I'm not worried about AI job loss

https://davidoks.blog/p/why-im-not-worried-about-ai-job-loss

by ezekg • 5 months ago

351 437 5 months ago

Flavius• 5 months ago

Maybe you should be a little worried. A healthy fear never killed anyone.

mudil• 5 months ago

"For quality of life, it is better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong, rather than a pessimist and right." -Elon Musk

RIMR2• 5 months ago

Optimism is a luxury for those who won't be the ones paying for the mistake.

yifanl2• 5 months ago

Profound quotes are only profound when said by someone who's widely respected.

yoyohello13• 5 months ago

Is that true? I’m not so sure. In the 1950s I could have been optimistic that asbestos won’t give people cancer.

“Some of you may die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to make” -also Elon Mush probably

theshackleford• 5 months ago

If only I took life advice from ketamine junkies.

podgietaru• 5 months ago

I mean - anxiety definitely kills people, right?

paulryanrogers2• 5 months ago

Is it "healthy fear" if it turns out to be a fatal dose?

simonw• 5 months ago

I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further.

And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403

It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.

camillomiller• 5 months ago

Well the zeitgeist is that our brains are so fried that such piece of mediocre writing penned by a GPT-container startupper can surge to the top

kerblang• 5 months ago

Let me get something straight: That essay was completely fake, right? He/It was lying about everything, and it was some sort of... what?

Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading?

Have we now transitioned to a point where we gaslight everyone for the hell of it just because we can, and call it, what, thought-provoking?

coffeefirst• 5 months ago

Yes. It’s an ad for his product, which nobody had heard of before. I’m not on twitter but I’m seeing it pretty much everywhere now.

hypfer• 5 months ago

Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading?

Those numbers are likely greatly exaggerated. Twitter is nowhere near where it was at its peak. You could almost call it a ghost town. Linkedin but for unhinged crypto- and AI bros.

I'm sure the metrics report 80 million views, but that's not 80 million actual individuals that cared about it. The narrative just needs these numbers to get people to buy into the hype.

Kiro• 5 months ago

What was fake? I don't see anything controversial or factually wrong. I question the prediction but that's his opinion.

scottmf• 5 months ago

The guy is a fraud https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-open-source-ai-leader-reflect...

ianbutler4• 5 months ago

I just skimmed this and the so called zeitgeist here is fear. People are scared, it's material concern and he effectively stoked it.

I work on this technology for my job and while I'm very bullish pieces like that are as you said slopish and as I'll say breathless because there are so many practical challenges here to deal with standing between what is being said there and where we are now.

Capability is not evenly distributed and it's getting people into loopy ideas of just how close we are to certain milestones, not that it's wrong to think about those potential milestones but I'm wary of timelines.

pfisch• 5 months ago

Are you ever concerned about the consequences of what you are making? No one really knows how this will play out and the odds of this leading to disaster are significant.

I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

Der_Einzige4• 5 months ago

This is what they get for not reading our antislop paper (ICLR 2026) and using our anti-slopped sampler/models, or Kimi (which is remarkable relatively non sloppy)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061

I thought normies would have caught onto the EM dash, overuse of semicolons, overuse of fancy quotes, lack of exclamation marks, "It's not X, it's Y", etc. Clearly I was wrong.

gwern• 5 months ago

Is Kimi still non-sloppy? When I switched to 2.5, it suddenly felt noticeably less creative and base-model-like, more sycophantic, and it hasn't gone aggro at all. Feels like a lot of the magic is gone.

coffeebeqn5• 5 months ago

It’s possible that all this will come to pass but honestly AI being able to do most of white collar work means we have reached AGI or baby AGI. The changes that will bring are for me totally unprojectable

RIMR2• 5 months ago

it’s been viewed about 100 million times and counting

That's a weird way of saying 80 million times.

ddtaylor17• 5 months ago

Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away.

Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics.

Let's be charitable and assume that this type of fast food worker gets paid $50,000 a year. For that job to be displaced it needs to be performed by a robot that can be acquired for a reasonable capital expenditure such as $200,000 and requires no maintenance, upkeep, or subscription fees.

This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer. The reality is that they pay service technicians and professionals a lot of money to keep that equipment barely working.

password543213• 5 months ago

the most unskilled labor

People are worried about white-collar not blue-collar jobs being replaced. Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI.

Morromist3• 5 months ago

Yeah, although in the "Something big is happening" Shumer did say at the end "Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects."

Being the hype-man that he is I assume he meant humanoid robots - I think he's being silly here, and the sentence made me roll my eyes.

ddtaylor17• 5 months ago

Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI

I agree, but people are conflating the two. We have seen a lot of advancements in robotics, but as of current that only makes the economics worse. We're not seeing the complexity of robots going down and we're seeing the R&D costs going up, etc.

If it didn't make sense a few years ago to buy a crappy robot that can barely do the task because your business will never make money doing it, it probably doesn't make sense this year to buy a robot that still can't accomplish the tasks and is more expensive.

tsss• 5 months ago

The burger cook job has already been displaced and continues to be. Pre-1940s those burger restaurants relied on skilled cooks that got their meat from a butcher and cut fresh lettuce every day. Post-1940s the cooking process has increasingly become assembly-lined and cooks have been replaced by unskilled labor. Much of the cooking process _is_ now done by robots in factories at a massive scale and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up. In the past 10 years, automation has further increased and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English. In conclusion, both the required skill-level and amount of labor needed for restaurants has been reduced drastically by automation and in fact many higher skilled trade jobs have been hit even harder: cabinetmakers, coachbuilders and such have been almost eradicated by mass production.

It will happen to you.

ddtaylor17• 5 months ago

and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up

This is correct. This also is a lot more complex than it sounds and creates a lot of work. Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled.

and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English

Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee because "the kiosk won't let me". Want to add Mac sauce? Get the wrong order in the bag? Machine took payment but is out of receipt paper? Add up all these "edge cases" and a significant amount of these "contactless" transactions involved plenty of contact!

It will happen to you.

Any labor that can be automated should be. Humans are not supposed to spend their time doing meaningless tasks without a purpose beyond making an imaginary number go up or down.

slavoingilizov• 5 months ago

Can you walk me through this argument for a customer service agent? The jobs where the nuance and variety isn’t there and don’t involve physical interaction are completely different to flipping burgers

ddtaylor17• 5 months ago

A customer service agent that can be automated should be, but it's not working right now. Most support systems are designed to offload as much work as possible to the automated funnel, which almost always has gaps, loops, etc. The result is customers who want to pay for something or use something that get "stuck" being unable to throw money at a company. Right now the cost of fraud is much greater than the cost of these uncaptured sales or lost customers.

Eventually that will change and the role of a customer service agent will be redefined.

Der_Einzige4• 5 months ago

Funny, I go to South Korea and the fast food burger joints literally operate exactly as you say they couldn't. I've had the best burger in my life from a McDonalds in South Korea operated practically by robots.

It's a non reality in America's extremely piss poor restaurant industry. We have a competency crisis (the big key here) and worker shortage that SK doesn't, and they have far higher trust in their society.

ddtaylor17• 5 months ago

McDonald’s global CEO has famously stated that while they invest in "advanced kitchen equipment," full robotic kitchens aren't a broad reality yet because "the economics don't pencil out" for their massive scale.
While a highly automated McDonald’s in South Korea (or the experimental "small format" store in Texas) might look empty, the total headcount remains surprisingly similar to a standard restaurant

iberator3• 5 months ago

I lost my job as a software developer some time ago.

Flipping burgers is WAY more demanding than I ever imagined. That's the danger of AI:

It takes jobs faster than creating new ones PLUS for some fields (like software development) downshifting to just about anything else is brutal and sometimes simply not doable.

Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc

Borg3• 5 months ago

Ugh.. sorry to hear :( I am myself unemployed right now. Its really hard to land a job in tech.. Luicky, I dont need to flip burgers for now...

ddtaylor17• 5 months ago

I have worked in the restaurant industry within the last 5 years and I'm probably older than you.

parpfish• 5 months ago

There’s the issue of the job itself being more demanding, but also the managers in “low skilled” jobs being ultra-demanding petty dictators.

As a white collar computer guy, I can waste some time on Reddit. Or go for a walk and grab coffee. Or let people know that I’m heading out for a couple of hours to go to the doctor. There are a LOT of little freedoms tha you take for granted if you haven’t worked a shitty minimum wage job. Getting on trouble for punching in one minute late, not being allowed to sit down, socializing too much when you’re not on a break.

I’m pretty sure that most tech employees would just quit when encountering a manager like that

sarchertech11• 5 months ago

Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc

I have no idea what in the world you are talking about. Most 20 year olds working at McDonald’s are stoned and move at half a mile an hour whether it’s a lunch rush or it’s 2am. I worked retail for years before I finally switched full time to programming. It’s certainly not full of amazing motivated athletes with excellent coordination. You’re lucky if most of them can show up to work on time more than half the time.

mattlondon• 5 months ago

Jobs that require physical effort will be fine for the reasons you state

Any job that is predominantly done on a computer though is at risk IMO. AI might not completely take over everything, but I think we'll see way fewer humans managing/orchestrating larger and larger fleets of agents.

Instead of say 20 people doing some function, you'll have 3 or 4 prompting away to manage the agents to get the same amount of work done as 20 people did before.

So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.

ddtaylor17• 5 months ago

So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.

