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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

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osigurdson

>> Most dev jobs are mostly repetitive plumbing

Those jobs should go away. Basically, the elimination of anything boring is ultimately a net good for humanity.

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Neat idea. That solves everything.

Oh, one quick thing. I'm sure it's nothing, but I'm a bit slow.

How do you get new experts if no one gets to do the junior work that gives them the experience to become an expert?

Unions and apprenticeships?

Firat it was people pushing plows, then horses pulled them, and now machines do the work a hundred people used to do.

This technology is no different.

but the ability to get horses to pull carts is not tied to expert knowledge of hand-pushing plows, neither is machinery to horse-pulling. This is not really the case for AI

I guess in the ideal world, everyone just does what they want, since everything will be so cheap. Enjoy chess? Study it and play against other humans. AI will of course crush you in any game. Enjoy accounting, radiology or programming? Same thing.

Move to a higher level of abstraction and architecture. We’re leaving the era of hand wiring data structures and program logic the same way we left behind the era of hand wiring ICs and discrete components. Different skills will be needed.

UML rises again! Maybe we will even have a unified process one day for creating software - a rational one no less.

Hey over there. I’m very much grateful for the privilege of this boring job, which is not 100% of my job, but a huge part of it. Grateful because it allows me to feed a family of four. I’m sure in your Musk’esque utopia without boring work is place enough for all mankind. But please, don’t forget to draft a bridge that will bring us all over there and not just a bunch of filthy rich Silicon Valley assholes. Because that wouldn’t be a utopia. Thank you.

That is a fair assessment. I am probably parroting Musk here a little. However, your main issue is access to food and resources, not boring work. I can't see why the price of everything goes to zero if there is no cost to make it.

Because there's a finite amount of resources so almost always you'll run into scarcity?

Very well the wages might fall much quicker than the costs so for a handful it will be beneficial, for the rest not so much.

It might become way easier to start companies, as there won't be a need to nearly as many people. It might end up being more of a equalizing force in the end.

Only if you provide an alternative way for the newly unemployed to earn a living. Otherwise you just get crime, hunger and eventually war.

When you consider how early we are in the evolution of software and the role it can play in our professional and personal lives, this seems like one of the easier problems to solve though.

Political problems are much harder to solve than technical ones.

It doesn't follow that reducing efficiency helps in the long run. If producing a good or service takes 10X less work than it used to, that good or service will become cheaper. The only force that can stop this is regulation.

Jobs aren’t distributed out of some cookie jar. They are needs and wants and obligations that other people will pay to have fulfilled or taken off their hands. Figure out how to solve those problems and you’ll have all the work you could ever ask for.

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