1 person needs to do that. The other 100 not doing that currently to begin with, but doing the AI-automatable work?
We used to say that (not long ago, even) about the code-writing part. Why do we believe that LLMs are going to stop there? Why do we think they won't soon be able to talk to people, listen, and determine what they need? I think it's mostly a cope.
We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.
Imagine 45% of higher than average paying jobs gone.
If that happens we’ll either figure out a new economic system, or society will collapse.
Also saying robots are walking just fine is misleading for any definition of just fine that is anywhere near as good as a human.
As harsh it may sound, it seems rather likely to me. It is not like s/w engineers have helped struggling workers in other sectors other than sanctimonious "Learn to code" advice. So software folks can't expect any solidarity or help from others.
It should be something for us to celebrate, because it means greater freedom for humans to pursue something else rather than spending time doing drudgery.
Or they're planning to build an Elysium-like colony in the ocean or space, to keep the billionaire class far from danger.
More likely they figure out what to do with a bunch of idle talent. Or the coming generation of trillionaires will.
"Automating half the jobs" is the same as "double productivity per worker".
When the doubling happens in 5 years rather than 50, it might be more disruptive, but I'm convinced we're on the verge of huge improvements in human standard of living!
If we double productivity per worker, we have twice as much wealth on average.
I know there are angry people convinced that this will all be consumed by billionaires and jews, but historically that is not at all the track record of the last 250 years, and I expect that to continue.
That's not true. There are other factors at play such as demand.
If we make the average IT worker twice as productive, that doesn't mean now every IT worker is being paid twice as much, because most users aren't going to care if there are twice as many options on the app store, or twice as many bug fixes per release.
There are differences due to import/export balance, investments, government borrowing etc, but as a first approximation, if GDP increases by 10%, consumption will rise by a similar amount.
About your IT worker example: Let's say s/he produces $150k/year in value and is paid $140k. If AI makes them produce $300k of value, they may not automatically get a raise. But it becomes very attractive for another employer to hire them for $200k or $250k, or even $280k.
In the medium/long term, I don't see why wages would keep proportional to produced value.
The fact that oligarchy now has more resources than ever in the history of humankind, a means to mass surveillance and generating mass propaganda, those wealth redistributions are looking much MUCH harder to accomplish.
Yea, historically it will inevitably happen. Realistically it will be after the new version of fuedalism and dark ages. So strap in for the next 400 years aren’t looking too good
Heck, even long before LLMs about 10% to 30% of my code was already automatically generated. By tooling, by IDLs and by my editor just being able to infer what my most likely input would be.
> We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.
I don't think you got the point I was trying to make.
Because they are currently "generative AI" meaning... autocomplete. They generate stuff but fall down at thinking and problem solving. There is talk of "reasoning models" but I think that's just clever meta-programming with LLMs. I can't say AI won't take that next step, but I think it will take another breakthrough on the order of transformers or attention. Companies are currently too busy exploiting the local maxima of LLMs.
I get the feeling we can already spot the next AI Winter. Which is okay, we need a breather, and the current technology is useful enough on its own.
Why do you believe they wont? I think it's reasonable to assume that we will hit a ceiling that current models will not be able to break.
> We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.
Walking and reasoning are unrelated abilities.
What evidence is there that LLMs have hit a ceiling at being able to do things like talk to users or stakeholders to elicit requirements? Using LLMs to help with design and architecture decisions is already a pretty common example that people give.
To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need.
This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs and suchlike. He spent 6 months working in the company. On the factory floor, in the logistics department, in procurement, in accounting and even shadowing the board. Then he delivered a proposal for how to restructure the parts of the company, change manufacturing processes, and show how logistics and procurement could be optimized if you saw them as two parts in a bigger dance.
He redesigned the company so that it could a) be automated, and b) leverage automation to increase the efficiency of several parts of the business. THEN, he started planning how to write the software (this was the 80s after all), and then we started implementing it.
Now think about what went into this. For instance we changed a lot of what happened on the factory floor. Because my boss had actually worked it. So he knew what pain points existed. Pain points even the factory workers didn't know how to address because they didn't know that they could be addressed.
I was naive. I thought this was how everyone approached "software projects". People generally don't. But it did teach me that the job isn't writing code. It is reasoning about complex systems that often are not even known to those who are parts of it.
And this is for _boring_ software that requires very little creativity and mostly zero novelty. Now imagine how you do novel things.
> People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.
You make it sound like it is a bad thing that certain tasks become easier.
I spent a lot of time writing CRUD stuff. Because the things i really want to work on depend on them. I don't enjoy what is essentially boilerplate. Who does? If you can do the same job in 1/20 the time, then how is this a bad thing?
It is only a bad thing if writing CRUD webapps is the limit of your ability. We don't argue for banning excavators because it puts people with shovels out of work. We find more meaningful things for them to do and become more productive. New classes of work becomes low-skilled jobs.
If you have been doing software for a while, you are probably doing some subset of this. But these things are hard to articulate. It is hard to articulate because it is not something we think about. Like walking: easy for us to do, hard to program a robot to do it.