability I have to carry.
So I’m embracing AI-assisted coding with open arms. It’s not that I don’t enjoy coding. it’s that this approach lets me solve problems faster than ever before.
Ok but you do realize that AI can also solve problems? The thing is it's not just taking away "the coding" it's also taking away the problem solving (of course I'm not talking about all problem solving).
That's the real risk here is that we are getting to the point (probably already there for a lot of stuff) where you can just point it to your already existing codebase and tell it your problem and it can basically do it.. I mean I've tested that in practice, sometimes I'll have a clear direction of where I want to go or what I would do.. but I don't really give it any hints of how to solve the problem, and many times it comes up with a similar result or at least one that also works completely fine.
So I think part of the issue is that people like you and me I feel like are going to be so much less needed because an AI can just do it instantly for basically free.
Anyway, I know this is a slight hyperbole.. but it's also not. It kind of sucks to realize that a simple prompt can replicate your work 95% of the time and do it basically instantly.
Currently we have C-level people saying "I want a website that sells widgets". Then product managers make a plan for all the pages/functionality on that site. Designers style the site. Managers divide up the work into smaller tasks. Tech leads steer a group of software engineers, and software engineers do the actual implementation.
2 years ago AI was a novelty and essentially just "fancy autocomplete". Today a skilled software engineer can use it to mostly one-shot the whole website with a detailed technical prompt and then iterate on it from there.
What happens 2 years from now? If progress continues, I expect we'll start walking up that chain of command. First you eliminate the software engineers and just have the tech leads do the prompting. Then you eliminate the tech leads and have the managers do the prompting. Then you eliminate the managers and designers and eventually you end up with star-trek-esque programming where some C-level person is just telling their computer "I want a website that sells widgets. Good! Now make the navigation bar blue. Could you make the font bigger?"
So what are your plans for when the wealthy no longer need you?
Then I will find other problems to solve. Do you think AI will solve every problems for humanity? it has nothing to do with coding as I mentioned earlier.
What you said is valid but I think you are still constrained in thinking that the code is the solution, though. I wish I could word it a better way. Maybe we need a word calculator /s
As someone that works in robotics/automation, it pains me to see people in creative/office verticals getting all the shit with AI these days while hard labor positions, the one that everyone could be doing a bit less because they take a toll on you (working the fields, farms, hazardous tasks) remain pretty much the same.
don't we already have lots of machines that do things like this though? Even if its human operated: excavators, combines, tractors, and other heavy machinery have reduced the physical burden involved in sustaining large societies tremendously.
Yes there are fewer hands on the job site but there are still hands at all. This is increasingly becoming not the case in the future. The goal is to fully eliminate all hands and all minds. There will be no more sponges of newly available labor. Then what happens exactly no one really knows or even wants to meaningfully try to answer, because the implications are too disturbing.
If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.
We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
I looked into this (or rather, had Google Deep Research do a 30-page report on it!) and it's still a very long way off. So long, that the AI, or any reference it found, would not even give me a rough timeline, but I suspect it is multiple decades away. The main blocker is a very severe crunch in the supply chain of critical materials, mostly rare earth elements which are essential to make those high power density + high precision motors feasibly.
Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.
This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.
All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.
First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be.
If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.
Mining is not limited by human labor, we already use huge machines (and some robots) controlled by a few humans. The limitations are investment in huge machines and processing plants, and regulations on where/how you can mine/process.
You can't just have a robot start mining/processing rare earths, anywhere in the country. You need permits, and a lot of money. I guess that didn't stop AI companies ... but there isn't an "infinite" novelty/hype premium for rare-earths, like there is for LLMs.
> If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear
That totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.
Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it significantly affect the economics.
Robots have been used in industry for decades already. Most jobs won't be worth investing in the robot doing it, since human labour is cheaper than the capital investment.
I would agree with you, if we taxed the ever-living fuck out of AI companies to enable UBI, so that the people replaced with robots did not end up homeless.
Worse, it was just almost all horses. There are a few in Central Park pulling tourists and that’s enough for the Pollyanna’s to point to and go “See! We’ll be fine!”
Horses where the plaything of the rich. Farmers were using oxen not horses for the most part. However the modern plow (invented in the mid 1830s - John Deere being the best known inventor, but others were inventing them about the same time) needed the faster speed of a horse to work well, but if the previous farming technology worked for you then oxen (or donkeys ... - there are several other work animals used in different areas for farming) were better.
There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.
Do you have a citation for the horse number? My research [0] shows we have a 1/5 out peak number in ~1900 and our population has 5x since then. This means per capita horses in the country is down 96%, while absolute count is down 80%. Both are huge numbers.
> the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
> Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist?
We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
LLMs have much better cognitive empathy than most humans have limbic+cognitive empathy - the therapists will also be automated - friction like licensing bodies will slow it down but not stop it.
This is the Chinese century, and even if China charts a somewhat different course than Western capitalism, it still believes that human beings should spend most of their days in some employment, even if it is just makework. A population with mostly leisure time is viewed as very threatening to social stability. I can see that model being exported to the rest of the world far more than I can imagine your utopia.
The Chinese social safety net, for individuals not covered by unemployment insurance, is strongly centered around public sector jobs (公益性岗位) that, if you see them in practice, are often plainly makework: the essence of the work has been mechanized/automated, but human beings will still be directed to be somewhere all day and look busy. There is no paying those people a dole while they stay home like in sone other countries.
Many of these jobs are things that improve quality of life for everyone else, too, like street beautification programmes. They do this alongside coming up with robotic means to also sweep streets, but yes, they find ways to hire people to just "make this place look nicer".
Not necessarily! In "Saturn's Children" by Stross, humanity managed to wipe itself out, but post-humans (evolved from former, ahem, entertainment androids) are doing just fine across the Solar System. There's a plot point where one of them discovers that some corporation back on Earth inherited full property rights to her body due to an old pre-human-extinction EULA, and she'll be recycled for parts if she ever sets foot in their jurisdiction (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
All the rich people become bankrupt or otherwise loose their political capital, new politicians are elected in that owe more to workers and thus enact anti-capitalist policy to win over the loyalty of workers.
That or, as rich people loose more and more of their political capital, workers get empowered and use direct action (such as strikes) to demand the end of more and more capitalistic policies, until there are none left. The rich get along with it because the alternative is loose everything.
Edit: And today's industrial society is quite far from being capitalist. Feudalism is more close to reality, seeing as the one most important factor for almost everything in life is whether you own real estate or not.
That's a very loose definition of feudalism. However if you take in account nepotism and bribery, which are more and more widespread around the world, maybe we get close to that exchange of land for loyalty that was the basis of feudalism.
It's not just the Scrooges in power. Previous attempts to actually make a better world often made a worse one, and not just because of capitalist opposition.
If you mean attempts like centralized communism - absolutely - and the failure mode should have been obvious from human nature: centralizing great power incentivizes corruption.
We don't fully know the failure modes of every alternative yet, but that doesn't mean powerful central governments + capitalism is the best alternative.
Interestingly, the Amish shape their lives around this sort of thing. With any technology, they ask themselves, "Does this make us dependent?" If the answer is yes, they refuse it.
They are more and more adopting modern technology. And where they haven't directly they have found ways to use it and be just as dependent while appearing to not. Go visit one and you discover they want to borrow your phone to buy things from Amazon...
> HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
That's an underrated comment! Totally agree. So so much of discussion on this topic sort of assumes business as usual (both literally and figuratively) and that AI quickly diffuses through the economy, sucking up all economically useful activity, with humans falling by the wayside as inevitable collateral damage.
There's a failure of imagination taking place here that there's no other outcome. Capitalism is an evolved solution to how human community works, but is not inevitable.
Massive changes in technology pretty much always involve wars and a reshuffling of power. This doesn't have much to do with capitalism at all. It's more of a question of how are those that currently have power going to adjust. In the case of technology we quite often see this end up with a concentration of power.
How to maintain stability in a world filled with greedy people in power that don't want to give up a single penny is a good question to ask at this point.
If you're not economically useful, what pressure would you be able to bring against the government and it's drone-based police force if it does things you don't like? General strikes don't work in a world with no human labor needed.
Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested. If a sociopath were in power, what would stop them?
> I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
I also think that will be the case. However, not all the jobs are worth being automated. Say, if you are a modern-day horse-riding instructor, I very much doubt the robots will come knocking the door to take your job. Not because they can't, but because the headache is not economically worth it.
It'd be uneconomical today but I don't see any reason to believe it will always be that way. Any time you want a high standard of living for people it creates an incentive to eventually make a cheaper way of doing what those people make their high standard of living with.
About the only things I can think to guarantee will have some constancy are "for the sake of being human" type things. Much like buying handmade bowls is something you can do out of pure preference/taste/ideology even though it's cheaper to buy massed produced ones.
I can see that going away too. Eventually the average horse rider is going to be someone of stature of a saudi prince at the rate horse ownership coupled with inequality is going. They'd probably be all about buying the Gemini horse teacher over learning from some lesser birth stableboy. I bet eventually all tutoring from a human is seen as some lesser ick by the rich. People already think as much about you today when you talk about say not relying on claude code. It is all about optics and virtue signalling pedigrees at the end of the day.
In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. (Unless something drastic changes.) That means how long it will take for robots to be practical matters. We don’t know how long it will be, but driverless cars have been coming for 15 years now and they’re still unavailable in most places.
People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.
Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
You seem to be living under a rock. Yes driverless cars started in 2009, but in 2026 it is very much here. Waymo recently crossed a milestone of more 500k trips I think, we will have millions of driverless cars in the coming years (we’re at 10k right now)
There's always exceptions. To not beat a dead horse(hah!) in Texas you can still find people on horseback in the drive through line at Starbucks from time to time.
For a while waymo didn't even serve the hillier parts of where they were deployed. These roads are challenging conditions for even a human rideshare driver, when you are down to about a cars width of winding road, with a moving truck trying to pass in front of you, and a dump truck trying to move behind you, cars increasingly piling on either end, no way to turn around or back out, everyone increasingly honking and cussing as if that would lubricate things. It is kind of hilarious in a way seeing how quickly things effectively blow up in those street conditions with just the perfect storm of two slightly larger vehicles passing at once.
Now you can imagine a waymo in this mix how it would just be on its knees in a situation like that. How is a waymo to interpret "fucking move already you dumb fuck" into any sort of meaningful instruction?
I'm reminded of that story about activists in SF requesting a dozen waymos at once at some one way street and creating a localized denial of service attack essentially.
No. The horses were made redundant and no longer exist in such quantities
So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.
Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.
The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?
Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
So long as they can keep us fighting amongst ourselves in meaningless culture wars. If there is ever a broad alignment of populists spanning left to right, it could get spicy.
There are more horses today than ever... Oxen got the short end of the deal - almost nobody uses oxen even though historically they were the backbone labor of the farm, while the horse was for the right.
The only data I can find ignores the majority of horses today - recreational riders. If you can find a better citation I'd stand corrected, but everything I can find counts race horses and horses used for farming.
>There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.
It is clear that at the limit, machines will be more capable in nearly every way. I suppose there might be some room for a few exceptions like working around big electromagnets that machines can't get close to... Does that sound great? Is there something else you had in mind which would be reserved for humans and fulfilling?
reality tv star on something like real housewives. I think AI/robotics would have a hard time being that irrational and illogical consistently. That behavior is pretty unique to humans.
I feel like Neuro-sama is essentially already that, but for the Twitch / YT crowd instead of television. It's trivial to train a model to maximize engagement (as one can see gestures broadly), so I'm sure if we can get robots looking nice and human, we'll have Futurama's All My Circuits in no time.
Though I guess there was a token human on that show, so maybe you're right!
The last job is going to be hairdresser, because billionaires have wives (not to assume all billionaires are men), and those wives will want a human to gossip to.
Other than Uber and Uber eats, I can’t imagine myself doing anything other than those. I might get a security guard certificate and guard empty halls during the night, which quite suits me.
Not a handyman, not suitable for physical jobs, I think I’m cooked! This is the fear that is always on my head.
What makes you think those jobs will still be available?
Uber : Getting replaced by Waymo
Uber Eats : They've been experimenting with ways to replace humans for this. I think the most likely scenario isn't those silly robots on the sidewalks but rather just a Waymo. Have the restaurant send someone to carry food from the restaurant to the Waymo idling at the curb, and have the customer come out to the street to pick up their food from the Waymo. We lose the door-to-door convenience but I think a lot of people would take that trade to eliminate the cost of tips and paying the delivery person.
Security Guard : AI monitoring security cameras and automating calls to police sounds trivial. There are also already "security robots" that move around so they could be dispatched for scenarios which do not warrant a call to the police.
Handyman / physical jobs : While I think these will last longer than the others, I think they won't last much longer. We've already invented all the necessary hardware. The limiting factor was the software. What happens when you take an LLM from the year 2030 and give it a pile of tokens to write the software to drive the robots to do plumbing/building/whatever.
This is my dilemma as well. I can't think of a role that won't be impacted so I don't know what to train for. When I was younger, my fallback was always going to be "truck driver" but that's going to be one of the first dominos to fall.
I don’t particularly like the horse to engine angle because it doesn’t capture the issue well.
When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???
Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?
You mean my meat proxy skills while wearing a Ratatouille machine-vision head camera that tells me what wrench to pick up and how to crimp the Pex rings?
The solution is probably a trash bag with a mini forklift compatible lift rings, an optical center mark, a ratcheting closure, and make a raspberry PI do the computing millions of dollars of tooling to make a robot compatible trash bag but it might be worth it, deploy the bean counters!
Plumbing is kind of a hard job, definitely not fun for anyone above middle age. And given it will pay minimum wage, I think I'd just take a life of leisure instead.
Sure, but that is today. When AI decimates the knowledge fields, a whole lot of people are going to be looking at different career options. There will not be any shortage of people hoping to make money in the trades, and with that surge in supply will come a collapse in prices.
Apologies, I'm with you. I was speaking to the hypothetical, not trying to suggest it is inevitable. I think it is uncertain how this plays out, but I am an optimist and I think it ends up a net positive.
It is very plausible that LLMs never get to 100% replacement for knowledge workers and the winners will the people who use both, leaving behind the people who thought all they needed to do was cut costs by doing existing workloads without humans. It remains to be seen if the constraint on quantity of knowledge work was the people or the work.
The knowledge economy was already on the way out in favour of the performance economy even before LLMs. LLMs have also shown that they can produce in the performance space, of course, so it remains to be seen how valuable humans are in that position but so far it would appear that many are willing to pay for a "human connection".
Plenty if not all people put more value into handmade things, but they can't afford to have everything handmade. An IKEA coffee table is $15. Handmade one from a woodworker is $400 - $1000.
Absolutely. Hence why manufacturing died long ago, and why the knowledge economy was already on the verge of death even before LLMs, and why we were already moving to the performance economy: because in the performance economy the consumer and the buyer are able to be disparate entities, where the buyers can have deep pockets even if the consumers don't.
