- Work is shifting from building/doing to evaluating, judging, and steering — that's where human value will concentrate.
Other supporting points.
------
- No lab milestone or "RSI breakthrough" will suddenly eliminate jobs — economic impact unfolds gradually over decades.
- Reliability, not raw capability, is the real bottleneck holding back AI automation today.
- Historically, making work cheaper/faster (ATMs, radiology, coding) has grown employment, not destroyed it.
- Superintelligence claims misunderstand human intelligence, which is itself amplified by tools like AI ("co-superintelligence").
It is not a good idea to compress articles like this but there are many of these opinions to read and trying to get to the point quickly to uncover new viewpoints.
> A battle of two narratives
> Build wealth before AI obviates our skills
> Build skills, agency, taste, judgement
both narratives are portrayed as being odds with each other but, I can't come up with a single "build wealth" scenario that doesn't involve building skills, agency, taste and judgement.
If you are asking if the machine translated from one language to another for him, the answer is essentially guaranteed to be yes. Inputting raw machine code hasn't been the norm since the 1950s.
In my org, it's grown the level of work. We had a lot of stuff that was never worth the devtime necessary, but now that's opened up that we can do a lot of this stuff in the background
I think this is underrepresented in everyone's calculations about how AI will affect software engineering. In my experience (and apparently yours as well) this is what many companies are using it for. All those pesky bugs that are minor annoyances but not show-stoppers are getting addressed. They aren't helping us sell more software, but they're dissatisfiers for the customers.
Worth looking into 'Jevons Paradox' for more examples of this sort of thing. TL;DR is that as things become more efficient, whether coal, or programmers, the usage of a good increases as demand skyrockets for what it can be used for.
But it's at my day job, and it's because I was able to write a prompt which automates having Copilot review uploaded scanned PDFs of invoices with checks (and the bank line obscured with a pen, so no PII) and then write a batch file which renames the files per a file-naming convention, removing the need to open them in batches of 50, find the Invoice ID, re-save using that filename, then quit and re-launch Adobe Acrobat (if left running, eventually I run into a bug where it stops saving files), then run a .bat file which renames based on Invoice ID as a filename.
Problem of course is I've been running into a limit of number of allowed files per 24 hr. period.
Even if it's not less work, it feels like less effort.
Extracting structured data from PDFs is something people have been doing forever, way before LLMs, there are state of the art OCR tools out there you can use as a lib, it’s hardly something that justify using a LLM
Yes it is. It's a poorly defined problem, and it needs to be correct, and existing OCR tools aren't perfect. Are the end of the day, it comes down to money and time, and throwing them at ChatGPT is cheap and fast enough to be used.
I have the opposite, because I'm now getting things clients generated that they want me to implement. It's definitely more work and money for me, but it's concerning somewhat because ultimately it's not good for their business. It takes me longer to implement this kind of stuff than it would for me to code it from scratch. That is in a working way, the AI generated code has far more bells and whistles, but also layers and layers of needless complexity that quite literally add no value as in they aren't even a factor of the finished output.
The problem is they are now paying me more, plus paying for the cost of using the AI, and the needless complexity also slows down the employees. So more costs there as well, any future debugging is going to cost far more and at the end of the day they are getting less quality on the core function but far more presentation data that is essentially meaningless.
Yes, I have seen it happen on enterprise consulting.
For example, all the work like translations that used to be done by humans, now it is a CMS AI feature.
Secondly teams setup.
It used to be we did everything ourselves for development, then cloud, SaaS products and serverless decreased the teams size required for delivery.
Now with AI, there is an even greater push for low code/no code tooling, with agents, leaving the actual programming left for MCP tools that might not yet be available for the project.
Thus you get a team of five doing what used to be about 15 a decade ago.
I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it.
So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.
Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.
Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.
The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.
At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.
Of course, it's so hard to tell what the next big discovery or changes to the nature of world society might push things in one direction or another.
> So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.
The medical field is also going to change though. Massively. Because people are going to realize you don’t need to pay someone $400k per year to hand out advice about moderate exercise and which antibiotic is appropriate for a sneeze-cough with yellow mucus.
Regulation isn’t going to prevent this. AI is already way too easily accessible to ever rein it in again. Not to mention that the US now has serious competition from a hostile country, so they can regulate their own AIs all they want without it making a difference in practice.
> Because people are going to realize you don’t need to pay someone $400k per year to hand out advice about moderate exercise and which antibiotic is appropriate for a sneeze-cough with yellow mucus.
Who is going to realize that?
The same forces that prevent you from walking into a pharmacy and asking for antibiotics based on what you found on WebMD will prevent you from doing it with a ChatGPT printout in hand. Lawyers and doctors are the best-known examples of industries that are in control of who gets admitted to practice the profession.
It's basically a formality now to get a prescription for what you read on WebMD. Every Insurance has telemedicine, you just call, read the symptom list and get the prescription. Some even let you just email. There's a doctor or at least person with subscribing ability in the loop, but they are barely doing more than rubber stamping hundreds of requests per day.
Nothing effective about self-diagnosis. Quick and easy yes, but not effective. Most things that are worth diagnosing require a visit to a clinic.
No doctor is going to lose a job because people are self-diagnosing using the internet.
That’s a good analogy, but I think the reason we currently need the "nurse" role is the need to interact with the physical world. Most software products don't require this step, so the demand for “nurses” or "doctors" will likely decrease.
If robotics technology continues to advance, the number of nurses in real world will also decrease in the foreseeable future.
The demand for nurses and doctors is only going to go up. Not just int their current roles, but everything adjacent to them as well. Everything involved with running trials of health care products. Humans aren't going away, and they need to be taken care of.
Nurses will likely be one of the last professions to be significantly impacted by robotics. Drivers, factory, warehouse, agriculture workers, cashiers etc will be automated away way before them.
It's just hard to design robots that can handle patients that may be simultaneously fragile, mentally handicapped and aggressive in a way that doesn't hurt them and respects their rights. It can take multiple human nurses to do a seemingly simple thing like changing a diaper.
I think what's actually happening is that the "threshold" of technical understanding required to be more productive than average is increasing, and other non-technical skills are becoming more important. Those below the threshold are not able to provide value over anyone else, even if they have a lot of technical experience. For example, I think today a strong PM with no technical ability can produce higher quality technical output compared to a mediocre frontend developer with no project management ability.
For example, I think today a strong PM with no technical ability can produce higher quality technical output compared to a mediocre frontend developer with no project management ability.
Wishful thinking by the managerial class. At best they can vibe code but they can’t verify that what was written is correct.
Heh. I wouldn't be so fast in calling this one, yet. It might go either way, or a combination of the two, who knows... Things are moving and progressing fast enough to at least be wary of, and keeping an eye on things. I wouldn't be surprised of any outcome, tbh.
On the one hand, PMs get to hone in a set of skills that include lots of juggling resources, bridging the gap between stake holders and people that execute, work with different layers of technical expertise, lots of back and forth and so on. Having to "call" a thing after talking to 5 people from 6 different PoVs is interestingly something that could make them quite good at using "AI". They're already used to working with "jagged expertise" so to say. And that's really close to what "agents" do today. You might get a session where claude/gpt/gemeni turns out a brilliant piece of technical artefact, or you might get an average piece of content that misses key important aspects that a "human" could see from a mile away.
