[DrewADesign]

Nobody gives a damn about the dying of a trade. People don’t want their house foreclosed on when they lose their income, or their cancer to kill them when they lose their health insurance, to move an elderly parent into a cheap shitty old folks home because they can’t afford home health care, or not be able to pay for their kid to go on that school field trip.

This would all be pretty fucking swell if the fundamental problems this could cause were even considered before hitting the gas. Instead, you’re going to have a shitload of people with ruined lives, but as a consolation prize, they can vibe code stuff! Wowee!

[woah]

This very forum was founded by a VC who had great success recruiting 22 year olds with fancy diplomas to automate away the job of the guy who copied the numbers from the TPS report pdf attachment into excel.

I didn't see people on here ranting and taking up the flag of revolution for the TPS report excel paster guy's job that they were automating away with their web2 SaaS startup.

But wait- that guy himself was automating away the job of the lady who used to physically Xerox the TPS report and put it in the filing cabinet down the hall, but that lady was automating the job of the secretary who used to re-type all those TPS reports.

It's automatic filing cabinets all the way down, and ranting because your little slice of the filing cabinet automation machine has been made redundant is a bit silly.

[mikkupikku]

You act as if this is the first time in history technology has wiped out a trade and made people scramble to sort out their lives. No, this has been happening over and over again throughout history and at a rapidly accelerating pace since the industrial revolution. Why should we ask it to slow down on behalf of programmers, when it never did for anybody else? Don't pretend you didn't know this was a possibility when you got into tech in the first place. You might have to downsize your life but humanity as a whole will be better off.

[paulryanrogers]

> You might have to downsize your life but humanity as a whole will be better off

This assumes that there will be other jobs to get. If AI replaces a large enough segment of office jobs then huge portions of the population will be unable to afford essentials like food and healthcare.

[cardanome]

The industrial revolution resulted in children being worked to literal death. Of people toiling 16 hours ad day and living in cramped up spaces without any windows and barely any hygiene. It brought suffering on a scale never seen before.

Organized labor movements managed to fight back and improve conditions somewhat but will we be able to do it this time?

Humanity will not profit from generative AI, tech billionaires will. It is based on the theft of human labor of millions of programmer, artists and writers without any compensation. If left unchecked it will destroy the environment, any form of democracy, our mental health. It will cause mass unemployment at a grand scale.

Could it be in theory used for good? Maybe. As the current political situation stands it will cause massive suffering for the majority of people.

[DrewADesign]

Your glib dismissal of the real effects of those technological upheavals shows you haven’t actually looked into this. You should probably tamp down that smugness until you find out.