The last time my family was replaced by technology
manuel.darcemont.fr
manuel.darcemont.fr
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.
And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.
We're fixing up a 1987 Jeep Wrangler for our son. I could strip it down to the frame with 3 or 4 tools. It's kind of amazing how simple cars were, and that was in the late 80's.
Alec of Technology Connections just posted a video on this:
This and the video on hybrids, are, imo important works, because they break things down in a way that disarms tribalism, and explain how it is that we got to where we are. There are very real stakes in ownership, right to repair, and freedom of movement that rest on people having a good baseline understanding of this stuff.
As an aside, because of this Technology Connections video, particularly from: https://youtu.be/0KoeY54M5VA?t=746
I now better understand the voir dire scene from My Cousin Vinny: https://youtu.be/1QrTzTe90QA?t=200
I had always loved that scene (as well as https://youtu.be/CFdJza0AbeA ), but I now love it a little bit more. :-)
The complexity of modern vehicles comes down to software coupling between the systems, which (to my knowledge) started with automatic transmissions, and then spread to everything else. In very modern vehicles, even the sensors register with the ECU and communicate on encrypted channels.
The reason for these measures is ostensibly security and quality, but automakers don't seem to mind the fact that it also makes many repairs more difficult or impossible.
But it was easy to work on. My dad (not a mechanic) usually had a strong hunch about what the problem was. Lights went dim while you were driving and five minutes later it sputtered out? Alternator is dead. Flip through the manual to find a diagram of where all the bolts are, take it off, run to Auto Zone, get another one, bolt it on. By the end it was usually dark and I was finishing the job with a shop light hung under the hood.
I drove a series of beaters from the 80s and 90s and did all my own repairs until my mid 20s. Alternators, water pumps, break pads, break lines, ignition solenoids. All of it is just parts that you unbolt and bolt a new one on. When I got my first modern car (a 2008!) one look under the hood made me realize I had joined the yuppie class and would not be changing my own spark plugs anymore.
My solution was to use like 11 wobble extensions and pray that I didn't drop anything. 8 hours later I changed 4 plugs and understood why it cost $250 at the dealer to have them to it. Then I gladly started paying that money.
Car bodies were carriages for few first decades of car history. So if you can fix and maintain horse carriage - you can maintain car carriage.
Engines were simple too and designed to be maintained in a field environment with few tools. So it’s reasonable that this skill was learned, especially by mechanically inclined people.
Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
Interesting historical read:
https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-cr...
>> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
Also, AI adoption might look like it's moving fast for individuals, however I see many companies struggling to actually utilise it effectively. Business processes are slow moving political machines. Sure a large part of the software industry is ephemeral, indirectly providing capital value. However many jobs are still very tangible; embedded, backend web systems, networking etc etc. Instability in these systems absolutely results in tangible loss of value.
It will absolutely take decades before we figure out 'correct' AI usage at an industry scale. Heck, even frontier labs are still undecided about best practices.
P.S. ty for the article link, will read!
Just for another datapoint: two of my great-great-grandfathers in two family branches, in the same small village in France, were respectively farrier and black-smith, while I'm a software engineer. One son of the black-smith continued the trade as a side activity of being a plumber. So I had to think about how my career choice (and those of my siblings, uncles, cousins) relates to theirs.
My own perspective on those trades is that transforming metal was the top engineering scale in the countryside in their era. In those times (XIXth century, early XXth), learning the job required to go work with different masters around France ("tour de France" had another meaning before cycling). While it was still manual work, it was highly skilled job which required both technical skills and creativity, which are also key skills for software engineering.
ChatGPT was released in 2023 and we're still not out of the job for the most part. It doesn't feel slow but we might have these five to ten years.
The total market addressed by current-shaped LLMs is not "software development" - it's approximately all of white-collar jobs. And with recent advancements in robotics, blue-collar work isn't really much safer. Hardware is getting better, and the one thing that was stopping robotics from entering our own workplaces and living spaces, the ability to make decisions on the fly in heterogenous, unpredictable environment - the judgement - is literally what LLMs themselves are embodying.
So I agree, we all likely still have 3-5 years to figure this out - but also no indication where to go, or if there even exists a direction to go in.
Throwback to HN anno 2021 everyone was complaining about their bread and butter was creating CRUD apps.
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden (December 2025)
The AI situation is similar to someone saying "see, we're gonna keep the horses exactly as they are, but replace farriers, trainers, grooms, stable hands, saddlers, vets, and coachmen with absolutely nobody other than some manager type".
The AI industry can't really say they're gonna replace SaaS, because SaaS is the lifeline of their business.
So they just claim they're gonna replace several classes of professionals.
Which starts to be my fear for the real "solution" to job displacement by AIs : people will just be sent to some far away conflict where they will transition to a career in "daffodil fertilization" :/
Some of us will need to move on to other things but there will probably still be a lot of farrier type jobs around.
The perfect HN frontpage material.
Of course I wrote the two preceding paragraphs before reading your webpage: “I am Co-founder and CTO of Tandem, an AI Assistant for SaaS apps.” Just another entrepenur with a psychological spin.
A couple hundred years ago, something like 70% of the population worked in agriculture. Technology replaced almost all of these jobs.
So far, we have reimagined old professions and created brand new ones. Is this ability of ours limitless?
Jobs are a mean to make people consumers, not the only mean, but a significant one.
The ability to create more economic activity require both sides to catch up, so we will find a way to do so.
I imagine this is gonna continue to be true, except that "everyone wants consumers, nobody wants to employ people".
This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.
It is also shocking how little my life compares to the rich people I see. I don't own two houses or a yacht. We don't take yearly vacations to a chateau in France. The gap between the top 10% and the top 1% is insane. The gap between the 1% and the 0.1% is even larger still.
But hey... not like the rich getting richer and saying "screw you" to everyone else has ever led to negative consequences right? Nothing to see here, business as usual.
Crassus amasses so much wealth because Caesar helped him.
And Crassus was the rich man who was monopolizing all of Rome with his slave firefighters + real estate scheme. When the going got tough, they seekwd power from the rich guy, no one was stopping Crassus.
Caesar was killed by the same people (hardline conservative ultra-wealthy 'Optimate' families/factions) who also brutally murdered the tribune of the plebs (person appointed to beg the ultra-wealthy for favorable legislation) and his supporters not once but twice. He was killed for the same reason too - land redistribution, limits on slave labor. That was called 'tyranny' by the elites.
Crassus was wealthy before Caesar and died before Caesar took power. This kind of politicking was just a necessary evil in the Roman Republic - which always was an oligarch-controlled plutocracy and never a true democracy as we know it today (e.g. Athens). It was 'pay to play', sponsorship of the ultra-wealthy was not optional.
Also the logic of what Broadcom/Avago did with VMware: only chase the whales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
True... but not really relevant here.
Wealth inequality is a global problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/24/un-global-ineq...
Yeah, and not just individual destinations but entire destination cities.
See, for example, the radical reshaping of Las Vegas.
The number of millionaires/billionaires/etc feels low enough that there won't be demand for dozens of companies in every possible industry. The ones that have the biggest fanbase/cultural footprint maybe stick around, but the majority would presumably just go under.
First, why does it feel wrong?
1. the top 10% get about 50% of pre-tax income
2. they get 30 to 37% of disposable income after tax&transfers (depending on source)
3. and we know the rich have a higher savings rate, so consume a lesser share of their income (US, China)
May be not top 10% but top 0.1% are good at avoiding tax using various loopholes. Like borrowing against stocks (and other appreciating assets) till death to avoid paying CGT and debt is then repaid by heirs which do not pay CGT AFAIK. So they can spend more than income stats would suggest.
Is it not conceivable that we won't find a way to do so, and that consumption and economic activity will ultimately decline?
What I always come back to is this: Why does it matter what the very richest do? Worst case the economy operates approximately as it does now (maybe with us knowledge workers knocked down a few rungs). But like, the rich can't eat _all_ the food.
I feel like the most likely outcome is that the quality of life of the bottom 90% is overall better than today. HN'ers quality of life is maybe worse than it is today.
Where do you live? The rich will own all housing.
Presumably if we're all unemployed or employed in jobs that have zero economic worth to them, they'll buy all of our houses, build a bunch of big grey boxes for us to live in like a human zoo, build even bigger and more tasteless McMansions for themselves, and pass legislation that makes it illegal to live near them or inconvenience them.
The quality of life for the bottom 90% of the world has been getting better because they were so desperately poor that they could rely on economic growth to help them. At some point they're going to be rich enough in commodities that they start looking to buy things like houses or start businesses, at which point they'll find that asset prices are rising faster than their own wealth because of growing inequality, and they will look at their big grey boxes full of shoebox apartments and start to become unhappy too.
- capital / limited goods
- allocation of labor
Things like land are a limited commodity. Concentration of ownership usually comes with rent extraction. Because you need to live somewhere, but available locations are finite (and supply can even be controlled, and is). This means that you can end up with a cartel scenario where increasingly normal peoples previously disposable income is tied up in an increasingly large % to those fixed costs of living. This is arguably well under way in some countries.
The second point is, the richest enjoy goods like personal yachts, private planes, luxury restaurants. If a lot of labor is increasingly allocated to producing highly inefficient luxuries, it's essentially wasted. You might have hundreds of businesses employing thousands of people or machines, but the productivity of their work is essentially all going into products consumed by a few people. I'd say a limited amount of this is a good thing, it's a normal part of the proliferation of choice enabled by capitalism. But taken too far you return to a historic economy where most peoples productive life is spent serving a tiny elite, while living in poor conditions themselves.
