I really wish I could ascend to your level and never be upset about anything bad that happens, no matter how pointless and obviously unjust.
To be fair, parent and grandparent are never being upset about anything bag that happens to other people. I've met plenty of this type and you can be assured they'll be outraged when it happens to them....though often they're the type born into wealth so all problems are other people's problems.
Being a software engineer professionally in call it 1990 thru 2020 is an incredibly privileged position. We were only able to enjoy such an easy position in life because of supply and demand and the math has changed. We had these positions not because we were special but because investors could make money off of it and needed us.
Suddenly they don't. Or believe they don't. Should we be pissed. Probably. But it doesn't change the fact that we got cozy with things that were revokable.
Yes, I agree, programmers got lucky, and that luck is coming to an end. This has happened to many professions in the past. It's not new.
What is new is two things:
* that it's not just programmers that will be displaced, although we are among the first. Many people, possibly all of them, will have their labor value diminished by AI. This is a systemic issue that requires a systemic solution, not just a pep talk and "Get tough, buttercup,"
* that the success of AI is built on illegitimate grounds, as the training data is built by the people it's displacing; and is serving to enrich a fantastically small number of capital holders, at the expensive of literally everyone else.
So in view of that, I think it's silly and beside the point to say "Hey, tough luck" or to accuse programmers of being entitled, which is certainly the subtext in your comment. Programmers should be upset, but so should everyone else.
We are being entitled. We shouldn't have been sucking at the investors class teet thinking we are special. We along with most white collar workers on the west were being entitled and complacent. My point of view is very far from tough luck.
Who is "we"? Every labor-providing human on the planet? When that many people are economically disenfranchised and you call them "entitled", the problem is you.
> thinking we are special.
Again, it's not clear who you are talking about. Who thought they are special? Human beings who exchange their labor for money, i.e. have a job? I think I've made clear that programmers are not the end of this trend so to the extent your comment focuses on programmers, it is misguided.
> My point of view is very far from tough luck.
In that case, I don't understand your view at all, because it sure sounds like you are blaming the victim here.
I'm speaking specifically about white collar workers in western countries. I don't believe they are economically disenfranchised at least not yet. We were behaving entitled-ly by not acting in unison with the other laborers who are economically disenfranchised. If you are some sort of exception forgive me but I doubt you were spending your money to build shared parks and teach programming to the children of Amazon drivers. Most white collar workers here are buying pickup trucks and living it up. Myself included. And now we are in the finding out phase of why that was bad.
Post AI they will not need to spend so much resources for your job. They will have more for themselves. It's good for vast majority of people.
Where will they get those resources for themselves? From the job that they don't have anymore, because of AI?
There is no reason to assume that the AI employment catastrophe will end with coders.
Even if they have resources, what makes you think they get to hoard them? Instead of paying programmers, they'll pay the owners of data centers.
From goods and services they provide to others - now at lower cost.
>>There is no reason to assume that the AI employment catastrophe will end with coders.
It will not. It will also create a lot of new jobs. Stuff will get cheaper which means you will need to work less on average to sustain the same standards of living.
>> Instead of paying programmers, they'll pay the owners of data centers.
Yes but less. Paying less means more is left.
> From goods and services they provide to others - now at lower cost.
So why don't they do that today? Why don't today's poor people have access to a wide selection of good and services that they exchange with other poor people?
> It will also create a lot of new jobs.
Specifically, what new jobs will be created? That is, what jobs will be needed that an AI can't do cheaper than a human?
Well you don't, the person I'm replying to say they won't find ANY job.
If you lose your job and truly need money to feed yourself of pay your bills you will find a job, any job, that's how the bottom 80% of the population live, welcome to the club lmao
Rather than encouraging people to accept the misery inflicted on them by a handful of billionaires, why don't you acknowledge the injustice that AI magnifies the gap between capital and labor, and encourage people to fight (through democratic means) for a more just society, i.e. one that distributes the benefits of labor-saving devices among everyone, not just to a tiny fraction at the top.
Technology and "progress" haven't been improving the workers life in a long long time, again: welcome to the club.
That's ridiculous and myopic. Technology have improved many people's lives for a long time. Or would you prefer to stop wearing industrially-manufactured clothes, stop taking scientifically-developed vaccines, and of course stop using the device that you are reading this on now?
The difference is that in the past, technological development victimized only subsets of the work force. Mechanical looms were bad for textile workers, but good for everyone else. Personal computers were bad for "human calculators," but good for everyone else. The people who lost their jobs to technology could, theoretically, retrain and get another job.
But now we're facing technology that is theoretically capable of doing any job, at a price that's cheaper than any human. If you lose your job as a programmer due to AI, you can't just retrain as a lawyer, because those jobs are gone too (or will be soon). You can't just become a barista or a cab driver, those jobs are gone too.
Sniping at fellow working-class members is counterproductive. Ultimately, this is a test of democracy: can our government be forced to serve the people who it represents, or only corporate interests? If the latter, then we're entering a period of neo-feudelism.
>>the owners of AI infrastructure will continue to get rich while literally everyone else gets poorer
This didn't happen with previous technological revolutions, isn't happening now and won't happen as long as we don't mess it up with preventing competition and access to technology.
At the risk of repeating myself: who is going to buy it, when wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capital-owning elite? If human labor can't compete with AI, what value can a person exchange in the free market for goods?
> This didn't happen with previous technological revolutions,
Yes, it did [1]. Maybe you should study some history before leaping to conclusions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)