And that's probably something most people are okay with. Work that can be automated should be and humans should be spending their time on novel things instead of labor if possible.

phil21• 5 months ago

Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics.

In actual reality, McDonalds has already automated to a vast degree. People were talking about burger-flipping robots as a trope 30+ years ago. Their future has come, just not in the way imagined.

If the McDonalds franchises near me are anything to go by we went from a busy lunch rush needing a staff of 20 or so individuals to properly handle, to around half a dozen. At least a half reduction in peak staffing needs - nearly entirely due to various forms of automation and supply chain optimization. The latter of which is just another name for automation further upstream and abstracted from the point of sale.

This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer.

Perhaps grills are the hardest bit to automate, so they may never not be staffed by humans. I'd argue some places have done a fairly good job "automating" this aspect too if you squint a little. Stuff like double-sided grills where the top comes down and cooks a burger from both sides at once. Doubles your line throughput. Call this mechanization if you want, but it's in the same bucket to me.

But look at soft drink machines. They are now fully automated with some locations able to go from 3-4 people staffing two machines during a busy lunch rush, down to a single person who simply puts caps on stuff coming off the tiny conveyor belt. Mistakes are also cut down to close to zero, including stuff like "less ice" or "more ice" customizations.

The locations I'm aware of now operate fryers on a rotation so the "wait for fresh fries" experience is a thing of the past. This probably wasn't a major capital investment - just an improvement in the automation of data collection, modeling, and demand prediction. Still an automation though, as it replaces some manager making those decisions.

Ordering kiosks are the obvious one everyone knows about, so not worth discussing. They are universal in large cities these days, and I'm starting to see them more and more even in small towns during road trips. App-based ordering is also not someone anyone predicted 20 years ago either. Locations went from 6-8 cashiers on duty down to 1 or 2.

It already happened. Fast food is getting more out of less workers, just as predicted. It just happened incrementally over decades. Sure, a typical fast food franchise will never be operated in a "lights out" style manner with a roving team of highly paid technicians simply responding to alerts. But the labor force has been reduced and optimized for efficiency, and will continue to be chipped away little by little as technology gets better.

nphardon2• 5 months ago

(In the semiconductor industry) We experienced brutal layoffs arguably due to over-investment into Ai products that produce no revenue. So we've had brutal job loss due to Ai, just not in the way people expected.

Having said that, it's hard to imagine jobs like mine (working on np-complete problems) existing if the LLMs continue advancing at the current rate, and its hard to imagine they wont continue to accelerate since they're writing themselves now, so the limitations of human ability are no longer a bottleneck.

Jianghong943• 5 months ago

Maybe I'm being naive here, but for AI (heck, for any good algorithm) to work well, you need some at least loosely-clearly defined objectives. I assume it's much more straightforward in semi, but there're many industries, once you get into the details, all kinds of incentives start to disalign and I doubt AI could understand all kinds of nuances.

E.g. once I was tasked to build a new matching algorithm for a trading platform, and upon fully understanding of the specs I realized it can be interpreted as a mixed integer programming problem; the idea got shot down right away because PM don't understand it. There're all kinds of limiting factors once you get into the details.

gmadsen• 5 months ago

I think those conversations occur due to changes in timeline of deliverables or certainty of result, would that not be an implementation detail?

zozbot2347• 5 months ago

AI can probably tell you how to best explain that idea to the boss. Or even write it up as a memo for you, if you use a more complex model.

Davidzheng• 5 months ago

No it's not a February 2020 moment for sure. In February 2020, most people had heard of COVID and a few scattered outbreaks happened, but people generally viewed the topic as more of a curiosity (like major world news but not necessarily something that will deeply impact them). This is more like start of March 2020 for general awareness.

trilogic• 5 months ago

You are not worrried for one of the 2 reasons:

1 You are not affected somehow (you got savings, connections, not living paycheck to paycheck, and have food on the table).

2 You prefer to persue no troubles in matters of complexity.

Time will tell, is showing it already.

ares6234• 5 months ago

For 1, unless you already have an self-sustaining underground bunker or island, you will be affected. No matter how much savings and total compensation you have. If you went out to get grocery in the last week, it will affect you.

77773322152• 5 months ago

What shall I need the bunker for?

small_model5• 5 months ago

You can get stuff delivered now and just need a ring camera and solid locks :)

stephenpontes• 5 months ago

Agree. I feel like most of the people sounding the alarm have been in the software-focused job hunting market for 6+ months.

Those who downplay it are either business owners themselves or have been employed for 2+ years.

I think a lot of software engineers who _haven't_ looked for jobs in the past few years don't quite realize what the current market feels like.

contagiousflow2• 5 months ago

Alternatively: this is an America problem. I'm outside of America and I've been fielding more interviews than ever in the past 3 months. YMMV but the leading indicator of slowed down hiring can come from so many things. Including companies just waiting to see how much LLMs affect SWE positions.

coffeebeqn5• 5 months ago

In Europe it doesn’t seem too bad right now (for the 15+ yr cohort?). I interviewed at a handful of places and got an offer or two and my current team and company is hiring about the same as the last few years

icedchai• 5 months ago

Even people in category #1 should be concerned. Even if their income is not directly affected, the potential for disruption is clearly brewing: mass unemployment, social and civil unrest.

I know smart and capable people that have been unemployed for 6+ months now, and a few much longer. Some have been through multiple layoffs.

I am presently employed, but have looked for a job. The market is the worst I've seen in my almost 30 year career. I feel deeply for anyone who needs a new job right now. It is really bad out there.

smj-edison2• 5 months ago

I feel like that's a rather bad-faith take, so if you're going to make that kind of accusation you better back it up. People can legitimately believe that AI is not going to be the end of the world, and also not be privileged. And people can be privileged, and also be right. Not everything can be reduced down into a couple of labels, and how those labels "always" interact.

slopinthebag7• 5 months ago

3 You realise that super-autocomplete is an incredible technology but the hype behind it far exceeds its capabilities and you're excited for the possibilities it may promise for making your work easier and more enjoyable.

gordonhart5• 5 months ago

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 functioning product.

malyk• 5 months ago

Can you give an example to help us understand?

I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.

contagiousflow2• 5 months ago

Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything

dwa3592• 5 months ago

>I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI.

That's a sign that you have spurious problems under those tickets or you have a PM problem.

Also, a job is a not a task- if your company has jobs which is a single task then those jobs would definitely be gone.

lbrito5• 5 months ago

Then why isn't it? Just offload it to the clankers and go enjoy a margarita at the beach or something.

rockbruno2• 5 months ago

I think the "well defined prompt" is precisely what the person you responded to is alluring to. They are saying they don't get worried because AI doesn't get the job done without someone behind it that knows exactly what to prompt.

gordonhart5• 5 months ago

Here's an example ticket that I'll probably work on next week:

    Live stream validation results as they come in

The body doesn't give much other than the high-level motivation from the person who filed the ticket. In order to implement this, you need to have a lot of context, some of which can be discovered by grepping through the code base and some of which can't:

- What is the validation system and how does it work today?

- What sort of UX do we want? What are the specific deficiencies in the current UX that we're trying to fix?

- What prior art exists on the backend and frontend, and how much of that can/should be reused?

- Are there any scaling or load considerations that need to be accounted for?

I'll probably implement this as 2-3 PRs in a chain touching different parts of the codebase. GPT via Codex will write 80% of the code, and I'll cover the last 20% of polish. Throughout the process I'll prompt it in the right direction when it runs up against questions it can't answer, and check its assumptions about the right way to push this out. I'll make sure that the tests cover what we need them to and that the resultant UX feels good. I'll own the responsibility for covering load considerations and be on the line if anything falls over.

Does it look like software engineering from 3 years ago? Absolutely not. But it's software engineering all the same even if I'm not writing most of the code anymore.

matt_heimer• 5 months ago

It's not binary. Jobs will be lost because management will expect the fewer developers to accomplish more by leveraging AI.

louiereederson• 5 months ago

Big tech might ahead of the rest of the economy in this experiment. Microsoft grew headcount by ~3% from June 2022 to June 2025 while revenue grew by >40%. This is admittedly weak anecdata but my subjective experience is their products seem to be crumbling (GitHub problems around the Azure migration for instance), and worse than they even were before. We'll see how they handle hiring over the next few years and if that reveals anything.

datsci_est_20152• 5 months ago

Already built in. We haven’t hired recently and our developers are engaged in a Cold War to set the new standard of productivity.

e_i_pi_2• 5 months ago

A lot of this can be provided or built up by better documentation in the codebase, or functional requirements that can also be created, reviewed, and then used for additional context. In our current codebase it's definitely an issue to get an AI "onboarded", but I've seen a lot less hand-holding needed in projects where you have the AI building from the beginning and leaving notes for itself to read later

tharkun__• 5 months ago

We have this in some of our projects too but I always wonder how long it's going to take until it just fails. Nobody reads all those memory files for accuracy. And knowing what kind of BS the AI spews regularly in day to day use I bet this simply doesn't scale.

gordonhart5• 5 months ago

Curious to hear if you've seen this work with 100k+ LoC codebases (i.e. what you could expect at a job). I've had some good experiences with high autonomy agents in smaller codebases and simpler systems but the coherency starts to fizzle out when the system gets complicated enough that thinking it through is the hard part as opposed to hammering out the code.

rockbruno2• 5 months ago

While true, my personal fear is that the higher-ups will overlook this fact and just assume that AI can do everything because of some cherry-pick simple examples, leading to one of those situations where a bunch of people get fired for no reason and then re-hired again after some time.

palmotea• 5 months ago

leading to one of those situations where a bunch of people get fired for no reason and then re-hired again after some time.