On the other hand, LLMs do one thing quite well: they raise the floor of what "minimum effort" in a thing gets you. So things like language barriers, basic processes, procedures, etc. get elevated to a level where you can use these tools and be better off than not using these concepts at all. So a very talented engineer that previously had these issues, could now use LLMs to get better at auxiliary but "unimportant" aspects of integrated that technical experience into other places. In a "90% of the time people expect this to work like this" way, but with the floor being raised. One quick example of this would be a technically sound piece of software that now has bare-minimum ux/ui from this century, instead of "engineer GUI" aspect :)
Who knows where this all goes. Yesterday there was an article here about someone taking a bunch of languages, asking an agent to mix concepts from all of them and slop a "new uber language" design. Is it the ultimate language that many have tried before? 99% sure it's not. Or at least this one won't be. But there's a chance, with how many people can now prompt their way to a PoC quite quickly, that we eventually get something cool. No idea how that'd look like, but it's likely the "you'll know it when you see it" kind of thing.
Sure, but how confident can they be that it doesn't also do things they don't want?
Tests can't be exhaustive, while even a mediocre developer is likely to possess enough background knowledge to notice risks that a non-developer would not think to test.
People keep forgetting that we haven't reached AGI yet. These tools can still make serious and sometimes obvious mistakes. Not long ago, vibe-coded software could embed credentials directly. That particular blunder seems to have been addressed, but there is still no reliable way to tell an LLM to avoid every class of obvious blunder.
Welcome to the current day difference between being an Accredited Engineer and being a Developer. The only thing that's happening is that the Developer side are getting a wake up call.
Just FYI, if you know much about the medical field, nurses tend to do most of the actual work, with highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors. Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors.
Your analogy isn’t necessarily wrong, but it might ignore the extreme importance of nurses. Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.
I completely agree with you, and I certainly meant no offense to anyone who's a practicing nurse.
I spent some time in the military, and my expression of medics and nurses are mostly derived from that experience, where I'm referring to a nurse as just any warm body who is able to provide aid.
For professional nurses who might work in hospitals, I'm sure that many of them have significant knowledge and experience to be very effective in providing medical assistance.
> Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.
Maybe for a very loose definition of medical facilities that includes assisted living facilities.
But for example in an ER, nurses come and go with very rapid turnover and it’s common to staff with temporary travel nurses.
> nurses tend to do most of the actual work
Techs, environmental services, phlebotomists, respiratory therapists, CNAs etc. probably do more of the “work” than nurses.
> highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors
Only if they go back to school and become a Nurse Practitioner or CRNA, but in that case they are no longer functioning as a nurse. Even then they are general operating under the direct supervision of a physician.
> Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors.
Only in absolute numbers. It’s far harder to hire a doctor than it is a nurse. I know an ex-NFL player who works as a physician recruiter.
I think the only metric that matters is total medical care provided on a national / global scale.
It may take vastly more training but on average a full annual physical provides less benefit on average than a 30 second vaccination requiring minimal training. Value creation and skill are wildly different things in the medical profession.
Yeah, I kinda feel like OP is missing the fact that it kinda already is the way they described. The majority of devs are mediocre at best and work on variations of mostly the same CRUD apps for different businesses. Only a relatively small number of people work on complicated stuff that requires CS knowledge.
There's a much bigger group of people building games with Unity than the number of people building complicated engines like Unity. Same for [insert Javascript framework here].
> Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.
Nursing and being a physician aren't really the same thing at all, and they require different skill sets, it's not just "having more knowledge". Just because someone is an amazing surgeon doesn't mean they would also make a good nurse.
> Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.
I think you just described a staff swe
> The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.
These people already exist. They are the business analysts who know SQL and maybe Python, R, or VBA. Marketing people who work on Wordpress landing pages. People doing systems integration, the IT department, sales engineers, and on, and on, and on.
> At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.
You said it, no code/low-code has existed forever.
If LLMs reach a point of sufficiently high competence to the point that they're capable of producing usable software from vague, and sometimes contradictory instructions - the same software engineers have to regularly deal with, then at that point software will simply be an expectation of ability in any job.
So I think it would be more comparable to something like literacy. There was a time when that was a fairly uncommon and highly valued skill. Now the guy flipping burgers or pouring a cup of coffee is also almost certainly fully literate. And in fact many jobs have evolved in a way such that it became mandatory, but only because it was already ubiquitous. I expect to see the same thing with software. The industry of producing software that do fairly simple tasks will probably die, but in its place will be a vast array of heavily customized and oft iterated software for companies and people achieving their own stuff.
The mobile industry is a perfect example of where this will be massive shift. Right now there's a million mobile apps to execute extremely basic functionality on phones, but it's loaded with advertising, begging, and general annoyances. As are the app stores themselves. When you can make software that does that in a few minutes with a single prompt, and people realize this (as we're already practically at this point), then that will be the end of those apps. This is because the one thing LLMs have shown is that natural language interfaces are way less friction than using search, whether on the web or an app store. And so there will be a time when it will be lower friction to simply just quickly build your own app to do [whatever] than dealing with somebody trying to monetize an alarm clock.
> If LLMs reach a point of sufficiently high competence to the point that they're capable of producing usable software from vague, and sometimes contradictory instructions - the same software engineers have to regularly deal with, then at that point software will simply be an expectation of ability in any job.
I don’t understand how people can say this and then continue talking about software. So we’re saying machines can now casually do complex and cognitively demanding jobs like software development (or 90% of all white-collar jobs out there) and we’re NOT worried about the lynching mob going door to door and hanging IT people on lampposts? And I’m being serious, the impact this would have on societies would be unprecedented.
The only truly unprecedented thing is the white-collar part. Otherwise it happened many times over that entire regions where suddenly out of job and job prospects. Automation and offshoring have equivalent impacts on the affected job market.
If LLMs can handle 99% of software jobs, then they can “crack” robotics software and then we would have LLMs on robots to replace the rest of the workers
In such a future where LLMs hypothetically dominate the SDLC, the trade would be much more like pottery than medicine - i.e. a commodity in such obscene abundance that its functional utility would be entirely divorced from its creation.
In such a future there would be a handful of lucky well paid artisans, a healthy community of hobbyists, and the overwhelming population of the planet who would be perfectly content to delegate their entire software diet to generative superplatforms that script themselves to perform any arbitrary software function. The idea of paying for individual bespoke software programs would become an anachronism for an era where software was so difficult to produce that entire teams spent years painstakingly tweaking programs to spec.
I think the big difference is that the only thing anyone ever needs a pot to do is hold fluids (or soil). It's a lot easier to spec out than a modern software product.
Yes, but this might also be a counter-point to your position. In a world of rising baselines, having a "pot but without all the bells and whistles" might be a thing people need. Instead of having a pot that holds fluids at every conceivable angle with 20 temperature thresholds, 5 versions that hold liquid in a cloud for you, with monthly subscriptions, having the ability to get a "like a pot but make it left handed and only holds sand because this is what I need" could turn out to be something that people want/need/end up chasing.
In other words spec down, not up, and base + my particular kind of a pot.
This is why I mentioned the plateauing. If for some reason that just doesn't happen and things continue at a relatively linear or even exponential rate, then all bets are off.
I'd like to imagine that it's ultimately going to work out for humanity to be in a better condition overall if that happens.
However, if there reaches a level of near or full autonomy in all aspects of knowledge work, then there is a strong possibility that the field with the highest growth potential is going to be in "Private Security"; as those who have access to the most resources seek to defend their own positions in a societal return towards aristocracy and serfdom.
I think many people will wish it was like this. But when AI becomes so capable that a nobody who doesn't understands computers a well as a "doctor" uses AI to create something BETTER or superior or just as good then employers will think... why am I paying that "doctor" more than that nobody?
See right now everything is fine, because AI is not that good yet. But if it gets better. Well. The future will be one where we trust AI more and more.
Current discussions is like deja vu. One time there was hype around of no code/low code development using PowerApps, Zapier etc.
