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I don't really think law, medicine, and software engineering are the main drivers of wage inequality, though. If the lowest wage was minimum wage and the highest wage was a programmer salary, the Americas would be a very equitable economy.

Automating America's remaining paths to the middle class will only serve to widen the gap between capital owners who will own infrastructure for automation and those shoved into a shrinking piece of the unautomated pie.

The comment you’re replying to is making that point: that people who earn a decent wage from the knowledge economy are threatened by AI and oppose it because of their interest in the current system’s inequality.

It follows that if it is unjust for those who are knowledge workers then it is unjust for those who are service workers (unless you can morally differentiate them).

Perhaps if inequality is wrong then it’s the system that creates inequality that should be looked at rather than preserving rent seeking by knowledge workers refusing to compete with AI while perpetuating inequality on those who aren’t powerful in the current economy?

Food for thought.

I think you're reading a lot more into my comment than is there, tbh.

The comment I'm replying to said something to the effect of: "this may be a good thing because by democratizing highly paid professions, lower income workers will be lifted."

My comment said something to the effect of: "I disagree, I think capital owners will simply get more rich and the middle class will collapse further without raising anyone."

Of course our society doesn't give service workers a fair shake. My partner worked in a grocery store for a large chunk of our relationship. The schedule inconsistency, the sleep deprivation, the lack of healthcare, no vacation, no real sick leave, and on. Much of my family works in blue collar oil positions. There you're paid a bit better, but you throw away your body to make a dime. I know.

I'm just not convinced the default outcome of automating some knowledge workers is that magically somehow that makes everyone's lives better. I think legislative change of some kind would have to happen if that's the outcome we want.

If software dev is simplified to the point people working jobs like you describe are able to do it, wages will also plummet, so it’s not like their situation is going to improve.

If a developer making $1/hour produces $10 output (of something people buy), then if you add another developer making $1/hour produces $10 of output, you have $20 total product. Developer A and B can compete on their rate down to the point that it's not sustainable, and thus, an equilibrium will be struck.

How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?

too many cooks in the kitchen

> How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?

time spent coordinating, time spent arguing, time spent reaching consensus (dumb example: function signatures / architecture / api contracts), time spent comparing approaches.

This is a zero-sum way of thinking about the world.

It’s true though. If anyone with a high school education can be a successful “programmer”, most programming jobs will be filled by the cheapest labor.

Why would any company pay more than they need to to keep their company functioning?

It’s already currently true that many mid-tier shops employ an army of low-knowledge practitioners who will always “solve” whatever problem you give them in record time by abusing the tools you give them, reinventing wheels, punching semi-truck-sized holes in otherwise functional abstractions, barely testing anything. All is well until scaling problems or distributing desyncronization bugs or severe data-loss/replication happens in production.

Once you’ve seen this happen, and especially when you see it cause outages that costs thousands of dollars, you understand why it’s worth it to “pay more than you need”. When the rubber hits the road, having an army of automata who “get things done” is functionally not the same as having skilled developers who own their craft in the long term.

If I were starting a company today I’d probably be fine taking on some tech debt to get v1 out the door and then worry about investing in a dev team who can scale/rewrite it into the version that can scale to whatever level I need. But in no way would I want to ever again watch a junior dev who doesn’t understand how to read logs trying to implement a caching + crontask solution to reduce app load times from 30s to 15s on a backend query against a table that holds 10k records, because their code retries 500 times because they don’t understand timeouts, indices, or ORM induced n+1 issues.

In the long term, automaton armies will always curse you to the problems of local min/maxima problems unless they are backed up by someone with enough global vision to get them out of that hole.

Life is zero sum. Space I exist in is space someone else literally can’t exist in. Anyone telling you something else is lying to you and doesn’t have your best interests at heart.

Yes. Finally. I'm tired of people spewing this zero sum buzz word. Literally everything has a limit. It's all zero sum. Actually it's negative sum. Entropy only increases.

It's not just space that's taken up. There's a fixed amount of energy in the known universe. The usability of that energy continuously becomes less and less and less.

We have gone from living to caves to quantum computers and curing several types of cancer, and we are several orders of magnitude away from any kind of hypothetical energy usage limit imposed by the known universe. This could grow to hundreds of orders of magnitude easily as we learn more.

In the everyday life, there are negative-sum, zero-sum and positive-sum situations and events all over the place.

So, I don't get what your comment is supposed to mean and what it is exactly that you are tired of.

"Your statement implies that the situation/economy/whatever is a zero sum game. It's not."

^thats what I'm tired of. Baseless statements like that.

Fundamentally all things are negative sum. Anything beyond that are temporary local phenomenons.

Energy is has no "limit" in the sense you imply. It always exists. Once you "use" it, it still exists. In this sense energy is zero sum. The quantity never changes. Unless you count mass which is convertible to energy. Mass and energy are fixed zero sum things.

And since mass and energy are zero sum. Fundamentally, everything that extends from mass and energy is also zero sum.

The quantity outside of this that is negative sum is entropy. It always increases. But that's only because we set the baseline. It could be that maximal entropy is equilibrium and we are just an oscillation away from this baseline. In this case even entropy would be zero sum.

All forms of computations including coming up with cures for cancer or inventing quantum computing requires conversion of part of the universe from low entropy to high entropy. Once that conversion happens, the overall entropy of the universe goes up and it cannot be reversed. Even from a practical perspective we are using up fossil fuel resources and solar resources faster than then the sun can regenerate.

So if you technically knew what you were talking about. You'd know life and reality is overall practically and universally speaking is zero sum or worse.

> I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people.

I think the fear of software developers is that they will join the low pay crowd.