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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future. And that puts software developers next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now.

I'm fairly sure that programmers will be employable for the foreseeable future but in a way this is fair play, we - the programmers - did this to an immense number of people it would seem that we ourselves should not be immune to becoming superfluous as well at some point. After all programmer is not some kind of protected status, if it's ok for programmers to automate away whole segments of the job market why should programmers expect that their jobs could never be automated away? If anything we should be more aware of such risks having been in the drivers seat on this one for the last 50 years.

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More automation more of the time! The world needs to focus on how we collectively become more efficient while working less / relaxing more.

Having said that, I think automation of software development has a long way to go before it's particularly effective. Though it's certainly going to be an interesting space to watch. It's somehow weird to imagine a future in which we disrupt ourselves.

All those working on AI are effectively working very hard to put themselves out of business, it's a funny version of poetic justice.

Many of them are very aware of this.

This is the webpage's introduction of one of those people:

"Since age 15 or so, Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber's goal has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, then retire" ( http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

> The world needs to focus on how we collectively become more efficient while working less / relaxing more.

The world doesn't reward working less. More automation might lead to lower average work hours, but the reduction comes from people losing their jobs and not finding new ones.

So, yes, you get to work less, but you almost might go bankrupt, lose your house and car, and be reliant on government welfare, if you're "lucky" enough to live in country with a decent safety net.

Need to change the reward structures.

I don't think Max Weber ever fathomed a world where human labor was unnecessary and inefficient.

Work is not rewarding if you can never have it.

Still waiting for the new treatise.

I think he was saying that automating all the things is good, but we need to rethink the economic system that we currently have. Imagine the logical extreme of our current trajectory: a world in which robots/computers do everything that humans currently do. 100% automation, 0% employment.

This should be a good thing, giving humans unprecedented leisure time and producing a huge cultural boom. The problem is that in the current economic system 0% employment means the world would be impoverished, except for the few that owned the robot/computer production systems.

More automation means lower prices for everyone and less hours to work.

It's easier to accept it when you have yours.

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