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I'm not worried about AI job loss

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Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#71

Post by Nevermark »

Morromist wrote: post #67
Nevermark wrote: post #29

> Bottlenecks rule everything around me The self-setup here is too obvious. This is exactly why man + machine can be much worse than just machine. A strong argument needs to address what we can do as an extremely slow operating, slow learning, and slow adapting species, that machines that improve in ability and efficiency monthly and annually will find they cannot do well or without. It is clear that we are going thr…

I belive the black plague actually caused a massive labor shortage and wages increased. When a huge amount of people die and you still need to have people build bridges and be soldiers and finish building the damn cathedral that's been under construction for the last 400 years then that is what will happen. Here's an article: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...

I meant the jobs die. So I am not sure what would stand in for "labor shortage" in a situation of sustained net job losses. Perhaps a growth opportunity for mannequins to visually fill the offices/shops of the fired, and maintain appearances?

But yes, if lots of people deathed by AI, the remaining humans might have more job security! Could that be called a "soft landing"?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#72

Post by uqual »

qgin wrote: post #40

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

In reality that would probably mean that something like 60% of the developer positions would be eliminated (and, frankly, those 60% are rarely very good developers in a large company).

The remaining "surplus" 20% roles retained will then be devoted to developing features and implementing fixes using AI where those features and fixes would previously not have been high enough priority to implement or fix.

When the price of implementing a feature drops, it becomes economically viable (and perhaps competitively essential) to do so -- but in this scenario, AI couldn't do _all_ the work to implement such features so that's why 40% rather than 20% of the developer roles would be retained.

The 40% of developer roles that remain will, in theory, be more efficient also because they won't be spending as much time babysitting the "lesser" developers in the 60% of the roles that were eliminated. As well, "N" in the Mythical Man Month is reduced leading to increased efficiency.

(No, I have no idea what the actual percentages would be overall, let alone in a particular environment - for example, requirements for Spotify are quite different than for Airbus/Boeing avionics software.)

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#73

Post by 827a »

The take that I am increasingly believing is that Software Engineers should broadly be worried, because while there will always be demand for people who can create software products, whatever the tools may be, the skills necessary to do it well are changing rapidly. Most Software Engineers are going to wake up one day and realize their skills aren't just irrelevant, but actively detrimental, to delivering value out of software.

There will also be far fewer positions demanding these skills. Easy access to generating code has moved the bottleneck in companies to positions & skills that are substantially harder to hire for (basically: Good Judgement); so while adding Agentic Sorcerers would increase a team's code output, it might be the wrong code. Corporate profit will keep scaling with slower-growing team sizes as companies navigate the correct next thing to build.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#74

Post by gordonhart »

e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #56
gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

A lot of this can be provided or built up by better documentation in the codebase, or functional requirements that can also be created, reviewed, and then used for additional context. In our current codebase it's definitely an issue to get an AI "onboarded", but I've seen a lot less hand-holding needed in projects where you have the AI building from the beginning and leaving notes for itself to read later

Curious to hear if you've seen this work with 100k+ LoC codebases (i.e. what you could expect at a job). I've had some good experiences with high autonomy agents in smaller codebases and simpler systems but the coherency starts to fizzle out when the system gets complicated enough that thinking it through is the hard part as opposed to hammering out the code.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#75

Post by Morromist »

Nevermark wrote: post #71
Morromist wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I belive the black plague actually caused a massive labor shortage and wages increased. When a huge amount of people die and you still need to have people build bridges and be soldiers and finish building the damn cathedral that's been under construction for the last 400 years then that is what will happen. Here's an article: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...

I meant the jobs die. So I am not sure what would stand in for "labor shortage" in a situation of sustained net job losses. Perhaps a growth opportunity for mannequins to visually fill the offices/shops of the fired, and maintain appearances? But yes, if lots of people deathed by AI, the remaining humans might have more job security! Could that be called a "soft landing"?

Ahh I see what you mean.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#76

Post by gordonhart »

danesparza wrote: post #61
gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

Apparently you haven't seen ChatGPT enterprise and codex. I have bad news for you ...

Codex with their flagship model (currently GPT-5.3-Codex) is my daily driver. I still end up doing a lot of steering!

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#77

Post by lossolo »

qgin wrote: post #40

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

What happens if you lay off 80% of your department while your competitors don't? If AI multiplies each developer's capabilities, there's a good chance you'll be outcompeted sooner or later.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#78

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

Nevermark wrote: post #29

> Bottlenecks rule everything around me The self-setup here is too obvious. This is exactly why man + machine can be much worse than just machine. A strong argument needs to address what we can do as an extremely slow operating, slow learning, and slow adapting species, that machines that improve in ability and efficiency monthly and annually will find they cannot do well or without. It is clear that we are going thr…

> Job loss is likely to have statistics more comparable to the Black Plague.

Maybe this is overly optimistic, but if AI starts to have negative impacts on average people comparable to the plague, it seems like there's a lot more that people can do. In medieval Europe, nobody knew what was causing the plague and nobody knew how to stop it.

On the other hand, if AI quickly replaces half of all jobs, it will be very obvious what and who caused the job loss and associated decrease in living standards. Everybody will have someone they care about affected. AI job loss would quickly eclipse all other political concerns. And at the end of the day, AI can be unplugged (barring robot armies or Elon's space-based data centers I suppose).

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#79

Post by RS-232 »

dysoco wrote: post #63
RS-232 wrote: post #36

The advent of AI may shape up to be just like the automobile. At first, it's a pretty big energy hog and if you don't know how to work it, it might crash and burn. After some time, the novelty wears off. More and more people begin using it because it is a massive convenience that does real work. Luddites who still walk or ride their bike out of principle will be mocked and scoffed. Then the mandatory compliance will…

> This license will be tied to your identity and it will become a hard requirement for employment, citizenship, housing, loans, medical treatment, and more. Not having it will be a liability. You will be excluded from society at large if you do not comply. That's just an American thing, I've never owned a car and most people of my age I know haven't either.

That's fair. The public infrastructure in other places around the world is a lot more hospitable to other methods of transportation.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#80

Post by nphardon »

Unfortunately, one of the struggles in old high tech (thats the only thing i know, are you also experiencing this?) is that the C-level people don't look at Ai and say LLM's can make an individual 10x more productive therefore (and this is the part they miss) we can make our tool 10x better. They think: therefore we can lay off 9 people.
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