Yes, AI Will Take Your Job

https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/ai-will-take-your-job/

by HotGarbage • 15 days ago

31 32 15 days ago

blog.calebjay.com

twosdai• 15 days ago

I think this article takes some assumptions for granted:

1. AI will get better, and at a price point that makes sense for businesses to operate on.

2. "Managers" (non-technical users) will be as good at using AI as "frontend engineers" (technical users) or make something of comparable quality.

3. All or most technical problems can be solved by AI.

I think the title and take for this type of doom thinking is not really productive. AI is really just a tool which does some unit of work, it cannot on its own "find gold". Some people are better at using it than others, and there is a reason why the largest AI companies have continued to hire YOY for more top talent and employees.

Some jobs will be replaced, or have their expectations changed extensively. But the idea its going to take all knowledge workers jobs, is a path that needs a lot of things to go wrong for it to occur.

throwawayffffas• 15 days ago

In my view the article makes the following points.

  1. AI does not need to get better for the MBA to use it instead of your labor.
  2. They don't need to be good at using AI because they don't care about quality.
  3. Most technical problems are unsolved right now and AI won't change that.

If you observer the processes PMs follow they can just drop in an AI agent instead of a dev. Just tell it to do stuff and look at the result is their modus operandi as it is right now. They don't care about the engineering quality because they are not the ones that have to maintain it. And they won't get fired if it keels over.

polotics• 15 days ago

"they won't get fired if it keels over" ?

In a company that badly managed, AI or not AI the ship's going down.

weard_beard• 15 days ago

My takeaway was that the purpose of AI is not to do “your job” as well as you but to do the things you refuse to do in your job as a person with taste and ethics.

someguynamedq2• 15 days ago

1. Well substantiated up to this point 2. Unknown 3. This is a serious metaphysical, question not something to punt on. Is there anything fundamental to humanity that makes us required for innovation, or is the only important thing our taste/selection criteria over which innovations we want? If it's the latter, you truly don't need a labor force the way we have one today to do what we're doing today.

"Path that needs a lot of things to go wrong" -- wrong for whom? For the people with money and power, the people who determine what jobs exist and what those jobs are doing, this would be a dramatic version of things going right (as long as they're able to capitalize on it). Human labor is an expense for business owners, not a virtue.

Not speaking to you in particular, but I'm shocked at how so many otherwise brilliant people are rendered practically neo-luddites by AI. The cotton gin was disruptive, but once it was invented there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. The same is true of agentic AI. The question isn't whether or not it will upset the status quo of human labor, it's how much and in what way.

etchalon2• 15 days ago

I mean, we can always riot.

dag1002• 15 days ago

And die in large numbers, yes.

otikik3• 15 days ago

Or not riot and die in large numbers a bit more slowly.

thomascountz• 15 days ago

If AI replaces most software developers, it may be because there is less use for the software (read: mostly SaaS applications) developers are employed to build. Or otherwise, there will be fewer people who will want to buy software (or buy it indirectly from ad conversion).

guluarte• 15 days ago

At the moment, AI is creating more work for me, not less. The more capable the models become, the more responsibilities and expectations you have as a developer. Nowadays, I spend more time babysitting AI agents than I did manually coding during COVID.

pryelluw• 15 days ago

Yes, the horse will take your job.

Yes, the written word will take your job.

Yes, fire job take.

Yes, the automobile will take your and the horse’s job.

Yes, we’re all doomed. Might as well go back up the trees and start hollering.

tavavex• 15 days ago

Automation in the past was just about changing what was in the human's hands. Technology improved, people got faster, but there was still a balance. The people who owned the machines and the factories couldn't and didn't want to operate them, and had to employ others.

Now they're threatening us with total automation. In their dreams, we're not the people riding horses who now get to drive shiny new cars. We are the horse. If that dream is possible with the current technology, they will stop at nothing to achieve it.

sebastianconcpt• 15 days ago

The article is a piece of revolutionary rant.

Capitalism is unnatural, and selects for unnatural things.

Wrong. Even plants have a conspicuous signaling economy to get their way to selection.

sassbadger• 15 days ago

Economy/Markets != Capitalism

flossly3• 15 days ago

There's a really insightful book on this topic (by pretty much the name you suggested):

https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/1...

dag1002• 15 days ago

TFA means Capitalism in terms of "capitalism as it is today, particularly in the US". There are plenty of other ways of figuring out how to distribute resources.

flossly3• 15 days ago

Signalling = markets.

Capitalism is allowing the winners of the markets to make the rules that everyone has to abide by, sidestepping "democracy" with anti-democratic "lobbyism" and creating a power hierarchy based on networth. The markets that allowed this are usually "free'ish" at best.

doughnutstracks• 15 days ago

No, liberal capitalist societies will not reduce work hours, increase safety nets, do UBI, or competently handle massive unemployment.

