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I'm also tired of how market fundamentalists always keep comparing their opponents to the Luddites, as if the Luddites were irrational fools with eternal egg on their face for their inability to see the blessings that technological advancement would bestow upon society.

No, the Luddites actually lost their livelihoods in the early Industrial Revolution, and they would reap none of the eventual benefits of technological advancement. Their quality of life decreased suddenly and dramatically because they were replaced by technology.

If you'd be told that some technology will make you obsolete and you will become a homeless pauper by next year, but it's ok: decades from now the improved technology will lead humanity towards a post-scarcity paradise; would you be ok with that?

The luddites were fundamentally selfish. Imagine if workers in a business burned down a competing business so they didn't get laid off during a downturn - zero sympathy right?

Ah yes here selfishness is wrong. Everywhere else in capitalism it’s a sacred virtue.

My sympathy depends on context. In the society I live in, my sympathy would be very limited, as there is a social security system so these people will not go homeless or starve (though the experience will still be painful to them).

In a society where there's no such system, I don't blame them at all. If someone is coming for the roof over your head and the sandwich you eat, it doesn't matter if they're doing it legally or illegally. You can't begrudge someone defending their own existence.

If I really believed that my suffering would lead to a post-scarcity paradise, yes, I would (but I don't believe it). And this rhetoric isn't just from free-marketeers. On the left, that's also what motivated people to endure the insanity of Stalin's and Mao's regimes -- that all the suffering they endured was temporary and was for a higher purpose -- to achieve a utopia that always seemed just out of reach.

> AI will absolutely change the way software engineering is accomplished. We already use things like Cloud Formation templates to auto-build and scale cloud-based architectures. We have code generators to build microservices. We even have modeling techniques to simplify complex systems.

> All of those "things" will be plugged into an AI and one senior technologist will be able to write a detailed functional description of a system in natural language, domain models, with data points, and an AI will write, test, integrate, and deploy production level code.

Are you sure? Imagine someone saying the same thing about compilers: "Before we employed 20 programmers to write machine code but now we can employ 5 C programmers because C is so much more productive". Of course the opposite happened. Compilers increased the demand for programmers.

Was it compilers alone? Or a complex mix of factors as software has eaten the world?

The improvements in efficiency for programming also occurred at the same time as it was undergoing explosive growth across every industry. How much room for growth is left is anybody’s guess.

> This article is pure conservative BS

Just based on how the entire article is structured, and the way it links in supporting evidence that normal people don't do, its like a delusional rant almost, but there's something off, honestly, the inconsistency in certain areas makes it looks like a number of articles that were generated by chat-GPT. Anyone else getting that vibe?

Aside from that, it completely ignores the division of labor, and AI isn't being developed to augment production, its being developed to replace human's as the source of productive effort.

For the communist bashing it does about universal basic income, its positively influencing socialist topics, cherry picking, and quite ironic.

The benefits we get from being the primary form of production are growth from challenges, professional experience, money, food, the means to support children, etc.

There's a lot of good reasons why thinking machines are generally outlawed/banned on pain of death in realistic scifi literature.

Overpopulation isn't a problem anyone wants to touch. What use is humanity if the environment becomes disadvantaged to human intellect, and there are too many mouths to feed for the resources available. There are always limits to growth.

Most benefits we enjoy today have only been possible through the division of labor.

OpenAI's own ai text classifier (https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier) says "The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated."

Software Engineering is only one of the fields that will be revolutionized by this technology, and to agree with the article at least in one point, regulation will be the major inhibitor to how far it goes. The two big problems for our current AIs is a) copyright of training data and b) liability when adhering to the output.

In the case of self-driving for example, having cameras that film everything around the car can be a problem if handled incorrectly, there are some countries where it might be outright illegal (eg. Germany). There will also be huge legal battles on liability when things go wrong.

