[Herring]

This argument is basically just the 1800s Luddite vs Industrialist argument recast for a new age. Group A thinks quality is about human agency, and that machines are being used to bypass the apprenticeship system and produce inferior goods. Group B thinks efficiency is the highest priority, and craft is just vanity. Of course as we know we went a third way, and human roles just shifted.

I think one promising shift direction is humans do NOT like to talk to bots, especially not for anything important. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other.

[convolvatron]

I dont think it's the same at all. when weaving was displaced, yes some people were pissed about losing their livelihood, but the quality of the cloth didn't diminish.

when CNC came for machining, no one really bitched, because the computers were just removing the time consuming effort of moving screws by hand.

when computers write code, or screenplays, the quality right now is objectively much worse. that might change, but claims that we're at the point where computers can meaningfully displace that work are pretty weak.

sure that might change.

[gbear605]

Cloth absolutely has gotten worse over the last two hundred years since industrialization. It's also orders of magnitude cheaper, making it worth it, and certainly new types of cloth are available that weren't before, but we're not better off in every possible way.

[WarmWash]

>but we're not better off in every possible way

I'd argue that we are, because cloth of higher quality than anything that has ever existed before is available today, it's just really expensive. But high quality cloth was also expensive back then.

I think you are making the error of comparing cheap clothes of today with expensive clothes of the past, rather than cheap clothes with cheap clothes and expensive with expensive. People of the past might have had higher quality clothes on average, but its because those clothes were expensive despite being the cheapest available. Trust me, if Shein was around in 1780, everyone would be wearing that garbage.

[mh2266]

Is there any type of clothing that existed in the 1800s that you could actually not buy or have custom made today?

On the other hand, you could not buy a Gore-Tex Pro shell or an ultralight down jacket for any price in 1800.

[gbear605]

Dhaka muslin most famously isn't producible today due to a lack of knowledge. More broadly a lot of weaving techniques have been lost since they don’t make sense to do with machinery.

I don’t disagree that there are a lot of gains, including on net, just that it hasn’t been a pareto improvement with no losses at all.

[trollbridge]

We're definitely worse off when fabric now is mostly synthetic fabrics that flood the environment with microplastics, and last a much shorter amount of time. Of course, that's good for the fashion industry since it means they can sell more often.

[odo1242]

The result being worse generally doesn't stop humans from being displaced. Clothes made today are notably worse than the handmade ones.

[bfung]

Is clothes today really worse?

We have clothes and materials like gortex now that blocks rain and snow no handmade jacket could ever hope to perform at the same level to be lightweight AND dry.

[anhner]

> We have clothes and materials like gortex now that blocks rain and snow no handmade jacket could ever hope to perform at the same level to be lightweight AND dry.

At the cost of massive environmental, animal and human health.

[fwip]

The available quality of cloth did, in fact, diminish.

[Terr_]

Hold up, why it changed matters to parent-poster's argument. Consider the difference between:

1. "The technology's capability was inferior to what humans were creating, therefore the quality of the output dropped."

2. "The costs of employing humans created a floor to the price/quality you could offer and still make a profit. Without the human labor, a lower-quality product became possible to offer."

The first is a question of engineering, the second is a question of economic choice and market-fit.

[fwip]

Some of both.

The fabric and clothes were worse, and cheaper. This put many traditional workers out of business, making actually good clothes scarcer, and eventually, more expensive than they previously were.

[Terr_]

I think the poster's "LLMs are not like textile machines" point hinges on whether a step down in quality is required due to engineering issues or not, at least for an equivalent product. (E.g. bulk cloth, rather than fine embroidery.)

[fwip]

I'm talking about equivalent products. The cloth made by machine during the Industrial Revolution was meaningfully worse in quality than the hand-made stuff.

[ekianjo]

Not really. Polymers in clothes are everywhere and they have very désirable properties compared to pure cotton. Untreated cotton had many problems.

[trollbridge]

Materials other than cotton (like wool and leather) existed.

[ekianjo]

yup, but polymers are much, much cheaper to produce. And some have properties that no natural fabric can offer.

[anhner]

> properties that no natural fabric can offer

like polluting every inch of the Earth with microplastics!

[lkey]

sighs pulling out this quote again:

"Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to >>circumvent standard labor practices<< of the time."

Luckily, the brave government's troops, show trials and making '"machine breaking" (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime"' solved the crisis of these awful, entitled workers' demands once and for all and across all time.

I'm sure that any uppity workers in our present age can also be taught the appropriate lessons.

[rapind]

I wonder if the workers of the time were as responsible for the propaganda as we are... It seems like the ultimate heist when capital can get labour to propagate their own messaging.

[Herring]

Ordinarily yes I’d love to overthrow the bourgeoisie (check my history, I live in flagged threads), but this time I think this thread is really just about the evolution of the profession.

