[simonw]

Yes, it does. It's a lot easier not to be scared of the impact this stuff could have on your career if you are already financially secure.

(I'm still personally optimistic that software engineering careers will have a bright future, for what that's worth.)

[bigtex88]

How do you expect this plays out when 99% of people have no money and no hope? Do you think they'll just sit back and take it?

[cstoner]

My friend once told me an analogy about modern software engineering that went something along the lines of the following.

There are piles of money just sitting around waiting for someone to pick them up. Unfortunately it's really hard to do because the piles are scattered around and hard for any one person to pick up.

So the best way to coordinate picking up all of these piles of money is to figure out how to convince a bunch of people with autism spectrum disorder to program machines to do it for you.

In this analogy you can get rich by doing one of a few jobs:

* Finding the piles of money (sales)

* Coding robots to pick up the piles of money (engineering)

* Coordinating the above two in come capacity (management)

AI certainly makes it less lucrative to pick up some of these piles because there will be more people picking them up. But will probably also be the case that it will let us pick up piles of money we didn't even know existed before. Or ones that we knew about but were hidden deep inside of sprawling caves that were intractable to search before.

If it turns out that we don't need any coordination to pick up these piles any more, then pretty much everyone is out of a job. Not just software engineers, but pretty much every white collar job. Once that's done it'll only be a matter of time before they can automate away the blue collar jobs, too.

I guess I'm just skeptical that we'll actually automate away all of the white collar jobs.