In the performance economy it doesn't matter how rich the consumer is, but what the consumer wants to consume does matter. Because the buyer and consumer are disjointed in the performance economy, the consumer isn't swayed by cost. However, if the consumer prefers AI performances, which they quite easily could, then humans are in trouble. But so far it seems human performances remain what the consumer wants to consume.
(Technically manufacturing and knowledge work could have established the same separation, but since the bright minds went to performance nobody thought to before it was too late)
Amazing. I bet this can really help thousands of programmers who are simply not needed, because companies decided to replace them with AI agents. These philosophical ponders are very comfortable to do when your ass is safe. Most of people don’t have this privilege.
> what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
It never was the code. The code is how you solve problems, make stuff happen. The code is a tool. It’s people’s brain that is of value. People learn how to use these tools the best they can. And now they are told that they should become mere supervisors for the AI agents. Simply by trusting the output and QA-ing the result. Because no human can keep track of the AI’s generated mess.
My grandad ran a small letterpress shop and when phototypesetting came in he didn't retrain, he just did smaller and smaller jobs until it was wedding invitations.
“Retraining” is mostly a myth. Former skilled workers just downgrade to service jobs, pushing out younger, less skilled workers in the process.
The NYT touched on this issue in a podcast about NAFTA: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/podcasts/the-daily/americ.... AI is going to be NAFTA on steroids. Politicians will be able to point to growing top-like GDP to say it was a good thing. But it’s going to brutally hit a lot of people and most of those folks will never regain a secure economic footing.
Retraining for typesetters meant becoming "prepress" guys, and going from the wide array of tools and hand skills they used to need to Photoshop, Illustrator, and digital imposers and plates. In the process, the job went from a middle-class job to a minimum-wage job, and the bosses who used to respect you (after the union that used to protect you disappeared) became fly-by-night scumbags who treated you like dirt.
As far as I can tell, the entire business for someone who was good at running a press is fancy wedding invitations and business cards with raised type. I am speaking as someone who waltzed into (and later out of) prepress because I knew the digital tools, made no money, and talked with those guys a lot about the past. This discussion would be while we were printing wedding invitations and fancy business cards.
It's simply a different, low-status job now. Retraining is no different than training the first time, because if you want to make a living you either have to somehow be better than the people who started with the new tools (and the new tools don't require as many people) and maybe get into printing packaging or manuals, or you need to do something completely different, and compete with people just starting their careers.
Going to college again is not a trivial thing. The mortgage will still be due.
I'm not sure I can quite agree with that. I'd say that spreadsheets definitely reduced the need to manually calculate things, and calculators before that, and the abacus before that.
I basically agree with your "higher level reasoning", but not your statement that we previously only automated muscles.
> Today, the number of people employed purely for their muscle is very small.
I also believe we underestimate how much that costs us too. Yes, it is good that fewer people are breaking their bodies on brutal physical jobs.
But there are many people in the world for whom their physical strength and dexterity are perhaps their most valuable asset. With the loss of those jobs came a loss of an avenue of meaning for them.
I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that the whole manosphere alt-right conservative thing going on in the US is driven in part by a generation of young men who don't find intellectual work to be appealing but don't see many alternatives out there either. It's telling how closely Gamergate is tangled up in that world and how many games are basically simulations of heavily physical prestigious roles.
A recent Onion headline really hits the nail on the head: "'This Here Is Probably Our Bestselling Love Seat,' Says Man Who Would Have Been Powerful, Revered Warrior 4,000 Years Ago"
Compilers automated higher level reasoning, at least to a small degree. LLMs themselves are basically just compilers with a much, much, much, much more expansive set of built-in language constructs.
Can you describe the last time you asked your compiler how you should best approach an interpersonal problem, to research an investment thesis, or to figure out an org chart by analyzing communication patterns within teams?
People aren't just using AI for writing code, but for all of their decision making. AI is far from limited to writing code.
> Can you describe the last time you asked your compiler how you should best approach an interpersonal problem
Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem. It compiled that into a description of how to deal with it.
> People aren't just using AI for writing code
Compilers have never been about producing code in particular, though, even if that is where they are most commonly used. A LaTeX compiler, for example, outputs books. To think they are about code exclusively is a grave misunderstanding of what a compiler is.
> Compilers have never been about producing code in particular, though, even if that is where they are most commonly used. A LaTeX compiler, for example, outputs books. To think they are about code exclusively is a grave misunderstanding of what a compiler is.
And what, pray tell, are those books output by TeX? That's right, PDF or PostScript code.
> Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem.
The LLM usage I see from most people has the LLM write out the specification, asking clarifying questions as needed. If you're using LLMs as you describe, you're using them ineffectively.
> The LLM usage I see from most people has the LLM write out the specification
If the compiler is writing the specification, what purpose does the person serve? That is not what I'm seeing out in the wild, though. Perhaps what is happening in research labs aside, compilers, even those implemented as an LLM, don't do anything until the user specifies their intent.
In fact, you literally recognized that in your earlier comment, asking about my action to specify my problem. Not sure why the story is changing now? There is probably a day where the systems solve your problems before you even know you have them, but we're not there yet. The technology hasn't advanced that much in the span of a couple of hours.
> asking clarifying questions as needed.
Sure. Even the earliest, most primitive compilers would seek clarification if there was something that it felt required more information. That's expected.
> If you're using LLMs as you describe, you're using them ineffectively.
LLMs are just compilers so they can't do anything else. Maybe you're thinking of some technology that is layered on top of a compiler like an IDE, REPL, or something to that effect?
> Sure. Even the earliest, most primitive compilers would seek clarification if there was something that it felt required more information. That's expected.
Can you tell me what the last question GCC asked you was, and can you rate its coherence in comparison to your colleagues questions?
I don't think I knew how to approach the problem. There would have been no benefit in using the compiler if I did. Kind of like, if we want to talk about code, many coders don't know how to approach making a hashmap. They don't need to. The compiler figures it out for them, as it did me for my problems. I'd call the input I gave a specification of the problem, but words are in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.
If we take "write the specification of how to approach the problem" at literal value, you might be narrowly thinking of a low-level compiler, or what sometimes gets called a transpiler? However, compilers encompass a much wider spectrum than that. Generally they enable users to operate at higher levels of abstraction.
I think you're talking about more than just a compiler, though standard libraries are often distributed with the compiler. Take Rust for example, it's not like the compiler has special integration with hash maps, it's just that the standard library has a standard implementation and the compiler lets you refer to that implementation without having to repeat it yourself. In a way you're just including parts of another spec in yours. Specifications do this all the time, for example by using English. You don't have to define all the levels of abstraction, only the ones that matter.
Even so, I'd argue that you still have to define how to use those abstractions rather than only the result you'd like to achieve with them. Sure, maybe the abstraction has a ".achieve_the_result()" method, and calling that method is how you achieve it, but often there's a bunch of stuff you fit together to achieve a solution to your problem and the compiler doesn't necessarily do that for you.
I think there actually may be some compilers that get closer to this, for example some problems can be expressed quite elegantly in Haskell or APL and the compiler will do a lot of black magic behind the scenes to get you a performant executable (somehow). But for most traditional compilers you are still going to have to define how to approach your problem, even if only at a higher level thanks to libraries.
This is a tired, idiotic analogy. For one, if LLMs are compilers, they're terrible compilers because they can't be reasoned about the way one wants to reason about a compiler (but I assume you have a weird take here since you claim compilers are non-deterministic).
But more importantly, if you insist on treating LLMs like compilers, then the source language – natural prose – is the worst programming language ever invented. Coding the world in brainfuck is a better idea than where you lot is suggesting we go.
However, the one thing I feel like is missed by some in these conversations is that what's being built is a general purpose thinking machine, not a coding machine. How are we going to transition from writing code to solving problems when the machines are solving the problems?
The honest AI boosters do claim we won’t solve problems anymore, we will live animals in a zoo, overseen by machines of loving grace.
The retard AI boosters, tell us to be AI first, learn this harness bro, loops are yesterday, now it’s graphs, use 100 agents a minimum or be left behind, actually world will require 100X more software engineers.
Why would we still be alive? Once we have advanced enough AI inside not only computers but robots, the rich will no longer need us. They will have the robots farm the land, clean their homes, fly their planes, etc. We will then have no income and therefore no way to feed ourselves. Most people do not own enough farm land to keep themselves alive.
In the past, such imbalances of power were resolved because the rich still relied upon the poor for everything (security, food, etc). I think we're approaching the point where even armed insurrection is no longer an option with the advances in automated killing machines. We're not there yet, but it's coming.
Back in the '70s my dad used to tell a joke about his dad. He said that my grandfather had a job that supported his whole large family while my dad was growing up. But unfortunately technology caught up with him, and he was replaced by a device just this big, and he held his fingers apart to demonstrate.
Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."
Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.
It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, and so was the pickle slicer.
In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.
I think the punchline is that workplace romance usually gets both parties fired, regardless of who initiated. Hence, doing "things" with the pickle slicer means the pickle slicer gets fired for participating...
The first one sounds like the dad was replaced by computers. But then reveals the dad is a sex worker and being replaced by sex toys.
The second one sounds like the person was being intimate with dangerous kitchen equipment, then reveals that a "pickle slicer" is a job for a human and not a machine.
My grandpa was a shoemaker. The real change in technology left his family in poverty in Chicago during the depression. I didn't hear anyone joke about that, directly.
Jewish humor is frequently about laughing at your own pain. There's a genre of Jewish jokes created in concentration camps.
It is more like, "I'm a carpenter, and electric powertools that can also operate themselves, and run the sales department, and control a robot to change a lightbulb, and manage the entire company, and surround it with armed guards it also controls, just came out. I'm screwed."
The grandfather must also have survived two world wars. The transition from horse to cars happened within a broader context and was greased by blood.
I find it curious that this is often elided when discussing technological transition. Sure the whip makers went away but they probably also ended up dead in a trench.
I just wanted to point something out. I hear people say the AI revolution is the biggest one since the industrial revolution. I think it's the biggest revolution since the one that just preceded us, the information (computer) age. So we're still going fairly in order revolution wise.
The biggest revolutions since the Industrial Revolution were probably trains first and everything related to electricity later. Telegraph, radio, lightning, TVs spanning over about one century. And advances in health care, agriculture. But it's hard to tell without having lived through all those changes.
Then computers of course, but not as impactful as the other ones. And cars and mobile phones (mobile dumbed down computers) have been more important than AI so far IMHO.
I am already seeing more companies hire people who are developer-adjacent, especially now with AI-assistance.
I don't think software developers are going away, but likely headed more in-house, as each company can cheaply have bespoke software made and maintained.
So far the impact of LLMs have been very much overstated.
Like most (all?) tools, they require a human in the loop to work as intended.
This fear of being replaced by an LLM is unfounded and irrational.
The alternatives that may cause such mass displacement like World Models and such are yet to be proven.
LLM's went from generating incoherent garbage, to weird text that seems coherent but isn't (gpt-2), to what we have no with agents passing some of the hardest benchmarks, necessitating benchmark development just to be able to keep up with the rate of progress. They did this in about 5 years.
The sheer rate of progress is what is meaningful. If LLM's agents were frozen now without any further improvement, your position would be must more defensible. But that's not what's happening, we are getting breakthroughs almost on a weekly basis.
It feels to me like the advancements are not accelerating, though, like we're nearer the top of the S-curve than enthusiasts think we are. A lot of the recent advances seem as much a harness improvement as an actual model improvement. We've made exceptional progress in the last couple years, but spent an exceptional amount of money to do it. A moon shot, basically.
Honestly, my gut feeling (worth every bit of what you are paying for it...) is that until we get actual intelligence instead of a good facsimile, we're not looking at an existential problem or a UBI-level problem, even, just a big change in tooling.
Hey I hope you are right. I, like so many of my fellow engineers, am not exactly thrilled at the prospect of my role changing from underneath my feet and the uncertainty that comes with it.
We are making steady progress. It’s not exponential per se like we used to see but in my experience models are steadily getting better. Also breakthroughs can be sudden.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
I used to find joy in knowing how things worked inside-out. Whether it was Postgres, or browser engines, or some detail about compilers... I used to find joy in developing the little techniques that made programming NOT building on quicksand. There was satisfation in what you had done being robust.
Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like.
When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)
Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers?
It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face).
I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.
It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.
When I would code by hand I often found I was concerned with the house of cards in my head, am I remembering the right variable names, did I forget something that would lead to an exploit, etc. Now I can direct the LLM to do the work and the skill is split between having an understanding of the interactions of the technologies, choosing tech that will be less of a pain to update/migrate. You can even put some LLM-bow grease into finding more efficient approaches catching corner cases etc. And just by asking I can have test frameworks setup, I can drill into some pet peeve and it takes less time. Now we still have lots of ops moments, like the radicel distributed git forge forgetting to use encryption for private repos, and I run into this class of problem in my own casual LLM use, but that's where our taste and attention to detail powers need to be spent in this modern developer world.
I've always been either entirely self-directed, choosing my own goals, or almost entirely self-directed, being given high-level goals, and getting to choose my own means to accomplish them. So my opinions are probably different from somebody who was a smaller part in a chain.
You say that you liked learning how things worked inside out, whether it was Postgres or whatever. You can still do that. You can learn it at a high level, and then it becomes like a magic word in your arsenal. You don't have to know or remember the details of implementation, but only the nature of its costs, benefits, and synergies with other systems. You just have to remember that high-level abstraction, maybe just a single vocabulary word, of a low-level reality - the exact syntax is really no longer a concern.
The better the agents get, the less there is playing manager. Really your job now is to have and execute vision. Execution is largely a function of having a map of the high level vision and low-level realities in your head, or just having in-the-moment intuition about these things... then just speaking it.
Also, there is developing personal libraries. You may find that in your business you repeatedly tackle similar problems. You develop and refine a library that your future agents can utilize. You develop prompts that make your work more automatic and more robust. And when I say you, I mean, you direct your agents to do it.
It's not so different from what it always was, except that years get compressed into months. What was slow and tedious is now... less so.
I don't know how much advantage I have in this new world, having programmed (sometimes more, sometimes less) for 30 years. My brother has never written a line of code in his life. He's been heavy into AI for a while, and he has developed some really incredible stuff. I think he may have already outpaced me. His $1500/mo+ in subscriptions definitely help.
How do LLMs work? Yes there's a model and there's inference, but dig deeper. How can you, today, with < $50, train a small GPT-2 class model,
how do you fine tune it, what training data do you give it, how do you give it training data, what algorithms do you use for reinforcement learning, what even is RLHF? You don't have to know any of those details to use ChatGPT, just like you don't need to know how a D flip-flop works in a CPU to write some code that runs on one, but if you're looking for feeling like you know what's going on, at their heart, LLMs are still next word prediction engines, so knowing, deeply, how that engine is created and works, would be my idea of mastery of it. Karpathy has a good set of tutorials on this.
that's a good analogy and puts into words the way i've always felt about software development. Every so often the entire industry rolls over into something new. I've been here 30 years now and, in my experience, the skill that counts is being able learn new skills. To go back to the analogy, to build something new on top of what you've built in the past before everything is swallowed by the quicksand.
