[akoboldfrying]

Absolutely. And not even making the connection.

On a broader scale, the sheer face-eating-leopards-ness of programmers finally automating away our own jobs and then realising how much this sucks, after automating away so many other kinds of jobs, can feel darkly amusing to me too.

[dminik]

I keep reading this sort of comment quite a lot, but programming isn't always about automating jobs away. In my career I have not eliminated a single job. I don't consider that a failure on my part.

[akoboldfrying]

I didn't mean to imply that automation through programming is always bad. Like with any technology that increases productivity, there are many obvious benefits. We have all benefited enormously on the consumer side of the economy, for example. But I think it's recently become a lot clearer to many in the tech industry that automation can have downsides too, and those downsides are not evenly distributed. This truth was there all along, but because we were shielded from it for so long, we were able to look away. Not anymore.

Any computational task done by a computer could in principle be done by a person, albeit billions of times slower and with a larger error rate. If computer programs could not automate certain practical tasks -- that is to say, do them much more reliably and efficiently than people do them -- they would be an academic curiosity studied by a handful of professors instead of a central part of modern infrastructure.

So I'm sceptical of your claim not to have eliminated a single job. You might not have removed an existing job, but couldn't people be paid to do the work your code does?

[dwaltrip]

Programming is just another form of tool building, no? So anyone who builds things that humans use to solve problems is a job eliminator.

[akoboldfrying]

I agree with you that there's no obvious way to separate tool creation from job elimination. This argument holds going right back to the wheel.

I think the strongest argument that can be made against this is that the supply of human labour has varied by time and place, so that in times where labour was short, new tools were no doubt welcomed by all, whereas when labour was plentiful, new tools that eliminated some of that demand for labour were opposed by those whose livelihoods were threatened. But this is not very satisfying because the types of labour available at any time are highly contingent on the current culture and technology, i.e., highly path-dependent.

(And I think there are different kinds of labour, and that not everyone can do every kind, contra the usual capitalist assumption.)