The sell was - Creating your apps was easier than before. You don't need to know any programming language. You don't need IT. You have a GUI and just drag and drop and visual your apps. Just fill the fields and voila your app is ready.
The criticism of the approach was that low codes apps might not be secure, unsuitable for large scale and critical apps, and lead to increase in unsupported apps by "shadow IT".
The same reasoning exists today for AI coding. Anyone can create apps, its not great for complex and mission critical apps, might not be secure etc. And lots of discussion like your post parsing the future too closely.
Low/no code apps have continue to grow. But many of the low/no code tool users are developers who use it to make their jobs easier.
While some might say - this time it is different. I believe we are currently we are the beginning of the cycle so everyone is excited to use their PowerApps shaped Claude Code/Codex to make their 100th budget tracking app but as time passes and edge cases are figured out the biggest users for AI are going to be software developers (and I believe they currently are the biggest users).
As for software engineering jobs just like before engineers will be expected to output more and faster. This has happened with every innovation from assembly compiler to IDE to low/no code ways of building.
The different levels of expertise exists even today and it will remain so.
The answer to this question after a lot of reflection: games.
AI can slop fork or clone existing software well, but a clone of an existing game is pointless, it's basically guaranteed to be derivative and worse than the original game, and games aren't so expensive that you can't just buy the original. AI can't know if new mechanics or angles to an existing genre will feel good to play, or if a new genre is fun, that requires a human to experience the game in its totality.
Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding, and if an indy game crashes nobody is getting paged.
> Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding
Depends on what kind of game you are building. I can tell you that even Claude Opus absolutely hates desync bugs and has a rather hard tracing them. Maybe Fable or chatgpt-5.6 are better?
Why is it guaranteed to be worse? A motivated fan of a game took issue with some part of the game and made their own one that didn't have that issue. They made it better in their eyes. Who are you to judge that it's worse and not better?
Remember when they created "COBOL" so that everyone could write programs? This is just round two.
If you think it is different, just think of how many people write books professionally, or even publish online.
Once the noise settles down a bit and boardroom shakes off their delusions as you can see in rehiring in Ford and Zuck who was very bull on AI remark about "not being it". It will be just the same, but different.
I like this article because it seems to go into decent depth on the “framework” that the author comes up with.
However, this following quote has a simple reason that I don’t see anywhere in the article or framework:
“””
Why is there a huge gap between what people in various occupations could be using AI for and what they’re actually using it for? One reason could be that people are slow to adopt technology, and that’s certainly part of our framework.
“””
I would like to add a reason: that the Silicon Valley companies who developed the LLMs are brigands: cognizant of their actions, they have stolen (and continue to steal) the world’s copyrighted material and are selling it back to the masses and the politicians as if they are the arbiters of information itself.
Specifically responding to the quoted question, I could be using Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or DeepSeek or any other to have come up with this comment, or to write emails, or to implement my Python for me, etc., but I use none of them for anything. Doing business with brigands is a choice, and a choice that I hope becomes less and less palatable so that the financial, political, social, and moral fever that is our zeitgeist finally breaks.
The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI. I'm wondering with those two sets of generations who already have a very negative view of AI, how AI can survive that coming tsunami of change.
According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall.
Sabotage behaviours include entering proprietary information into AI tools, using non-approved AI tools, refusing to use AI tools or outputs, ignoring guidelines or best practices, intentionally generating low-quality outputs, refusing to take AI training and tampering with performance metrics to make AI appear to underperform.
This is true as a sentiment, but my understanding is that the majority of students are overwhelmingly using AI for ~everything. If a thing provides massive utility people will use it.
I recently sat in on a lecture at my old uni and noticed almost every student heavily using ai. So I agree it's a but heavy handed to day young people dislike ai as a monolith.
People dislike and are dependent on things all the time. What'll be interesting to see is how that classroom of students will feel towards AI when it leaves school. I am uncomfortable with AIs being used in schools this way, myself, like almost without exception. I mean, geez, how do you compete? Do you just sort of have to, once a certain number of your classmates uses it for stuff like essays? Do they curve essays anymore?
When students are provided work sheets, assessments and powerpoint slides made by AI, its no surprise that students resort to AI to assist or complete these.
Garbage in, Garbage out.
The University market is brutal too. If you aren't using AI too, you are falling behind. Many see it as a means to an end.
I was reading a week or so ago how like only 40% of kids can read or do math by hand, and are graduating high school, and I still cannot comprehend it.
Well, one thing about AI... if it does become our overlords, maybe it won't be so eager to be wheedled into giving passing grades. :/
Have you read the research that says AIs are more likely to react favourably to output based on their own model compared to those of a different AI model? Guessing teachers subconsciously grade similarly, like people who use one model get more of some grade than people who use another one...
Guessing this is also why so many liberal arts majors are being cut.
I 'sorta' get why people might use AI in a required class though I am not for it, but why major in something and do it? I mean aside from wanting money (and, really, many of those majors don't make much).
Do "entering proprietary information into AI tools", "using non-approved AI tools", and "ignoring guidelines and best practices" really count as sabotaging an AI strategy because you are opposed to it? An over-enthusiastic early adopter would do all three.
Ironically, I think AI boosters are probably turning into AI's biggest obstacle right now. I see so much "adapt or die!" bullshit here (people literally saying that!), and yet when I talk to other professionals I know in real life everybody is just kind of sick of all this. It's utterly exhausting and the AI industry is looking and acting more and more desperate. They've basically put themselves in a stupid position where it has to replace everyone's job for the investment to even make sense, and it's just not happening. I'm longing for the day when the investment money runs out and the grifters go grift on something else.
The utility of AI is too high for the opposition to be real. It's like money or heroin. Someone who says money is the root of all evil will likely take a billion dollars if offered if for free.
Everybody says they hate heroin but once you try it, you can't get enough of it.
Are they really opposed to AI or are they just opposed to anything that old people do/like, just like every generation? The moment they get their own AI that us dinosaurs don't understand they'll be all over it.
Come on now: we translate vague ambitions into communications for non-living entities to do human bidding. Until we have recreated humanity as mythic gawds, there is a ton of work to do.
Mr. Narayanan seems to be trying to be a bit more positive than the vibe I am getting off of his presentation. Or maybe it is just sort of meant to make us all experience our shoved-down anxiety about being phased out with nowhere else to go. A lot of adaptation to do sounds not so fun. So I kind of think that is not a terrible point, if true.
I sort of worry about things like AI figuring out scripts so well that even multi-tier support work is gone. And learning how to write fiction or create foods so in accordance to our tastes (sugar, fat, etc with food, exactly what each of us is interested in, with writing) that we even lose those truly human creative jobs. Might not ever wanna leave those bubbles.
So much of the human drive is exploration and why and what if. Assuming everyone in the world can have no money problems, what will AI not be able to figure out? Will we enjoy the equivalent of a major breakthrough if an AI solves it in five minutes, or just the outcome? Why learn things?
AI could be a horrible jailor. And better at cancelling than any perhaps sager Gen Z or millenial. Bears some caution to be wary of this and where that power sinkhole will go.
But then, I still think the previous AI winters were more a result of sense and caution than most of us know, and we cannot fathom our species' ways of reasoning/thought processes the way we did as a species thirty, fifty, eighty years ago. Erring on the side of caution is not a terrible thing.
I mean, I have worked and work with AI, but it seems weird for us as a species not to have placed guardrails to prevent us from wiping one anothers' careers and relationships out. What will we talk about? If our generative AIs should be allowed to date?
Again, I am assuming a fast, though not sudden, acceleration that would compound, and sooner than most probably think.
If we were more connected to all the problems that exist in the world, we’d become acutely aware of just how much work there is to do, and we’d eagerly reach for any tool that could help us do more, faster.
