[LogicFailsMe]

I don't see a world where a motivated soul can build a business from a laptop and a token service as a problem. I see it as opportunity.

I feel similarly about Hollywood and the creation of media. We're not there in either case yet, but we will be. That's pretty clear. and when I look at the feudal society that is the entertainment industry here, I don't understand why so many of the serfs are trying to perpetuate it in its current state. And I really don't get why engineers think this technology is going to turn them into serfs unless they let that happen to them themselves. If you can build things, AI coding agents will let you build faster and more for the same amount of effort.

I am assuming given the rate of advance of AI coding systems in the past year that there is plenty of improvement to come before this plateaus. I'm sure that will include AI generated systems to do security reviews that will be at human or better level. I've already seen Claude find 20 plus-year-old bugs in my own code. They weren't particularly mission critical but they were there the whole time. I've also seen it do amazingly sophisticated reverse engineering of assembly code only to fall over flat on its face for the simplest tasks.

[sarchertech]

That depends on how fast that change happens. If 45% of jobs evaporate in a a 5 year period, a complete societal collapse is the likely outcome.

[LogicFailsMe]

Sounds like influencer nonsense to me. Touch grass. If the people are fed and housed, there's no collapse. And if the billionaire class lets them starve, they will finally go through some things just like the aristocracy in France once did. And I think even Peter Thiel is smarter than that. You can feed yourself for <$1000 a year on beans and rice. Not saying you'd enjoy it, but you won't starve. So for ~$40B annually, the billionaires buy themselves revolution insurance. Fantastic value.

OTOH if what you're really talking about is the long-term collapse in our ludicrous carbon footprint when we finally run out of fossil fuels and we didn't invest in renewables or nuclear to replace them, well, I'm with you there.

[sarchertech]

>Sounds like influencer nonsense to me. Touch grass.

I don't even know what this means.

The worst unemployment during the Weimar Republic was 25-30%. Unemployment in the Great Depression peaked at 25%.

So yeah if we get to 45% unemployment and those are the highest paying jobs on average then yeah it's gonna be bad. Then you add in second order effects where none of those people have the money to pay the other 55% who are still employed.

We might get to a UBI relatively quickly and peacefully. But I'm not betting on it.

>finally go through some things just like the aristocracy in France once did.

Yeah that's probably the most likely scenario, but that quickly devolved into a death and imprisonment for far more than the aristocrats and eventually ended with Napoleon trying to take over Europe and millions of deaths overall.

The world didn't literally end, but it was 40 years of war, famine, disease, and death, and not a lot of time to think about starting businesses with your laptop.

[LogicFailsMe]

And the dark ages lasted a millennium. Sounds like quite an improvement on that. And if America didn't want a society hellbent on living the worst possible timeline, why did it re-elect President Voldemaga and give him the football? And then, even when he breaks nearly every political promise, his support remains better than his predecessor? Anyway, I think the richest ~1135 Americans won't let you starve, but they'll be happy to watch you die young of things that had stopped killing people for quite some time whilst they skim all the cream. And that seems to be what the plurality wants or they'd vote differently.

The good news is that America is ~5% of the world. And the more we keep punching ourselves in the face, the better the chance someone else pulls ahead. But still, we have nukes, so we're still the town bully for the immediate future.

[sarchertech]

What are you even arguing about? I have absolutely no idea where you are going with this.

[LogicFailsMe]

Yeah I figured that. You think society is going to collapse because of AI. I don't. But I do think that stupid narrative is prevalent in the media right now and the C-suite happily proclaiming they're going to lay people off and replace them with AI got the ball rolling in the first place. Now it has momentum of its own with lunatics like Eliezer Yudkowsky once again getting taken seriously.

Fortunately, the other 95% of humanity is far less doomer about their prospects. So if America wants to be the new neanderthals, they'll be happy to be the new cro magnons.

[jplusequalt]

>You can feed yourself for <$1000 a year on beans and rice. Not saying you'd enjoy it, but you won't starve. So for ~$40B annually, the billionaires buy themselves revolution insurance. Fantastic value.

You are the epitome of the tech bro.

[LogicFailsMe]

Sure, sure. Understanding how these sociopaths think clearly makes me a tech bro rather than someone who incorporates worst-case scenarios into my planning. Suggesting they would maintain minimum viable society to save their own asses means I'm in favor of it, right? This is why I work remotely.

[bhaak]

Peter Thiel might be smarter than that but I’m not sure about the other ones.