In our financial system, your income as an individual has to be significant enough to send a signal to produce the goods you want. If this ceases to be true for even a significant minority of people, you will find consumer choices and available quality decreasing for those people, which is a real problem. This is to a lesser extent happening in some segments of the economy.
This is also largely the conclusion of classical economics (i.e. Adam Smith) and the argument was developed in great detail by Riccardo, George (who explicitly considered the no-labor-required case in 1800s), and many others.
This is history, not a random hypothesis. Feudal serfs had the ways and means to bootstrap, but in fact lived worse than their pre-feudal ancestors.
I actually have a random thought that it is this innate human drive that causes society to be mostly employed despite massive differences in technology and productivity across geography and time.
What if the driver of employment is not efficient return of capital, but satisfaction of human mind?
The human system relies on us doing stuff for each other, mediated by "money". We get "paid" by some other human for doing stuff for them. "Stealing" is discouraged. "Being given" is rare. "Money" originates from fiat, goes where it goes.
Humans unable to do for others don't get "paid", get starved/sick etc, experience pain, cause trouble and disappear eventually. When doing stuff for people is not done by people, the pay cycle breaks. When machines do a substantial fraction of economic activity (intangibles like decision-making, writing, answering the phone, etc. as well as transport), there is no need for very many people. Absent the need, there will be no support. The farms won't give their food away, they will arm themselves against the hungry.
There will be some human work. So long as machines cannot equal human touch and experience combined, there will be medicine. There will always be sex work. But who affords it?
Possibly racial disparities will diminish. A machine might actually give equal medical care to, or equally arrest, the Black and white person. Or not, depends on the training. Look who's developing the AIs.
Economists thought that economic development means democratic development. They were wrong, see China. They thought that economic liberalization means good governance. Wrong, see Russia. Economists are right about things until they are wrong, and we can all run off the cliff with them.
When the population drops (war, starvation, refusal to bear children) to the level needed to run the machines, the system will stabilize. Pretty much the horse scenario.
But what's consistent with those events is that they end and economic development is resumed under different circumstances. I don't see any reason that the current era will be different or that current problem will be unfixable. People used to get paid to build national parks. What would be our current iteration of national parks?
Public works projects need funding and purpose. I'm not optimistic about what purposes the make-work funding gets applied to these days. Public beauty, cleanliness, health are not in the priorities.
2. Economics is a function of human behavior, not horse behavior. Economics is about coordinating human effort. Humans make economics, horses don’t. When economics change in a way that is bad for horses, the horses have no recourse. When economics change in a way that is bad for humans, the affected humans seek to change things.
Humans are not required in economics. Only inputs and outputs. That's it. It is a grand delusion we have that we meatsacks are needed.
Civics and society seem to still need people and that's what I'm worried about breaking down.
Assuming we are around for this, this raises the question: if the economy can function without us, what claim will we have on its outputs?
It took some time for cars to be available even in good weather in specific places, so I'm guessing no, the cars aren't good enough.
They were tools that people used to get things done.
They got replaced by better tools. Just like typewriters got replaced by computers and printers.
This is exactly the perspective many executives have of their employees.
To spell it out: When horses are no longer needed for a task, they are sold or sent to slaughter.
I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?
People need jobs in order to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.
Many executives feel zero moral obligation to provides jobs to people and instead treat that as a necessary evil that gets in the way of profit. As soon as that evil becomes unnecessary, they will happily lay off as many people as they can.
In aggregate, when enough executives do that, then people will not be able to find jobs.
When they can't find jobs, they are unable to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.
Even if the board cares, they are pressured by the investors.
Even if the investors care, they are pressured by the pension fund administrators.
Even if the pension fund administrators care, that far removed, they care about their pensioners more.
Similarly, hardly anyone takes a job out of moral obligation to the employer. They need money, and accepts the best job they can get.
We've been doing this for many centuries now, and empirically it has been wildly successful for pretty much everyone involved.
In aggregate, yes. But if you zoom in on the trajectory, you can see that it's peppered with wars and revolutions.
Also famines and diseases we can now easily cure wiping out entire societies.
I'm glad we had this talk :)
Also, those past few centuries have involved the largest violent revolutions and wars in human history.
The idea of employment and money is a relatively modern conception. There is no physical law that states it must work indefinitely and efficiently for all participants.
> I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?
About the same once you run out of money. At least here in the US, ymmv in countries that have sane social safety net policy.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-uphold-laws-targ...
There's a phrase for it in fact, "Human Resources".
Though that sounds more like natural resources, like trees for a lumber company or paper mill.
There are plenty of poeple who have inadequate work the world over because there isn't enough paid work to do, and most professions are servicing wants, not needs, so the demand is very elastic, with many people now multi talented and still not making ends meet.
Yes, we can probably invent new jobs and new career fields.
No, it does fuck all for people who lose their current jobs mid-way through their career or later, and watch themselves and their families be kicked down 2-3 rungs on the socioeconomic ladder, possibly throwing them into generational poverty.
Or, in short: yes, there will be new jobs. But not for you, and not for your children.
For the society and human civilizations, these techological revolutions were always a net positive down the line. For individuals caught in them, they rarely were.
That's why the Luddites were destroying looms. Not to fight the progress of technology, but to save their own families from being thrown into poverty.
What did you think "disruption" meant? Vibes, papers, new Javascript frameworks?
Or their rural economy collapsed, everyone was hungry and unemployed, and they moved somewhere new out of necessity and basically started over with nothing, living in squalid conditions and working very unsafe, unpleasant, and exploitative jobs.
If software engineering goes the way of the dodo, I suspect most other white collar jobs are also displaced (anything done entirely on the computer, really). A few years after that I suspect an overwhelming supply of physical labor.
It’s a house of cards at that point, sure - software engineering could be the first to go, but I don’t see any reason to try to retrain or pivot. As soon as I lose my job and jump to plumbing, the rest of the white collar jobs are going with me.
If we get to that point, I’m just going to assume that the rest of the world is also going to be in shambles.
Though, I’m more of a Jevon’s paradox believer. We’ve had so much work in the backlog and now we can finally take a stab at it, I’ve been busier than I ever have been. Until the AI can competently run our entire stack, I’m skeptical. If it gets there, I’ve got no reason to try swapping jobs, because everything will be busted in a short timeframe - no?
I’m also trying to keep my eyes on the big dogs. Once Google starts to hemorrhage engineers and knowledge workers that means that AI can meaningfully replace entire roles, but until then I’m just sitting tight and building stuff, business as usual I guess…
I feel for everyone else in this position, on edge for the last 3 years with no end in sight.
Much more likely is that software engineering goes the way of the elevator operator. Advancements in technology saw the number of elevator operators explode, to the point that we've all become one!
Unfortunately for those wishing to make a living as an elevator operator, due to the properties of supply and demand, us all joining the ranks of elevator operator means that supply is effectively unlimited and thus price cratered to effectively zero. This is the real risk to software engineers, at least those who are in it for the money.
The cure for high prices is high prices.
If it was about building useful or fun things, then AI will probably not take that away, even if it's just for the simple reason that you care more about it than some hot GPU.
The engineering part of software was already completely dead for a large portion of coders who didn't want to know anything about the domain, left all the decision-making to business people/product managers/designers and was downright allergic to doing anything that was more complicated than a CRUD in their favorite framework (which would invariably either change daily or remain static for their entirely career).
There was a huge influx of people like that in the last 10 years who got into it for the money, and frankly the industry got much worse and much more hostile to different perspectives and different experiences.
People who have not evolved into builders have visibly become meat interfaces to the LLM.
Strongly disagree with this. In contrast to most jobs, software engineering is unusually self-contained, with short feedback loops and immediate validation. You (or Claude) implements the feature, you run the tests, you fix the bugs.
Most white collar jobs are nothing like this: lawyers have to prepare briefs (AI can help here) but they have to file briefs, they have to wait weeks or months for rulings, they have to argue in court. Marketing execs might spend millions preparing a new campaign, launch it for the holiday season, and it has to be right the first time. Most white collar work involves judgement, anticipation, and ambiguity in a way that software doesn't.
Software lets you guess-and-check over and over again until it works.
...you then take it to the customer. And wait, and wait, and wait, and maybe eventually they'll get around to trying out what you created, and if you're lucky they'll even give you some feedback to loop back with to try again. They will only try your application a few times before giving up on you, so even if the feedback loop is immediate like you claim (its not; not even close), you aren't afforded many iterations. A software engineer's job is, of course, to get ahead of the customer using judgment, anticipation, and dealing ambiguity to minimize how many round trips are required to satisfy the customer.
If AI can replace the software engineer, why can't it replace all "white collar" work?
I think there will be a convergence where AI enables more POs to create software directly, and more SEs move up the value chain to work on product-level problem solving.
Perhaps you have confused software engineer with coder? LLMs are most definitely the final death knell for anyone still working as a coder, but that profession was on the way out for decades already. The earlier comment was clear about software engineer.
If you want to go into detail with that kind of stuff, your best bet is not the PO, but the lead engineer of the team. If the team was properly staffed, the lead engineer will have a solid knowledge of the business aspects of the product while at the same time being able to cross-reference that with the most important technical aspects.
