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Comment by supern0va | Hacker News Reader

>AI can be an amazing productivity multiplier for people who know what they're doing.

>[...]

>The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding.

You're sort of acting like it's all or nothing. What about the the humans that used to be that "force multiplier" on a team with the person guiding the research?

If a piece of software required a team of ten to people, and instead it's built with one engineer overseeing an AI, that's still 90% job loss.

For a more current example: do you think all the displaced Uber/Lyft drivers aren't going to think "AI took my job" just because there's a team of people in a building somewhere handling the occasional Waymo low confidence intervention, as opposed to being 100% autonomous?

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Where I work, we're now building things that were completely out of reach before. The 90% job loss prediction would only hold true if we were near the ceiling of what software can do, but we're probably very, very far from it.

A website that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2000 could be replaced by a wordpress blog built in an afternoon by a teenager in 2015. Did that kill web development? No, it just expanded what was worth building

> If a piece of software required a team of ten to people, and instead it's built with one engineer overseeing an AI, that's still 90% job loss.

Yes, but this assumes a finite amount of software that people and businesses need and want. Will AI be the first productivity increase where humanity says ‘now we have enough’? I’m skeptical.

> Yes, but this assumes a finite amount of software that people and businesses need and want.

A lot of software exists because humans are needy and kinda incompetent, but we needed to enable to process data at scale? Like, would you build SAP as it is today, for LLMs?

This is all inevitable with the trajectory of technology, and has been apparent for a long time. The issue isn't AI, it's that our leaders haven't bothered to think or care about what happens to us when our labor loses value en masse due to such advances.

Maybe it requires fundamentally changing or economic systems? Who knows what the solution is, but the problem is most definitely rooted in lack of initiative by our representatives and an economic system that doesn't accommodate us for when shit inevitably hits the fan with labor markets.

there's 90% job loss assuming that this is a zero sum type of thing where humans and agents compete for working on a fixed amount of work.

I'm curious why you think I'm acting like it's all or nothing. What I was trying to communicate is the exact opposite, that it's not all or nothing. Maybe it's the way I articulate things, I'm genuinely interested what makes it sound like this.

Fully agree with your og comment and I didn’t get the same read as the person above at all.

This is a bizarre time to be living in, on one hand these tools are capable of doing more and more of the tasks any knowledge worker today handles, especially when used by an experienced person in X field.

On the other, it feels like something is about to give. All the superbowl ads, AI in what feels like every single piece of copy coming out these days. AI CEOs hopping from one podcast to another warning about the upcoming career apocalypse…I’m not fully buying it.

The optimistic case is that instead of a team of 10 people working on one project, you could have those 10 people using AI assistants to work on 10 independent projects.

That, of course, assumes that there are 9 other projects that are both known (or knowable) and worth doing. And in the case of Uber/Lyft drivers, there's a skillset mismatch between the "deprecated" jobs and their replacements.

Well those Uber drivers are usually pretty quick to note that Uber is not their job, just a side hustle. It's too bad I won't know what they think by then since we won't be interacting any more.

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