Look how Musk treated the Twitter devs or Bezos any of his workers or Trump anybody.

[LogicFailsMe]

They're all quite intelligent. And they're world class experts in saving their own bacon. Doesn't mean they have any ethics though nor any emotional intelligence after decades of being surrounded by toadies and bootlickers.

[bhaak]

Smart is not equal to intelligent.

You can be very intelligent but have a blind eye on some trivial things.

I’m certain that some of them think they are untouchable (or even just are well prepared). We will only see if that’s really true if shit hits the fan.

[LogicFailsMe]

We all know they have bunkers and we roughly know where they are. I got suspended on reddit for threatening harm to others for saying that a couple weeks back. But I don't think we need to raid the bunkers in your TEOTWAWKI scenario, their bodyguards will do all the heavy-lifting once they realize the power balance has shifted. But I also don't expect a SHTF scenario, just a slow creeping enshitification of living standards instead of actually implementing a UBI.

And then the survivors who band together to rebuild community instead of chasing some idiotic Mad Max scenario will ultimately prevail. And yes, they are blind to that other option because they wouldn't end up on top.

[jplusequalt]

>If you can build things, AI coding agents will let you build faster and more for the same amount of effort.

But you aren't building, your LLM is. Also, you are only thinking about ways as you, a supposed builder, will benefit from this technology. Have you considered how all previous waves of new technologies have introduced downstream effects that have muddied our societies? LLMs are not unique in this regard, and we should be critical on those who are trying to force them into every device we own.

[raw_anon_1111]

Would you say the general contractor for your home isn’t a builder because he didn’t install the toilets?

[jplusequalt]

I think this argument would be make more sense if you were talking about an architect, or the customer.

A contractor is still very much putting the house together.

[raw_anon_1111]

The general contractor is not doing the actual building as much as he is coordinating all of the specialist, making sure things run smoothly and scheduling things based on dependencies and coordinating with the customer. I’ve had two houses built from the ground up

[LogicFailsMe]

3 myself and I have yet to meet a "vibe" contractor.

[raw_anon_1111]

And he is also not inspecting every screw, wire, etc. He delegates

[LogicFailsMe]

I think that's precisely his thinking and don't let him know about all those fancy expensive unitasker tools they have that you probably don't that let them do it far more cost effectively and better than the typical homeowner. Won't you think of the jerbs(tm)? And to Captain dystopia, life expectencies were increasing monotonically until COVID. Wonder what changed?

[k3nx]

I've struggled a bit with this myself. I'm having a paradigm shift. I used to say "but I like writing code". But like the article says, that's not really true. I like building things, the code was just a way to do that. If you want to get pedantic, I wasn't building things before AI either, the compiler/linker was doing that for me. I see this is just another level of abstraction. I still get to decide how things work, what "layers" I want to introduce. I still get to say, no, I don't like that. So instead of being the "grunt", I'm the designer/architect. I'm still building what I want. Boilerplate code was never something I enjoyed before anyway. I'm loving (like actually giggling) having the AI tie all the bits for me and getting up and running with things working. It reminds me of my Delphi days: File->New Project, and you're ready to go. I think I was burnt out. AI is helping me find joy again. I also disable AI in all my apps as well, so I'm still on the fence about several things too.

[andrekandre]

  > I'm having a paradigm shift. I used to say "but I like writing code". But like the article says, that's not really true. I like building things, the code was just a way to do that.

i get this; for me i find coding is fun as video games so i don't personally want to turn all code to ai, but what i DO WANT is for it to automate away drudgery of repeating actions and changes (or when i get stuck be a rubber duck for me)... i want to focus my creativity on the interesting parts myself and learn and grow to a better programmer... it may sound crazy but programming is relaxing for me lol

[druide67]

This resonates. I spent years thinking I enjoyed coding, but what I actually enjoy is designing elegant solutions built on solid architecture. Inventing, innovating, building progressively on strong foundations. The real pleasure is the finished product (is it ever really finished though?) — seeing it's useful and makes people's lives easier, while knowing it's well-built technically. The user doesn't see that part, but we know.

With AI, by always planning first, pushing it to explore alternative technical approaches, making it explain its choices — the creative construction process gets easier. You stay the conductor. Refactoring, new features, testing — all facilitated. Add regular AI-driven audits to catch defects, and of course the expert eye that nothing replaces.

One thing that worries me though: how will junior devs build that expert eye if AI handles the grunt work? Learning through struggle is how most of us developed intuition. That's a real problem for the next generation.