Merely from your telling, it seems it is no longer "not worth the effort", as "the effort" has been reduced drastically. This is itself significant.
This is complex automation which by definition compresses the solution into a computable process that works more efficiently than the non-automated process
That, in fact, is the revolutionary part - you’re changing how energy is used to solve the problem.
If you prefer to think of human effort, there was also immense human effort building the models, the needed infra, assembling the data to train on, etc. There's usually 1000+ specialists on projects like this (see the last chat gpt paper author list, which took pages and pages as an appendix).
There is no way I can think any of this result was anything more than a massive effort, costing 10s to 100+ millions of dollars.
Go ahead and explain how this was low effort.
Like even just for programming. I just had an AI instrument my app for tracing, something I wanted to do for a while, but I didn't know how to do and didn't feel like figuring out how to do it. That's not work we were likely to hire someone to do or that would ever get done if the AI wasn't there. It's a small thing, but small things add up.
In a way it is nothing new but natural progression of technology. It is increasing pace of change that is different. Can a person learn some skills by their 20s and apply productively throughout their lifetime? Now at this point it is so thoroughly untrue that I'd be laughed out if I asked for such thing. We are told to up skill few times in career to up-skilling continuously.
As changes are getting faster and faster more people are gonna fall wayside and of course they can blame themselves for their predicament.
Automation changed farming for the worse? Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work? Farmers were replaced with low skilled labor? Do you think the job of a farmer (aka "food grower") will stop existing?
I do not predict future only look at what happened in the past and my answer to each question above about farming is the opposite what your comment would imply if it was applied to farming.
Farmers couldn't be replaced by low skill labor because they are low skill.
Farmer didn't stop existing, but we went from 80% of the population farming is to 1-10%. If farming automation had happened in 1800 when 80% of the workforce was working in agriculture, it'd have been a cataclysm.
I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers, mainly offset by their high salaries. Wait and see once vibecoding becomes the new norm.
And for software engineers, yeah, automation will wreck their jobs and their paychecks because software engineering's higher speed limit in efficiency is the speed of light, not a tractor's.
I can list lot more jobs e.g exchange admins, app server admins, DBAs, they are either gone or far fewer available. And lot of people were not able to up-skill and fell out of race in just a matter of 15-20 years.
The point is more and more people who survived with average skills or one time learning in past are not able to do so now. And it is not a complain about anything or anyone but observation that few people are seeing marked improvement in their lives with changing technology and many more are seeing degradation due to same changes.
We can already see for example as per Ericsson report[1] after exponential demand for mobile data and speed it is now plateauing and next decade will not see huge growth. As users are finding things they do and apps they use with phones are now fast/good enough.
1. https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-repo...
I get the opposite impression. If anything software developers get more respect than they deserve.
Of course my life is bit better as I saved few hours on weekend as owner of house and a vacuum cleaner.
But my life as worker is worse in last 10 years as knowledge of developing large complex applications is not valuable because we are in Next Gen Cloud native era where one application will not contain more than 5 functions anyway. Even if I claim I can write better maintainable, performance code , the employer directly or indirectly says "Well we don't care, we need you to complete these 10 JIRAs in this sprint" And only answer they take from me is yes.
Pretty much most of them feel underpaid for the amount of hard work and I hear they're having problem recruiting younger people to the business, so many foreigners take those jobs.