[dizzydes]

Three things that get me about current AI discourse:

- The public focus on AGI is almost a distraction. By the time we get to AGI highly-specialised models will have taken jobs from huge swaths of the population, SWE and CS are already in play.

- That AI will need to carry out every task a role does to replace it. I see this a lot on HN. What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? That's still a gigantic economic impact. Even at the current state of the art this is plausible.

- The notion that everyone laid off above will find new employment from the opportunities AI creates. Perhaps it's just a gap in my knowledge. What opportunities are so large they'll make up for the economies we're starting to see? I understand the inverting population pyramid in the Western world helps this some also (more retirees/less workers).

[visarga]

> What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half?

Zero sum game or fixed lump of work fallacy. Think second order effects - now that we spend less time repeating known methods, we will take on more ambitious work. Competition between companies using human + AI will raise the bar. Software has been cannibalizing itself for 60 years, with each new language and framework, and yet employment is strong.

[dizzydes]

Fair, there are probably two threads to this.

New product that push that bar and can command a decent margin (and good staff salaries) as long as there's a business case/demand and feature-sets that currently command a decent margin will be available for dirt cheap prices (managed by one or two person outfits).

Your comment really got me thinking, it's time to upskill haha. Aside from biotech and robotics do you see any areas particularly ripe for this push?

[typewithrhythm]

It's probably true, but just not for SWEs. Many roles will go the way of secretarys; the cost of making an administrative tool will decrease to the point where there is less need for a specialised role to handle it. The question is going to be about the pace of disruption, is there something special about these new tools?

[wil421]

Just like robo-taxis are supposed to be driving us around or self driving cars. Not to mention the non-fiat currency everyone can easily use to buy goods nowadays.

[napoleoncomplex]

Waymo was providing 10,000 weekly autonomous rides in August 2023, 50,000 in June 2024, and 100,000 in August 2024.

Not everything has this trajectory, and it took 10 years more than expected. But it's coming.

Not saying AI will be the same, but underestimating the impact of having certain outputs 100x cheaper, even if many times crappier seems like a losing bet, considering how the world has gone so far.

[dijit]

To be fair, I haven't touched real money in about 3 years.

If it's called "bank-coin"; "swedish crowns" or "bitcoin" it doesn't matter because it's all digital anyway.

On that count, the technological innovation is here, but it's centralised in a few "trusted" entities, just like everything.

[dizzydes]

In the first case there are inherent safety constraints preventing it and thus its not available to public to freely use. It's highly regulated. With GPT to writing code, it is already generally available and in heavy use. There are no such life-and-death concerns in the main.

In the second case there are inherent technical challenges to using non-fiat currency and the fx volatility with fiat is wild. There are also barriers and inconveniences to conversion. With GPT writing code, the user can review for quality and still be many x more productive and there is far fewer fees and risk of loss.

It's risky to take two failed or slow innovations and assume that all innovations will be failed or slow.

[hiddencost]

Waymo is doing 100k paid driverless trips a week with significantly better safety than humans in matched conditions.

[no_op]

Non-general AI won't cause mass unemployment, for the same reason previous productivity-enhancing tech hasn't. So long as humans can create valuable output machines can't, the new, higher-output economy will figure out how to employ them. Some won't even have to switch jobs, because demand for what they provide will be higher as AI tools bring down production costs. This is plausible for SWEs. Other people will end up in jobs that come into existence as a result of new tech, or that presently seem too silly to pay many people for — this, too, is consistent with historical precedent. It can result in temporary dislocation if the transition is fast enough, but things sort themselves out.

It's really only AGI, by eclipsing human capabilities across all useful work, that breaks this dynamic and creates the prospect of permanent structural unemployment.

[fulafel]

We do have emplyoment problems arguably caused by tech, currently the bar of minimum viable productivity is higher than before in a lot of countries. In western welfare states there aren't jobs anymore for people who were doing groundskeeper ish things 50 years ago (apart from public sector subsidized employment programs).

We need to come up with ways of providing meaningful roles for the large percentage of people whose peg shape doesn't fit the median job hole.