LLMs will make more people into "lead engineers", even if all they're "leading" is the LLM agents and not other humans, as it was common before the LLM age. One of those will then emerge as the "lead lead engineer" who's going to lead the humans which in turn lead the LLMs. If it wasn't for the "engineer" in the meaning of "code monkey" dying out - which I also expect - we'd have to invent a new title, but I'm currently expecting this shift to go without that. It'll still leave some engineers who made themselves comfortable just churning out code that does whatever a ticket requests, without even understanding one iota of the business process behind the ticket, without a job, but that's the kind of "software engineer" who in my opinion shouldn't ever have taken up the profession anyway.
> They simply pass messages back and forth.
So you claim. We're about to conduct a real-life experiment to see which is more valuable: passing messages back and forth to the computer, or passing messages back and forth to the customer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...
You don't think anyone designs software? It just magically appears?
> So-called software "engineers" do not practice engineering in the way that a mechanical engineer or a civil engineer does.
And? The dictionary defines engineer as someone who designs and builds things. It does not prescribe how the thing is designed.
> How often do bridges collapse?
Not often, but often enough to know that we still consider the designer to have been an engineer and not a project manager. I still have no idea where the idea that project managers do the design work came from.
> passing messages back and forth to the computer, or passing messages back and forth to the customer.
When AI can handle the judgment, anticipation, and deal with ambiguity neither are important. The customer will go straight to he AI. Hence why "white collar" jobs of all sorts are ultimately doomed. Unless you believe AI cannot reach that level, in which case software engineers will be fine, since that's the whole reason for their existence.
What we do see happening already is the decline of the project owner/manager role. More expensive money and technology increasing engineering efficiency has made it such that it is becoming hard to justify an assistant to bridge the telephone tag gap. That doesn't really affect engineers much, though. Before ZIRP allowed budgets for project managers/owners engineers also played that same role, so it is nothing unusual for them. Engineering getting secretarial assistants for a time, something historically reserved only for the upper brass, is but a curious aberration.
Do you actually write software for money?
Most commercial software is never designed, it evolves, over the course of repeated "agile" "sprints". Every two weeks, someone hacks together something that kinda-sorta works and then that is released.
Eventually (often many years later) the thing becomes so complex and unwieldy that it's impossible to add any more features, so someone gets angry, throws it away, and starts again growing a new monster.
No. I am paid to be involved in the software industry, but as an engineer, not as a coder. Writing software is not part of what I do. That is, to use your bridge analogy, for the construction crew.
> over the course of repeated "agile" "sprints".
It is true that not all engineers know what they are doing, are good at what they do, or bold enough to push back against out-to-lunch stakeholders.
> so someone gets angry, throws it away, and starts again growing a new monster.
I never understood that. Untangling the messes was always the fun part back when coding was still a job. But I don't really see any coders in industry anymore. Any last remaining ones I knew of have already been replaced by LLMs. LLMs will also happily untangle the messes, though, so still no reason to abandon code.
I'm very very curious where all these mythical software engineers are working. Finance, maybe? ... or not https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-03-03/citi-k...
>> One quirk of the program was that the amount field came pre-populated with 15 zeros, which the person inputting a transaction needed to delete, something that did not happen.
> One quirk? Fifteen zeros? The quirk in the software is that if you type “send $1” it says “okay sending one quadrillion dollars” and you have to backspace over all the zeros? Incredible interface design.
Boeing, Microsoft, and medical device manufacturers mentioned seem like pretty good candidates. Were you under the impression that the software designed at those places just magically appears?
As before, being an engineer does not imply being good at the job. It only implies designing things. The designation of Professional Engineer institutes a vetting process to try and weed out those who aren't good at the job, which may be the source of your confusion, but PE is a designation, not a job. Not all PEs even work as engineers, although certainly many do.
Has any software "engineer" ever lost his license because he signed off on trash code that failed? Where is the Otis elevator emergency brake[0] of the software world?
[0] https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20...
[1] https://www.otis.com/en/us/tools-resources/high-rise-safety-...
Because the people involved weren't good at their job...? We've been over this multiple times now. It doesn't seem like it should be hard to figure out. What do you continue to miss?
> but they are not engineers
Sure, software involves lots of different types of work. Engineers are just one tiny piece of the puzzle. But design is exclusively the domain of engineers. Anyone working on the design is an engineer, by definition. That, again, does not imply that they know what they are doing, are good at their job, or bold enough to push back against out-to-lunch stakeholders. Having someone doing engineering work does not magically mean you are going to see an excellent product on the other side. Most people are pretty lousy at what they do.
You, again, increase your chances if you involve PEs, but that's not a job, just a designation.
You and I have very different definitions of "engineer". To me, an engineer is a licensed professional who adheres to the code of practice for his or her profession. We'll have to agree to disagree on the semantics. I think lots of software people want to call themselves "engineers" because it sounds like someone who should be paid more money.
...or it did, until the AI revolution.
Again, we’re talking about jobs (and whether they will remain in the future), not professional designations. Licensed professional engineers are usually referred to as PEs, but even if you want to call them engineers it is clear that not all engineers of that sort work in engineering. In context, we can establish that we are talking about engineers in the worker sense, not the professional license sense.
Is English a second language for you? Maybe context doesn’t translate well. English is certainly bad for assigning multiple meanings to words and relying on context to figure out which meaning applies.
> I think lots of software people want to call themselves "engineers" because it sounds like someone who should be paid more money.
How would describing the job by what it is, literally by dictionary definition, garner more money?
I am aware of the time physicians started calling themselves doctors to try and ride on the coattails of academics, so I think I understand the angle you are trying to come up with, but this isn’t like that. In this case engineer was already the word in the dictionary that existed to describe the work.
Even outside of "software engineering" there are tons of people working jobs that almost everyone would consider "engineering" that don't require a stamp. Chemical engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, tons. Only ~5% of chemical engineers have passed the PE, I guess there are essentially no real chemical engineers then?
Even in a civil engineering firm, most likely the kind of engineering you're talking about, only about half will actually be licensed and have a stamp. Tons of people will work on a project and figure out a lot of details, then work with the person with the stamp to sign off on the implementation details. Their work is undoubtedly still "engineering", but they don't have a stamp.
This was the norm in every job I had from late 90s to around 2015.
Engineering Managers were responsible for both technical and business outcomes, and it worked fine.
The scrum solution of having from the business side acting as a literal "product owner" or "client representative" and giving feedback IMO was a much better direction that unfortunately companies have not followed.
In my current position as a software engineer, this is MOST of the job.
I don't know what everyone else's role is like, but a software engineer that isn't dealing with those three items sounds more like a compiler.
"Most white collar jobs are nothing like this: [software engineers] have to [implement features] (AI can help here) but they have to [coordinate releases across teams], they have to wait weeks or months for [real-world usage to validate architectural decisions], they have to [defend technical decisions to stakeholders]. [Engineering teams] might spend millions preparing a new [platform migration], launch it for the holiday season, and it has to be right the first time. Most [software engineering] involves judgement, anticipation, and ambiguity in a way that [isolated code production] doesn't."
I think software development is a field unusually vulnerable to LLMs because there's lots of good examples for training data, and the work is easy to validate in short order according to somewhat-objective criteria.
Note that certain kinds of mathematical proofs also fit these criteria, and also have been an early showcase for AI abilities. Anything where the bot can get to a good result by just grinding on it for days is going to get taken over by AI quickly.
This is nice and makes things easier for the models to learn. Emphasis on easier. They are still capable of learning how to deal with other kinds of problems and being better at it, and they have, over the last couple years.
Consider assembly -> higher order languages -> libraries -> open source -> stack overflow -> now AI.
Secondly, in CA to be a real residential electrician you need to be C-10 licensed. Which requires all kinds of time consuming prerequisites to begin with. Some of them could be a challenge if you are not the kind of guy who knows a guy. Apprenticeships, unions, depending on your major 1 to 4 year of "hands-on, full-time journey-level experience" and such. Your best hope is probably that your EE degree from 20+ years ago still counts for something.
And there quite a few 20 yo candidates to compete with who are taking DC/AC circuits classes in community colleges this very moment. They are not spoiled with life-long office work experience.
The competition among people who'd like to be an industrial robotics technician at the Tesla Fremont Factory is very real too.
Unfortunately most well paying jobs do.
That's for anyone joining the trade. Out-of-work middle-aged programmers with soft keyboard hands and little or no experience hanging dry wall? Why pay them any more than the 24 year old guy. AI may automate us out of our desk jobs, but the downward pressure of us transitioning to trade jobs, even at the bottom level, will only make those jobs less lucrative.
Whereas many of us can’t take a loss of income for months while we retrain.
Even if you've saved enough for 1 to 3 years of university, there's a risk that you won't get a job especially if you're getting towards 40+.
Drawing down savings is a very high risk move, since you could easily never recover those savings because you may struggle to get a job that has a better ability to save as much.
And actually no, I can’t afford to be unemployed for a year. On COVIDs cost of living it would have been easy. But the current cost of living I’m not able to save even with my “inflated” salary. And the savings I do have isn’t going to stretch as far.
I honestly don’t know how people save on lower incomes. I suspect they don’t. Which is why the debt crisis keeps worsening.
I’m lucky enough to have assets but once they’re sold they’re gone. And most people don’t even have that luxury.
Of course there are exceptions, but I don't expect those to apply to anyone commenting here.
It’s plainly true that for a significant number of people, even those who satisfy your moral sensibilities around money, they won’t have had sufficient time at sufficient incomes to have enough saved for a significant period of unemployment to retrain.
It's usually best not to make assumptions about other people's personal circumstances.
