[twosdai]

I think this article takes some assumptions for granted:

1. AI will get better, and at a price point that makes sense for businesses to operate on.

2. "Managers" (non-technical users) will be as good at using AI as "frontend engineers" (technical users) or make something of comparable quality.

3. All or most technical problems can be solved by AI.

I think the title and take for this type of doom thinking is not really productive. AI is really just a tool which does some unit of work, it cannot on its own "find gold". Some people are better at using it than others, and there is a reason why the largest AI companies have continued to hire YOY for more top talent and employees.

Some jobs will be replaced, or have their expectations changed extensively. But the idea its going to take all knowledge workers jobs, is a path that needs a lot of things to go wrong for it to occur.

[throwawayffffas]

In my view the article makes the following points.

  1. AI does not need to get better for the MBA to use it instead of your labor.
  2. They don't need to be good at using AI because they don't care about quality.
  3. Most technical problems are unsolved right now and AI won't change that.

If you observer the processes PMs follow they can just drop in an AI agent instead of a dev. Just tell it to do stuff and look at the result is their modus operandi as it is right now. They don't care about the engineering quality because they are not the ones that have to maintain it. And they won't get fired if it keels over.

[polotics]

"they won't get fired if it keels over" ?

In a company that badly managed, AI or not AI the ship's going down.

[someguynamedq]

1. Well substantiated up to this point 2. Unknown 3. This is a serious metaphysical, question not something to punt on. Is there anything fundamental to humanity that makes us required for innovation, or is the only important thing our taste/selection criteria over which innovations we want? If it's the latter, you truly don't need a labor force the way we have one today to do what we're doing today.

"Path that needs a lot of things to go wrong" -- wrong for whom? For the people with money and power, the people who determine what jobs exist and what those jobs are doing, this would be a dramatic version of things going right (as long as they're able to capitalize on it). Human labor is an expense for business owners, not a virtue.

Not speaking to you in particular, but I'm shocked at how so many otherwise brilliant people are rendered practically neo-luddites by AI. The cotton gin was disruptive, but once it was invented there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. The same is true of agentic AI. The question isn't whether or not it will upset the status quo of human labor, it's how much and in what way.

[weard_beard]

My takeaway was that the purpose of AI is not to do “your job” as well as you but to do the things you refuse to do in your job as a person with taste and ethics.