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Comment by fhub | Hacker News Reader

I think a key goal of senior management at any big company in the last 6 months is to make rank and file fungible or obsolete. It’s one big experiment. There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.

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I've worked at Amazon since 2018 and they've always talked about the software engineers being fungible during my tenure there. Technically everyone is supposed to be able to do everything, but in practice it's a huge headache if you want to hire for a more specialized role. They started creating some, like Frontend Engineer and Embedded Systems Engineer, but in practice these are still extremely broad

> There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.

And things only got better post-Industrial Revolution when labor organized and forced the issue.

There's no guarantee that will work again if labor has reduced leverage due to AI reducing their value.

I think in one way or another this all works itself out, but I'm not convinced it won't be a very painful (and possibly violent) transition to whatever comes next.

Also nobody talks enough about the fact that workforce is effectively cut out from the means of productions. Even with the capital at hand blackwell cabinets are all sold out, contracted to the big providers.

There are paralles to the industrial revolution, but it seems the working class is cut out from being able to deny labor in exchange for better conditions.

I am also increasingly worried by the potential for violence here. This is a social experiment that is harming the daily lives of millions of people in very obvious ways already. The environmental costs for the data centres are not insignificant. The economic damage from allowing AI to have so much funny money when it doesn't make much real money to justify it could be disastrous on a generational scale. Governments aren't making any serious attempt to regulate and if anything are drinking the Kool-Aid. We might be on a path that literally collapses the established Western capitalist order within a generation but historically societal change of that scale usually has a body count and I have no idea what comes afterwards.

The actual Industrial Revolution labor wars happened because workers were being maimed, killed, and disposed of with zero legal recourse. The Ludlow Massacre in 1914 ended with the Colorado National Guard machine-gunning a tent colony and burning women and children alive. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 had the United States Army bombing American coal miners from biplanes. Pinkertons routinely shot organizers. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed 146 garment workers because management locked the exit doors to prevent unauthorized breaks. Coal miners were paid in company scrip redeemable only at company stores in towns the company also owned and policed. Black workers attempting to organize in the South were lynched. Children were maimed in textile mills.

A software engineer getting four months severance after a layoff exists in a different universe from this so no. There is no precedent. Don't you dare talk about the industrial revolution because its not even in the parking lot of the ballpark.

That your examples come from the 1900s but the changes that caused them started in the 1800s might give you pause.

You should look past the screen and see what's going on. War is not the same; violence against humanity is not the same.

You're right, it's not in the ballpark. It's at the gates. The game isn't on simply because they poisoned the opponent in the duggout.

It's time. It needs to stop now while the body count is low. This isn't about some dev getting severence. They've taken away the street sweeper position and are watching us eat each other.

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