[the_af]

> There will still be a need for skilled software engineers to understand domains, limitations of AI, and how to harness and curate AI to develop custom apps.

But will there be a need for fewer engineers, though? That's the question. And the competition for those who remain employed would be fierce, way worse than today.

Or so I fear. I hope I'm wrong.

[andrei_says_]

I think it might be useful to look at this as multiple forces to play.

One force is a multiplier of a software engineer’s productivity.

Another force is the pressure of the expectation for constant, unlimited increase in profits. This pressure force the CEOs and managers to look for cheaper alternatives to expensive software engineers, ultimately to eliminate the position and expense. The lie that this is a possibility draws huge investments.

And another force is the infinite number of applications of software, especially well designed, truly useful, software.

[the_af]

Yes, these are good considerations.

I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't admit I use AI daily in my job, and it's indeed a multiplier of my productivity. The tech is really cool and getting better.

I also understand AI is one step closer for the everyday Jane or Joe Doe to do cool and useful stuff which was out of reach before.

What worries me is the capitalist, business-side forces at play, and what they will mean for my job security. Is it selfish? You bet! But if I don't advocate for me, who will?

[btilly]

Jevon's Paradox says that you're probably wrong. But I'm worried about the same thing. The moat around human superiority is shrinking fast. And when it's gone, we may get more software, but will we need humans involved?

[svara]

AI doesn't have needs any desires, humans do. And no matter how hyped one might be about AI, we're far away from creating an artificial human. As long as that's true, AI is a tool to make humans more effective.

[btilly]

AI may not have desires, but corporations do. And control more resources than humans.

Making corporations more effective is not always in the interest of humans.

[svara]

That's fair, but the question was whether AI would destroy or create jobs.

You might speculate about a one-person megacorp where everything is done by AIs that a single person runs.

What I'm saying is that we're very far from this, because the AI is not a human that can make the CEO's needs and desires their own and execute on them independently.

Humans are good at being humans because they've learned to play a complex game, which is to pursue one's needs and desires in a partially adversarial social environment.

This is not at all what AI today is being trained for.

Maybe a different way to look at it, as a sort of intuition pump: If you were that one man company, and you had an AGI that will correctly answer any unambiguously stated question you could ask, at what point would you need to start hiring?

[menaerus]

You're taking your opinion to extreme because I don't think anyone is talking about replacing all engineers with a single AI computer doing the work for a one-person mega-corporation.

The actual question, which is much more realistic, is if an average company of, let'say, 50 engineers will still have a need to hire those 50 engineers if AI turns out to be such an efficiency multiplier?

In that case, you will no longer need 10 people to complete 10 tasks in given time-unit but perhaps only 1 engineer + AI compute to do the same. Not all businesses can continue scaling forever, so it's pretty expected that those 9 engineers will become redundant.

[svara]

You took me too literally there, that was intended as a thought experiment to explore the limits.

What I was getting at was the question: If we feel intuitively that this extreme isn't realistic, what exactly do we think is missing?

My argument is, what's missing is the human ability to play the game of being human, pursuing goals in an adversarial social context.

To your point more specifically: Yes, that 10-person team might be replaceable by a single person.

More likely than not however, the size of the team was not constrained by lack of ideas or ambition, but by capital and organizational effectiveness.

This is how it's played out with every single technology so far that has increased human productivity. They increase demand for labor.

Put another way: Businesses in every industry will be able to hire software engineering teams that are so good that in the past, only the big names were able to afford them. The kind of team required for the digital transformation of every old fashioned industry.

[strogonoff]

It should be obvious that technology exists for the sake of humans, not the other way around, but I have already seen an argument for firing humans in favour of LLMs since the latter emit less pollution.

LLMs do not have desires, but their existence alters desires of humans, including the ones in charge of businesses.

[boothby]

> AI doesn't have needs any desires, humans do.

I fear that this won't age well. But to shamelessly riff on Marx, those who control the means of computation will control society.

[svara]

I agree the latter part is a risk to consider, but I really think getting an AI to replace human jobs on a vast scale will take much more than just training a bit more.

You need to train on a fundamentally different task, which is to be good at the adversarial game of pursuing one's needs and desires in a social environment.

And that doesn't yet take into account that the interface to our lives is largely physical, we need bodies.

I'm seeing us on track to AGI in the sense of building a universal question answering machine, a system that will be able to answer any unambiguously stated question if given enough time and energy.

Stating questions unambiguously gets pretty difficult fast even where it's possible, often it isn't even possible, and getting those answers is just a small part of being a successful human.

PS: Needs and desires are totally orthogonal to AI/AGI. Every animal has them, but many animals don't have high intelligence. Needs and desires are a consequence of our evolutionary history, not our intelligence. AGI does not need to mean an artificial human. Whether to pursue or not pursue that research program is up to us, it's not inevitable.

[the_af]

To be clear, I'm not arguing humans will stop being involved in software engineering completely. What I fear is that the pool of employable humans (as code reviewers, prompt engineers and high-level "solution architects") will shrink, because fewer will be needed, and that this will cause ripples in our industry and affect employment.

We know this isn't far-fetched. We have strong evidence to suspect during the big layoffs of a couple of years ago, FAANG and startups all colluded to lower engineer salaries across the board, and that their excuse ("the economy is shrinking") was flimsy at best. Now AI presents them with another powerful tool to reduce salaries even more, with a side dish of reducing the size of the cost center that is programmers and engineers.

