What jobs have been totally replaced thus far?
Second, why it has to be "thus far"? If it happens in 1 or 5 or 10 years does it disqualify it?
Because above you claimed it will "never take thought workers' jobs". Suddenly the goalposts moved so that it has to have happened "totally" and "thus far" to qualify as taking their jobs?
I have no doubt in my mind it is reducing the need for more engineers and has probably already contributed to a reduction of them and I think it's just getting started.
The reality is that companies are going to continue allocating a similar percentage of their budget to tech that they were before, and what we DO might change a ton; but, frankly, I've been doing this now for decades, and the stuff I used to do 25 years ago (omg: a full quarter of a century of professional software development ;P) already often just isn't a thing anyone does anymore. Every time my job gets easier, the expectations for the products I architect also increase, because we're all in a rat race attempting to compete for the same customers to defend our margins.
Hell: I remember when the first step to deploying a new service--even if you were a company that only had a handful of people--was to attempt to predict how much capacity you needed and then buy a ton of parts so you'd be able to sit around and build machines for your server room to run your new product. I was involved in a project back in like, 1998/1999, for a company with all of maybe five people, and someone's job was just sitting around building the server room... that specific task is now a few lines of YAML configuration and a couple of accounts (AWS and Twilio <- back in the day, we had to have custom T1 lines brought in not for data but for bulk parallel phone service to hook up to the Dialogic boards we needed to simulate phone lines ;P).
The concept of cloud-computing entirely changed that part of the business--having a small handful of companies manage all the servers at scale and run numerous jobs on shared hardware, in some sense reducing the cost to the point where you can both outsource this and pay less--to the point where doing that almost sounds insane; and yet, I'm sure there are more people getting paid more to deploy and manage ever more virtualized servers in the cloud than there ever were people (including me!) literally screwing around with screwdrivers in the ubiquitous server rooms. You could argue that my job got "replaced", with all of the skills I had to deal with IRQ balancing and automated power backup systems being for naught... but, somehow, I'm apparently still relevant.
I'll also admit that I honestly kind of enjoyed doing that work?... and yet, I also was quite happy to never have to do it ever again. I'll never forget the day I took the first real-world server I was in charge of and just like, uploaded it to 1&1 where I had an early software-based hypervisor-like stack I was experimenting with (UML, aka User Mode Linux, which is no longer something people bother with due to the advent of Xen/KVM/etc.); it just worked and I was like "omg I'm never building another server again, am I? that was it: it's over". (It then turned out that I did build another complex hardware solution in 2016 to start doing work with GPUs, but there was only a small window of time there before cloud services caught up.)
So like, sure: at some point the AI is going to entirely replace what we do--not the specific frustrating coding tasks we do today, but the entire concept of our jobs--but, the issue at that point isn't going to be me figuring out what I'm going to do next to make ends meat... it is going to be that I'm not a serviceable warrior in the war against the machines as the world devolves into some kind of Terminator-inspired hellscape; because, if you can manage to do my job in its totality, then you frankly can also do the job of everyone who has ever hired me and you can do the job of every investor who has ever given us money to do those things... we are all obsolete and, if AI actually gets as good as so many people here fear it will, at best we all become pets :(.
I think your argument requires a paradigm shift like teletype -> web to soak up the new productivity. I don't think we have that today. For how many purposes have we reached peak consumer software capability? i.e. global reach to publish text, images, video and make purchases is the entire use case of most media and commerce businesses. If you gave every company double the amount of dev resources tomorrow, do they even have anything to build? Even for those with deep feature roadmaps, how much of that stuff is just nice-to-have things that won't move the revenue needle anyway?
Maybe we will get that new platform from AR or direct brain interfaces... but without it, the situation looks more like how the human role of "computer" just vanished... sure we then got programmers, but they weren't necessarily the same people.
The Culture appeals to me, but there are literary critics who find even The Culture, let alone the grander environment beyond it, to be dystopian. And I definitely don't want to wake up dead with my mind in one of Joiler Veppers' simulations.
Only for people with dignity. So, in general, no!
I was asking a question. I don't think anyone can confidently quantify the effects of AI at this point so I was seeing if I was missing something. What I said is just some word vomit about what I'm seeing on the ground as an engineer. I'm happy to accept a refutation as we gather more concrete data. The reason I asked the question the way I did is because as I stated there is no doubt AI will impact our jobs, but I'm understandably more concerned about less jobs because of AI. I also have the experience of writing a lot of automation, and hearing this same style of rhetoric when we started doing that heavily. For all the scare around automation, it did end fact end up creating more jobs and typically made lives easier.
Jumping to "shifting goalposts" over that is pretty trash conversation.
That in a very real way is a replaced job.
The remaining job is running large scale data loading for a startup and really now is just eyeballs to make sure errors are caught. No longer requires much skill either.
I think some degree of low end engineering work in the outsourcing world is at risk.
