Comment by samplatt
2 days ago
I have personally written VBA macros (or hell - just a decent Excel spreadsheet...) that have put people out of their jobs. I didn't know this at the time, I was just a young gun able to see how to make some slow repetitive jobs, faster.
Later moved to Oracle / SQL Server / C# / microservices / CICD etc etc) but hell, that was my whole career 2002-2012 across various companies. Making cool tools for smart people, things the accelerated the company in smal;l but measurable ways, that unbeknownst to me would absolutely have directly resulted in a team of 3-5 being reduced to a team of 1, or a team of 1 not being expanded to be a team of 3-5.
The same will happen (IS happening) with LLM's.
"Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself. "
"No doubt, in turning them out of this “temporal” world, the machinery caused them no more than “a temporary inconvenience.” For the rest, since machinery is continually seizing upon new fields of production, its temporary effect is really permanent. Hence, the character of independence and estrangement which the capitalist mode of production as a whole gives to the instruments of labour and to the product, as against the workman, is developed by means of machinery into a thorough antagonism. Therefore, it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the first time brutally revolts against the instruments of labour."
soon we'll see if the old man was wrong and short-sighted, or if what has happened since the internet revolution is just an abnormal period in centuries