[coldtea]

>Or, for every junior that isn't hired by a business that can't expand its portfolio to exploit greater productivity or can’t figure out how to effectively use LLMs across the experience spectrum, two will be hired in shops that can do those things

And everybody also gets a pony! Win-win-win situation!

Previous "software dev productivity increases" happened as computing saturation itself increased from a hanful of mainframes to one in every office, then at every desk, then a few in every home, and later one in every hand. Now it's at 100% or close.

It also still required computer operators. LLM are not mere increased productivity of a human computer operator, but automation of productivity so that it can happen without an operator (or with much fewer).

Moreover, all this "increased productivity" still left wage stagnant for 40 years (with basic costs like housing, education, healthcare skyrocketing). It's not like more of it, in the same old corporatism context, bodes better for the future...

[dragonwriter]

> LLM are not mere increased productivity or the computer operator, but automation of productivity so that it can happen without an operator (or with much fewer).

Enabling the same production with fewer workers (or, equivalently, greater production with the same number of workers) is the definition of a productivity increase, not something that constitutes a difference in kind from a normal productivity increase.

> Moreover, all this "increased productivity" still left wage stagnant for 40 years

Not in computing it didn't. Same job category pay rose in real terms over almost any window you choose in the last 50 years, and in most cases the distribution of jobs also moved over time from lower-paid to higher-paid categories within computing.

Also, even general real wages didn't really stagnate for 40 years, average (mean) wages dropped slowly for 20 — mid-70s to mid-90s, and mostly have slowly climbed since, crossing over about 30-ish years after the past peak, but the same effect isn't seen in median wages (though that also was low in the early 1980s and most of the 1990s, before mostly rising strongly) or median personal income (which, despite short drops around recessions, has been rising consistently strongly since the 1981 trough.)

[coldtea]

>Enabling the same production with fewer workers (or, equivalently, greater production with the same number of workers) is the definition of a productivity increase, not something that constitutes a difference in kind from a normal productivity increase.

Of course. But "greater production with the same number of workers" vs "the same production with fewer workers" is already a difference in quantity (of both production, and, the thing pertinent to the discussion, of workers).

And there's also "greater production with fewer workers" - where you get to have your employer pie (fewer workers) and eat it too (still get greater production).

[philwelch]

Yes, but you’re just reiterating the basic Luddite argument, and taking IMO a blinkered perspective by looking at it from the perspective of a single firm rather than the economy as a whole. Often, increasing labor productivity in a given category actually increases the total quantity of such labor demanded in the economy due to the Jevons effect. If you increase output per worker by 10x, sometimes the product becomes cheap enough that the quantity demanded goes up by 100x and the economy ends up needing 10x as many workers. (Numbers for purpose of illustration of course.)

In other words, sure, there’s a limiting factor in terms of how much software the world actually wants, but the more software we can produce per programmer, the cheaper software gets and the more software the world wants. There is still eventually a limit here, but it is a lot farther away than it looks.

[TrueSlacker0]

I'm not sure why your getting down voted so much. This is literally what Henry Ford and others did. He raised wages for staff to be the highest in manufacturing, then improved their throughout by streamlining and removing wastes, then he lowered the cost of cars to customers making the market for them change from a few per year for only the ultra wealthy to what it is today. Thus expanding the needed workers.

[mistermann]

Did you run this by the risk, global relations, and legal guys/gals?

[kragen]

> Previous "software dev productivity increases" happened as computing saturation itself increased from a handful of mainframes to one in every office, then at every desk, then a few in every home, and later one in every hand. Now it's at 100% or close.

previous 'computing saturation is at 100% or close' pronouncements go back to 01953 https://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-w...

this human body weighs about 100 kg and occupies about 100 liters. it contains about 30 trillion cells, each of which contains something like 10 million ribosomes, 300 quintillion in all, which are programmable machines that construct proteins by executing a digital program on a dna tape, although the program is quite limited, more like a player piano roll than a computer program

current sram bits are on the order of 20 nanometers in diameter, about the same size as a ribosome. this is clearly feasible because these devices are already in mass production. you need on the order of 4096 of these, plus a roughly equivalent number of transistor-like switching elements (which are smaller), to get something we would recognize as a computer (i.e., you can program it in c or basic or assembly rather than verilog or abel or something). multiplying by a safety factor of two, we're talking about 32768 20-nanometer-sized elements, which is a cube 640 nanometers on a side

