Comment by lkey
16 hours ago
sighs pulling out this quote again:
"Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to >>circumvent standard labor practices<< of the time."
Luckily, the brave government's troops, show trials and making '"machine breaking" (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime"' solved the crisis of these awful, entitled workers' demands once and for all and across all time.
I'm sure that any uppity workers in our present age can also be taught the appropriate lessons.
I wonder if the workers of the time were as responsible for the propaganda as we are... It seems like the ultimate heist when capital can get labour to propagate their own messaging.
Ordinarily yes I’d love to overthrow the bourgeoisie (check my history, I live in flagged threads), but this time I think this thread is really just about the evolution of the profession.
To be clear, I'm an accidental member of the haute bourgeoisie, and under normal circumstances, I cannot be harmed directly by this, or any, new evolution of labor relations.
I was mostly annoyed because Luddites were an early labor movement and their demands were, by modern standards, normal, but they are continually invoked like they believed and demanded things they did not.
I do agree the profession, if we dare diminish coding to exactly one thing, is changing, but I believe the direction of that evolution, unchecked, will exacerbate the ongoing attenuation of the power of labor in the US, even as workers individually become more 'productive'.
Quoting you from elsewhere: "Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance."
We agree here, and likely elsewhere, so keep fighting the good fight on this orange hell site (and also outside if you're able).
This evolution comes at a cost - if one senior suddenly can do their work and plus work of 5 juniors - why would company keep these juniors? It won't - the moment C-suite realizes they don't need extra people, they will be gone. But at some point senior engineers will retire or find new better paying jobs and said company would need to find a replacement. In the past this replacement could come from one of the juniors that worked in that company for a while and mentored by the senior. Not so much when there's no more juniors thanks to AI.
Not so much evolution here, I'm afraid. Just a plain redistribution of wealth upwards thanks to new tools that made large chunk of workforce obsolete. How this will affect industry in 15 years - nobody seem to think about that.
The same could be said about the mass adoption of open source.
Why hire an experienced coder to create project X, when you can just use an open source project and hire cheaper and less experienced coders to make updates? I've been part of many of these conversations with business leaders and management over the years.
Developers have been giving away their work and devaluing their profession for decades and has basically turned it into digital factory work.
It's why I stopped writing software professionally almost a decade ago.
AI is using all of this open source to train and will eventually put you out of a job.