Humans ourselves are a technology. We have incredibly flexible brains and dexterous hands. Up to now, we could always do things that robots couldn't. That was where our job security came from.
But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
This is what the article misses and what people have trouble accepting. Yea, this is a technological revolution, but unlike the Industrial Revolution, you can't just upskill your way out of it.
> But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
I've already started to feel this.
One thing that made us special was our intelligence. We were, and were always going to be (unless some alien form of life arrived), the most intelligent things on earth. Is that still true today?
Very often the justification for why these things aren't terribly disruptive is that the very best of a certain trade or field will still have a useful skillset. Like the best graphic designers in the world are still more creative and skilled than AI, and the best writers are still better, the best programmers are still better, just that they're all more expensive and slower.
But we're not taking into account how it affects the mediocre or average people in these fields. Roughly half of all of these people are below average. Maybe if you're the best you'll always have a job, but what about the guy who legitimately struggled to finish high school? The person who genuinely doesn't have the capacity to earn much more than minimum wage?
We should start with the assumption that humans are valuable and deserve to live with dignity. Any philosophy that doesn’t have that at its center is broken.
Yes but same should have been true of animals and humans as a whole did not afford dignity or value to animals. Maybe we will get a taste of our own medicine this time.
I weep for people whose scientistic reductionism has led to such devaluation of humanity. Robots don’t do anything and don’t think anything. Humans do things with and through them. What makes us special is that we exist and love one another.
The economy long moved past the things we can do, hence "bullshit jobs". Our job security has come from our willingness to "look the other way", allowing the job creators to live out lives the rest of us can only imagine. If they didn't placate our insatiable desire to work, that wouldn't last long.
Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
I don’t particularly like the horse to engine angle because it doesn’t capture the issue well.
When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???
Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?
You mean my meat proxy skills while wearing a Ratatouille machine-vision head camera that tells me what wrench to pick up and how to crimp the Pex rings?
My grandad ran a small letterpress shop and when phototypesetting came in he didn't retrain, he just did smaller and smaller jobs until it was wedding invitations.
“Retraining” is mostly a myth. Former skilled workers just downgrade to service jobs, pushing out younger, less skilled workers in the process.
The NYT touched on this issue in a podcast about NAFTA: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/podcasts/the-daily/americ.... AI is going to be NAFTA on steroids. Politicians will be able to point to growing top-like GDP to say it was a good thing. But it’s going to brutally hit a lot of people and most of those folks will never regain a secure economic footing.
As someone that works in robotics/automation, it pains me to see people in creative/office verticals getting all the shit with AI these days while hard labor positions, the one that everyone could be doing a bit less because they take a toll on you (working the fields, farms, hazardous tasks) remain pretty much the same.
If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.
We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
Worse, it was just almost all horses. There are a few in Central Park pulling tourists and that’s enough for the Pollyanna’s to point to and go “See! We’ll be fine!”
If you're not economically useful, what pressure would you be able to bring against the government if it does things you don't like? Keep in mind that we're also automating the police force.
Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested.
> the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
> Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist?
We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
This is the Chinese century, and even if China charts a somewhat different course than Western capitalism, it still believes that human beings should spend most of their days in some employment, even if it is just makework. A population with mostly leisure time is viewed as very threatening to social stability. I can see that model being exported to the rest of the world far more than I can imagine your utopia.
It's not just the Scrooges in power. Previous attempts to actually make a better world often made a worse one, and not just because of capitalist opposition.
No. The horses were made redundant and no longer exist in such quantities
So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.
Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.
The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?
Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
>There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.
In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. (Unless something drastic changes.) That means how long it will take for robots to be practical matters. We don’t know how long it will be, but driverless cars have been coming for 15 years now and they’re still unavailable in most places.
People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.
Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
I'm not sure I can quite agree with that. I'd say that spreadsheets definitely reduced the need to manually calculate things, and calculators before that, and the abacus before that.
