[sokoloff]

When coal powered engines became more efficient, demand for coal went UP. It went up because vastly more things could now be cost effectively be coal-powered.

I can see a future where software development goes the same way. My wife works in science and I see all kinds of things in a casual observation of her work that could be made more efficient with good software support. But not by enough to pay six-figures per year for multiple devs to create it. So it doesn’t get done and her work and the work of tens of thousands like her around the world is less efficient as a result.

In a world where development is even half as expensive, many such tasks become approachable. If it becomes a third or quarter as expensive, even more applications are now profitable.

I think far more people will be doing something that creates the outcomes that are today created by SWEs manually coding. I doubt it will be quite as lucrative for the median person doing it, but I think it will still be well above the median wage and there will be a lot of it.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[encyclopedism]

Many HN users may point to Jevons paradox, I would like to point out that it may very well work up until the point that it doesn't. After all a chicken has always seen the farmer as benevolent provider of food, shelter and safety, that is until of course THAT day when he decides he doesn't.

[sokoloff]

It is certainly possible that AI is the one great disruptor that we can’t adapt to. History over millenia has me taking the other side of that bet, seeing the disruptions and adaptations from factory farming, internal combustion engines, moving assembly lines, electrification, the transistor, ICs, wired then wireless telecommunications, the internet, personal computing, and countless other major disruptions.

[techblueberry]

Have we though?

1. Fundamentals do change, Yuval Noah Harari made this point in the book Sapiens, but basically there are core beliefs (in fact the idea that things do change for the better is relatively new, “the only constant is change”. Wasn’t really true before the 19th century.

What does “the great disrupter we can’t adapt to” mean exactly? If humans annihilate themselves from climate change, the earth will adapt, the solar system will shrug it off and the universe won’t even realize it happened.

But like, I am 100% sure humans will adapt to the AI revolution. Maybe we let 7 billion people die off, and the 1% of the rest enslave the rest of us to be masseuses and prostitutes and live like kings with robot servants, but I’m not super comfortable with that definition if “adaptation”.

For most of human history and most of the world “the rest of us” don’t live all that well, is that adaptation? I think most people include a healthy large, and growing middle class in their definition of success metrics.

[sokoloff]

Isn’t this “healthy, large middle class” a reality that is less than 100 years old in the best of cases? (After a smaller initial emergence perhaps 100 years prior to that.) In 250K years since modern humans emerged, that’s a comparative blink of an eye.

There might be slight local dips along the timeline, but I think most Westerners (and maybe most people, but my lived experience is Western) would not willingly trade places with their same-percentile positioned selves from 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 10K, 50K, or 250K years ago. The fact that few would choose to switch has to be viewed with some positive coefficient in a reasonable success metric.

[techblueberry]

Yes, my point was, if AI and automation in general are the start to the end of all that (and I do think there are some signs that these technologies could be leading us towards a fundamentally less egalitarian society) I think many would consider that a devastating impact that we did not adapt to, the way we did the Industrial Revolution, which ultimately led towards more middle class opportunities.