Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

When software engineers spent the last 50 years eliminating the work of clerical, secretarial, and dozens of other back-office functions, were they concerned about how those people would feed their families? Do you think anybody but other software engineers feels any sorrow for them today, now that they are facing the same fate?

View on HN

That wasn't software engineers eliminating that work. And neither is it today AI eliminating software jobs. Let's name the straw man in the room: it's humans displacing humans, and extracting the value for themselves.

Just like in past history.

Yes, it sucks, for software engineers, those in the past, and those in the future. As long as you and others fall for the straw man perhaps you and others will get more and more tricked and hurt, misplacing your aggression and hatred on each other rather than those receiving most of the extracted value.

> extracting the value for themselves

Yes in some cases, but the reduced costs also allow lower prices which benefits all consumers of whatever product is being produced. At least for those products where there is a competitive market.

While I mostly agree with you, there's an argument to be made that classical programming tended to eliminate the mechanical parts of work that people hate doing, while AI is removing the intellectually stimulating part.

It's not fun to think of a future where knowledge workers become irrelevant in society and we're back to just physical work and managerial elites.

Plenty of people pay the bills with work they hate doing.

I'm not really one of them, but there are many developers for whom the intellectually stimulating part is designing the system. Writing the code was boring drudgery that they hated doing. They tend to call themselves "architects" or something similar, not "programmers."

Finally, someone who gets me!

How long until the LLMs run circles around the best software “architect” out there?

And then "ideas are cheap" becomes the dumbest thing. I always knew people would laugh at us 1000 years from now just not why.

What an asinine comment. Do you think I, as a software engineer, am sitting around twirling my mustache, cackling as I plot to destroy livelihoods? I'm trying to make a living like anybody else. I've had my own opportunities lost to outsourcing and H-1B's since day 1.

The economist John Keynes predicted almost 100 years ago that technological advances would lead to a 15 hour workweek. If AI now makes you 5x as productive, then why aren't you working 1 day a week for the same pay? Why didn't Keynes' vision come true.

A living like anybody else or a living at the expense of everybody else?

> Why didn't Keynes' vision come true.

governments implemented (and still implement) keynesian economics, and it has turned out to be a very bad idea and he was very very wrong.

It is not for the same pay. Real wage increased dramatically during that time period. And despite all obsoleted jobs, society is still more or less at full employment.

Before calling that comment asinine, did you consider that the commenter might be reflecting @flowerlad's comment back to him/her to prove a point ?

You may not have sat around twirling your moustache but you have actively been involved in an industry where the goal is to automate stuff that people would previously do manually. That is the entire point. Which, if you believe the message on many threads/posts here, puts people out of jobs.

I don't believe it is that black and white. Yes, automation eliminates some jobs, but overall moves everyone (on average) further up the productivity line, which improves lives, again, on average.

That is why we live like kings now compared to people of the past.

But circling back to the point, if AI does the same thing, eliminates expensive manual coding and other similar work, that is essentially the same thing we've been doing to other people for decades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com