Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

Bluntly, Yes.

There will be less jobs out there for software engineers since AI can pretty much do them for cheap and very fast, OpenAI talked about driving down the cost of intelligence, and now this is what is happening for all models that are being released.

Right now LLM’s like GPT-4o and Claude have gotten to the intelligence of a mid-level level engineer.

The company I was in was so fascinated by this that they closed job openings for junior employees, laid them off, and are thinking about laying off some senior engineers after carrying out a trial of AI tools like cursor, copilot and others.

I can only imagine the same thing is happening across other companies and especially startups that cannot afford many senior engineers, they will just use AI and only one senior engineer.

Expect more layoffs and less job openings unfortunately.

someday but not too soon.

i fucking love claude 3.5 but i still catch it slippin.

as johnson wang of nvidia said, ai wont replace you, but you will be replaced by people who uses AI.

i think the former will eventually come, but the latter is already here.

> I can’t do without the help of AI in my daily development work. I use ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and various AI-driven design platforms. AI can help me improve my efficiency by at least 30%. For some HTML pages or pure algorithm modules, AI code accounts for 80%, and only a small amount of modification is required.

If you replace "AI" with "StackOverflow", would you still feel the same?

> LLMs have no intelligence at all, they don't reason.

So the benchmarks (1) of LLM's like Claude 3.5 are categorically flawed at reasoning and they will never get better?

Yet their outputs are heuristically good enough to reduce jobs from engineers by driving the cost of code generation down to almost 0.

If we take the idea that you believe that it cannot reason at all in any capacity, as whole it would be regretful for you to bet against these systems not getting better or that another breakthrough would change the perspective of a new generation of LLMs.

(1) https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet

At some point in time, AI will become mighty. In certain areas it is already. For example, predictions of failures of machinery.. weather forecasting (Google has a weather model), etc.. what you are talking about as "AI" is LLM. LLM is not AI. It's a part of a lot different technologies and techniques. Also know as machine learning. So please, keep it divided.

LLMs won't replace you in this round at statistically composing text/code. But may be in the next. The best thing about this, still a human is needed to do the reasoning instead of the LLM. But when this can be done (f.e. with a combination of different ML techniques and LLM) then we have to talk what can be done about it.

We can talk now, but each solution for the question "what will happen to working people, when AI rise" is just a game of thoughts and in the end lead to the only conclusion:

You get rid of it and work further OR you stop working and let AI do it for you. It will be in the time of the transition, surely a lot of people will become unemployed. But at some point, the whole economy and money does not make sense anymore. Just imagine AI produces you the parts you need with a 3D printer on your sign. So when we come to this point, we've transformed as society so much, that your question is not important anymore.

(I think in Europe it will be started early to find solutions to the threat, a AI tax or something like this. With this AI tax the people who lost their jobs will be supported..

Amerika, India, Afrika (as example) are the countries where a lot people living in that care by themselves for their lives. No helping state. There will be big problems, as no social/governed safety net existing.)