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Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

While I applaud the OP's point and approach, it tragically ignores the reality that the ruling powers intend for this skill atrophy to happen, because it lowers labor costs. That's why they're sinking so much into AI in the first place: it's less about boosting productivity, and more about lowering costs.

It doesn't matter if you're using AI in a healthy way, the only thing that matters is if your C-Suite can get similar output this quarter for less money through AI and cheaper labor. That's the oft-ignored reality.

We're a society where knowledge is power, and by using AI tooling to atrophy that knowledge, you reduce power into fewer hands.

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Lowering costs is obviously a major goal of AI. However, I seriously doubt that the intent of C-suites is to cause skill atrophy. It's just an unfortunate byproduct of replacing humans with computers.

Skill atrophy doesn't lower labor costs in any significant way. Hiring fewer people does.

Skill atrophy doesn't lower labor costs in any significant way. Hiring fewer people does.

Devaluing people lowers it even more. Anything that can be used as a wedge to claim that you're worth less is an advantage to them. Even if your skills aren't atrophied, the fact that they can imply that it's happening will devalue you.

We're entering an era where knowledge is devalued. Groups with sufficient legal protection will be fine, like doctors and lawyers. Software engineers are screwed.

We still need AI to be able to fully write, deploy and manage software products before software engineers are completely screwed, but yeah there are no protections to help us out like other industries.

The entire AI debacle is just a gold rush, but instead of poor people rushing to California to put their lives at risk, this one is gated by the amount of money and influence one needs to have before even attempting to compete in the space. Nobody is going to "win," ultimately, except the heads of these companies who will sock enough cash away to add to their generational wealth before they inevitably fall flat on their faces and scale back their plans.

Remember 3 years ago when everything is gonna become an NFT and the people who didn't accept that Web 3 was an inevitability were dinosaurs? Same shit, different bucket.

The people who are focused on solving the small sorts of problems that AI is decent at solving will be the ones who actually make a sustainable business out of it. This general purpose AI crap is just a glorified search engine that makes bad decisions as it yaps at you.

Preaching to the choir, my Bastahrd, preaching to the choir.

> We're a society where knowledge is power, and by using AI tooling to atrophy that knowledge, you reduce power into fewer hands.

Knowledge isn’t power. Power is power. You can just buy knowledge and it’s not even that expensive.

As that Henry Ford quote goes: “Why would I read a book? I have a guy for that”

That's a little bit of a weird take in that just such a knowledge differential was the whole pivot of the movie Trading Places, even with the two extremely wealthy (and presumably powerful) Mortemer brothers

Also, there's the fact that recreating large software projects still will require highly skilled labor which will be thoroughly out of reach of the future's vide-native coders, reducing the likelihood of competition to come up.

At the bottom of things, the problem we are facing is not a technical, but a societal one. Our societies are rapidly regressing to "techno-feudalism" (see [1]).

There will be some tech-lords in their high castles. Some guilds with highly-skilled engineers that support the tech-lords, but still highly-dependent on them to maintain their relative benefits. And then and endless mass of very-low skilled, disposable neo-peasants.

AI needs regulation not to avoid Skynet from happening (although we should keep an eye for that too), but because this societal regression is imminent.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75560037-techno-feudalis...

It's a bit of both, in any technological shift, a particular set of skills simply becomes less relevant. Other skills are needed to be developed as the role shifts.

If we're talking about simply cutting costs, sure -- but those savings will typically be reinvested in more talent at a growing company. Then the bottleneck is how to scale managing all of it.

Costs are part of productivity. Productivity is still paramount. More productive nations outcompete less productive ones.

I agree, but it's not just AI. There's long been a push to standardize anything that requires critical thinking and human intelligence. To risk-averse rent seekers, requiring human skill is a liability. Treating human resources as replacable cogs is the gold standard. Otherwise you have to engage in thinking during meetings. Yeah, with your brain. The horror /s.

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