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Comment by waprin | Hacker News Reader

I strongly agree with you.

Reminds me of something I read that claimed when drum machines came out, the music industry thought it was the end of drummers. Until people realized that drummers tended to be the best people at programming cool beats on the drum machine.

Every single technological advancement meant to make technology more accessible and eliminate expertise has instead only redefined what expertise means. And the overall trend has been a lot more work opportunities created, not less.

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I had a front row seat to the technological changes in the music industry. I opened a recording studio when you had to "edit" using a razor blade and tape to cut tape together. I remember my first time doing digital editing on a Macintosh IIfx. What happened to drummers is that technology advanced to the point where studio magic could make decent drummers sound great. But it's still cheaper and faster (and arguably better) to get a great session drummer who doesn't need it. Those pros are still in high demand.

Yeah, but less drummers are being hired than before drum machines came out. What you describe sounds like work has become more concentrated into fewer hands. Perhaps this will happen with software as well.

What happened is what typically happens: Concentration of expertise. The lower expertise jobs (just mechanically play what someone else wrote/arranged) went away and there was increased demand for higher expertise (be an actual expert in beats _and_ drum machines).

So the winners were those that adapted earlier and the losers were those that didn't/couldn't adapt.

This translates to: If you're mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again, then it's a low value prop and is at risk. But if you're solving actual problems that require thought/expertise then the value prop is high and probably going to get higher.

But there's also the subtext that if you find yourself at the lower-skill portion of your particular industry, then you should probably have a contingency plan to avoid being automated out of a job, such as retiring, learning more, or switching to an adjacent field.

Exactly, and AI only means that this adage now applies to programming as well.

but this was true anyways -- the lower your skill, the more competition you have. At the lowest skill levels, you better damn well have a contingency plan, because any slight downward shift in market demand is sword coming straight for your neck.

I think you have another thing coming. Think about what really got abstracted away. The super hard parts like scaling and infrastructure (aws), the rendering engines in React, all the networking stuff that’s hidden in your server (dare you to deal with tcp packets), that’s the stuff that goes away.

We can automate the mundane but that’s usually the stuff that requires creativity, so the automated stuff becomes uninteresting in that realm. People will seek crafted experiences.

I'm not sure that all of that has really gone away.

It's just concentrated into the hands of a very few super specialists, it's much harder to get to their level but their work is much much more important.

Better yet -- the jobs of those specialists got better, and the people who would have done similar work did not end up unemployed, they just do some other kind of programming.

True, and if the specialists retire, there may be some parts that no one understands properly anymore.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko / Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow

It would be funny if after the AI automates away "all the boring stuff" we're left with the godawful job of writing tests to make sure the AI got it right.

I think it'll be much more likely that the AI writes the tests (the boring stuff) for the buggy code I write.

I can see the AI suggesting and fixing syntax in the tests. Determining their semantics, not without true AGI.

Source? I would actually expect there to be around the same amount of drummers, but more people making music.

Based on these very unreliable sources, the number of drummers in the US may have increased from ~1 million in 2006 to ~2.5 million in 2018. That's during a time when the population increases from 298 million to 327 million.

So, during this period, a ~10% increase in population saw a 250% increase in drummers.

It does not appear that the drum kit killed the drummer.

Big caveats about what these surveys defined as "drummer" and that this doesn't reflect professional drummer gigs, just the number of drummers.

[1] https://m.facebook.com/Bumwrapdrums/posts/how-many-drummers-...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-play-drums-in-the-US

Are we in a drummer bubble?

If you could get by with a drum machine, did you really need a real drummer in the first place? Maybe a lot of drummers were used for lack of any automated alternative in the early days?

By the same line of thinking, If you can get by with AI generated code did you really require a seasoned, experienced developer in the first place? If your product/company/service can get by with copy pasta to run your CRUD app (which has been happening for some time now sans the AI aspect) did you ever really need a high end dev?

I think its like anything else, 80% is easy and 20% is not easy. AI will handle the 80% with increasing effectiveness but the 20% will remain the domain of humans for the foreseeable future.

Worth considering maybe.

Do you have any actual data for that? Last I saw, most bands are still using live drummers and studio recordings for small to mid-sized bands are still actual drummers as well - unless it's a mostly studio band trying to save cost.

I think the analog to programming is a bit more direct in this sense; most companies aren't going to go with something like Copilot unless it's supplemental or they're on an entirely shoestring budget; it'll be the bigger companies wanting to squeeze out that extra 10% productivity that are betting hard on this - same with where larger bands would do this to have an extremely clean studio track for an album.

The counter argument comes from photography. 20 years ago digital photography didn't exist and if you were a photographer it was a lot easier to make a living.

Nowadays everyone can make professional looking photos so the demand for photographers has shrunk, as the supply has increased.

Drummers do tend to be good drum programmers, but I believe they're a small fraction of the pool of pros. The drum machine made percussion feasible for lots of people living in dense housing for whom real drums were out of the question. (Also drummers tend to dislike using drum machines, because the real thing is more expressive.)

AI will be similar -- it will not just give more tools to people already in a given field (programming, writing, whatever), but also bring new people in, and also create new fields. (I personally can't wait for the gardening of AI art to catch on. It'll be so weird[1].)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwtVkPKx3RA

Those drum machines didn't use machine learning though.

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