I basically agree with your "higher level reasoning", but not your statement that we previously only automated muscles.
Back in the '70s my dad used to tell a joke about his dad. He said that my grandfather had a job that supported his whole large family while my dad was growing up. But unfortunately technology caught up with him, and he was replaced by a device just this big, and he held his fingers apart to demonstrate.
Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."
Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.
It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, and so was the pickle slicer.
In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.
I don’t know, somehow the pace seems different, these transitions felt more like the last generation retiring, and the next generation doing something different, instead of it happening to everyone at the same time.
I think the analogy of moving from horses to engines breaks down when going from code to AI as AI can quite plausibly work on itself. It's a fundamentally different game we're playing this time. And there were as many engine jobs as horse jobs (maybe more). The whole point of AI is super human productivity. Even the idea of just using AI means you need less humans because one human with AI can out-produce multiple humans without. It's very difficult to imagine a future where AI can do every job and things don't turn into a sci-fi dystopia.
I like this article, but it took decades for cars to take over: we needed to build vehicles, build roads, build up gas production and distribution... as Bill Gates wrote, one of the differences with the AI disruption is how fast it's coming, since it's almost immaterial (except data centers of course). It may be too fast for humans to adapt like they did in the previous revolutions.
The current trend of comparing AI development to the development of motorised personal transport makes it very easy to remind everyone that undoing the effects of decades of blind "progress" once the negative externalities become unavoidable is much easier said than done.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
Amazing. I bet this can really help thousands of programmers who are simply not needed, because companies decided to replace them with AI agents. These philosophical ponders are very comfortable to do when your ass is safe. Most of people don’t have this privilege.
> But it makes me wonder: what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
This exactly. Look, I "love" code but only because of what it allows me to do and there is plenty of code/coding that I don't love. Not to be too hippy-dippy but I'm a builder, I like to build things. Build things for myself, build things for others. The code was _always_ a means to an end.
Sure, it was cool I had this skill that many people didn't have but I also used to have skill in managing the windows machines and things like the registry. When I first switched to macOS I felt lost, I had this "skill" that was no longer needed but after a while I realized that was a good thing, I wasn't wasting my time fiddling with crap that was just getting in the way of _using_ my computer.
Similarly I may mourn the loss of writing code but at the end of the day code was just a way for me to build, if there are better tools to build (LLMs) then I'm all for it.
Actually, what attracted me to programming was partly the code. When I saw those weird hieroglyphs on the screen and thought "I wonder how it would feel to understand that". Also when I found out that there were different "languages" to write code in and I thought you could get lost in them like in human languages. And later when I found out about "if" and "while" and wondered wow, what would come next [1]. Generally, it felt like some sort of alien civilization. It never felt like "a tool to master".
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.
This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).
I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.
As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.
A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.
There are two key elements in the current AI fearmongering:
1) People think they can predict the future
2) People think humans can't adapt
The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.
Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.
Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.
Adapt, sure, but is my life better or worse after adapting? It's a fair question and a fair worry. The goal of most AI companies seems to be to replace some amount of labor with AI. Look how that worked out for our factory workers. They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.
Why is it whenever people try to downplay the efficacy of LLM’s evangelists go “there’s literally never been anything like this,” but the moment people critique them or try to weigh their impact on society the response is “well it’s nothing we haven’t seen before”?
The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation. We are clearly experiencing a moment of sorts, and anybody who is worried about what the fallout will be is just handwaved away as ignorant fear mongers. Unless you are the head of these companies doing it in a disingenuous way to pump up your valuation, then suddenly it’s legitimate - but not so legitimate that we should do anything besides let the US government build a moat for them!
> The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation.
Yes, the absolute numbers might now read TRILLION instead of BILLION or MILLION, but the concept of "Technology so impactful governments shift their economies" is in no way new, and has already happened a bunch of times before in humanity's timeline.
I guess that's why you're seeing some of us less stressed out about it, as again, scale is different, because scale today is different in everything, but relatively, we're just repeating another of those "Technology changes everything" milestones that we've done before.
sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.