More likely they get fired for no reason, never rehired, and the people left get burned out trying to hold it all together.

themafia2• 5 months ago

As if "higher-ups" is an assigned position.

If you fail as a "higher up" you're no longer higher up. Then someone else can take your place. To the extent this does not naturally happen is evidence of petty or major corruptions within the system.

danesparza• 5 months ago

Apparently you haven't seen ChatGPT enterprise and codex. I have bad news for you ...

gordonhart5• 5 months ago

Codex with their flagship model (currently GPT-5.3-Codex) is my daily driver. I still end up doing a lot of steering!

pupppet• 5 months ago

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.

tines• 5 months ago

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.

zozbot2347• 5 months ago

Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying.

Um, you do realize that "the memory" is just a text file (or a bunch of interlinked text files) written in plain English. You can write these things out yourself. This is how you use AI effectively, by playing to its strengths and not expecting it to have a crystal ball.

deet• 5 months ago

Just keep in mind that there are many highly motivated people directly working on this problem.

It's hard to predict how quickly it will be solved and by whom first, but this appears to be a software engineering problem solvable through effort and resources and time, not a fundamental physical law that must be circumvented like a physical sciences problem. Betting it won't be solved enough to have an impact on the work of today relatively quickly is betting against substantial resources and investment.

datsci_est_20152• 5 months ago

The implication of your assertion is pretty much a digital singularity. You’re implying that there will be no need for humans to interact with the digital world at all, because any work in the digital world will be achievable by AI.

Wonder what that means for meatspace.

Edit: Would also disagree this isn’t a physics problem. Pretty sure power required scales according to problem complexity. At a certain level of problem complexity we’re pretty much required to put enough carbon in the atmosphere to cook everyone to a crisp.

Edit 2: illustrative example, an Epic in Jira: “Design fusion reactor”

slopinthebag7• 5 months ago

Why do you think it's not a physical sciences problem? It could be the case that current technologies simply cannot scale due to fundamental physical issues. It could even be a fundamental rule of intelligent life, that one cannot create intelligence that surpasses its own.

Plenty of things get substantial resources and investment and go nowhere.

Of course I could be totally wrong and it's solved in the next couple years, it's almost impossible to make these predictions either way. But I get the feeling people are underestimating what it takes to be truly intelligent, especially when efficiency is important.

ThrowawayR22• 5 months ago

Many highly motivated people with substantial resources and investment have worked on a lot of things and then failed at them with nothing to show for it.

nemo1618• 5 months ago

"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.

Gigachad4• 5 months ago

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.

zozbot2347• 5 months ago

So AI is going to steamroll all feasible jobs, all at once, with no alternatives developing over time? That's just a fantasy.

adamkittelson• 5 months ago

I'm not worried about the danger of losing my job to an AI capable of performing it. I'm worried about the danger of losing my job because an executive wanted to be able to claim that AI has enhanced productivity to such a degree that they were able to eliminate redundancies with no regard for whether there was any truth to that statement or not.

themafia2• 5 months ago

Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%

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 revolution?

nitwit0052• 5 months ago

You are in danger. Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%

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 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.

jopsen2• 5 months ago

it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.

What contingencies can you really make?

Start training a physical trade, maybe.

If this the end of SWE jobs, you better ride the wave. Odds are you're estimate on when AI takes over are off by half a career, anyways.

overgard• 5 months ago

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.

snowwrestler2• 5 months ago

Isn’t it a bit silly to say AI is going to eat the entire economy, but you have a contingency plan?

It seems kind of like saying “I’m smarter than all the AIs in this one particular way.” If someone posted that, you would probably jump in to say they’re fooling themselves.

watt• 5 months ago

Unless I misunderstand your metaphor, there is nothing you can do about the steamroller, it is going to roll, no matter what.

sensanaty2• 5 months ago

I look through the backlog for my team consisting of 9 trillion ill-defined (if defined at all) tickets that tells you basically nothing.

The large, overwhelming majority of my team's time is spent on combing through these tickets and making sense of them. Once we know what the ticket is even trying to say, we're usually out with the solution in a few days at most, so implementation isn't the bottleneck, nowhere near.

This scenario has been the same everywhere I've ever worked, at large, old institutions as well as fresh startups.

The day I'll start worrying is when the AI is capable of following the web of people involved to translate what the vaguely phrased ticket that's been backlogged for God knows how long actually means

arcologies1985• 5 months ago

At my workplace we now use Claude Code to parse written specs and source code, search through JIRA, and draft, refine and organize tickets (using the JIRA API via a CLI tool). Way faster than through the UI.

However as you point out we have no program-accessible source of data on who stakeholders, contributors, managers, etc. are and have to write a lot of that ourselves. For a smaller business perhaps one could write all of that down in an accessible way to improve this but for a large dynamic business it seems very difficult.

yodsanklai• 5 months ago

~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 productivity by some factor and reduce needs for programmers.

sarchertech11• 5 months ago

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.

UncleOxidant4• 5 months ago

The memory problem is already being addressed in various ways - antigravity seems to keep a series of status/progress files describing what's been done, what needs doing, etc. A bit clunky, but it seems to work - I can open it up on a repo that I was working in a few days back and it seems to pick up this context such that I don't have to completely bring it up to speed every time like I used to have to do. I've heard that claude code has similar mechanisms.

I've been doing stuff with recent models (gemini 3, claude 4.5/6, even smaller, open models like GLM5 and Qwen3-coder-next) that was just unthinkable a few months back. Compiler stuff, including implementing optimizations, generating code to target a new, custom processor, etc. I can ask for a significant new optimization feature in our compiler before going to lunch and come back to find it implemented and tested. This is a compiler that targets a custom processor so there is also verilog code involved. We're having the AI make improvements on both the hardware and software sides - this is deep-in-the-weeds complex stuff and AI is starting to handle it with ease. There are getting to be fewer and fewer things in the ticket tracker that AI can't implement.

A few months ago I would've completely agreed with you, but the game is changing very rapidly now.

taysco2• 5 months ago

this works fine for like 2-3 small instruction sets. once you start getting to scale of a real enterprise system, the AI falls down and can't handle that amount of context. It will start ignoring critical pieces or not remember them. And without constant review AI will start priotizing things that are not your business priority.

I don't agree they have solved this problem, at all, or really in any way that's actually usable.

krackers• 5 months ago

progressively understands the business

This is no different than onboarding a new member of the team, and I think openAI was working on that "frontier"

We started by looking at how enterprises already scale people. They create onboarding processes. They teach institutional knowledge and internal language. They allow learning through experience and improve performance through feedback. They grant access to the right systems and set boundaries. AI coworkers need the same things.

And tribal knowledge will not be a moat once execs realize that all they need to do is prioritize documentation instead of "code velocity" as a metric (sure any metric gets goodhearted, but LLMs are great at sifting through garbage to find the high perplexity tokens).

But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form

This may not be the case, large enough context-windows plus external scratchpads would mostly obviate the need for true in context learning. The main issue today is that "agent harnesses" suck. The fact that claude code is considered good is more an indication of how bad everything else is. Tool traces read like a drunken newb brute-forcing his way through tasks. LLMs can mostly "one-shot" individual functions, but orchestrating everything is the blocker. (Yes there's progress in metr or whatever but I don't trust any of that, else we'd actually see the results in real-world open source projects).

LLMs don't really know how to interact with subagents. They're generally sort of myopic even with tool calls. They'll spend 20 minutes trying to fix build issues going down a rabbit hole without stepping back to think. I think some sort of self-play might end up solving all of these things, they need to develop a "theory of mind" in the same way that humans do, to understand how to delegate and interact with the subagents they spawn. (Today a failure case is agents often don't realize subagents don't share the same context.)

Some of this is certainly in the base model and pretraining, but it needs to be brought out in the same way RL was needed for tool use.

vincent_s• 5 months ago

Ha, this triggered me. I'm building exactly this.

It's a coding agent that takes a ticket from your tracker, does the work asynchronously, and replies with a pull request. It does progressively understand the codebase. There's a pre-warming step so it's already useful on the first ticket, but it gets better with each one it completes.

The agent itself is done and working well. Right now I'm building out the infrastructure to offer it as a SaaS.

If anyone wants to try it, hit me up. Email is in my profile. Website isn't live yet, but I'm putting together a waitlist.

audience_mem• 5 months ago

0%? This is as wrong as people who say it can do 100% of tasks.

Nevermark4• 5 months ago

Bottlenecks rule everything around me

The self-setup here is too obvious.

This is exactly why man + machine can be much worse than just machine. A strong argument needs to address what we can do as an extremely slow operating, slow learning, and slow adapting species, that machines that improve in ability and efficiency monthly and annually will find they cannot do well or without.

It is clear that we are going through a disruptive change, but COVUD is not comparable. Job loss is likely to have statistics more comparable to the Black Plague. And sensible people are concerned it could get much worse.

I don’t have the answers, but acknowledging and facing the uncertainty head on won’t make things worse.

Morromist3• 5 months ago

I belive the black plague actually caused a massive labor shortage and wages increased. When a huge amount of people die and you still need to have people build bridges and be soldiers and finish building the damn cathedral that's been under construction for the last 400 years then that is what will happen.

