With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX.
>When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI.
The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, instead of it all going solely to resource guzzling data centres selling opaque models whilst simultaneously destroying the pricing for local hardware!
We are only 1 to 2 year into a cycle and we expect a lot of things to happen. Even the business decisions of things were decided before the cycle happened, as if they are fortune teller or God, the hardware lead time would meant it will be next year at best before we see results. And Nvidia has already moved at a faster pace than most imagined. Latest GPU R&D are now fully amortised on the AI server front. GPU now move to leading edge node faster than before and iterate on a shorter cycle. I have yet to read a single comments on either HN, Reddit or wider internet that appreciate this.
And as to NAND and DRAM, which most people are concern. We only need a few companies to commit to long term ( 3 - 5 years ) agreement on pricing and quantity, DRAM and NAND will increase supply or new fabs accordingly. This isn't new and is exactly what Apple did with iPod. But no companies wants to do that, as they all want lowest price and little commitment, while foundry don't want to bare the risk of new fab and over supply in the long term. This is just classic commodity supply and demand scenario.
On a simpler terms, no one asked why Toilet paper companies aren't putting up more factory just to output more paper rolls during COVID. And If you need 5 to 10 years just to earn back the cost of additional supply line, why risk that?
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
We are saying AI companies have trillions to spend over the next 5 years on infrastructure, based on servicing a hypothetical TAM that includes large amounts of workers who it also expects to displace.
> The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out.
Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today.
Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s.
And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money.
Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
The railroad bubble and the dotcom bubble feature prominently as disastrous misallocations of capital in one of my favorite books: "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation."
Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
The comparison with the internet is not valid, and I can immediately give you one reason. I was there (3000 years ago) when the internet was in its infancy. When the dot com bubble was going on, the internet was a fringe thing for most people. People didn't really use it, didn't know how to use it, didn't trust it (for purchases, for information). The investors were still right, but they were too ahead of their time, by almost a decade.
AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
Upsides will be seen into societies that are not capital-above-govt, but govt-above-capital. China for instance: they will show advantages of AI (amongst other technologies). Sure they've got surveillance there, but there's also surveillance in the west. In China you have clean streets and low crime, while in the west it's surveillance without tangible benefit for the common people.
I could barely exist in Shanghai when I visited it for a week earlier this year. The surveillance is suffocating. With all my disdain towards the way the West is going, the level of control and freedom can't be compared. Especially if you've ever experienced freedom taken from you (unfortunately, I have).
> exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?)
How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth?
If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
The upside will mostly be the schadenfreude we'll get when, coming in Q4 of this year, the managerial class is finally called on to show ROI for the $100,000+ (depending on company size) per employee they shunted to anthropic and openai.
Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
It would be one thing if those increases in productivity were improving my QOL as a consumer of produced goods, through cost reductions or increases in quality, but I'm not seeing any of that.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
Yup. Everything after the first decade of a career is either jockeying for a promotion, jumping ship-to-ship as needed, or sitting around in meetings.
It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.
> I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.
Key factors for me:
- Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs. Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
- Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them. Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
- Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.
That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target.
Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
> Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
The delusion of engineers is that finally we have the means to stop compromising on quality to deliver, and fix all the garbage we’ve had to put out rationalizing about “cost-benefit”.
Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.
Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.
They didn't say a word about "our profession". Where is the upside for humanity? Everyone is bearing the cost of hardware going up 4x. Anyone purchasing a computer feels the downside of components costing 4x. Anyone who likes interesting things being hosted on the internet feels the downside of small-scale projects shutting down when they can no longer be sustainably hosted at 4x cost. Anyone who likes interesting consumer hardware feels the downside when 4x cost means there is no longer room for small or new businesses to innovate and find new products to bring to market because nobody can afford them, and when game consoles and other electronics spike in price. Anyone who browses the internet feels the downside of it being >50% bot content. Anyone who uses software feels the downside of "AI" being shoved into everything while performance, security, and reliability of their programs deteriorate to new lows. Anyone who participates in society feels the downside of police, military, lawyers, healthcare professionals, and all manner of other foundations of society outsourcing their life-altering decisions to a hallucination machine.
What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.
I read "fewer jobs" and "massive increase in hardware cost" as issues principally pertaining to programmers. I can't tell if any of the rest of this argument applies if we stipulate that's what I'm talking about.
Because the alternative is admitting the main upside so far is: a few VCs and early employees get yacht money while everyone else gets a gate-kept chatbot and constant fear mongering. But hey, I guess we all have our own opinion of "upside".