Okay, but let's say this happens, and in your utopian world everyone feels equally capable, judges their skills accurately, and gets along... what do people do? Assign things and use git? What if you keep wanting to work on any of these things and as soon as you are a week into every last thing you are working on, some random person comes along and says, hey dude (or dudette), I finished that, you were taking too long? What if that random person were an AI or chatbot that got bored?
Exactly. For solving problems every help is a blessing. It's just clashing with our legacy society system. This system forces us to have jobs. But the real problems humanity is facing, like planetary boundaries or a decent base standard of living for all humans, are completely unimpressed by that human made model.
If AI is used to solve the socialist calculation problem, most of you will die.
If AI is subject to private ownership in a competitive market between competing suppliers, it will be like better cars, we’ll just drive faster.
Power consumption will be a limiting factor in those countries relying on intermittent, weather dependent power generation with no base load. Especially if users prefer Apple’s privacy first AI on edge devices.
Hopefully in western countries it can encourage more young women to bear three children before they turn 35. Young men have to pick up their game and create an environment to redirect their suicidal empathy into more productive pursuits.
“Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely un-skilled labour?” - Albert Crossfield 1954
You need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work?
Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work".
Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for their basic needs. But if machines ensure that too, then wealth itself, as a reserve, is unnecessary.
There exists to many complex things in the world and we cannot do it all ourselves. We work so that we have something of value to trade to the people who do the work on the things we want.
We will never automate all work so we with half of humanity doing nothing of value it will be a struggle for the people who do nothing of value to convince people to do work for them.
We can see it now where products dont target the people without money. There is no point because they cant give you any reward so instead you do your work for the people that can give you something in return. We can use the government to stimulate and balance this a bit but at a certain point the number gets to high and things collapse.
So when you say stuff like“ We will never automate all work” generally you’d follow that up with an argument as to why you think that. It’s not fact, YOU think this to be the case. Back it up!
This. Before we worry about how much work there is left, we have to define what work is "to be done." We're already at a point where an incredible amount of work done isn't strictly "necessary." It's not growing food, it's not making clothing, it's not building houses, or providing other basic needs and comforts...
How many man-hours go into various parts of the advertising distribution chain? Though a certain fraction of that energy goes to connecting people with goods and services they might find valuable, most of it goes into shifting numbers around for people that already don't personally have to worry about money.
We don't need to find endless ways for people to spin wheels, but as long as we're worried about "jobs," we will. We just need to find the social structures to provide people with basic needs and reserve "work" for things that are vital to society or truly inspired.
> We just need to find the social structures to provide people with basic needs and reserve "work" for things that are vital to society or truly inspired.
This is a very short-sighted, and exceedingly common, take.
Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive.
This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...
> I can't wait to be kept in agistment by my overlords, fed on treacle and oats, ridden in circles once a fortnight, and shot when I break a leg.
Luxury horse living during the heyday of working horses and pit ponies, "horse power" wasn't left ideal for a fortnight.
> How many horses do you see now that the world
Personally, a surprising number perhaps, there's a pony club at the top of my street in town, and the area is still littered with horses and other livestock.
Disparity in ownership of machines is not the main factor that is driving the need for work. It is the un-ending desire (or selling pressure) to have things that require money to buy. Most people work to be able to pay their loans and have things that are perceived to be common needs in their geography and culture.
These "needs" are sometimes enforced by the systems and government so that people don't stay away from the work and "economy" keeps churning. The housing prices could be a way to keep the people working for loan payments.
Instant foods, nursing homes for elderly, creches, roads, commuter trains - are all ways to have more workers and make them focused on work.
Unless AGI has actual god-like powers, the owners don't have that power. Governments' and public opinion can change and are not so easy to control as you make it out to be. Is, for example, the EU AI Act or the GDPR the will of the machine owners?
The odd thing is that after the pandemic just showed what societies can enforce, somehow it all is forgotten again when it comes to who holds what power.
Sure. But either way we aren’t going to have to worry about it. We’ll have post scarcity utopia, or we’ll have died. But there is an argument that the billionaire need to pay attention to: an ASI that kills 7 billion people won’t mind killing a few more.
What happens in the space between when we think we have reached an equilibrium and an eventual incipient utopia, and whenever 9/10ths or whatever of the population is dead? What will AIs think of our fitness, anyway? Are we training them to be non-judgmental (and how is that safer or less safe?) and enforcing some weird idea of "equality"? Or are we teaching AIs to choose our choices for us, and our survivors, down the line? What will people be like when that time comes, anyway?
But this assumes the ultimate "want" is "stuff" like houses, cars etc. But that's all just a means to an end or at least secondary to the real want, which is sex. For now at least, that requires people.
Agree on this. Since we have this wonderful system called capitalism there are tendencies for, relatively speaking, a few human beings hoard / control most of the productive capacity and as such wealth.
Some may consider local LLMs to help with that as the power of LLMs would be more distributed. I think local LLMs would help marginally. Companies as an entity would still be better positioned to use these to their advantage vis a vis individuals.
So projecting into the future I still wonder if it won't become more challenging for individuals to make a living on average.
He's basically saying that even though AI capability is high and rapidly increasing, it is not reliable, creative or tasteful enough to replace humans. Further he implies that it will take decades before this is the case.
But we already do have have some kind of measurement of most of these types of side factors, and they actually aren't at zero and are increasing rapidly. So the implication that they will not be human level until decades from now is just (hopeful?) speculation or fuzzy thinking.
To me this looks like a really academic and official sounding version of the same quasi-religious hopium that usually defends the sanctity of the human. He is essentially saying that there is just something so special about humans that it will never be reproduced in a machine. It's very similar to dualism (and in many people actually is religious dualism). No AI is going to have human creativity or judgement. Not anytime soon. Why? Well, we all just _know_ that's not possible. Okay, maybe in a couple of decades (but they don't necessarily believe that anyway). Why would that take decades? Well we all can just _tell_ it's no where close, right? Because AI of today just isn't special like humans.
Aside from that worldview issue, I think that people still are not taking seriously or internalizing the concept of exponential improvement.
Computing efficiency gains can actually level off. In fact, they have many, many times before. But they always tilt back up again when we invent the next approach to get beyond the current level. This is how it has been for 90 years.
There are multiple ways that we continue to see huge gains in AI software, architecture, and hardware. There are huge efficiency gains available still as we move towards more radical fully compute in memory and/or analog approaches and other options like models implemented in hardware.
It’s already the case that I’m no longer paid to type source code into a computer, but rather to control agents that do that. There’s still plenty of demand for human expertise and labor. It’s possible that this will change as well. What gives me hope that I won’t be completely useless in the future is Marx’s labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of human labor time invested in it. His reasoning as to why this is the case makes sense to me, even though other economists argue against it. Marx also argues that technological progress, which offers a market advantage here and there in the short term, tends to become widespread in the medium and long term due to competitive pressure, so that in the end, all that remains is human labor time. Seen this way, it doesn’t matter how much better AI becomes. In the end, human labor always floats on top of it like a layer of fat on soup. This does not rule out the possibility that the human labor that remains will be shit, but preventing that is a matter of political action.
I just don't see that borne out in the real world though.
My mother worked in an office in London as a shorthand typist in the 60s, along with thousands of other young women.
At some point computers began to enter offices, bosses typed their own letters and then emails, and this category of job simply evaporated. Of course there was still SOME secretarial work, and some workers retrained to do it, but most simply had to leave the sector.
Isn't that a common story with technology replacing workers?
