[MisterTea]

It's numerous. CEO's lying, ceo-ceo marketing - fire your employees and use AI, environmental impact, social impact, memory/chip shortages, theft of information which has placed a massive burden on site operators assaulted by scraper traffic. I'm sure I'm missing a few but the negatives are real but so long as people get to feel like 10x engineers, it's fine.

Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.

[jesse_dot_id]

They're not firing employees to replace them with AI. We're mostly engineers here I think. Does anyone actually believe they're replacing humans with the same AI that we're using in our day-to-days? I don't know about you, but my harnesses absolutely suck without a human driving them and the more knowledgeable the human, the less they suck.

It's obvious they're just using AI as cloud-cover to act like assholes in the typical ways in which they would normally act like assholes.

[MisterTea]

If one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into.

AI is in its infancy, it's just learning to crawl. There will be more breakthroughs which will have more serious consequences. Today engineers are safe, holding the AI's hand as it crawls around, bumping into furniture. What happens when it learns to walk, run, and win marathons?

[ant_li0n]

(Assuming that LLM does indeed multiply productivity) We are likely in for some rough days, as it's much easier to just fire people and maintain the same level of productivity. Musk (arguably) did that with Twitter, even before this started. I was impacted by a post-COVID layoff, myself.

But do you think that once that has leveled out a bit, the bandwidth/market bottleneck you referenced will be identified as the new bottleneck[0]? Like, new businesses will launch, or existing companies will identify new growth areas that they did not have the capacity to move into.

I don't know how to respond to your second paragraph. Looking in that direction is a bit too overwhelming.

[0] I think this was always the problem, not developer productivity

[zozbot234]

> If one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into.

If the extra one or two employees are 2x or 3x as productive as they used to be, why would they not be employed? There will be plenty of market to grow into since the gains in productivity are shared throughout the economy.

[kjkjadksj]

Money and customers are finite. The market will only grow via finite constraints changing. And ai is not changing these finite constraints.

[zozbot234]

A growth in productivity throughout the market is a changing constraint, and the flow of money and spending expands to reflect that change.

[kjkjadksj]

How can flow expand of a finite quantity?

[StilesCrisis]

I think the naive CEO-level reasoning is that one person can get twice as much done with a harness, not that AIs will suddenly become useful while autonomous.