[29athrowaway]

Self-checkout at supermarkets does 90% of the work. The 10% of work remaining is done by a human supervising the self-checkout stations.

And same will happen to development. Lots of tasks will be automated and less people will be needed as a result.

[scaredginger]

Self-checkout isn't a great example since it's mainly just shifting the work from one human (the employee) to another (the customer), rather than true automation.

As a side note, we were told decades ago that visual programming would similarly displace developers; however, I'm doing perfectly fine

[analog31]

The best thing about self checkout is the parallel stations, so that getting behind a single black swan customer won't set me back by half an hour.

In some cases, shifting work to the customer is a net positive, especially if the customer can estimate their own time and effort better than they can estimate and manage someone else doing it. Nearly a half century after The Mythical Man Month, managing software development is still widely agreed to be an unsolved problem.

The cost of software development is not just the time and effort, but the existential risk to your own job or business from its unpredictability. This is why I do all of my own programming, and also most of my own home repairs... and use the self checkout at the supermarket.

It didn't displace developers because the industry has grown to absorb them. In my own case, I use my programs to get my own job done, then hand the whole thing over to the project team, and the developers write the production code that ends up in the product... but not at my expense.

[psi75]

Self-checkout isn't a great example since it's mainly just shifting the work from one human (the employee) to another (the customer), rather than true automation.

It may not be true automation, but it's very effective, and it's something we're seeing not only at the grocery store. What used to involve calling a person up and asking for services is now done through web portals... taking a few minutes of the person's time.

The real issue in this degradation of customer service is usually not the time cost but the fact that, while it doesn't change the amount of random human error that occurs, it shifts the penalties onto the users... if your travel agent screws up, you get a refund... if you screw up (in something that used to be someone else's job) you're told to eat the costs.

Thing is, the replacement of a process when an ersatz alternative may not be "true automation" but it doesn't need to be in order to work. And job destruction across an industry isn't 0/1. There are still jobs in car factories in Detroit, just far fewer of them. There will still be jobs for truck drivers in 2040, but there probably won't be nearly as many. Employers will still need programmers; they might not need the same number of us. It only takes a dip of a few percent in job supply to cause wages and working conditions to crater (that's inelasticity), and even this says nothing about the ripple effects and systemic calamities (up to and including the possibility of economic depressions that last decades) that occur when large numbers of working people lose substantial income.

[Ekaros]

True automation would be system that would at 100% accuracy note and bill all of the bagged items you carry out of the shop. Without ever scanning them. Which turns the whole thing to much harder case to solve. 90% is simple, but it really doesn't change the last 10% still needing to do essentially the 90% again...

[coffee_beqn]

There’s already Amazon Go which is fully automated

[imtringued]

It is kind of ironic that we use this technology to detect shop lifting at clothes stores instead of just charging people at a turnstyle.

[29athrowaway]

Even better, less money spent by companies, cheaper products due to lower expenses at the retail level.

[dumpsterlid]

Self checkout at supermarkets absolutely sucks. For the customer it is a huge downgrade in experience.

[zeroonetwothree]

I like it. It’s one of my favorite innovations of all time. I don’t use it when I have a ton of stuff of course but for my frequent trips to buy <10 items it’s much quicker than waiting in line.

[koliber]

I’ve seen different self checkout systems that provide a vastly different experience. Some are painful, like the ones where you scan a bar code and place the items in a scale. It’s effectively a checkout where I am now the clerk, but am less well trained, less experienced, and can not solve my own issues when they happen.

I’ve also seen a superb one at Decathlon stores in Poland. You dump your items in a box. It automagically scans everything using something that I’m guessing is RFID based. Bag, swipe a card to pay, and goIt is much simpler to use and is actually pleasant. It’s one step short of just walking out of the store without actually checking out.

[saghm]

I think this experience probably varies a lot person-to-person. For someone like me who often experiences social anxiety even from the most minimal of interactions, being able to keep my earbuds in and not have to talk to a stranger can be a huge difference if I'm happening to feel stressed on a given day. The biggest issue I used to have was when I wanted to carry something out instead of putting it in a bag, but since all they check for bagging is that the weight is placed on the surface, you can just put the item on the surface outside of a bag after scanning, and it will accept it as being "bagged".

[imtringued]

You can't ruin a cashier's day by being nice to them, they won't hate you for that.

[saghm]

Sure, and I do always strive to be nice to anyone I have to interact with whether they're cashiers or otherwise. Social anxiety doesn't tend to be a rational thing though, so the fact that consequences aren't unlikely doesn't really make it go away. I know that nothing bad is going to happen from a minor social interaction, and yet that does absolutely nothing to make me dread it less if I'm happening to be in an anxious state. A lot of mental health things work similarly to this; for example, having depression doesn't just mean you're sad because things aren't going well, but you can be despondent despite everything going perfectly fine in your life. If you can't imagine having feelings like this that conflict with what you actually know about a situation, then you're one of the lucky ones, but you probably do know someone who would know exactly what I'm talking about.

