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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

#331

Post by dakolli »

lich_king wrote: post #318
dakolli wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao, you need to go read up on the french revolution. This is the craziest comment I've read on this site in a long time. And I know datacenters and semiconductor manufacturing don't employ a lot of people, thats my point, the advent of llms replaces more jobs than it creates.

> french revolution. A bunch of revolutionaries who carried a campaign of murder that ultimately had little bearing on the economic standing or job prospects of French citizens? I'm not saying that people will be content or that there will be no revolutions in the future. There might be. But most jobs are a social construct. A relatively small fraction of employed people are essential to the well-being of mankind. Fo…

:clown:

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#332

Post by dakolli »

dyauspitr wrote: post #254
dakolli wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that create jobs? This makes no sense, also I wouldn't consider 99% of what it outputs worthy of production, it just satisfies some low standards of a certain subset of modern business.

This take is atleast 6 months old. I would say 90% of the stuff my team puts out now comes straight out of Claude and coverage, performance, latency, MTTF, velocity have never been better.

You make slop, congrats. Your father's pacemaker isn't made by Claude, the software in your phone that keeps the battery from catching on fire isn't made with Claude. Sorry the world of software isn't just http handlers.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#333

Post by yonaguska »

mbgerring wrote: post #330

Something I don’t see enough people talking about is how AI will reduce barriers to entry. One of the things that drove the tech boom in the 2010s was cloud computing driving the cost of starting an internet company into the ground. What happens when there’s software you think should exist, and you no longer need to hire a bunch of people at $150k-$250k per year to build it?

Im employed by two semi-technical cofounders that vibe coded the MVP until they couldn't maintain the technical complexity. I expect scenarios like this to continue. There is a subset of companies that eventually will those engineers.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#334

Post by Animats »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

> automation tools ... eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts.

But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified.

There's also a tradeoff between automation flexibility and cost. If you need an LLM for each transaction, your costs will be much higher than if some simple CRUD server does it.

Here's a nice example from a more physical business - sandwich making.

Start with the Nala Sandwich Bot.[1] This is a single robot arm emulating a human making sandwiches. Humans have to do all the prep, and all the cleaning. It's slow, maybe one sandwich per minute. If they have any commercial installations, they're not showing them. This is cool, but ineffective.

Next is a Raptor/JLS robotic sandwich assembly line.[2] This is a dozen robots and many conveyors assembling sandwiches. It's reasonably fast, at 100 sandwiches per minute. This system could be reconfigured to make a variety of sandwich-format food products, but it would take a fair amount of downtime and adjustment. Not new robots, just different tooling. Everything is stainless steel or food grade plastic, so it can be routinely hosed down with hot soapy water. This is modern automation. Quite practical and in wide use.

Finally, there's the Weber automated sandwich line.[3] Now this is classic single-purpose automation, like 1950s Detroit engine lines. There are barely any robots at all; it's all special purpose hardware. You get 600 or more sandwiches per minute. Not only is everything stainless or food-grade plastic, it has a built-in self cleaning system so it can clean itself. Staff is minimal. But changing to a product with a slightly different form factor requires major modifications and skills not normally present in the plant. Only useful if you have a market for several hundred identical sandwiches per minute.

These three examples show why automation hasn't taken over. To get the most economical production, you need extreme product standardization. Sometimes you can get this. There are food plants which turn out Oreos or Twinkies in vast quantities at low cost with consistent quality. But if you want product variations, productivity goes way, way down.

[1] https://nalarobotics.com/sandwich.html

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YdWBEJMFyE

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRUfdBEpFJg

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#335

Post by sarchertech »

yodsanklai wrote: post #203
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 prod…

What factor of increased productivity will lead to reduced need for programmers?

I have seen numerous 25-50% productivity boosts over my career. Not a single one of them reduced the overall need for programmers.

I can’t even think of one that reduced the absolute number of programmers in a specific field.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#336

Post by cindyllm »

lich_king wrote: post #318
dakolli wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao, you need to go read up on the french revolution. This is the craziest comment I've read on this site in a long time. And I know datacenters and semiconductor manufacturing don't employ a lot of people, thats my point, the advent of llms replaces more jobs than it creates.

> french revolution. A bunch of revolutionaries who carried a campaign of murder that ultimately had little bearing on the economic standing or job prospects of French citizens? I'm not saying that people will be content or that there will be no revolutions in the future. There might be. But most jobs are a social construct. A relatively small fraction of employed people are essential to the well-being of mankind. Fo…

[dead]

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#337

Post by [deleted] »

nitwit005 wrote: post #228
nemo1618 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> You are in danger. Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at It's not the odds of the breakthrough, but the timeline. A factory worker could have correctly seen that one day automation would replace him, and yet worked his entire career in that role. There have been a ton of predictions about software engineers, radiologists, and some other roles getting replaced in months. Those predictions have clearly be…

[deleted]

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#338

Post by sarchertech »

adriand wrote: post #219
codegangsta wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But planning like this is absolutely something AI can do. In fact, this is exactly the kind of thing we start with on our team when it comes to using AI agents. We have a ticket with just a simple title that somebody threw in there, and we asked the AI to spin up a bunch of research agents to understand and plan and ask itself those questions. Funny enough, all the questions that you posed are things that come up rig…

Absolutely. Eventually the AI will just talk to the CEO / the board to get general direction, and everything will just fall out of that. The level of abstraction the agents can handle is on a steady upward trajectory.

If AIs can do that, they won’t be talking to a CEO or the board of a software company. There won’t be a CEO or a board because software companies won’t exist. They’ll talk to the customers and build one off solutions for each of them.

There will be 3 “software” companies left. And shortly after that society will collapse because of AI can do that it can do any white collar job.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#339

Post by sarchertech »

fishpham wrote: post #103
Analemma_ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds bogus to me: if AI really could close 100% of your backlog with just a couple more humans in the loop, you’d hire a bunch of temps/contractors to do that, then declare the product done and lay off everybody. How come that isn’t happening?

Because there's an unlimited amount of work to do. This is the same reason you are not fired once completing a feature :-) The point of hiring a FTE is to continue to create work that provides business value. For your analogy, FTEs often do that by hiring temp, and you can think of the agent as the new temp in this case - the human drives an infinite amount of them

Why hasn’t any of the software I use started shipping features at a breakneck speed then? The only thing any of them have added is barely working AI features.

Why aren’t there 10x the number of games on steam? Why aren’t people releasing new integrated programming language/OS/dev environments?

Why does our backlog look exactly the same as when I left for posterity leave 4 months ago?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#340

Post by djfergus »

I’m fascinated by the confidence in the cyborg theory that there will always be value in having a human in the loop. Especially for domains like code where the inputs and outputs are bits not atoms.

This is exactly what chess experts like Kasparov thought in the late 90s: “a grandmaster plus a computer will always beat just a computer”. This became false in less than a decade.

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