We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.
Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.
My grandad on one side of the family was a market gardener. He didn't become a farmer.
My great grandad on the other side was a lighterman[0]. He didn't become a ship captain.
Sometimes professions really are just gone. In both cases in my family it was due to consolidation of resources and concentration of capital/power. Technology was just a catalyst for that.
Humans ourselves are a technology. We have incredibly flexible brains and dexterous hands. Up to now, we could always do things that robots couldn't. That was where our job security came from.
But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
This is what the article misses and what people have trouble accepting. Yea, this is a technological revolution, but unlike the Industrial Revolution, you can't just upskill your way out of it.
> But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
I've already started to feel this.
One thing that made us special was our intelligence. We were, and were always going to be (unless some alien form of life arrived), the most intelligent things on earth. Is that still true today?
Very often the justification for why these things aren't terribly disruptive is that the very best of a certain trade or field will still have a useful skillset. Like the best graphic designers in the world are still more creative and skilled than AI, and the best writers are still better, the best programmers are still better, just that they're all more expensive and slower.
But we're not taking into account how it affects the mediocre or average people in these fields. Roughly half of all of these people are below average. Maybe if you're the best you'll always have a job, but what about the guy who legitimately struggled to finish high school? The person who genuinely doesn't have the capacity to earn much more than minimum wage?
We should start with the assumption that humans are valuable and deserve to live with dignity. Any philosophy that doesn’t have that at its center is broken.
I'm curious where you are drawing the line. Why is a human different from a ape/dog/chicken now? I wonder: do they not deserve to live with dignity?
Yes but same should have been true of animals and humans as a whole did not afford dignity or value to animals. Maybe we will get a taste of our own medicine this time.
Perhaps. But are humans going to get what they deserve?
I weep for people whose scientistic reductionism has led to such devaluation of humanity. Robots don’t do anything and don’t think anything. Humans do things with and through them. What makes us special is that we exist and love one another.
The economy long moved past the things we can do, hence "bullshit jobs". Our job security has come from our willingness to "look the other way", allowing the job creators to live out lives the rest of us can only imagine. If they didn't placate our insatiable desire to work, that wouldn't last long.
Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
I don’t particularly like the horse to engine angle because it doesn’t capture the issue well.
When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???
Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?
How are your plumbing skills?
You mean my meat proxy skills while wearing a Ratatouille machine-vision head camera that tells me what wrench to pick up and how to crimp the Pex rings?
My grandad ran a small letterpress shop and when phototypesetting came in he didn't retrain, he just did smaller and smaller jobs until it was wedding invitations.
“Retraining” is mostly a myth. Former skilled workers just downgrade to service jobs, pushing out younger, less skilled workers in the process.
The NYT touched on this issue in a podcast about NAFTA: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/podcasts/the-daily/americ.... AI is going to be NAFTA on steroids. Politicians will be able to point to growing top-like GDP to say it was a good thing. But it’s going to brutally hit a lot of people and most of those folks will never regain a secure economic footing.
[dead]
And my great great grandpa thought horses would lose all their jobs to cars. And they all did and it was never the same again.
There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
As someone that works in robotics/automation, it pains me to see people in creative/office verticals getting all the shit with AI these days while hard labor positions, the one that everyone could be doing a bit less because they take a toll on you (working the fields, farms, hazardous tasks) remain pretty much the same.
If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.
We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
Worse, it was just almost all horses. There are a few in Central Park pulling tourists and that’s enough for the Pollyanna’s to point to and go “See! We’ll be fine!”
Presumably you are a human, not a horse, yes? Presumably there is more to your life than dragging around carts all day every day?
HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
If you're not economically useful, what pressure would you be able to bring against the government if it does things you don't like? Keep in mind that we're also automating the police force.
Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested.
> the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
Yes, most of the work many people do is virtually meaningless.
Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist? Does your work contribute anything to yourself or other humans around you?
