Yes, AI Will Take Your Job

In my view the article makes the following points.

  1. AI does not need to get better for the MBA to use it instead of your labor.
  2. They don't need to be good at using AI because they don't care about quality.
  3. Most technical problems are unsolved right now and AI won't change that.

If you observer the processes PMs follow they can just drop in an AI agent instead of a dev. Just tell it to do stuff and look at the result is their modus operandi as it is right now. They don't care about the engineering quality because they are not the ones that have to maintain it. And they won't get fired if it keels over.

My takeaway was that the purpose of AI is not to do “your job” as well as you but to do the things you refuse to do in your job as a person with taste and ethics.

1. Well substantiated up to this point 2. Unknown 3. This is a serious metaphysical, question not something to punt on. Is there anything fundamental to humanity that makes us required for innovation, or is the only important thing our taste/selection criteria over which innovations we want? If it's the latter, you truly don't need a labor force the way we have one today to do what we're doing today.

"Path that needs a lot of things to go wrong" -- wrong for whom? For the people with money and power, the people who determine what jobs exist and what those jobs are doing, this would be a dramatic version of things going right (as long as they're able to capitalize on it). Human labor is an expense for business owners, not a virtue.

Not speaking to you in particular, but I'm shocked at how so many otherwise brilliant people are rendered practically neo-luddites by AI. The cotton gin was disruptive, but once it was invented there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. The same is true of agentic AI. The question isn't whether or not it will upset the status quo of human labor, it's how much and in what way.

Automation in the past was just about changing what was in the human's hands. Technology improved, people got faster, but there was still a balance. The people who owned the machines and the factories couldn't and didn't want to operate them, and had to employ others.

Now they're threatening us with total automation. In their dreams, we're not the people riding horses who now get to drive shiny new cars. We are the horse. If that dream is possible with the current technology, they will stop at nothing to achieve it.

It's no different from the perspective of a business. A human is a tool in that context as much as a cotton gin or a horse is.

The difference is that it's less clear how humans can "just adapt to use the new tool" when the tool thinks. But this isn't actually that much of a difference -- were the horse ferriers re-employed as engine designers and manufacturers? No. From their perspective the engine was just as much of an existential threat.

The question remains: how do we mitigate the impact of making human labor obsolete on society and on the humans impacted. How do we make sure humans still have a way to contribute to society and the economy? The alternative is disastrous.

Well, that's what I meant by my European coworker - perhaps his country has found a socialist balancing point that maintains a level of capitalism that somehow doesn't tip into power cascades concentrating power around Capital. IMO that wouldn't be a liberal capitalist society though, that would be a socialist-capitalist society, which perhaps the Netherlands and Nordic countries are, I'm not too familiar. With the level of privatization striking Canada, I think it'll end up like the USA.

If we're gonna take a look at places, where I'm really interested in watching is the PRC, Cuba, and Vietnam. Capitalism managed to beat the Soviet Union, will it to any other remainders from the era, or will the conversion to state capitalism create a strange equilibrium? In any case it's not like the PRC is doing much better in terms of worker's rights, you still have to justify your existence through labor there more than you do in the aforementioned Nordic countries.

Economy/Markets != Capitalism

TFA means Capitalism in terms of "capitalism as it is today, particularly in the US". There are plenty of other ways of figuring out how to distribute resources.

Signalling = markets.

Capitalism is allowing the winners of the markets to make the rules that everyone has to abide by, sidestepping "democracy" with anti-democratic "lobbyism" and creating a power hierarchy based on networth. The markets that allowed this are usually "free'ish" at best.

I wrote it, and I invite you to tell me why I'm wrong - genuinely. I'm here for the conversation. I don't know how else to write on something other than authoritatively. If I'm wrong on the internet, people will definitely tell me!

In person, I'll hedge of course, it's a natural part of conversing and inviting people to share.

Arguing whether someone is permitted to speak on a subject sounds like it would take as much effort as simply discussing the subject itself.

I really liked the article. Sure maybe the title of the original article is a little clickbaity; but are article titles not supposed to be "drawing your attention"?

The author is doing really cool things, like a worker-coop for software engineering:

https://508.dev/pricing

Also i think the article contained some interesting points. Like the "class consciousness" of the owner-class and how this affects decisions on AI. But, to me, there were more.

Anyway, to each their own. I liked it.

> a job market expert nor a historian

I would not expect a job market "expert" or a historian to be able to predict future world where cumulative machine intelligence is higher than cumulative human intelligence. Why would you?

> I wish there were options on HN to filter out "my opinion is a fact and you're all wrong" articles

Don't wish. Just vibecode it for your personal use. Seriously.

And die in large numbers, yes.