Comment by deisteve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deisteve | Hacker News Reader

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It's already the case, at a few companies I've involved with we've already laid off much of the content creation roles. The first to go were written content, then drawn content and now corporate stock photographers/videographers are next.

The second wave will involve 3d modelers, animators, post-processing jobs in cinema.

I'm already seeing lot of developer jobs especially front-end, testing roles being replaced entirely. Ironically, only back-end, devops, cybersecurity appears to be safe as it is mission critical even when good chunk of the jobs are automated.

what leads to my conclusion is that your comment will hold true for the most part, much as people stopped buying newspapers once Google News took off, there will still be those that pay digital subscriptions for media outlets they support, in fact their market shares might increase as a result of creative destruction.

There are riches to be made during these chaotic times. There are none for those seeking to be a miner-for-hire anymore in a large chunk of the white collar space.

> I'm already seeing lot of developer jobs especially front-end, testing roles being replaced entirely.

Can you give me some public examples if it's so prevalent? I play around with the AI Dev tools and I can't see them being a feasible replacement for a human yet.

I also have friends that are copywriters, illustrators, photographers and they're pretty much the same as they always have been with another tool under their belt. So if you could also substantiate this claim I'd be curious.

I'm sorry I can't as I've signed an NDA

but if you think these new generation of AI tools are some innocent augmentative processes you are gravely mistaken. What you describe are the previous generation of AI tools which were using you as training. What you will see come out next year will be a truly reckoning force.

Not even Indians are safe.

> I'm sorry I can't as I've signed an NDA

Surely the company you worked for can't be the only one replacing people with these tools. What about the companies that actually have thousands of devs on their payroll?

> What you describe are the previous generation of AI tools which were using you as training

Do these new generation AI tools have names, mentions, parent companies? Or is everything in this shadow realm covered by NDA and I, as a mere mortal, cannot access?

> Not even Indians are safe.

What does this even mean?

>> Not even Indians are safe.

> What does this even mean?

You know, I'm genuinely curious; do you honestly not understand what OP meant or are you actually disagreeing with OP by asking a rhetorical question?

I honestly don't understand what he meant with the Indians part.

The last wave of companies trying to save money on programming labor was outsourcing the jobs to India.

Deisteve appears to be claiming that LLM-based techniques for automating programming will be cheap and effective enough that even that kind of outsourcing will be unprofitable by comparison.

Then I find this to be a totally unnecessary addition to a claim that they've replaced frontenders and testers with LLM. Of course no one is safe if they've actually achieved that (with no proof given) so obviously Indian programmers are not safe. Neither are east european ones, Indonesian ones, or American ones for that matter. For the (unsubstantiated) claim that actual humans have been replaced.

It's like Tesla creating a full self driving car (level 5) and ending the promotional video with "Not even rickshaw drivers are safe". Just fluff.

You are in Europe so you may not be aware of the situation in North America especially Canada and the government mandated surge of migrants from India and the tensions it has created.

> Neither are east european ones, Indonesian ones, or American ones for that matter. For the (unsubstantiated) claim that actual humans have been replaced.

The representation of Indonesian workers here is nil. Eastern European migrants are also unable to compete with the suppressed wages that Indian migrants can fill. It's an overwhelming motif playing out across all industries.

You can take a look at the scale of the exploitation of Indian migrant labour for reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41284574

You answer this to me, but then you also answer 'correct' to the post I am replying to that mentions outsourcing, which is a totally different beast than Indian immigrants.

This discussion is also away from my initial intent which was to find out any sort of source, whether it be a press release, a research paper, anything related to your claim of frontenders and testers being replaced.

I would still appreciate such an answer. Though I expect I'll be disappointed.

k

Seems to me precisely those jobs will be more at risk than others.

If something is simple enough to be semi-automated by writing scripts for low-trained humans, it's more likely to be simple enough to be fully automated by LLM "AI" than more complex jobs would be.

Correct.

I'm hoping people start asking themselves, "Why should I take the time to read something that nobody took the time to write?" and start rejecting AI slop content.

This is exactly my feeling. I'm not interested in listening to AI music, or reading AI prose or poetry. I'm not even a fan of todays CGI in movies, it's just too unbelievable. I'd rather be impressed by real stunt actors, model builders, lighting and sound engineers, and a good director behind the cameras.

but what if you can't tell?

what if it was AI generated pornography?

I actually could make an exception for porn I think. So much abuse in that industry, and taking advantage of people who have had terrible lives since childhood. If people could satisfy their voyeuristic urges without contributing to the perpetuation of abuse that would be a good thing.

I agree the human cost of producing pornography is too much for the individual

but thats exactly why people are drawn to it

there is something about seeing shame, humiliation and violence in pornography that makes people tick

a big reason why most people dont really care about onlyfans

and why 90s to early 2000s pornography is sought after

I think actual good quality testing will take while to get replaced. Just like cybersecurity there is lot of thinking outside the box. Or even exploring the less common corners and paths.

But, maybe with AI testing becomes more valued. As who else will validate that whatever AI generated does what we actually want. And then reports the issues for fine tuning.

False. I can't get into details but testing is going to become the next copywriters.

Interesting. I'm a BE developer but I always thought it would be easier to validate BE results (json blobs, sql rows, etc.) automatically than the more qualitative output of FE engineers.

Doesn't make me feel much better though. If FE is on its way out I'd bet BE is no more than a year behind.

Rest assured FE developers are no different than artists

the end product, the UI, is limited in terms of edge cases

the backend however, there is no limit. business logic, automation, all of these are endless edge cases.

if any FE engineers thinking they should switch to BE, its too late. There is large generation of those that have been using PHP since early 2000s, have seen everything under the sun, and their experience is irreplaceable

Rest assured BE engineers, your golden era is coming. The era without FE engineers hounding you for API parameters and QA rejecting your tickets for some UI bug.

Same thing for devops and cybersecurity. Your golden era is coming.

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