First automation acts as a powerful lever and enabler, then it replaces you.
In 5 years time you may well be more productive than ever. In 15 years I doubt there'll be many programming jobs in the form they are recognisable today.
In 5 years time you may well be more productive than ever. In 15 years I doubt there'll be many programming jobs in the form they are recognisable today.
There are two guys outside of my window at this very moment getting rid of a huge pile of dirt. One is in an excavator, the other in a truck. There’s a bunch of piles that they’ve taken care of today. Two centuries ago this work would’ve taken a dozen people, a few animals of burden, and a lot more time.
Where are the other ten hypothetical people? I don’t know, but chances are they’ve been absorbed by the rest of the economy doing something else worthwhile that they are getting paid for.
The other problem is, of course, is that all the historical examples (the data) are too few to generalize from while we do see how these examples are different from each other. As technological evolution progresses, automation gets more and more sophisticated, it can replace jobs that require more and more skills and talent. In other words, jobs that fewer and fewer people were able to do in the first place. This means that the bar for successfully competing in the labor market gets higher and higher and it will get to a point where a substantial number of people will just be plain uncompetitive for any job.
Or, at least that was one of the morels until LLMs were invented. (Mostly everyone thought that automation would take over the opportunities from the bottom up in general.) Now it seems that indeed white collar jobs are more in danger for now. But I digress.
The point here is that past examples are false analogies because AI (and I moslty mean future AI) is funcamentally different from past inventions. It's capabilities seem to improve quickly but we're mostly stuck with what evolution gave us. (We, as a species, are evolving but it's very slow compared to the rate of technological evolution and also we, as individuals, are stuck with whatever we were born with.)
We of course wouldn't have to make this explicit calculation if we could incorporate all this knowledge about fossil fuels directly into the prices of goods and services, but this is very difficult thing to do, and so far nobody has managed to do it in a global way.
It may still make material sense to use ChatGPT to create slides for middle management meetings, but that is not at all certain in a world with a significant price on emissions (though, to be fair, almost no human activity from the past fifty years stands up to this test either).
So doing stuff yourself is less carbon efficient than letting ChatGPT do its job.
As for calculating co2 pollution into the prices - we're slowly doing that, e.g. EU is setting up its carbon tax that applies to companies abroad.
The issue is that if we were to instantly include true costs of carbon removal into everything, the economy might collapse at worst, and at the least poor people might not afford food, heating nor other basic necessities any more. It will take time to do it sensibly.
Society had a lot of time to get used to the printing press, the advances of the Industrial Revolution and the internet. This is because the knowledge had to spread, and it's also because a ton of equipment had to be manufactured and/or shipped all over the world. We had to make printing presses, design and build factories, and get a critical mass of people internet-capable computers.
AI is fundamentally different, in that the knowledge of AI can spread instantly because of the internet and because the vast majority of the world already has access to all of the hardware they need to access the most powerful AI models.
Soon we'll have humanoid robots coming, and while they obviously have to be built, we are much more capable now than we were 50 years ago at building giant factories. We also have an efficient system of capital allocation that means that as soon as someone demonstrates a generally useful humanoid robot and only needs to scale production, they'll have access to basically infinite investor money.
On an individual level, however, I'd suggest keeping an eye out for opportunities to retrain.
As an analogy, I'd rather be like the coal miners in the 80s who could read the writing on the wall and quietly retrained into something else rather than those who spent their better years striking over cuts to little avail.
It's a very daunting prospect seeing a path to unemployability, though.
Depending how quickly the change happens, it could be a gentle transition, or it could upset a lot of people.
Imagine yourself as CEO. What do you think is your most likely train of thought? A/ "I can fully replace my labor force with bots" or B/ "My employees now have superpowers to do things we couldn't even conceive of two years ago". While there are certainly some scenarios where the first choice is appropriate, the latter sounds far far more likely in most scenarios to me. Why would you contract when there's suddenly so much opportunity to expand?
Zoned out somewhere in the backstreets of SF
Very few jobs now where you put together basic webpages with HTML and CSS (Frontpage, then Wix/Wordpress etc replaced you). Very few jobs where you spend 100% of your time dealing with database backups and replication and managing the hardware (the cloud replaced you). Very few jobs where you spend all your time planning hardware capacity and physically inserting hard disks into racks (the cloud replaced you, too).
What do you think programming will be like in 15 years and where is the high-value work by human programmers?