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by ninkendo 152 days ago
> It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work.

Agreed.

> Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

Eh… some people maybe. But history shows nearly every time a tool makes people more efficient, we get more jobs, not less. Jevon’s paradox and all that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

2 comments

Right, cars lead to more horses... except it didn't.
Of course cars wouldn't lead to more horses, because horses were the thing being replaced. But cars sure as hell lead to a lot more drivers, which is more akin to the analogy.

To take a software engineer for an example, Jevon's paradox would say that since software engineering is now so much easier due to LLM's, the demand will increase due to the reduced cost, which will lead to more software needing created, which paradoxically leads to more software engineers. There's no equivalent of the "horse" in the analogy, because the same people who were coding before ("driving" the horse) will be aided by LLM's in the future ("driving" a car.)

> But history shows nearly every time a tool makes people more efficient, we get more jobs, not less.

I hope so, but you have any ideas what they could be? This time feels different, especially because all the ultra-pro-AI people keep saying that "this time it's different" from a technological revolution. This is aiming to replaces people across many industries whereas historically it has been in smaller increments as new inventions are (more slowly) rolled out.