181–190 of 272 posts
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Cool. You best worry and stress yourself out about a situation you cannot control then.
The usual political means (writing to your senator or something appropriate for your country of residency) still work.
I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age , incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever. If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this: I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart And it never…
Knowledge depreciates, so it is clarifying to add time explicitly: I thought this knowledge would set me apart... Forever? That seems over-optimistic for all occupations in all eras. For the rest of my working career? This really hasn't been true in a long time either, especially in software, where technology changes on the order of years. For the duration of my mortgage? The fondest hope, but pretty much like the ab…
As long as we can adapt, move on to the next knowledge-needed area, we'll hopefully be alright.
(I think there are many analogies here to things people have always said about undergraduate study – e.g. it's about teaching you to learn, not teaching you the specific things you're taught, to be remembered and applied forever.)
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This doesn't seem at all related to the above comment - or anything, for that matter. Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.
> Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs. I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying? Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?
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There’s not much articulation except some personal snippets about someone caught in the hype cycle of a product, that the hive mind is buzzing about deafeningly. Tools/improvements have rarely been negative in such a massive way except rare instances, and even then society moved on and past those tools to bigger & better things. How many people today seriously consider agriculture as a career prospect but almost all…
Just because a generation or two down the line is better off does’t mean a lot of lives aren’t effected negatively when industries are destroyed or moved.
5 years ago absolutely everyone was talking about how blockchains & ledgers were going to solve all the problems of the world, and executives needed blockchain & ledgers in their products. Now, no one cares.
Not saying that happens in this case, but don’t believe the hype so easy. Even job losses in the context of a radically different policies by the current administration doesn’t get a second thought, nor does the fact we’re no longer in a low interest rate environment.
I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age , incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever. If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this: I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart And it never…
This is the old China fallacy. "Oh, we'll just ship production to China, and do the design and marketing in US, this is where the real value is anyway, China will never be able to do design and marketing as well as we do". Literally same thing: "Oh, we'll just let LLMs code, and we'll just do Taste. LLMs will never be able to do Taste"
Except China is just humans in a different location so it shouldn't be surprising they can do things humans in the US can do.
LLMs are a totally distinct type of thing. It's possible they'll be able to do Taste but it's also quite possible they'll never be able to.
I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools and their growing potential. We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.
How good something is inside is directly responsible for how well it works. Your customers might not care about the former, but they will care when your cuts to the former impact the latter (and they always do impact it, in the end).
AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace * AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure * there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced There are strong headwinds to all three of these. Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a l…
It's hardly an inevitability though (nothing is... and analogues to the industrial revolution are iffy at best, we haven't ever had an attempted replacement for intelligence itself before).
Society is doing this at an unprecedented cost and it's clear a large portion of the population is uneasy with it. Whether society in the US, Europe, and Asia will continue to allow such investment at the expense of everything else remains to be seen.
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> The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months. How do you know that? In 2026 the prices have been spiking. It now costs orders of magnitude more than it did in November.
> How do you know that? Historic trends, every 18 months, performance for the same level of quality has gone down 90%. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1gpr2p4/llms_co ... And Chart 13 here: https://www.rdworldonline.com/ais-great-compression-20-chart ... And here: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends The technology already exists now on the algorithmic front for the next 10x dro…
Speculative decoding usually only improves decode and sometimes actually harm prefill and for agentic coding prefill matters more.
You’re right about the rest but I need to set the record straight on these details.
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Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of production you win. Knowledge, skill, and experience are largely irrelevant to the conversation. I’ve held this opinion for quite some time and would be interested to hear alternative perspectives.
> Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of production you win. Yeah, but we were talking about only success, not winning. In the past and the present, you could succeed purely on a combination of skill, talent and labour. This approach looks like it will not work much longer.
We exchange our knowledge, time, and skill for money. If this exchange is no longer viable — because similar value can be accessed via LLM agents — we'll have no way of making money.
I do think some (non-billionaire) people will survive the transition, but the question then becomes: what happens to everyone else?