[burnt-resistor]

When I repeated to other tech people from about 2012 to 2020 that the technological singularity was very close, no one believed me. Coding is just the easiest to automate away into almost oblivion. And, too many non technical people drank the Flavor Aid for the fallacy that it can be "abolished" completely soon. It will gradually come for all sorts of knowledge work specialists including electrical and mechanical engineers, and probably doctors too. And, of course, office work too. Some iota of a specialists will remain to tune the bots, and some will remain in the fields to work with them for where expertise is absolutely required, but widespread unemployment of what were options for potential upward mobility into middle class are being destroyed and replaced with nothing. There won't be "retraining" or handwaving other opportunities for the "basket of labor", but competition of many uniquely, far overqualified people for ever dwindling opportunities.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

[kenjackson]

I don't think it was unreasonable to be very skeptical at the time. We generally believed that automation would get rid of repetitive work that didn't require a lot of thought. And in many ways programming was seen almost at the top of the heap. Intellectually demanding and requiring high levels of precision and rigor.

Who would've thought (except you) that this would be one of the things that AI would be especially suited for. I don't know what this progression means in the long run. Will good engineers just become 1000x more productive as they manage X number of agents building increasingly complex code (with other agents constantly testing, debugging, refactoring and documenting them) or will we just move to a world where we just have way fewer engineers because there is only a need for so much code.

[throw1235435]

Its interesting that even people initially skeptical are now thinking they are on the "chopping block" so to speak. I'm seeing it all over the internet and the slow realization that what supposed to be the "top of the heap" is actually at the bottom - not because of difficulty of coding but because the AI labs themselves are domain experts in software and therefore have the knowledge and data to tackle it as a problem first. I also think to a degree they "smell blood" and fear, more so than greed, is the best marketing tool. Many invested a good chunk of time on this career, and it will result in a lot of negative outcomes. Its a warning to other intellectual careers that's for sure - and you will start seeing resistance to domain knowledge sharing from more "professionalized" careers for sure.

My view is in between yours: A bit of column A and B in the sense both outcomes to an extent will play out. There will be less engineers but not by the factor of productivity (Jevon's paradox will play out but eventually tap out), there will be even more software especially of the low end, and the ones that are there will be expected to be smarter and work harder for the same or less pay grateful they got a job at all. There will be more "precision and rigor", more keeping up required by workers, but less reward for the workers that perform it. In a capitalist economy it won't be seen as a profession to aspire to anymore by most people.

Given most people don't live to work, and use their career to also finance and pursue other life meanings it won't be viable for most people long term especially when other careers give "more bang for buck" w.r.t effort put into them. The uncertainty in the SWE career that most I know are feeling right now means to newcomers I recommend on the balance of risk/reward its better to go another career path especially for juniors who have a longer runway. To be transparent I want to be wrong, but the risk of this is getting higher now everyday.

i.e. AI is a dream for the capital class, and IMO potentially disastrous for social mobility long term.

[skydhash]

I don't think I'm on the chopping block because of AI capabilities, but because of executive shortsightedness. Kinda like moving to the Cloud eliminated sysadmins, but created DevOps, but in many ways the solution is ill-suited to the problem.

Even in the early days of LLM-assisted coding tools, I already know that there will be executives who would said: Let's replace our pool of expensive engineers with a less expensive license. But the only factor that led to this decision is cost comparison. Not quality, not maintenance load, and very much not customer satisfaction.

[dboreham]

That said, management generally never cared about quality and maintenance.

[burnt-resistor]

> I don't think it was unreasonable to be very skeptical at the time.

Well, that's back rationalization. I saw the advances like conducting meta sentiment analysis on medical papers in the 00's. Deep learning was clearly just the beginning. [0]

> Who would've thought (except you)

You're othering me, which is rude, and you're speaking as though you speak for an entire group of people. Seems kind of arrogant.

0. (2014) https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...

[ayrtondesozzla]

Do you've any textual evidence of this 8-year stretch of your life where you see yourself as being perpetually correct? Do you mean that you were very specifically predicting flexible natural language chatbots, or vaguely alluding to some sort of technological singularity?

We absolutely have not reached anything resembling anyone's definition of a singularity, so you are very much still not proven correct in this. Unless there are weaker definitions of that than I realised?

I think you'll be proven wrong about the economy too, but only time will tell there.

[GenshoTikamura]

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