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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

> My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure.

Both of these jobs - particularly the latter but where I live also the former - rely on a heavy surplus of disposable income sloshing around the economy. Once the money stops flowing the home stills start and the ski trips stop.

> My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.

The broad point you're conveying is reasonably clear, but I'm not even sure whether you're implying your friend is a SWE by virtue of their child tinkering with a REPL, or if you're referring to the future job prospects of said 10 year old.

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AI might not come for the ski instructors, but climate change will. Already being felt in Europe.

> broad point you're conveying is reasonably clear

Let me further clarify it: winemakers, lobbyists, charismatic artists and anyone else whose job is based on relationships will also be fine. (Or folks like plumbers and electricians.)

The roles being automated away look like the quiet, tinkering alone genius types. First at the commodity level. But increasingly at the highest ones. The preserved jobs will be both high and low, and exist in the context of a more-productive society.

> The preserved jobs will be both high and low, and exist in the context of a more-productive society.

A more productive society is not incompatible with extreme inequality. Unless the middle is preserved, it's hard to see how all these winemakers and charismatic artists will find a market for their labor.

> more productive society is not incompatible with extreme inequality

Sure. And I don’t see why in the trades and service industry solid middle-class jobs won’t survive. I’m just commenting that, ironically, coding is turning out to be the 21st century’s auto line worker.

Just because software engineering is being done by AI does not apply most other jobs can, too—it’s just the impersonal ones.

I don't think ski instructors are safe from AI over the next ten years. It already seems quite feasable on indoor skiing treadmills (which are getting pretty popular for lessons), and would be enabled on actual slopes with some heads-up display and body sensors/cameras.

So the idea is that a massive increase in productivity will reduce economic production?

Or is the idea that we will continue to organize our society around the ever more pointless concentration of wealth?

Are you asking me what I personally believe, or what the GP meant? I don't want to put words in their mouth, but stating that bartending is future-proof while white collar work isn't paints the picture of a future with more inequality and concentration of wealth rather than less.

Maybe I'm being overly broad in my interpretation, because they did specifically single out "coding" - but having personally worked both in and out of tech I don't really see non-dev "desk jobs" as having any particular moat against automation (and potentially even less than devs, which admittedly means I disagree with the likes of Jensen Huang).

So, when programmers go - they won't go alone. At that point it's reasonable to ask what kind of human labor will be marketable enough to command upward-mobility salary tiers, or if the 99.9% are perpetually relegated to pouring Bezos & co drinks while teaching them how to telemark [1]

[1] dystopia aside it would be entertaining to watch

I was making a snide remark about bizarre belief that the macroeconomic effect of increased automation will be poverty.

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