Isn’t this the same thing every other industry and market has been experiencing with technology, automation, etc. for decades, while tech workers basked in their joy at being safe from being replaced because we were the ones powering the replacing?
I mean, that very well could be the case. It often is the case with any kind of automation. There's a plausible claim that things will turn out fine, and another plausible claim that it could be a disaster for the profession. But whether or not it's a disaster for professional developers is separable from whether (a) it's a disaster for, like, society, and (b) whether or not it fundamentally is an important new fact about the world --- like, whether we're OK with it or not, it does appear likely that a huge swathe of professional software development work is fully automatable.
It doesn't seem like it, but there are other people in the world besides programmers and venture capitalists. They will benefit from AI, many already are. Some professionals are not.
A computer used to be a person, it was a job title. They worked in giant offices where they calculated important things on paper.
Fair point... but I feel awash in doom, gloom and other apocalyptic predictions.
I found this book to be a welcome breath of fresh air, and I enjoyed listening to it.
It revealed to me that maybe, just maybe (we can only hope) things aren't
quite as bad as we've been lead to believe... and while ai is obviously not
mentioned, it does help cast modern tech developments in a more favorable light.
With all the AI stuff available everyone, does anyone actually work any less? 4 hours per day instead of 8? Or even less? More vacation days? Anything?
I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
What's your source? The Bureau of labor statistics that is marking most of unemployed people as "not seeking employment" because they aren't walking into workforce centers?
Payrolls are up about 214k in March, 180k in April, and 140k in May. The BLS data is from broad monthly surveys, not people showing up in workforce centers.
Well, it's a mania, it's stupid now and it will correct itself. There will be pain. There's always pain after stupidity. Then we will see if LLMs are as useful as we were told.
The only correction will be anyone not in the concentrated wealth part being left out to rot. There is no upside for pretty much anyone posting on hacker news
The upsides are going to be everyone freed up from their menial corporate jobs so they can be a trader/'investor' and buy nft, crypto, SpaceX, AI stocks. Everyone becomes a millionaire on speculation. There will be Universities offering courses and degrees. Influencers selling their own courses.
Will those new jobs be as good as or better than the jobs that were lost? Will those jobs appear shortly, or will it be decades before they appear? Will the people who lost jobs get free education and training for these jobs that will supposedly appear?
I hold the same job title as 2 years ago but my job duties are vastly different now. So yeah new jobs are being created it's just hard to be creative enough to name them properly
Just trust us bro!!!! Just some more ai investment please! The jobs will totally come from like, the ai and stuff! We promise!! Just another billion dollars!
I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha).
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is:
Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier.
Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living.
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go
Capitalism, by nature, will want to force everything to the limit.
It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%.
The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?
Your complaints could have been made in the 80s as well. When the personal computer was introduced it removed tons of jobs, Bill Gates became the first 100 billionaire.
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.
>(world's first trillionaire anyone?)
With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX.
>When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI.
The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, instead of it all going solely to resource guzzling data centres selling opaque models whilst simultaneously destroying the pricing for local hardware!
>Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that,
We are only 1 to 2 year into a cycle and we expect a lot of things to happen. Even the business decisions of things were decided before the cycle happened, as if they are fortune teller or God, the hardware lead time would meant it will be next year at best before we see results. And Nvidia has already moved at a faster pace than most imagined. Latest GPU R&D are now fully amortised on the AI server front. GPU now move to leading edge node faster than before and iterate on a shorter cycle. I have yet to read a single comments on either HN, Reddit or wider internet that appreciate this.
And as to NAND and DRAM, which most people are concern. We only need a few companies to commit to long term ( 3 - 5 years ) agreement on pricing and quantity, DRAM and NAND will increase supply or new fabs accordingly. This isn't new and is exactly what Apple did with iPod. But no companies wants to do that, as they all want lowest price and little commitment, while foundry don't want to bare the risk of new fab and over supply in the long term. This is just classic commodity supply and demand scenario.
On a simpler terms, no one asked why Toilet paper companies aren't putting up more factory just to output more paper rolls during COVID. And If you need 5 to 10 years just to earn back the cost of additional supply line, why risk that?
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> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
We are saying AI companies have trillions to spend over the next 5 years on infrastructure, based on servicing a hypothetical TAM that includes large amounts of workers who it also expects to displace.
One of these two things can be true.
> The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
>Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years.
Tell that to Intel and how TSMC manage to outpace Intel. It was because Smartphone had a much bigger scale. The TAM of custom foundry went up by 10x.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out.
Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today.
Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s.
And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money.
Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
The railroad bubble and the dotcom bubble feature prominently as disastrous misallocations of capital in one of my favorite books: "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation."
Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
The comparison with the internet is not valid, and I can immediately give you one reason. I was there (3000 years ago) when the internet was in its infancy. When the dot com bubble was going on, the internet was a fringe thing for most people. People didn't really use it, didn't know how to use it, didn't trust it (for purchases, for information). The investors were still right, but they were too ahead of their time, by almost a decade.
AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
> Demand is higher than supply.
Only when the product is being given away for free or sold way below cost. It's still unclear how large the actual market is.
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Upsides will be seen into societies that are not capital-above-govt, but govt-above-capital. China for instance: they will show advantages of AI (amongst other technologies). Sure they've got surveillance there, but there's also surveillance in the west. In China you have clean streets and low crime, while in the west it's surveillance without tangible benefit for the common people.
I could barely exist in Shanghai when I visited it for a week earlier this year. The surveillance is suffocating. With all my disdain towards the way the West is going, the level of control and freedom can't be compared. Especially if you've ever experienced freedom taken from you (unfortunately, I have).
Can you explain? What sort of surveillance that affects a casual visitor?!
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Finland and Taiwan has all of that with the added bonus of no Great Firewall of the Internet.
Social credit bonus for wild unfounded claims online is probably nice if you live in the top 5 megacities.
Social credit does not exist the way you think it does
>Social credit bonus
People does still believe this shit?
There are many places in the West with clean streets and low crime that don't use China's economic or political model.
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Texas at least disagrees with you - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
Do you have statistics to back your assertions that disagree with this data?
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Are the foreign born in Germany excluding EU nationals?
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[dead]
We won't need to write our obituaries ;)
He wasn't just a software enginer — he was also a true innovator.
Memories of his work will forever live in the models trained on his GitHub repositories.
:chef's kiss:
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> exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?)
How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth?
If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
The upside will mostly be the schadenfreude we'll get when, coming in Q4 of this year, the managerial class is finally called on to show ROI for the $100,000+ (depending on company size) per employee they shunted to anthropic and openai.
Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
I think the upsides already hit, they just weren't meant for you and I
Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
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It would be one thing if those increases in productivity were improving my QOL as a consumer of produced goods, through cost reductions or increases in quality, but I'm not seeing any of that.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
What's the point of all that, to me?
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I could “retire” to a senior level role and run at 10% capacity with zero AI use at a bigco and nobody would know the difference.
Yup. Everything after the first decade of a career is either jockeying for a promotion, jumping ship-to-ship as needed, or sitting around in meetings.
It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.
> I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.
Key factors for me:
That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target.
Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
This a chamber of weights and measurements comment "I got mine, fuck everyone else".
Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
> Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
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Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
> I can do more than I could before as the result of AI
Are you getting paid more or are you just doing more for fun.
Somebody will eventually know the difference.
And then you’re fired.
"The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours."
This will never happen in the USA. Together with UBI.
The delusion of engineers is that finally we have the means to stop compromising on quality to deliver, and fix all the garbage we’ve had to put out rationalizing about “cost-benefit”.
Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.
Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.
Why does there need to be an "upside" legible to our profession?
They didn't say a word about "our profession". Where is the upside for humanity? Everyone is bearing the cost of hardware going up 4x. Anyone purchasing a computer feels the downside of components costing 4x. Anyone who likes interesting things being hosted on the internet feels the downside of small-scale projects shutting down when they can no longer be sustainably hosted at 4x cost. Anyone who likes interesting consumer hardware feels the downside when 4x cost means there is no longer room for small or new businesses to innovate and find new products to bring to market because nobody can afford them, and when game consoles and other electronics spike in price. Anyone who browses the internet feels the downside of it being >50% bot content. Anyone who uses software feels the downside of "AI" being shoved into everything while performance, security, and reliability of their programs deteriorate to new lows. Anyone who participates in society feels the downside of police, military, lawyers, healthcare professionals, and all manner of other foundations of society outsourcing their life-altering decisions to a hallucination machine.
What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.
I read "fewer jobs" and "massive increase in hardware cost" as issues principally pertaining to programmers. I can't tell if any of the rest of this argument applies if we stipulate that's what I'm talking about.
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Because the alternative is admitting the main upside so far is: a few VCs and early employees get yacht money while everyone else gets a gate-kept chatbot and constant fear mongering. But hey, I guess we all have our own opinion of "upside".
Isn’t this the same thing every other industry and market has been experiencing with technology, automation, etc. for decades, while tech workers basked in their joy at being safe from being replaced because we were the ones powering the replacing?
