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Comment by IncreasePosts | Hacker News Reader

Quite recently, lots of people were calling on almost-striking longshoremen to be replaced by machines.

How is replacing tech workers with AI any different?

To be fair, I think the public bristled at the longshoremen strike because the vast majority of their leverage comes not from (most) of their jobs being particularly high-skill but from the fact that they can unilaterally destroy the entire economy for everyone else. Add to that the fact that their union chief was extremely blunt about the whole thing, and that longshoremen make, on average, triple the average household income in the US, it wasn't a very sympathetic cause.

Fighting for anything but your right to be an asshole has never, ever been popular in the US. The labor wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led to modern professional comforts like the weekend were wildly unpopular; the women's suffrage movement was unpopular; the civil rights movement to end what we would clearly call Apartheid now was extremely unpopular; MLK was unpopular during his entire tenure in the public eye; today you see the same contempt and tone-policing of protestors against both police brutality and the mass slaughter in Gaza. It's a tale as old as time and media outlets are more than happy play along and fan the flames.

Popularity (especially with a population that's so easy to discomfort as americans are) is largely irrelevant to power, which is what actually matters. Unions would be complete fools to NOT leverage the american economy to better themselves or to force a move from the federal government.

Believing that they should, just because they can, is a destructive zero-sum worldview.

I don't follow. Can you articulate further the link between doing what you can and zero-sum?

It's different because automation of ports actually works

About as well as automation of devs.

I look forward to executives trying it and discovering exactly how fucked they will be.

I get the chance to talk to a lot of people who think this will work, and, it's really striking how poor their grasp of the business is.

What if they use it as an augmentation rather than completely replacement? Could it be used to reduce time required per person? Could it be used to reduce headcount, without a lack of quality?

Replacing your whole workforce with a machine, at this state, is silly, but that's not the only option.

It's not. If my work (as a software developer) can be replaced more cheaply by a machine, it should be.

I'm still quite a bit better than SotA models, but I imagine that won't be true in 2034.

> How is replacing tech workers with AI any different?

It is not?

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