Then the call centre jobs offshored (and now are being replaced by AI).
The older I get the more time I heard this. Never actually true. But always used by somebody asking for power, to protect me - of course.
What I'm more concerned about are the younger generation where all the learning tasks have been automated. I have faith that the strong, naturally curious engineering types will still learn to do great engineering, and honestly without some of the mental blocks and calcified assumptions that us greybeards have. But how do they get in the foot in the door and the reps needed to develop senior-level judgment is another question.
In some sense we need the current mania to die down and the long-term maintenance implications of heavy AI assistance to become more apparent. Basically I think we need the AI bubble to pop and then 1-2 years for things to stabilize, and then we'll recalibrate on hiring expectations and best practices for AI usage. The current AI maximalist and doomer views I think are both basically driven by capitalist incentives and wishful thinking from investors and a reality check is going to come in some form (whether technically, socially or politically).
Nowadays you'll be spending $40 (same price after adjusting for inflation) for something definitely not made in America, and probably of inferior quality too. Since the domestic garment industry has shrunk so much, the supply chains an economies of scale don't exist anymore to buy domestically-made garments of decent quality at those prices.
Well, it was, until the factories in Mexico also closed as the jobs migrated to China, Vietnam, and so forth. So Mexico got to enjoy the same problems America had, except they were poorer to begin with.
Not really sure what I should be doing on the side since AI seems to be automating a lot of work that I do as an analytics engineer. Maybe in 10 years all I'm doing is feeding in markdowns and project specs to an LLM and reading test outputs. At what point are you just a technician?
I also (personally! I'm in data engineering for my part) feel it's one of the safer roles from an AI perspective. Yes, you'll be writing a lot less code in the future, but that's never been the particularly difficult part of your job: SQL is dead easy to use.
The difficult part is picking up all the business context and knowledge in order to work out the best ways of representing complicated and messy data for the business. AI can help to some degrees there, but if you're great at your job, your judgement is going to be built on so much business context that both can't be written down and would be too vast to feed into the model.
Sure, AI can do some of the job, but you'll always thrash it in terms of quality (whilst getting to spend less time doing the busywork of just writing your thousandth predicate of the day!). And worst comes to worst, all the business knowledge you have in your head makes moving into analytics a far more viable lateral move.
And that one is definitely AI proof. If all companies use AI for their analytics, they're going to be moving largely in lockstep with each other. Humans might be far worse, but often far better, so I'd be willing to bet that through sheer randomness that over time companies using human analytics will outperform those relying on AI.
I’ve never met you but based on your last 10 HN comments I think the world would be worse off without you in it.
That hardly seems like it would be satisfying.
But the change from being fed up with the world to being just neutral could be seen as a positive change.
Where is the satisfaction in that?
If you jump from a bridge, all it does, is that relatives of yours will receive the bill for cleaning up the blood and remains (on top of funeral etc).
But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.
What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.
You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.
Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.
First you assume that being "interested" in the work is a requirement. I'm guessing 90% of people are doing work that doesn't interest them. But assuming that it's a requirement for you the question becomes, what are you interested in?
Second you want well-paying work. I understand. Programmers got well paid. They lived above the standard of most. It's not surprising you'd want to keep that. But "well paying" is a spectrum. It depends on your life-style, location, eating habits and so on.
And finally, lots and lots of jobs don't require a formal certification. Or one that isn't trivial to get. Ask the people you see everyday (including the software programmers, hardware designers, receptionists, assistants, book keepers, marketing and advertising people, sales, support, your vehicle mechanic and so on.) I suspect if you asked every dingle person you met in a day the ones that actually had this requirement would be a rounding error.
My unmet needs are $2.5k rent and $2k childcare, per month. Then there's food, healthcare, car payments. There is pretty much zero wiggle room for us.
This is Denver rent actually, and increasingly most urban centers.
Even if you "retrain" your quality of life will go down because the market value of your life will go down as automation and AI improve, unless you're a member of the capitalist class. Which, if you need to work for a living at all, you aren't. No matter what you do unless you're personally wealthy your quality of life will go down. That's just what an efficient market does to most people, and AI is going to make the market brutally efficient.
Quality of life during the Industrial Revolution dropped considerably for most of the working population, but afterwards saw big improvements. You seem to be implying that life now is worse than before the IR. Are you? If not, in what way was the loss of jobs to mechanisation then more acceptable than it is now?
The overall quality of life improved through and thanks to IR. But the quality of life of the people most affected, and their children, and their children's children - did not do so well.
Technological progress automating away jobs lifts humanity as a whole, but it absolutely fucks over the people whose jobs got automated away, and the families of those people, and the communities they live in.
That’s been how humanity has always worked, human migration is probably the largest single driver of social change in human history
Millions of people migrate every year today, I’m not sure what you think the alternative is
> Millions of people migrate every year today
A just society that doesn't force them to.
We’re physically built to be mobile - the extent you can take your community with you has always been relevant
I’m sitting in Virginia USA with 50% of my neighbors being migrant families of 5+ people usually across three generations
I’m not sure what data you’re working with. In fact there a whole lot of ignorant politicians that want to stop migration precisely because of how valuable of a tool it is.
Some humans lived nomadically, moving all the time, as a way of life.
Being forced to do the second because nowhere is stable enough to do the first is what we're talking about.
That colonization happened when there weren't other humans there. Later colonizations were either unsuccessful or led to very nasty events.
Also, today jobs are concentrated in places where things are expensive.
You're talking about time scales on the order of several thousand human generations.
Take any human over the course of the last quarter million years, the chances are they didn't migrate away from their communities.
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
Equally, if you are in SF you're about to feel the pain you've caused to the locals by moving there. Somewhat harshly, I could suggest that you didn't care about their existing community when you priced them out of their neighborhoods.
So here's the rub. SF is somewhat different. It is a company town. If you don't work for the company you're moving. Sorry. There's certainly nothing else that can pay you the same money.
On the up side, there are lots send lots of cheaper places to live. And chances are you can find a good job there doing something that adds value to that community.
And I suspect disaster to have correlated chances of killing parents or grandparents or children. i.e. if you've become a parent there's a good chance your parents did too.
Our own lived experiences are likely outliers, since developed countries have different outcomes than the past.
Crap and nonsense! Rewrite:
Once someone's survived to become a parent, there's a good chance the grandparents survived as well (assuming the norm is to breed ASAP).
However, most people in America can't rely on grandparents for childcare. One reason is we have children much older than people in the third world do - if two generations have children at age 38, it's not very reasonable to be expecting a 76 year old to provide child care.
1300 sq ft house with a big yard for the toddler.
My HVAC contact in FL needs a $100 just to sniff the AC/boiler closet. That is, if I can get him to show up. I don't even know if he's licensed here, but he's definitely very experienced.
1br in Denver was well over $1000 last i looked.
It wasn't urban enough for me, for someone working remote at the time, and few growth opportunities for my wife, but I regret moving to FL. Miami has become the least affordable city in the US relative to income.
Excuse me, but what could you possibly do with a ~360sqm house than one half the size wouldn't do? A family of 4 for sure fits in even a smaller one.
I could have rented a townhouse for $300-400 less, but then there are different constraints. Small or no yard, tiny kitchens, no garage etc.
I was perfectly content with a 2200 sq ft ranch in Henderson Nevada.
That's just sad. I knew that real estate was a pain in most countries around the world, but I never realized that choice in the land of freedom was that constrained. I guess in most places it's basically: "Detached House, Large".
Those graduating today have plenty of buffer to reskill tomorrow. Those of us who graduated 20 years ago, have no chance.
Healthcare is another growing field that's easy to get into with only 1- or 2-year certification programs for some positions.
Good pay, low barrier to entry, pleasant. Pick two.
However the number of professions that require a formal degree is very small. (And notably, programming is not one of them.) If you take any large group of random people and asked them, you'd find close to all are not required to have a formal certification.
Generally yes, people with (any) degree are more hirable to (any) job. The skills getting a degree are generally useful, and make a candidate more employable. But if you already have one, you already have that.
If someone's degree is in computer science, they're not going to be a good fit to be, say, an accountant or a nuclear engineer.
There was a saying where I went to high school: “the language programme students are not better at languages, they’re just worse at math”.
But to further the GP question there are lots of examples of people not working in their degree in both directions. The entire computer industry was built by people without a Computer Science degree. Today huge numbers of programmers have no degree at all.
To refer back to the original post about the farrier turned mechanic. Most comments seem to miss the point. Change is coming. You can lean into the change and prosper. Or fight the change and vanish. Those with enough vision, creativity, adaptability will continue to thrive.
In my case that’s mathematics in academia so I’m going to be starving to death.
I'd say (not a teacher myself, but related to several) teaching is a lot more difficult than people give it credit for.
Whatever cushy career path you think is safe now will probably not be so safe by the time you go to university, train, land a job in it etc. The job of the future is nurse, diaper-changer, cleaner, prostitute for elderly retirees. Welcome to the aging fascist AI technoutopia.
I would even recommend against going back to college unless someone has an extremely compelling case for a career change that requires it and the conviction to see it through.
I'm hesitant to give examples because I know every example I give will be met with objections from "But I don't want to do that job" or "What if that gets replaced by AI too?". Look around you and you can should be able to identify some adjacent roles where you at least have an understanding of what the works like and you could learn the rest by taking on gradually more responsibility.