Did a tailor gain mastery of the sweatshop machine? Did mastery of the automated sewing machines give the same joy to the tailor or was it mind numbing meaningless activity that he would be happier to be free of.
I think well north of 90% of people in software engineering have job expectations that, when assisted/automated with AI, boil down to exactly that.
It's a pain in the ass to work at such a job and find challenges or things to master--your superiors don't want you to do that, there's not enough time in the day, and you're tired from LGTM-now-make-this work.
That's most software jobs, because that's what most software companies want.
I like this article, but it took decades for cars to take over: we needed to build vehicles, build roads, build up gas production and distribution... as Bill Gates wrote, one of the differences with the AI disruption is how fast it's coming, since it's almost immaterial (except data centers of course). It may be too fast for humans to adapt like they did in the previous revolutions.
The current trend of comparing AI development to the development of motorised personal transport makes it very easy to remind everyone that undoing the effects of decades of blind "progress" once the negative externalities become unavoidable is much easier said than done.
It can replace all work, IMO. I'm doing intellectual work that replaces manual labor with machinery and computer vision systems. It's massively sped up by AI.
> But it makes me wonder: what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
This exactly. Look, I "love" code but only because of what it allows me to do and there is plenty of code/coding that I don't love. Not to be too hippy-dippy but I'm a builder, I like to build things. Build things for myself, build things for others. The code was _always_ a means to an end.
Sure, it was cool I had this skill that many people didn't have but I also used to have skill in managing the windows machines and things like the registry. When I first switched to macOS I felt lost, I had this "skill" that was no longer needed but after a while I realized that was a good thing, I wasn't wasting my time fiddling with crap that was just getting in the way of _using_ my computer.
Similarly I may mourn the loss of writing code but at the end of the day code was just a way for me to build, if there are better tools to build (LLMs) then I'm all for it.
I too love building things, but by building things I mean the act of actually building it. Thinking of a problem, devising a solution and then executing the steps to solve the problem, if that doesn’t work, debugging and trying another method and so on. I am not and will never be a fan of buying things, where I just ask for something and it gets made which is what you’re a fan of if you’re honest to yourself.
A less misanthropic alternative: The technology required to replace the person is much smarter and more adaptable than that which was needed to replace the horse. Because of this, you can end up in the horse's role in the story without having to be as dumb as a literal one so long as it's this other lever which moves instead.
The information revolution has been going on for >50 years. AI is one event in a broader arc. Wait 10 years when the humanoid robots become reasonably capable and affordable. We’re in the middle of it, but still so so far to go.
> Wait 10 years when the humanoid robots become reasonably capable and affordable
We've had humanoid robots that could walk for what, 30 years? While technology marches ever forward, and sometimes makes pretty good leaps, 10 years for both capable and affordable seems pretty optimistic.
I’d agree that the word “reasonably” is carrying a lot here. But call it 20 years, no question. Look how far computers came from 1970 to 1990, that’s probably about the pace to expect, or faster.
I don’t know, somehow the pace seems different, these transitions felt more like the last generation retiring, and the next generation doing something different, instead of it happening to everyone at the same time.
I think the analogy of moving from horses to engines breaks down when going from code to AI as AI can quite plausibly work on itself. It's a fundamentally different game we're playing this time. And there were as many engine jobs as horse jobs (maybe more). The whole point of AI is super human productivity. Even the idea of just using AI means you need less humans because one human with AI can out-produce multiple humans without. It's very difficult to imagine a future where AI can do every job and things don't turn into a sci-fi dystopia.
Don't forget blatantly ignoring all the times something similar happened in the past and didn't turn out fine.
Sticking your fingers in your ears and singing "Lalalalalala" will in fact sometimes work for some people, and that is not a good argument for everyone to do it.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.
This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).
I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.
As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.
A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.
On the one hand, it makes sense to think of this as just another revolution as it keeps things familiar, keeps the ground underneath us intact and lets hope it goes this way.
On the other hand, if long horizon independent problem solving with almost zero human intervention or support is realized in these models 1-5 years down, then it will lead not to new tech, but essentially a new species of workers that can replace humans at all tasks, In that case, humans wouldn't really have the upper hand as an economical resource to get any work done.
I think the big problem is that nowadays, you can't simply switch professions any more, A.I. can do just about anything white collar, and there's only limited amount of blue collar jobs to go around.
sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.
We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.
Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.
There’s no demand for human dexterity anyway, and it’s not about money. I like doing intellectual work.
They are spending 1T to ruin the quality of work we do, also probably ruining our chances of securing a livelihood and then they want us to for some reason welcome it with open arms and openly say look how great this is and marvel at human obsolescence. Yeah no thanks.
"My family" - a nice anecdotal frame. No worries here. After all, labor savers for production has evolved for millennia. And you should only worry about the impact to yourself, and be glad your lot is better than your ancestors'.
But our society today has very extensive systems with very few deciders, who are largely enmeshed in social and legal constraints to ensure our reliance is safe and effective (at least in the large/long run).
The concern is about that constraint system being displaced - minimally with decider over-reliance on AI (still subject to guardrails?), or maximally with AI itself (no internal guardrails). Slop (in software, medical services, and military targeting) is just the symptom.
That replacement/shift has already been a corrosive side-effect of capitalism, as elites slowly cede loyalty and professional standards to competitive pressure, but even now most constraints allow replacement of bad actors (if demonstrable). AI reliance just makes that shift irreversible. People no longer have incentives or opportunities to spend the decades required to lead effectively, so organizations could never revert the heartless efficient machine elites back to the available incompetent and oblivious humans.
Maybe the result is just wealth transfer, or health, but I'd expect the high-value use to be in a military where very few people can combat many (as is happening in Ukraine now), making the military a preferred option for anyone with resources.
The distribution of (and checks on) responsibility - up, down, across companies and political systems - was intended to constrain agents to organizational goals, but it effectively kills any internal change by requiring near-unanimity and overcoming people's dependence on their jobs. So even if a super-majority of people agreed on some negative projection of AI usage AND had the resources to put work and investments at risk, it still wouldn't be enough to change this trajectory.
My grandad on one side of the family was a market gardener. He didn't become a farmer.
My great grandad on the other side was a lighterman[0]. He didn't become a ship captain.
Sometimes professions really are just gone. In both cases in my family it was due to consolidation of resources and concentration of capital/power. Technology was just a catalyst for that.
There are two key elements in the current AI fearmongering:
1) People think they can predict the future
2) People think humans can't adapt
The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.
Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.
Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.
Adapt, sure, but is my life better or worse after adapting? It's a fair question and a fair worry. The goal of most AI companies seems to be to replace some amount of labor with AI. Look how that worked out for our factory workers. They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.
> They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.
The tech crowd used to say that only the "dumb" ones did that. They said those who were "smart like us" were much more adaptable, learning to code and whatnot to find new, often even better careers. It will be interesting to see if the emperor has clothes.
Why is it whenever people try to downplay the efficacy of LLM’s evangelists go “there’s literally never been anything like this,” but the moment people critique them or try to weigh their impact on society the response is “well it’s nothing we haven’t seen before”?
The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation. We are clearly experiencing a moment of sorts, and anybody who is worried about what the fallout will be is just handwaved away as ignorant fear mongers. Unless you are the head of these companies doing it in a disingenuous way to pump up your valuation, then suddenly it’s legitimate - but not so legitimate that we should do anything besides let the US government build a moat for them!
You're mixing a bunch of different "people" in the same bag. I'm not the one saying "there's never been anything like this before".
The investment is massive, but not bigger than other projects by an order of magnitude. Major wars were bigger than AI. The dot com bubble was 2-3T dollars.
There may not be so much in the way of soldiers in the field guns blazing, but we are very much seeing a 'cold war' emerging with AI at the centre of it. Call it speculative, but the incentives for nations to spend are essentially the same in cold and hot wars.
> The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation.
Yes, the absolute numbers might now read TRILLION instead of BILLION or MILLION, but the concept of "Technology so impactful governments shift their economies" is in no way new, and has already happened a bunch of times before in humanity's timeline.
I guess that's why you're seeing some of us less stressed out about it, as again, scale is different, because scale today is different in everything, but relatively, we're just repeating another of those "Technology changes everything" milestones that we've done before.
We have never seen governments essentially leverage their economies so heavily, so quickly, for a speculative technology. It is literally propping up a significant portion of the US economy right now.
The US canal and railroad boom in the 1800s definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger", it looks comparatively small. But in their world, back then, it was basically the same thing, just with canals and railroads. Indiana almost financially ruined itself because of their "infrastructure program". The government got involved heavily with the "1862 Pacific Railway Act" as well.
And yes, easy to say now that "Duh, that's essentially infrastructure" but at the time, that wasn't as obvious to everyone, as and railroad were newfangled technology, especially deployed like that, on a scale never seen before.
> definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger",
And faster. More, bigger, faster. Which substantively changes the situation the same way a musket stops venn diagraming as a “firearm” at some point when compared to a 50-round automatic rifle.
Humans ourselves are a technology. We have incredibly flexible brains and dexterous hands. Up to now, we could always do things that robots couldn't. That was where our job security came from.
But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
This is what the article misses and what people have trouble accepting. Yea, this is a technological revolution, but unlike the Industrial Revolution, you can't just upskill your way out of it.
> But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
I've already started to feel this.
One thing that made us special was our intelligence. We were, and were always going to be (unless some alien form of life arrived), the most intelligent things on earth. Is that still true today?
We should start with the assumption that humans are valuable and deserve to live with dignity. Any philosophy that doesn’t have that at its center is broken.
We should, but to date anyone that wanted to be treated as though they were valuable and deserved dignity needed some way to apply pressure to ensure that.
I'm not optimistic that this will change in the future -- but, I am watching automation erode the amount of pressure that humans can apply.
Yes but same should have been true of animals and humans as a whole did not afford dignity or value to animals. Maybe we will get a taste of our own medicine this time.
Depends on who you ask. Some people might put it at opposable thumbs. Others might ask how many legs one has. Or language, or ability to count (crows can count up to 30). Memory (elephants have memories that go back over a decade).
Very often the justification for why these things aren't terribly disruptive is that the very best of a certain trade or field will still have a useful skillset. Like the best graphic designers in the world are still more creative and skilled than AI, and the best writers are still better, the best programmers are still better, just that they're all more expensive and slower.
But we're not taking into account how it affects the mediocre or average people in these fields. Roughly half of all of these people are below average. Maybe if you're the best you'll always have a job, but what about the guy who legitimately struggled to finish high school? The person who genuinely doesn't have the capacity to earn much more than minimum wage?
We're currently at the part of the story where chess AI can beat amateurs and is rapidly improving. Kasparov's not worried, he's an expert. He's more creative and skilled than an AI.
Why would these machines stop improving at average this time?
I didn't say they weren't improving. My point is that if our justification is comparing the top 10% of performers to AI to justify human performance, that speaks poorly for the replacement of the bottom 10% of humans.
I weep for people whose scientistic reductionism has led to such devaluation of humanity. Robots don’t do anything and don’t think anything. Humans do things with and through them. What makes us special is that we exist and love one another.
The economy long moved past the things we can do, hence "bullshit jobs". Our job security has come from our willingness to "look the other way", allowing the job creators to live out lives the rest of us can only imagine. If they didn't placate our insatiable desire to work, that wouldn't last long.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I LOVE playing "product designer" with LLM. The thing I normally hate and never do, write and update "design docs" being my only lever is awesome. I do already hate how it seems to turn development into a much less social activity. It's great that we don't need other people and a lot of time for some things now, but it's also not.
But more importantly, because I also like solving problems and seeing people thrive, I can't overlook that it's all based on stuff taken without consent, how artists were made "obsolete" by what plasters me with slop every day (already, and we didn't even get started). And they're not even going "okay, now that we proved it can work with stolen stuff, let's do it proper". No, this is "the new world now", just keep pushing and squeezing and extract more "value". So wtf? Well, I like solving problems, I love games! One cool game is "catch the thief", another is "call out the sociopath". So let's?
But we can't, because we're not building this after deliberation and discussion, we're being herded into it and then make rationalizations for foregone conclusions made in our absence against our interests. Building systems nobody understands that keep making more systems nobody even tries to understand is not some hyper-efficient future, it's no future at all, and nobody with power (however wishy-washy that phrase is) wants to live under any of that, you can be assured.
So this all seems more like an airlock to me, an abattoir, not a spaceship that just happens to be kinda dirty and stinky because the focus is on so much grander things. How insincere and stupid so much of it is just can't be overlooked, and very much unlike other technological advancements where the results speak for themselves, where the results (or the improved process to get them), pull something, make it inevitably seep everywhere it is useful. There is so much pushing and hyping, and so precious little good stuff to make for the really bad stuff, all the slop that is produced and clogs up inter-human channels.
This is not even progress, this is just subversion, that's my thesis. It's deliberately driven for the easily predictable bad effects it will have.
Aside the fact the author sells ai services, training, whatever i can not understand the view how knowledge workers will be replaced while every employee is now forced and expected to work 10-fold and hiring is halted because shortsighted deciders and ... money.
The effect on the market is pure GREED and wishful thinking as none of the people in charge of HR or decision making have any idea how this technology actually works.
Also - why is everyone comparing this to the industrial revolution? And not f.e. invention of vaccines. No it HAS to be the big big story or you cannot make money with it.
All while the actual results are well, great. Helpful, sure. But so are vaccines!
Don't buy into this bs, any service or course. d2l.ai is free and wont be stupidly useless next month like whatever hype we sell this week.
As the doom stories lose novelty now we get the feel good "my grandpa" stories.
Thank you for your comment. I didn't intend to tell a feel good story. I'm just a seed startup founder, I'm not DHH! I'm just sharing a personal story that helps me navigating into the storm. There is no message here, I guess I hadn't been clear enough.
Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
I appreciate your wholesome message, but I feel a bit is overlooked.
Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
Interesting historical read:
https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-cr...
>> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
Sounds amazing. How on earth did he go from shoeing horses to learning about the internal combustion engine? Seems quite the leap that not everyone would be capable of.
He just vibe-repaired cars!
Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.
And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.
This happened to my grandfather (blacksmith to working on cars and motorcycles), who was illiterate. From what I gather, it was a lifetime of trial-and-error-and-keep-what-works.
And he was probably very inquisitive too. Great story.
Early automobiles were very simple machines. I you knew how to repair a carriage or a wagon, you were pretty close to being able to work on an early automobile. You should check them out.
Honestly I think people forget this fact. You don't have to go that far back to find vehicles that you absolutely could do anything to yourself with basic tools.
We're fixing up a 1987 Jeep Wrangler for our son. I could strip it down to the frame with 3 or 4 tools. It's kind of amazing how simple cars were, and that was in the late 80's.
Yeah as long as you ignore the engine (ECU/PCM/TCUs) in cars in the 80s, they're quite simple. Go back to the early 70s-before and it's mostly all analog or trivial electronics.
> Yeah as long as you ignore the engine (ECU/PCM/TCUs) in cars in the 80s, they're quite simple.
