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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

#371

Post by Animats »

catdog wrote: post #365
Animats wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ma…

> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified. Not necessarily. Automation may also just result in higher quality output because it eliminates mistakes (less the case with "AI" automation though) and frees up time for the humans to actually quality control. This might require the people on average to be more skilled though. Even if it only results in higher output volume you often hav…

There's a classic book on this, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor" (1926). [1]

They show three cases of what happened when a process was mechanized.

The "good case" was the Linotype. Typesetting became cheaper and the number of works printed went up, so printers did better.

The "medium case" was glassblowing of bottles. Bottle making was a skilled trade, with about five people working as a practiced team to make bottles. Once bottle-making was mechanized, there was no longer a need for such teams. But bottles became cheaper, so there were still a lot of bottlemakers. But they were lower paid, because tending a bottle-making machine is not a high skill job.

The "bad case" was the stone planer. The big application for planed stone was door and window lintels for brick buildings. This had been done by lots of big guys with hammers and chisels. Steam powered stone planers replaced them. Because lintels are a minor part of buildings, this didn't cause more buildings to be built, so employment in stone planing went way down.

Those are still the three basic cases. If the market size is limited by a non-price factor, higher productivity makes wages go down.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1885817?seq=1

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#372

Post by KittenInABox »

Bayko wrote: post #319
OccamsMirror wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment. AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because: - Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline. - Quality bec…

> AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context This is why (personal experience) I am seeing a lot of FullStack jobs compared to specialized Backend, FE, Ops roles. AI does 90% of the job of a senior engineer (What the CEOs believe) and the companies now want someone that can do the full "100" and not just supply the missing "10". So that remaining 90 is now coming from an amalgamation of other responsibilities.

In my mind we will have a bimodal set of skills in software development, likely something like a product engineer (an engineer who is also a product manager-- this person conceptualizes features and systemically considers the software as a whole in terms of ergonomics, business sense, and the delight in building something used by others) and something like a deep-in-the-weeds engineer (an engineer who innovates on the margins of high performance, tuning, deep improvements to libraries and other things of that nature). The former is needing to skill in rapid context switching, keeping the full model of customer journey in their minds, while also executing on technical rigor enough to prevent inefficiencies. The latter will need to skill in being able to dive extremely deeply into nuanced subjects like fine-tuning the garbage collector, compiler, network performance, or internal parts of the DOM or OS or similar.

I would expect a lot of product engineering to specialize further into domains like healthtech, fintech, adtech, etc. While the in-the-weeds engineering will be platform, infra, and embedded systems type folks.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#373

Post by selylindi »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #271
Gigachad wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a fellow chad I concur. Though I am improving my poker skills - games of chance will still be around

You likely already know, but the "Pluribus" poker bot was beating humans back in 2019. Games of chance will be around if people are around, but you'll have to be careful to ensure you're playing against people, unassisted people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#374

Post by tines »

pupppet wrote: post #88
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…

We're all slowly but surely lowering our standards as AI bombards us with low-quality slop. AI doesn't need to get better, we all just need to keep collectively lowering our expectations until they finally meet what AI can currently do, and then pink-slips away.

Exactly. This happens in every aspect of life. Something convenient comes along and people will accommodate it despite it being worse, because people don’t care.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#375

Post by overgard »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #359
OccamsMirror wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment. AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because: - Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline. - Quality bec…

"it is already showing up as stagnant or declining Western salaries" Real median salary, and real median wages are both rising for the last couple years. Maybe they would have risen faster if there was no AI, but I don't think you can say there has been a discernible impact yet.

I don't think that's true, if you trust gemini at least.. "In 2025, U.S. software engineer pay is barely keeping pace with inflation, with median compensation growing 2.67% year-over-year compared to 2.7% inflation. While salaries held steady or increased during the 2021-2023 inflationary period, many professionals reported that real purchasing power remained stagnant or dipped, making it difficult to get ahead. "

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#376

Post by selylindi »

slopinthebag wrote: post #312
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think hard about this. Does that seem to you like it's likely to be a physical law? First of all, it's not necessary for one person to build that super-intelligence all by themselves, or to understand it fully. It can be developed by a team, each of whom understands only a small part of the whole. Secondly, it doesn't necessarily even require anybody to understand it. The way AI models are built today is by pressing…

> Think hard about this. Does that seem to you like it's likely to be a physical law? Yes, it seems likely to me. It seems like the ultimate in hubris to assume we are capable of creating something we are not capable of ourselves.

