This is an excellent point. It should also be noted that the people who want a better position over labor largely write mediocre memos, make bad decisions, barely listen in meetings, and slap together powerpoints for said meetings. As it turns out, AI can also automate the work of thousands of shitty execs and upper management. If only we could apply that pressure in their direction...

I mean there might be a market for an AI model which takes i.e. Redmine (or any project managing tool) and will direct developer to work on this or that task, automatically split tasks into smaller ones or request from stake holder to better explain what is requested on vague tasks and so on.

With Claude new context size, we were able today to feed it our library, an API page as well as part of our architecture documentation, and it was able to write us stories really well. We still had to check everything and rewrite a bit, but it took us like 30 minutes for 5 stories, instead of one hour for two or three (I'm exaggerating, but it did happen multiple time).

Our PM/manager should not have taken any vacations :D

It doesn’t need to be able to entirely automate a job to replace jobs though. If it enables one worker to be 10 times as productive, then the company can hire 9 fewer people (depending on how the productivity of the position scales)

Or better yet, focus on the top line, and enable sales to sell 10 times as much...

> It creates a weaker position for labor.

Is this worth >1 trillion in capex?

For reference, less than 100 billion have been invested into fusion energy — since 1950.

Could be? What is your take?

What does fusion energy have to do with labor cost?

Obviously AI is technology that has its own value.

But keeping the labor cost down by just a few percent (and handing that money to company profits) has tremendous leverage.

Total wages in the us is ~11T per year. Depress the labor force a little bit, force up unemployment a little bit, and halt wage growth and you are seeing trillions in annual savings for the bosses just in the US alone.

100% spot on

I haven’t seen this. There are more smaller companies than larger ones. At my company, as a manager, I encourage the use of AI because it appears to make developers about 10% more efficient, helps kickstart new projects, and improves job satisfaction by automating away some of the boring parts of development.

Perhaps at call centers and such you are correct, but your comment is as disingenuous as saying the compiler is about getting a stronger position over labor, or the expansion of included libraries, or faster microprocessors, or modern IDEs before AI. The march towards automation, efficiency, and automation in engineering never stops.

Every so often there is a massive leap which results in significant job losses, but that doesn’t mean it’s about labor. Was the release of AWS about labor? It destroyed many Silicon Valley companies as you could now do with $5k what previously took $200k.