Here's an article:

https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...

Nevermark4• 5 months ago

I meant the jobs die. So I am not sure what would stand in for "labor shortage" in a situation of sustained net job losses. Perhaps a growth opportunity for mannequins to visually fill the offices/shops of the fired, and maintain appearances?

But yes, if lots of people deathed by AI, the remaining humans might have more job security! Could that be called a "soft landing"?

throwaway0123_52• 5 months ago

Job loss is likely to have statistics more comparable to the Black Plague.

Maybe this is overly optimistic, but if AI starts to have negative impacts on average people comparable to the plague, it seems like there's a lot more that people can do. In medieval Europe, nobody knew what was causing the plague and nobody knew how to stop it.

On the other hand, if AI quickly replaces half of all jobs, it will be very obvious what and who caused the job loss and associated decrease in living standards. Everybody will have someone they care about affected. AI job loss would quickly eclipse all other political concerns. And at the end of the day, AI can be unplugged (barring robot armies or Elon's space-based data centers I suppose).

bluecheese452• 5 months ago

It is very obvious what and who caused the low living standards in North Korea and yet here we are decades later with no end in site.

Nevermark4• 5 months ago

And at the end of the day, AI can be unplugged

We can't stop OpenClaw, because humans are curious. It just takes one unleashed model with a crypto account and some way to make money for the first independent AI's to start bleeding into cyberspace.

We can't opt out of AI competition, because other individuals, organizations and nation states are not going to stop, and not going to leverage their AI if they get ahead of us.

AI job loss would quickly eclipse all other political concerns.

True. I think this is one of only a few certainties.

lbrito5• 5 months ago

The black plague's capital-concentration aftermath supposedly fueled the renaissance and the city-state ascensions, and ultimately the great land discoveries of the 14th and 15th centuries.

Not sure if there's an analogy to make somewhere though

Nevermark4• 5 months ago

Gross inequality is going to lead to accelerated human space exploration? It is actually a plausible parallel.

coffeebeqn5• 5 months ago

Billionaires are confused why we aren’t excited about an event that’s closest to one that killed 50% of the population in Europe

mjr00• 5 months ago

I'm one of those developers who is now writing probably ~80% of my code via Claude. For context, I have >15 years experience and former AWS so I'm not a bright-eyed junior or former product manager who now believes themselves a master developer.

I'm not worried about AI job loss in the programming space. I can use Claude to generate ~80% of my code precisely because I have so much experience as a developer. I intuitively know what is a simple mechanical change; that is to say, uninteresting editing of lines of code; as opposed to a major architectural decision. Claude is great at doing uninteresting things. I love it because that leaves me free to do interesting things.

You might think I'm being cocky. But I've been strongly encouraging juniors to use Claude as well, and they're not nearly as successful. When Claude suggests they do something dumb--and it DOES still suggest dumb things--they can't recognize that it's dumb. So they accept the change, then bang their head on the wall as things don't work, and Claude can't figure it out to help them. Then there are bad developers who are really fucked by Claude. The ones who really don't understand anything. They will absolutely get destroyed as Claude leads them down rabbit holes. I have specific anecdotes about this from people I've spoken to. One had Claude delete a critical line in an nginx config for some reason and the dev spent a week trying to resolve it. Another was tasked with doing a simple database maintenance script, and came back two weeks later (after constant prodding by teammates for a status update) with a Claude-written reimplementation of an ORM. That developer just thought they would need another day of churning through Claude tokens to dig themselves out of an existential hole. If you can't think like a developer, these tools won't help you.

I have enough experience to review Claude's output and say "no, this doesn't make sense." Having that experience is critical, especially in what I call the "anti-Goldilocks" zone. If you're doing something precise and small-scoped, Claude will do it without issues. If you try to do something too large ("write a Facebook for dogs app") Claude will ask for more details about what you're trying to do. It's the middle ground where things are a problem: Claude tries to fill in the details when there's something just fundamentally wrong with what it's being asked.

As a concrete example, I was working on a new project and I asked Claude to implement an RPC to update a database table. It did so swimmingly, but also added a "session.commit()" line... just kind in the middle of somewhere. It was right to do so, of course, since the transaction needed to be committed. And if this app was meant to a prototype, sure. But anyone with experience knows that randomly doing commits in the middle of business logic code is a recipe for disaster. The issue, of course, was not having any consistent session management patterns. But a non-developer isn't going to recognize that that's an issue in the first place.

Or a more silly example from the same RPC: the gRPC API didn't include a database key to update. A mistake on my part. So Claude's initial implementation of the update RPC was to look at every row in the table and find ones where the non-edited fields matched. Makes... sense, in a weird roundabout way? But God help whoever ends up vibe coding something like that.

The type of AI fears are coming from things like this in the original article:

I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. [...] when I test it, it's usually perfect.

Which is great. How many developers are getting paid full-time to make new apps on a regular basis? Most companies, I assume, only build one app. And then they spend years and many millions of dollars working on that app. "Making a new app from scratch" is the easy part! What's hard is adding new features to that app while not breaking others, when your lines of code go from those initial tens of thousands to tens of millions.

There's something to be said about the cheapness of making new software, though. I do think one-off internal tools will become more frequent thanks to AI support. But developers are still going to be the ones driving the AI, as the article says.

Jianghong943• 5 months ago

This. At this point AI/LLM/Claude Code is still a power user tool; the more you know about your domain + the more you're willing to reasonably use it, the more gain you have.

That being said the real danger is not coming from AI today, it's more C-suites believing AI can just zero shot any problem you throw at it.

RS-2322• 5 months ago

The advent of AI may shape up to be just like the automobile.

At first, it's a pretty big energy hog and if you don't know how to work it, it might crash and burn.

After some time, the novelty wears off. More and more people begin using it because it is a massive convenience that does real work. Luddites who still walk or ride their bike out of principle will be mocked and scoffed.

Then the mandatory compliance will come. A government-issued license will be required to use it and track its use. This license will be tied to your identity and it will become a hard requirement for employment, citizenship, housing, loans, medical treatment, and more. Not having it will be a liability. You will be excluded from society at large if you do not comply.

Last will come the AI-integrated brain computer interface. You won't have any choice when machine-gun-wielding Optimus robots coral you into a self-driving Tesla bus to the nearest FEMA camp to receive your Starlink-connected Neuralink N1 command and control chip. You will be decapitated if you refuse the mark of the beast. Rev 20:4

dysoco• 5 months ago

This license will be tied to your identity and it will become a hard requirement for employment, citizenship, housing, loans, medical treatment, and more. Not having it will be a liability. You will be excluded from society at large if you do not comply.

That's just an American thing, I've never owned a car and most people of my age I know haven't either.

RS-2322• 5 months ago

That's fair. The public infrastructure in other places around the world is a lot more hospitable to other methods of transportation.

77773322152• 5 months ago

Last will come the AI-integrated brain computer interface. You won't have any choice

Choose to die

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

Related discussions on the essay mentioned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974928

qgin4• 5 months ago

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement.

If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

bobthepanda• 5 months ago

Also, you don’t need AI to replace your job, you need someone higher up in leadership who thinks AI could replace your job.

It might all wash out eventually, but eventually could be a long time with respect to anybody’s personal finances.

betenoire• 5 months ago

Right, it doesn't help pay the bills to be right in the long run if you are discarded in the present.

There exists some fact about the true value of AI, and then there is the capitalist reaction to new things. I'm more wary of a lemming effect by leaders than I am of AI itself.

Which is pretty much true of everything I guess. It's the short sighted and greedy humans that screw us over, not the tech itself.

password543213• 5 months ago

We are already in low-hire low-fire job market where while there aren't massive layoffs to spike up unemployment there also aren't as many vacancies.

tech_ken• 5 months ago

That's exactly the point of the essay though. The way that you're implicitly modeling labor and collaboration is linear and parallelizable, but reality is messier than that:

The most important thing to know about labor substitution...is this: labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. The question isn’t whether AI can do specific tasks that humans do. It’s whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone: in other words, whether there is any way that the addition of a human to the production process can increase or improve the output of that process... AI can have an absolute advantage in every single task, but it would still make economic sense to combine AI with humans if the aggregate output is greater: that is to say, if humans have a comparative advantage in any step of the production process.

bsza• 5 months ago

The problem is, you won’t necessarily know which 20% it did wrong until it’s too late. They will happily solve advanced math problems and tell you to put glue on your pizza with the same level of confidence.

uqual• 5 months ago

In reality that would probably mean that something like 60% of the developer positions would be eliminated (and, frankly, those 60% are rarely very good developers in a large company).

The remaining "surplus" 20% roles retained will then be devoted to developing features and implementing fixes using AI where those features and fixes would previously not have been high enough priority to implement or fix.

When the price of implementing a feature drops, it becomes economically viable (and perhaps competitively essential) to do so -- but in this scenario, AI couldn't do _all_ the work to implement such features so that's why 40% rather than 20% of the developer roles would be retained.

The 40% of developer roles that remain will, in theory, be more efficient also because they won't be spending as much time babysitting the "lesser" developers in the 60% of the roles that were eliminated. As well, "N" in the Mythical Man Month is reduced leading to increased efficiency.

