Comment by isityettime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by isityettime | Hacker News Reader

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This reminds me a lot (mostly for worse) of the industrial revolution. The industrialization of textiles didn't help weavers weave better clothes. It displaced smaller, higher quality output with dramatically less varied, lower quality output in much greater quantities, more cheaply. It also dramatically undermined the relative autonomy of weavers and the control they exerted over the structure and details of their own workdays.

What I think we're likely to witness here, or at least what AI investors ultimately are hoping to see happen, is the displacement of code as we know it (often already sorely lacking in quality and craft) not by more of the same varieties of code, but a massive profusion of shittier, more homogenous code. It won't have to win by being better; it'll be able to do that by being cheaper alone. And we're frankly kidding ourselves if we think that doesn't mean a profound deskilling and potentially deprofessionalization across the whole class.

>It won't have to win by being better

I agree but it's also better. On average for most programming tasks I think humans are as "defeated" as coders as we are as chess players.

The machines will not only be as good or better than you at the DB design, the business logic, the performance critical algorithms, the UX, the performance tweaks, the accessibility standards, security holes, browser compatibilities, laws and regulations and whatever else you need to make the whole solution.

It will also write user manuals in any language, and rewrite them when needed even on a friday evening. It absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are DE...wait, I mean DONE!

So the situation for coders is even worse than it was for the weavers. The machine delivers not only cheaper and faster, but also better. :-/

I think nearly all white collar office workers will be replaced eventually. For lots of jobs, the limitation is not the ability of current models, but lack of integration to existing systems. This will change quickly, as writing new systems and integrations is cheaper than ever, thanks to agentic programming.

If the job involves mostly working on a computer, it will be probably gone in 10-20 years.

You may be right that white collar work can be replaced but I don't think it will be. Current society can't function with a majority of the population unemployed.

It's a catch-22 for the companies as well, since white collar work is presumably done because a company has customers, and most of their customers are white collar workers. At least in the US and Europe.

> Current society can't function with a majority of the population unemployed.

I think that argument could have been made at any major conjuncture of creative destruction throughout history, if "employed" is construed broadly.

I don't think any previous disruption was as destructive as this. Firstly it happens much faster and affects many more people at once, and secondly it doesn't seem to create any new jobs for the ones it replaces.

The industrial revolution took at least a century depending on how you count, and it created more jobs than it destroyed.

The introduction of computers obliterated whole office floors of employees at banks and insurance companies but it created even more work at companies that sold computers and software and consultant hours.

Ai takes millions of jobs and replaces them with a few thousand caretakers at megawatt datacenters. The workforce at Anthropic and OpenAI is comparable to a game development studio. If all they end up doing is reducing the workforce of JP Morgan by 10%, society still has a net loss of jobs.

That said, it's at least possible Ai will eventually end up creating a bunch of new work indirectly, by enabling people to do more than they ever imagined they could. One can hope.

I agree. I was asking a devil's advocacy kind of question, to be clear.

> This reminds me a lot (mostly for worse) of the industrial revolution. The industrialization of textiles didn't help weavers weave better clothes.

I don't think comparing it to the industrial revolution is appropriate, as the political and social conditions were completely different. I think you can compare the disruption that is introduced by artificial intelligence more with the deindustrialization of regions such as the Ruhrgebiet in Germany.

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