[lwhi]

I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent to wayfinders.

People who _can_ see the wood for the trees, and are able to understand multiple (sometimes conflicting) requirements and work out a way through that solves the problems that arise, for all involved parties.

An understanding of domain, the ability to communicate effectively and a mind that can think laterally, will all be vital.

[lelanthran]

> I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent to wayfinders.

In the future, those who succeed will be the owners of capital.

[oompydoompy74]

Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of production you win. Knowledge, skill, and experience are largely irrelevant to the conversation. I’ve held this opinion for quite some time and would be interested to hear alternative perspectives.

[Ferret7446]

That's clearly wrong, because capital doesn't just appear out of thin air. You are ignoring that there's clearly rare skills involved that enable a few to become very successful. Your strawman only applies to the second generation that inherits wealth, and case in point inherited wealth tends to disappear in a couple of generations further proving that skill is required to build and maintain wealth.

[lelanthran]

> Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of production you win.

Yeah, but we were talking about only success, not winning.

In the past and the present, you could succeed purely on a combination of skill, talent and labour. This approach looks like it will not work much longer.

[lwhi]

I can see where you're coming from.

We exchange our knowledge, time, and skill for money. If this exchange is no longer viable — because similar value can be accessed via LLM agents — we'll have no way of making money.

I do think some (non-billionaire) people will survive the transition, but the question then becomes: what happens to everyone else?

[contingencies]

> In the future, those who succeed will be the owners of capital.

No. In the future, those who succeed will be the children of the owners of capital.

See The Economist, February 2025: https://archive.is/PCoWl

[archagon]

Means of production, yadda yadda… I feel a great sense of deja vu.

[jerkstate]

How do you know those aren’t the same thing?

[Fargren]

Because you can inherit capital.

You can also inherit talent, but "the descendants of those worthy are worthy" is a belief humanity spilled a lot of blood to get away from.

[_doctor_love]

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

[lwhi]

Well, yes .. but they're going to need people to do their evil bidding /s

[fasterik]

I don't think history bears this out. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs of the computer age, none of them started out as owners of capital. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs: yes, they had some level of privilege and opportunity, but they didn't start out as billionaires. Their success came from their ideas.

[marcosdumay]

The fact that you had to separate them into an age should tell you something.

Something happened in the 80s, and it wasn't "the dawn of a new technology". It happened specifically in the US, and was done by their government.

[judahmeek]

Are you referring to the antitrust breakup of AT&T in 1982?

[zdragnar]

Does it surprise you that wealth takes time to accumulate? None of those people had a get rich quick scheme that made them billionaires in their 20's.

[marcosdumay]

Those were mostly the same billionaires 20 years ago.

[SR2Z]

In 2006? No, there have been lots of changes since then. Lots of new billionaires.

[Matl]

In the case of Gates at least, it definitely came in part from having access to the right people.

[Calavar]

Gates famously came from a rich family, but Bezos did too - he used hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments from his immediate family members to get Amazon off the ground. Maybe 1 to 2% of Americans would be able draw that much from their family members if they were to launch a startup. If we define "bootstrapped" wealth as starting from an economic background within one standard deviation of the national average, then he doesn't count.

[littlexsparkee]

If the labor -> wealth pipeline is weakening, then the present won't behave like the past, i.e. you would need assets to success since you won't be able to work your way up.

[skybrian]

How does that work? Funding is useful, but we aren't seeing fully-automated startups, and often, founders don't need all that much funding.

[awesomeMilou]

By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of starvation, poverty and death.

When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.

[SR2Z]

If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to?

Nobody wants to be king of the ashes. The future is going to be the same as now, just with a little less menial work.

[dag100]

> If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to?

Themselves. The economy is a big cycle where money changes hands to drive production i.e. things getting made. AI will simultaneously greatly increase production (especially once humanoid robots are as dexterous as humans) and make the humans whose jobs it will do economically irrelevant.

So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.

[SR2Z]

> So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.

Here's another framing for you: at this point _there are no longer rich and poor people_. There are fewer people, but we knew that was going to happen as a consequence of declining birthrates. The elderly are taken care of despite an otherwise unsustainable dependency ratio, because robots can manage the actual business of survival. In that world everyone is a member of the nobility by the virtue of being _human_. There are a few holdouts - mostly religious nuts and other cults - but by and large everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to.

There is no world where legions of filthy rich AI barons lord it over the technologically illiterate peasants, though. How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model? When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate?

One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.

[skybrian]

This is dystopian speculation. You don't have to believe every science fiction scenario someone famous talks about.

[dag100]

It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already happening.

[skybrian]

No, that was not "effectively what happened" in the Industrial Revolution. That was an enormous change, but it didn't "completely eliminate the need for a human workforce." That's just hype.

[csomar]

In a perfect world, yes. However, the current tech world is akin to a flea market. Those who shout out more stand out more.

[lwhi]

Surely you can judge people by results though?

[RugnirViking]

measuring programmer productivity is notoriously difficult. Does james, who shipped 20 features without testing thoroughly provide more value? or does joe, who patched a security hole in that time and avoided disaster? what about jason, who facilitated communication between them, and kept the infra going so their changes could go into prod without issues?

[lwhi]

We won't be programmers in this scenario.

The results will hopefully be a lot more tangible.

[RugnirViking]

This also was true for teams, and indeed, businesses. It's not a property of the code itself, its a property of products and outcomes. I don't think AI agents doing the day to day changes will affect this directly (but people may have more time to think about these higher level problems, and increased volume of changes may make the issue more important)

[lwhi]

I agree.

I suppose, my best guess is that a team will be reduced to one or two people; the those that are left will be judged solely on outcomes.

Two (human) brains are always useful; the benefit of a human in these scenarios is that we can be accountable, and that we have a very real incentive to do well and not be fired. The LLM obviously doesn't care in that regard!

[pirates]

It’s clearly Jason in this scenario

[csomar]

How do you do that in practice though? You won't know the engineer is a con-man until after you have spent $$ and months into the process. Then you are in the position of trusting nobody.

[Tanjreeve]

Welcome to the problem of hiring and managing employees generally.