But speaking of legal; law is one of the industries outside of SWE that might see the biggest shift. The stakes here are also high, sometimes possibly as high as with decisions made by driving AIs, but for a lot of people getting free or very cheap legal advice will be an incredible blessing. Law firms might be able to cut out most non-partners if "legal assistant AIs" get sophisticated.

The chances for medicine are what excites me the most. Already, most doctors google a lot. (Personalized) Medicine is simply a field too complex for a human to fully encompass, and AI has the potential to sift through all the literature, and all the available medical data, to find possible relations in symptoms. And, again, free medical advice (even if dubious) would be a blessing for the billions of people without access to healthcare.

> AI is going to change humanity in dramatic ways. I just hope that in the process, someone builds an AI that figures out a path out of international conflict, through global food and water safety issues, and speeds up our ability to restore the planet's health so humanity can survive.

I agree with this, although I'm deeply scared of an AI that capable. Increasingly, I'm agreeing with the hawks who believe AI is one of the biggest existential threats of the ongoing century.

> regulation will be the major inhibitor to how far it goes.

This likely won't be true if China also has the technology. Regulation would give serious disadvantage to western countries while China keep improving their AI without giving two fucks about copyright of western content. The choice will be either to let China take all the software engineering, writing, creative etc. jobs, or to deregulate to not cripple the country.

China has a huge and restless population, and their economy at this point isn’t designed around outsourcing. I see them using AI in an authoritative way, but they wont be rushing to replace people with the zeal that Silicon Valley has.

>All of those "things" will be plugged into an AI and one senior technologist will be able to write a detailed functional description of a system in natural language

I fully agree that this will be possible.

However, having worked in the industry, especially FAANG, Ive seen people getting hired and teams grow from 4 devs to 8 solely based on metrics of how long it takes those engineers to finalize projects, and when you look at the work that they do, so much of it is dealing with bullshit friction that doesn't need to be there.

One of the most memorable examples was people writing Cloudformation stacks. One of the issues that used to happen is that if you fucked up your template, and the stack started deploying a bunch of infra like EC2 instances, and then it ran into an error, it would take the time to delete all the instances it created, which took forever.I suggested that we just use python+boto3 to define our stacks to avoid this, and people looked at me like I was crazy.

So this developer rent-seeking behavior is going to exist for some time thats going to keep jobs in place.

I read the article far enough to confirm that it’s too biased to be taken seriously; I’m commenting more from the general high-level discussion of AI and labor.

The advances you mention wiping out software divisions: if you apply that to robotics, half of the workers in the world will be out of work.

This kind of thing is very far off, yes? (Which, in my opinion, makes your comment a tad bit nonsense in and of itself.)

I personally enjoy trying to get ChatGPT+ to try to write code for me. It’s really bad. It’s like a junior dev who can piece together puzzles you spend more time creating than it would take to do yourself. There’s really a paradigm shift between now and functional software-writing AI.

You’re implying technology will exist where it doesn’t currently exist, not that current tech will be rearranged. I feel you’re predicting the future in a almost-as-ridiculous way. I personally stick to the (perhaps oversimplified) notion that software will be the last industry to be replaced by AI.

You don’t need a physical robot to replace software engineers. I can envision one person scripting an entire complex application and an AI generating all of the code to perfection. To update the app, that one person adds qualifiers to the original text and the AI will update the code and automatically handle api/schema changes.

I see this happening within five years, maybe sooner.

Your prediction here incorporates the paradigm shift I mentioned above. The AI software upon which your prediction relies does not yet exist. There is a huge gap between the current functionality and AI that can produce non-trivial end-to-end programs.

It’s tempting to fall into the trap of “five years away” because things like copilot are so significantly different from what we had before.

As far as I’m concerned, Occam’s Razor tends to suggest much bigger changes in how robotics affects labor. We simply have to build new robots. There’s no paradigm shift necessary to design a new robot; only labor on the part of the engineers. It’s also relevant here that most folks aren’t too keen to be employed as automation engineers. It’s not exactly glamorous to work explicitly towards the purpose of removing others’ jobs.

