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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

#191

Post by cbdevidal »

Gigachad wrote: post #162
zozbot234 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.

Automation made the TV inexpensive, but if you look at a chart on inflation almost everything that cannot be easily automated has risen in price.

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019-...

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#192

Post by qgin »

slopinthebag wrote: post #157
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.

That's an oversimplification. Work is rarely so simply divisible like this.

There would be a lot of economic pressure to figure it out.

Amazon fulfillment centers are a good example of automation shrinking the role of humans. We haven't seen total headcounts go down because Amazon itself has been growing. While the human role shrinks, the total business grows and you tread water. But at some point, Amazon will not be able to grow fast enough to counterbalance the shrinking human role in the FC and total headcount will decrease until one day it disappears entirely.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#193

Post by beeflet »

stouset wrote: post #186
jjmarr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

the pre-industrial utopia has been created

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#194

Post by rnewme »

zozbot234 wrote: post #127
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…

> 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. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

Have you seen the land prices

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#195

Post by adamkittelson »

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.

I'm not worried about the danger of losing my job to an AI capable of performing it. I'm worried about the danger of losing my job because an executive wanted to be able to claim that AI has enhanced productivity to such a degree that they were able to eliminate redundancies with no regard for whether there was any truth to that statement or not.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#196

Post by zozbot234 »

sensanaty wrote: post #188
gordonhart wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 div…

Ask the AI to figure out your code base (or self-contained portions of it, as applicable) and document its findings. Then correct and repeat. Over time, you end up with a scaffold in the form of internal documentation that will guide both humans and AIs in making more productive edits.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#197

Post by easymodex »

palmotea wrote: post #111
rockbruno wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, my personal fear is that the higher-ups will overlook this fact and just assume that AI can do everything because of some cherry-pick simple examples, leading to one of those situations where a bunch of people get fired for no reason and then re-hired again after some time.

> leading to one of those situations where a bunch of people get fired for no reason and then re-hired again after some time. More likely they get fired for no reason, never rehired, and the people left get burned out trying to hold it all together.

Exactly, now which one do you wanna be? The burned out ones but still working in SWE or the fired ones which in the long run converge to manual labor which AI can't do. Not to mention in SWE case the salaries would be pushed down to match cost of AI doing it.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#198

Post by qgin »

lossolo wrote: post #77
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.

At some point soon, humans will be a liability, slowing AI down, introducing mistakes and inefficiences. Any company that insists on inserting humans into the loop will be outcompeted by those who just let the AI go.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#199

Post by zahlman »

Kiro wrote: post #53
kerblang wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me get something straight: That essay was completely fake, right? He/It was lying about everything, and it was some sort of... what? Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading? Have we now transitioned to a point where we gaslight everyone for the hell of it just because we can, and call it, what, thought-provoking?

What was fake? I don't see anything controversial or factually wrong. I question the prediction but that's his opinion.

I think the claim is that it doesn't represent an authentic personal experience, despite pretending to.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#200

Post by zozbot234 »

rnewme wrote: post #194
zozbot234 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

Have you seen the land prices

What land prices? There's plenty of cheap land, it's just a bit far away from where most people live. But guess what, population densities were also lower a century ago.
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