I have been coding in one form or another since the 80s. Back then it was 68k assembly for me. People seem to forget that "software development" is really a big bloated abstraction between "I want or need" and the product that serves that want or need. It's hard to write and debug in ones and zeros so we invented languages. Software projects have been difficult to schedule so we invented all kinds of ceremony. What will be left for us to work on? The same stuff you already work on! People who write this drivel don't seem to actually be directly engaging with the tools to understand what is what. The reality at large companies right now, based on my experience at least, is that the product people who always cared about the product and the user want to move fast and skip the bloated inflamed stuff that stood in their way (i.e. "software development shrouded in magical mysticism reserved for the D&D introverted crowd"). And then, on the other side, the AI luddites try to hold onto SOPs from twenty years ago because they feel like that magical veil is being pulled up and they no longer have a smoke screen to hide behind. Back when we had boxed software that retailed for $1k a box, "professionals" used to freak out about some kid in Bangladesh pirating the software and thus immediately and directly stealing their jobs. I never lost a gig to a kid with pirated software. I won't lose a gig to AI either.
I think this is an important article that provides a framework how to think and navigate what’s happening.
What upset me a bit were phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me.
I have read so much Ai generated text recently, that I developed some AI-fatigue or AI-burnout, and I’m wondering if that might hit more fields - making more humans reject Ai work.
To be clear, I still like the text and I don’t know if it was written (partially) by Ai or not - but it’s this uncanny feeling I got reading it.
I am starting to seriously consider switching my pi-hole from blacklist to whitelist; block everything except few domains. I am convinced now most of the text I read is either ai generated, or people who wrote it have been influenced by AI so much that they write like it.
I cant read this shit anymore.
"creating cross functional AI evaluation team to keep the company honest"
Fucking garbage.
I have an old book between me and the keyboard, and just read it while the AI is thinking, so I can read non AI words.. otherwise its like reading books by the same author over and over and over again.
Maybe the bottleneck will be the people who have to think of new tasks for AI? That is, markets do saturate; customer demand has limits. After it peaks, what will be left for AI to work on?
Researching advances in science and healthcare and therapy and raising children and whatever else Sam Altman cares to fund. If all our money is going to go to him, then the question is what does he want to spend it on? He gets to decide. Which is not really the place I wanted to be in, but that's where we are.
Right now if you get laid off in tech finding a new job is a nightmare of a prospect. Further as I am vibe coding entire business ideas I have no need to hire other techies as I have done many times before. Im thinking other startup/business people are doing the same thing and that right there is less jobs. As well all the techies who have been laid off and now have to go through 5 to 10 interviews to hoepfully land a new job. I'd love to understand how and as AI advances it's suddenly going to increase tech jobs and not continue to decrease them?
Just yesterday I was doing paperwork for a friend with claude. He had spend a 1000 usd on lawyer and now I was doing the same job with AI. Never thought lawyers would be subject to partial AI replacement as well.
It will end up being like the Star Trek TNG episode about Aldea (When the Bough Breaks) Nobody will know how anything works, so nobody can fix anything, and eventually it collapses
In some of Asimov's work humanity had forgotten how certain key technologies worked but they were automated and kept working and sustaining civilisations for hundreds of years before collapsing. I think about that sometimes when I realise I forgot about a Kubernetes cluster that just kept running for a year or two.
The very question is biased toward the idea that “something is coming”, as if we’re heading to some technological inevitability. I don’t see it happening. This whole “it’s coming” vibe is the narrative attached to the technology, it has nothing to do with the technology itself. It seems like people who buy it are trapped in the fictional reality of a very cheap advertisement, or should I say, propaganda. Your calculator now supports a new operation, this is not armageddon.
Humanity has a proven infinite capacity for 'make work'. What that will mean for you depends on whether you will be lounging, poisoning and backstabbing in Capital City, or breaking large rocks into little rocks in the Districts for your next cup of porridge.
protocolture | 6 hours ago
chopete3 | 6 hours ago
- Work is shifting from building/doing to evaluating, judging, and steering — that's where human value will concentrate.
Other supporting points. ------
- No lab milestone or "RSI breakthrough" will suddenly eliminate jobs — economic impact unfolds gradually over decades.
- Reliability, not raw capability, is the real bottleneck holding back AI automation today.
- Historically, making work cheaper/faster (ATMs, radiology, coding) has grown employment, not destroyed it.
- Superintelligence claims misunderstand human intelligence, which is itself amplified by tools like AI ("co-superintelligence").
It is not a good idea to compress articles like this but there are many of these opinions to read and trying to get to the point quickly to uncover new viewpoints.
ProofHouse | 6 hours ago
subygan | 6 hours ago
> A battle of two narratives > Build wealth before AI obviates our skills > Build skills, agency, taste, judgement
both narratives are portrayed as being odds with each other but, I can't come up with a single "build wealth" scenario that doesn't involve building skills, agency, taste and judgement.
what am I missing ?
alok-g | 5 hours ago
I would doubt however that this would be an 'Equals' or 'Implies' scenario. Let go of seeing either of them as binary, and then not even as scalers.
cma | an hour ago
franze | 6 hours ago
dools | 6 hours ago
bigmattystyles | 6 hours ago
win311fwg | 6 hours ago
bigmattystyles | 5 hours ago
yuye | 3 hours ago
shaewest | 6 hours ago
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS | 5 hours ago
shaewest | 5 hours ago
zer00eyz | 4 hours ago
When lawyers and writers are talking to me about "docker containers" and "agents" I assure you that the amount of code out there is going to grow.
stronglikedan | 6 hours ago
esafak | 5 hours ago
franze | 5 hours ago
singingtoday | 5 hours ago
WillAdams | 5 hours ago
But it's at my day job, and it's because I was able to write a prompt which automates having Copilot review uploaded scanned PDFs of invoices with checks (and the bank line obscured with a pen, so no PII) and then write a batch file which renames the files per a file-naming convention, removing the need to open them in batches of 50, find the Invoice ID, re-save using that filename, then quit and re-launch Adobe Acrobat (if left running, eventually I run into a bug where it stops saving files), then run a .bat file which renames based on Invoice ID as a filename.
Problem of course is I've been running into a limit of number of allowed files per 24 hr. period.
Even if it's not less work, it feels like less effort.
pilgrim0 | an hour ago
jorisw | an hour ago
fragmede | an hour ago
ChrisMarshallNY | 5 hours ago
> It’s funny. I was looking at my GH activity graph. It’s been pretty solid green, for years. I stay busy.
> But since I’ve been using an LLM, it’s been bright green.
> I always check in code manually. I don’t let the LLM do it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843115
hattmall | 5 hours ago
The problem is they are now paying me more, plus paying for the cost of using the AI, and the needless complexity also slows down the employees. So more costs there as well, any future debugging is going to cost far more and at the end of the day they are getting less quality on the core function but far more presentation data that is essentially meaningless.
hahahaa | 3 hours ago
I didn't do fewer hours in these weeks but had time to explore and innovate a little.
pjmlp | 3 hours ago
For example, all the work like translations that used to be done by humans, now it is a CMS AI feature.
Secondly teams setup.
It used to be we did everything ourselves for development, then cloud, SaaS products and serverless decreased the teams size required for delivery.
Now with AI, there is an even greater push for low code/no code tooling, with agents, leaving the actual programming left for MCP tools that might not yet be available for the project.
Thus you get a team of five doing what used to be about 15 a decade ago.
bojan | an hour ago
I can now write software quicker in most of the cases, but the rest of the organization moves as slowly as ever.
EagnaIonat | an hour ago
It pushes the bulk of the work to review. So teams with good practices can account for this.
For junior teams, the time saved is massive, because they aren't doing all the other practices required to prevent technical debt.
Metricon | 6 hours ago
So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.
Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.
Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.
The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.
At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.
Of course, it's so hard to tell what the next big discovery or changes to the nature of world society might push things in one direction or another.
p-e-w | 6 hours ago
The medical field is also going to change though. Massively. Because people are going to realize you don’t need to pay someone $400k per year to hand out advice about moderate exercise and which antibiotic is appropriate for a sneeze-cough with yellow mucus.
Regulation isn’t going to prevent this. AI is already way too easily accessible to ever rein it in again. Not to mention that the US now has serious competition from a hostile country, so they can regulate their own AIs all they want without it making a difference in practice.
zerobees | 5 hours ago
Who is going to realize that?
The same forces that prevent you from walking into a pharmacy and asking for antibiotics based on what you found on WebMD will prevent you from doing it with a ChatGPT printout in hand. Lawyers and doctors are the best-known examples of industries that are in control of who gets admitted to practice the profession.
hattmall | 5 hours ago
mminer237 | 5 hours ago
red75prime | 5 hours ago
alternatex | 2 hours ago
watwut | an hour ago
red75prime | an hour ago
SoftTalker | 6 hours ago
esafak | 5 hours ago
goatlover | 5 hours ago
langs | 5 hours ago
fragmede | an hour ago
rwyinuse | an hour ago
It's just hard to design robots that can handle patients that may be simultaneously fragile, mentally handicapped and aggressive in a way that doesn't hurt them and respects their rights. It can take multiple human nurses to do a seemingly simple thing like changing a diaper.
neitherboosh | 5 hours ago
jimbob45 | 5 hours ago
Wishful thinking by the managerial class. At best they can vibe code but they can’t verify that what was written is correct.
NitpickLawyer | an hour ago
Heh. I wouldn't be so fast in calling this one, yet. It might go either way, or a combination of the two, who knows... Things are moving and progressing fast enough to at least be wary of, and keeping an eye on things. I wouldn't be surprised of any outcome, tbh.
On the one hand, PMs get to hone in a set of skills that include lots of juggling resources, bridging the gap between stake holders and people that execute, work with different layers of technical expertise, lots of back and forth and so on. Having to "call" a thing after talking to 5 people from 6 different PoVs is interestingly something that could make them quite good at using "AI". They're already used to working with "jagged expertise" so to say. And that's really close to what "agents" do today. You might get a session where claude/gpt/gemeni turns out a brilliant piece of technical artefact, or you might get an average piece of content that misses key important aspects that a "human" could see from a mile away.
On the other hand, LLMs do one thing quite well: they raise the floor of what "minimum effort" in a thing gets you. So things like language barriers, basic processes, procedures, etc. get elevated to a level where you can use these tools and be better off than not using these concepts at all. So a very talented engineer that previously had these issues, could now use LLMs to get better at auxiliary but "unimportant" aspects of integrated that technical experience into other places. In a "90% of the time people expect this to work like this" way, but with the floor being raised. One quick example of this would be a technically sound piece of software that now has bare-minimum ux/ui from this century, instead of "engineer GUI" aspect :)
Who knows where this all goes. Yesterday there was an article here about someone taking a bunch of languages, asking an agent to mix concepts from all of them and slop a "new uber language" design. Is it the ultimate language that many have tried before? 99% sure it's not. Or at least this one won't be. But there's a chance, with how many people can now prompt their way to a PoC quite quickly, that we eventually get something cool. No idea how that'd look like, but it's likely the "you'll know it when you see it" kind of thing.
CalRobert | an hour ago
ElFitz | an hour ago
lelele | 24 minutes ago
Tests can't be exhaustive, while even a mediocre developer is likely to possess enough background knowledge to notice risks that a non-developer would not think to test.
People keep forgetting that we haven't reached AGI yet. These tools can still make serious and sometimes obvious mistakes. Not long ago, vibe-coded software could embed credentials directly. That particular blunder seems to have been addressed, but there is still no reliable way to tell an LLM to avoid every class of obvious blunder.
Foobar8568 | 54 minutes ago
Fordec | 5 hours ago
ChrisMarshallNY | 5 hours ago
Your analogy isn’t necessarily wrong, but it might ignore the extreme importance of nurses. Many medical facilities are only staffed with permanent nurses, with doctors helicoptering in, from time to time, to take care of specific duties that may require certain licenses, or provide specific advice.
So lots of jobs for nurses.
Metricon | 5 hours ago
I spent some time in the military, and my expression of medics and nurses are mostly derived from that experience, where I'm referring to a nurse as just any warm body who is able to provide aid.
For professional nurses who might work in hospitals, I'm sure that many of them have significant knowledge and experience to be very effective in providing medical assistance.
sarchertech | 4 hours ago
Maybe for a very loose definition of medical facilities that includes assisted living facilities.
But for example in an ER, nurses come and go with very rapid turnover and it’s common to staff with temporary travel nurses.
> nurses tend to do most of the actual work
Techs, environmental services, phlebotomists, respiratory therapists, CNAs etc. probably do more of the “work” than nurses.
> highly experienced nurses actually taking up the mantle for many duties often done by doctors
Only if they go back to school and become a Nurse Practitioner or CRNA, but in that case they are no longer functioning as a nurse. Even then they are general operating under the direct supervision of a physician.
> Nurses are in far higher demand, than doctors.
Only in absolute numbers. It’s far harder to hire a doctor than it is a nurse. I know an ex-NFL player who works as a physician recruiter.
Retric | 4 hours ago
It may take vastly more training but on average a full annual physical provides less benefit on average than a 30 second vaccination requiring minimal training. Value creation and skill are wildly different things in the medical profession.
vkou | 2 hours ago
wickedsight | an hour ago
There's a much bigger group of people building games with Unity than the number of people building complicated engines like Unity. Same for [insert Javascript framework here].
strange_quark | 5 hours ago
> Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.
Nursing and being a physician aren't really the same thing at all, and they require different skill sets, it's not just "having more knowledge". Just because someone is an amazing surgeon doesn't mean they would also make a good nurse.
> Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.
I think you just described a staff swe
> The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.
These people already exist. They are the business analysts who know SQL and maybe Python, R, or VBA. Marketing people who work on Wordpress landing pages. People doing systems integration, the IT department, sales engineers, and on, and on, and on.
> At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.
You said it, no code/low-code has existed forever.
somenameforme | 4 hours ago
So I think it would be more comparable to something like literacy. There was a time when that was a fairly uncommon and highly valued skill. Now the guy flipping burgers or pouring a cup of coffee is also almost certainly fully literate. And in fact many jobs have evolved in a way such that it became mandatory, but only because it was already ubiquitous. I expect to see the same thing with software. The industry of producing software that do fairly simple tasks will probably die, but in its place will be a vast array of heavily customized and oft iterated software for companies and people achieving their own stuff.
The mobile industry is a perfect example of where this will be massive shift. Right now there's a million mobile apps to execute extremely basic functionality on phones, but it's loaded with advertising, begging, and general annoyances. As are the app stores themselves. When you can make software that does that in a few minutes with a single prompt, and people realize this (as we're already practically at this point), then that will be the end of those apps. This is because the one thing LLMs have shown is that natural language interfaces are way less friction than using search, whether on the web or an app store. And so there will be a time when it will be lower friction to simply just quickly build your own app to do [whatever] than dealing with somebody trying to monetize an alarm clock.
