AI Will Not Be Taking Away Code Jobs Anytime Soon (2018)

nextplatform.com

5 points·uoaei··4 comments

Evidently, a five-year-old article, one I hope will foster discussion in the HN community about what's changed in the last five years especially given the meteoric rise of LLMs.

Some people will keep saying it even after the jobs have been 'taken away'. Also it's hard to objectively say that a job was taken away by AI except in some edge cases. If one person in an apartment can be a whole tech company by themselves with ai and never has to hire anyone then would that be an example of 'taking away code jobs'? It would be hard to prove they would have hired more 'code jobs' if ai didn't exist, maybe they just wouldn't have made their company.

It's an interesting edge case, similar to companies claiming dollar value losses due to piracy.

Can't assume people would have bought your content simply because they consumed it for free. Feels as alien to me as saying "if aeroplanes didn't exist I would have swam to Fiji for my holiday"

Such a common fallacy, surely there's a good name for it?

Seems mostly like Argumentum Ad Speculum or Affirming the disjunct, but would be nice to have a more specific term

Yes those are good analogies, but I don't know the name for the general idea. Probably it's the same phenomenon that makes some people refuse on principle to discuss anything involving a hypothetical or counterfactual premise.

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