There's a fundamental disconnect: OP refers to senior engineers being replaced with AI, whereas the evidence and logical reasoning points much more to junior engineers being replaced by AI. And that premise seems like a quite plausible one...
AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
31–40 of 107 posts
Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But if people blame tech, root issues will not be addressed. Agreed. I think people would be open to suggestions if you have actionable ways to improve the current socio-economic system.
If it involves work then no, people are not open to suggestions.
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Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
#33It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if pe…
I think technology has always been a tool to impose will over others. Computing was just such a unique kind of technology where, for a decently long time, only a subset of people knew how to use it, and that subset didn’t have existing wealth and power (or not enough). It’s taken upto now for the ones with real power to catch up, or a mix of the ones who didn’t now have real power. And they will use technology for what it ultimately is for, to impose their will on others.
Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
What masterful framing AI leaders developed that people say, “AI is doing my work”. Did other technologies get phrased this way? The accounting software is doing my work? The locomotive is doing my work?
yeah it’s all branding. there is totally nothing different about this technology that might cause someone to say that… e:tone
The technology is different, but we've been told that we'll be replaced by foreign teams for years. It's had some impact, but in all but two of the cases I've personally seen it has been significantly detrimental. In the majority of cases, the offshore team was either replaced or relegated to pointless busy work.
Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
#35It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.
I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making. The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work. In fact, it more or less assumes the opposite. The critique is about the economic and organizational story being told around AI, not about whether an individual developer can ship faster today. Saying “these tool…
You can read my reply to another comment making a similar point. In short, I think you are giving Doctorow far too much credit - the assumption that these tools are fundamentally incapable is woven throughout the essay, the risk always comes from the fact that managers might think these tools (which are obviously inferior) can do your job. The notion that they can actually do your job is treated as invariable absurd, pie-in-the-sky, bubble thinking, or unmentionable.
My point is I don’t think a technology that went from chatgpt (cool, useless) to opus-4.5+ in 3 years is obviously being oversold when it says that it can do your entire job beyond being just a useful tool.
Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Is this really something you want to have proudly said? Because it makes it sound like your "work" is not very important.
My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt cam…
> My work involves reading papers
And yet you did not read this essay, or at least did not understand it.
Whatever LLM you used to summarize it has let you down. I wonder how often that is happening in your day to day work, perhaps that's why you feel your job is at risk.
Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
#37It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if pe…
> people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead.
If by "people" you mean "Cory Doctorow, the author of the article", then you really don't know anything about their work.
For example, he coined the term "enshitifacation" and talks often about the "enshitogenic policy environment" that gives rise to it.
Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
#38> Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don’t compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels. >Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market, “Tech companies are monopolies”, proceeds to describe how tech companies compete with each other.
A market with only two players isn't much of a market.
TBF on the LLM side we currently have 4 big players, and a bunch of smaller ones. Plus a healthy bunch of open models, lagging ~1y behind SotA. The best thing for us consumers is that it stays this way. Any of them winning would be bad in general.
Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
#39> Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don’t compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels. >Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market, “Tech companies are monopolies”, proceeds to describe how tech companies compete with each other.
> or in cartels
Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
What masterful framing AI leaders developed that people say, “AI is doing my work”. Did other technologies get phrased this way? The accounting software is doing my work? The locomotive is doing my work?
yeah it’s all branding. there is totally nothing different about this technology that might cause someone to say that… e:tone
Do you not remember the early days of Covid?
People are really, really, really good at not seeing what they don't want to see.