[therealdrag0]

Unemployable is a charged word. A lot of outdated professions still have professionals. There are still professional horse drawn carriages.

If the AI performance gains are 50% improvement, and companies decide they rather cut costs and pocket the difference, could be due to many factors, that leaves millions out of a job. And those performance gains are coming for many white collar jobs. I guess your premise is mass unemployment is not worth worrying about, so okay then.

Marginal changes in productivity can make huge impacts to industries employment rates.

[fatherwavelet]

People still pay thousands of dollars for wedding photographers even though everyone at the wedding also has a camera and many are taking their own pictures.

I am not a software engineer and it seems to me if someone has experience as a software engineer before LLMs, they have skills no one will really be able to acquire again in the same way.

I would expect current software engineers to eat the entire non-customer facing back office in the next ten years.

[varjag]

> People still pay thousands of dollars for wedding photographers even though everyone at the wedding also has a camera and many are taking their own pictures.

Wedding photography used to be the lowest in the pecking order of professional photography. Now all the photojournalists, travel magazine and corporate events photographers are as good as extinct. Even the arts market for photography been on decline for years.

[AstroBen]

> I guess your premise is mass unemployment is not worth worrying about, so okay then

My point wasn't that it's not a big deal. My point there is that if AI ends up taking a large % of white collar work you're going to have a huge portion of the population in the same boat. Maybe an overly optimistic view but that'll end up forcing change through politics

..I also think this is a ridiculously low % chance of happening and it would take something close to AGI to bring about. I don't know how you can use AI regularly and think we're anywhere close to that

Contracting an incurable illness that renders me blind and thus unable to work is just as likely and not something I spend time worrying about

> Marginal changes in productivity can make huge impacts to industries employment rates

Maybe? We also have Jevon's paradox. Software is incredibly expensive to build right now - how many more applications for it can people find if the cost halves?