Comment by finnjohnsen2
7 days ago
I like this. This is an accurate state of AI at this very moment for me. The LLM is (just) a tool which is making me "amplified" for coding and certain tasks.
I will worry about developers being completely replaced when I see something resembling it. Enough people worry about that (or say it to amp stock prices) -- and they like to tell everyone about this future too. I just don't see it.
Amplified means more work done by fewer people. It doesn’t need to replace a single entire functional human being to do things like kill the demand for labor in dev, which in turn, will kill salaries.
I would disagree. Amplified meens me and you get more s** done.
Unless there a limited amount of software we need to produce per year globally to keep everyone happy, then nobody wants more -- and we happen to be at that point right NOW this second.
I think not. We can make more (in less time) and people will get more. This is the mental "glass half full" approach I think. Why not take this mental route instead? We don't know the future anyway.
In fact, there isn’t infinite demand for software. Especially not for all kinds of software.
And if corporate wealth means people get paid more, why are companies that are making more money than ever laying off so many people? Wouldn’t they just be happy to use them to meet the inexhaustible demand for software?
I do wonder though if we have about enough (or too much) software.
I hear people complaining about software being forced on them to do things they did just fine without software before, than people complaining about software they want that doesn’t exist.
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Jevon's paradox means this is untrue because it means more work not less.
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Hm. More of what? Functionality, security, performance?
Current software is often buggy because the pressure to ship is just too high. If AI can fix some loose threads within, the overall quality grows.
Personally, I would welcome a massive deployment of AI to root out various zero-days from widespread libraries.
But we may instead get a larger quantity of even more buggy software.
This is incorrect. It’s basic economics - technology that boosts productivity results in higher salaries and more jobs.
That’s not basic economics. Basic economics says that salaries are determined by the demand for labor vs the supply of labor. With more efficiency, each worker does more labor, so you need fewer people to accomplish the same thing. So unless the demand for their product increases around the same rate as productivity increases, companies will employ fewer people. Since the market for products is not infinite, you only need as much labor as you require to meet the demand for your product.
Companies that are doing better than ever are laying people off by the shipload, not giving people raises for a job well done.
Well, that depends on whether the technology requires expertise that is rare and/or hard to acquire.
I'd say that using AI tools effectively to create software systems is in that class currently, but it isn't necessarily always going to be the case.
You obviously haven't thought about economics much at all to say something this simplistic.
There are so many counter examples of this being wrong that it is not even worth bothering.
I love economics, but it is largely a field based around half truths and intellectual fraud. It is actually why it is an interesting subject to study.
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Nah, most of it just gets returned to capital holders.
The more likely outcome is that fewer devs will be hired as fewer devs will be needed to accomplish the same amount of output.
The old shrinking markets aka lump of labour fallacy. It's a bit like dreaming of that mythical day, when all of the work will be done.
No it's not that.
Tell me, when was the last time you visited your shoe cobbler? How about your travel agent? Have you chatted with your phone operator recently?
The lump labour fallacy says it's a fallacy that automation reduces the net amount of human labor, importantly, across all industries. It does not say that automation won't eliminate or reduce jobs in specific industries.
It's an argument that jobs lost to automation aren't a big deal because there's always work somewhere else but not necessarily in the job that was automated away.
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This implication completely depends on the elasticity (or lack thereof) of demand for software. When marginal profit from additional output exceeds labor cost savings, firms expand rather than shrink.
When computers came onto the market and could automate a large percentage of office jobs, what happened to the job market for office jobs?
They changed, significantly.
We lost the pneumatic tube [1] maintenance crew. Secretarial work nearly went away. A huge number of bookkeepers in the banking industry lost their jobs. The job a typist was eliminated/merged into everyone else's job. The job of a "computer" (someone that does computations) was eliminated.
What we ended up with was primarily a bunch of customer service, marketing, and sales workers.
There was never a "office worker" job. But there were a lot of jobs under the umbrella of "office work" that were fundamentally changed and, crucially, your experience in those fields didn't necessarily translate over to the new jobs created.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qman4N3Waw4
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