[waldohatesyou]

I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well.

At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues that my part of the world (Canada and to a lesser extent, America) has been faced with is inequality. I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people.

Are there downsides to that? Probably but I think granting power evenly is probably a better path to utopia than misguided elitism. The latter sounds like the path to despotism.

[jpatt]

I don't really think law, medicine, and software engineering are the main drivers of wage inequality, though. If the lowest wage was minimum wage and the highest wage was a programmer salary, the Americas would be a very equitable economy.

Automating America's remaining paths to the middle class will only serve to widen the gap between capital owners who will own infrastructure for automation and those shoved into a shrinking piece of the unautomated pie.

[Affric]

The comment you’re replying to is making that point: that people who earn a decent wage from the knowledge economy are threatened by AI and oppose it because of their interest in the current system’s inequality.

It follows that if it is unjust for those who are knowledge workers then it is unjust for those who are service workers (unless you can morally differentiate them).

Perhaps if inequality is wrong then it’s the system that creates inequality that should be looked at rather than preserving rent seeking by knowledge workers refusing to compete with AI while perpetuating inequality on those who aren’t powerful in the current economy?

Food for thought.

[stcroixx]

If software dev is simplified to the point people working jobs like you describe are able to do it, wages will also plummet, so it’s not like their situation is going to improve.

[rsanek]

This is a zero-sum way of thinking about the world.

[acscott]

If a developer making $1/hour produces $10 output (of something people buy), then if you add another developer making $1/hour produces $10 of output, you have $20 total product. Developer A and B can compete on their rate down to the point that it's not sustainable, and thus, an equilibrium will be struck.

How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?

[zetsurin]

> I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people.

I think the fear of software developers is that they will join the low pay crowd.