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Comment by notjoemama | Hacker News Reader

Do we really want this? As soon as possible, employers will fire software engineers and replace them with AI. I’m positive they will not care about what AI can do, only how many salaries they can eliminate and still achieve the same results. You and I will not be the inheritors of AI.

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I think that by the time AI can genuinely replace software engineers, a lot else in society will change.

It's hard to predict what it will look like. I could write both utopian and dystopian narratives and I can pretty much guarantee they'll both be wrong. Not "in the middle" but something unexpected, the way nobody predicted cat videos or doomscrolling.

But you are almost certainly right that we will not be the inheritors.

Yes, because employers will also be replaced by AI. Technology penetration won’t stop at some arbitrary boundary, it will go all the way through to logical conclusion. We have a chance at qualitatively better world, but we’ll need to act and push for new economic systems - when the time comes.

Maybe I read too much science fiction, but my first thought when speaking about "true AI" isn't the worry that a lot of us will get fired, it's the worry that we'll have created an army of digital slaves.

"Army of digital slaves" doesn't really sound that bad when I think about it. As long as it's your army and not your adversary's army... In what ways do you think "an army of digital slaves" is bad?

I guess only in the sense that any form of slavery is bad and morally reprehensible, and ethically inexcusable.

“and still achieve the same results”.

That is the part that won’t actually happen, at least pretty quickly.

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