[gwern]

> Forty-six percent of the global population lives on less than $5 per day. In some countries, more than 90% of the population lives on less than $5 per day. If agentic AI code generation becomes the most effective way to write high-quality code, this will create a massive barrier to entry. Access to technology is already a major class and inequality problem. My bitter prediction is that these expensive frontier models will become as indispensable for software development as they are inaccessible to most of the world’s population.

Forty-six percent of the global population has never hired a human programmer either because a good human programmer costs more than $5 a day{{citation needed}}.

[fragmede]

How much of the global population has hired another person to do something for them directly? If I go to the store and the cashier does the transaction, I haven't hired a human. so more broadly, do most people hire other humans for jobs? that seems like a rich person thing to me in the first place.

[gwern]

Well then - the cost of hiring a LLM compared to hiring a human is irrelevant if you are going to deny that hiring in general is irrelevant, now isn't it? So either OP is making an idiotic comparison because he is wrong and using a LLM to do programming already is several orders of magnitude cheaper than using a human to do programming and it is vastly more likely that poor people will be able to afford occasional LLM use, or it's idiotic because it's irrelevant.