Or do you get paid a lot of money to sit in an office and update JIRA tickets about tracking ad conversions and increasing engagement OKRs?
> Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist?
We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
This is the Chinese century, and even if China charts a somewhat different course than Western capitalism, it still believes that human beings should spend most of their days in some employment, even if it is just makework. A population with mostly leisure time is viewed as very threatening to social stability. I can see that model being exported to the rest of the world far more than I can imagine your utopia.
Have you got a citation that the Chinese government believes in makework?
Because the capitalists have very big guns and a monopoly on violence.
Its very easy to imagine a better world.
Its much harder to imagine the Scrooges in power willfully giving it up so that we can build that better world.
It's okay, I'll just use AI to vibengineer a viral basilisk that only targets those who violate the NAP.
It's not just the Scrooges in power. Previous attempts to actually make a better world often made a worse one, and not just because of capitalist opposition.
But the horses themselves got the better end of the deal - they spend all their time in the field eating hay rather than pulling carts.
No. The horses were made redundant and no longer exist in such quantities
So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.
Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.
The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?
Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
>There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.
Intuitively I think we all understand that the % of jobs not doable by steam and iron approaches 0 over time.
In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. (Unless something drastic changes.) That means how long it will take for robots to be practical matters. We don’t know how long it will be, but driverless cars have been coming for 15 years now and they’re still unavailable in most places.
People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.
Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
The last hundred times we automated things, we automated muscles. Today, the number of people employed purely for their muscle is very small.
This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.
I'm not sure I can quite agree with that. I'd say that spreadsheets definitely reduced the need to manually calculate things, and calculators before that, and the abacus before that.
I basically agree with your "higher level reasoning", but not your statement that we previously only automated muscles.
Back in the '70s my dad used to tell a joke about his dad. He said that my grandfather had a job that supported his whole large family while my dad was growing up. But unfortunately technology caught up with him, and he was replaced by a device just this big, and he held his fingers apart to demonstrate.
Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."
Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.
It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, and so was the pickle slicer.
In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.
It may be funny when it's a joke, not so when it's real.
My grandpa was a shoemaker. The real change in technology left his family in poverty in Chicago during the depression. Nobody joked about that.
I’m trying to figure out this joke. Is the punchline that he was a gigolo and he got replaced be sextoys?
That was my interpretation but nobody ever explained it.
The Industrial Revolution took over 100 years. You could argue that WW1 and WW2 were direct, structural consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
This has taken months to up-end multiple industries.
I don't think the article makes a fair comparison.
I don’t know, somehow the pace seems different, these transitions felt more like the last generation retiring, and the next generation doing something different, instead of it happening to everyone at the same time.
I think the analogy of moving from horses to engines breaks down when going from code to AI as AI can quite plausibly work on itself. It's a fundamentally different game we're playing this time. And there were as many engine jobs as horse jobs (maybe more). The whole point of AI is super human productivity. Even the idea of just using AI means you need less humans because one human with AI can out-produce multiple humans without. It's very difficult to imagine a future where AI can do every job and things don't turn into a sci-fi dystopia.
You are not the farrier in this analogy. You are the horse.
No, he is the farmer all right:
https://manuel.darcemont.fr/projects/
We are the horses.
I like this article, but it took decades for cars to take over: we needed to build vehicles, build roads, build up gas production and distribution... as Bill Gates wrote, one of the differences with the AI disruption is how fast it's coming, since it's almost immaterial (except data centers of course). It may be too fast for humans to adapt like they did in the previous revolutions.
The current trend of comparing AI development to the development of motorised personal transport makes it very easy to remind everyone that undoing the effects of decades of blind "progress" once the negative externalities become unavoidable is much easier said than done.
Unfortunately, work from home made it easy for companies to realize how easily a chat window could fulfill employee interactions
And it threatens not a single profession, but all people doing intellectual work.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
Can you not seek mastery with the new tools, though?
