Swap it out for chess. Tell Magnus Carlsen he can't play chess anymore. Instead he gets paid to run a Stockfish team in an all-engine tournament.
If people stop being interested in human-played chess, then yes he's out of luck. But that could happen with or without computers. Same for football and anything else.
So I don't think this analogy works either.
The important parallels of the analogy are that:
* Magnus dedicated his whole life to chess, just as many programmers have done with programming.
* Magnus enjoys the craft of chess, the human elements of creativity and cleverness, just as many artisan programmers do.
* Both prefer to be hands on and don’t enjoy being relegated to managerial / supervisory roles, and would probably move on to something else if they could no longer do the part they love.
* Many outsiders do not have any idea how much time and dedication it takes to reach the upper echelons of a skill like that, and struggle to empathize with those who have done so, and perhaps even feel Schadenfreude to see these folks “taken down a peg.”
Mathematicians have recently been lumped into this category of knowledge workers at risk. Many are grieving gratuitously and suffering a lot of flippancy from Schadenfreude-feeling onlookers.
A computer programmer, on the other hand, is paid to produce something. They aren't entertaining anyone (except themselves). The act of producing code doesn't matter to the person that wants a binary. The binary is what matters. So if a computer can out-program a human, then the human is in trouble. So it's different.
But, nothing is stopping a human from programming for entertainment purposes. And nothing is stopping humans from being entertained by watching other humans program, maybe competitively. Like chess, or basketball. Or from getting together and solving programming problems. Then it doesn't matter that a computer can run circles around them, and nobody can tell them to stop doing it.
I get it, though. Younger people in tech should be worried.
But I don't really understand the "grief" by people who say they're losing their hobbies. Like the top comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50158159
If you don't understand grief then I'm wasting my time. Sounds like I got suckered into arguing with an AI yet again.
This is not what I said and you're being rude. I'm saying that I don't understand the grief being expressed for the loss of a hobby. Because as I explained, computers can't invalidate hobbies.
> Sounds like I got suckered into arguing with an AI yet again.
Nope. I'm a human and didn't use AI for anything I wrote. But thanks?
Making art is often considered entertainment, and it can also be commoditized. The difference between entertainment and work is often thin, dictated by personal enjoyment, not how one is paid. I can be paid for something I find very entertaining. I can also be paid for something I find dull.
If the thing I find entertaining disappears, it's reasonable for me to feel grief. For something I enjoyed is no longer available to me, at least not in full.
There's a community around programming, much like chess and basketball. Seeing that community deteriorate into solely programming for profit, and using AI to do so, is tragic. Programming has been very focused on profit for a long time, but now even those who think it fun are debating on whether or not to offload their work to a machine that does all the work for them.