Alec of Technology Connections just posted a video on this:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KoeY54M5VA
Shoeing horses properly is actually no joke and cars back then were laughably simple. I don’t see how any of that could feel relatable to people in software development now, when almost all jobs that require real smarts and competency require years of study and experience.
I don't think the story is meant to be taken as literally as I'm reading in this comment.
Many people in life are underutilized and ready to step up to challenges if given the opportunity.
The flagging here is better than in a Steinberger thread. Unreal and congrats.
There is a quote from a CGP Grey video from a bit over a decade ago, "There isn't a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right." [1]
A couple hundred years ago, something like 70% of the population worked in agriculture. Technology replaced almost all of these jobs.
So far, we have reimagined old professions and created brand new ones. Is this ability of ours limitless?
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CMFj75kBQlU
Yes, because people are consumers, horses are not.
Jobs are a mean to make people consumers, not the only mean, but a significant one.
The ability to create more economic activity require both sides to catch up, so we will find a way to do so.
The amount of consumption is largely dependent on income level. There's a recent study from Moody's that says that in the US, the top 10% income bracket now accounts for roughly half of consumer spending. As wealth inequality continues to worsen, it makes more and more sense to solely target high earners because you make the same or more as selling higher amounts of lower priced product but with less overhead.
> As wealth inequality continues to worsen, it makes more and more sense to solely target high earners because you make the same or more as selling higher amounts of lower priced product but with less overhead.
This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.
It works right up until some form of revolution, either politically or violently. We are far from anything like that but I'd rather not get close to the line. I think I'm a minority view though, despite being in the top 10% myself.
It is also shocking how little my life compares to the rich people I see. I don't own two houses or a yacht. We don't take yearly vacations to a chateau in France. The gap between the top 10% and the top 1% is insane. The gap between the 1% and the 0.1% is even larger still.
But hey... not like the rich getting richer and saying "screw you" to everyone else has ever led to negative consequences right? Nothing to see here, business as usual.
> This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.
Also the logic of what Broadcom/Avago did with VMware: only chase the whales.
This sounds like you are deriving an is from an ought.
Is it not conceivable that we won't find a way to do so, and that consumption and economic activity will ultimately decline?
Everyone wants seniors, nobody wants to train juniors.
I imagine this is gonna continue to be true, except that "everyone wants consumers, nobody wants to employ people".
Your statement makes it seem like we had no problem losing professions to automation. I'd argue this isn't true.
There are plenty of poeple who have inadequate work the world over because there isn't enough paid work to do, and most professions are servicing wants, not needs, so the demand is very elastic, with many people now multi talented and still not making ends meet.
I know it's been talked to death already, but the fact that the video is so wrong on self-driving cars is mind-blowing. We can rationalize post-fact as much as we want - still it is shocking that popular belief never expected language models before self driving.
Popular belief never took the regulatory obstacles to self-driving cars seriously. If LLMs required insurance to use, they also wouldn't be available in public yet.
That's a good point. I'll add that killing someone (even yourself) with a public chat bot is a drawn out affair. With a car it happens all the time.
1. There are no rules of economics. Economists attempt to understand things that happen and use that understanding to predict future events, but frankly there’s not a lot of consensus.
2. Economics is a function of human behavior, not horse behavior. Economics is about coordinating human effort. Humans make economics, horses don’t. When economics change in a way that is bad for horses, the horses have no recourse. When economics change in a way that is bad for humans, the affected humans seek to change things.
...by dying under the treads of tanks.
Humans are not required in economics. Only inputs and outputs. That's it. It is a grand delusion we have that we meatsacks are needed.
Civics and society seem to still need people and that's what I'm worried about breaking down.
The fallacy here is that horses were never employees!
They were tools that people used to get things done.
They got replaced by better tools. Just like typewriters got replaced by computers and printers.
Not just the typewriters. Also the armies of secretaries that came with them.
> They were tools that people used to get things done.
This is exactly the perspective many executives have of their employees.
Employees are just another way to get things done. Ripe for disruption!
Have any of these articles actually addressed HOW software developers are supposed to retrain for good jobs? Personally I have neither the money nor the years to go back to college to get a livable job.
I know some people whose work was already almost completely eliminated by AI (language translation) and they're not doing great. Reality is there's no-one out there looking out for you except yourself and very close family/friends.
I know a language translator (Japanese/English) who is doing very well out of AI screwing up and causing damage.
This might be the savior for software developers
Just curious, what kind of jobs did they transition to? Or were they forced to take a break, or left in job application hell, etc?
Doing mostly language tutoring last I checked.
So obviously each college is different. And your experience is not mine.
But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.
What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.
You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.
Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.
I don't know where you are, but when I hire mechanical engineers, I hire them from universities with accredited engineering programs. It's actually a legal requirement for the job in my jurisdiction. And if those engineers decide they want to become daycare teachers or knee surgeons, they do have to go back to university and re-train, even though they already learned how to think the first time.
There are many fast-track teaching certification programs for people who already have a university degree https://tntpteachingfellows.org/
Healthcare is another growing field that's easy to get into with only 1- or 2-year certification programs for some positions.
Is that true for healthcare careers that don't have abysmal quality of life? All of the nurses I've known are working 60 hour weeks, night shifts, etc.
And get paid peanuts. And effectively they're told that they are disposable in the face of a pandemic.
Pharmacy techs work regular hours.
Good pay, low barrier to entry, pleasant. Pick two.
Not from the pharma workers I hear from in the US. But this is all anecdotal.
Did you graduate yesterday? Have you actually lived in the world?
My unmet needs are $2.5k rent and $2k childcare, per month. Then there's food, healthcare, car payments. There is pretty much zero wiggle room for us.
Only $2.5K rent? That's like free these days. For what though. I rented a 4K sq ft house in Charlotte three years ago and now paying $3.5K for not a modern 2bdr in Miami proper.
1100 a month in Kansas City and $800 a month in Denver. Everybody wants to live on the coast.
The Gulf Coast?
For sure! Still more money than I can fathom bringing in if software engineering went away tomorrow.
1300 sq ft house with a big yard for the toddler.
I keep telling my 22y who graduated from a university last year to go to a trade school (HVAC/ electric, plumbing). Too late for me as these require apprenticeships in the US.
My HVAC contact in FL needs a $100 just to sniff the AC/boiler closet. That is, if I can get him to show up. I don't even know if he's licensed here, but he's definitely very experienced.
If you're unemployed, you won't need to pay 2 grand/month for someone else to watch your children, and you don't have to pay San Francisco rents if you're not working there.
I don't think "just give up your existing community and move" is a viable option. That defeats the whole point since at that point the retraining isn't allowing you to maintain your quality of life.
> just give up your existing community and move" is a viable option.
That’s been how humanity has always worked, human migration is probably the largest single driver of social change in human history
Millions of people migrate every year today, I’m not sure what you think the alternative is
No, it isn't. This is an incredibly modern phenomenon. We see examples of peoples moving en masse throughout history, yes, but the idea that everyday individuals should expect to leave their community is an incredibly recent one. Such would have seemed monstrous to people even a few hundred years ago. Fun fact: Socrates wasn't actually sentenced to death, he was sentenced to death or exile, and chose death over having to leave his home behind.
> Millions of people migrate every year today
A just society that doesn't force them to.
It is a viable option. "Quality of life" is a luxury and programmers no longer belong to the class that can afford it. Do what everyone else does and go wherever the jobs are and live at whatever quality the market decides that you deserve.
San Francisco is where the jobs are, and dropping your entire social network on the floor at exactly the moment you need it the most to help you is not good advice.
Former tech workers can ask for advice from non-tech people who previously had to leave because they could no longer afford rising costs that happened due to influx of well paid IT jobs.
I think you are missing the point of the discussion. The idea behind "just retrain" rhetoric is effectively "new technology won't destroy people's quality of life because they can just retrain!". If quality of life isn't maintained, then there is no reason to retrain at all, people can just get a minimum wage job and live in poverty.
The rhetoric was a lie. Capitalists lie. That new technology always creates a surplus of newer, better jobs and quality of life always improves for everyone was a lie. That you can "just retrain" and everything will remain the same was a lie.
Even if you "retrain" your quality of life will go down because the market value of your life will go down as automation and AI improve, unless you're a member of the capitalist class. Which, if you need to work for a living at all, you aren't. No matter what you do unless you're personally wealthy your quality of life will go down. That's just what an efficient market does to most people, and AI is going to make the market brutally efficient.
I wonder how many sectors this will have to happen to until workers realize that nobody's safe. I was shocked to see journalists at major firms peddling the 'just learn to code' line a few years back, given how much their industry had contracted in the decades before.
I'm interested in how you expect someone to attend school/retrain without childcare. You can't generally bring your kids to class with you.
In some other countries family generally takes this role: grandparents look after them
Odd assumption that everyone has grandparents alive.
Or assumes their grandparents are allowed within 200 feet of any children.
Your solution to childcare is permanent unemployment?
This is Denver rent actually, and increasingly most urban centers.
People don't get a degree in "generic doing things people want". They generally get one focused on a particular field.
If someone's degree is in computer science, they're not going to be a good fit to be, say, an accountant or a nuclear engineer.
This works if you're interested in running a business, but what well paying work doesn't require a degree or some kind of formal training certification?
People in tech change roles and careers all the time. The vast majority of role or career changes do not involve going back to college.
I would even recommend against going back to college unless someone has an extremely compelling case for a career change that requires it and the conviction to see it through.
I'm hesitant to give examples because I know every example I give will be met with objections from "But I don't want to do that job" or "What if that gets replaced by AI too?". Look around you and you can should be able to identify some adjacent roles where you at least have an understanding of what the works like and you could learn the rest by taking on gradually more responsibility.
There are a lot of jobs out there that aren't exciting, don't pay SWE level salaries, but nevertheless pay enough to support a family as evidenced by all of the people doing those jobs who support their families. Not every company or industry is interested in squeezing maximum efficiency out of their employees. I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
I don't think SWE is going to disappear either, but it will look a lot different in years to come. If you can't or won't adapt to the new normal, one of those boring alternative careers might be worth pursuing.
>The vast majority of role or career changes do not involve going back to college.
That was possible pre-2022 during the famous developer labor shortage. In the current market, companies expect seniority/experience in that specific stack they use for that, no more career changers.
They either take you as a senior/expert to contribute from day one, or as a young and cheap newgrad/junior out of uni they expect to train on the job, but no more in-betweeners switching careers as they're not as experienced as the seniors on the market, nor are they as cheap and malleable as newgrads/juniors.
Sure, in theory every developer can learn at home to do anything new related, but in the current job market, companies expect X-years of proven on the job experience with their stack, no more bootcampers, and no more self-taught-at-home types. The entry bar has risen significantly. At least where I live.
Like I just saw on linkeidn a job posting from a large bank that was an hour old and it already had 100 applications, which probably means most applications are now AI botted, meaning yours will get lost in the noise and getting a call back for an actual interview is like rolling a dice.
Not saying it's impossible to change(I did a couple of times), just that's it's much more difficult than in the good times, and will most likely also come with a paycut.
I guess where I'm coming from is that I currently am trying to change careers. Everything I'm finding is either a 50% pay cut or is simply unwilling to consider anyone without 5-10 years of experience in that particular industry. Since I've already built a life here I can't really just move and a 50% pay cut isn't enough to live anywhere near a comfortable life; particularly since I have medical expenses that aren't covered by insurance.
> I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
I think these jobs are actually the most likely to be replaced by AI. They have resisted automation to date because there's too much fuzz in the inputs/outputs to make it feasible to computerize. LLMs solve exactly that problem.
The same way clerical and manufacturing workers retrained when their jobs were replaced by computers/the Internet and robots. That is to say, most won’t.
Well, a lot of them retrained into call-centre type of jobs.
Then the call centre jobs offshored (and now are being replaced by AI).
Just like everyone else. I have a feeling your definition of “livable” is not in line with the reality that most people face. You share more in common with a stay-at-home mom going back to school to become a phlebotomist than you think. It’s just pride gets in the way
A stay-at-home mom isn’t bringing any income in so has the luxury of being able to fail.
Whereas many of us can’t take a loss of income for months while we retrain.
You don't have any buffer at all? You're spent your entire inflated software developer salary for the entire time you've had it?
Not enough buffer to take 3-5 years to rebuild a career is not the same as no buffer at all. Personally I have about a year of buffer which is no where near enough to meaningfully retrain.
I don't get it. Didn't you live way below your means so you can save up money for retirement? I've got enough money saved to get away with being jobless for about a decade.
Is that in cash, so if the stock market drops 80%, it's still true?
If the stock market drops 80% and stays there for longer than a year it's Great Depression 2.0. Retraining won't do jack shit. There'll be breadlines, governments paying people to dig ditches and build trails in national parks.
Not everyone's had the luxury of saving for years and years. Some people just got into the industry (remember 'learn to code'? not to mention recent graduates), others had to work their way up through lower-wage roles (e.g. contracting) just to get to a place from where they could hope to save. Other people have family to take care of and can't just throw everything into their savings.
Even back when I had to make do with $400 a month I was saving. Live out of a van to save on rent if you have to. There's always a way to live below your means and save.
Of course there are exceptions, but I don't expect those to apply to anyone commenting here.
Since that time living out of a van has become a crime in a lot more places.
The trick is not to start in software and have something to fall back in to.
In my case that’s mathematics in academia so I’m going to be starving to death.
I started from sweeping floors and making survey calls at minimum wage. I think you can teach Math to high school students.
Have you checked how much high school teachers actually make? It's not much.
It's possible to make low 6 figures, but a lot of pay is dependent upon length of time teaching and/or which district to get into. Good districts rarely have openings.
I'd say (not a teacher myself, but related to several) teaching is a lot more difficult than people give it credit for.
Still better than sweeping floors definitely. And you can work as tutors if you are good with kids.
you know I would go back to cleaning toilets if it paid the same as staring at a screen
Actually that's not generally true. Janitors at least work 12 months a year, many schoolteachers are paid ~9 despite being expected to work through them (on lesson prep &c).
I would like to know the answer to this, too.
Not really sure what I should be doing on the side since AI seems to be automating a lot of work that I do as an analytics engineer. Maybe in 10 years all I'm doing is feeding in markdowns and project specs to an LLM and reading test outputs. At what point are you just a technician?
We are mostly already doing that now as DE.
Lately I've been just thinking of hitting ALT+F4 on life for good, as a big FU to the megacorps (not that they would care, but it would give me the satisfaction at least)
There’s so much more you can do to get back at megacorps that will hurt them more than that. 1 less person in the world to oppose them is a win for them.
I’ve never met you but based on your last 10 HN comments I think the world would be worse off without you in it.
Just ALT+F4 on shitty tech, which is most of it. Ditching your smartphone is a small but good start.
"as a big FU to the megacorps"
Where is the satisfaction in that?
If you jump from a bridge, all it does, is that relatives of yours will receive the bill for cleaning up the blood and remains (on top of funeral etc).
I think of doing this except for suicide (which you shouldn't do) I fantasize about becoming a monk. That's a life role that can't be replaced with AI, provides meaning to yourself and to the community and guarantees you a certain amount of happiness – probably more than most jobs.
Monasteries are wary about people inquiring because they can't hack it in the world. And because monasteries are businesses of a sort, they are concerned with what a middle-aged inquirer can bring to the table financially.
That's a very broad statement; the reality depends on the specific order and monastery in question. To be sure monasteries are wary about all who inquire, thus the usual two-year neophyte period. Beyond that some will expect more from novices, other less, but there are many stories of broken people retreating to monastic life even today. Indeed many (within the Church) expound that as a key role of monasteries, providing a place for people to escape from the world. If you just want to live a Godly life, you can do that in society; monasteries are precisely the place you go to do so outside of it.
A pithy saying in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions is that people shouldn't consider monasticism if they want to run away from the world, but rather only if they want to run towards Christ. A significant part of the discernment process is weeding out the former.
> hitting ALT+F4 on life for good
That hardly seems like it would be satisfying.
There are many ways to do that more effectively TBH.
I have a friend who is a skilled UX designer and UI artist.
He works at Best Buy now.
Also what job do we retrain for?
No - because as a software developer adapting IS the job.
Exactly. Though this round of tech change is much faster than the previous ones.
well, I suppose the same way that other people whose jobs were lost due to automation over the years were supposed to retrain for good jobs? I doubt they had the money or years to go back to college to get a livable job either.
Hence why we had things like the rust belt with excessively high drug use.
In the past there was always demand for "unskilled" (manual) labor where displaced workers could land to without long (re)training, and possibly even gain skills on the job. But that job marked has dramatically diminished especially in the west; there are only so many burgers to be flipped. Somewhat famously during industrial revolution displaced agricultural workers (e.g. farmhands) ended up mass-migrating to cities doing factory work under extremely exploitative conditions. And that never truly got resolved, we just brushed the issue under the rug by pushing manual labor to third world countries where the problems could remain out of sight.
Generally speaking they didn't. They either got lucky or their quality of life plummeted.
You retrain the same way that we told workers when we decimated the garment and manufacturing industries. You'll get the same amount of government support too.
Who's we? Personally, I've actively supported the traditional garment industry to the degree that it still exists.
It used to be you could just buy (for example) jeans made in America for $20. I bought such a pair back in the late 1990s. There was no need to be busy trying to "support the traditional garment industry".
Nowadays you'll be spending $40 (same price after adjusting for inflation) for something definitely not made in America, and probably of inferior quality too. Since the domestic garment industry has shrunk so much, the supply chains an economies of scale don't exist anymore to buy domestically-made garments of decent quality at those prices.
As recently as the 1980s-90s (when I was a kid) 50-70% of American clothing was made in the U.S. Post-NAFTA, that declined to 3-10%.
Many of us on this site have worked directly on projects where the efficiency gains ultimately reduced or eliminated positions. If you want to exit the development field, I think the answer is probably the same as for the people whose jobs we helped eliminate.
Pretty much none of us are doing jobs that existed in colonial America.
How can you not see that this time its actually different? The very need for labor is being obviated. Every technological change we had before still required a need for labor often an massive need that justified an entire city population. That is the difference. For the first time in human history, economic output is being severed from requiring maintenance of a labor pool. Considering we are that labor pool, things do not bode so well for us. As you state, look at the relative lack of abundance of candlestick makers and horeshoe makers and basket weavers and other colonial jobs. We are essentially making ourselves extinct and we don't even realize this.
They said the same thing when the looms put weavers out of a job.
There's an off-color joke that could be made here but the real question is the speed of change - we gloss over it but there have been major changes that took centuries, and others that were quite fast, this one seems to be closer to the fast end.
Yes and? You'll be shocked to know that pretty much none of us were alive in colonial America.
You are presuming that you will need to retrain for a new job. Why do you think that?
Because I've been looking for a new job for several months and all of them either require significant retraining or don't pay nearly enough to maintain even a similar quality of life. I don't just mean they don't pay enough for luxury. I mean they don't pay enough to live in my community without a roommate.
In my experience, AI has given far more leverage to software engineers than anyone else, because they have a feel for what computers can do, what's easy, what's hard, what's performant, or poorly specified, etc. Therefore I think retraining is mostly about being willing to experiment with AI-assisted workflows and not being too tied to old ways of doing things. As long as you are focused on the problems you are solving, I think you'll do okay.
What I'm more concerned about are the younger generation where all the learning tasks have been automated. I have faith that the strong, naturally curious engineering types will still learn to do great engineering, and honestly without some of the mental blocks and calcified assumptions that us greybeards have. But how do they get in the foot in the door and the reps needed to develop senior-level judgment is another question.
In some sense we need the current mania to die down and the long-term maintenance implications of heavy AI assistance to become more apparent. Basically I think we need the AI bubble to pop and then 1-2 years for things to stabilize, and then we'll recalibrate on hiring expectations and best practices for AI usage. The current AI maximalist and doomer views I think are both basically driven by capitalist incentives and wishful thinking from investors and a reality check is going to come in some form (whether technically, socially or politically).
We are all going to learn the hard way, this is what the economy is like for many people. Always on the precipice of losing everything and thus willing to do anything like the capital owners want it.
Whatever cushy career path you think is safe now will probably not be so safe by the time you go to university, train, land a job in it etc. The job of the future is nurse, diaper-changer, cleaner, prostitute for elderly retirees. Welcome to the aging fascist AI technoutopia.
The internet has made it easier than ever to learn new skills. You don't need college unless you're targeting a career that requires, or expects, a degree.
"unless you're targeting a career that requires, or expects, a degree."
Unfortunately most well paying jobs do.
Maybe there will be an inversion. Lots of white collar office jobs can be partially automated, or have their efficiency greatly increased by AI. But we still don't seem to be near widely deployed robots that finish drywall
You think the drywall company is going to hire you? Why would they hire someone in middle age with no experience when there are no shortage of 20 year olds who already know the trade?
Also, illegal immigrants, who are actually the people who do most of the drywall.
Do you like working with dry walls? I don't. I can do it, but I ain't born for handywork.
Interviewers and hiring managers make that decision. I'd say the better paying jobs require a degree or training.
Okay, I'll write one for you...
https://soj.ooo/p/positivevibesonly/post/f467feb1453208a492d...
I’ve been coding for over 20 years. I may not be the perfect coder, but for me, the real goal has always been solving problems and coding is just a side effect. If I could solve an operational problem with Excel, I would! Code, once created, is a liability I have to carry.
So I’m embracing AI-assisted coding with open arms. It’s not that I don’t enjoy coding. it’s that this approach lets me solve problems faster than ever before.
Ok but you do realize that AI can also solve problems? The thing is it's not just taking away "the coding" it's also taking away the problem solving (of course I'm not talking about all problem solving).
That's the real risk here is that we are getting to the point (probably already there for a lot of stuff) where you can just point it to your already existing codebase and tell it your problem and it can basically do it.. I mean I've tested that in practice, sometimes I'll have a clear direction of where I want to go or what I would do.. but I don't really give it any hints of how to solve the problem, and many times it comes up with a similar result or at least one that also works completely fine.
So I think part of the issue is that people like you and me I feel like are going to be so much less needed because an AI can just do it instantly for basically free.
Anyway, I know this is a slight hyperbole.. but it's also not. It kind of sucks to realize that a simple prompt can replicate your work 95% of the time and do it basically instantly.
> where you can just point it to your already existing codebase and tell it your problem and it can basically do it
Who is deciding the action/s to take in response to the problem? How do you know which is the right action to take?
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
Currently we have C-level people saying "I want a website that sells widgets". Then product managers make a plan for all the pages/functionality on that site. Designers style the site. Managers divide up the work into smaller tasks. Tech leads steer a group of software engineers, and software engineers do the actual implementation.
2 years ago AI was a novelty and essentially just "fancy autocomplete". Today a skilled software engineer can use it to mostly one-shot the whole website with a detailed technical prompt and then iterate on it from there.
What happens 2 years from now? If progress continues, I expect we'll start walking up that chain of command. First you eliminate the software engineers and just have the tech leads do the prompting. Then you eliminate the tech leads and have the managers do the prompting. Then you eliminate the managers and designers and eventually you end up with star-trek-esque programming where some C-level person is just telling their computer "I want a website that sells widgets. Good! Now make the navigation bar blue. Could you make the font bigger?"
So what are your plans for when the wealthy no longer need you?
Then I will find other problems to solve. Do you think AI will solve every problems for humanity? it has nothing to do with coding as I mentioned earlier.
What kinds of problems do you think someone will pay you to solve after AI advances for another 10 years?
What you said is valid but I think you are still constrained in thinking that the code is the solution, though. I wish I could word it a better way. Maybe we need a word calculator /s
And my great great grandpa thought horses would lose all their jobs to cars. And they all did and it was never the same again.
There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
As someone that works in robotics/automation, it pains me to see people in creative/office verticals getting all the shit with AI these days while hard labor positions, the one that everyone could be doing a bit less because they take a toll on you (working the fields, farms, hazardous tasks) remain pretty much the same.
don't we already have lots of machines that do things like this though? Even if its human operated: excavators, combines, tractors, and other heavy machinery have reduced the physical burden involved in sustaining large societies tremendously.
Yes there are fewer hands on the job site but there are still hands at all. This is increasingly becoming not the case in the future. The goal is to fully eliminate all hands and all minds. There will be no more sponges of newly available labor. Then what happens exactly no one really knows or even wants to meaningfully try to answer, because the implications are too disturbing.
If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.
We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
How long do you give it?
I looked into this (or rather, had Google Deep Research do a 30-page report on it!) and it's still a very long way off. So long, that the AI, or any reference it found, would not even give me a rough timeline, but I suspect it is multiple decades away. The main blocker is a very severe crunch in the supply chain of critical materials, mostly rare earth elements which are essential to make those high power density + high precision motors feasibly.
Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.
This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.
All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.
That doesn't make intuitive sense to me.
First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be.
If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.
Mining is not limited by human labor, we already use huge machines (and some robots) controlled by a few humans. The limitations are investment in huge machines and processing plants, and regulations on where/how you can mine/process.
You can't just have a robot start mining/processing rare earths, anywhere in the country. You need permits, and a lot of money. I guess that didn't stop AI companies ... but there isn't an "infinite" novelty/hype premium for rare-earths, like there is for LLMs.
> If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear
That totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.
Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it significantly affect the economics.
We're waiting for the point that replacing the humans is the cheaper option. Not sure that robot plumbers are in our near future.
What's your definition of "near future"? 3 months? 1 year? 5? 10? 50? 100?
Not the other commenter, but we won’t have robot plumbers in 10 years. Maybe in 50.
Robots have been used in industry for decades already. Most jobs won't be worth investing in the robot doing it, since human labour is cheaper than the capital investment.
To the start of it? Maybe two years?
To the end of it? Maybe 40?
I would agree with you, if we taxed the ever-living fuck out of AI companies to enable UBI, so that the people replaced with robots did not end up homeless.
Well, first these AI companies would have to turn a profit.
Worse, it was just almost all horses. There are a few in Central Park pulling tourists and that’s enough for the Pollyanna’s to point to and go “See! We’ll be fine!”
Horses where the plaything of the rich. Farmers were using oxen not horses for the most part. However the modern plow (invented in the mid 1830s - John Deere being the best known inventor, but others were inventing them about the same time) needed the faster speed of a horse to work well, but if the previous farming technology worked for you then oxen (or donkeys ... - there are several other work animals used in different areas for farming) were better.
There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.
Do you have a citation for the horse number? My research [0] shows we have a 1/5 out peak number in ~1900 and our population has 5x since then. This means per capita horses in the country is down 96%, while absolute count is down 80%. Both are huge numbers.
0 - https://datapaddock.com/usda-horse-total-1850-2012/
The page you linked doesn't count recreational horses.
The number of horses in the US is down by about a factor of 3 from the peak in 1920. They're mostly recreational now though.
Presumably you are a human, not a horse, yes? Presumably there is more to your life than dragging around carts all day every day?
HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
This may shock you but there are still in fact humans who drag around carts every day
> the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
Yes, most of the work many people do is virtually meaningless.
Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist? Does your work contribute anything to yourself or other humans around you?
Or do you get paid a lot of money to sit in an office and update JIRA tickets about tracking ad conversions and increasing engagement OKRs?
> Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist?
We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
LLMs have much better cognitive empathy than most humans have limbic+cognitive empathy - the therapists will also be automated - friction like licensing bodies will slow it down but not stop it.
I’m not sure how to respond to this before I know if it’s satire or not?
Unfortunately not satire - modern models can be trained to be better than humans in recognizing emotions straight off camera.
This is the Chinese century, and even if China charts a somewhat different course than Western capitalism, it still believes that human beings should spend most of their days in some employment, even if it is just makework. A population with mostly leisure time is viewed as very threatening to social stability. I can see that model being exported to the rest of the world far more than I can imagine your utopia.
Have you got a citation that the Chinese government believes in makework?
The Chinese social safety net, for individuals not covered by unemployment insurance, is strongly centered around public sector jobs (公益性岗位) that, if you see them in practice, are often plainly makework: the essence of the work has been mechanized/automated, but human beings will still be directed to be somewhere all day and look busy. There is no paying those people a dole while they stay home like in sone other countries.
Many of these jobs are things that improve quality of life for everyone else, too, like street beautification programmes. They do this alongside coming up with robotic means to also sweep streets, but yes, they find ways to hire people to just "make this place look nicer".
Chinese State Council: 2026 Employment Priority Strategy
http://big5.www.gov.cn/gate/big5/www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/...
Isn't the end of the humanity also the end of capitalism?
Not necessarily! In "Saturn's Children" by Stross, humanity managed to wipe itself out, but post-humans (evolved from former, ahem, entertainment androids) are doing just fine across the Solar System. There's a plot point where one of them discovers that some corporation back on Earth inherited full property rights to her body due to an old pre-human-extinction EULA, and she'll be recycled for parts if she ever sets foot in their jurisdiction (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
Do you expect competing AIs to give up on private ownership of the means of production and using them for profit?
And vice versa.
It'll turn into some starwars robot slave trading, Capitalism will be fine!
Explain a world in which capitalism ends without a fight?
Who said it needed to happen without a fight?
The world where humanity ends without a fight due to capitalism "winning"...
All the rich people become bankrupt or otherwise loose their political capital, new politicians are elected in that owe more to workers and thus enact anti-capitalist policy to win over the loyalty of workers.
That or, as rich people loose more and more of their political capital, workers get empowered and use direct action (such as strikes) to demand the end of more and more capitalistic policies, until there are none left. The rich get along with it because the alternative is loose everything.
Or capitalism ends in a big messy fight.
It will happen. Communism ended without a fight.
Edit: And today's industrial society is quite far from being capitalist. Feudalism is more close to reality, seeing as the one most important factor for almost everything in life is whether you own real estate or not.
That's a very loose definition of feudalism. However if you take in account nepotism and bribery, which are more and more widespread around the world, maybe we get close to that exchange of land for loyalty that was the basis of feudalism.
Because the capitalists have very big guns and a monopoly on violence.
Its very easy to imagine a better world.
Its much harder to imagine the Scrooges in power willfully giving it up so that we can build that better world.
It's not just the Scrooges in power. Previous attempts to actually make a better world often made a worse one, and not just because of capitalist opposition.
If you mean attempts like centralized communism - absolutely - and the failure mode should have been obvious from human nature: centralizing great power incentivizes corruption.
We don't fully know the failure modes of every alternative yet, but that doesn't mean powerful central governments + capitalism is the best alternative.
Interestingly, the Amish shape their lives around this sort of thing. With any technology, they ask themselves, "Does this make us dependent?" If the answer is yes, they refuse it.
They are more and more adopting modern technology. And where they haven't directly they have found ways to use it and be just as dependent while appearing to not. Go visit one and you discover they want to borrow your phone to buy things from Amazon...
Uncle Ted warned us about this.
It's okay, I'll just use AI to vibengineer a viral basilisk that only targets those who violate the NAP.
> HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
That's an underrated comment! Totally agree. So so much of discussion on this topic sort of assumes business as usual (both literally and figuratively) and that AI quickly diffuses through the economy, sucking up all economically useful activity, with humans falling by the wayside as inevitable collateral damage.
There's a failure of imagination taking place here that there's no other outcome. Capitalism is an evolved solution to how human community works, but is not inevitable.
Massive changes in technology pretty much always involve wars and a reshuffling of power. This doesn't have much to do with capitalism at all. It's more of a question of how are those that currently have power going to adjust. In the case of technology we quite often see this end up with a concentration of power.
How to maintain stability in a world filled with greedy people in power that don't want to give up a single penny is a good question to ask at this point.
See also: Russia, 1917
> HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism
HN is literally owned and operated by venture capitalists why are you surprised by this.
I guess op wasn't surprised, just called out for those who should maybe consider this angle of the situation also.
Unsurprising stuff can still suck, and we can still complaint about it.
If you're not economically useful, what pressure would you be able to bring against the government and it's drone-based police force if it does things you don't like? General strikes don't work in a world with no human labor needed.
Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested. If a sociopath were in power, what would stop them?
What's your proposal for ending capitalism in our working lifetimes?
> I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
I also think that will be the case. However, not all the jobs are worth being automated. Say, if you are a modern-day horse-riding instructor, I very much doubt the robots will come knocking the door to take your job. Not because they can't, but because the headache is not economically worth it.
It'd be uneconomical today but I don't see any reason to believe it will always be that way. Any time you want a high standard of living for people it creates an incentive to eventually make a cheaper way of doing what those people make their high standard of living with.
About the only things I can think to guarantee will have some constancy are "for the sake of being human" type things. Much like buying handmade bowls is something you can do out of pure preference/taste/ideology even though it's cheaper to buy massed produced ones.
I can see that going away too. Eventually the average horse rider is going to be someone of stature of a saudi prince at the rate horse ownership coupled with inequality is going. They'd probably be all about buying the Gemini horse teacher over learning from some lesser birth stableboy. I bet eventually all tutoring from a human is seen as some lesser ick by the rich. People already think as much about you today when you talk about say not relying on claude code. It is all about optics and virtue signalling pedigrees at the end of the day.
In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. (Unless something drastic changes.) That means how long it will take for robots to be practical matters. We don’t know how long it will be, but driverless cars have been coming for 15 years now and they’re still unavailable in most places.
People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.
Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
You seem to be living under a rock. Yes driverless cars started in 2009, but in 2026 it is very much here. Waymo recently crossed a milestone of more 500k trips I think, we will have millions of driverless cars in the coming years (we’re at 10k right now)
Waymo still doesn't serve my city. We get too much snow/ice in winter and so they are slow to expand here.
There's always exceptions. To not beat a dead horse(hah!) in Texas you can still find people on horseback in the drive through line at Starbucks from time to time.
The cities Waymo serves are the exception even in the US, and worldwide it is even more an exception.
I give them til 2030 for that to become false in the US, maybe 2040 for the entire rest of the world.
For a while waymo didn't even serve the hillier parts of where they were deployed. These roads are challenging conditions for even a human rideshare driver, when you are down to about a cars width of winding road, with a moving truck trying to pass in front of you, and a dump truck trying to move behind you, cars increasingly piling on either end, no way to turn around or back out, everyone increasingly honking and cussing as if that would lubricate things. It is kind of hilarious in a way seeing how quickly things effectively blow up in those street conditions with just the perfect storm of two slightly larger vehicles passing at once.
Now you can imagine a waymo in this mix how it would just be on its knees in a situation like that. How is a waymo to interpret "fucking move already you dumb fuck" into any sort of meaningful instruction?
I'm reminded of that story about activists in SF requesting a dozen waymos at once at some one way street and creating a localized denial of service attack essentially.
But the horses themselves got the better end of the deal - they spend all their time in the field eating hay rather than pulling carts.
The phrase "sent to the glue factory" comes from this era where many horses made redundant were sent to be slaughtered for meat or raw materials.
Or on the shelves of Tesco.
No. The horses were made redundant and no longer exist in such quantities
So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.
Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.
The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?
Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
> The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us.
Well that and there are more guns than people and if a million people come for you then there is no army that will be able to save you.
Looking at the news in the US, it feels like the wealthy and powerful are working that problem.
So long as they can keep us fighting amongst ourselves in meaningless culture wars. If there is ever a broad alignment of populists spanning left to right, it could get spicy.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to start a war, engineer water shortages and famines.
There are more horses today than ever... Oxen got the short end of the deal - almost nobody uses oxen even though historically they were the backbone labor of the farm, while the horse was for the right.
> There are more horses today than ever...
The global horse population peaked in the 1910s.
Apparently there are around 60M horses currently, while there's no world wide data for 1910.
Horse ownership isn't what it used to be, but the horse population seems fine.
The only data I can find ignores the majority of horses today - recreational riders. If you can find a better citation I'd stand corrected, but everything I can find counts race horses and horses used for farming.
>There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.
It is clear that at the limit, machines will be more capable in nearly every way. I suppose there might be some room for a few exceptions like working around big electromagnets that machines can't get close to... Does that sound great? Is there something else you had in mind which would be reserved for humans and fulfilling?
Intuitively I think we all understand that the % of jobs not doable by steam and iron approaches 0 over time.
Give us a single example of a job that you believe can never be done by robots or AI.
reality tv star on something like real housewives. I think AI/robotics would have a hard time being that irrational and illogical consistently. That behavior is pretty unique to humans.
I feel like Neuro-sama is essentially already that, but for the Twitch / YT crowd instead of television. It's trivial to train a model to maximize engagement (as one can see gestures broadly), so I'm sure if we can get robots looking nice and human, we'll have Futurama's All My Circuits in no time.
Though I guess there was a token human on that show, so maybe you're right!
Waiter at a fancy restaurant.
The last job is going to be hairdresser, because billionaires have wives (not to assume all billionaires are men), and those wives will want a human to gossip to.
Other than Uber and Uber eats, I can’t imagine myself doing anything other than those. I might get a security guard certificate and guard empty halls during the night, which quite suits me.
Not a handyman, not suitable for physical jobs, I think I’m cooked! This is the fear that is always on my head.
What makes you think those jobs will still be available?
Uber : Getting replaced by Waymo
Uber Eats : They've been experimenting with ways to replace humans for this. I think the most likely scenario isn't those silly robots on the sidewalks but rather just a Waymo. Have the restaurant send someone to carry food from the restaurant to the Waymo idling at the curb, and have the customer come out to the street to pick up their food from the Waymo. We lose the door-to-door convenience but I think a lot of people would take that trade to eliminate the cost of tips and paying the delivery person.
Security Guard : AI monitoring security cameras and automating calls to police sounds trivial. There are also already "security robots" that move around so they could be dispatched for scenarios which do not warrant a call to the police.
Handyman / physical jobs : While I think these will last longer than the others, I think they won't last much longer. We've already invented all the necessary hardware. The limiting factor was the software. What happens when you take an LLM from the year 2030 and give it a pile of tokens to write the software to drive the robots to do plumbing/building/whatever.
I don’t think they are not going be impacted. So yeah, maybe I’ll be jobless.
This is my dilemma as well. I can't think of a role that won't be impacted so I don't know what to train for. When I was younger, my fallback was always going to be "truck driver" but that's going to be one of the first dominos to fall.
I have no idea either. And I’m in my mid 40s which is a pretty hard place.
If I’m younger I’d probably find some trade and do it. I think it’s safe for another two decades maybe. And I wouldn’t bore a child.
If I’m older I’ll just call it the end and retire early. My wife still works and I can live at around 300-500 CAD per month for all expenditures.
But now it’s a bit scary if I lose my job.
I don’t particularly like the horse to engine angle because it doesn’t capture the issue well.
When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???
Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?
How are your plumbing skills?
You mean my meat proxy skills while wearing a Ratatouille machine-vision head camera that tells me what wrench to pick up and how to crimp the Pex rings?
You're telling me Google Gemini robot 2 tying a trash bag isn't also gonna be able to crimp PEX rings?
The solution is probably a trash bag with a mini forklift compatible lift rings, an optical center mark, a ratcheting closure, and make a raspberry PI do the computing millions of dollars of tooling to make a robot compatible trash bag but it might be worth it, deploy the bean counters!
It will. But having watched the video, I can tie one faster and cheaper. This week. Next week, who knows?
Plumbing is kind of a hard job, definitely not fun for anyone above middle age. And given it will pay minimum wage, I think I'd just take a life of leisure instead.
Minimum wage? Where I live, the plumber median wage is pretty much exactly the national median.
Sure, but that is today. When AI decimates the knowledge fields, a whole lot of people are going to be looking at different career options. There will not be any shortage of people hoping to make money in the trades, and with that surge in supply will come a collapse in prices.
Ah, then I understand you. But please, let's stop with this inevitability. If AI decimates, not when.
Apologies, I'm with you. I was speaking to the hypothetical, not trying to suggest it is inevitable. I think it is uncertain how this plays out, but I am an optimist and I think it ends up a net positive.
Why would it not? The economic incentives make it inevitable. Might as well expect water to not flow downhill.
It is very plausible that LLMs never get to 100% replacement for knowledge workers and the winners will the people who use both, leaving behind the people who thought all they needed to do was cut costs by doing existing workloads without humans. It remains to be seen if the constraint on quantity of knowledge work was the people or the work.
Actually had a plumber here earlier today which was an ordeal so have been asking that myself too...
The knowledge economy was already on the way out in favour of the performance economy even before LLMs. LLMs have also shown that they can produce in the performance space, of course, so it remains to be seen how valuable humans are in that position but so far it would appear that many are willing to pay for a "human connection".
Plenty if not all people put more value into handmade things, but they can't afford to have everything handmade. An IKEA coffee table is $15. Handmade one from a woodworker is $400 - $1000.
Absolutely. Hence why manufacturing died long ago, and why the knowledge economy was already on the verge of death even before LLMs, and why we were already moving to the performance economy: because in the performance economy the consumer and the buyer are able to be disparate entities, where the buyers can have deep pockets even if the consumers don't.
In the performance economy it doesn't matter how rich the consumer is, but what the consumer wants to consume does matter. Because the buyer and consumer are disjointed in the performance economy, the consumer isn't swayed by cost. However, if the consumer prefers AI performances, which they quite easily could, then humans are in trouble. But so far it seems human performances remain what the consumer wants to consume.
(Technically manufacturing and knowledge work could have established the same separation, but since the bright minds went to performance nobody thought to before it was too late)
> Become a useless class?
Like our capital class overlords?
Amazing. I bet this can really help thousands of programmers who are simply not needed, because companies decided to replace them with AI agents. These philosophical ponders are very comfortable to do when your ass is safe. Most of people don’t have this privilege.
> what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
It never was the code. The code is how you solve problems, make stuff happen. The code is a tool. It’s people’s brain that is of value. People learn how to use these tools the best they can. And now they are told that they should become mere supervisors for the AI agents. Simply by trusting the output and QA-ing the result. Because no human can keep track of the AI’s generated mess.
My grandad ran a small letterpress shop and when phototypesetting came in he didn't retrain, he just did smaller and smaller jobs until it was wedding invitations.
“Retraining” is mostly a myth. Former skilled workers just downgrade to service jobs, pushing out younger, less skilled workers in the process.
The NYT touched on this issue in a podcast about NAFTA: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/podcasts/the-daily/americ.... AI is going to be NAFTA on steroids. Politicians will be able to point to growing top-like GDP to say it was a good thing. But it’s going to brutally hit a lot of people and most of those folks will never regain a secure economic footing.
Some skilled workers retrained. Many of them refused to learn.
Don't be the old dog who can't learn new tricks.
Most of the time, you just have to learn what makes the new trick the same as the old trick.
Retraining for typesetters meant becoming "prepress" guys, and going from the wide array of tools and hand skills they used to need to Photoshop, Illustrator, and digital imposers and plates. In the process, the job went from a middle-class job to a minimum-wage job, and the bosses who used to respect you (after the union that used to protect you disappeared) became fly-by-night scumbags who treated you like dirt.
As far as I can tell, the entire business for someone who was good at running a press is fancy wedding invitations and business cards with raised type. I am speaking as someone who waltzed into (and later out of) prepress because I knew the digital tools, made no money, and talked with those guys a lot about the past. This discussion would be while we were printing wedding invitations and fancy business cards.
It's simply a different, low-status job now. Retraining is no different than training the first time, because if you want to make a living you either have to somehow be better than the people who started with the new tools (and the new tools don't require as many people) and maybe get into printing packaging or manuals, or you need to do something completely different, and compete with people just starting their careers.
Going to college again is not a trivial thing. The mortgage will still be due.
Right, retraining often means a major switch. I don't want to go back to college either...
So naive.
Automation will take everything it can in a race to the bottom towards higher profits.
Your great great grandfather changed, and the automation didn't keep up.
This time it will, and there will be no safe harbor.
I don't think we can say what will happen, but I agree that history offers no guarantees for the future.
Significant unemployment leads to civil unrest, which leads to government intervention.
The last hundred times we automated things, we automated muscles. Today, the number of people employed purely for their muscle is very small.
This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.
I'm not sure I can quite agree with that. I'd say that spreadsheets definitely reduced the need to manually calculate things, and calculators before that, and the abacus before that.
I basically agree with your "higher level reasoning", but not your statement that we previously only automated muscles.
see: when 'computer' was a job title
Also relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_occupations
> Today, the number of people employed purely for their muscle is very small.
I also believe we underestimate how much that costs us too. Yes, it is good that fewer people are breaking their bodies on brutal physical jobs.
But there are many people in the world for whom their physical strength and dexterity are perhaps their most valuable asset. With the loss of those jobs came a loss of an avenue of meaning for them.
I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that the whole manosphere alt-right conservative thing going on in the US is driven in part by a generation of young men who don't find intellectual work to be appealing but don't see many alternatives out there either. It's telling how closely Gamergate is tangled up in that world and how many games are basically simulations of heavily physical prestigious roles.
