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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

#201

Post by paulryanrogers »

ddtaylor wrote: post #115
fragmede wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's gonna play you to flip burgers with no experience doing it and everyone else needing a job as well?

There is a huge demand for low-skill labor in other industries. Stuff like plumbing, HVAC, and a ton of other traditionally unsexy jobs that can barely keep enough people in a town to perform these jobs at higher costs than normal.

Those jobs don't often pay well until you graduate out of journeyman / apprentice, or are a business owner. They usually require some training and testing ahead of time. They also carry a higher risk of serious injury or death.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#202

Post by downboots »

febed wrote: post #134

AI is increasing my job security at the moment because the junior developers I work with use AI without discretion. On of them didn’t remember having worked on a feature they built with AI assistance in the recent past. To his credit he admitted he didn’t know how the code worked.

AI breaks the window you repair, at scale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#203

Post by yodsanklai »

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…

> ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today

I think it's more nuanced than that. I'd say that - 0% can't be implemented by AI - but a lot of them can be implemented much faster thanks to AI - a lot of them can be implemented slower when using AI (because author has to fix hallucinations, revert changes that caused bugs)

As we learn to use these tools, even in their current state, they will increase productivity by some factor and reduce needs for programmers.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#204

Post by ls612 »

One of the most robust findings in labor economics is that labor and capital are long run complements, not substitutes. I would be shocked if AI is an exception to that rule, for software engineers the sheer flood of code that will be generated in the coming years will demand more and more labor to manage.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#205

Post by themafia »

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.

> Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at I do. Show me any evidence that it is imminent.

> or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant

Not in my lifetime.

> it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.

No, I'm actually measuring the risk, you're acting as if the sky is falling. What's your contingency plan? Buy a subscription to the revolution?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#206

Post by beeflet »

Morromist wrote: post #58
password54321 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the most unskilled labor People are worried about white-collar not blue-collar jobs being replaced. Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI.

Yeah, although in the "Something big is happening" Shumer did say at the end "Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects." Being the hype-man that he is I assume he meant humanoid robots - I think he's being silly here, and the sentence made me roll my eyes.

what difference does it make if the robots are humanoid or not?

It merely reflects the designer's willingness to engage in sci-fi tropes.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#207

Post by hirvi74 »

9dev wrote: post #144
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.

Most non-banana republics across the world define the Minimum standard of living as having all of the things you listed, meaning welfare/social safety nets provide for that. As they should. We’re not animals.

I appreciate that Finland considers Internet access of a minimum of 1 Mb to be a basic human right. I am not sure if other countries follow, but I wish the USA did.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#208

Post by alchemism »

arctic-true wrote: post #148
delegate wrote: post #86

Bottlenecks. Yes. Company structures these days are not compatible with efficient use of these new AI models. Software engineers work on Jira tickets, created by product managers and several layers of middle managers. But the power of recent models is not in working on cogs, their true power is in working on the entire mechanism. When talking about a piece of software that a company produces, I'll use the analogy of…

This gives me a lot of hope for a decentralized future for all kinds of service industries. Why would you go to a big-name accounting firm where the small number of humans can only give you a sliver of attention, when you can go to a one-man shop and get much more of the one human’s attention? Especially if you know that the “work” will be done by the same tools? So many of the barriers to entry in various services -…

If every person is now a captain, with their own ship, the harbor may become rather crowded.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#209

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

fourside wrote: post #163
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…

You also need a system that is ok with giving you some of said abundance without you working. Last year the US voted to hand over the reigns, in all branches of government, to a party whose philosophy is to slash government spending and reduce people’s dependence on the government. To all the US futurists who are fantasizing about a post-scarcity world where we no longer work, I’d like to understand how that fits in…

It fits because now you can start up the conquering war machine and have a bunch of soldiers who're willing to kill in another country before starving in theirs

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#210

Post by beeflet »

ddtaylor wrote: post #117
mattlondon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs that require physical effort will be fine for the reasons you state Any job that is predominantly done on a computer though is at risk IMO. AI might not completely take over everything, but I think we'll see way fewer humans managing/orchestrating larger and larger fleets of agents. Instead of say 20 people doing some function, you'll have 3 or 4 prompting away to manage the agents to get the same amount of work…

> So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be. And that's probably something most people are okay with. Work that can be automated should be and humans should be spending their time on novel things instead of labor if possible.

all jobs will be automatable, and there will be no room for humans to work on novel things.
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