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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

What skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are replacing.

Skilled. Not pedigree-filtered and trained and certified into a scarcity that may or may not actually be natural. Chances are most doctors or lawyers or software engineers would perform rather sub-par picking and putting in a warehouse.

Day one yes. put us in the warehouse for a few months and we would be as good as everyone. I'm guessing the woule only give a few days of training before setting us loose.

Several months of me as a doctor and I'd still be incompetent.

Have you read the article?

    "The fastest humans at this task are like Olympic athletes. They’re far faster than the robots, and they’re able to store items in pods at much higher densities."

They're not paying for the fastest. If they get some by accident that's great, but otherwise they just want someone reasonably mobile that will be good enough after a week or two of practice.

Of course the robots don't trip and fall breaking their back and sue the company, nor do they want vacations or raises. In fact the robot performance is probably rather consistent versus human performance.

Compare to a doctor who needs nearly a decade of special training. Or an engineer who needs a complex university training program.

Yes some are better than others. However there is still a vast gulf in skill between those people than engineers (much less doctors), while the gap between them and someone off the street is much less. (the article doesn't say how long it takes someone to get to that high skilled state or even if it is possible to train to that level - if someone can show me data on this I might change my mind on skill)

If your point is that experience is not necessarily skill, I suppose that's fair, but in that case skill does not always tell the full story.

What data? Just try it yourself and see.

For now.

Wait until LLMs get better and destroy the ability for junior developers to get their foot in the door.

How do you get senior developers if you replace the junior developers?

Sounds like a problem for some future CEO, long after current CEO has gotten a fat bonus from improving quarterly profits now.

Well the obvious answer is training. Medicine requires 4 years undergrad plus 4 years grad plus 3+ years residency. You might argue medicine can be replaced by AI similarly, but the issue is risk. That 11 years is to reach the point you can be trusted to make the really high-risk and high-value decisions, not to do the easy stuff analogous to entry-level software.

Software has been an outlier in terms of its high salaries requiring only minimal training. That implies automating it will disproportionately be both easier and more valuable than many other skilled tasks.

That's the neat part - you don't.

(The suits think that's a good thing)

You don't, you slowly cannibalize your business and industry. By the time consequences show up, you've already jumped ship with your golden parachute

By then the senior developers will be obsolete too

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