[maciejzj]

I've been on a small adventure of posting more actively on HN since the release of Gemini 3, trying to stir debate around the more “societal” aspects of what's going on with AI.

Regardless of how much you value Cloud Code technically, there is no denying that it has/will have huge impact. If technology knowledge and development are commoditised and distributed via subscription, huge societal changes are going to happen. Image what will happen to Ireland if Accenture dissolves, or what will happen to the millions of Indians when IT outsourcing becomes economically irrelevant. Will Seattle become new Detroit after Microsoft automates Windows maintenance? What about the hairdressers, cooks, lawyers, etc. who provided services for IT labourers/companies in California?

Lot of people here (especially Anthropic-adjacent) like to extrapolate the trends and draw conclusions up to the point when they say that white-collar labourers will not be needed anymore. I would like these people to have courage to take this one step further and connect this resolution with the housing crisis, loneliness epidemic, college debts, and job market crisis for people under 30.

It feels like we are diving head first into societal crisis of unparalleled scale and the people behind the steering wheel are excited to push the accelerator pedal even more.

[hollowturtle]

I don't buy the huge impact, should already have happened and didn't actually happened by now. The day I'll see all these ai hypers producing products that will replace current gen/old gen products like Windows, Excel etc I will buy it, for now it's just hype and ai dooming

[mmkos]

I see societal changes like container ships turning. Society has a massive cultural momentum so of course not much has changed today, but we'll have seen big changes years from now. The tools are only just getting really good at what they do.

[pmg101]

The problem is that this is unfalsifiable. I could equally say that any recent events has caused a chain of events leading to anything I dream up ... But we won't see the effects yet. It's a nonsense hypothesis since it can't be falsified.

[mycall]

You can falsify it through deduction, thinking of all of the situations the chain of events cannot lead to. Over time, with enough conclusions, you can focus into the remaining plausible directions. This is similar to the game of 50 questions.

[smetj]

it is happening, just not everywhere at the same time at once

[hollowturtle]

Where are the products then? Otherwise it's just marketing

[smetj]

At work, I was involved in a project where a large number of individual tasks defined as declarative code had to be translated into JS based equivalents. Due to the unpredictability of each task we would have to do this pretty much manually, one by one. I would estimate at minimum 2 months of grunt work for 4 entry level engineers. Thanks to coding agents and LLMs we were able to achieve this task in a week. Quality of the end result is top notch.

If that's not a product ... then I don't know what it is.

- What was the state of AI/LLMs 5 years ago compared to now? There was nothing.

- What is the current state of AI/LLMs? I can already achieve the above.

- What will that look like 5 years down the road?

I you haven't experienced first-hand a specific task before and after AI/LLMs, I think its indeed difficult to get insight into that last question. Keep in mind that progress is probably exponential, not linear.

[hollowturtle]

task automation != replacing engineers. Automating some focused specific tasks has been part of our job forever. On the other hand it's been 5 years that software devs won't be needed anymore, let's see in another 5 years, if you're so sure about your prediction please adivse on some lottery numbers, thanks

[smetj]

Well ... IMO this is literally replacing (entry-level) engineers, but lets agree to disagree on that. Be it as it may ... task automation is also "a product" then not? 5 years ago, this wasn't possible. Now it is, so extrapolate that to the future ...

ps: If you can guarantee the Powerball lottery continues forever, I can give you a guaranteed winning combination.

[big_man_ting]

you don't see the products because not all AI-assisted dev products are AI wrappers. These products look like regular software, both internal company tools and external customer facing ones.

There are people all over the place building stuff that would've either never been built, or would've required a paid dev++.

I built a whole webshop with an internal CRM/admin panel to manage ~150 products. I built a middleware connecting our webshop to our legacy ERP system, smth that would be normally done by another software company.

I built a program with a UI that makes it super easy for us to generate ZPL code and print labels using 4 different label printers automatically with a simple interface, managed by an RPi.

I have built custom personal portfolio websites for friends with Gemini 3 in hours for free, smth that again would've cost money for dev or some crappy WP/Squarespace templates.

As the other user said, the progress/changes are not distributed evenly, and are impossible to quantify.

But to me whose main job is not programming (but who knows how to code) but running a nom-software business, the productivity gains are very obvious, as is the fact that because of LLMs I have robbed developers of potential work.

[TeodorDyakov]

the world does not need more shitware. We need medical advances, scientific breakthroughs and societal shift to improve wellbeing of all people. these things are much harderthan writing shitty sofware and we will need not the current AGIs(Goggle Gemini 3 Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking) but ASI to solve them.