[29athrowaway]

Yes, but it's improving. Look at Amazon Go, for example, where you can take your items and leave.

[tormeh]

Depends. Software could be like lighting, where the cheaper it gets the more resources is spent on it. Right now it looks like it. Humans want to be able to see everywhere, and we want everything to be smart. Maybe a biotech revolution will shift demand towards that, but that’s speculation at this point.

[pjc50]

If you look back at far enough, quite a lot of development tasks have already been automated. There aren't all that many people manually "coding", or turning high level languages into machine code. That got automated early on.

[vishnugupta]

> And same will happen to development.

It is already happening. For example; setting up a production DB in primary-secondary mode; with daily back up and what not used to be quite a bit of manual grunt work. AWS Aurora and similar services handle 70-80% of the pain leaving you with setting up right table, index etc., Same in setting up a backend stack with DNS, load balancer etc.,

My guess is cloud services will automate even DB configuration. They have 100% visibility into the true production load pattern they will be able to suggest or even auto-configure things such as indexes.

[29athrowaway]

That's why most dev teams now do dev ops, where before you had an ops team and on premise infrastructure, which is still necessary in some sectors with strict data regulations but not for everyone.

[vishnugupta]

Indeed. We now have dev teams trying to tinker around with infra layer and more often shooting themselves in the foot because the UI makes it easy to play around. We often read horror stories of a one person startup accidentally running up $1MM AWS bills.

That said, we will continue to have a need for dedicated dev-ops team. Just that instead of say 10 people team it'd require 2 person team. But you still need a person dedicated (maybe part time) baby-sitting infrastructure. Don't let every dev get their hands on infra.

[qualudeheart]

That’s a scenario people don’t seem to explore.

The scenario in which demand for labor drops massively but human labor is still needed. Many industries would lose 80% of workers, but 20% would remain. Those 20% would be very high status and well paid, at least compared to the UBI neo-serf class that yheir former colleagues of the 80% have fallen off into. It is yhese 20% that woll form a new upper middle class. They will be isolated from the UBI serfs and live in gated communities.

These communities won’t be like the extremely luxurious communities of the one percent, but still isolated from the poor.

In another thread on this topic I’ve predicted a rise of technologically driven authoritarianism where the human elite uses AI to oppress the poor. The 20% that maintain such a system’s infrastructure (technical and otherwise) would probably support it politically. In most right wing authoritarian states the government has drawn support from its upper middle class. In left wing authoritarian states like the Soviet Onion there was a vast beurocrat class that was structurally isomorphic to the upper middle class.

I’m predicting that the humans that hold onto their jobs the longest, and work in high paying stem jobs, will form the core of such a regime. This is good news for many HN users, because you’ll be part of those 20%. I’m just worried what happens to the people that aren’t so lucky.

Of course there are caveats here that the automation may not happen soon, happen quickly or lead to societal upheaval or fascism, but all of those are still possible.

[unknownsky]

Will they bother to oppress the poor, or will they start killing them off completely? Historically, peasants have been oppressed but still kept alive because the rich and powerful relied on them to farm the food, build the houses and empty the chamberpots. In a world with 80% unemployment, will the rich and powerful be merciful enough to only oppress that 80% of the population, or will they kill them instead?

[imtringued]

You know, the entirety of economics is doomed because frankly it is just there to justify and explain wealth inequality rather than actually maximize economy efficiency. The laffer curve is the go to example people bring up. Completely made up.

[vincentmarle]

Maybe our engineering jobs will consist of reviewing AI-generated PRs all day…

[bckr]

Oh, that didn't cross my mind. Yes, that's a serious potential.

Take it a few more steps and then you get to automated analysis tools, system simulations, and NLP systems. This looks essentially like IronMan's Jarvis running heuristics interactively.

"Which edge cases did you cover?"

`I covered 3000 edge cases extrapolated from these bug reports...`

[koliber]

This is a possibility, but it presents a problem. In order to be a senior enough engineer to review PRs really well, you need years of practical experience. Those years start out in entry level jobs where you make lots of mistakes and learn by doing. But these are the very jobs that AI is most likely to eliminate first. So the first AIs will have good PR reviewers that were “classically trained”. Who will review the PRs of AI 50 years from now?

[bckr]

Great observation. Reminds me of this article[] about how surgeons are having a hard time getting experience with the rise of robotics.

It may be that this training will need to get pushed to the education system (whatever that looks like by that point).

Additionally, there can be a mentorship model where the junior performs the first pass of reviews and iterations before presenting to the senior.

Think Star Trek: how does anyone learn to fly a spaceship? Lots of simulation and running smaller parts of the system in close observation... which isn't too different from now.

[] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989991