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Comment by wastewastewaste | Hacker News Reader

Yea man, people say combine harvesters will eliminate agriculture jobs, but then who will operate these combine harvesters? Obviously every single manual farm laborer will just switch to being an operator of those.

God, will we never move this discussion past this worthless argument? What value would there be in any of these automatization tools, be in in agriculture or AI, if it just made every single worker switch to being an [automatization tool] operator?

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Barring population growth, there is essentially fixed demand for agriculture. For software we don’t know what the market will look like once everything about making it gets automated. Either we will churn out the same amount of software with fewer people, or the same amount of people will churn out larger amounts of software. Or maybe there will be even more people working on creating enormous amounts of software. I’d say the likely answer is somewhere between the first and second option, but time will tell.

If software becomes cheaper to make it’s not like every IT company in the world is running a cartel where they agree to just cut costs and leave the output the same. Someone will come and smash the competition with more or better features and the ones who didn’t invest into development will face pressure to acquire more talent again.

There really isn’t a diminishing return on executing great ideas. Almost all software projects have an essentially endless backlog of items that could be done. So I think it will be between 2. and 3. with people who really understand how software is built being even more in demand than ever since they act as multipliers in making sure the increased output is evolvable and maintainable.

Only a few lucky ones will get the operator jobs, everyone else will queue at the job center.

Save people, not jobs. Alas, the powers that be prevent that.

As seen in many countries, people without jobs don't have much of to live from, unless they are lucky ones living at the beach profiting from shares, driven by endless exponential growth demands.

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