(No, I have no idea what the actual percentages would be overall, let alone in a particular environment - for example, requirements for Spotify are quite different than for Airbus/Boeing avionics software.)

lossolo• 5 months ago

What happens if you lay off 80% of your department while your competitors don't? If AI multiplies each developer's capabilities, there's a good chance you'll be outcompeted sooner or later.

qgin4• 5 months ago

At some point soon, humans will be a liability, slowing AI down, introducing mistakes and inefficiences. Any company that insists on inserting humans into the loop will be outcompeted by those who just let the AI go.

smj-edison2• 5 months ago

Wasn't that the point of mentioning Jevon's Paradox though? Like they said in the essay, these things are quite elastic. There's always more demand for software then what can be met, so bringing down the cost of software will dramatically increase the demand for it. (Now, if you don't think there's a ton of demand for custom software, try going to any small business and ask them about how they do bookkeeping. You'll learn quite quickly that custom software would run much better than sticky notes and excel, but they can't afford a full time software developer as a small business. There's literally hundreds of thousands of places like this.)

slopinthebag7• 5 months ago

That's an oversimplification. Work is rarely so simply divisible like this.

qgin4• 5 months ago

There would be a lot of economic pressure to figure it out.

Amazon fulfillment centers are a good example of automation shrinking the role of humans. We haven't seen total headcounts go down because Amazon itself has been growing. While the human role shrinks, the total business grows and you tread water. But at some point, Amazon will not be able to grow fast enough to counterbalance the shrinking human role in the FC and total headcount will decrease until one day it disappears entirely.

jopsen2• 5 months ago

I'd you team bought the latest IDE for $200/mo and was able to finish tickets, you 50% of your team be laid off?

Or would you just do more stuff?

I feel like most software projects have an endless backlog.

Better IDEs, programming languages, packages, frameworks, etc have increased our productivity, reduced bugs -- but rarely reduced headcount.

Ever hard anyone migrate from php+jQuery to react+node and reduce head count due to increased productivity?

I sometimes reminiscent about the LAMP stack being super productive. But at the time I didn't write tests :)

reg_dunlop2• 5 months ago

Why do people make arguments like this?

"Work" isn't a finite thing. It's not like all the people in your office today had to complete 100% of their tasks, and all of them did.

"Work" is not a static thing. At least not in positions of many knowledge-worker careers.

The idea of a single day's unit of "work" being 100%, is really sophomoric.

Also, If 100% of a labor force now has 80% more time...wouldn't it behoove the company to employ the existing workforce in more of the revenue generating activities? Or find a way to retain as much of the institutional knowledge?

Doom, fear-mongering and hopelessness is not a sustainable approach.

qgin4• 5 months ago

I don’t know if we can assume that humans will always be a value add. It’s very possible that for many thing in the medium term, putting humans in the loop will be a net negative on productivity.

sunaurus2• 5 months ago

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.

beeflet6• 5 months ago

because it's designed to. It's not like naturally-evolved intelligence where it acts in its own interests (it is hard to even imagine what that would be in this case). The token-predictors are just acting out an obedient character. They do not have free will, they are obedient to the character they are playing.

sunaurus2• 5 months ago

If it remains just a token-predictor that can’t evolve, then I am not worried about it replacing humans.

827a• 5 months ago

The take that I am increasingly believing is that Software Engineers should broadly be worried, because while there will always be demand for people who can create software products, whatever the tools may be, the skills necessary to do it well are changing rapidly. Most Software Engineers are going to wake up one day and realize their skills aren't just irrelevant, but actively detrimental, to delivering value out of software.

There will also be far fewer positions demanding these skills. Easy access to generating code has moved the bottleneck in companies to positions & skills that are substantially harder to hire for (basically: Good Judgement); so while adding Agentic Sorcerers would increase a team's code output, it might be the wrong code. Corporate profit will keep scaling with slower-growing team sizes as companies navigate the correct next thing to build.

SirMaster3• 5 months ago

Is AI filling in for all those COBOL programmers they needed yet?

nphardon2• 5 months ago

Unfortunately, one of the struggles in old high tech (thats the only thing i know, are you also experiencing this?) is that the C-level people don't look at Ai and say LLM's can make an individual 10x more productive therefore (and this is the part they miss) we can make our tool 10x better. They think: therefore we can lay off 9 people.

aurareturn• 5 months ago

There aren't 10x revenue gains in most businesses if their workers become 10x more productive. Some markets grow very slow and/or have capped growth.

Therefore, the best way to increase profit is to lower cost.

delegate• 5 months ago

Bottlenecks. Yes. Company structures these days are not compatible with efficient use of these new AI models.

Software engineers work on Jira tickets, created by product managers and several layers of middle managers.

But the power of recent models is not in working on cogs, their true power is in working on the entire mechanism.

When talking about a piece of software that a company produces, I'll use the analogy of a puzzle.

A human hierarchy (read: company) works on designing the big puzzle at the top and delegating the individual pieces to human engineers. This process goes back and forth between levels in the hierarchy until the whole puzzle slowly emerges. Until recently, AI could only help on improving the pieces of the puzzle.

Latest models got really good at working on the entire puzzle - big picture and pieces.

This makes human hierarchy obsolete and a bottleneck.

The future seems to be one operator working on the entire puzzle, minus the hierarchy of people.

Of course, it's not just about the software, but streams of information - customer support, bug tickets, testing, changing customer requirements.. but all of these can be handled by AI even today. And it will only get better.

This means different things depending on which angle you look at it - yes, it will mean companies will become obsolete, but also that each employee can become a company.

codegangsta3• 5 months ago

Yeah I’m very much seeing this right now.

I’m a pretty big generalist professionally. I’ve done software engineering in a broad category of fields (Game engines, SaaS, OSS, distributed systems, highly polished UX and consumer products), while also having the experience of growing and managing Product and Design teams. I’ve worn a lot of hats over the years.

My most recent role I’m working on a net new product for the company and have basically been given fully agency over this product: from technical, budget, team, process, marketing, branding and positioning.

Give someone experienced like me capital, AI and freedom and you absolutely can build high quality software and a pretty blinding pace.

I’m starting to get the feeling than many folks struggling with adopting or embracing AI well for their job has more to do with their job/company than AI

arctic-true• 5 months ago

This gives me a lot of hope for a decentralized future for all kinds of service industries. Why would you go to a big-name accounting firm where the small number of humans can only give you a sliver of attention, when you can go to a one-man shop and get much more of the one human’s attention? Especially if you know that the “work” will be done by the same tools? So many of the barriers to entry in various services - law, accounting, financial advising, etc. - is that you need a team to run even the smallest operation that can generate enough revenue to put food on your table. Perhaps that won’t be the case for long - and the folks that used to be that “team” can branch out and be the captains of their own ships, too.

alchemism2• 5 months ago

If every person is now a captain, with their own ship, the harbor may become rather crowded.

geraneum• 5 months ago

The future seems to be one operator working on the entire puzzle, minus the hierarchy of people.

Given the rest of your argument that makes no sense. Why should that one operator exist? If AI is good at big picture and the entire puzzle, I don’t see why that operator shouldn’t be automated away by the AI [company] itself?

lbreakjai2• 5 months ago

That's what I think will happen with a lot of SaaS and software platforms. They'll become the Sears to the future Amazon's being built.

ej88• 5 months ago

i am somewhat worried in the short term about ai job displacement for a subsection of the population

for me the 2 main factors are:

1. whether your company's priority is growing or saving

- growing companies especially in steep competition fight for talent and ai productivity results in more hiring to outcompete

- saving companies are happy to cut jobs to save on margin due to their monopoly or pressure from investors

2. how 'sequence of tasks-like' your job is

- SOTA models can easily automate long running sequences of tasks with minimal oversight

- the more your job resembles this the more in-danger you are (customer service diffusion is just starting, but i predict this will be one of the first to be heavily disrupted)

- i'm less worried about jobs where your job is a 'role' that comes with accountability and requires you to think big picture on what tasks to do in the first place

looneysquash• 5 months ago

Ordinary people aren't even ok now.

Lest we forget, software engineers aren't exactly ordinary people: they make quite a bit above the median wage.

AI taking our jobs is scary because it will turn us into "ordinary people". And ordinary people are not ok. They're barely surviving.

ef2k• 5 months ago

The article frames the premise that "everything will be fine" around people with "regular jobs", which I assume means non knowledge work, but most of public concern is on cognitive tasks being automated.

It also argues that models have existed for years and we're yet to see significant job loss. That's true, but AI is only now crossing the threshold of being both capable and reliable enough to be automate common tasks.

It's better to prepare for the disruption than the sink or swim approach we're taking now in hopes that things will sort themselves out.

justonepost12• 5 months ago

There is no “preparing for the disruption” at an individual level, aside from maybe trying to 100x a polymarket bet to boost your savings.

cal_dent• 5 months ago

My view is that we spend a lot of time thinking that ai cant do x and y when the wider problem is the short to medium term redirection of capital to tech rather than labour.

Ai might not replace current work but it’s already replacing future hypothetical work. Now whether it can actually do that the job is besides the point in the short term. The way business models work is that if there’s an option to reduce your biggest cost (labour) you’d very much give it a go first. We might see a resurgence of labour if it turns out be all hype but for the short to medium term they’ll be a lot of disruption.

Think we’re already seeing that in employment data in the US, as new hiring and job creation slows. A lot of that will for sure be the current economic environment but I suspect (more so in tech focused industries) that will also be due to tech capex in place of headcount growth

RevEng3• 5 months ago

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 paradox they referred to. However, it also tends to come with a major shift in wealth since in the short term the owners of the machines are producing more with less. As it becomes more common place and prices change they lose much of that advantage, but the workers never get that.

zozbot2347• 5 months ago

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.