It does feel a bit like building on quicksand, but coding has always been that way for me. Well, less so with embedded than webdev, but still.
Amazing. I bet this can really help thousands of programmers who are simply not needed, because companies decided to replace them with AI agents. These philosophical ponders are very comfortable to do when your ass is safe. Most of people don’t have this privilege.
> But it makes me wonder: what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
This exactly. Look, I "love" code but only because of what it allows me to do and there is plenty of code/coding that I don't love. Not to be too hippy-dippy but I'm a builder, I like to build things. Build things for myself, build things for others. The code was _always_ a means to an end.
Sure, it was cool I had this skill that many people didn't have but I also used to have skill in managing the windows machines and things like the registry. When I first switched to macOS I felt lost, I had this "skill" that was no longer needed but after a while I realized that was a good thing, I wasn't wasting my time fiddling with crap that was just getting in the way of _using_ my computer.
Similarly I may mourn the loss of writing code but at the end of the day code was just a way for me to build, if there are better tools to build (LLMs) then I'm all for it.
Actually, what attracted me to programming was partly the code. When I saw those weird hieroglyphs on the screen and thought "I wonder how it would feel to understand that". Also when I found out that there were different "languages" to write code in and I thought you could get lost in them like in human languages. And later when I found out about "if" and "while" and wondered wow, what would come next [1]. Generally, it felt like some sort of alien civilization. It never felt like "a tool to master".
[1] Of course, there was nothing.
The difference here is that the car was not a centralized cloud service, owned by select few billionaires.
So the post does need an asterisk, referring to how it all hinges on availability of open weights and inference hardware.
Yes, but this time, we're the horse.
Only if you accept that you are as stupid and unadaptable as a horse.
That is an unnecessarily rude and mean comment.
> something happened once in the past and turned ok hence you should never ever worry about other vaguely similar things ever again
That's how it sounds to me
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.
This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).
I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.
As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.
A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.
I wish the author had gone deeper
People are flagging in real time. Maybe the grandfather would have thought you are cowards and frauds who abuse him to push a vibe coding company.
There are two key elements in the current AI fearmongering:
1) People think they can predict the future
2) People think humans can't adapt
The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.
Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.
Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.
Adapt, sure, but is my life better or worse after adapting? It's a fair question and a fair worry. The goal of most AI companies seems to be to replace some amount of labor with AI. Look how that worked out for our factory workers. They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.
Why is it whenever people try to downplay the efficacy of LLM’s evangelists go “there’s literally never been anything like this,” but the moment people critique them or try to weigh their impact on society the response is “well it’s nothing we haven’t seen before”?
The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation. We are clearly experiencing a moment of sorts, and anybody who is worried about what the fallout will be is just handwaved away as ignorant fear mongers. Unless you are the head of these companies doing it in a disingenuous way to pump up your valuation, then suddenly it’s legitimate - but not so legitimate that we should do anything besides let the US government build a moat for them!
> The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation.
Yes, the absolute numbers might now read TRILLION instead of BILLION or MILLION, but the concept of "Technology so impactful governments shift their economies" is in no way new, and has already happened a bunch of times before in humanity's timeline.
I guess that's why you're seeing some of us less stressed out about it, as again, scale is different, because scale today is different in everything, but relatively, we're just repeating another of those "Technology changes everything" milestones that we've done before.
sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.
We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.
Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.
What a refreshingly positive read
That is inherent to propaganda.
No il isn’t, fear mongering is way more common for propaganda. What makes you think it’s the case here?
How many of these do we really need? Nothing is happening, and a lot of people are upset about it.
They wanted to make money, or at least be a part of history during a transformational era. No dice.
My grandad on one side of the family was a market gardener. He didn't become a farmer.
My great grandad on the other side was a lighterman[0]. He didn't become a ship captain.
Sometimes professions really are just gone. In both cases in my family it was due to consolidation of resources and concentration of capital/power. Technology was just a catalyst for that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighterman
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