I personally feel that scientific advances in AI will slow down, not speed up. There’s plenty of research to do in computer science, obviously, but scientific breakthroughs slow down over time.

All of those "things" will be plugged into an AI and one senior technologist will be able to write a detailed functional description of a system in natural language, domain models, with data points, and an AI will write, test, integrate, and deploy production level code.

Given that the severe limitations of the current state of the art (as we've seen from from how trivial is to show that these systems are basically spouting nonsense, and certainly have no meaningful understanding of the world we actually live in); and that this 100 percent waterfall model of software creation you describe has never worked in the aforementioned actual world that we live in -

How, exactly, do you "know" that the above will come to pass?

Unfortunately AI is far more likely to make global conflict worse.

I should have become a blacksmith instead of a software engineer.

>>The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's.

The growth of the healthcare bureaucracy is generally attributed to the increase in regulations:

https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...

While somewhat better designed to constrain costs, other countries' central economic planning in healthcare are also leading to runaway growth in healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP, and increasingly dire crises, e.g. Canada:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/doctor-shortage-cancer-video-...

What your comment illustrates though is how the dominant narrative will be shaped by the entrenched special interests who benefit from growing regulatory control, ensuring that Conservatism will remain the bogeyman even as the economy becomes increasingly centrally planned: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

The administrators are a direct consequence of insurance-mandated budgeting.

You can't seriously argue that they're caused by "regulations" when front-line doctors are having to call insurance companies from their offices to get clearance for life-saving procedures.

Or when patients having an emergency have no idea how much treatment will cost because their insurance company has to work out whether treatment will be in/out of network, what the co-pays and deductions will be, and other bureaucratic friction which has nothing to do with providing care and everything to do with profitability.

The US has the highest per-capita spending on health, and also the highest level of personal bankruptcies caused by health insurance.

It's quite a strange point of view to consider that latter point any kind of win.

Regulations make the provision of healthcare and health insurance more complex, so seem like the most probable culprit.

The decline in the share of healthcare spending constituted by out-of-pocket spending, due to growing insurance-mandated budgeting, could very well have played a role in the growth of healthcare costs, and I believe it did.

But two points:

1. Those mandates are regulations, so this development doesn't contradict the thesis.

2. Out-of-pocket spending declined from 44 percent of total spending, in 1965, to about 10 percent today.

That can't explain a 32X increase in the number of hospital administrators. It is probably one component, among the many that are responsible for the growth in the number of hospital administrators.

To elaborate on 1: the rise in the reliance on third party payers has been mostly due to the steady expansion of Medicare/Medicaid, and the piling on of laws that encourage reliance on health insurance over out-of-pocket healthcare spending, like "Patient Bill of Rights" laws that probibit all but the most comprehensive health insurance plans, and rule out catastophic-only plans that were at one time more common:

https://archive.is/GHjIl

> will be able to write a detailed functional description of a system in natural language, domain models, with data points, and an AI will write, test, integrate, and deploy production level code.

Yes, once math is also done in natural language, this will be the next step. I don't believe I will experience this in my lifetime unfortunately, but it will eventually happen.

Math has been done in natural language since the very beginning. Whatever math writing is not in natural language serves a specific purpose, such as being more precise than usual. In time, a jangon develops naturally as people with a lot of shared background knowledge optimize communication within their ingroup.

> In time, a jangon develops naturally as people with a lot of shared background knowledge optimize communication within their ingroup

Exactly. Only once humans completely stop working on trying to understand a system, we will only use natural language as suggested.

>This article is pure conservative BS.

Is conservative the right word for that? For example there's a graph of inflation/deflation in different industries and it blames the inflationary industries on government regulation holding back technological progress. Wouldn't those be considered conservative policies that are meant to preserve the status quo?

> someone builds an AI that figures out a path out of international conflict, through global food and water safety issues

None of these are engineering problems, these are entirely political problems or non-profitable problems where specific entrenched/corrupt interest groups have got large benefits from exploiting them

But yeah, let's shoot down more weather balloons, hopefully that will help