But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers?
In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?
In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?
Taiwan creates most of the worlds semiconductors. China makes the majority of everything else. Silicon Valley created a majority of the tech market's value.
But there's a cap where the world has enough stuff at least in the short term, and growth slows.
Humans only need a certain amount to survive. With populations leveling out, industry will shift from servicing human needs, to the needs of corporations and other industries. Consumers will become a minority in the future economy.
What will corporations value in the future, that they're willing to spend on recurring human capital expenses? I think the answer will always be: the tasks that will help companies grow.
Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work.
For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!
What’s uncertain, however, is whether the work that remains to be done is valuable enough that it makes sense to pay someone an engineer’s salary to do it.
In your analogy, your competitors who keep their people could just as easily end up bankrupt.
sure, but there is not more work that people will pay you to do; that's the important question
What really happens is that your bucket gets filled with more work, and now you are as busy as before. Or did someone else got fired because now you were working twice as fast as them?
No I watch/listen to a lot of entrepreneurial stuff since 2016 and I still haven't launched my own product. There's a YT channel "Starter Story" it's like "this person make $100K/mo, here is the template".
It really is simple though, put a paypal button on a squarespace page and ask someone to pay it.
That's my point. You couldn't tell an unemployed farm worker to go start their own farm. They probably don't have the land or substantial capital it takes. But an unemployed software engineer just doesn't need anything like that to go into a business built on AI.
A farmer couldn't create a farm from nothing, but if you had one, you very likely were able to sell its products - everyone always wants to eat. That is in addition to the natural benefit of being able to use the food grown there to survive all on their own, being your own guaranteed consumer.
A software developer can create software from nothing, but who is going to buy it? There's not enough consumers and problems in the world for everyone to have their own specialized business that is able to thrive. Someone is always going to be left out. It's not like food.
It's like as if a farmer was able to conjure up a farm for free, but there is such an abundance of farms that to sell the crops to anyone, you'd need the help of a bigger business, or try to cultivate very specialized and niche crops that are not being made by one of the mega-farms, yet.
Especially when people or orgs who would have previously paid them for said software can now crap out an 80% solution in a few hours or days.
farming hit a ceiling because of demand
software today is heavily, heavily constrained by supply. demand is basically infinite for actually good software that solves problems people have (and people always have problems).
1) demand for software is not, and was never infinite
2) the AI that put the 6 SWEs out of a job is the same AI that is supplying the demand; meaning there is no demand for 6 new software companies
They need to go into business for themselves, and become capital owners, who benefit from AI, not workers who are replaced by it. AI won't be able to compete at entrepreneurship unless robots are given autonomy and property rights like humans, which is quite unlikely to happen any time soon.