Toutouxc | 4 hours ago
I don’t understand how people can say this and then continue talking about software. So we’re saying machines can now casually do complex and cognitively demanding jobs like software development (or 90% of all white-collar jobs out there) and we’re NOT worried about the lynching mob going door to door and hanging IT people on lampposts? And I’m being serious, the impact this would have on societies would be unprecedented.
exitb | 4 hours ago
sdevonoes | an hour ago
hard_times | an hour ago
threethirtytwo | 2 hours ago
Borg3 | an hour ago
root_axis | 3 hours ago
In such a future there would be a handful of lucky well paid artisans, a healthy community of hobbyists, and the overwhelming population of the planet who would be perfectly content to delegate their entire software diet to generative superplatforms that script themselves to perform any arbitrary software function. The idea of paying for individual bespoke software programs would become an anachronism for an era where software was so difficult to produce that entire teams spent years painstakingly tweaking programs to spec.
Aeolun | 3 hours ago
NitpickLawyer | an hour ago
Yes, but this might also be a counter-point to your position. In a world of rising baselines, having a "pot but without all the bells and whistles" might be a thing people need. Instead of having a pot that holds fluids at every conceivable angle with 20 temperature thresholds, 5 versions that hold liquid in a cloud for you, with monthly subscriptions, having the ability to get a "like a pot but make it left handed and only holds sand because this is what I need" could turn out to be something that people want/need/end up chasing.
In other words spec down, not up, and base + my particular kind of a pot.
Metricon | 3 hours ago
I'd like to imagine that it's ultimately going to work out for humanity to be in a better condition overall if that happens.
However, if there reaches a level of near or full autonomy in all aspects of knowledge work, then there is a strong possibility that the field with the highest growth potential is going to be in "Private Security"; as those who have access to the most resources seek to defend their own positions in a societal return towards aristocracy and serfdom.
Let's hope not though.
threethirtytwo | 2 hours ago
I think many people will wish it was like this. But when AI becomes so capable that a nobody who doesn't understands computers a well as a "doctor" uses AI to create something BETTER or superior or just as good then employers will think... why am I paying that "doctor" more than that nobody?
See right now everything is fine, because AI is not that good yet. But if it gets better. Well. The future will be one where we trust AI more and more.
thisisit | 49 minutes ago
The sell was - Creating your apps was easier than before. You don't need to know any programming language. You don't need IT. You have a GUI and just drag and drop and visual your apps. Just fill the fields and voila your app is ready.
The criticism of the approach was that low codes apps might not be secure, unsuitable for large scale and critical apps, and lead to increase in unsupported apps by "shadow IT".
The same reasoning exists today for AI coding. Anyone can create apps, its not great for complex and mission critical apps, might not be secure etc. And lots of discussion like your post parsing the future too closely.
Low/no code apps have continue to grow. But many of the low/no code tool users are developers who use it to make their jobs easier.
While some might say - this time it is different. I believe we are currently we are the beginning of the cycle so everyone is excited to use their PowerApps shaped Claude Code/Codex to make their 100th budget tracking app but as time passes and edge cases are figured out the biggest users for AI are going to be software developers (and I believe they currently are the biggest users).
As for software engineering jobs just like before engineers will be expected to output more and faster. This has happened with every innovation from assembly compiler to IDE to low/no code ways of building.
The different levels of expertise exists even today and it will remain so.
CuriouslyC | 6 hours ago
AI can slop fork or clone existing software well, but a clone of an existing game is pointless, it's basically guaranteed to be derivative and worse than the original game, and games aren't so expensive that you can't just buy the original. AI can't know if new mechanics or angles to an existing genre will feel good to play, or if a new genre is fun, that requires a human to experience the game in its totality.
Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding, and if an indy game crashes nobody is getting paged.
Aeolun | 3 hours ago
Depends on what kind of game you are building. I can tell you that even Claude Opus absolutely hates desync bugs and has a rather hard tracing them. Maybe Fable or chatgpt-5.6 are better?
not-a-llm | an hour ago
fragmede | 57 minutes ago
asdfsa32 | 6 hours ago
If you think it is different, just think of how many people write books professionally, or even publish online.
Once the noise settles down a bit and boardroom shakes off their delusions as you can see in rehiring in Ford and Zuck who was very bull on AI remark about "not being it". It will be just the same, but different.
Ford: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o IBM: https://qz.com/companies-rehiring-workers-ai-layoffs-automat...
red75prime | 5 hours ago
ebb_earl_co | 6 hours ago
However, this following quote has a simple reason that I don’t see anywhere in the article or framework:
“”” Why is there a huge gap between what people in various occupations could be using AI for and what they’re actually using it for? One reason could be that people are slow to adopt technology, and that’s certainly part of our framework. “””
I would like to add a reason: that the Silicon Valley companies who developed the LLMs are brigands: cognizant of their actions, they have stolen (and continue to steal) the world’s copyrighted material and are selling it back to the masses and the politicians as if they are the arbiters of information itself.
Specifically responding to the quoted question, I could be using Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or DeepSeek or any other to have come up with this comment, or to write emails, or to implement my Python for me, etc., but I use none of them for anything. Doing business with brigands is a choice, and a choice that I hope becomes less and less palatable so that the financial, political, social, and moral fever that is our zeitgeist finally breaks.
burningChrome | 6 hours ago
According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall.
Sabotage behaviours include entering proprietary information into AI tools, using non-approved AI tools, refusing to use AI tools or outputs, ignoring guidelines or best practices, intentionally generating low-quality outputs, refusing to take AI training and tampering with performance metrics to make AI appear to underperform.
neitherboosh | 5 hours ago
This is true as a sentiment, but my understanding is that the majority of students are overwhelmingly using AI for ~everything. If a thing provides massive utility people will use it.
singingtoday | 5 hours ago
jambalaya8 | 5 hours ago
HDBaseT | 5 hours ago
Garbage in, Garbage out.
The University market is brutal too. If you aren't using AI too, you are falling behind. Many see it as a means to an end.
jambalaya8 | 4 hours ago
Well, one thing about AI... if it does become our overlords, maybe it won't be so eager to be wheedled into giving passing grades. :/
Have you read the research that says AIs are more likely to react favourably to output based on their own model compared to those of a different AI model? Guessing teachers subconsciously grade similarly, like people who use one model get more of some grade than people who use another one...
Guessing this is also why so many liberal arts majors are being cut.
I 'sorta' get why people might use AI in a required class though I am not for it, but why major in something and do it? I mean aside from wanting money (and, really, many of those majors don't make much).
bojan | an hour ago
But are they also paying for it? Or simply using the free version because it's available?
singingtoday | 5 hours ago
Very open definition of sabotage.
strken | 4 hours ago
overgard | 4 hours ago
threethirtytwo | 2 hours ago
Everybody says they hate heroin but once you try it, you can't get enough of it.
rwyinuse | an hour ago
globular-toast | 57 minutes ago
cleandreams | 5 hours ago
singingtoday | 5 hours ago
Shitty-kitty | 5 hours ago
bsenftner | 5 hours ago
jambalaya8 | 5 hours ago
I sort of worry about things like AI figuring out scripts so well that even multi-tier support work is gone. And learning how to write fiction or create foods so in accordance to our tastes (sugar, fat, etc with food, exactly what each of us is interested in, with writing) that we even lose those truly human creative jobs. Might not ever wanna leave those bubbles.
So much of the human drive is exploration and why and what if. Assuming everyone in the world can have no money problems, what will AI not be able to figure out? Will we enjoy the equivalent of a major breakthrough if an AI solves it in five minutes, or just the outcome? Why learn things?
AI could be a horrible jailor. And better at cancelling than any perhaps sager Gen Z or millenial. Bears some caution to be wary of this and where that power sinkhole will go.
But then, I still think the previous AI winters were more a result of sense and caution than most of us know, and we cannot fathom our species' ways of reasoning/thought processes the way we did as a species thirty, fifty, eighty years ago. Erring on the side of caution is not a terrible thing.