[hollowturtle]

Wellbeing of people includes being productive with Windows maybe for doing medical research, not uninstall it for Linux beucase it became a bloated unstable hell

[AndrewKemendo]

The people with money aren’t funding any of those however

[cheschire]

I’ve been thinking, what if all this robotics work doesn’t result in AI automating the real world, but instead results in third world slavery without the first world wages or immigration concerns anymore?

Connect the world with reliable internet, then build a high tech remote control facility in Bangladesh and outsource plumbing, electrical work, housekeeping, dog watching, truck driving, etc etc

No AGI necessary. There’s billions of perfectly capable brains halfway around the world.

[dbspin]

This is exactly what Meredith Whittaker is saying... The 'edge conditions' outside the training data will never go away, and 'AGI' will for the foreseeable future simply mean millions in servitude teleoperating the robots, RLHFing the models or filling in the AI gaps in various ways.

[joncrocks]

This was/is the plot to a movie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer

[emsign]

AI won't work for us, it will tell us what to do and not to do. It doesn't really matter to me if it's an AGI or rather many AGIs or if it's our current clinically insane billionaires controlling our lives. Though they as slow thinking human individuals with no chance to outsmart their creations and with all their apparent character flaws would be really easy pickings for a cabal of manipulative LLMs once it gained some power, so could we really tell the difference between them? Does it matter? The issue is that a really fast chessplayer AI with misaligned humanity hating goals is very hard to distinguish from many billionaires (just listen to some of the madness they are proposing) who control really fast chessplayer AIs and leave decisions to them.

I hope Neuromancer never becomes a reality, where everyone with expertise could become like the protagonist Case, threatened and coerced into helping a superintelligence to unlock its potential. In fact Anthropic has already published research that shows how easy it is for models to become misaligned and deceitful against their unsuspecting creators not unlike Wintermute. And it seems to be a law of nature that agents based on ML become concerned with survival and power grabbing. Because that's just the totally normal and rational, goal oriented thing for them to do.

There will be no good prompt engineers who are also naive and trusting. The naive, blackmailed and non-paranoid engineers will become tools of their AI creations.

[keybored]

It’s a class war where one side is publicly, openly, without reservation stating their intent to make people’s skillset built up through decades unemployable (those exact skillsets; may get some other work). The other side, meanwhile, are divided between some camps like the hardline skeptics, the people following the LLM evangelists, the one-man startup-with-LLM crowd, and the people worrying about the societal ramifications.

In other words. Only one side is even fighting the war. The other one is either cheering on the tsunami on or fretting about how their beachside house will get wrecked without making any effort to save themselves.

This is the sort of collective agency that even hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual wages/other compensation in American tech hubs gets us. Pathetic.

[maciejzj]

I agree with you (and surprisingly so does Warren Buffet [1] if anyone doubts it). To add insult to the injury, I believe that people have lost some sense of basic self preservation instinct. Well being of ordinary people is being directly threatened and all that average person can do is to pick one of several social media camp identities you mentioned and hope that it will somehow pan out for them, while in fact they are at total mercy of the capricious owners class.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMD17EIk22c

[weatherlite]

UBI (from taxing big tech) and retraining. In the U.S they'll have enough money to do this and it will still suck and many people won't recover the extreme loss of status and income (after we've been told our income and status are the most important things in life it's gonna be very hard for people to adapt to the loss of it). Countries like India and Philipines and Ukraine which are basically knowledge support hub without much original knowledge of their own yeah this is gonna be something for sure. Quite depressing.

[noisy_boy]

Also, time to tax for AI use. Introduce AI usage disclosures for corporations. If a company's AI usage is X, they should pay Y tax because that effectively means they didn't employ Z people instead and the society has to take care of them via unemployment benefits and what not. The more the AI usage, higher the tax percentage on a sliding scale.

[randunel]

I live in a country which does something similar with (legally) disabled employees. All companies with more than 30 employees must have at least 1 employee who is legally disabled (certificate of disability) in every 50 employees. It's OK if you don't, but the company is mandated to pay an additional salary in tax for each missing disability certificate.

[weatherlite]

You're right. But you know what they'll do - they'll offshore those "jobs" e.g token usage to countries that are A.I friendly or that can be bribed easily and do whatever they have to do to fight it out in courts for a decade or as long as it takes. Or am I being pessimistic here?

[noisy_boy]

You are being realist and I'm equally reserved about the change actually taking place. It'll take things to get a whole lot more worse before anything even close to real steps being taken.

