221–230 of 582 posts
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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.
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…
Datacenters are very automated. They already don't require many people and they're going to be needing less and less humans in them going forward.
Semiconductor manufacturing is also very heavily automated.
I’m not worried about job loss as a result of being replaced by AI, because if we get AI that is actually better than humans - which I imagine must be AGI - then I don’t see why that AI would be interested in working for humans. I’m definitely worried about job loss as a result of the AI bubble bursting, though.
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…
Neither datacenters nor chip manufacturing employ a whole lot of people. But I think you're looking at it wrong. Jobs come from people with money wanting to pay for jobs. That's not going to change. The jobs of the future may be that you're a court jester for Larry Ellison, or that you do something else that's fundamentally pointless but happens to be something that a person with money wants. Companion, entertainment…
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> 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 revoluti…
> What's your contingency plan? Buy a subscription to the revolution? I’ve been working on my contingency plan for a year-and-a-half now. I won’t get into what it is (nothing earth shattering) but if you haven’t been preparing, I think you’re either not paying enough attention or you’re seriously misreading where this is all going.
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…
There is zero actual intentional reduction of dependence, just elimination of government support.
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.
There have been a ton of predictions about software engineers, radiologists, and some other roles getting replaced in months. Those predictions have clearly been not so great.
At this point the greater risk to my career seems to be the economy tanking, as that seems to be happening and ongoing. Unfortunately, switching careers can't save you from that.
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"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.
My contingency plan is that if AI leaves me unable to get a job, we are all fucked and society as a whole will have to fix the situation and if it doesn’t, there is nothing I could have done about it anyway.
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>It could even be a fundamental rule of intelligent life, that one cannot create intelligence that surpasses its own. Well that is easily disproved by the fact that people have children with higher IQ's than their own.
That's not what I mean, rather than humans cannot create a type of intelligence that supersedes what is roughly capable from human intelligence, because doing so would require us to be smarter basically. Not to say we can't create machines that far surpass our abilities on a single or small set of axis.