There are a lot of jobs out there that aren't exciting, don't pay SWE level salaries, but nevertheless pay enough to support a family as evidenced by all of the people doing those jobs who support their families. Not every company or industry is interested in squeezing maximum efficiency out of their employees. I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
I don't think SWE is going to disappear either, but it will look a lot different in years to come. If you can't or won't adapt to the new normal, one of those boring alternative careers might be worth pursuing.
That was possible pre-2022 during the famous developer labor shortage. In the current market, companies expect seniority/experience in that specific stack they use for that, no more career changers.
They either take you as a senior/expert to contribute from day one, or as a young and cheap newgrad/junior out of uni they expect to train on the job, but no more in-betweeners switching careers as they're not as experienced as the seniors on the market, nor are they as cheap and malleable as newgrads/juniors.
Sure, in theory every developer can learn at home to do anything new related, but in the current job market, companies expect X-years of proven on the job experience with their stack, no more bootcampers, and no more self-taught-at-home types. The entry bar has risen significantly. At least where I live.
Like I just saw on linkeidn a job posting from a large bank that was an hour old and it already had 100 applications, which probably means most applications are now AI botted, meaning yours will get lost in the noise and getting a call back for an actual interview is like rolling a dice.
Not saying it's impossible to change(I did a couple of times), just that's it's much more difficult than in the good times, and will most likely also come with a paycut.
Everything is commercialized now. Even the discard pile of resumes can be sold for pennies. A job application isn't a job application anymore: it's a desperation signal alerting predators to come extract some value.
I think these jobs are actually the most likely to be replaced by AI. They have resisted automation to date because there's too much fuzz in the inputs/outputs to make it feasible to computerize. LLMs solve exactly that problem.
Like, sure, using an LLM as a CEO today will bankrupt you and some of the decisions leading to that are daft, but even despite that it's in the same "huh, interesting" kind of zone that early LLMs like InstructGPT and the first release of ChatGPT were with code. It could write short functions or small scripts for you, even then… but any attempt to go beyond that would fall over quite fast.
Again, the improvement in coding is due to RLVR, and it does not generalize to other domains. So it is meaningless to point to examples of that improvement.
There are many ordinary behaviors and skills that are not feasible to RL at scale. The sampling efficiency is just way to low.
Yes, like I said, a mediocre idea of how the world works.
> Again, the improvement in coding is due to RLVR, and it does not generalize to other domains. So it is meaningless to point to examples of that improvement.
I can point at actual benchmarks for performance on business tasks. On the one hand, those lines go up; on the other, I just don't know how good those benchmarks are.
> There are many ordinary behaviors and skills that are not feasible to RL at scale. The sampling efficiency is just way to low.
Yes. A point I make myself on occasion. One of two perfectly valid ways to describe intelligence, and one by which all current machine learning really sucks.
Like, if it was fully general, the trillion or so miles that Tesla cars have driven would have obsoleted the steering wheel long ago, rather than the closest we have being (yet another) pronouncement from Musk that this new car he's not actually made available for sale won't need one.
Business self-play training could be anywhere from code to cars. I was expecting much faster progress with the cars, and much slower progress with code, so I don't know how to adjust my expectations with any other domain, including business.
I won't be surprised if current approaches can get decently good at e.g. managing a corner store or a restaurant, without scaling up to a 1000 person R&D firm.
(Famous last words).
Software and Math are not the only things LLMs are fast improving on. Astra is one of the biggest examples of this being untrue. The model is cracked at computer use and vision/spatial tasks and reasoning. Driving, Operating Robots, Video Editing, 3D modelling, graphics are all things Astra was >>> at than any other model.
>but they can’t run a business.
And it's the leader on VendingBench. Also most people cannot run a business.
https://soj.ooo/p/positivevibesonly/post/f467feb1453208a492d...
He works at Best Buy now.
There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Though I guess there was a token human on that show, so maybe you're right!
HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist? Does your work contribute anything to yourself or other humans around you?
Or do you get paid a lot of money to sit in an office and update JIRA tickets about tracking ad conversions and increasing engagement OKRs?
We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
Its very easy to imagine a better world.
Its much harder to imagine the Scrooges in power willfully giving it up so that we can build that better world.
We don't fully know the failure modes of every alternative yet, but that doesn't mean powerful central governments + capitalism is the best alternative.
Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested. If a sociopath were in power, what would stop them?
http://big5.www.gov.cn/gate/big5/www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/...
That's an underrated comment! Totally agree. So so much of discussion on this topic sort of assumes business as usual (both literally and figuratively) and that AI quickly diffuses through the economy, sucking up all economically useful activity, with humans falling by the wayside as inevitable collateral damage.
There's a failure of imagination taking place here that there's no other outcome. Capitalism is an evolved solution to how human community works, but is not inevitable.
How to maintain stability in a world filled with greedy people in power that don't want to give up a single penny is a good question to ask at this point.
HN is literally owned and operated by venture capitalists why are you surprised by this.
Edit: And today's industrial society is quite far from being capitalist. Feudalism is more close to reality, seeing as the one most important factor for almost everything in life is whether you own real estate or not.
That or, as rich people loose more and more of their political capital, workers get empowered and use direct action (such as strikes) to demand the end of more and more capitalistic policies, until there are none left. The rich get along with it because the alternative is loose everything.
Or capitalism ends in a big messy fight.
There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.
The general point is before cars horses were used a lot, entire industries were based around them and our now gone. The toy factor does not compensate because of cost and inconvenience of owning a horse.
Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.
We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
To the end of it? Maybe 40?
Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.
This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.
All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.
First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be.
If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.
That totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.
Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it significantly affect the economics.
You can't just have a robot start mining/processing rare earths, anywhere in the country. You need permits, and a lot of money. I guess that didn't stop AI companies ... but there isn't an "infinite" novelty/hype premium for rare-earths, like there is for LLMs.
People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.
Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
Now you can imagine a waymo in this mix how it would just be on its knees in a situation like that. How is a waymo to interpret "fucking move already you dumb fuck" into any sort of meaningful instruction?
I'm reminded of that story about activists in SF requesting a dozen waymos at once at some one way street and creating a localized denial of service attack essentially.
We are still a long way from a self driving car being the default type of car
So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.
Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.
The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?
Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
The global horse population peaked in the 1910s.
Horse ownership isn't what it used to be, but the horse population seems fine.
Well that and there are more guns than people and if a million people come for you then there is no army that will be able to save you.
I also think that will be the case. However, not all the jobs are worth being automated. Say, if you are a modern-day horse-riding instructor, I very much doubt the robots will come knocking the door to take your job. Not because they can't, but because the headache is not economically worth it.
About the only things I can think to guarantee will have some constancy are "for the sake of being human" type things. Much like buying handmade bowls is something you can do out of pure preference/taste/ideology even though it's cheaper to buy massed produced ones.
> what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
It never was the code. The code is how you solve problems, make stuff happen. The code is a tool. It’s people’s brain that is of value. People learn how to use these tools the best they can. And now they are told that they should become mere supervisors for the AI agents. Simply by trusting the output and QA-ing the result. Because no human can keep track of the AI’s generated mess.
When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???
Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?
Citation needed. Again, I wanna emphasize that I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying that it's not a given that it will.
There is very little sign that current models can do anything but (at best!) augment most knowledge workers (with some exceptions). And there are very reasonable open questions about whether it's economically, and ecologically, sustainable to continue development at anything near the current pace. There is, in fact, plenty of indicators that even the current SoTA is the result of a financial overexertion.
And the worst case downward spiral will involve not only a surge in supply but a drastic drop in demand to go along with it.
All of those previous "knowledge workers" scurrying for the trades not only become more labor supply, but without their cushy jobs they will no longer be able to afford to hire trades people to prop up the demand side.
Double whammy.
In the performance economy it doesn't matter how rich the consumer is, but what the consumer wants to consume does matter. Because the buyer and consumer are disjointed in the performance economy, the consumer isn't swayed by cost. However, if the consumer prefers AI performances, which they quite easily could, then humans are in trouble. But so far it seems human performances remain what the consumer wants to consume.
(Technically manufacturing and knowledge work could have established the same separation, but since the bright minds went to performance nobody thought to before it was too late)
Like our capital class overlords?
The AI "revolution" as described here is the wholesale outsourcing of vast swaths of thinking and decision-making to a single entity. A project coded with Claude is a project coded by Anthropic. A business whose decisions are made with ChatGPT is a business run by OpenAI.
Is that what these people really want? To become a conduit through which two or three companies get to exert control over everything in the world?
My son wants to enter the software profession. He isn't just immitating his father, he really considered different careers and really likes this one. He is capable -- had nearly a year of experience working at a tiny company building a high performance database in C before they had to shrink; not quite enough experience to qualify for "experienced" jobs. He is even comfortable with using AI to build code.
But he simply cannot find work. No one is hiring entry level software developers (especially not those who are better at designing code than at networking colleagues). It appears that he will be driven out of the field because of the disruption AI is bringing, and I morn for that.
So I’m embracing AI-assisted coding with open arms. It’s not that I don’t enjoy coding. it’s that this approach lets me solve problems faster than ever before.
That's the real risk here is that we are getting to the point (probably already there for a lot of stuff) where you can just point it to your already existing codebase and tell it your problem and it can basically do it.. I mean I've tested that in practice, sometimes I'll have a clear direction of where I want to go or what I would do.. but I don't really give it any hints of how to solve the problem, and many times it comes up with a similar result or at least one that also works completely fine.
So I think part of the issue is that people like you and me I feel like are going to be so much less needed because an AI can just do it instantly for basically free.