[consteval]

> So long as humans can create valuable output machines can't

Not all humans are going to be capable of this as time goes on. Those humans will be subjected to abject poverty.

The reality is not everyone can possess a highly skilled knowledge job. Not everyone can go to college. What of them?

[snowwrestler]

If an AI can do my job, why would my employer fire me? Why wouldn’t they be excited to get 200% productivity out of me for the marginal cost of an AI seat license?

A lot of the predictions of job loss are predicated on an unspoken assumption that we’re sitting at “task maximum” so any increase in productivity must result in job loss. It’s only true if there is no more work to be done. But no one seems to be willing or able or even aware that they need to make that point substantively—to prove that there is no more work to be done.

Historically, humans have been absolutely terrible at predicting the types and volumes of future work. But we’ve been absolutely incredible at inventing new things to do to keep busy.

[ninetyninenine]

> If an AI can do my job, why would my employer fire me? Why wouldn’t they be excited to get 200% productivity out of me for the marginal cost of an AI seat license?

They’d be excited at getting 100x of 100% output out an AI for 20 dollars a month and laying you off as redundant. If you aren’t scared of the potential of this technology you are lying to yourself.

[dizzydes]

It depends on who your employer is.

If they're high growth yes, if they're in the majority of businesses that are just trying to maximise profit with negligible or no growth then likely not.

[jonplackett]

When electricity got cheap - we use MORE electricity.

Think how many places you see shitty software currently.

My wife was just trying to use an app to book a test with the doctor - did not work at all. The staff said they know it doesn’t work. They still give out the app.

We are surrounded by awful software. There’s a lot of work to do- if it could be done cheaper. Currently only rich companies can make great software.

[rty32]

Well, that probably happens to some extent, but I am quite confident that some smaller shops will just say "Hey make an app that works 50% of the time and that's good enough." then fire half of the staff.

Oh, not just smaller shops, I have many issues with Android and other Google products -- from bugs to things that just don't work that have existed for decades, and there is no action on those over the years. Surely Google has the resources? Right? riiight?

This is a human problem, not a technology problem.

[eitland]

> We are surrounded by awful software. There’s a lot of work to do- if it could be done cheaper. Currently only rich companies can make great software.

Lots of the awful software is made by awfully rich companies - and lots of good software is made by bootstraped devs.

To mention some interesting examples, both Amazon and Google has gone from great to meh soon after they went from startups to entrenched market leaders.

[schnitzelstoat]

I agree on the first two points.

On the third point, I think we've always seen this happen even in massive shocks like the Industrial Revolution (and the Second Industrial Revolution with assembly lines etc. and the Computer Age)

It might be hard for people to retrain to whatever the new opportunities are though. Although perhaps somewhat easier nowadays with the internet etc.

[kranke155]

The Industrial Revolution was a period of massive economic growth that was coupled with decline in the quality of life of the average worker.

This Economist article talks about how looking at the historical data, historians now see that the height of the average Englishman actually went down due to malnutrition. https://web.archive.org/web/20210905065401/https://www.econo...

The myth that the Industrial Revolution was a wonderful time is just that, a myth. The actual reality of the AI revolution will likely be the same. Record number of billionaires and record number of people in deep poverty at the same time.

[beepbooptheory]

The industrial revolution didn't lay everyone off, it just made everyone's jobs worse in every possible sense.

[visarga]

One thing AI is good at is explaining things, we can retrain faster and better with it.

[tarsinge]

SWE became way more productive with Email and the Internet, did that lead to a significant part of them getting fired?

[deathanatos]

> What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half?

This is kinda ironic in a thread that's basically about the AI hype landscape, but you've just reduced the amount of SWE "power" your example organization has there by 25%.

[charlie0]

Buy stocks and try to own the means of production. Things are going to begin to flatten out in terms of salary or even decrease as competition increases due to productivity gains.

[littlestymaar]

> SWE and CS are already in play. What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half?

You know what happened last time we got 50% more efficient? It was when github and npm arrived. LLM are saving time and making us more efficient, but that's peanuts compared to the ability to just “download a lib that does X” instead of coding this shit on your own. And you know what happened after that? SWE position skyrocketed.