Comment by ToucanLoucan
1 day ago
> Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious?
Look at the majority of the tech sector for the last ten years or so and tell me this answer again.
Like I guess this is kind of true, if "problems for real people" equals "compensating for inefficiencies in our system for people with money" and "solutions" equals "making a poor person do it for them and paying them as little as legally possible."
Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away. There is no profession with less claim to the moral high ground of worker rights than ours.
I often think about the savage job-destroying nature of the open source community: hundreds of thousands of developers working tirelessly to unemploy as many of their peers as possible by giving away the code they've written for free.
(Interesting how people talk about AI destroying programming jobs all the time, but rarely mention the impact of billions of dollars of code being given away.)
Would vim or python be created by a company? It’s hard to see how they take jobs away
Open source software is not just different in the license, it’s different in the design
Linux also doesn’t take jobs away - the majority of contributors are paid by companies, afaik
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"Ten year contract you say?"
"Yes, yes... Satellites stay in orbit for a while. What about it?"
"Looks a bit cramped in there."
"Stop complaining, at least it's a real job, now get in, we're about to launch."
> Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away.
How true that is depends on what sort of software you write. Very little of what I've accomplished in my career can be fairly described as "automating other people's jobs away".
Speak for yourself.
I've worked in a medical space writing software so that people can automate away the job that their bodies used to do before they broke.
You're automating the 1's and 0's. There could be millions of people in an assembly like line of buttons, being paid minimum wage to press either the 1 or 0 button to eventually trigger the next operation.
Now all those jobs are gone because of you.
Bit of a tangent but...
Haven't we been automating jobs away since the industrial revolution? I know AI may be an exception to this trend, but at least with classical programming, demand goes up, GDP per capita goes up, and new industries are born.
I mean, there's three ways to get stuff done: do it yourself, get someone else to do it, or get a machine to do it.
#2 doesn't scale, since someone still has to do it. If we want every person to not be required to do it (washing, growing food, etc), #3 is the only way forward. Automation and specialization have made the unthinkable possible for an average person. We've a long way to go, but I don't see automation as a fundamentally bad thing, as long as there's a simultaneous effort to help (especially those who are poor) transition to a new form of working.
We have always automated, because we can.
What is qualitatively different this time is that it affects intellectual abilities - there is nothing higher up in the work "food chain". Replacing physical work you could always argue you'd have time to focus on making decisions. Replacing decision making might mean telling people go sit on the beach and take your universal basic income (UBI) cheque, we don't need you anymore.
Sitting on the beach is not as nice as it sounds for some; if you don't agree, try doing it for 5 years. Most people require work to have some sense of purpose, it gives identity, and it structures their time.
Furthermore, if you replaced lorry drivers with self-driving cars, you'd destroy the most commonly held job in North America as well as South America, and don't tell me that they can be retrained to be AI engineers or social media influencers instead (some can only be on the road, some only want to be on the road).
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> as long as there's a simultaneous effort to help (especially those who are poor) transition to a new form of working.
Somehow everyone who says this misses that never in the history of the United States (and most other countries tbh) has this been true.
We just consign people to the streets in industrial quantity. More underserved to act as the lubricant for capitalism.
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> Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away.
Depends what you write. What I work on isn't about eliminating jobs at all, if anything it creates them. And like, actual, good jobs that people would want, not, again, paying someone below the poverty line $5 to deliver an overpriced burrito across town.
I think most of the time when we tell ourselves this, it's cope. Software is automation. "Computers" used to be people! Literally, people.
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Yeah I see it as fair game
Automating jobs away is good for workers. Not bad. Don't you start repeating ignorant socialist nonsense. You are better than that.
> Automating jobs away is good for workers. Not bad.
Sure, if you completely disregard the past 200 years or so of history.