[lkey]

To be clear, I'm an accidental member of the haute bourgeoisie, and under normal circumstances, I cannot be harmed directly by this, or any, new evolution of labor relations.

I was mostly annoyed because Luddites were an early labor movement and their demands were, by modern standards, normal, but they are continually invoked like they believed and demanded things they did not.

I do agree the profession, if we dare diminish coding to exactly one thing, is changing, but I believe the direction of that evolution, unchecked, will exacerbate the ongoing attenuation of the power of labor in the US, even as workers individually become more 'productive'.

Quoting you from elsewhere: "Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance."

We agree here, and likely elsewhere, so keep fighting the good fight on this orange hell site (and also outside if you're able).

[Ronsenshi]

This evolution comes at a cost - if one senior suddenly can do their work and plus work of 5 juniors - why would company keep these juniors? It won't - the moment C-suite realizes they don't need extra people, they will be gone. But at some point senior engineers will retire or find new better paying jobs and said company would need to find a replacement. In the past this replacement could come from one of the juniors that worked in that company for a while and mentored by the senior. Not so much when there's no more juniors thanks to AI.

Not so much evolution here, I'm afraid. Just a plain redistribution of wealth upwards thanks to new tools that made large chunk of workforce obsolete. How this will affect industry in 15 years - nobody seem to think about that.

[billy99k]

The same could be said about the mass adoption of open source.

Why hire an experienced coder to create project X, when you can just use an open source project and hire cheaper and less experienced coders to make updates? I've been part of many of these conversations with business leaders and management over the years.

Developers have been giving away their work and devaluing their profession for decades and has basically turned it into digital factory work.

It's why I stopped writing software professionally almost a decade ago.

AI is using all of this open source to train and will eventually put you out of a job.

[hackyhacky]

The Luddites indeed lost their jobs to machines, but they could find other jobs, and their children adapted to the changed world.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, thinks that this disruption be different from that one. From his article The Adolescence of Technology, currently on HN's front page:

> AI will be capable of a very wide range of human cognitive abilities—perhaps all of them. This is very different from previous technologies like mechanized farming, transportation, or even computers. This will make it harder for people to switch easily from jobs that are displaced to similar jobs that they would be a good fit for. For example, the general intellectual abilities required for entry-level jobs in, say, finance, consulting, and law are fairly similar, even if the specific knowledge is quite different. A technology that disrupted only one of these three would allow employees to switch to the two other close substitutes (or for undergraduates to switch majors). But disrupting all three at once (along with many other similar jobs) may be harder for people to adapt to. Furthermore, it’s not just that most existing jobs will be disrupted. That part has happened before—recall that farming was a huge percentage of employment. But farmers could switch to the relatively similar work of operating factory machines, even though that work hadn’t been common before. By contrast, AI is increasingly matching the general cognitive profile of humans, which means it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily be created in response to the old ones being automated. Another way to say it is that AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.

[pydry]

It has nothing to do with luddites.

Software quality about speed of delivery and lack of bugs.

If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways, AI is totally fine.

Ive yet to meet many AI champions who are explicit about their desire to make that trade off though. Even the ones who downplay software quality arent super happy about the bugs.

[bfung]

> If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways,

human written code is similarly fine. Save for very few human individuals.

[trevwilson]

> If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways, AI is totally fine.

While the speed and scale at which these happen is definitely important (and I agree that AI code can pose a problem on that front), this applies to every human-written piece of software I've ever worked on too.

[adithyassekhar]

> I think one promising shift direction is humans do NOT like to talk to bots, especially not for anything important. It's biological.

Let me tell you why I like shopping from amazon instead of going to a super market...

But also the older I get I keep wanting to visit the store in person. It's not to see the other human, I just want to hold the thing I want to buy and need it immediately instead of waiting. I feel like there isn't enough time anymore.

[SchemaLoad]

You talk to bots on Amazon? If say Hacker News was entirely just bots, why would you bother commenting, why would you bother reading the comments?

[adithyassekhar]

This is exactly why I come here. I just woke up and didn't feel like dealing with people today and made that comment. Now you got me thinking, I do like to be social. Just not the kind where the other person is actively trying to sell me something often by being dishonest.

I remember a sales person in a store actively trying to shame me for purchasing from a brand he didn't prefer. I gave him a lot of chances to get off of me, respectfully and firmly. Some really are like blood sucking leeches, they don't come off. He was probably paid to do that.

[pjmlp]

It helps getting acceptance of talking to bots, when using voice instead of typing book sized prompts into tiny chat windows.

[bitwize]

Maybe kids will end up preferring to talk to bots, much like the generations after my own actually preferred digital compression artifacts in their music.

[Herring]

Can it get me a job if I get laid off (networking)? Can I crash on its couch for a while? It might displace tv/netflix, which yes is a huge market, but I don't think much more than that.

[ekianjo]

> It's biological.

Nonsense. We never evolved to send text messages and yet here we are with social networks, chat systems and emails used everywhere for everything.