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Comment by kaveh_h | Hacker News Reader

That’s assuming frontends need to be ”developed” at all in the future. There’s a possibility intelligent chat bots able to generate microfrontends on the fly is going to eat our lunch, but what is really going to eat the lunches is a failing capitalistic system due too lack of demand for labour. I guess overall society is going to balance things out somehow, curious if it’s going to be a in a civil manner or brutal disruption.

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Well, no the point to my comment was that they won't need to be developed, and that the real skill will be in knowing how people interact with things so you can tell the machine what to make, and that is absolutely not a technical job. Even in the interim, incidentally gained technical skills will suffice rendering the technical people in the chain redundant. Surely the human understanding component will be whittled down at some point, too, but it's a much much further goal than automating essentially mechanical processes.

And, of course-- all of the "unpleasant" side effects of massive innovation would be totally avoidable if we didn't treat people as disposable labor units worth nothing more than their market value.

>Surely the human understanding component will be whittled down at some point, too, but it's a much much further goal than automating essentially mechanical processes.

Why do you think that?

People used to think that making paintings and poems would be one of the most difficult things for AI, and look how that turned out.

I don't think the above comment disagrees that much with you. As far as paintings and poems go those are also pulling off of patterns that humans naturally have given off too right? An LLM is a bit more than a stochastic parrot sure, but it's also a large part of how it functions. The real surprise, or maybe not a surprise, is how formulaic everything is.

Because interfaces require situation-specific reasoning that purely expressive art can be imitated without. And frankly, I think the slick looking images that AI spews out from actual artists' munged up work is a far cry from being equivalent. Like interfaces, the people who wouldn't pay an artist or designer to begin with probably don't care enough about the quality of the art or interface for it to matter. Cookie cutter applications and stock images are going to suffer, but developers making basic crud functionality or simple API interactions will suffer soon after.

I can only see brutality personally. I’m not prepared. Once I lose my way of making a living I think it’s done basically. Time will tell, but it’s never been kind before, why now?

Many here seem to think anyone "smart enough" or "hardworking enough" could simply pivot into something else after their entire category of employment was decimated. I assume that:

a: These people are very young and don't understand what it takes to invest 3, 4, or 5 decades in a career and/or despite their assumptions about their life experiences, have never actually experienced significant hardship.

b: They're neurologically or emotionally incapable of empathy or lack a usable theory of mind.

c: They've read too much inspirational linkedin hustle porn about people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps (which is actually supposed to be a joke-- it's obviously impossible to pull youself up by your own bootstraps, but for some reason people repeat it without considering its true meaning) and think if they are tough and ruthless enough that they'll be one of the ones on top. Which is kind of sad.

Or a variant of a: they're forgetting how little their first jobs paid.

Even in most lucky case, pivoting your career into an entirely different category means reverting to entry-level pay, while your age, health and obligations remain the same. Imagine just the paycut alone happening to you, out of a sudden. And that's the best case for what people displaced by AI will experience.

I’d pivot into crime and drugs if I had too survive. I’ll be eating no matter what. Not too worried.

You know, they send people to jail over that stuff.

He still gets his food in that case.

Hey they’d still have food/shelter in that scenario…

Yeah, but a lot depends on where they live. From what I heard about the US penal system, someone living there would be better off being homeless than jailed.

For most people who don't already have an established network associated with crime, it would probably be the only way you'd get anybody to trust you.

As someone who spent quite some time as a young person with the fringe end of society, I can assure you that saying you'll pivot into crime and drugs is like saying you'll pivot into being a plumber. It takes time to build a career that pays more then entry level money consistently, and good luck developing a network of connections to make it happen. It's not like walking down the street to pick up an application at Chipotle. And AI is probably going to take individual computer criminals' jobs even before most other people's.

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