To me it seems like the big question for the future will be how to achieve political relevance as "the little guy". It seems like with LLMs the typical "get educated" pathway for the lower class is closing quick. I dread to think of a world where large portions of society are essentially "useless".
The speed and scale are different. The power loom took a while to replace a subset of jobs. It didn't make "manual work" obsolete overnight.
"Going into trades" isn't gonna save you. Knowledge work is 40% of the workforce. Whose electricity are you gonna fix when people can't afford a house?
*THE word ''Luddite'' continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins.
It begins :
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!*
What went viral?
To me it just seems like people are pretty divided on the topic which makes sense as it’s an emerging technology. I feel I see as many posts against AI as glazing it.
Which side of that argument has lots of marketing dollars behind it. I suspect what we are all seeing is marketing plus a few useful idiots against everyone else. I will change my mind when I start seeing actual apps created by LLMs which people actually use. What I do see is LLMs replacing search engines and lots of failed software projects. The basic problem here is that the powers that be think the economics of software are like manufacturing. They aren't; they are closer to music publishing, just a lot bigger. And AI isn't having any real impact there.
I agree its not a flat out replacement, but this doesn't stop the marketing from infecting C -suite and leading to them cutting engineering payroll. 400k layoffs in the USA in the last 16 months, and most of those were before this ramp up in "agentic marketing". The tools will 100% be leveraged as a weapon to devalue the expected salaries of tech workers.
Then when they do need to rehire everyone, they will have improved these tools and people will be desperate. They'll say SWE is vastly easier now, and they'll either hire less qualified or push down the value of SWE salaries, I expect the latter.
I think the lawyer money for SWE is gone, so glad I spent 100k in school, years of study and practice. Instead of getting to do the thing I love, I'm going to be expected to basically play project manager with a half literate bot.
To me it seems like the big question for the future will be how to achieve political relevance as "the little guy". It seems like with LLMs the typical "get educated" pathway for the lower class is closing quick. I dread to think of a world where large portions of society are essentially "useless".
That's literally what automation is. You could make the same argument against the power loom. People did!
The speed and scale are different. The power loom took a while to replace a subset of jobs. It didn't make "manual work" obsolete overnight.
"Going into trades" isn't gonna save you. Knowledge work is 40% of the workforce. Whose electricity are you gonna fix when people can't afford a house?
I don't agree, but at least that's an argument.
[dead]
*THE word ''Luddite'' continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins.
It begins : As the Liberty lads o'er the sea Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood, So we, boys, we Will die fighting, or live free, And down with all kings but King Ludd!*
Your homework:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
What went viral? To me it just seems like people are pretty divided on the topic which makes sense as it’s an emerging technology. I feel I see as many posts against AI as glazing it.
The recent frontpage post I see is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926245 (not on frontpage anymore, probably downranked by flamewar detector since it has tons of comments)
Which side of that argument has lots of marketing dollars behind it. I suspect what we are all seeing is marketing plus a few useful idiots against everyone else. I will change my mind when I start seeing actual apps created by LLMs which people actually use. What I do see is LLMs replacing search engines and lots of failed software projects. The basic problem here is that the powers that be think the economics of software are like manufacturing. They aren't; they are closer to music publishing, just a lot bigger. And AI isn't having any real impact there.
I agree its not a flat out replacement, but this doesn't stop the marketing from infecting C -suite and leading to them cutting engineering payroll. 400k layoffs in the USA in the last 16 months, and most of those were before this ramp up in "agentic marketing". The tools will 100% be leveraged as a weapon to devalue the expected salaries of tech workers.
Then when they do need to rehire everyone, they will have improved these tools and people will be desperate. They'll say SWE is vastly easier now, and they'll either hire less qualified or push down the value of SWE salaries, I expect the latter.
I think the lawyer money for SWE is gone, so glad I spent 100k in school, years of study and practice. Instead of getting to do the thing I love, I'm going to be expected to basically play project manager with a half literate bot.