It's not the next few years, but half-century out that I'm worried about. I'll personally be retired by that point, sure, but that doesn't stop me from being deeply worried by society at large. Even good programmers are going to have a hard time finding jobs.

You're also missing that programming isn't the only sector that's going to be upended by automation. Basically every job market is going to be affected by the end of the century.

>If we reach some zen state where truly all has been automated then we’ll have UBI (or some dystopian hellscape)

In the States at least, the resistance to any form of socialism is so strong that I have no faith UBI has a snowball's chance in hell.

>there’s tons of one person businesses you can run if you automate workflows.

and when literally everyone can do it, competition will be brutal. When the stakes are "make it or end up homeless", and everyone is desperately trying to run their own business because corporations don't need to hire anymore, we're in deep trouble

We have about a century of empirical data that says that automation does not cause widespread unemployment. Automating horses took away all the horse-care jobs and business, but they found other things to do. Computers automated computers (armies of mostly women who chugged out calculations), and they all found new jobs. Nobody has a secretary any more. All those people responsible for inter-departmental mail are gone, because nobody sends memos any more. Nobody has live-in servants any more, partly thanks to washing machines, dishwashers, and microwaves.

Actually, in some sense, more people have servants, just that they are part-time: cleaning services, people who keep track of your schedule (executive assistants, but for normal people, can't remember the word).

When Microsoft Word automated away secretaries, it also raised the level of quality to be what was formerly available only at professional printers, so people spend the same amount of time, but now the expectation of quality of output is higher.

There can't really be widespread unemployment due to automation, because then labor costs would decrease and handmade goods would become more affordable, so people would start doing that.

Actually studies are that people who specialized in Eg. Looming fabrics never found equivalent jobs. They literally lost their livelihoods and never regained that quality of life. I would be supremely worried if a permanent underclass of people whose specialties are automated away and there are no equivalent quality jobs for them.

Good point, but as a counterbalancing force, those people still benefit from the economy-wide productivity increase in the long run. An entry-level unskilled worker has a much higher standard of living today than a skilled tradesman of the 19th century.

> a permanent underclass of people whose specialties are automated away and there are no equivalent quality jobs for them.

Isn't this pretty much a description of the US manufacturing sector over the last 40 years?

When it comes to approaching the asymptote of the singularity (or just general exponential increase in tech advancements across the board, if you don't buy the general singularity theory), the societal impact of the car replacing horses means little to me in terms of predicting the future.

UBI is orthogonal to socialism. It could exist under socialism, but you could also just take the existing state of the USA, widely considered capitalist, and modify it by setting the Social Security benefits age to 0. I've actually seen socialists against the UBI often enough; it implies the existence of money and markets

We won't automatically have UBI, we'll have to fight for every part of it, just like historical working class movements.

> I go to sleep wishing for the day when I can automate everything away.

I've been sitting here trying to suss out why something about saying this outside the context of a job interview feels so cringe to me. Best I can figure is that it's two things. 1.) Having that thought as a central part of your inner life implies that you have a very limited social life. 2.) The lack of worry about your own well being - "we'll have UBI or a dystopian hellscape, oh well" - feels almost ... subish in a sadomasochistic sort of way. Like you're bottoming for the economy (not that there's an issue with bottoming, lol).

If you owned your own business it wouldn't strike me this way, but if you're just a programmer at a company you don't actually get to work less by automating things, you just get to work on different stuff. But if you automated everything you'd just be tossed aside and reap no benefits. Wishing that on yourself is just.... so strangely pathetic. I know you didn't mean to sound pathetic. You probably consider it cool or heroic (in a nerdy sense) to talk about how much you want to automate everything.

Sorry to derail like this. I'm just fascinated by my revulsion and trying to untangle it.

I don’t literally think of this every night. I was exaggerating and should have been more clear about this statement not being literal.

I’ve never actually ended my day wishing for automating everything. But it is an ideal that I would like.

I wouldn’t be tossed aside from automating my own business as I own it and no one could toss me aside. There’s not a requirement that I have an employer.

So I don’t think automating all my work away means I won’t have a purpose any longer. I think it will lead to more interesting and meaningful work.

I could be wrong but I’ve automated hundreds, maybe thousands of processes over the years for various companies and it’s always led to me working on more interesting stuff.

I don’t think it’s cool or heroic, whatever that means, just part of fun problems that I get to solve.

My lack of worry is based on not having any control over the situation so instead focusing on other things. It’s just a reductive analysis that lets me think I don’t have to worry about it.

In the extremely small chance that it is possible to automate everything so that there’s no more work, I don’t have control over it. In hellscape mode, that sucks and is not fun. In UBI mode that’s great. Either way, it’s not affecting my decisions today. I certainly don’t wish for the negative outcome or relish it’s potential.

I think your revulsion may be due to misunderstanding some of my motivations.