[SirensOfTitan]

In my mind, AI is making a lot of engineers, including Carmack, seem fairly thoughtless. At the other moments in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization. Tech workers are highly atomized now, and if you have to work to live, you're negotiating on your own.

It seems like Carmack, like a lot of tech people, have forgotten to ask the question: who stands to benefit if we devalue the US services economy broadly? Who stands to lose? It seems like a lot of these people are assuming AI will be a universal good. It is easy to feel that way when you are independently wealthy and won't feel the fallout.

Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered. This is what happened in 2008: like 7% of mortgages failed, and this caused a cascade of failures we are still feeling today.

[skybrian]

Software engineers have been automating away workers' jobs from the beginning. "Computer" was once a job title. There were armies of switchboard operators at the phone company. Companies had typing pools, mail clerks, and file clerks. We write shell scripts and development tools to automate our own jobs.

[sph]

Most of us got into engineering for the means (programming computers) rather than the ends (automating away jobs).

I guess the people that have been rejoicing from the AI revolution are of the latter type.

[esperent]

Or maybe they find the idea of computers that can think just as exciting as you found programming at the start of your career?

[sph]

I never found the idea of a thinking computer exciting, just as I don’t find the idea of a thinking screwdriver exciting.

These days I see the ultimate goal to create a super-intelligence to be blasphemous, if not existentially dangerous and I am afraid by how nonchalant everybody is about it.

I quite enjoy a reality where humans and biological life are in control of their destiny, but it’s apparently become a taboo opinion around these parts.

[esperent]

Good for you. But other people are allowed to find things exciting that you don't.

Personally I'd find the idea of thinking screwdriver... Well, weird. But definitely amazing and exciting.

[jasomill]

I find the idea of a thinking screwdriver annoying. Thinking things are difficult to reason about, and tools that are difficult to reason about are frustrating to use.

[tpoacher]

A thinking screwdriver:

"You know what ... screw this."

[ryandrake]

I think a lot of engineers ignore the ends because they enjoy the means. The ethical impact of their work doesn't matter because they get to work on cool technology.

[Atomic_Torrfisk]

Those were electrical engineers, digital switches came out later... regardless we are talking about labor of a much larger industry.

[ryandvm]

I guess 25 years of "unions are for under-performers" is finally going to bite us in the ass.

[nitwit005]

I'm not aware of any labor efforts that have successfully fought automation long term.

There's been plenty of temporary victories, but even the unions often acknowledge it's temporary.

[markus_zhang]

The point is not to fight automation. The point is to fight for a better distribution model.

Well you are still right though. There were only temporary wins.

[nomel]

> in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization

what examples are you thinking of?

[_doctor_love]

Most of 19th and early-20th century history, which is very much recent history.

Look up:

- The Haymarket Affair

- The Homestead Strike

- The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

- The Ludlow Massacre

- The Battle of Blair Mountain

You could also simply have taken the quote you were responding to and run it through a few LLMs to acquire those examples.

[_doctor_love]

lol this got downvoted - sorry that I studied history!

[nomel]

> You could also simply have taken the quote you were responding to and run it through a few LLMs to acquire those examples.

Wasn't me, but probably because this was unnecessary and rude. An example, or a link, when a claim is made, is always nice, turns a hollow claim into something informative. Better signal to noise is nice.

[_doctor_love]

That’s funny.

I find it pretty rude to ask a question on a fairly well-documented historical topic that you could also very easily have found out with a simple Google search. Back in the day, we used to reply to people, “Let me Google that for you,” when someone asked such a low-effort question.

Your original reply strongly indicated that you were skeptical and questioning the user’s claim. There is a very large body of historical research documenting all of these things.

[nomel]

> Your original reply strongly indicated that you were skeptical and questioning the user’s claim.

No, I was honestly genuinely interested. This is foreign to me and thought there might be an interesting starting point. You should read comments with a charitable interpretation.

You should check out the HN comment guidelines [1], which the mods take seriously.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[YeGoblynQueenne]

This is a conversation forum, so it's natural for people to ask questions of each other. Sure, we could, in principle, ask Google, or ChatGPT for everything, but then why have an online conversation at all?

[gnabgib]

nomel couldn't have downvoted you (HN constraint), stop the attack. LMGTFY has a terrible rep on HN (I'd link a search, but you can easily find).

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered.

A major economic crash as the only consequence would be the good ending.