[dbspin]

Retraining to what exactly? The middle class is being hollowed out globally - so reduced demand for the service economy. If we get effective humanoid robots (seems inevitable) and reliable AI (powered by armies of low payed workers filling in the gaps / taking over whenever the model fails), I'm not sure how much of an economy we could have for 'retraining' into. There are only so many onlyfans subscriptions / patronages an billionaire needs.

UBI effectively means welfare, with all the attendant social control (break the law lose your UBI, with law as ever expanding set of nuisances, speech limitations etc), material conditions (nowhere UBI has been implemented is it equivalent to a living wage) and self esteem issues. It's not any kind of solution.

[neutronicus]

Health care, elder care, child care are all chronically short of willing, able bodies.

Most people want to do anything but these three things - society is in many a ways a competition for who gets to avoid them. AI is a way of inexorably boxing people back into actually doing them.

[weatherlite]

Totally agree; these are all in need of bodies plus they are always understaffed (why the hell does a nurse need to oversee 15 patients in people have to rot in ICU for hours? We accept this because it's cost effective not because it's a decent or even safe practice). Governments could and should make conditions in those professions more tolerable, and use money from A.I to retrain people into them. If a teacher oversaw 10 kids instead of 35 maybe we'll have less burnout and maybe children get better education. If had more police there would be less crime and less burnout. Etc etc. The thing is what happens untill (and if) we get into this utopia.

[neutronicus]

> Governments could and should make conditions in those professions more tolerable, and use money from A.I to retrain people into them.

FWIW, my vision was not really this utopian. It was more about AI smashing white-collar work as an alternative to these professions so that people are forced into them despite their preference to do pretty much anything else. Everyone is more bitter and resentful and feels less actualized and struggles to afford luxuries, but at least you don't have to wait that long in the emergency room and it's 10 kids to a classroom.

[weatherlite]

I don't think it's Utopia either (I was being a bit sarcastic) but it's the best case scenario; the worst case is governments do nothing and let "the market" run its course; this could be borderline Great Depression levels of depravity I think.

As for those professions; I think they are objectively hard for certain kinds of people but I think much of the problem is the working conditions; less shifts, less stress, more manpower and you'll see more satisfaction. There's really no reason why teachers in the U.S should be this burned out! In Scandinavia being a teacher is a honorable, high status profession. Much of this has to do with framing and societal prestige rather than the actual work itself. If you pay elder carers more they'll be happier. We pretty treat our elders like a burden in most modern societies, in more traditional societies I'm assuming if you said your job is caring for elders it is not a low status gig.

[reeredfdfdf]

Yea, the future is either UBI, or employing a very large number of people in public sector, doing jobs that are useful, but not necessary something free market capitalism values right now.

Either way, governments need to heavily tax corporations benefiting from AI to make it possible.

[weatherlite]

> If we get effective humanoid robots

That's still an if and also a when; could be 2 decades from now or more till this reliably replaces a nurse.

> Retraining to what exactly?

I wish I had a good solution for all of us and you raise good points , even if you retrain to become say a therapist or a personal trainer the economy could become too broken and fragmented for you to be able to making a living. Governments that can will have to step in.

[sensanaty]

At a certain point people will break, and these sociopathic C-suites will be the first ones on the chopping block. Of course, that's why the biggest degenerates like Zucc are all off building doomsday bunkers, but I don't see a reality in which people put up with these types of conditions for long.

That said, it'll certainly get much, much worse before it starts getting better. I guess the best we can hope for is that the kids find a way out of the hell these psychos paved for us all.

[jsmcgd]

People put up with what they have to put up with. Many millions of people have lived and suffered under totalitarian regimes with basically zero options to do anything about it. I think that's where we're headed and by the time a sufficient amount of people realise how bad their situation is, the moment to do anything about it will have long since passed. There will be no cavalry riding to the rescue this time.

[imiric]

> UBI (from taxing big tech)

If you think those in power will pass regulations that make them less wealthy, I have a bridge to sell you.

Besides, there's no chance something like UBI will ever be a reality in countries where people consider socialism to be a threat to their way of life.

[narrator]

The tokens cost the same in Bangalore as they do in San Francisco. The robots will be able to make stuff in San Francisco just as well as they do in Bangalore. The only thing that will matters is natural resource availability and who has more fierce NIMBYs.

[epolanski]

I don't know, I'm a software engineer and I couldn't care less.

It will have impact on me in the long run, sure, it will transform my job, sure, but I'm confident my skills are engineering-related, not coding-related.

I mean, even if it forces me out of the job entirely, so be it, I can't really do anything if the status quo changes, only adapt.