Comment by empath75
7 months ago
This is exactly why I think the concerns about AI taking people's jobs are overblown. There is not a limited amount of knowledge work to do or things that can be invented or discovered. There's just work that isn't worth the effort, time or money to do right now, it doesn't mean it's not valuable, it's just not cost effective. If you reduce effort, time and money, then suddenly you can do it.
Like even just for programming. I just had an AI instrument my app for tracing, something I wanted to do for a while, but I didn't know how to do and didn't feel like figuring out how to do it. That's not work we were likely to hire someone to do or that would ever get done if the AI wasn't there. It's a small thing, but small things add up.
It is not some very explicit threshold beyond which AI will take job but before it won't. What's already happening is long drawn attrition where tools at different level of code, low code , no code will keep creeping up. And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop existing altogether.
In a way it is nothing new but natural progression of technology. It is increasing pace of change that is different. Can a person learn some skills by their 20s and apply productively throughout their lifetime? Now at this point it is so thoroughly untrue that I'd be laughed out if I asked for such thing. We are told to up skill few times in career to up-skilling continuously.
As changes are getting faster and faster more people are gonna fall wayside and of course they can blame themselves for their predicament.
> And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop existing altogether.
Automation changed farming for the worse? Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work? Farmers were replaced with low skilled labor? Do you think the job of a farmer (aka "food grower") will stop existing?
I do not predict future only look at what happened in the past and my answer to each question above about farming is the opposite what your comment would imply if it was applied to farming.
Your point is about as good as saying that "Is my life worse off at home since I can clean whole area in 30 min of mild effort with my cordless vacuum cleaner where as manual broom would've taken me at half day of hard work?"
Of course my life is bit better as I saved few hours on weekend as owner of house and a vacuum cleaner.
But my life as worker is worse in last 10 years as knowledge of developing large complex applications is not valuable because we are in Next Gen Cloud native era where one application will not contain more than 5 functions anyway. Even if I claim I can write better maintainable, performance code , the employer directly or indirectly says "Well we don't care, we need you to complete these 10 JIRAs in this sprint" And only answer they take from me is yes.
> Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work?
Pretty much most of them feel underpaid for the amount of hard work and I hear they're having problem recruiting younger people to the business, so many foreigners take those jobs.
And the invention of AGI will have the same impact as the electricity, i mean, they're both inventions, right ? I can't wait for all these billions of new full time jobs coming to replace the current ones.
Farmers couldn't be replaced by low skill labor because they are low skill.
Farmer didn't stop existing, but we went from 80% of the population farming is to 1-10%. If farming automation had happened in 1800 when 80% of the workforce was working in agriculture, it'd have been a cataclysm.
I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers, mainly offset by their high salaries. Wait and see once vibecoding becomes the new norm.
And for software engineers, yeah, automation will wreck their jobs and their paychecks because software engineering's higher speed limit in efficiency is the speed of light, not a tractor's.
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