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Comment by morei | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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