An AI being able to consistently outperform us in recalling the syntax for switch statements, is a world away from "all of our basic needs being taken care of by automation". The former is going to take a few more weeks/months, while the latter is going to take a few more decades/centuries.
In the interim, there will be some winners, and many losers from this innovation. Wealth will concentrate significantly towards the winners, while the losers will be out of work with a valueless skillset, and their basic needs going unmet. While this may be true for most high-skill professions in the coming decades, there's a unique irony for programmers - who will be the losers, having invented and then fueled the engine of their own demise on behalf of the winners.
It's not necessarily a value-judgement based comment. It's just noting the irony, and highlighting that it's a specific genre of irony that economists absolutely salivate over.
Well then that may just refute your claim that the profession would become defunct by 2040...
Haven't we been promised this for literally a century? We don't even have a four-day workweek.
[1] As opposed to something that will keep you alive but perhaps not give you any means of expressing or pursuing your interests. If UBI even becomes a thing.
Sure, but until you actually see evidence that this will become a reality instead of a pipe dream, you should be planning accordingly, right?
Even the most UBI optimistic people should expect there to be a very painful period of time where things are being automated and people are unemployed en masse which could last a long time before any kind of UBI is enacted
This is a US-only problem. The majority of software professionals in the world do not reside in the US.
> after your health insurance ends
While the ACA filled a lot of gaps, it's still possible to find yourself without insurance and without any insurer who will take you on - or being unable to afford it (which is what unemployment tends to do to people...), especially if you're above the cut-off limits for state and federal aid.
So the boring version: you will be left with the problem of a sudden loss of money as (concurrently) labor power vanes because LLMs don’t go on strike and you have no one to complain to since no one with any power has to care (see: LLMs don’t strike) that unemployed person #5468 today couldn’t pay their mortgage again and/or started on an opioid death-of-despair campaign.
"No job" is only a problem for someone who refuses to learn and move on. It's similar to having a child - first you have a job as a technician, then teacher, then mentor and lastly you are out of job until your customer makes you grandkids to care for, or something. ;-)
The idea that programmers serve some higher purpose in society ("solving customer problems") that frees them from the whims of corporate restructuring or bad management is laughable. Pray tell, how many programmers employed by Google or Netflix are solving actual problems? As opposed to helping build a bigger competitive moat?
Jobs as we know them have only been around for 500 or so years. There have been other ways of living beforehand and I expect we'll be about to figure another way in the near future. The only real argument I see for keeping jobs around even when human labor isn't needed anymore is the protestant moralistic one, and I don't buy that one.
Or we revert back to serfdom and slavery.
There is -plenty- of work out there that's currently not worth taking that will be suddenly worth it if you can code 100x faster than you can now. It might be for jimbob's landscaping company instead of google, but that hardly matters outside of your ego.
Many countries have managed to separate healthcare coverage from your current employment status with better results and at lower costs than in the US. The US should learn from others solving problems better.
Also healthcare has been tied to work in the US since long before the ACA.
But in all seriousness - the way I see it is that it’s a race to reaching post-scarcity utopia before we reach unemployment dystopia.