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Comment by staunton | Hacker News Reader

So I guess the coders get replaced first after all? Sounds like a more natural progression. There's more of them and it's easier/faster to tell if their work is getting done. And they don't need any "empathy" while writing their code (or so they think at least, is what seems to explain a lot of UI decisions...)

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Realistically if there's no more need for software engineers then I think what follows next is that most forms of labor are being replaced by machines. There's already videos of machines hooked up to LLMs doing incredible things, so it's not much of a leap to go from this to machines taking orders, making food, working assembly line jobs, driving, etc.

Yeah honestly I feel for people whose jobs have been lost to automation in the past, but mostly because everyone else's didn't. If my job evaporates because AI can actually do it more efficiently, I'm not sure how much longer "work" is going to be a thing like it is now[1]. And personally I can't wait for that - but again, I'm in a privileged position where I won't starve immediately. My actual hope is that we're crossing a threshold where we stop expecting that people have to "earn" their right to stay alive through some form of labor exploitation.

[1] I'm basing this off the assumption that other IC jobs and low-level management jobs don't have a significantly greater cognitive demand than software engineering. I could be wrong.

That's the good ending of AI advancement.

The bad ending is that we continue the current trend, where the profit margins created by increasing labor productivity are completely captured by capital, and ~90% of the population starves.

You're more optimistic than I am.

People aren't just going to say "OK, I guess I'm useless now" and simply starve. The scenario you're talking about has something like a civil war in there somewhere. Keep in mind that the people being replaced this time are the ones with political and economic power. This has never happened before.

By the way, in my book the bad ending of AI advancement is where skynet kills all humans.

The social contract will be massively upgraded so that work becomes about self-improvement, like in Star Trek.

It's my hope, but not my realistic expectation. I expect the ongoing class war to go hot.

Who is "we"? Why would the wealthy keep the poor alive? Just look at all the people dying in tents on the sidewalk in any major US city.

software is cheap and low risk, anything in the physical world is absolutely not.

taking orders - yes, but there are no moving parts or liability there.

for software you also generate N solutions and evaluate each of them to shore up weaknesses in the current, very nascent, technology. microsoft is sure to be going down this path.

probably because AI is awful at coding anything complex but the social and communication skills these companies value so hard are actually easily done by AI. The social elite are far more replaceable by text. What a world we live in.

Coding (in the strictest sense) is a far easier and more tractable problem than anything that involves social skills.

not true at all

> but the social and communication skills these companies value so hard are actually easily done by AI

Can you expand this premise?

It invalidates not just managers, but therapy, virtually any social function.

Wasn't an "AI" "therapist" the very first chat bot?

> It invalidates not just managers, but therapy, virtually any social function.

It doesn't, because it can't replace authenticity. That is, unless you never realize you're talking with an AI.

But if the human connection doesn't matter for you in a given context, then yes, GPT-4 can already compete with therapy, as well as with many social functions.

This is never how it goes. Coders will simply be expected to produce more with AI copilots.

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