Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm not worried about AI job loss

davidoks.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 582 posts

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#181

Post by dyauspitr »

dakolli wrote: post #165

When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs. LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a li…

Disagree. The input to output ratio is ridiculous. With the latest LLMs you can input very few words to generate a lot of production usable output.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#182

Post by hunterpayne »

This reminds me of that old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times". I see AI causing lots of chaos. I also see AI causing some of the biggest opportunities in some time. Many businesses are destroying their competitive advantage by deploying AI slop. Over time, they will degrade their ability to make a working and snappy website. This will create opportunities for new businesses to take their place. If you ever wanted to start a new business, shockingly this is the time as the current crop slowly degrades their customer portals into slop. They will probably reach a point where they can no longer deliver working, efficient and secure apps anymore.

Maybe I am wrong, but the history of business on the web says I am right. If you go back and look at why those businesses think they are successful, and if that analysis is correct, then I am.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#183

Post by qudat »

dakolli wrote: post #165

When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs. LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a li…

Creative destruction is a fundamental component of economic growth and has been happening since economies were part of humanity.

You are thinking too linearly. When the price of goods and services go down because the cost to produce those goods are services decreases, that means things are cheaper. Now that things are cheaper we have more money to spend on other goods or services.

Who knows what industries will be created because of this alleged release of human labor.

When the refrigerator was invented we didn’t just replace an industry of shipping ice, we created new industries that relied on refrigeration. That’s creative destruction. That’s economic growth.

This is not to mention that I find the scope and scale of AI displacement to be highly dubious and built on hype.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#185

Post by cbdevidal »

dakolli wrote: post #165

When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs. LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a li…

Automations do create jobs, but fewer jobs. Businesses wouldn’t invest so much money if they had to keep the same number of workers. Automation necessarily reduces the number of humans working in aggregate at one task.

What DOES go up with automation is demand. Fewer farmers today than 100 years ago, but significantly more mouths to feed.

What also increases is new kinds of jobs; entirely new fields. The automobile shrank the number of buggy whip makers, but taxi drivers increased. Then the internet increased Uber drivers on top of taxi drivers.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#186

Post by stouset »

jjmarr wrote: post #139
RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

If you want to live with no electricity, no running water, and a lack of refrigerated food, you could do so purely on welfare. In that sense, we already have the UBI that Marx predicted. However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.

I’m not really sure the point you’re trying to make behind “as long as you don’t mind dying early and painfully from easily preventable diseases technically you can live in utopia”. Would you mind clarifying your position here?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#187

Post by zozbot234 »

nemo1618 wrote: post #154
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…

"The steamroller is still many inches away. I'll make a plan once it actually starts crushing my toes." You are in danger . Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%, or you already have enough money to retire, or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant, it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.

So AI is going to steamroll all feasible jobs, all at once, with no alternatives developing over time? That's just a fantasy.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#188

Post by sensanaty »

gordonhart wrote: post #74
e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd estimate we're near a million LoC (will double check tomorrow, but wouldn't be surprised if it was over that to be honest). Huge monorepo, ~1500 engineers, all sorts of bespoke/custom tooling integrated, fullstack (including embedded code), a mix of languages (predominantly Java & JS/TS though).

In my case the AI is actively detrimental unless I hand hold it with every single file it should look into, lest it dive into weird ancient parts of the codebase that bear no relevance to the task at hand. Letting the latest and "greatest" agents loose is just a recipe for frustration and disaster despite lots of smart people trying their hardest to make these infernal tools be of any use at all. The best I've gotten out of it was some light Vue refactoring, but even then despite AGENTS.md, RULES.md and all the other voodoo people say you should do it's a crapshoot.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#189

Post by lemax »

I think that, for possibly a very long time, AI will just increase the quality bar and scale of expectations when we produce things. We might take the same amount of time (or longer) to produce something, but with significantly better outcomes. Ultimately human preferences and tastes prevail and the world is full of problems that are not simple I/O, that are not repeatable, and that require human taste to improve. The people who will immediately survive economically are the ones who leverage AI to produce stuff that wasn't possible before.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#190

Post by atlintots »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #171
suzzer99 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.

[flagged]

You can't afford an apartment because the ownership class is working very hard to keep housing prices high while paying you as little as possible for the two decades you have been working. Not because some disabled person elsewhere is struggling to get by on government loans and welfare.
Post reply on HN