The real societal risk here is that software development is not just a field of primarily white men, it was one of the last few jobs that could reliably get one homeownership & an (upper) middle class life.

And the current US government is not, shall we say, the most liberal. There is a substantial risk that when forced with the financial destitution of being unemployed while your field is dying, people will radicalize.

It takes a good amount of moral integrity to be homeless under a bridge and still oppose the gestapo deporting the foreigners who have jobs you'd be qualified for. And once the deportations begin, I doubt they'll stop with only the H1Bs. The Trump admin's not exactly been subtle about their desire to undo naturalizations and even birthright citizenship.

[SirensOfTitan]

I totally agree. I've written about this topic a lot on this site, probably most recently here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115597

The US is built on-top of a high value service economy. And what we're doing is allowing a couple companies to come in, devalue US service labor, and capture a small fraction of the prior value for themselves on top of models trained on copyrighted material without permission. Of course, to your point: things can get a lot worse than that. I honestly don't think a lot of executives even know how much they're shooting themselves in the foot because they seem unable to think beyond the first order.

I also see a lot of top 1% famous or semi-famous engineers totally ignoring the economic realities of this tech, people like: Carmack, Simon Willison, Mitchell Hashimoto, Steve Yegg, Salvatore Sanfilippo and others. They are blind to the suffering these technologies could cause even in the event it is temporary. Sure, it's fun, but weekend projects are irrelevant when people cannot put food on the table. It's been really something to watch them and a lot of my friends from FAANG totally ignore this side. It is why identity matters when people make arguments.

I also think I'm insulated partially from the likely initial waves of fallout here by nature of a lucky and successful career. I would love it if the influential engineers I mentioned above stopped acting like high modernists and started taking the social consequences of this technology seriously. They could change a lot more minds than I could. And they could ensure through that advocacy for labor that we see the happiest ending with respect to rolling out LLMs.

Unfortunately I don't really believe labor has much teeth anymore, and tech will wake up too late to do anything about it.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> I honestly don't think a lot of executives even know how much they're shooting themselves in the foot because they seem unable to think beyond the first order.

It's just so depressing. You see Microsoft and Google's CEOs being completely reckless with investment & the economy. And it's just ... HAVE THEY NOT LOOKED INTO A MIRROR? DO THEY NOT REALIZE THEY ARE THE FALL GUYS?!

Nevermind how the vast majority of major CEOs can't even run a business anymore. An old boys club of morons running the entire economy.

> And they could ensure through that advocacy for labor that we see the happiest ending with respect to rolling out LLMs.

It's just more of the same old "Software dev doesn't need unions". The top 1% always think they're pointless because they made it without unions.

> Unfortunately I don't really believe labor has much teeth anymore, and tech will wake up too late to do anything about it.

Amusingly, I hold the opposite sentiment.

Labor isn't going anywhere. These executives and managers can barely tie their own shoelaces. Big Tech and the current startup scene are laughably dysfunctional.

The moment the economic recession really starts to set in, everyone's gonna try to cut down their SaaS spending. Then, the days of being able to shit out some (AI or not) slop and charge double price will be well and truly over.

Once software firms have to compete on quality again, labor is going to be more important than ever.

AI may not even be meaningfully involved in software dev. To break even at the API prices would require charging on the order of 1-2 thousand dollars, per month, per seat. Factoring in long term training costs will will make that several times worse.

... Before we consider that we're probably heading into an oil crisis making energy and computer hardware much more expensive.

I doubt employers are going to pay the $10,000/month/seat required to make AI profitable for everyone in the supply chain. Certainly not during the worst recession this side of WWII.

[neumann]

They are not the fall guys. They are at the buffet with the biggest plates, and when the buffet ends, they'll have the most food on their plates.

[poopbutt22]

> the US is built on a high value service economy

The purist forms of capitalism I’ve seen are places with low prices, a large working class, practical marketing, and high competition - often they’re considered “3rd world” places.

The US economy, if it wants to remain “1st world” must have high prices. It has to contain an element of scarcity (however faux) in order to be sold at a premium, or be able to impart some privileged (institutional) knowledge as a firm - which should be as esoteric as it is scarce.

It can’t be quality alone since all building and manufacturing is effectively outsourced. It has to have a premium brand recognition or monopolistic aspects to it that necessitate a high price.

So the challenge for the first world, during the rise of China (Mexico, etc.), is to find new ways to justify the privileged position using this new technology as a lever to do so.