Comment by ok_dad
1 day ago
Your whole point is disproven by woodworking as a craft, and many other crafts for that matter. There are still craftspeople doing good work with wood even though IKEA and such have captured the furniture industry.
There will still be fine programmers developing software by hand after AI is good enough for most.
> There will still be fine programmers developing software by hand after AI is good enough for most.
This fallacy seems to be brought up very frequently, that there are still blacksmiths; people who ride horses; people who use typewriters; even people who use fountain pens, but they don't really exist in any practical or economical sense outside of 10 years ago Portland, OR.
No technological advancement that I'm aware of completely eliminates one's ability to pursue a discipline as a hobbyist or as a niche for rich people. It's rarely impossible, but I don't think that's ever anyone's point. Sometimes they even make a comeback, like vinyl records.
The scope of the topic seems to be what the usual one is, which is the chain of incentives that enable the pursuit of something as a persuasive exchange of value, particularly that of a market that needs a certain amount of volume and doesn't have shady protectionism working for it like standard textbooks.
With writing, like with other liberal arts, it's far from a new target of parental scrutiny, and it's my impression that those disciplines have long been the pursuit of people who can largely get away with not really needing a viable source of income, particularly during the apprentice and journeyman stages.
Programming has been largely been exempt from that, but if I were in the midst of a traditional comp sci program, facing the existential dreads that are U.S and Canadian economies (at least), along with the effective collapse of a path to financial stability, I'd be stupid not to be considering a major pivot; to what, I don't know.
No job is special, even though many programmers like to think of themselves as so. Everyone must learn to adapt to a changing world, just as they did a hundred years ago at the turn of the century.
I was pretty much told this in the 90s that I would have no real stability in life like my parents did and my life would be constant reinvention. That has been spot on.
It is the younger people who started their career after the financial crisis that got the wrong signaling. As if 2010-2021 was normal instead of the far from equilibrium state it was.
This current state of anxiety about the future is the normal state. That wonderful decade was the once in a lifetime event.
This is always said as if the buggy whip maker successfully transitioned to some new job. Please show me 10 actual examples of individuals in 1880 that successfully adapted to new jobs after the industrial revolution destroyed their old one, and what their life looked like before and after.
'Sure the 1880 start of the industrial revolution sucked, all the way through the end of WW2, but then we figured out jobs and middle class for a short time, so it doesn't matter you personally are being put at the 1880 starting point, because the 1950s had jobs'. Huh?
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Things that won't be automated anytime soon, like plumbers or electricians.
Or double down on applied ML?
Like hundreds of thousands other workers who had the same genius idea.
Nurses.
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> This fallacy seems to be brought up very frequently, that there are still blacksmiths; people who ride horses; people who use typewriters; even people who use fountain pens, but they don't really exist in any practical or economical sense outside of 10 years ago Portland, OR.
Did you respond with a fallacy of your own? I can only assume you’re not in or don’t have familiarity with those worlds and that has lead you to conclude they don’t exist in any practical or economical sense. It’s not difficult to look up those industries and their economic impact. Particularly horses and fountain pens. Or are you going by your own idea of practical or economical?
No, horses and fountain pens do not exist in any real sense today vs. the economic impact they once had. They are niche hobbies that could disappear tomorrow and the economy wouldn't even notice. They used to be bedrocks where the world would stop turning without them overnight if they disappeared. The folks put out of work would be a rounding error on yearly layoffs if every horse and pen was zapped out of existence tonight.
They are incredibly niche side industries largely for the pleasure of wealthy folks. Horses still have a tiny niche industrial use.
There may not be many people whose professional job is using a typewriter, but there are still tons of writers.
Yet usually woodworking is not a viable business. As a craft - sure. As a day job to provide for your family - not really. Guys who created a custom tables for me five years ago are out of business.
Pretty much the same story with any craft.
The Mechanics Institute, where craftsman learned and offered their wares in my town, was founded in 1801.
Its still here, today.
I wouldn't dismiss an industry based on business failures. The restaurant industry still exists, despite it being almost a guarantee that you will fail.
There's also stores with hand-knitted clothes and bears, sculpters and painters.
Yes, all of these are niche - but they survive because they embrace a different business model.
>> Its still here, today.
Because it is a different business, to teach people. So many places are teaching nice things that could help little to get a job with living wage.
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America and a bunch of western developed countries are about to experience first hand why immigrants go to their countries. I find some of the comments here funny, they don’t have the imagination on how bad things can really get.
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Right, nobody needs cabinets or doors because... AI. /s
I'm a professional woodworker. One-off tables in a garage might not be a great business, but millwork, built-ins, and cabinetry in homes is a great business. You're likely not exposed to cabinet or architectural woodwork shops that build high-end homes, or that just do renovation for that matter.
A better comparison to Ikea vs Handcraft would be shrinkwrap software vs custom software for companies. With AI, the custom software industry is getting disrupted (if the current trajectory of improvements continue).
In case of woodcraft, there is some tangible result that can be appreciated and displayed as art. In case of custom software, there is no such displayability.
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That’s the point. It used to be something almost everyone bought. Now it’s relegated to high-end luxury. The craft still exists, and you can still do well, but it’s much diminished.
It’s not that nobody needs cabinets or doors. It’s that automation, transportation, and economies of scale have made it much cheaper to produce those things with machines in a factory.
> One-off tables in a garage might not be a great business, but millwork, built-ins, and cabinetry in homes is a great business.
I'd like to see numbers backing that up. My personal impression is that you have a small number of custom woodworkers hustling after an ever smaller number of rich clients. That seems like exactly the same problem.
This comparison is hardly apt in the way it is formulated, but it is fitting when considering tailors and seamstresses. A few decades ago, numerous tailors made custom-made clothes and skilled seamstresses repaired them. Today, since clothes are made by machines and the cost of production has fallen significantly, making bespoke clothes has become a niche job, almost extinct, and instead of repairing clothes, people prefer to buy new ones.
These jobs have not disappeared, but they have become much less common and attractive.
high quality carpentry has a market of people who buy one off projects for lots of money.
There is not really a similar market in software.
I'm not saying there won't be fine programmers etc. but with woodworking I can see how a market exists that will support you developing your skills and I don't see it with software and thus the path seems much less clear to me.
Bro, there is a HUGE market for one off software projects for lots of money.
yeah sorry I've seen one off carpentry projects for lots of money and I've worked on software projects for individual companies, and it's not really comparable (especially going back to the earlier post that started this, which I thought was not discussing say the newest spotify competitor or something similar)
however I suppose at the point where I need to explain that and all the ways in which the two things are dissimilar it becomes a book in itself.
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I've been involved in building a multitude of saas apps and very few of them had any unique functionality. I'm not sure many of those companies cared about the uniqueness of their code.
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