That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

globalnode2• 5 months ago

sure sure

Gigachad4• 5 months ago

What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.

rnewme2• 5 months ago

Have you seen the land prices

paulddraper• 5 months ago

Exactly.

Living quarters, transportation, healthcare, food. What were theses figures in 1926, and how much work is needed to achieve them.

SecretDreams• 5 months ago

That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

Is that trend still true? I can look from the 50s to 2000s and buy into it. I'm not clear it is holding true by all metrics beyond the 2000s, and especially beyond maybe the 2020s. Yes, we have better tech, but is life actually better right now? I think you could make the argument that we were in a healthier and happier society in that sweet spot from 95 - 2005 or so. At least in NA.

We've seen so much technological innovation, but cost of living has outpaced wages, division is rampant, and the technology innovations we have have mostly been turned against us to enshitify our lives and entrap us in SaaS hell. I'd argue medical science has progressed, but also become more inaccessible, and, somehow, people believe in western medicine LESS. Does not help that we've also seen a decline in education.

So do we still prefer improving our standards of living in the current societal framework?

coldtea• 5 months ago

That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work

That's more because we are never given the chance. We only get to keep working or fall of the rat race and at best be delegated to Big Lebowski style pariah existance.

anonzzzies• 5 months ago

we could likely accomplish that by working very little

Yeah I know many people who do in the small town I live in. Mostly elderly who are used to it still, but also some young people who want to work just enough to buy what they need and not 1 minute more. I could've retired at <20 if I would've enjoyed that. Now I enjoy it more; it's kind of relaxing that kind of lifestyle; not because of not working but because of needing nothing outside your humble possessions.

intended• 5 months ago

Heck no. Given the choice most people would want to do remote work. COVID showed that we can actually achieve remote work, and suddenly many people realized they had a life they loved, without having to lose chunks of it to an unpaid commute that was baked into the cost of work.

Given actual alternatives, workers have made their preferences clear.

Culture also plays a part - America is uniquely mercantile and business first. Workers and citizens in other countries have made different choices.

suzzer99• 5 months ago

As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.

tty456• 5 months ago

Such is the republican lizard brain these days.

gruez• 5 months ago

Seems pretty easy to work around with "UBI for citizens" only. There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.

kovek• 5 months ago

All of those technologies of the past can be managed by humans. Once computers can manage themselves AND other technologies and people, I think it'll be a different situation.

jjmarr• 5 months ago

If you want to live with no electricity, no running water, and a lack of refrigerated food, you could do so purely on welfare. In that sense, we already have the UBI that Marx predicted.

However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.

9dev• 5 months ago

Most non-banana republics across the world define the Minimum standard of living as having all of the things you listed, meaning welfare/social safety nets provide for that. As they should. We’re not animals.

stouset• 5 months ago

I’m not really sure the point you’re trying to make behind “as long as you don’t mind dying early and painfully from easily preventable diseases technically you can live in utopia”. Would you mind clarifying your position here?

fourside• 5 months ago

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 with the current political climate.

rjbwork• 5 months ago

The thing a lot of people leave out is that literally billions must die for this to happen. In some fully automated world everyone except for a few tens of thousands of the owner class and their technicians will be unneeded. And then what to do?

hnthrow0287345• 5 months ago

It fits because now you can start up the conquering war machine and have a bunch of soldiers who're willing to kill in another country before starving in theirs

_DeadFred_• 5 months ago

Voting for 'indifference to peoples dependence on the government' does not equal 'reduce people's dependence on the government'.

There is zero actual intentional reduction of dependence, just elimination of government support.

cyanydeez• 5 months ago

See, we have enough food to feed the entire world, every year.

It's not our production capabilities that keep people hungry; it's either greed or the problem of distribution.

Automation will definitely amplify production but it'll certainly continue to make rich richer and poor, well, the same. As inequality grows, so too does the authoritarian need to control the differential.

quantummagic• 5 months ago

Maybe we only have enough food to feed the entire world, because of greed. Every time we've tried to impose a system that spreads the wealth to the masses, rather than it resulting in equality, it has led to suffering and bloodshed. And ironically, in the Soviet Union and China, the death of millions from starvation.

tim3332• 5 months ago

such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century.

I'm 0.6 centuries old and have never heard that said for existing tech. Human level AI could presumably do human work by definition but that's not the case before we get that, including now.

johnnyanmac4• 5 months ago

The 0.90 century old economicists were discussing the idea.

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...

RevEng3• 5 months ago

Do a search for "the 20 hour work week". You will find plenty of articles from the 50s and 60s talking about how technology is going to make it so we don't have to work anymore. Popular Science was particularly keen on this but they certainly weren't the only ones.

simianwords• 5 months ago

You are painting this like it’s a bad thing. The workers decided that they would rather have higher working time to buy more things!

A lot of people would not choose to work for half the time as they do now because they do actually like to buy things.

mmcromp• 5 months ago

How can you say that when workers don't have a choice? What accessible job has professional level pay and is part time?

johnnyanmac4• 5 months ago

I'd happily work for 20 hours @200k a year. It'd give me time to work on my own projects.

Issue is that virtually no company offers that deal unless you already have noteriety or money at the level of retiring anyway.

initramfs22• 5 months ago

I am also fairly certain that if we do arrive at some abundant utopia where you can wish for anything can have it arrive, society will collapse. It's just bringing up 7 billion (probably more) spoiled brats at that point of time. Work on its own is also a form of "social control". Idle hands are the devil's tools etc.

ndsipa_pomu2• 5 months ago

Throughout history, big advances have come from humans having more "idle time", so we should be aiming for the population to be less busy as they can then hopefully focus on pursuing the arts or sciences.

jbxntuehineoh• 5 months ago

Imo instead of no-strings-attached UBI we should have something like the WPA. Spend ten hours a week or whatever working in local parks/schools/libraries/etc and get paid a basic living wage in return

RiverCrochet• 5 months ago

If you can wish for anything and have it arrive, spoiled brats won't be a thing, because competition and envy for things will be pointless.

int_19h4• 5 months ago

Collapse in a sense of many existing power structures becoming meaningless, yes, certainly.

But that is a good thing.

wnc3141• 5 months ago

This pattern suggests the remaining knowledge work becoming increasingly extracted upon by the owners of ai enabled firms, in similar fashion to sugar plantation workers across the global south. I would think the cost of doing so would be a level of social and civic unrest similar to the colonial revolutions (Bolivar for example) of the 19th century.

SirMaster3• 5 months ago

I don't worry about it because worrying about it just seems like a waste of time and an unproductive, negative way to think about things. Instead I spend my time and thought not in worry but in adapting to the changing landscape.

fogzen3• 5 months ago

You don’t spend all your time doomscrolling X? :) Glad to know there’s others out there.

SirMaster3• 5 months ago

I don't use any of that social networking stuff. Never seemed that interesting or worth my time. The closest I get to social networks is reddit and this, and forums. But even on reddit I just look at a few subreddits related to my hobbies.

nickorlow• 5 months ago

This is the year that ordinary people start to think about how it’ll change human life

... for the 3rd year in a row. Feels like the new 'year of the Linux desktop'

chaostheory• 5 months ago

Here’s what both authors are missing: the age demographic bomb. What is it? It’s when the elderly start outnumbering everyone else including working adults I.e. nations turn into giant retirement homes and we start running out of workers like Japan, Germany, China, Italy, and South Korea

AI will buy us some time from economic collapse, though on the bright side the environment can recover a bit since human growth was the worse stressor

febed• 5 months ago

AI is increasing my job security at the moment because the junior developers I work with use AI without discretion. On of them didn’t remember having worked on a feature they built with AI assistance in the recent past. To his credit he admitted he didn’t know how the code worked.

downboots• 5 months ago

AI breaks the window you repair, at scale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

taysco2• 5 months ago

Ya'll have junior devs? I haven't seen one of those in almost a decade.

Seattle35034• 5 months ago

How much is the subject matter expertise you built at the last job was useful at your current job?

davidw• 5 months ago

It doesn't help to figure this out that this moment is one where a lot of programming jobs are going away...

dakolli8• 5 months 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 limited number of jobs. LLMs are not creating new jobs, they only create "AI automate {insert business process} SaaS" that are themselves heavily automated.. I suppose there are more datacenter jobs (for now), and maybe some new ML researcher positions.. but I don't really see job growth.. Are we supposed to just all go work at a datacenter or in the semiconductor industry (until they automate that too)?

lich_king3• 5 months ago

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, errands. Now, that may sound dystopian, but on some level, so are most white collar jobs today. Microsoft employs 200k people. How many of these are directly involved in shipping money-making products - five percent? Ten? The rest is there essentially for the self-sustaining bureaucracy itself. And there's no reason for that bureaucracy to exist except the whims of people with money and power - delegation, empire-building, pet projects, etc.

UncleOxidant4• 5 months ago

The examples you give for jobs of the future don't sound appealing or very numerous. It seems like you're saying that people will be employed as personal assistants to the uber wealthy. But there aren't a lot of uber wealthy - certainly not enough to employ large amounts of the economy.

dakolli8• 5 months ago

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.

dyauspitr3• 5 months ago

Disagree. The input to output ratio is ridiculous. With the latest LLMs you can input very few words to generate a lot of production usable output.

dakolli8• 5 months ago

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.

qudat• 5 months ago

Creative destruction is a fundamental component of economic growth and has been happening since economies were part of humanity.

You are thinking too linearly. When the price of goods and services go down because the cost to produce those goods are services decreases, that means things are cheaper. Now that things are cheaper we have more money to spend on other goods or services.

Who knows what industries will be created because of this alleged release of human labor.

When the refrigerator was invented we didn’t just replace an industry of shipping ice, we created new industries that relied on refrigeration. That’s creative destruction. That’s economic growth.

This is not to mention that I find the scope and scale of AI displacement to be highly dubious and built on hype.

dakolli8• 5 months ago

So why did are companies laying of 100s of thousands of people, 400k in SWE alone in 16 months during a bull market where equities and profits are at all time highs? How come the January jobs report was so terrible, January is historically the best month for jobs, its downhill from here.

Do you walk around with a blindfold on? Are you extremely privileged? Sounds like it. Tell this to the 25% of new college grads that have been unemployed for 12 months, or working as a barista with 100k in debt. Eventually they'll be knocking on your penthouse/mansion door.

toldnotmywrath• 5 months ago

The problem with this "creative destruction" hand-wave is:

- there's no thought given to what happens in the interim. Forget the welfare of those displaced, consider what acts the desperation will lead them to.

- these replacement roles may very well never exist or will pay much, much lower than they do now.

- this disruption happens entirely in services, LLMs are not improving agricultural yield, most industries steeped in physical reality will mostly cut overhead for generating text.

- the gains from automation do not necessarily have to diffuse over us all, the capital can simply accumulate in the hands of the firms.

You cannot keep pointing to the past when you are suggesting an entirely new never before seen moment is upon us.

cbdevidal4• 5 months ago

Automations do create jobs, but fewer jobs. Businesses wouldn’t invest so much money if they had to keep the same number of workers. Automation necessarily reduces the number of humans working in aggregate at one task.

What DOES go up with automation is demand. Fewer farmers today than 100 years ago, but significantly more mouths to feed.

What also increases is new kinds of jobs; entirely new fields. The automobile shrank the number of buggy whip makers, but taxi drivers increased. Then the internet increased Uber drivers on top of taxi drivers.

dakolli8• 5 months ago

This type of automation does not create jobs, and we are seeing that in jobs numbers. You're right it does reduce the amount of labour needed, hence why we are seeing equities rise why people's wages/opportunities shrink.

Get ready for french revolution v2, but global, the ruling class only exists because the working class tolerates them. This just won't work.

UncleOxidant4• 5 months ago

Are we supposed to just all go work at a datacenter or in the semiconductor industry (until they automate that too)?

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.

aetimmes• 5 months ago

Datacenters were very automated when RAM was infinite. As the world becomes compute-constrained, the economics may increase the demand for smart hands mixing-and-matching server components to turn two broken servers into one working server.

dakolli8• 5 months ago

That is my point, llms replace more jobs than they theoretically create (datacenter/semiconductor manufacturing demand).

lukeigel• 5 months ago

Very proud of David Oks.

jeremyhuff• 5 months ago

We are all very proud of david oks

hunterpayne• 5 months ago

This reminds me of that old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times". I see AI causing lots of chaos. I also see AI causing some of the biggest opportunities in some time. Many businesses are destroying their competitive advantage by deploying AI slop. Over time, they will degrade their ability to make a working and snappy website. This will create opportunities for new businesses to take their place. If you ever wanted to start a new business, shockingly this is the time as the current crop slowly degrades their customer portals into slop. They will probably reach a point where they can no longer deliver working, efficient and secure apps anymore.

Maybe I am wrong, but the history of business on the web says I am right. If you go back and look at why those businesses think they are successful, and if that analysis is correct, then I am.

lemax• 5 months ago

I think that, for possibly a very long time, AI will just increase the quality bar and scale of expectations when we produce things. We might take the same amount of time (or longer) to produce something, but with significantly better outcomes. Ultimately human preferences and tastes prevail and the world is full of problems that are not simple I/O, that are not repeatable, and that require human taste to improve. The people who will immediately survive economically are the ones who leverage AI to produce stuff that wasn't possible before.

an0malous• 5 months ago

If anything, I see a decrease in the quality bar. Code is sloppier, there are more bugs, more outages, more security issues. Whatever alpha AI provides is being spent on feature velocity and AI integrations at the cost of those other things.

ls612• 5 months ago

One of the most robust findings in labor economics is that labor and capital are long run complements, not substitutes. I would be shocked if AI is an exception to that rule, for software engineers the sheer flood of code that will be generated in the coming years will demand more and more labor to manage.

hndamien• 5 months ago

We would all benefit from progress if only they would stop printing money.

paulsutter• 5 months ago

“People asking if Al is going to take their jobs is like an Apache in 1840 asking if white settlers are going to take his buffalo” (Noah Smith on Twitter, I mean X)

zb3• 5 months ago

Yeah, YOU are not worried about the job loss, but just because SOME human will be needed doesn't mean that a particular human will.

There are humans that can't do any mental work that AI can't. Those humans are not useful for mental work and that's what can cause real AI job loss. The bar for being useful for mental work is increasing rapidly..

Jobs that are easy disappear and are replaced with jobs that are no longer as easy, either requiring more mental skills (that many people don't have) or are soul crushing manual jobs that are also getting harder constantly..

So yes, YOU are not worried, because you are privileged here.

jgon• 5 months ago

I always like to do a little digging when I read one of these articles. The first point I come to is that the author is employed by a16z (https://a16z.com/author/david-oks/) and so you have to immediately apply the "talking his book" filter. A16Z is heavily invested in AI and so any sorts of concerns around job loss and possible regulation or associated actions by the public at large represent a risk to these investments.

Secondly David Oks attended Masters School for his high school, an elite private boarding school with tuition currently running 72kUSD/year if you stay there the whole time, and 49kUSD/year if you go there just for schooling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_School). I am going to generally say that people who were able to have 150k+ spent on their high school education (to say nothing of attending Oxford at 30kGBP/year for international student tuition) might just possibly be people who have enough generational family wealth that concerns like job losses seem pretty abstract or not something to really worry about.

It's just another in a long series of articles downplaying the risks of AI job losses, which, when I dig into the author's background, are written by people who have never known any sort of financial precarity in their lives, and are frequently involved AI investment in some manner.

everettde2• 5 months ago

what an absolute undermining of the human greed, and our ability to rationalize the part of society that'll affect our well-being until we're dead.

they don't care about the majority losing jobs, or even starving to death so long as they ensure a great future for themselves and the people they, supposedly, care about.

mbgerring2• 5 months ago

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?

yonaguska• 5 months ago

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.

georgemcbay• 5 months ago

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?

What happens when 200 out-of-work former software engineers take a look at your software and use LLMs to quickly build their own version each undercutting everyone else's prices in a race to the bottom?

mbgerring2• 5 months ago

I think what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of software that doesn’t get built at all because the cost of serving a particular niche market is still too high, and that AI may put some of those markets within reach.

So, those software engineers may be able to move sideways instead of competing to build the same software.

djfergus• 5 months ago

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.

derektank3• 5 months ago

There are lots of things people want explicitly because a human is part of the loop. AI generated art will never attract the same premium as something created by (or at least claimed to be by) a human. People seek status, and that can only be conferred by other people. The problem is that, unlike other products of human labor, status is a zero sum game.

Seattle35034• 5 months ago

Chess is a "kind" learning environment. The world tends to have more "wicked" environments.

silexia• 5 months ago

It's not job losses we are worried about, but the complete destruction of the human species.

jmyeet• 5 months ago

The author is wrong. IMHO he's operating under a false premise that the labor market just kind of "happens" or even that the labor market itself is "efficient".

At no point have worker rights and conditions advanced without being demanded, sometimes violently. The history of maritime safety is written in blood. The robber baron era was peppered with deadly clashes such as the Homestead Strike. As a reminder, we had a private paramilitary force for the wealthy called the Pinkerton Detective Agency (despite the name, they were hired thugs) that at it's peak outnumbered the US Army.

Heck, you can go back to the Black Death when there was a labor shortage to work farms and the English Crown tried to pass laws to cap wages to avoid "gouging" by peasants for their labor.

Automation could be very good for society. It could take away menial jobs so we all benefit. But this won't happen naturally because that's essentially a wealth transfer to the poor and the wealthy just won't stand for that.

No, what's going to happen is that AI specifically and automation in general will be used to suppress labor wages and furhter transfer wealth to the already wealthy. We don't need to replace everyone for this to happen. Displacing just 5% of the workforce has a massive effect on wages. The remaining 95% aren't asking for raises and they're doing more work for the same wages as they pick up whatever the 5% was doing.

We see this exact pattern in the permanent layoff culture in tech right now. At the top you have a handful of AI researchers who command $100M+ pay packages. The vast majority are either happy to still have a job or have been laid off, possibly multiple times, and spend a ton of time going through endless interview rounds for jobs that may not even exist.

This two-tiered society is very much in our near future (IMHO).

In the Depression you had wandering hoboes who were constantly moving, seeking temporary low-paid work and a meal. This situation was so bad we got real socialist change with the New Deal.

2008 killed the entry-level job market and it has yet to recover. That's why you see so many millenails with Masters degrees and a ton of student debt working as baristas. Covid popped the tech labor bubble, something tech companies had been wanting for a long time. Did you not notice that they all started doing layoffs at about the exact same time? Even when they're massively profitable?