On the contrary, nearly every machine we've created is capable of things that we are not capable of ourselves. Cars travel more than twice as fast as the swiftest human. Airplanes fly. Calculators do math in an instant that would take a human months. Lightbulbs emit light. Cranes lift many tons. And so on and so forth.

So to create something that exceeds our capabilities is not a matter of hubris (as if physical laws cared about hubris anyway), it's an unambiguously ordinary occurrence.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#377

Post by enraged_camel »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #248

[flagged]

>> The thing I keep seeing firsthand is that automation doesn't eliminate the job - it eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts.

No, not necessarily. There are different kinds of automation.

Earlier in my career I sold and implemented enterprise automation solutions for large clients. Think document scanning, intelligent data extraction and indexing and automatic routing. The C-level buyers overwhelmingly had one goal: to reduce headcount. And that was almost always the result. Retraining redundant staff for other roles was rare. It was only done in contexts where retaining accumulated institutional knowledge was important and worth the expense.

Here's the thing though: to overcome objections from those staff, whom we had to interview to understand the processes we were automating, we told them your story: you aren't being replaced, you're being repurposed for higher-level work. Wouldn't it be nice if the computer did the boring and tedious parts of your job so that you can focus on more important things? Most of them were convinced. Some, particularly those who had been around the block, weren't.

Ultimately, technologies like AI will have the the same impact. They weren't quite there yet, but I think it's just a matter of time.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#378

Post by slopinthebag »

selylindi wrote: post #376
slopinthebag wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think hard about this. Does that seem to you like it's likely to be a physical law? Yes, it seems likely to me. It seems like the ultimate in hubris to assume we are capable of creating something we are not capable of ourselves.

On the contrary, nearly every machine we've created is capable of things that we are not capable of ourselves. Cars travel more than twice as fast as the swiftest human. Airplanes fly. Calculators do math in an instant that would take a human months. Lightbulbs emit light. Cranes lift many tons. And so on and so forth. So to create something that exceeds our capabilities is not a matter of hubris (as if physical laws…

> Not to say we can't create machines that far surpass our abilities on a single or small set of axis.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#379

Post by jarjoura »

christofosho wrote: post #350
jarjoura wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frame the shift more like this: Systems engineering is an extremely hard computer science domain with few engineers either interested in it, or good at it. Building dashboards is tedious and requires organizational structure to deliver on. This is the bread and butter of what agents are good at building right now. You still need organization and communication skills in your company and to direct the coding agents t…

I understand where you're coming from, and think there is something missing in your final paragraph that I'm curious to understand. If LLMs do end up improving productivity, what would make them go away? I think automated code generators are here until something more performant supersedes them. So, what in your mind might be possibilities of that thing?

Well I guess I no longer believe that long term, all this code generation would make us more productive. At least not how the fan favorite claude-code currently does it.

I've found some power use cases with LLMs, like "explore", but everyone seems misty eye'd that these coding agents can one-shot entire features. I suspect it'll be fine until it's not and people get burned by what is essentially trusting these black boxes to barf out entire implementations leaving trails of code soup.

Worse is that junior engineers can say they're "more productive" but it's now at the expense of understanding what it is they just contributed.

So, sure, more productive, but in the same way that 2010s move fast and break things philosophy was, "more productive." This will all come back to bite us eventually.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#380

Post by overgard »

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.

What contingency plan is there exactly? At best you're just going from an automated-already job to a soon-to-be-automated job. Yay?

I'm baffled that so many people think that only developers are going to be hit and that we especially deserve it. If AI gets so good that you don't need people to understand code anymore, I don't know why you'd need a project manager anymore either, or a CFO, or a graphic designer, etc etc. Even the people that seem to think they're irreplaceable because they have some soft power probably aren't. Like, do VC funds really need humans making decisions in that context..?

Anyway, the practical reason why I'm not screaming in terror right now is because I think the hype machine is entirely off the rails and these things can't be trusted with real jobs. And honestly, I'm starting to wonder how much of tech and social media is just being spammed by bots and sock puppets at this point, because otherwise I don't understand why people are so excited about this hypothetical future. Yay, bots are going to do your job for you while a small handful of business owners profit. And I guess you can use moltbot to manage your not-particularly-busy life of unemployment. Well, until you stop being able to afford the frontier models anyway, which is probably going to dash your dream of vibe coding a startup. Maybe there's a handful of winners, until there's not, because nobody can afford to buy services on a wage of zero dollars. And anyone claiming that the abundance will go to everyone needs to get their head checked.

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