[datakan]

Judging by the IT maturity of most of the companies I have worked with in the last 30 years, my guess is we're about 10-15 years from any serious changes, solely because adopting AI will require a few things. Most are running razor thin margins and wont be able to afford any of this, others have so much technical debt piled up that even if they could afford it they couldn't do anything without identifying ancient systems and then updating them.

Most people I deal with still struggle with basic things. These were the types of people that couldn't program a VCR back in the 80's. Yes eventually they may get left behind but they are the majority of the population.

I'm sure AI is all the rage in SV but everywhere else I go, no one gives a damn about any of this. I was just in Florida for work last week. 5 days and not one person I talked to brought AI up outside of a vendor trying to scare me about Mythos. It's just a nonissue for most people.

In time maybe that changes, but I still hear people arguing about "the cloud" which was over a decade ago at this point in terms of tech trends. Expecting any of these people to understand what skills are or MD files or MCP is unrealistic. They simply don't give a fuck.

[Mezzie]

What I'm seeing, as someone who works in a giant company but not in a tech department, is the rise of middle companies that specifically do all the hard work of organizing/wrangling the AI and providing more streamlined options that are easier to understand, with the end users giving up flexibility and freedom for ease of use. (Like the AI version of Dreamweaver, I guess would be a comparison?) Or modern no/low-code offerings.

I've also seen already existing SaaS offerings integrating AI into their already existing product. How well that's going to work... I'm not sure. The economics of at least some of what I've seen is questionable (e.g. giving end users essentially unlimited token spend without passing any of the cost along), and at least one company in my field is clearly adding AI features because they're spooked that the existence of AI is damaging their moat/vendor lock in.

The shift might look like 'company Y contracts with AI companies A, B, and C, and as a result does more with less and therefore needs 30% fewer people'. In theory, companies A, B, and C are creating jobs so the job numbers shift, but your point about a certain level of understanding being needed to do those new jobs definitely stands.

The question is are there enough competent people to staff the middleman companies (I'd say yes specifically because entry level tech is a bloodbath atm) and how simple can these tools be made? Can they be dumbed down enough so that businesses can just buy a package from a vendor where they can give tool access to the people who can't program VCRs and trust that they won't shoot themselves in the foot? That, I don't know.

[StrauXX]

I agree with your sentiment, doing security auditing for old-school entprise and the like. I'd revise the timeline ti 3-10 years though. Eith how much AI can change productvity companies that don't adopt it will be in a tougher spot much more quickly than with new tech in the past.

[xnx]

AI is different than previous technologies in that a sufficiently advanced AI can "adopt" itself. That is, it can analyze the situation of a company (asking questions when necessary), describe the benefits, and deploy itself. This sounds like science fiction, but is very plausible in 3 years of trends hold.

[samrus]

The whole thing is that the trend wont hold steady. Its a n s curve and will taper off. The onky question is if the asympote is tapers to is above a certain threshold or not. Like the threshold needed to achieve what your talking about.

I dont know about the capability your talking about, but anyone who thinks these things are guaranteed, or a matter of time, is in for a rude awakening over the next few years

[bonoboTP]

People have been foretelling the S curve flattening for years now. At every jump of capability people confidently assert that no more progress is possible, it has reached a plateau, there is no way to go beyond this, it's a fundamental limitation of the architecture, of the training methods etc. The horse will never ride the astronaut, it won't recognize cows on beaches, new theorems will never be proved, etc. etc.

[samrus]

It hasnt flattened yet. And the question is when will it. But its stupif to think its exponential. These things just arent exponential. The first half of the s curve seems exponential and wishful thinking extrapolates from there

[bonoboTP]

This is a very shallow point. The whole question is about where the S curve ends. Nobody claims that it will literally progress beyond all physical limits and number of atoms in the universe and beyond energy constraints contained in the universe and whatnot.

[datakan]

> AI is different than previous technologies in that a sufficiently advanced AI can "adopt" itself.

Literally does not exist

[bonoboTP]

"very plausible in 3 years of trends hold"

[bonoboTP]

> It's just a nonissue for most people.

I'm not sure how relevant the sentiment of average people are regarding the future. People are generally not well tuned in to any such things. Things just happen to most of us and we spend our lives thinking about gossip and life stuff, family, friends, chores etc., not musing about the future which we have little impact on.

Think about people's views on the coronavirus in February 2020. Things can change fast, and people will be like "Where did this come from all of a sudden? I was told by all the experts that AI is a bubble and irrelevant chatbot stuff." Most people hold extremely outdated (ie ~1-3 year out of date) ideas about AI capabilities and are absolutely unable to imagine what the capabilities in 1-3 years in the future will be (because they are unable to imagine what is already possible with frontier models today).

[stephenitis]

I agree with the sentiment entirely. I moved from the Bay Area to the DC Maryland Virginia area. the viewpoints out here have been strangely stuck on opinion pieces written during the gpt-3 era. Same goes for electric vehicles.

It’s slowly changing for some of the holdouts out here given how immediately useful certain personal and business use cases can be.

[datakan]

> I'm not sure how relevant the sentiment of average people are regarding the future.

They vote. They buy the products. They are the only ones that ARE relevant.

[bonoboTP]

I don't see how that's relevant to the topic at hand. Average people's sentiment is not what will decide on whether jobs will be eliminated or not. It depends on model capabilities and people's self assessment of what's difficult in their own jobs is often massively miscalibrated, because they have no "software brain" and no "ML brain". They simply cannot think ahead. I've talked to people who object to the idea of them being replaceable by AI on the grounds that they have to log in to various GUI programs and (fairly trivially) align two information sources or copy some things from emails into systems where they have to log in separately with a password, and how could AI (which they think of as a chatbot in a browser tab) do all that. They don't know about Claude Code, Codex, the research on computer use (GUIs), anything like this.

[kakacik]

100% agree, the only people enthusiastic about it that I know are faang / startup folks here on HN. The rest, including all possible white collar jobs see it more as some medium to distant threat to their work, and life is too short to spend it enshitifying with worries about potential incoming doom, we had plenty of those. Many otherwise very capable folks do it anyway, to visible detriment of their mental health (a bit, or more than a bit, seeing it first hand).

Even managers just follow the trends and just say things others are saying, they understand that their position is not granted in case of middle management in case of bigger upheaval.

For me, I can't even have access to any recent model at work, just heavily constrained gitlab duo which is still fine for most stuff. I cost them a day much more than good monthly subscription, but so are the policies of higher management, so - I don't care. It will come, I can pick up those skills a bit later, they are not that wide and deep if one is just an agentic user. If I get fired in next few years it will be other multinational corporate forces, not this. Proper SW engineering skills and experience picked over past 25 years are not going away anytime soon, its the solid base I can build on for anything next decade or two can bring my way. Summer is here, time to enjoy the mountains, lakes and family, thats what matters long term much more.