Comment by asdff
2 days ago
Are you really surprised people feel this way? People have pigeonholed themselves into this field and now they find themselves horseshoe makers in this new age. It is scary and concerning. People do have legitimate fear. The whole pitch with AI isn't really that it empowers you to make some CRUD app easily. It is that eventually, sometime very soon, people will wise up to the fact that prompting is not a six figure job. It can be done by desperate low skilled people halfway across the world. Eventually those people will also hit the block.
I think people who aren't scared right now aren't really considering the larger implications of what is actually being pitched. The fact that the AI evangelicals don't realize that they too have no moat is going to be so ironic if only it wasn't so sad what is actually happening.
I mean, we are devaluing humanity. That is what these tools are promising really. It isn't just software. It is art. It is sales. It is poetry. It is C suite. It is filmaking. It is surgery. Every job there is, is at risk. Maybe not tomorrow, but on the horizon. The remaining jobs on earth will become the next target to automate and remove humans out of existence. An ever larger target until there are no targets left but AI controlled companies infighting among eachother for the energy coming from the sun and the nutrients in the 6 inches of topsoil.
Earth will be for the birds and the machines by the end of the century I'm guessing. Keeping us alive will be seen as a liability and a great risk to power structures. If we are allowed to live, and that is a huge if, we will probably devolve back into the hunter gatherer stage, fearful of the machine gods and their robot soldiers and temples of data and compute.
> at prompting is not a six figure job. It can be done by desperate low skilled people halfway across the world. Eventually those people will also hit the block.
And people will rightfully respond that we ‘will’ need people who understand architecture and such: almost certainly more than a handful.
The bigger problem is that right now we have a lot of developers. Even if this had the comparatively mild overall impact of increasing developer productivity by 25%, that’s going to mean the industry needs somewhere around 25% fewer people. And it’s not like the people who lose their jobs are going to pick their stuff up and join the circus… they’re going to fight tooth and nail for the jobs that are available, plummeting supply. Even if development with LLMs remains a highly skilled job, we probably currently have all the software developers we’ll need for decades. This is exactly what happened to toolmakers, pattern makers, and all sorts of other highly skilled manufacturing disciplines during the off-shoring craze.
People in the software business have been so coddled for so long, they’ve started to believe that they demand high salaries because of their incredible genius, rather than a labor shortage in the field. It’s going to be a pretty huge shock for a whole lot of people to suddenly be on the same playing field as everybody else.