[boothby]

Honestly, I wasn't even talking about jobs with that. I worry about an intelligent IOT controlled by authoritarian governments or corporate interests. Our phones have already turned society into a panopticon, and that will can get much worse when AGI lands.

But yes, the job thing is concerning as well. AI won't scrub a toilet, but it will cheaply and inexhaustibly do every job that humans find meaningful today. It seems that we're heading inexorably towards dystopia.

[svara]

> AI won't scrub a toilet, but it will cheaply and inexhaustibly do every job that humans find meaningful today

That's the part I really don't believe. I'm open to being wrong about this, the risk is probably large enough to warrant considering it even if the probability of this happening is low, but I do think it's quite low.

We don't actually have to build artificial humans. It's very difficult and very far away. It's a research program that is related to but not identical to the research program leading to tools that have intelligence as a feature.

We should be, and in fact we are, building tools. I'm convinced that the mental model many people here and elsewhere are applying is essentially "AGI = artificial human", simply because the human is the only kind of thing in the world that we know that appears to have general intelligence.

But that mental model is flawed. We'll be putting intelligence in all sorts of places that are not similar to a human at all, without those devices competing with us at being human.

[visarga]

In the AI age, those who own the problems stand to own the AI benefits. Utility is in the application layer, not the hosting or development of AI models.

[kelipso]

Can’t be sure though, there used to be way more accountants decades ago.

[bubbleRefuge]

this is a better world. we can work a few hours a week and play tennis, golf, and argue politics with our friends and family over some good cheese and wine while the bots do the deployments.

[hgomersall]

We're already there in terms of productivity. The problem is the inordinate number of people doing nothing useful yet extracting huge amounts. Think most of finance for example.

[bubbleRefuge]

oh. yeah. finance is to big. they've captured the government.

[the_af]

Assuming you retain a good paying job and are not treated like a disposable commodity. That cheese and wine is not going to be free.

[bubbleRefuge]

as long as we keep learning and our heads in the game we will be fine. I worry much more for the non-techno savy like scrum masters. yikes.

[weatherlite]

If it's any consolation, if indeed the extra productivity happens, and kills the number of SWE jobs I don't see why this dynamic shouldn't happen in almost all white collar job across the private sector (government sectors are pretty much protected no matter what happens). There'll be a decreasing demand for lawyers, accountants, analysts, secretaries, HR personnel, designers, marketers etc etc. Even doctors might start feeling this eventually.

[bubbleRefuge]

no I think more engineers. especially those who can be a jack-of-all-trades. if a software project that takes normally 1 year of customer development can be done in 2 months, then that project is affordable to a wide array of business who would could never fund that kind of project before.

[the_af]

I can see more projects being deployed by smaller businesses, that would otherwise not be able to.

But how will this translate to engineering jobs? Maybe there will be AI tools to automate most of the stuff a small business needs done. "Ah," you may say, "I will build those tools!". Ok. Maybe. How many engineers do you need for that? Will the current engineering job market shrink or expand, and how many non-trash, well paid jobs will there be?

I'm not saying I know for sure how it'll go, but I'm concerned.

[dwaltrip]

Just had a thought, perhaps software engineers will become more like car mechanics.

[the_af]

That's not an encouraging thought.

By the way, car mechanics (especially independent ones, your average garage mechanic) understand less and less about what's going on inside modern cars. I don't want this to happen to us.

[bubbleRefuge]

would be similar to solution engineers today. you build solutions using ai. think about all the moving parts to building a complex business app. user experience, data storage, business logic, reporting, etc. etc. the engineer can orchestrate the ai to build the solution and validate its correctness.

[the_af]

I fear even this role will need way fewer people, meaning the employment pool will heavily shrink, and those competing for a job will need to accept lower paychecks.

[bubbleRefuge]

like someone said above. demand is infinite. imagine a world where the local AI/Engineer tech is a ubiquitous as the uber driver. don't think it will necessarily create smaller paychecks. hard to say. But I see demand skyrocketing for customized software that can be provided at 1/10 of today's costs.

We are far away from that though. As an enterprise software/data engineer, AI has been great in answering questions and generating tactical code for me. Hours have turned into minutes. It even motivated me to work on side projects because they take less time. You will be fine. Embrace the change. Its good for you. Will lead to personal growth.

[the_af]

I'm not at all convinced demand is infinite, nor that this demand will result in employment. This feels like begging the question. This is precisely what I fear won't happen!

Also, I don't want to be a glorified uber driver. It's not good for me and not good for the profession.

> As an enterprise software/data engineer, AI has been great in answering questions and generating tactical code for me. Hours have turned into minutes.

I don't dispute this part, and it's been this way for me too. I'm talking about the future of our profession, and our job security.

> You will be fine. Embrace the change. Its good for you. Will lead to personal growth.

We're talking at cross-purposes here. I'm concerned about job security, not personal growth. This isn't about change. I've been almost three decades in this profession, I've seen change. I'm worried about this particular thing.

[llm_trw]

Did the introduction of assemblers lead to creating more or fewer programming jobs?

[the_af]

I get this argument, but it feels we cannot always reason by analogy. Some jumps are qualitatively different. We cannot always claim "this didn't happen before, therefore it won't happen now".

Of course assemblers didn't create fewer programming jobs, nor did compilers or high level languages. However, with "NO CODE" solutions (remember that fad?) there was an attempt at reducing the need for programmers (though not completely taking them out of the equation)... it's just that NO CODE wasn't good enough. What if AI is good enough?