obviously (?) such a computer can't be manufactured by current manufacturing techniques, but also obviously it will work once you figure out how to make it. quite likely you can improve on that by orders of magnitude; ribosomes, after all, are considerably more capable than a 1-bit memory cell

you can fit 400 quadrillion such computers into the space of the human body, a bit over ten thousand per cell

so quite plausibly we are still 20 orders of magnitude away from personal computing saturation, and after another 12 orders of magnitude people will be saying things like 'then a few in every home, later one in every hand, and finally one in every cell. now it's at 100% or close'

even this is overly pessimistic, though. the obviously-workable computer outlined above weighs about 2e-16 kg, and jupiter weighs about 2e27 kg, so if you convert jupiter into computronium, you can get about 1e43 computers, roughly 1e33 computers per currently living person. and the milky way is about 1e12 solar masses, which works out to 2e42 kg, so a milky way of computronium would be roughly 1e58 computers

converting most of the milky way to computronium is less obviously feasible or desirable than putting anticancer robots in every cell but it suggests that we're closer to 48 orders of magnitude from computing saturation

as for corporatism, corporatism seems very unlikely to become established in the current political environment outside of backwaters like argentina. of course, the future is enormously unpredictable, but to me corporatism seems like an idiosyncratic response to the political conditions of the 01920s

[coldtea]

>previous 'computing saturation is at 100% or close' pronouncements go back to 1953

Yes, pronouncements can come early. They can also come at the point in time that they hold. Previous pronouncements having come early doesn't mean the same pronouncement will never hold.

In any case, those pronouncements didn't match an 1:1 (or even 3:1, considering laptop+work computer+smartphone) ratio of computer to person.

>obviously (?) such a computer can't be manufactured by current manufacturing techniques, but also obviously it will work once you figure out how to make it.

In any case, fitting "400 quadrillion such computers into the space of the human body", even if possible, doesn't require 400 quadrillion programmers. Or even necessarily that much programmer. After all programmers genereally don't increase based on the count of cpus (that's a less strong correlation), but based on the number of individual software programs.

Such a development might not even require more programmers than there are today. In fact, if LLMs improve similarly as original GPT to GPT 4, or (even worse) if AGI is achieved before those nanocomputers, their software might require exactly 0 programmers.

In any case, the eventual (?) achievement of those "400 quadrillion such computers into the space of the human body" (while still waiting for flying cars, robot servants, and cold fusion) would be so far ahead to make the point moot regarding the job prospects on programmers in the industry given the raise of LLM in the next 30-40 years.

>as for corporatism, corporatism seems very unlikely to become established in the current political environment outside of backwaters like argentina.

Outside of backwaters? Corporatism has been the status quo in the US for several decades now...

[kragen]

i don't see how saying that 20-nanometer-diameter sram cells and switching elements will work could be any farther from handwaving; they're already in mass production, forming the bulk of shipped processors for cellphones and laptops this year

the only handwaving in the bit you quoted consists of saying that it's not possible to build computers where the entire computer is less than a micron across with current manufacturing techniques

it's certainly true that computers don't require programmers. i think it's easier to reason correctly about the issue the other way around; programmers can do anything, but they require computers to do it

50 years ago, if you wanted to cycle the current in a voltammetry lab setup or make your windshield wipers intermittent, you designed a circuit. if you wanted to get a screw machine to cut a new kind of screw, you probably cut some new cams out of steel sheet. if you wanted to retard the spark timing on your engine ignition, you adjusted a screw

now in all those cases you just write a program, or perhaps even change some parameters to a program, because all those things are controlled by computers now. so suddenly you have lots of programmers working in these areas

today, if you want a ditch dug, you don't write a program; you rent a backhoe or pick up a shovel. but that's just because your dirt isn't programmable yet

the flying cars problem is well documented to be a question of regulatory obstacles and governance, not technical capabilities. lots of people do fly ultralights today, you can find videos on youtube

will the same problem force you to move your dirt with a shovel 50 years from now instead of just telling it where to go? yeah, plausibly, but that's just a question of amish-style or tokugawa-style rejection of technology, not a question of saturating the possibilities

as for corporatism in the usa, it definitely isn't a thing. possibly you just don't know what corporatism is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

[jprete]

Are you by any chance a paperclip factory? /s

[kragen]

ask again in 53 years