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I mean, that very well could be the case. It often is the case with any kind of automation. There's a plausible claim that things will turn out fine, and another plausible claim that it could be a disaster for the profession. But whether or not it's a disaster for professional developers is separable from whether (a) it's a disaster for, like, society, and (b) whether or not it fundamentally is an important new fact about the world --- like, whether we're OK with it or not, it does appear likely that a huge swathe of professional software development work is fully automatable.
It doesn't seem like it, but there are other people in the world besides programmers and venture capitalists. They will benefit from AI, many already are. Some professionals are not.
A computer used to be a person, it was a job title. They worked in giant offices where they calculated important things on paper.
If you're interested in upsides, I can highly recommend the book "Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future", by Johan Norberg [1].
I was able to borrow the audio book from my library... absolutely worth the listen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_...
(edit: formatting)
2016 - so, generic upsides of global capitalism, but nothing specific to the AI bubble?
Fair point... but I feel awash in doom, gloom and other apocalyptic predictions.
I found this book to be a welcome breath of fresh air, and I enjoyed listening to it.
It revealed to me that maybe, just maybe (we can only hope) things aren't quite as bad as we've been lead to believe... and while ai is obviously not mentioned, it does help cast modern tech developments in a more favorable light.
One specific upside from ai?
I no longer have to write systemd unit files.
That alone may be worth the cost.
You forgot tariffs, you can see the difference in the price increase between the US and the other places...
With all the AI stuff available everyone, does anyone actually work any less? 4 hours per day instead of 8? Or even less? More vacation days? Anything?
I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
So far, there are more jobs.
What's your source? The Bureau of labor statistics that is marking most of unemployed people as "not seeking employment" because they aren't walking into workforce centers?
Payrolls are up about 214k in March, 180k in April, and 140k in May. The BLS data is from broad monthly surveys, not people showing up in workforce centers.
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The upside is that people will no longer be obligated to struggle.
> When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
Look again in 1000-10000 years.
The upside is c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality
I don't care about inequality, I care about the median.
These two things are linked because the outcomes are power law.
This is a literal Evil (I mean literally) idea wrapped up with statistical terminology and made to seem "logical". You should re-evaluate this.
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Well, it's a mania, it's stupid now and it will correct itself. There will be pain. There's always pain after stupidity. Then we will see if LLMs are as useful as we were told.
The only correction will be anyone not in the concentrated wealth part being left out to rot. There is no upside for pretty much anyone posting on hacker news
That’s not correction though, that’s perpetuation or acceleration of last 40 years‘ trend.
Not that I disagree otherwise though.
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I'm sorry for stirring up your communist fantasy.
The upsides are going to be everyone freed up from their menial corporate jobs so they can be a trader/'investor' and buy nft, crypto, SpaceX, AI stocks. Everyone becomes a millionaire on speculation. There will be Universities offering courses and degrees. Influencers selling their own courses.
Quality of life for basically everyone and percentage of the earth living in poverty are getting much better.
What about all the employees who had options at SPCX and are now > millionaires?
There will be new jobs.
Are the new jobs in the room now?
Or perhaps they're somewhere in West Virginia.
Best state in the country, jobs or no.
Will those new jobs be as good as or better than the jobs that were lost? Will those jobs appear shortly, or will it be decades before they appear? Will the people who lost jobs get free education and training for these jobs that will supposedly appear?
What are these jobs?
I mean for God's sake, people have been saying this shit for 3 years now, but nobody can fathom what those jobs may be.
I hold the same job title as 2 years ago but my job duties are vastly different now. So yeah new jobs are being created it's just hard to be creative enough to name them properly
Just trust us bro!!!! Just some more ai investment please! The jobs will totally come from like, the ai and stuff! We promise!! Just another billion dollars!
/s
you know how many r are in strawberry
It's the human superpower!
You can reply to emails faster and so have more time for hobbies. /s
I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha).
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is: Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier. Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living.
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
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Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go
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Capitalism, by nature, will want to force everything to the limit.
It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%.
The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?
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Toothpaste making did not completely take over the world's supply of plastic for caps.
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A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
Do you know how many jobs there will be on Mars? Go west young man..
Like in "Hello, Tomorrow" ?
Reminds me of a film I saw…
;)
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Less than there will be jobs in Antarctica.
Rovers of Wrath? East of Olympus Mons?
The next great American novels.
At least, Trillions+ I'd guess if I read the project right? :-D
They are are hiring AI Ethics Officers for robots deciding who gets the last potato.
Your complaints could have been made in the 80s as well. When the personal computer was introduced it removed tons of jobs, Bill Gates became the first 100 billionaire.
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
> When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse