Comment by asdfman123
1 month ago
I feel like this is a rational response.
Personally, while I'm becoming increasingly convinced there's going to be a wave of SWE layoffs, another part of me doesn't grasp it yet. I don't feel it.
I was an AI skeptic for a while but it's literally doing my job for me right now. Every month it needs less of my help.
Once they replace SWEs, they're going to turn around and replace every other knowledge worker yet. But most people haven't processed it yet.
I can't believe the AI boosters were right.
> I can't believe the AI boosters were right.
Not even sure they can believe it.
The AI field has known, but repeatedly ignored, that the knowledge work group would end up first on the chopping block, especially for those where everything they touch is digitally encoded already.
I used to joke that we're all really in trouble when robots can sort out your socks, but as of about a year ago I started seeing disturbing progress on that incredibly gnarly problem.
Most people really are going to be in denial about this as a coping mechanism, but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.
I don't think it was ever ignored that knowledge workers would be the first affected by AI. I remember hearing for a long time that lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc. would all be obsoleted by AI.
I do think many (including me) were surprised that software engineering would be the first kind of knowledge work to be successfully automated. We assumed it would be one of the last, because we'd be the industry using AI to replace everyone else, not the industry using AI to replace ourselves.
I've always been interested in making my job easier first and solving business problems second :)
> creating large minorities of disenfranchised.
That's called "elite overproduction". Too many people going to college when the jobs aren't there. In the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't require a college degree.
It's much worse in less developed countries. The article today about essays in Kenya mentions that the country is creating far more educated people than it can use. Egypt had a scheme where the government guaranteed a government job to everyone who graduated from college. They had to give that up when the oil ran out.
It's hitting top people first, which was unexpected. Mathematicians who've won the Fields Medal are worried, and some are giving up math.[1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/19/mathema...
I was in denial for a long time too. Now I see it everywhere, among very smart people, too.
They say "AI just hallucinates" or "your fear is overblown" or they have a general sour grapes attitude towards it. But I don't think they're prepared for what's coming.
It's been coming "soon" for years now.
On the one hand, I confess that the "AI skeptic" position (which is where I place myself) seems a lot like "Global Warming skeptic". On the other hand, every instinct I have is telling me "this is an epic scam" and the wheels will come off, and it will crash and burn. The only question is when.
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Honestly, I don't think any of us know exactly what's coming.
The difficult part is preventing the humans from causing the collapse of civilisation in the time before AI actually gets to ASI.
> but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.
I have mixed feelings about this statement. On the one hand: long-lived disparity like this is going to be very painful for those on the losing end of it. On the other hand: slowing the pace of change allows society and government to better adapt to it, and really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.
> really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.
This all depends on where the change ends. If it ends with ASI existing then it all works out.
If it ends with only sufficient AI to weaponise against the masses but not smart enough to escape the people pulling the strings then it's game over, and a totalitarian surveillance nightmare awaits.
Right now we're approaching the level of the second scenario already, but remain quite a long way (relatively speaking) from ASI. Slowing down simply makes the nightmare version more likely in the long run.
> the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be
Getting to the end asap is absolutely going to be "the vast majority of people are disenfranchised", how could it possibly be anything different? The only lever most people have is their labour, and that is being stripped from us.
Even if we aren't impoverished in the future due to some UBI scheme or whatever, it's hard to imagine what that looks like other than "disenfranchised". How do you have any kind of clout inside a system that you are fully dependent on?
Disenfranchising everyone at once beats disenfranchising enough to be a problem but not enough to motivate a solution, which is what the drip feeding achieves.
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Some people are sad others are very happy
Assuming you are in the happy camp, what do you intend to do for food after all the software engineers have been replaced? The only people I can imagine as happy are those who are either close to retirement or wealthy enough to live off savings/investments.
The problem is that in an AI powered future, there is no elite class.
In every regime in history, elites have been a threat to state power, but needed to keep things running.
If the state can run itself, you don't need elites anymore.
Elites will be the ones that hold the capital.
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The Ai overlords have been banging this drum for over a decade with Altman posting about the need for Universal Basic Income on here in 2016.
I didn't remember/realize this so I went searching [1] and found multiple sources e.g. [2]
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13207552
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>- if SWE’s are fked so is everyone else!
- Technical writers: It will never be me.
[Oh no, it was me]
- Graphics designers: It will never be me.
[Oh no, it was me]
- SWE: It will never be me.
[Oh no, it was me]
- everybody else: Haha, Idiots, it will never be me. <- We are here.
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Any job that requires human working on computers to complete tasks is slowly becoming irrelevant where the computers themselves do the work.
How many people now make their living completing tasks on computers?
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LLM's are perfectly capable of replacing tons of jobs in fields like marketing, corporate communications, journalism etc. Also, as price of software is driven down thanks to LLM's, more custom software can be built to automate all kinds of tasks in many fields, tasks that were not previously economically viable to automate. You are delusional if you think SWE's will be fkd and all other white collar professions will be fine.
The way I see it, few professions will be completely replaced, but people using LLM's as their tools will do more work, reducing the need for labour. Humans in many, many fields will focus more on quality assurance, less on the daily tasks they used to do.
Dismissive, uninformed, and in denial is not an attractive combination of traits to have.
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there are many many jobs that largely consist of sending emails and answering phones all day
Or generating spreadsheets, or sitting in meetings, or operating any other kind of software.
That can all be replaced with AI. Carpenters, flight attendants, etc. won't yet, because robotics just isn't there yet. You need humans to move things in irregular ways. But everyone else can be replaced.
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