Anyway, I know this is a slight hyperbole.. but it's also not. It kind of sucks to realize that a simple prompt can replicate your work 95% of the time and do it basically instantly.
Who is deciding the action/s to take in response to the problem? How do you know which is the right action to take?
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
2 years ago AI was a novelty and essentially just "fancy autocomplete". Today a skilled software engineer can use it to mostly one-shot the whole website with a detailed technical prompt and then iterate on it from there.
What happens 2 years from now? If progress continues, I expect we'll start walking up that chain of command. First you eliminate the software engineers and just have the tech leads do the prompting. Then you eliminate the tech leads and have the managers do the prompting. Then you eliminate the managers and designers and eventually you end up with star-trek-esque programming where some C-level person is just telling their computer "I want a website that sells widgets. Good! Now make the navigation bar blue. Could you make the font bigger?"
So what are your plans for when the wealthy no longer need you?
Without the internet these systems can not be maintained, we need all information about them available instantly. We also need people sharing how to solve problems at a global scale which the internet enables.
Personally I think LLMs will just allow even more complexity. This will create more situations that need human intervention to solve problems. And also new problems we have never seen before.
sure there’s things you still need investment and a physical presence for. but i reckon there is money and careers to be made in purely software based businesses still, and i think that value will mostly be captured by individuals and small teams moving forward.
my point was that for anyone who wanted to make software they couldn’t due to lack of free time or funds, they likely can give that a go now.
Those C-level people won't want to do that. Plus in a competitive economy everyone else can do the same so there will be competition to remain relevant.
1 website won't be enough, you'll need 10 and each site needs 10 times the features or your buyers will look elsewhere.
At the end of the day the C-level person delegates to a techy person, it's not the C suites job to care about font sizes or navigation bar colours.
It doesn't always know the right thing to fit the need, so you can now figure out what that looks like and design it appropriately (and try 10 options in production and see which one wins!)
But also you can just do a lot more work. If the prompt can replicate 95% of your work, now you can do keep moving forward faster and do a lot more work.
This does mean, of course, that there will be less of a need for software engineers that are only capable of reasoning about the edges of applications or one narrow part of the whole discipline will get squeezed out. If a computer can do the job, it's now less valuable of a skillset than it used to be in the market, and that hits wages hard if your only contribution to the market was "I know how to create React components when someone tells me what is in them, and how they need to interact with other components"
Happily, despite the amazing productivity of AI, there is still so much absolute CRAP software out there, and so many different places we can apply better options. Bureaucracy and poor management will continue to create new opportunities.
Why have companies with infinite amounts of AI and expertise not deployed comprehensive end to end solutions for business problems?
Every solution they've come up with is "here's a tool. The solution to make money from it is left up to the reader". Why would they leave all that money on the table?
The NYT touched on this issue in a podcast about NAFTA: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/podcasts/the-daily/americ.... AI is going to be NAFTA on steroids. Politicians will be able to point to growing top-like GDP to say it was a good thing. But it’s going to brutally hit a lot of people and most of those folks will never regain a secure economic footing.
Don't be the old dog who can't learn new tricks.
As far as I can tell, the entire business for someone who was good at running a press is fancy wedding invitations and business cards with raised type. I am speaking as someone who waltzed into (and later out of) prepress because I knew the digital tools, made no money, and talked with those guys a lot about the past. This discussion would be while we were printing wedding invitations and fancy business cards.
It's simply a different, low-status job now. Retraining is no different than training the first time, because if you want to make a living you either have to somehow be better than the people who started with the new tools (and the new tools don't require as many people) and maybe get into printing packaging or manuals, or you need to do something completely different, and compete with people just starting their careers.
Going to college again is not a trivial thing. The mortgage will still be due.
This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.
I basically agree with your "higher level reasoning", but not your statement that we previously only automated muscles.
Also relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_occupations
(No, compilers are not deterministic)
People aren't just using AI for writing code, but for all of their decision making. AI is far from limited to writing code.
Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem. It compiled that into a description of how to deal with it.
> People aren't just using AI for writing code
Compilers have never been about producing code in particular, though, even if that is where they are most commonly used. A LaTeX compiler, for example, outputs books. To think they are about code exclusively is a grave misunderstanding of what a compiler is.
The LLM usage I see from most people has the LLM write out the specification, asking clarifying questions as needed. If you're using LLMs as you describe, you're using them ineffectively.
If the compiler is writing the specification, what purpose does the person serve? That is not what I'm seeing out in the wild, though. Perhaps what is happening in research labs aside, compilers, even those implemented as an LLM, don't do anything until the user specifies their intent.
In fact, you literally recognized that in your earlier comment, asking about my action to specify my problem. Not sure why the story is changing now? There is probably a day where the systems solve your problems before you even know you have them, but we're not there yet. The technology hasn't advanced that much in the span of a couple of hours.
> asking clarifying questions as needed.
Sure. Even the earliest, most primitive compilers would seek clarification if there was something that it felt required more information. That's expected.
> If you're using LLMs as you describe, you're using them ineffectively.
LLMs are just compilers so they can't do anything else. Maybe you're thinking of some technology that is layered on top of a compiler like an IDE, REPL, or something to that effect?
Can you tell me what the last question GCC asked you was, and can you rate its coherence in comparison to your colleagues questions?
I might just not know enough compilers, but didn't you write the specification of how to approach the problem, not just the problem itself?
If we take "write the specification of how to approach the problem" at literal value, you might be narrowly thinking of a low-level compiler, or what sometimes gets called a transpiler? However, compilers encompass a much wider spectrum than that. Generally they enable users to operate at higher levels of abstraction.
Even so, I'd argue that you still have to define how to use those abstractions rather than only the result you'd like to achieve with them. Sure, maybe the abstraction has a ".achieve_the_result()" method, and calling that method is how you achieve it, but often there's a bunch of stuff you fit together to achieve a solution to your problem and the compiler doesn't necessarily do that for you.
I think there actually may be some compilers that get closer to this, for example some problems can be expressed quite elegantly in Haskell or APL and the compiler will do a lot of black magic behind the scenes to get you a performant executable (somehow). But for most traditional compilers you are still going to have to define how to approach your problem, even if only at a higher level thanks to libraries.
And what, pray tell, are those books output by TeX? That's right, PDF or PostScript code.
But more importantly, if you insist on treating LLMs like compilers, then the source language – natural prose – is the worst programming language ever invented. Coding the world in brainfuck is a better idea than where you lot is suggesting we go.
Having used, designed, and written compilers, this is news to me. Please, elaborate.
That’s very generous of you to call it that way.
It’s a parody at best.
I also believe we underestimate how much that costs us too. Yes, it is good that fewer people are breaking their bodies on brutal physical jobs.
But there are many people in the world for whom their physical strength and dexterity are perhaps their most valuable asset. With the loss of those jobs came a loss of an avenue of meaning for them.
I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that the whole manosphere alt-right conservative thing going on in the US is driven in part by a generation of young men who don't find intellectual work to be appealing but don't see many alternatives out there either. It's telling how closely Gamergate is tangled up in that world and how many games are basically simulations of heavily physical prestigious roles.
A recent Onion headline really hits the nail on the head: "'This Here Is Probably Our Bestselling Love Seat,' Says Man Who Would Have Been Powerful, Revered Warrior 4,000 Years Ago"
Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."
Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.
It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, and so was the pickle slicer.
In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.
The first one sounds like the dad was replaced by computers. But then reveals the dad is a sex worker and being replaced by sex toys.
The second one sounds like the person was being intimate with dangerous kitchen equipment, then reveals that a "pickle slicer" is a job for a human and not a machine.
Jewish humor is frequently about laughing at your own pain. There's a genre of Jewish jokes created in concentration camps.
That problem solving aspect is being replaced by AI, and that means anyone in a position like that is losing the piece of the job that they enjoyed. The more apt analogy is that the farrier worked in a farrier factory, and the horses were actually mass produced statue horses with no purpose but making money. He still enjoyed working with his hands, but now they have replaced that part of his job with a button to press. Now he presses the button in the horse statue factory. He still has a job but now no joy, and eventually they will automate the button too. The outlook IS bleak, and many of us will move on to totally new industries and that's fine. Some will stay because they have a rare job where they have agency to problem solve on the layer above code. Many still just press the button to feed their family.
Not sure if this fits, but the mechanic, rather than performing hard manual labor mounting horse shoes on horses, now just has to read software error codes during the day, and gets to enjoy driving his sports car in the evening.
Your disenfranchisement is valid, however fortunately (or unfortunately?) do-nothing soulless corporate programming jobs have a good chance of sticking around, if in a changed way.
However, the one thing I feel like is missed by some in these conversations is that what's being built is a general purpose thinking machine, not a coding machine. How are we going to transition from writing code to solving problems when the machines are solving the problems?
The retard AI boosters, tell us to be AI first, learn this harness bro, loops are yesterday, now it’s graphs, use 100 agents a minimum or be left behind, actually world will require 100X more software engineers.
Why would we still be alive? Once we have advanced enough AI inside not only computers but robots, the rich will no longer need us. They will have the robots farm the land, clean their homes, fly their planes, etc. We will then have no income and therefore no way to feed ourselves. Most people do not own enough farm land to keep themselves alive.
In the past, such imbalances of power were resolved because the rich still relied upon the poor for everything (security, food, etc). I think we're approaching the point where even armed insurrection is no longer an option with the advances in automated killing machines. We're not there yet, but it's coming.
