Comment by cogman10
7 days ago
The more likely outcome is that fewer devs will be hired as fewer devs will be needed to accomplish the same amount of output.
7 days ago
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.
Jobs are replaced when new technology is able to produce an equivalent or better product that meets the demand, cheaper, faster, more reliably, etc. There is no evidence that the current generation of "AI" tools can do that for software.
There is a whole lot of marketing propping up the valuations of "AI" companies, a large influx of new users pumping out supremely shoddy software, and a split in a minority of users who either report a boost in productivity or little to no practical benefits from using these tools. The result of all this momentum is arguably net negative for the industry and the world.
This is in no way comparable to changes in the footwear, travel, and telecom industries.
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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
I expect something like this will happen to some degree, although not to the extent of what happened with computers.
But the point is that we didn't just lose all of those jobs.
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