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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this stuff is fun to work with and use as an aid to programming. But I think what's dawning on a lot of us is that it seems to be able to facilitate a large increase productivity. And given that large productivity increase will industry need as many software developers (and other knowledge workers)?

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Your opinion on this probably depends on what your job currently looks like. Everywhere I've worked there's been significantly more stuff we wanted to do than we could actually do. Speeding that up looks awesome to me.

But if you work at BigCo and mostly sit on your hands already, then, yeah. I don't know.

>Everywhere I've worked there's been significantly more stuff we wanted to do than we could actually do. Speeding that up looks awesome to me.

Does it? Slowing our breakneck anti-human business pace and stopping mindless and environmentally and culturally harmful consumption and production of trinkets is surely better!

Huh? Have you attended a local city council meeting recently? I can guarantee you they're running on shoestring budgets with an endless backlog of requests that they are only treading water on because of anemic tax revenue and low prestige for government jobs. "Productivity" isn't just some high tech, consumer bauble producing phenomenon. It helps everyone out. Highly profitable, headcount-bloated big companies are the outlier.

I can guarantee you that the reason they do so, is an explosion of BS requests, extreme bureucracy, and needless requirements, with a simultaneous drop in actual useful basic work - on city instrastructure and such.

> anemic tax revenue

You mean, spending >1/2 their budget on police?

Every BigCo I’ve worked at (and I’ve worked at places that put the B in Big) people aren’t sitting on their hands because there isn’t way more to do than they can feasibly do. It’s usually because they’re fundamentally illsuited for the job and sitting on their hands is better than being homeless, or the people who are illsuited for their jobs feel anxious about being homeless so force everyone into meetings and team building and off sites and retrospectives and sprint planning and burn down chart analysis and whatever else they can conceive of that seems productive but doesn’t change production in any way. To that extent at least an AI would be left alone to write actual code, and those folks can have their endless meetings and still justify their job the same way they ever did. No AI will ever host a breakout session at an offsite to discuss strategy for getting people to work in the horrific hotel seating dehumanized office, they’re too capable.

> No AI will ever host a breakout session at an offsite to discuss strategy for getting people to work in the horrific hotel seating dehumanized office

Well, let’s hope not.

I can already feel it dramatically increasing my personal productivity. I expect it's going to eventually lead to a 2x or 3x time productivity increase for software engineering generally (if not more).

Will that result in less demand for software engineers? I doubt it. I think it will lead to companies and organizations doing way more software engineering.

I was going to use the old "ATMs resulted in more jobs for bank tellers example", but apparently that particular example is flawed: https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15584268/eric-schmidt-alphabet-...

> apparently that particular example is flawed

Um, yes. Been in a bank branch lately? Had to visit a bank branch for any reason?

Increased supply doesn't change the demand curve but there are basically no scenarios that don't lead to an increase in volume and a decrease in price.

I mean, people aren't going to be able to solve 100x as many problems because of this.

I don't think anyone is claiming that. But 2 or 3X? Possibly. And that would be enough to be a game changer.

Yeah maybe, but will it lead to less jobs? I am not convinced.

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