Comment by ToucanLoucan
1 day ago
> 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.
> "Computers" used to be people! Literally, people.
Not always. Recruitment budgets have limits, so it's a fixed number of employees either providing services to a larger number of customers thanks to software, or serving fewer customers or do so less often without the software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
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I'm unable and unwilling to shadowbox with what you think I'm actually experiencing.
That's fine; read it as me speaking to the whole thread, not challenging you directly. Technology drives economic productivity; increasing economic productivity generally implies worker displacement. That workers come out ahead in the long run (they have in the past; it's obviously not a guarantee) is besides my point. Software is automating software development away, the same way it automated a huge percentage of (say) law firm billable hours away. We'd better be ready to suck it up!
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