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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Even with just the advances in better programming languages (and newer versions of old languages) and better IDEs we have achieved tremendous productivity increases in the last 30 years. It's just that so far the amount of work has grown to absorb the added productivity.

There are some parallels to induced demand in road construction: when you build a new road to ease traffic, traffic increases to use up that capacity. But that isn't a sign that demand is infinite, it's just that demand is limited by the available resources. If you keep building roads, at some point they will become emptier. Similarly, at some point development productivity will outpace demand, and we will start optimizing our own jobs away.

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I'm not convinced. I think new abstractions beget new abstractions. There's so much left to explore in software. Imagine being in the first century of the printing press and imagining that the press is going to put all these poor monks out of business or that there's not much left to explore with writing. Speaking of writing, how much has our word processing technology succeeded in making authors obsolete?

> how much has our word processing technology succeeded in making authors obsolete?

makes more sense to think about GPT-2 like language models replacing authors, than word processors

presumably those models will be (are already being) incorporated into word processors?

I don't think word processors are the right analogy.

In your example programmers are the monks or the press makers. At some point we're not needed any more (at least at the same scale) since word processors have already been built.

Printers are actually a great analogy. Printing presses became more sophisticated, but the printing business grew even further, guaranteeing lots of jobs in the printing industry. But at some point we reached peak demand, but presses continued requiring fewer and fewer workers. Today there are still people manning the presses of publishing houses and newspapers, but in 200 years of improvement we made the job a much smaller niche.

I worked in the print industry when I was younger. The increase in Posters / bill boards / custom cardboard standing displays actually created so many more print jobs. From phd book binding to custom business print jobs to online demand printing there are so many more things we are printing now.

There are more newspapers but they are all owned by larger players which means different types of machines and parts.

A better example might have been blacksmiths. Although the amount of people making cars is a larger group.

Table 2 shows negative job growth in the printing industry in the last 10 years: https://collegegrad.com/industries/printing

That's too narrow of a group. What about 3-D printing.

If you read the whole article it shows a path to new jobs...

Digital printing has become the fastest growing industry segment as printers embrace this technology. Most commercial printers now do some form of digital printing.

Printing traditionally deals with 2D objects.

Manufacturing deals with making 3D objects.I think 3D printing belongs there.

The 3D printing revolution implies a fusion of manufacturing and printing. This just underscores my point though: abstractions beget new abstractions. 3D printing is an entirely new category that is just starting to come into maturity and reach mass adoption. Who knows what the implications of that are? It could cause a boom in custom made, limited run products. It could help to end our reliance on China for mass production. It's not obvious to me it will lead to less jobs in manufacturing.

There are more programmers coding word processors now than ever before.

Demand for the things we want _today_ will be met. But progress leads to new demands, and they are more complicated.

Anthropologists estimate that the work week was at 20 hrs at the end of the Stone Age. We have been inventing new problems in the vacuum created by our successes for, literally, millennia.

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