Making music expanded though. In the sense that more people played, there was more variety, and indeed more professional musicians today than 100 years ago. (the bar for entry is also lower, and most are permantly broke - take that as you will.)
Some orchestras still exist. But they're pretty rare.
So yes, alot of job descriptions and job titles will change. Making indie games just got a lot easier. But where you see loss, many others see opportunity.
AI is opposite of human creation. Its definition of anti-creation. Its a spell that locks visual culture to year 2025. And it can only do this by illeagly stealing all the human work.
What a fantastic way of putting it.
I'm constantly reminded of _the Matrix_, with Agent Smith telling Neo that 1999 (the apparent year inside the Matrix) was the peak of human civilization.
Our own Matrix will use the year 2025.
It seems much more likely to me that all that will happen is there will be a lot more poor people...
Jobs are a way of "adding value" to society. But over the last 120 years we've figured out how to add a Lot of value with minimal people. 95% of people used to grow food. Now it's like 2%.
People moved to factories, where today robots and automation rule. People moved to hi-tech, and leveraged that tech. Now AI is moving into that space.
In truth, we now create way, way, more value than we need. We need to figure out how to distribute the value created. Somehow I doubt that the US will be the leader here; things like UBI are too far against the "American Way".
When we see UBI emerge, in whatever form that takes (basically basic human needs met) it'll likely come from places that value community over individuality. Places that rate their success by their poor, not their rich. Places that celebrate achievements which don't require the exploitation of others.
People will be able to take more risks and do more interesting projects. It will be awesome.
Like personally, I think I will still draw concept art instead of asking a GAN. Feels like that greases my creative wheels more. Just me though.
Of course, having people hand knit garments used to be the only way to get a knitted garment at all.
Then we invented industrial knitting machines, and those hand knitters found their roles had changed. Instead of knitting a whole garment, they would be closing up the toe on the socks, or doing finishing work on a sweater. Of course, companies didn't need anywhere near as many knitters under this system, so a huge proportion of them lost their jobs.
Then the knitting machines got better. They could close the toes on the socks themselves, could do most of the finishing work automatically. Some of the remaining knitters became industrial knitting support workers, but most of the actual knitting jobs dried up.
But there are still professional, commercial hand knitters, even today! They test hand knitting patterns for the hobby market. Make the samples up for photographing, and make sure that all the sizes come out right.
They number... Dozens? Maybe? And most of them treat it as a side gig, despite being the absolute pinnacle of hand knitting talent, since it pays terribly.
A job doesn't have to have been totally replaced to be effectively replaced. As we find ways to hand over larger and larger pieces of the work to an automated system, the number of real roles in that field diminishes, until it eventually becomes infeasible as a career choice.
This is what a lot these digital content creation jobs are heading. Gradual obsolescence.
But do you think if none of these things had changed, and everyone was still doing nearly everything themselves, with a limited subset of libraries in use, writing everything in C, we would have all of these applications, services, pieces of software, etc? That all of these viable businesses employing people would still exist?
I doubt it. And like the poster from the reddit link, a lot of software devs truly did enjoy a lot of that work that they did. I've talked to plenty of greybeards who will wax nostalgic over spending months writing things that a pip install and import solve in a few seconds now.
If we double the efficiency of a team, do we fire half of them? Or do we double the amount of products we're releasing? Or double the amount of features for one product?
I think we have far more software devs today because of the advent of higher level languages, large library selections available with package managers, feature-rich IDEs, etc.
Is this always the case, for every industry? Obviously not. There are a lot fewer people making furniture by hand today than there was before automated manufacturing, and any individual only needs so many chairs. But there is, of course, still demand for hand built furniture using traditional joinery techniques.
"Art" is a big space, and I don't think that the impact will be universal across every part of it. For games in specific, I think we'll see something more like the software development side - people will make more and more unique assets vs. reusing them, we'll see the artwork be more detailed and "populated" in general. We'll see more and more smaller studios putting out work with higher quality and more art assets. Same thing for other media-related positions. And the people who are reliably selling prints for people to hang on walls, collect, etc., I think are also likely quite safe. I think people relying on twitter/instagram/etc. commissions to draw people's D&D characters or anime waifu are likely in a lot of trouble.
You can't view things in the void like this, though. Reducing the overall cost of doing something makes it viable for more businesses, which means more jobs. We have more jobs in software development overall now because of how much more productive it is today, which opens up so many more viable use cases for it. We have more CG artists for movies, games, etc. now in large part because more efficient workflows and more powerful software have increased productivity.
Will it be the same thing with generative AI? I think so, at least for the foreseeable future.
But that's not how the economics works out. The business can simply choose to sell 10% more content.
What do you expect will happen if an entry-level software engineer becomes 2x as productive? You need 2x less, so you fire half the team.
I think R&D is good in any company. Sure, the nature of R&D is that most of it is failure; that's just the way it is.
AI makes the R&D iteration shorter and cheaper, IMO. The more you try, the more likely you're to succeed (aside: I should listen to my own advice sometimes lol).