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Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

> I went to the coffeeshop and drank very good coffee listening to music. Then at night I sat and had a beer thinking about T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland', the effect of industrialization in England at that time and his views of how ennui affected the aristocracy.

Well, for those among us that are not aristocracy already, except for the vanishingly small number of people required to oversee such processes, we’re probably the closest we’re going to get to it. If they don’t need people to do the tech labor, we’ve got way more people than we need, so that’s a huge oversupply of tech skills, which means tech skills are rapidly becoming worthless. Glad to see how fast we’re moving in our very own race to the bottom!

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Lol,a race to the bottom where too many tech savvy people are left unemployed while a few "privileged" get a decreasing buying power to maintain security of the digital tools that keep the whole digital dependent civilizations afloat?

Sounds like a great starting plot for an interesting story.

I kind of feel like software engineers working on improving AI are traitors working against other SE’s trying to make a living.

However…

I have to acknowledge my craft of SE has been putting people out of work for decades. I myself came up with business process improvement that directly let the company release about 20 people. I did this twice.

So… fair play.

Aren't the true traitors still the ones paying the SE to do that work? The managerial slave-master class?

You always have a choice to make. You make it everyday. Get up. Go to a legitimate job. Work.

You probably choose not to steal, rob, impersonate someone else, or generally make money illegally.

It can be traitors all the way down.

In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

>It frees up people to do more interesting things

Like beg on the corners and starve in the street? Trying to figure out how the basics of capitalism where labor is exchanged for money is not going to work well when the only jobs left are side gigs. Something will have to change and a lot of People will fight said change.

I’ve thought about this myself. Couple of points:

1) It’s not my job to fix all the problems of Capitalism. It’s painful to try to fight the system without collective action. My family and I have to eat too.

2) We have had a solution all along for the particular problem of AI putting devs out of work. It’s called professional licensure, and you can see it in action in engineering and medical fields. Professional Software Engineers would assume a certain amount of liability and responsibility for the software they develop. That’s regardless of whether they develop it with LLM tools or something else.

For example, you let your tools write slop that you ship without even looking? And it goes on to wreak havoc? That’s professional malpractice. Bad engineer.

If we do this then Software Engineers become the responsible humans in the loop of so-called “AI” systems.

It’s not your job to fix capitalism. But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.

Say you found a job shooting people in the head for money. Like if you work for ICE or something…

You need to feed your family. Is this job ok? You may decide yes. I decided no. I will find another way to feed my family.

You don’t get to escape consequences because you are a small cog in a large system.

In the bigger picture, automation should free people from labor. But that requires some very greedy people to relax their grip ever so slightly. I imagine they see automation as a way to reduce reliance on labor, and if they don’t need labor, they don’t need people. So let them starve and stop having kids.

> But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.

It’s not even the money-making skill: it’s the application of it. People that are good at shooting people can be beneficial to society as protectors or they can be the the business end of systemic oppression. People with software development skills don’t have to help optimize the motor in the brand-new shiny capitalism juicer.

We will come up with new jobs, like we have for all of human history. I think even in an abundance utopia people will still work - we need purpose to sustain our existence.

The work will become even more fulfilling however.

Throughout human history that didn’t happen fast enough to avoid an astonishing amount of human misery. Nobody’s worried about the future of work. They’re worried about the people that rely on tech jobs for food, mortgage/rent, cancer treatments, elder care, retirement, et al. Look at what happened to the rust belt, coal country, etc. etc. etc.

I agree with you, IMO largely this is an affordability crisis though, which is fuelled by inflation. I don't really offer many solutions besides eliminating inflation. I apologise if that is insufficient (it is).

Don’t apologize — stop minimizing the job market concerns by saying “there will be new jobs” as if that’s imminent.

> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

Yeah, but why does it need to take the fun jobs first, like painting, writing poems, coding, making music, ...

I want the AI to cook, do the dishes, take out the trash, etc.

Well, because consuming art, reading poems, having code written for you that solves a problem, and listening to music is also fun. Recently I wanted a grand elegy to Britain written as the Empire started failing and set to music in a specific style. I had it playing in the background while fixing some issues with some software.

It truly was joyful to have this available to me. It didn’t have to have mass appeal or need me to pay the right artists the right amounts. I had it in moments.

It’s a wonderful world.

To me the image of a world where everyone does menial work while entertaining themselves with AI-generated "art" doesn't seem fun, it seems extremely depressing and dystopian. I guess we just have different values.

And if you consider art something to be consumed for light entertainment, that viewpoint makes sense. For people that consider art a way to express, and conversely experience, otherwise inexpressible things about our humanity, your wonderful world is a cheap, superficial, and sad way for tech companies to amalgamate and sell other people’s ideas and labor.

> like painting, writing poems, coding, making music

Citation needed. Do you have an example of someone in the arts losing their job because of AI?

Yes. The entire job markets for game concept art, stock photography, and storyboarding have been decimated and those were the lowest-hanging fruit for diffusion model applications.

I'm not sure cooking is a good example as it is fun, and also automated in many ways

Depends on the person. When I worked as a chef I’d gladly have had a robot cook for me at home if it was affordable.

> In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

To a point. Then it just frees up people to do nothing.

> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

That is in fact the goal. The less labor capital needs, the more money (and power) the capitalists get to keep for themselves.

The problem is that most people consider doing art, writing, making music, and heck, even coding, “more interesting” than orchestrating a pile of knowledgeable but idiotic robot interns because that’s what’s profitable.

Sure, but that’s fine. I don’t have any allegiance to other software engineers.

Do you think other people’s sense of ethics should be so transactional towards you? Companies that might sell your data to shitty date brokers have no allegiance to you. Muggers have no allegiance to the people they mug. They’re both executing their professional tasks that benefit the people they have allegience to. They’re contributing to the velocity of money in our society. The data might even be used to market beneficial goods and service. So… thumbs up? Or would you feel differently if it was someone else profiting at your expense.

Yes, none of these guys have any allegiance to me. Trying to form a union of muggers with a guy trying to mug me won’t work. You’re welcome to try it if you think it will work for you but I’m not going to.

Copout.

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