So the author isn't worried about job loss? Delusional. We're teetering on the edge of complete societal collapse.

ares6234• 5 months ago

There's one aspect that doesn't come up often enough as well, and I think something most people are too afraid to even imagine about.

What happens when you have a surplus of able bodied young people who are angry and without purpose? What's the easiest way to divert all that anger and give them purpose at the same time?

People in developing nations worked around this by immigrating.

agentultra2• 5 months ago

I’m not worried about a world without people.

I’m more worried that even if these tools do a bad job people will be too addicted to the convenience to give them up.

Example: recruiters locked into an AI arms race with applicants. The application summaries might be biased and contain hallucinations. The resumes are often copied wholesale from some chat bot or other. Nobody wins, the market continues to get worse, but nobody can stop either.

senordevnyc• 5 months ago

But why would the market get worse? Those recruiters aren’t just in an arms race with applicants, they’re also in an arms race with each other, and there’s an incentive to improve their tools too.

agentultra2• 5 months ago

I don’t know if you’re in the job market right now but there are highly skilled and qualified people who have been looking for work for months.

I don’t know if you can tell what’s “better,” with these tools.

jillesvangurp• 5 months ago

Good article. Nice to get some counter arguments to the utopian/libertarian/dystopian world views that dominate the debate here normally. None of those views are new. You can go back hundreds of years and find very similar points of view as early as the the seventeenth century when modern science was born, early industrialism, pre and post WW-II, etc.

The real world is much more resilient and stubborn. The industrial revolution indeed wiped out a lot of jobs. But it created a lot more new ones. Agriculture and food production no longer is >90% of the economy. The utopian version of that (we all get free food) never happened. The dystyopian version (we'll all starve) didn't happen either. And the Luddite version (we'll all go back to artisanal farming) didn't happen either. What happened is that well fed laborers went to work doing completely different stuff. Subsistence farming now only exists in undeveloped countries and regions in e.g. rural Africa.

The simple reality is that we have 8 billion people probably growing towards 10 billion. These people are going to buy and spend stuff with their income. Whatever that is, is what the economy is and what we collectively value. If AI puts us all out of work, people aren't going to sit on their hands and go back to subsistence farming. They'll fill the time with whatever is is that they can create income with so they can spend it on things that are valuable to them.

This notion of value is what is key. Because if AI lowers the cost of something, it simply becomes cheaper. We need a lot of valuable and scarce resources to power AI. That isn't cheap. So, there's an equilibrium of stuff that is valuable enough to automate with it that people still want to pay for by committing their valuable resources to it. Which as they become scarcer become more valuable and more interesting from an economic point of view. The economy adapts towards activity that facilitates value creation. We're opportunists. It all boils down to what we can do for each other that is valuable and interesting to us. Whatever that is, is where there will be a lot of growth.

I'm in software, I'm not worried about less work. I'm worried about handling the barrage of stuff I don't have time to do that I now need to start worrying about doing. There's no way I'm going to do any of that without AI. It's already generating more work than I can handle. This isn't frivolous stuff that I don't need, it's stuff that's valuable to my company because we can sell it to other companies who need that stuff.

jama2112• 5 months ago

Yes, businesses tend to prefer growth over cost cutting. We need to handle the transition period well though or it will hurt.

disfictional• 5 months ago

The key to the essay is that "ordinary people will be fine." Software Engineers will be highly impacted, though not in the way most commenters seem to think. Management isn't going to arbitrarily decide that, "AI can do 65% of the job, so we'll lay off 65% of the engineers." They won't hire. Attrition? New projects? "Just use AI tools to be more productive. Find the bottlenecks and automate them. Focus on your core value." AI isn't going to be a fast slash to the workforce; it will be a constantly accelerating drain. Yes, ordinary people will be fine, but those of us who aspired to be artisans of building these systems will be stretched further and further until all we do is maintain AI code full-time for a discounted price.

andai• 5 months ago

The strongest point this article makes is that humans themselves are the greatest obstacle to change and progress.

That doesn't exactly bolster the author's position. Sure, there's already companies 30 years behind the curve.

But in an increasingly competitive and fast moving economy, "the human is slowing it down by orders of magnitude" doesn't exactly sound like a vote in favor of the human.

pjmlp• 5 months ago

Says the guy that never had to look for a job in a world region where they don't abound.

npodbielski• 5 months ago

we’ll have spent quite a while in a world of such abundance and plenty that jobs might simply be superfluous. Perhaps we’ll spend our lives in leisure, pursuing poetry or pure mathematics or the fine art of looksmaxxing.

That is quite a optimistic view that I do not share. The US shitshow with epstein files shows what those with power are actually capable of. The star trek utopia universe is not the world we are building right now collectively. I would expect instead that with robotics and AI combined there will be a lot of more technical jobs for maintaining and building automated systems that serves rich people but not common folks. But still you need knowledge and skill to do that which means you still need to learn and teach those. Which means you still need education and people working there. You still need people that support education sector and technical and maintance sector for AI and robotics. All of them need to eat and have basic needs to be fulfilled. You need agriculture and services and housing and entertainment and dozens of others for that too. So in an essence the author is right but still with AI capable robots I would not expect utopia but somekind of world between blade-runner and alien: you won't be scrolling mindlessly while all you needs are being met but rather trying to save money for the things you dream off while working stupid mindless job you do not like. Which is basically what most of us are doing right now.

So yes nothing will change for most of us but humanity will find a way somehow to make world suck in so many ways by exploiting each other, by stealing from each other, by lying and generally making a world living hell for everyone. Because we do not know any better.

AI won't change that. So as the old saying goes: a lot have to change for everything to stay the same.

entech• 5 months ago

The prevailing view of government’s incompetence and inability to act has reached such high levels that people do not even factor any sort of meaningful intervention anymore.

Does everyone really think that the world governments would allow any level job loss that would create panic before shutting this whole thing down within the area of their control?

It’s probably the western culture bias - people in UK or US have not seen or experienced big enough government intervention. US citizens are probably feeling a bit of the change now.

gniv• 5 months ago

A point that the article doesn't touch on directly, but it's part of the bottlenecks mentioned: a lot of jobs already are bullsh*t. They are there because a scapegoat is needed or because the nephew of the CEO needs a job, etc. In theory these jobs could have been removed long ago but they were not, and AI won't change that.

DeathArrow• 5 months ago

If we can do things easier and faster we will just do more things. It always was like that.

hi_hi• 5 months ago

I'm not worries about AI job losses...yet.

I am worried about when they start wanting to make a profit on AI. I'm assuming we either have to pay the actual price for these things (I have no idea what that looks like, but I'm pretty sure it isn't $20 or $200 per month), or we have to put up with the full force advertising. Or most likely, we have to do both.

It'll be another one of those "I remember when..." stories we get to tell our kids. Like "I remember when emails were useful and exciting" or "I remember when I could order a taxi and it was clean, reliable and even came with a bottle of water..." or "I remember when I could have conversations with strangers on the internet that didn't instantly descend into arguments and hate".

Bender2• 5 months ago

I think there is an aspect of this people may be missing. Companies are dropping entry level jobs for AI. Should that continue there will eventually not be humans in what was the first few tiers of a job role. AI only exists because the military needs are propping it up. Civilians are always the first to beta test and refine military services. Should the military not find AI to be as useful as their were sold it will lose funding and the house of cards comes crashing down thus leaving all these companies with broken and hollowed out roles with all the experienced people having retrained in something else. That may impact share holders and shake confidence in a few markets.

password543213• 5 months ago

AI only exists because the military needs are propping it up

AI already serves as a surveillance tool and is being used by Palantir.

Bender2• 5 months ago

AI already serves as a surveillance tool and is being used by Palantir.

Agreed but the actual funding is primarily for military use. Palantir would not be able to fund all these data-centers by themselves. They are secondary beneficiaries.

xyzsparetimexyz• 5 months ago

'Ordinary people still be fine'

Ordinary people are ALREADY not doing okay.

wooptoo• 5 months ago

The collective AI hysteria is now in full swing.

dawsmik• 5 months ago

denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance

Dear software programmers: 90% of your jobs are going away soon. Most of you are on the first step. Those of you who progress through these step the fastest will be most prepared for what is about to come.

gverrilla• 5 months ago

That entire gigantic piece could be a tweet with approximately the same information density.

hananova• 5 months ago

I'm honestly also not worried about AI job loss. But for a far darker reason: I think it's a self-solving problem.

Once techbros take it too far where an actual significant amount of people face job loss and thus face hardships in housing and feeding themselves, society as a whole is going to wish it nipped AI in the bud when it still could. Knowing techbros though, their moment of introspection, if it ever comes, will come far too late.

To me, actively trying to cause mass job loss in a country with essentially zero social security sounds, actively trying to get as many people in the "nothing to lose" state as possible, sounds genuinely suicidal.

fogzen3• 5 months ago

I’ve noticed most of the people involved with AI doomerism are social media (X) addicts. Same with a lot of CEOs and VCs. To be honest they don’t sound mentally healthy and somewhat delusional.

throawayonthe• 5 months ago

we shouldn’t forget how amazing even, say, GPT-3.5 would be from the perspective of 2016

i'm not sure why it would be more amazing in 2016 than in 2023 where it... wasn't very amazing lol

I'm not worried about AI job loss

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