Therefore, unless you for some reason believe you will be in the shrinking portion that cannot be replaced I think the question deserves more attention than “nothing”.
1. A lot more projects get the green light when the price is 5x less, and a many more organizations can afford custom applications.
2. LLMs unlock large amounts of new applications. A lot more of the economy is now automatable with LLMs.
I think jr devs will see the biggest hit. If you're going to teach someone how to code, might as teach a domain expert. LLMs already code much better than almost all jr devs.
If we are talking an 80% reduction in developers needed per project, then we would need 5x the amount of software demand in the future to avoid a workforce reduction.
Comparing only the amount of forward progress in a codebase and AI's ability to participate or cover in it might be better.
Short of genuine AGI I’ve yet to see a compelling argument why productivity eliminates jobs, when the opposite has been true in every modern economy.
How would those have plausibly eliminated jobs? Neither frameworks nor compilers were the totality of the tasks a single person previously was assigned. If there was a person whose job it was to convert C code to assembly by hand, yes, a compiler would have eliminated most of those jobs.
If you need an example of automation eliminating jobs, look at automated switchboard operators. The job of human switchboard operator (mostly women btw) was eliminated in a matter of years.
Except here, instead of a low-paid industry we are talking about a relatively high-paid one, so the returns would be much higher.
A good analogy can be made to outsourcing for manufacturing. For a long time Chinese products were universally of worse quality. Then they caught up. Now, in many advanced manufacturing sectors the Chinese are unmatched. It was only hubris that drove arguments that Chinese manufacturing could never match America’s.
Me and the other senior dev spent weeks reviewing these PRs. Here’s what we found:
- The feature wasn’t built to spec, so even though it worked in general the details were all wrong
- The code was sloppy and didn’t adhere to the repos guidelines
- He couldn’t explain why he did things a certain way versus another, so reviews took a long time
- The code worked for the happy path, and errored for everything else
Eventually this guy got moved to a different team and we closed his PRs and rewrote the feature in less than a week.
This was an awful experience. If you told me that this is the future of software I’d laugh you out of the room, because engineers make enough money and have enough leverage to just quit. If you force engineers to work this way, all the good ones will quit and retire. So you’re gonna be stuck with the guys who can’t write code reviewing code they don’t understand.
In the long term, we SWEs (like other industries) have to own the fact that there’s a huge target on our backs, and aside from hubris there’s no law of nature or man preventing people smarter than us from building robots that do our jobs faster than us.
But like I said, I’m not worried about it in the imminent future, and I have enough leverage to turn down any jobs that want me to work in that way.
This is what will happen
2) I do see this, given the money poured into this cycle, as a potential possibility. It may not just be LLM's. To another comment you are betting against the whole capitalist systems, human ingenuity and billions/trillions? of dollars targeted at making SWE's redundant.
3) I think it can disrupt only knowledge jobs, and be some large time before it disrupts physical jobs. For SWE's this is the worst outcome - it means you are on your own w.r.t adjusting for the changes coming. Its only "world changing" as you put it to economic systems if it disrupts everyone at once. I don't think it will happen that way.
More to the point software engineers will automate themselves out before other jobs for only one reason - they understand AI better than other jobs (even if objectively it is harder to automate) and they tend not to protect the knowledge required to do so. They have the domain knowledge to know what to automate/make redundant.
The people that have the power to resist/slow down disruption (i.e. hide knowledge) will gain more pricing power, and therefore be able to earn more capital taking advantage of the efficiency gains made by jobs being redundant from AI. The last to be disrupted has the most opportunity to gain ownership of assets and capital from their economic profits preserved. The inefficient will win out of this - capital rewards scarcity/people that can remain in demand despite being inefficient relatively. Competition is for losers - its IMV the biggest flaw of the system. As a result people will see what has happened to SWE's and make sure their industry "has time" to adapt particularly since many knowledge professions are really "industry unions/licensed clubs" who have the advantage of keeping their domain knowledge harder to access.
To explain it further even if software is more complicated; there is just so much more capital it seems trying to disrupt it than other industries. Given IMV software demand is relatively inelastic to price due to scaling profits, making it cheaper to produce won't really benefit society all that much w.r.t more output (i.e. what was good economically to build would of been built anyway in an inelastic demand/scaling commodity). Generally more supply/less cost of a good has more absolute societal benefits when there is unmet and/or elastic demand. Instead costs of SWE's will go down and the benefit will be distributed to the jobs/people remaining (managers, CEO's, etc) - the people that dev's think "are inefficient" in my experience. When it is about inelastic demand its more re-distributive; the customer benefits and the supplier (in this case SWE's) lose.
I don't like saying this; but we gave AI all the advantage. No licensing requirements, open source software for training, etc.
What happens when a huge chunk of knowledge workers lose their job? Who is going to buy houses, roofs, cars, cabinets, furniture, amazon packages, etc. from all the the blue-collar workers?
What happens when all those former knowledge workers start flooding the job markets for cashiers and factory workers, or applying en masse to the limited spots in nursing schools or trade programs?
If GPTs take away knowledge work at any rate above "glacially slow" we will quickly see a collapse that affects every corner of the global economy.
At that point we just have to hope for a real revolution in terms of what it means to own the means of production.
- Unskilled work will become even more diminished: A lot of people in power are counting on this to solve things like aging population care, etc. Move from coding software to doing the hard work in a nursing home for example is a deflationary force and makes the older generations (who typically have more wealth) even more wealthier as the effect would be deflationary overall and amplify their wealth. The industries that will benefit (at the expense of ones that don't) will be the ones that can appeal to the winners - resources will be redirected at them.
- Uneven disruption rates: I disagree that the AU disruption force will be even - I think the academic types will be disrupted much more than the average person. My personal opinion is that anything in the digital world can be disrupted much quicker than the physical realm for a number of reasons (cost of change/failure, energy, rules of physics limitations, etc). This means that as a society there will be no revolution (i.e. it was your fault for doing that; why should the rest of society bear the cost? be adaptable...). This has massive implications for what society values long term and the type of people valued in the new world as well socially, in personal relationships, etc.
i.e. Software dev's/ML researchers/any other white collar job/etc in the long run have shot themselves in the foot IMO. The best they can hope for is that LLM's do have a limit to progres, that there is an element of risk to the job that still requires some employment, and time is given to adjust. I hope I'm wrong since I would be affected too. No one will feel sorry for them - after all other professions know better than to do this to themselves on average and they have also caused a lot of disruption themselves (taste of their own medicine as they say).
At that point its total societal upheaval and losing my job will probably be the least of my worries.
1) I believe we need true AGI to replace developers.
2) I don't believe LLMs are currently AGI or that if we just feed them more compute during training that they'll magically become AGI.
3) Even if we did invent AGI soon and replace developers, I wouldn't even really care, because the invention of AGI would be such an insanely impactful, world changing, event that who knows what the world would even look like afterwards. It would be massively changed. Having a development job is the absolute least of my worries in that scenario, it pales in comparison to the transformation the entire world would go through.