A recent Onion headline really hits the nail on the head: "'This Here Is Probably Our Bestselling Love Seat,' Says Man Who Would Have Been Powerful, Revered Warrior 4,000 Years Ago"
Compilers automated higher level reasoning, at least to a small degree. LLMs themselves are basically just compilers with a much, much, much, much more expansive set of built-in language constructs.
(No, compilers are not deterministic)
Can you describe the last time you asked your compiler how you should best approach an interpersonal problem, to research an investment thesis, or to figure out an org chart by analyzing communication patterns within teams?
People aren't just using AI for writing code, but for all of their decision making. AI is far from limited to writing code.
> Can you describe the last time you asked your compiler how you should best approach an interpersonal problem
Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem. It compiled that into a description of how to deal with it.
> People aren't just using AI for writing code
Compilers have never been about producing code in particular, though, even if that is where they are most commonly used. A LaTeX compiler, for example, outputs books. To think they are about code exclusively is a grave misunderstanding of what a compiler is.
> Compilers have never been about producing code in particular, though, even if that is where they are most commonly used. A LaTeX compiler, for example, outputs books. To think they are about code exclusively is a grave misunderstanding of what a compiler is.
And what, pray tell, are those books output by TeX? That's right, PDF or PostScript code.
> Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem.
The LLM usage I see from most people has the LLM write out the specification, asking clarifying questions as needed. If you're using LLMs as you describe, you're using them ineffectively.
> The LLM usage I see from most people has the LLM write out the specification
If the compiler is writing the specification, what purpose does the person serve? That is not what I'm seeing out in the wild, though. Perhaps what is happening in research labs aside, compilers, even those implemented as an LLM, don't do anything until the user specifies their intent.
In fact, you literally recognized that in your earlier comment, asking about my action to specify my problem. Not sure why the story is changing now? There is probably a day where the systems solve your problems before you even know you have them, but we're not there yet. The technology hasn't advanced that much in the span of a couple of hours.
> asking clarifying questions as needed.
Sure. Even the earliest, most primitive compilers would seek clarification if there was something that it felt required more information. That's expected.
> If you're using LLMs as you describe, you're using them ineffectively.
LLMs are just compilers so they can't do anything else. Maybe you're thinking of some technology that is layered on top of a compiler like an IDE, REPL, or something to that effect?
> Sure. Even the earliest, most primitive compilers would seek clarification if there was something that it felt required more information. That's expected.
Can you tell me what the last question GCC asked you was, and can you rate its coherence in comparison to your colleagues questions?
> Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem. It compiled that into a description of how to deal with it.
I might just not know enough compilers, but didn't you write the specification of how to approach the problem, not just the problem itself?
I don't think I knew how to approach the problem. There would have been no benefit in using the compiler if I did. Kind of like, if we want to talk about code, many coders don't know how to approach making a hashmap. They don't need to. The compiler figures it out for them, as it did me for my problems. I'd call the input I gave a specification of the problem, but words are in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.
If we take "write the specification of how to approach the problem" at literal value, you might be narrowly thinking of a low-level compiler, or what sometimes gets called a transpiler? However, compilers encompass a much wider spectrum than that. Generally they enable users to operate at higher levels of abstraction.
I think you're talking about more than just a compiler, though standard libraries are often distributed with the compiler. Take Rust for example, it's not like the compiler has special integration with hash maps, it's just that the standard library has a standard implementation and the compiler lets you refer to that implementation without having to repeat it yourself. In a way you're just including parts of another spec in yours. Specifications do this all the time, for example by using English. You don't have to define all the levels of abstraction, only the ones that matter.
Even so, I'd argue that you still have to define how to use those abstractions rather than only the result you'd like to achieve with them. Sure, maybe the abstraction has a ".achieve_the_result()" method, and calling that method is how you achieve it, but often there's a bunch of stuff you fit together to achieve a solution to your problem and the compiler doesn't necessarily do that for you.
I think there actually may be some compilers that get closer to this, for example some problems can be expressed quite elegantly in Haskell or APL and the compiler will do a lot of black magic behind the scenes to get you a performant executable (somehow). But for most traditional compilers you are still going to have to define how to approach your problem, even if only at a higher level thanks to libraries.
> (No, compilers are not deterministic)
Having used, designed, and written compilers, this is news to me. Please, elaborate.
tldr: Race conditions when building on multi-cpu systems (which is all of them these days), and timestamps sneaking in everywhere.
Oh, no. Timestamps. Truly the sign of higher level reasoning.
This is a tired, idiotic analogy. For one, if LLMs are compilers, they're terrible compilers because they can't be reasoned about the way one wants to reason about a compiler (but I assume you have a weird take here since you claim compilers are non-deterministic).
But more importantly, if you insist on treating LLMs like compilers, then the source language – natural prose – is the worst programming language ever invented. Coding the world in brainfuck is a better idea than where you lot is suggesting we go.
> This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.
That’s very generous of you to call it that way.
It’s a parody at best.
That's an optimistic view -- and even if it is, as the cryptographers like to say, "attacks only get better".
Well written, and good to reflect on.
However, the one thing I feel like is missed by some in these conversations is that what's being built is a general purpose thinking machine, not a coding machine. How are we going to transition from writing code to solving problems when the machines are solving the problems?
The honest AI boosters do claim we won’t solve problems anymore, we will live animals in a zoo, overseen by machines of loving grace.
The retard AI boosters, tell us to be AI first, learn this harness bro, loops are yesterday, now it’s graphs, use 100 agents a minimum or be left behind, actually world will require 100X more software engineers.
> we will live animals in a zoo
Why would we still be alive? Once we have advanced enough AI inside not only computers but robots, the rich will no longer need us. They will have the robots farm the land, clean their homes, fly their planes, etc. We will then have no income and therefore no way to feed ourselves. Most people do not own enough farm land to keep themselves alive.
In the past, such imbalances of power were resolved because the rich still relied upon the poor for everything (security, food, etc). I think we're approaching the point where even armed insurrection is no longer an option with the advances in automated killing machines. We're not there yet, but it's coming.
Back in the '70s my dad used to tell a joke about his dad. He said that my grandfather had a job that supported his whole large family while my dad was growing up. But unfortunately technology caught up with him, and he was replaced by a device just this big, and he held his fingers apart to demonstrate.
Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."
Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.
It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, and so was the pickle slicer.
In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.
I’m trying to figure out this joke. Is the punchline that he was a gigolo and he got replaced be sextoys?
That was my interpretation but nobody ever explained it.
I think the punchline is that workplace romance usually gets both parties fired, regardless of who initiated. Hence, doing "things" with the pickle slicer means the pickle slicer gets fired for participating...
They're both misdirection jokes.
The first one sounds like the dad was replaced by computers. But then reveals the dad is a sex worker and being replaced by sex toys.
The second one sounds like the person was being intimate with dangerous kitchen equipment, then reveals that a "pickle slicer" is a job for a human and not a machine.
It may be funny when it's a joke, not so when it's real.
My grandpa was a shoemaker. The real change in technology left his family in poverty in Chicago during the depression. I didn't hear anyone joke about that, directly.
Jewish humor is frequently about laughing at your own pain. There's a genre of Jewish jokes created in concentration camps.
I think we are very much in the below scenario:
"I'm a carpenter and electric power tools were just invented.
In the short term, people are asking if we need all these carpenters.
In the long term, people will want bigger houses and therefore the demand for carpenters will go up"
We are in the "short term" part of the above.
My real question is how long we spend in that period before moving on to the next one.
It is more like, "I'm a carpenter, and electric powertools that can also operate themselves, and run the sales department, and control a robot to change a lightbulb, and manage the entire company, and surround it with armed guards it also controls, just came out. I'm screwed."
This is the Jevons Paradox.
Correct.
I'm just not sure exactly where we are on the "Jevons Paradox Adoption Curve"
You are not the farrier in this analogy. You are the horse.
No, he is the farmer all right:
https://manuel.darcemont.fr/projects/
We are the horses.
The grandfather must also have survived two world wars. The transition from horse to cars happened within a broader context and was greased by blood.
I find it curious that this is often elided when discussing technological transition. Sure the whip makers went away but they probably also ended up dead in a trench.
I just wanted to point something out. I hear people say the AI revolution is the biggest one since the industrial revolution. I think it's the biggest revolution since the one that just preceded us, the information (computer) age. So we're still going fairly in order revolution wise.
The biggest revolutions since the Industrial Revolution were probably trains first and everything related to electricity later. Telegraph, radio, lightning, TVs spanning over about one century. And advances in health care, agriculture. But it's hard to tell without having lived through all those changes.
Then computers of course, but not as impactful as the other ones. And cars and mobile phones (mobile dumbed down computers) have been more important than AI so far IMHO.
I am already seeing more companies hire people who are developer-adjacent, especially now with AI-assistance.
I don't think software developers are going away, but likely headed more in-house, as each company can cheaply have bespoke software made and maintained.
So far the impact of LLMs have been very much overstated. Like most (all?) tools, they require a human in the loop to work as intended. This fear of being replaced by an LLM is unfounded and irrational.
The alternatives that may cause such mass displacement like World Models and such are yet to be proven.
LLM's went from generating incoherent garbage, to weird text that seems coherent but isn't (gpt-2), to what we have no with agents passing some of the hardest benchmarks, necessitating benchmark development just to be able to keep up with the rate of progress. They did this in about 5 years.
The sheer rate of progress is what is meaningful. If LLM's agents were frozen now without any further improvement, your position would be must more defensible. But that's not what's happening, we are getting breakthroughs almost on a weekly basis.
It feels to me like the advancements are not accelerating, though, like we're nearer the top of the S-curve than enthusiasts think we are. A lot of the recent advances seem as much a harness improvement as an actual model improvement. We've made exceptional progress in the last couple years, but spent an exceptional amount of money to do it. A moon shot, basically.
Honestly, my gut feeling (worth every bit of what you are paying for it...) is that until we get actual intelligence instead of a good facsimile, we're not looking at an existential problem or a UBI-level problem, even, just a big change in tooling.
Hey I hope you are right. I, like so many of my fellow engineers, am not exactly thrilled at the prospect of my role changing from underneath my feet and the uncertainty that comes with it.
We are making steady progress. It’s not exponential per se like we used to see but in my experience models are steadily getting better. Also breakthroughs can be sudden.
You’ve been living under a rock dude, have you even tried using it for maths or coding. No human in loop needed.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
Can you not seek mastery with the new tools, though?
It does feel a bit like building on quicksand, but coding has always been that way for me. Well, less so with embedded than webdev, but still.
I used to find joy in knowing how things worked inside-out. Whether it was Postgres, or browser engines, or some detail about compilers... I used to find joy in developing the little techniques that made programming NOT building on quicksand. There was satisfation in what you had done being robust.
Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like. When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)
Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers? It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face). I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.
It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.
When I would code by hand I often found I was concerned with the house of cards in my head, am I remembering the right variable names, did I forget something that would lead to an exploit, etc. Now I can direct the LLM to do the work and the skill is split between having an understanding of the interactions of the technologies, choosing tech that will be less of a pain to update/migrate. You can even put some LLM-bow grease into finding more efficient approaches catching corner cases etc. And just by asking I can have test frameworks setup, I can drill into some pet peeve and it takes less time. Now we still have lots of ops moments, like the radicel distributed git forge forgetting to use encryption for private repos, and I run into this class of problem in my own casual LLM use, but that's where our taste and attention to detail powers need to be spent in this modern developer world.
I've always been either entirely self-directed, choosing my own goals, or almost entirely self-directed, being given high-level goals, and getting to choose my own means to accomplish them. So my opinions are probably different from somebody who was a smaller part in a chain.
You say that you liked learning how things worked inside out, whether it was Postgres or whatever. You can still do that. You can learn it at a high level, and then it becomes like a magic word in your arsenal. You don't have to know or remember the details of implementation, but only the nature of its costs, benefits, and synergies with other systems. You just have to remember that high-level abstraction, maybe just a single vocabulary word, of a low-level reality - the exact syntax is really no longer a concern.
The better the agents get, the less there is playing manager. Really your job now is to have and execute vision. Execution is largely a function of having a map of the high level vision and low-level realities in your head, or just having in-the-moment intuition about these things... then just speaking it.
Also, there is developing personal libraries. You may find that in your business you repeatedly tackle similar problems. You develop and refine a library that your future agents can utilize. You develop prompts that make your work more automatic and more robust. And when I say you, I mean, you direct your agents to do it.
It's not so different from what it always was, except that years get compressed into months. What was slow and tedious is now... less so.
I don't know how much advantage I have in this new world, having programmed (sometimes more, sometimes less) for 30 years. My brother has never written a line of code in his life. He's been heavy into AI for a while, and he has developed some really incredible stuff. I think he may have already outpaced me. His $1500/mo+ in subscriptions definitely help.
It's funny though, llms are quite terrible at most things really.
They can build things, but it's all terrible really. Their "ideas" are terrible.
How do LLMs work? Yes there's a model and there's inference, but dig deeper. How can you, today, with < $50, train a small GPT-2 class model, how do you fine tune it, what training data do you give it, how do you give it training data, what algorithms do you use for reinforcement learning, what even is RLHF? You don't have to know any of those details to use ChatGPT, just like you don't need to know how a D flip-flop works in a CPU to write some code that runs on one, but if you're looking for feeling like you know what's going on, at their heart, LLMs are still next word prediction engines, so knowing, deeply, how that engine is created and works, would be my idea of mastery of it. Karpathy has a good set of tutorials on this.
> It does feel a bit like building on quicksand
that's a good analogy and puts into words the way i've always felt about software development. Every so often the entire industry rolls over into something new. I've been here 30 years now and, in my experience, the skill that counts is being able learn new skills. To go back to the analogy, to build something new on top of what you've built in the past before everything is swallowed by the quicksand.
Did a tailor gain mastery of the sweatshop machine? Did mastery of the automated sewing machines give the same joy to the tailor or was it mind numbing meaningless activity that he would be happier to be free of.
How can you say there are no challenges and things to master when working with AI? Unless you are just doing "Make this. LGTM. Now make this".
> "Make this. LGTM. Now make this".
I think well north of 90% of people in software engineering have job expectations that, when assisted/automated with AI, boil down to exactly that.
It's a pain in the ass to work at such a job and find challenges or things to master--your superiors don't want you to do that, there's not enough time in the day, and you're tired from LGTM-now-make-this work.
That's most software jobs, because that's what most software companies want.
This reminds me of a TIME article by former Governor of Indiana, Eric Holcomb
https://time.com/7346751/ai-impact-american-manufacturing/
I like this article, but it took decades for cars to take over: we needed to build vehicles, build roads, build up gas production and distribution... as Bill Gates wrote, one of the differences with the AI disruption is how fast it's coming, since it's almost immaterial (except data centers of course). It may be too fast for humans to adapt like they did in the previous revolutions.
The current trend of comparing AI development to the development of motorised personal transport makes it very easy to remind everyone that undoing the effects of decades of blind "progress" once the negative externalities become unavoidable is much easier said than done.
Unfortunately, work from home made it easy for companies to realize how easily a chat window could fulfill employee interactions
And it threatens not a single profession, but all people doing intellectual work.