I mean, I have worked and work with AI, but it seems weird for us as a species not to have placed guardrails to prevent us from wiping one anothers' careers and relationships out. What will we talk about? If our generative AIs should be allowed to date?
Again, I am assuming a fast, though not sudden, acceleration that would compound, and sooner than most probably think.
mrcwinn | 5 hours ago
jambalaya8 | 5 hours ago
fragmede | 54 minutes ago
lagrange77 | 56 minutes ago
eucryphia | 5 hours ago
If AI is subject to private ownership in a competitive market between competing suppliers, it will be like better cars, we’ll just drive faster.
Power consumption will be a limiting factor in those countries relying on intermittent, weather dependent power generation with no base load. Especially if users prefer Apple’s privacy first AI on edge devices.
Hopefully in western countries it can encourage more young women to bear three children before they turn 35. Young men have to pick up their game and create an environment to redirect their suicidal empathy into more productive pursuits.
“Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely un-skilled labour?” - Albert Crossfield 1954
zkmon | 5 hours ago
Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work".
Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for their basic needs. But if machines ensure that too, then wealth itself, as a reserve, is unnecessary.
AuthAuth | 5 hours ago
We will never automate all work so we with half of humanity doing nothing of value it will be a struggle for the people who do nothing of value to convince people to do work for them.
We can see it now where products dont target the people without money. There is no point because they cant give you any reward so instead you do your work for the people that can give you something in return. We can use the government to stimulate and balance this a bit but at a certain point the number gets to high and things collapse.
jeffhuys | 2 hours ago
RandomLensman | an hour ago
Human agency is real and powerful - unless humans want to automate all work, it won't happen.
plastic-enjoyer | an hour ago
jrowen | 5 hours ago
How many man-hours go into various parts of the advertising distribution chain? Though a certain fraction of that energy goes to connecting people with goods and services they might find valuable, most of it goes into shifting numbers around for people that already don't personally have to worry about money.
We don't need to find endless ways for people to spin wheels, but as long as we're worried about "jobs," we will. We just need to find the social structures to provide people with basic needs and reserve "work" for things that are vital to society or truly inspired.
sharikous | 26 minutes ago
just?
ElProlactin | 10 minutes ago
lelanthran | 4 hours ago
Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive.
This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...
strken | 4 hours ago
I can't wait to be kept in agistment by my overlords, fed on treacle and oats, ridden in circles once a fortnight, and shot when I break a leg.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/United-States-Farm-based...
defrost | 4 hours ago
Luxury horse living during the heyday of working horses and pit ponies, "horse power" wasn't left ideal for a fortnight.
> How many horses do you see now that the world
Personally, a surprising number perhaps, there's a pony club at the top of my street in town, and the area is still littered with horses and other livestock.
This isn't my area, but it's not dissimilar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45623799
Full size image: https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/a26664f6500a7c74...
zkmon | 4 hours ago
These "needs" are sometimes enforced by the systems and government so that people don't stay away from the work and "economy" keeps churning. The housing prices could be a way to keep the people working for loan payments.
Instant foods, nursing homes for elderly, creches, roads, commuter trains - are all ways to have more workers and make them focused on work.
lelanthran | 4 hours ago
"Work" doesn't exist to keep people busy, it exists to keep them alive.
RandomLensman | 29 minutes ago
nibbleyou | 20 minutes ago
Even now the machine owners have enough power to change laws to their liking, bending governments and public opinion to their will.
RandomLensman | 15 minutes ago
The odd thing is that after the pandemic just showed what societies can enforce, somehow it all is forgotten again when it comes to who holds what power.
lowbloodsugar | 3 hours ago
jambalaya8 | 3 hours ago
globular-toast | an hour ago
lagrange77 | an hour ago
shinryuu | 11 minutes ago
Some may consider local LLMs to help with that as the power of LLMs would be more distributed. I think local LLMs would help marginally. Companies as an entity would still be better positioned to use these to their advantage vis a vis individuals.
So projecting into the future I still wonder if it won't become more challenging for individuals to make a living on average.
jppope | 5 hours ago
There will always be new, hard problems to work on. AI will not, and can not eliminate that.
ilaksh | 5 hours ago
But we already do have have some kind of measurement of most of these types of side factors, and they actually aren't at zero and are increasing rapidly. So the implication that they will not be human level until decades from now is just (hopeful?) speculation or fuzzy thinking.
To me this looks like a really academic and official sounding version of the same quasi-religious hopium that usually defends the sanctity of the human. He is essentially saying that there is just something so special about humans that it will never be reproduced in a machine. It's very similar to dualism (and in many people actually is religious dualism). No AI is going to have human creativity or judgement. Not anytime soon. Why? Well, we all just _know_ that's not possible. Okay, maybe in a couple of decades (but they don't necessarily believe that anyway). Why would that take decades? Well we all can just _tell_ it's no where close, right? Because AI of today just isn't special like humans.
Aside from that worldview issue, I think that people still are not taking seriously or internalizing the concept of exponential improvement.
Computing efficiency gains can actually level off. In fact, they have many, many times before. But they always tilt back up again when we invent the next approach to get beyond the current level. This is how it has been for 90 years.
There are multiple ways that we continue to see huge gains in AI software, architecture, and hardware. There are huge efficiency gains available still as we move towards more radical fully compute in memory and/or analog approaches and other options like models implemented in hardware.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 4 hours ago
ilaksh | 3 hours ago
pmg101 | 2 hours ago
My mother worked in an office in London as a shorthand typist in the 60s, along with thousands of other young women.
At some point computers began to enter offices, bosses typed their own letters and then emails, and this category of job simply evaporated. Of course there was still SOME secretarial work, and some workers retrained to do it, but most simply had to leave the sector.
Isn't that a common story with technology replacing workers?
kkhs | 5 hours ago
doubtfuluser | 4 hours ago
What upset me a bit were phrases like “This is not a slogan. It’s a framework” which immediately devalued the work for me.
I have read so much Ai generated text recently, that I developed some AI-fatigue or AI-burnout, and I’m wondering if that might hit more fields - making more humans reject Ai work.
To be clear, I still like the text and I don’t know if it was written (partially) by Ai or not - but it’s this uncanny feeling I got reading it.
budududuroiu | 4 hours ago
jorisw | an hour ago
tkel | 51 minutes ago
jorisw | 11 minutes ago
lagrange77 | an hour ago
Why? Because it resembles the typical "You're not just implementing a text editor, you're reshaping the text editing landscape"?
jackdoe | 49 minutes ago
I cant read this shit anymore.
"creating cross functional AI evaluation team to keep the company honest"
Fucking garbage.
I have an old book between me and the keyboard, and just read it while the AI is thinking, so I can read non AI words.. otherwise its like reading books by the same author over and over and over again.
I will go touch some grass now.
pillsburry | 4 hours ago
skybrian | 4 hours ago
faeyanpiraat | an hour ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/3p0b3i/graphic_design...
fragmede | 3 hours ago
Does he want to fund the arts? Humanities?
vivzkestrel | 3 hours ago
- i would assume it is reasonable that anyone comes and see what other posts a person has written except you cant find that page anywhere linked
brador | 3 hours ago
The only question is what next?
Our only hope is to teach the AI to meld with our bodies and use them for gestation, energy or hibernation. The alternative is sustenance.
paul7986 | 3 hours ago
luciana1u | 3 hours ago
jongjong | 2 hours ago
Ourselves.
xkcd1963 | 2 hours ago
dosisking | an hour ago
globular-toast | 52 minutes ago
pilgrim0 | an hour ago
ranguna | an hour ago
PeterStuer | an hour ago
throwpoaster | 52 minutes ago