I think Navier Stokes is a brilliant case study for all that it didn't do. An AI 'solved' a famous problem, of a kind that is impossible to cheat, yet the reaction is incredibly apathetic. Why? Because it apparently failed to do the thing people were hoping it would, but what exactly? Of course it also manages to fumble the delivery by antagonising the people most interested in the result, but still.
Not a handyman, not suitable for physical jobs, I think I’m cooked! This is the fear that is always on my head.
Uber : Getting replaced by Waymo
Uber Eats : They've been experimenting with ways to replace humans for this. I think the most likely scenario isn't those silly robots on the sidewalks but rather just a Waymo. Have the restaurant send someone to carry food from the restaurant to the Waymo idling at the curb, and have the customer come out to the street to pick up their food from the Waymo. We lose the door-to-door convenience but I think a lot of people would take that trade to eliminate the cost of tips and paying the delivery person.
Security Guard : AI monitoring security cameras and automating calls to police sounds trivial. There are also already "security robots" that move around so they could be dispatched for scenarios which do not warrant a call to the police.
Handyman / physical jobs : While I think these will last longer than the others, I think they won't last much longer. We've already invented all the necessary hardware. The limiting factor was the software. What happens when you take an LLM from the year 2030 and give it a pile of tokens to write the software to drive the robots to do plumbing/building/whatever.
If I’m younger I’d probably find some trade and do it. I think it’s safe for another two decades maybe. And I wouldn’t bore a child.
If I’m older I’ll just call it the end and retire early. My wife still works and I can live at around 300-500 CAD per month for all expenditures.
But now it’s a bit scary if I lose my job.
Amazon is already able to do deliveries for some packages by drone in some cities. This seems perfect for it.
Automation will take everything it can in a race to the bottom towards higher profits.
Your great great grandfather changed, and the automation didn't keep up.
This time it will, and there will be no safe harbor.
https://manuel.darcemont.fr/projects/
We are the horses.
That's how it sounds to me
Sticking your fingers in your ears and singing "Lalalalalala" will in fact sometimes work for some people, and that is not a good argument for everyone to do it.
I find it curious that this is often elided when discussing technological transition. Sure the whip makers went away but they probably also ended up dead in a trench.
The alternatives that may cause such mass displacement like World Models and such are yet to be proven.
The sheer rate of progress is what is meaningful. If LLM's agents were frozen now without any further improvement, your position would be must more defensible. But that's not what's happening, we are getting breakthroughs almost on a weekly basis.
Honestly, my gut feeling (worth every bit of what you are paying for it...) is that until we get actual intelligence instead of a good facsimile, we're not looking at an existential problem or a UBI-level problem, even, just a big change in tooling.
We are making steady progress. It’s not exponential per se like we used to see but in my experience models are steadily getting better. Also breakthroughs can be sudden.
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
It does feel a bit like building on quicksand, but coding has always been that way for me. Well, less so with embedded than webdev, but still.
Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like. When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)
Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers? It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face). I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.
It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.
I think one thing that troubles me is that I so far have gotten quite far by 'caring about the little things'.
Now we live in a world where this feels, for the most part, unsustainable to keep up with. When directing LLMs to code something up, it's still occasional useful to have the knowledge and experience of those little things earned over years, but at the same time 1) it seems like I run into fewer opportunities to add to that experience and 2) it seems like you can often just prompt LLMs to 'grill' a design a few times, it will probably surface some of the most important tradeoffs
They can build things, but it's all terrible really. Their "ideas" are terrible.
I feel caught between two worlds, I know people both very 'for' and very 'against'. The business is very keen for people to use them to go faster.
For non-trivial changes, output so far does not meet my quality standard and I tend to spend a lot of time cleaning up after them, probably more than I would have spent doing the work myself. This being much more boring, I hasten to add.
Their comments suck so I feel like I have to go in and rewrite them all.
Maybe I should just let go of the quality standard and accept that in exchange for steaming ahead at full speed, but I'm reluctant (and not just for me, there are also coworkers who I feel like I would be letting down).
Knowing how an LLM is built, is trained, inferences, isn't "mastery" in the sense that crafts people use the word.
Mastery to a craftsmen is as much a product of mechanical performance as it is knowledge. For a software craftsmen, that means knowing how to code, debug, and architect a software application by hand.
I mean, yes I do find the mathematical background of LLMs fascinating, but it's not going to be something that I can put to practical use (much), if that makes sense?
You say that you liked learning how things worked inside out, whether it was Postgres or whatever. You can still do that. You can learn it at a high level, and then it becomes like a magic word in your arsenal. You don't have to know or remember the details of implementation, but only the nature of its costs, benefits, and synergies with other systems. You just have to remember that high-level abstraction, maybe just a single vocabulary word, of a low-level reality - the exact syntax is really no longer a concern.
The better the agents get, the less there is playing manager. Really your job now is to have and execute vision. Execution is largely a function of having a map of the high level vision and low-level realities in your head, or just having in-the-moment intuition about these things... then just speaking it.
Also, there is developing personal libraries. You may find that in your business you repeatedly tackle similar problems. You develop and refine a library that your future agents can utilize. You develop prompts that make your work more automatic and more robust. And when I say you, I mean, you direct your agents to do it.
It's not so different from what it always was, except that years get compressed into months. What was slow and tedious is now... less so.
I don't know how much advantage I have in this new world, having programmed (sometimes more, sometimes less) for 30 years. My brother has never written a line of code in his life. He's been heavy into AI for a while, and he has developed some really incredible stuff. I think he may have already outpaced me. His $1500/mo+ in subscriptions definitely help.
that's a good analogy and puts into words the way i've always felt about software development. Every so often the entire industry rolls over into something new. I've been here 30 years now and, in my experience, the skill that counts is being able learn new skills. To go back to the analogy, to build something new on top of what you've built in the past before everything is swallowed by the quicksand.
I think well north of 90% of people in software engineering have job expectations that, when assisted/automated with AI, boil down to exactly that.
It's a pain in the ass to work at such a job and find challenges or things to master--your superiors don't want you to do that, there's not enough time in the day, and you're tired from LGTM-now-make-this work.
That's most software jobs, because that's what most software companies want.
Since opus 4.8 the tools have started surpassing me and now they are far gone, so implementing by hand would mean sacrificing quality and my main goal as an engineer has always been quality so even though I hate it, I must use the best tool for the job.
> A century later, the torments felt by my great-great-grandfather are forgotten. The garage feels like it has always been in the family. My father loved his job like few people I know, as if it had run in the family forever.
Arguably, the internal combustion engine is one of the most unsustainable and devastating technologies invented by humans. The jury is still out on whether our species will survive the environmental impact wrought by its effects. So much benefit, but so much dependence.
This has taken months to up-end multiple industries.
I don't think the article makes a fair comparison.
We've had humanoid robots that could walk for what, 30 years? While technology marches ever forward, and sometimes makes pretty good leaps, 10 years for both capable and affordable seems pretty optimistic.
HAHAHAHAHA in a discussion full of doomers, I really appreciate the guffaw that gave me. Thank you.
"I'm a carpenter and electric power tools were just invented.
In the short term, people are asking if we need all these carpenters.
In the long term, people will want bigger houses and therefore the demand for carpenters will go up"
We are in the "short term" part of the above.
My real question is how long we spend in that period before moving on to the next one.
I'm just not sure exactly where we are on the "Jevons Paradox Adoption Curve"
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-output-dolla...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-employed...
Then computers of course, but not as impactful as the other ones. And cars and mobile phones (mobile dumbed down computers) have been more important than AI so far IMHO.
I don't think software developers are going away, but likely headed more in-house, as each company can cheaply have bespoke software made and maintained.
So our understanding moves from the C/Python level to the Markdown specification level. We still need to understand exactly what we're building and why.
The hard part was never translating the spec into machine code. The hard part is defining the right spec. That is still the job of the software engineer.
So the future is going to be interesting.
My great grandad on the other side was a lighterman[0]. He didn't become a ship captain.
Sometimes professions really are just gone. In both cases in my family it was due to consolidation of resources and concentration of capital/power. Technology was just a catalyst for that.
Doesn't really take much away from the article but a significant percentage of the developers who are unemployed are not losing their passion, they are worried about what job they will get to pay the bills.
This exactly. Look, I "love" code but only because of what it allows me to do and there is plenty of code/coding that I don't love. Not to be too hippy-dippy but I'm a builder, I like to build things. Build things for myself, build things for others. The code was _always_ a means to an end.
Sure, it was cool I had this skill that many people didn't have but I also used to have skill in managing the windows machines and things like the registry. When I first switched to macOS I felt lost, I had this "skill" that was no longer needed but after a while I realized that was a good thing, I wasn't wasting my time fiddling with crap that was just getting in the way of _using_ my computer.
Similarly I may mourn the loss of writing code but at the end of the day code was just a way for me to build, if there are better tools to build (LLMs) then I'm all for it.
This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).
I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.
As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.
A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.
Without the how, I have no interest? The 'why' isn't the end result. I don't read a book so that I can say I've read the book, the purpose is the reading, not the state of 'having been read'.
So the post does need an asterisk, referring to how it all hinges on availability of open weights and inference hardware.
On the other hand, if long horizon independent problem solving with almost zero human intervention or support is realized in these models 1-5 years down, then it will lead not to new tech, but essentially a new species of workers that can replace humans at all tasks, In that case, humans wouldn't really have the upper hand as an economical resource to get any work done.
Well put. You envision something you want, and then go through whatever it takes to make that a reality.
We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.
Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.
They are spending 1T to ruin the quality of work we do, also probably ruining our chances of securing a livelihood and then they want us to for some reason welcome it with open arms and openly say look how great this is and marvel at human obsolescence. Yeah no thanks.
How does that overlook the farmers? They're alluded to right there in the prior sentence. I don't get this.
Not a single comment about efficiency or consumption, only marketing stuff and bad analogies, not what it used to be HN... Where are all the nerds ?
That's the problem: if everything stayed at the current level of development, we would be fine. There is no reason to think that will be the case. Intelligence per watt has been rapidly improving [0]
> 1000x
Coincidentally, that is exactly the efficiency gain promised by ASICs like Taalas [1]
Having worked with a few combustion engines I have no clue about how to repair an EV.
A fine example of how new technology is not better, since it closes the door on too many people.
They wanted to make money, or at least be a part of history during a transformational era. No dice.
1) People think they can predict the future
2) People think humans can't adapt
The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.
Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.
Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.
The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation. We are clearly experiencing a moment of sorts, and anybody who is worried about what the fallout will be is just handwaved away as ignorant fear mongers. Unless you are the head of these companies doing it in a disingenuous way to pump up your valuation, then suddenly it’s legitimate - but not so legitimate that we should do anything besides let the US government build a moat for them!
Yes, the absolute numbers might now read TRILLION instead of BILLION or MILLION, but the concept of "Technology so impactful governments shift their economies" is in no way new, and has already happened a bunch of times before in humanity's timeline.
I guess that's why you're seeing some of us less stressed out about it, as again, scale is different, because scale today is different in everything, but relatively, we're just repeating another of those "Technology changes everything" milestones that we've done before.
When have we seen anything like this?
The US canal and railroad boom in the 1800s definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger", it looks comparatively small. But in their world, back then, it was basically the same thing, just with canals and railroads. Indiana almost financially ruined itself because of their "infrastructure program". The government got involved heavily with the "1862 Pacific Railway Act" as well.
And yes, easy to say now that "Duh, that's essentially infrastructure" but at the time, that wasn't as obvious to everyone, as and railroad were newfangled technology, especially deployed like that, on a scale never seen before.
And faster. More, bigger, faster. Which substantively changes the situation the same way a musket stops venn diagraming as a “firearm” at some point when compared to a 50-round automatic rifle.
The investment is massive, but not bigger than other projects by an order of magnitude. Major wars were bigger than AI. The dot com bubble was 2-3T dollars.
The tech crowd used to say that only the "dumb" ones did that. They said those who were "smart like us" were much more adaptable, learning to code and whatnot to find new, often even better careers. It will be interesting to see if the emperor has clothes.
You say "who cares if they suffer? They're obviously all just bad people". The people who attacked blue collar workers said "who cares if they suffer? They're obviously all just dumb people (and thus bad)." So the bulk of people who you decry are not guilty of what you claim. But you are!
This comment aside, I do not see that text anywhere, lest my own comments. Get back to us when you return to reality.
> The people who attacked blue collar workers said "who cares if they suffer? They're obviously all just dumb people (and thus bad)."
Whether or not calling them "dumb" was justified, there no implication of "who cares if they suffer". In fact, in the context I remember, those comments were made around trying to figure out how to help those who were deemed "dumb".
I LOVE playing "product designer" with LLM. The thing I normally hate and never do, write and update "design docs" being my only lever is awesome. I do already hate how it seems to turn development into a much less social activity. It's great that we don't need other people and a lot of time for some things now, but it's also not.
But more importantly, because I also like solving problems and seeing people thrive, I can't overlook that it's all based on stuff taken without consent, how artists were made "obsolete" by what plasters me with slop every day (already, and we didn't even get started). And they're not even going "okay, now that we proved it can work with stolen stuff, let's do it proper". No, this is "the new world now", just keep pushing and squeezing and extract more "value". So wtf? Well, I like solving problems, I love games! One cool game is "catch the thief", another is "call out the sociopath". So let's?
But we can't, because we're not building this after deliberation and discussion, we're being herded into it and then make rationalizations for foregone conclusions made in our absence against our interests. Building systems nobody understands that keep making more systems nobody even tries to understand is not some hyper-efficient future, it's no future at all, and nobody with power (however wishy-washy that phrase is) wants to live under any of that, you can be assured.
So this all seems more like an airlock to me, an abattoir, not a spaceship that just happens to be kinda dirty and stinky because the focus is on so much grander things. How insincere and stupid so much of it is just can't be overlooked, and very much unlike other technological advancements where the results speak for themselves, where the results (or the improved process to get them), pull something, make it inevitably seep everywhere it is useful. There is so much pushing and hyping, and so precious little good stuff to make for the really bad stuff, all the slop that is produced and clogs up inter-human channels.
This is not even progress, this is just subversion, that's my thesis. It's deliberately driven for the easily predictable bad effects it will have.
But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
This is what the article misses and what people have trouble accepting. Yea, this is a technological revolution, but unlike the Industrial Revolution, you can't just upskill your way out of it.
I've already started to feel this.
One thing that made us special was our intelligence. We were, and were always going to be (unless some alien form of life arrived), the most intelligent things on earth. Is that still true today?
I'm not optimistic that this will change in the future -- but, I am watching automation erode the amount of pressure that humans can apply.
But we're not taking into account how it affects the mediocre or average people in these fields. Roughly half of all of these people are below average. Maybe if you're the best you'll always have a job, but what about the guy who legitimately struggled to finish high school? The person who genuinely doesn't have the capacity to earn much more than minimum wage?
Why would these machines stop improving at average this time?
Grim.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
And yet problems of despair, poverty and marginalization continue to exist.
5-10% of people experience some level of food insecurity. Is that really because of a lack of resources??
It seems to me like we have a resource allocation problem, not a resource generation problem.
This is not an argument for some form a socialism. But instead an argument that progress in the field of social organization would be more productive than progress in the field of technological disruption.
And I love tech.
But our society today has very extensive systems with very few deciders, who are largely enmeshed in social and legal constraints to ensure our reliance is safe and effective (at least in the large/long run).
The concern is about that constraint system being displaced - minimally with decider over-reliance on AI (still subject to guardrails?), or maximally with AI itself (no internal guardrails). Slop (in software, medical services, and military targeting) is just the symptom.
That replacement/shift has already been a corrosive side-effect of capitalism, as elites slowly cede loyalty and professional standards to competitive pressure, but even now most constraints allow replacement of bad actors (if demonstrable). AI reliance just makes that shift irreversible. People no longer have incentives or opportunities to spend the decades required to lead effectively, so organizations could never revert the heartless efficient machine elites back to the available incompetent and oblivious humans.
Maybe the result is just wealth transfer, or health, but I'd expect the high-value use to be in a military where very few people can combat many (as is happening in Ukraine now), making the military a preferred option for anyone with resources.
The distribution of (and checks on) responsibility - up, down, across companies and political systems - was intended to constrain agents to organizational goals, but it effectively kills any internal change by requiring near-unanimity and overcoming people's dependence on their jobs. So even if a super-majority of people agreed on some negative projection of AI usage AND had the resources to put work and investments at risk, it still wouldn't be enough to change this trajectory.
No, the difference this time is that the goal is to replace all coding, and perhaps all office work. Two obvious problems:
1. All of Office Labor has nowhere to go to—how to translate thirty years of experience staring at a screen into something else? And will there even be other jobs for them?
2. No labor leverage since there is no labor in that sector and the capitalists just capture all of the value for free (with an initial investment in CAPEX...)
How does this compare to horses and cars? You still have to get around.
Granted these are the maximalist AI Cretin goals and I’m also influenced by their relentless propaganda campaign.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.
News to me. As long as I was in this wider culture, coders were sneering at people who were in it “for the money”[1] and not for the intrinsic pleasure of very specifically typing out and testing code. And at ideas people. But as soon as these programs hit the mainstream, oh the most vocal ones just never cared about coding itself and they were in fact passionate about all of those business value-adds they were adding.
And managers? Clueless people herders. But what are clankers comparing GenAI coding to? Management. And this is enjoyable to you?
People will yell Goomba Fallacy. Of course maybe that whole old guard was just displaced.
[1] Working in order to survive: what a concept.
they'll be more afraid of terrorism, black people and muslims than ever. and lets not get started about socialists!
however you spin this it is going to deteriorate your average job opportunity at least in the us. the us will be where China was 50 years ago: worse workers rights, worse political participation, more low income jobs working for "miltech superintelligence corp".
what hegseth does to your military, amazon-ifying it is what is also happening within your political system stripping you of your civil rights.
at least china had an economical goal furthering the nation state. maga has... what? sucking up to elons, zucks, bezos and other super rich weirdos in the hope of resurrecting the big american empire again. it's devastatingly stupid, really.
The effect on the market is pure GREED and wishful thinking as none of the people in charge of HR or decision making have any idea how this technology actually works.
Also - why is everyone comparing this to the industrial revolution? And not f.e. invention of vaccines. No it HAS to be the big big story or you cannot make money with it.
All while the actual results are well, great. Helpful, sure. But so are vaccines!
Don't buy into this bs, any service or course. d2l.ai is free and wont be stupidly useless next month like whatever hype we sell this week.
As the doom stories lose novelty now we get the feel good "my grandpa" stories.
The phrasing is very LLM. Apparently what you loved about writing blog posts wasn't the writing either, since looks like you are having AI do it too!