It can replace all work, IMO. I'm doing intellectual work that replaces manual labor with machinery and computer vision systems. It's massively sped up by AI.
> But it makes me wonder: what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
This exactly. Look, I "love" code but only because of what it allows me to do and there is plenty of code/coding that I don't love. Not to be too hippy-dippy but I'm a builder, I like to build things. Build things for myself, build things for others. The code was _always_ a means to an end.
Sure, it was cool I had this skill that many people didn't have but I also used to have skill in managing the windows machines and things like the registry. When I first switched to macOS I felt lost, I had this "skill" that was no longer needed but after a while I realized that was a good thing, I wasn't wasting my time fiddling with crap that was just getting in the way of _using_ my computer.
Similarly I may mourn the loss of writing code but at the end of the day code was just a way for me to build, if there are better tools to build (LLMs) then I'm all for it.
I too love building things, but by building things I mean the act of actually building it. Thinking of a problem, devising a solution and then executing the steps to solve the problem, if that doesn’t work, debugging and trying another method and so on. I am not and will never be a fan of buying things, where I just ask for something and it gets made which is what you’re a fan of if you’re honest to yourself.
Yes, but this time, we're the horse.
Only if you accept that you are as stupid and unadaptable as a horse.
A less misanthropic alternative: The technology required to replace the person is much smarter and more adaptable than that which was needed to replace the horse. Because of this, you can end up in the horse's role in the story without having to be as dumb as a literal one so long as it's this other lever which moves instead.
That is an unnecessarily rude and mean comment.
You're the one calling people horses. I'm the one saying, "No, you're probably better than that." Which one of us is being rude here?
You. Clearly.
Neigh. It is you.
> Neigh.
HAHAHAHAHA in a discussion full of doomers, I really appreciate the guffaw that gave me. Thank you.
The Industrial Revolution took over 100 years. You could argue that WW1 and WW2 were direct, structural consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
This has taken months to up-end multiple industries.
I don't think the article makes a fair comparison.
The information revolution has been going on for >50 years. AI is one event in a broader arc. Wait 10 years when the humanoid robots become reasonably capable and affordable. We’re in the middle of it, but still so so far to go.
> Wait 10 years when the humanoid robots become reasonably capable and affordable
We've had humanoid robots that could walk for what, 30 years? While technology marches ever forward, and sometimes makes pretty good leaps, 10 years for both capable and affordable seems pretty optimistic.
I’d agree that the word “reasonably” is carrying a lot here. But call it 20 years, no question. Look how far computers came from 1970 to 1990, that’s probably about the pace to expect, or faster.
I don’t know, somehow the pace seems different, these transitions felt more like the last generation retiring, and the next generation doing something different, instead of it happening to everyone at the same time.
I think the analogy of moving from horses to engines breaks down when going from code to AI as AI can quite plausibly work on itself. It's a fundamentally different game we're playing this time. And there were as many engine jobs as horse jobs (maybe more). The whole point of AI is super human productivity. Even the idea of just using AI means you need less humans because one human with AI can out-produce multiple humans without. It's very difficult to imagine a future where AI can do every job and things don't turn into a sci-fi dystopia.
> something happened once in the past and turned ok hence you should never ever worry about other vaguely similar things ever again
That's how it sounds to me
Don't forget blatantly ignoring all the times something similar happened in the past and didn't turn out fine.
Sticking your fingers in your ears and singing "Lalalalalala" will in fact sometimes work for some people, and that is not a good argument for everyone to do it.
Funny thing for me, it was NEVER the code...
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.
This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).
I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.
As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.
A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.
On the one hand, it makes sense to think of this as just another revolution as it keeps things familiar, keeps the ground underneath us intact and lets hope it goes this way.
On the other hand, if long horizon independent problem solving with almost zero human intervention or support is realized in these models 1-5 years down, then it will lead not to new tech, but essentially a new species of workers that can replace humans at all tasks, In that case, humans wouldn't really have the upper hand as an economical resource to get any work done.
I think the big problem is that nowadays, you can't simply switch professions any more, A.I. can do just about anything white collar, and there's only limited amount of blue collar jobs to go around.
So the future is going to be interesting.
sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.
We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.
Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.
There’s no demand for human dexterity anyway, and it’s not about money. I like doing intellectual work.
They are spending 1T to ruin the quality of work we do, also probably ruining our chances of securing a livelihood and then they want us to for some reason welcome it with open arms and openly say look how great this is and marvel at human obsolescence. Yeah no thanks.
I wish the author had gone deeper
What a refreshingly positive read
That is inherent to propaganda.
No it isn’t, fear mongering is way more common for propaganda. What makes you think it’s the case here?
The difference here is that the car was not a centralized cloud service, owned by select few billionaires.
So the post does need an asterisk, referring to how it all hinges on availability of open weights and inference hardware.
"My family" - a nice anecdotal frame. No worries here. After all, labor savers for production has evolved for millennia. And you should only worry about the impact to yourself, and be glad your lot is better than your ancestors'.
But our society today has very extensive systems with very few deciders, who are largely enmeshed in social and legal constraints to ensure our reliance is safe and effective (at least in the large/long run).
The concern is about that constraint system being displaced - minimally with decider over-reliance on AI (still subject to guardrails?), or maximally with AI itself (no internal guardrails). Slop (in software, medical services, and military targeting) is just the symptom.
That replacement/shift has already been a corrosive side-effect of capitalism, as elites slowly cede loyalty and professional standards to competitive pressure, but even now most constraints allow replacement of bad actors (if demonstrable). AI reliance just makes that shift irreversible. People no longer have incentives or opportunities to spend the decades required to lead effectively, so organizations could never revert the heartless efficient machine elites back to the available incompetent and oblivious humans.
Maybe the result is just wealth transfer, or health, but I'd expect the high-value use to be in a military where very few people can combat many (as is happening in Ukraine now), making the military a preferred option for anyone with resources.
The distribution of (and checks on) responsibility - up, down, across companies and political systems - was intended to constrain agents to organizational goals, but it effectively kills any internal change by requiring near-unanimity and overcoming people's dependence on their jobs. So even if a super-majority of people agreed on some negative projection of AI usage AND had the resources to put work and investments at risk, it still wouldn't be enough to change this trajectory.
My grandad on one side of the family was a market gardener. He didn't become a farmer.
My great grandad on the other side was a lighterman[0]. He didn't become a ship captain.
Sometimes professions really are just gone. In both cases in my family it was due to consolidation of resources and concentration of capital/power. Technology was just a catalyst for that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighterman
There are two key elements in the current AI fearmongering:
1) People think they can predict the future
2) People think humans can't adapt
The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.
Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.
Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.
Adapt, sure, but is my life better or worse after adapting? It's a fair question and a fair worry. The goal of most AI companies seems to be to replace some amount of labor with AI. Look how that worked out for our factory workers. They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.
> They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.
The tech crowd used to say that only the "dumb" ones did that. They said those who were "smart like us" were much more adaptable, learning to code and whatnot to find new, often even better careers. It will be interesting to see if the emperor has clothes.
Why is it whenever people try to downplay the efficacy of LLM’s evangelists go “there’s literally never been anything like this,” but the moment people critique them or try to weigh their impact on society the response is “well it’s nothing we haven’t seen before”?
The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation. We are clearly experiencing a moment of sorts, and anybody who is worried about what the fallout will be is just handwaved away as ignorant fear mongers. Unless you are the head of these companies doing it in a disingenuous way to pump up your valuation, then suddenly it’s legitimate - but not so legitimate that we should do anything besides let the US government build a moat for them!
You're mixing a bunch of different "people" in the same bag. I'm not the one saying "there's never been anything like this before".
The investment is massive, but not bigger than other projects by an order of magnitude. Major wars were bigger than AI. The dot com bubble was 2-3T dollars.
If we’re comparing war between entire nations to speculative economic investment than I’m not sure I need to make any more points.
There may not be so much in the way of soldiers in the field guns blazing, but we are very much seeing a 'cold war' emerging with AI at the centre of it. Call it speculative, but the incentives for nations to spend are essentially the same in cold and hot wars.
> The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation.
Yes, the absolute numbers might now read TRILLION instead of BILLION or MILLION, but the concept of "Technology so impactful governments shift their economies" is in no way new, and has already happened a bunch of times before in humanity's timeline.
I guess that's why you're seeing some of us less stressed out about it, as again, scale is different, because scale today is different in everything, but relatively, we're just repeating another of those "Technology changes everything" milestones that we've done before.
We have never seen governments essentially leverage their economies so heavily, so quickly, for a speculative technology. It is literally propping up a significant portion of the US economy right now.
When have we seen anything like this?
> When have we seen anything like this?
The US canal and railroad boom in the 1800s definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger", it looks comparatively small. But in their world, back then, it was basically the same thing, just with canals and railroads. Indiana almost financially ruined itself because of their "infrastructure program". The government got involved heavily with the "1862 Pacific Railway Act" as well.
And yes, easy to say now that "Duh, that's essentially infrastructure" but at the time, that wasn't as obvious to everyone, as and railroad were newfangled technology, especially deployed like that, on a scale never seen before.
> definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger",
And faster. More, bigger, faster. Which substantively changes the situation the same way a musket stops venn diagraming as a “firearm” at some point when compared to a 50-round automatic rifle.
Because they're liars. Plain and simple. Lying is a virtue as long as the lie is powerful enough to sustain attention.
Humans ourselves are a technology. We have incredibly flexible brains and dexterous hands. Up to now, we could always do things that robots couldn't. That was where our job security came from.
But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
This is what the article misses and what people have trouble accepting. Yea, this is a technological revolution, but unlike the Industrial Revolution, you can't just upskill your way out of it.
> But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
I've already started to feel this.
One thing that made us special was our intelligence. We were, and were always going to be (unless some alien form of life arrived), the most intelligent things on earth. Is that still true today?
We should start with the assumption that humans are valuable and deserve to live with dignity. Any philosophy that doesn’t have that at its center is broken.
We should, but to date anyone that wanted to be treated as though they were valuable and deserved dignity needed some way to apply pressure to ensure that.
I'm not optimistic that this will change in the future -- but, I am watching automation erode the amount of pressure that humans can apply.
Yes but same should have been true of animals and humans as a whole did not afford dignity or value to animals. Maybe we will get a taste of our own medicine this time.
I'm curious where you are drawing the line. Why is a human different from a ape/dog/chicken now? I wonder: do they not deserve to live with dignity?
Depends on who you ask. Some people might put it at opposable thumbs. Others might ask how many legs one has. Or language, or ability to count (crows can count up to 30). Memory (elephants have memories that go back over a decade).
I have some bad news for you about how our society actually functions...
Perhaps. But are humans going to get what they deserve?
Very often the justification for why these things aren't terribly disruptive is that the very best of a certain trade or field will still have a useful skillset. Like the best graphic designers in the world are still more creative and skilled than AI, and the best writers are still better, the best programmers are still better, just that they're all more expensive and slower.
But we're not taking into account how it affects the mediocre or average people in these fields. Roughly half of all of these people are below average. Maybe if you're the best you'll always have a job, but what about the guy who legitimately struggled to finish high school? The person who genuinely doesn't have the capacity to earn much more than minimum wage?
We're currently at the part of the story where chess AI can beat amateurs and is rapidly improving. Kasparov's not worried, he's an expert. He's more creative and skilled than an AI.
Why would these machines stop improving at average this time?
I didn't say they weren't improving. My point is that if our justification is comparing the top 10% of performers to AI to justify human performance, that speaks poorly for the replacement of the bottom 10% of humans.
And why not the top 1% or the top 0.1% or the top 0.001%? Either AI stops improving, or we're in for a grim future for people.
I weep for people whose scientistic reductionism has led to such devaluation of humanity. Robots don’t do anything and don’t think anything. Humans do things with and through them. What makes us special is that we exist and love one another.
> Humans ourselves are a technology.
Grim.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
This is just nonsense.
Humans are animals who throughout time have become conditioned to follow production processes for the betterment of society.
The economy long moved past the things we can do, hence "bullshit jobs". Our job security has come from our willingness to "look the other way", allowing the job creators to live out lives the rest of us can only imagine. If they didn't placate our insatiable desire to work, that wouldn't last long.
How many of these do we really need? Nothing is happening, and a lot of people are upset about it.
They wanted to make money, or at least be a part of history during a transformational era. No dice.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I LOVE playing "product designer" with LLM. The thing I normally hate and never do, write and update "design docs" being my only lever is awesome. I do already hate how it seems to turn development into a much less social activity. It's great that we don't need other people and a lot of time for some things now, but it's also not.
But more importantly, because I also like solving problems and seeing people thrive, I can't overlook that it's all based on stuff taken without consent, how artists were made "obsolete" by what plasters me with slop every day (already, and we didn't even get started). And they're not even going "okay, now that we proved it can work with stolen stuff, let's do it proper". No, this is "the new world now", just keep pushing and squeezing and extract more "value". So wtf? Well, I like solving problems, I love games! One cool game is "catch the thief", another is "call out the sociopath". So let's?
But we can't, because we're not building this after deliberation and discussion, we're being herded into it and then make rationalizations for foregone conclusions made in our absence against our interests. Building systems nobody understands that keep making more systems nobody even tries to understand is not some hyper-efficient future, it's no future at all, and nobody with power (however wishy-washy that phrase is) wants to live under any of that, you can be assured.
So this all seems more like an airlock to me, an abattoir, not a spaceship that just happens to be kinda dirty and stinky because the focus is on so much grander things. How insincere and stupid so much of it is just can't be overlooked, and very much unlike other technological advancements where the results speak for themselves, where the results (or the improved process to get them), pull something, make it inevitably seep everywhere it is useful. There is so much pushing and hyping, and so precious little good stuff to make for the really bad stuff, all the slop that is produced and clogs up inter-human channels.
This is not even progress, this is just subversion, that's my thesis. It's deliberately driven for the easily predictable bad effects it will have.
People are flagging in real time. Maybe the grandfather would have thought you are cowards and frauds who abuse him to push a vibe coding company.
Aside the fact the author sells ai services, training, whatever i can not understand the view how knowledge workers will be replaced while every employee is now forced and expected to work 10-fold and hiring is halted because shortsighted deciders and ... money.
The effect on the market is pure GREED and wishful thinking as none of the people in charge of HR or decision making have any idea how this technology actually works.
Also - why is everyone comparing this to the industrial revolution? And not f.e. invention of vaccines. No it HAS to be the big big story or you cannot make money with it.
All while the actual results are well, great. Helpful, sure. But so are vaccines!
Don't buy into this bs, any service or course. d2l.ai is free and wont be stupidly useless next month like whatever hype we sell this week.
As the doom stories lose novelty now we get the feel good "my grandpa" stories.
Thank you for your comment. I didn't intend to tell a feel good story. I'm just a seed startup founder, I'm not DHH! I'm just sharing a personal story that helps me navigating into the storm. There is no message here, I guess I hadn't been clear enough.
"what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?"
The phrasing is very LLM. Apparently what you loved about writing blog posts wasn't the writing either, since looks like you are having AI do it too!