Pretty wild to see this in a technology forum. The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. Have you ever wondered how many livelihoods computer programmers have destroyed? Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?
>The whole idea of technology is to do more with less
No, that's not the whole idea of technology. Technology exists to, and this is a non-exhaustive list: fostering creativity, play, enabling autonomy and self sufficiency, connecting people to each other, collaboration, building skills and enhancing people's natural capacities. That's a smalls et of examples of what one could imagine technology to do.
Are these AI tools connecting people, genuinely enhancing their capacity to think, increasing or diminishing their creativity and self-sufficiency? The answer looks pretty obvious to me.
People who think technology is something to be used to "do more" and then discarded have no actual interest in technology as an object of study, or as a set of pro-social tools. That's not the mentality of a hacker. Why would it surprise you that people on a website called hackernews don't have the same attitude as a guy in an MBA class?
It absolutely is. Technology is what lets you farm more with less resources. Manufacture more with less materials. Get more things done in less time. Fostering creativity and play? Yeah, by getting more things done in less time, so as to free up that time for all the fun stuff you actually want to do. Of course, to others this "fun stuff" is just yet another inefficiency to be eliminated.
We might love technology and think it has intrinsic value, but the rest of the world could not care less. It's about maximizing profits and minimizing costs. That includes the costs of human labor. No hacker here thinks of the amazon mechanical turk employees that AI will certainly get rid of, for example. I bet the hackers here will be at their most self-satisfied when they finally manage to replace doctors.
So it is indeed pretty rich to read complaints on so called Hacker News about hacking itself being automated away by AI models. It's a very arrogant perspective. Did hackers think they were above this? Did they think they were irreplaceable? Hilarious.
> The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable
I don't think either of these sentences is true.
> Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?
I didn't say anything about a moral line, I just said that there are a lot of programmers who are very excited to remove themselves from being employable. I didn't even say whether I thought that was good or bad!
I think that a lot of those overly enthusiastic engineer AI fanboys are just playing a rational game driven by their perception that AI is a effective substitute for them, and that the only way to survive the comming culling is by being seen on the market as something an AI thought leader.
Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land.
"I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here.
Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.
I think the prevailing mindset amongst developers who use LLMs is that actually LLMs are more of an effective augmentation of programming tools in the same way that an IDE is, and the marketing angle comes from perceived demand for that augmented skill set.
Many developers even seem to predict an increase in demand in the medium to long term as AI written systems increasingly begin to need human attention.
I think the hyper enthusiastic ones are more vocal, but there's a quieter and larger group who are somewhat more measured about it.
Yes, I am addicted to food and shelter and to being able to work in the profession that I specialized in and spent years learning to do well. Without these things I would literally die.
When I was fresh out of college in my 20s I watched two engineers get fired in front of me. They were hired to be DBAs. When I finished rewriting the software into a proper mvc their entire job became redundant since anyone could now make the database edits needed from an admin webpage. And I was better at the DBA part of my full stack role than they were. This is no different.
People need to be independently rich, or be extremelly frugal to not care about the hypothetical obsolescence of their jobs.
What the fuck do you expect? That people just cheer a brave new world of diminishing salaries and disappearing jobs along with some vague promises that every thing will be alright?
Yes, I absolutely do expect computer programmers to cheer as the brave new world they helped create is ushered in.
How many people here got rich by automating away the jobs of others? I mean, what is this? Others are fair game, but programming is sacred? That's quite simply the peak of absurdity.
Every single step in this saga has actually created millions of jobs.
It's pretty funny seeing this play out in the HN comments because I never got any consideration before when I had to learn new frameworks and languages. But suddenly machine learning is the line one should not cross? Playing the world's smallest violin right now.
Computer used to be a job for a cadre of women who did math. That job went away when computers, the physical machine, got enough software that those women were no longer needed.