You may want to look at the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, and Canada.

komali23• 15 days ago

Well, that's what I meant by my European coworker - perhaps his country has found a socialist balancing point that maintains a level of capitalism that somehow doesn't tip into power cascades concentrating power around Capital. IMO that wouldn't be a liberal capitalist society though, that would be a socialist-capitalist society, which perhaps the Netherlands and Nordic countries are, I'm not too familiar. With the level of privatization striking Canada, I think it'll end up like the USA.

If we're gonna take a look at places, where I'm really interested in watching is the PRC, Cuba, and Vietnam. Capitalism managed to beat the Soviet Union, will it to any other remainders from the era, or will the conversion to state capitalism create a strange equilibrium? In any case it's not like the PRC is doing much better in terms of worker's rights, you still have to justify your existence through labor there more than you do in the aforementioned Nordic countries.

bbg2401• 15 days ago

They’ll reach for the tools they always do: brutal suppression of the poor, leveraging of propaganda, and the dangling of carrots to a select few class traitors needed to enforce and maintain the system (middle managers, scabs, and cops).

Even if America was on a path towards communism, you'd be an ignorant fool to suggest the aforementioned ills would cease to exist given they are recurrent throughout communist systems.

doug_durham• 15 days ago

Nice rant with no evidence. I'll choose to ignore it.

Jgoauh• 15 days ago

i'm so tired of those HN blog articles where the title is always someone over confidently claiming something they have no expertise over (sorry, being a software engineer and founder doesn't make you a job market expert nor a historian, and doesn't make your opinion relevant). I wish there were options on HN to filter out "my opinion is a fact and you're all wrong" articles

komali23• 15 days ago

I wrote it, and I invite you to tell me why I'm wrong - genuinely. I'm here for the conversation. I don't know how else to write on something other than authoritatively. If I'm wrong on the internet, people will definitely tell me!

In person, I'll hedge of course, it's a natural part of conversing and inviting people to share.

Arguing whether someone is permitted to speak on a subject sounds like it would take as much effort as simply discussing the subject itself.

flossly3• 15 days ago

I really liked the article. Sure maybe the title of the original article is a little clickbaity; but are article titles not supposed to be "drawing your attention"?

The author is doing really cool things, like a worker-coop for software engineering:

https://508.dev/pricing

Also i think the article contained some interesting points. Like the "class consciousness" of the owner-class and how this affects decisions on AI. But, to me, there were more.

Anyway, to each their own. I liked it.

lostmsu• 15 days ago

a job market expert nor a historian

I would not expect a job market "expert" or a historian to be able to predict future world where cumulative machine intelligence is higher than cumulative human intelligence. Why would you?

mchaver• 15 days ago

I wish there were options on HN to filter out "my opinion is a fact and you're all wrong" articles

Don't wish. Just vibecode it for your personal use. Seriously.

otikik3• 15 days ago

So, this is what this person doesn't get about Europe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp84sRpM1Js

In case it isn't clear: riots in Paris are (relatively) common. Common enough so that regular life, or in this case, a croissant review, doesn't stop. People travelling to the train station might encounter a couple rubbish bins on fire on their way there, and then find that their train was cancelled because of riots.

That's what Europe has that the US is lacking, and can't quite conceive.

Yes, AI will take your job, except for a small subset of people: plumbers, surgeons and the like. Oh, and politicians, executives, and board members.

Not if every time they get out of their gated community or their 5-star hotel they face burning trash and get thrown rotten eggs to their faces.

You got to up your game, America.

bamazizi• 15 days ago

Lots of points on AI is just a "tool" and that's where I think misconception and misunderstanding will be most devastating for some.

- Yes, engines did replace horses, it was utility revolution

- Yes, computers replacing pen, paper and calculators

- Yes, internet has revolutionized access, borderless business, communication and digital transformation

All the inventions have been about tool replacing another tool, but AI trajectory does not really fit those models.

Maybe AI utilization today is giving the impression of tool and productivity revolution but it's the only entity challenging the actual human organ. It's brain replacing brain and that's the unprecedented and unfamiliar territory.

Eventually this new brain will get its own limbs too!

someguynamedq2• 15 days ago

It's no different from the perspective of a business. A human is a tool in that context as much as a cotton gin or a horse is.

The difference is that it's less clear how humans can "just adapt to use the new tool" when the tool thinks. But this isn't actually that much of a difference -- were the horse ferriers re-employed as engine designers and manufacturers? No. From their perspective the engine was just as much of an existential threat.

The question remains: how do we mitigate the impact of making human labor obsolete on society and on the humans impacted. How do we make sure humans still have a way to contribute to society and the economy? The alternative is disastrous.

Yes, AI Will Take Your Job

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