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Comment by ajb | Hacker News Reader

People have a bad intuition about economic mechanisms, but that does not mean that AI won't cause huge regressive effects.

The transition from independent artisans to factory work didn't cause massive unemployment. But it cause the former artisans to lose out, because they no longer had the bargaining power they had before - their work was now a commodity. This resulted in "Engel's pause", a period in which wages stagnated, and so conditions got worse because prices also increased.

But AI also isn't just automation. It's the automation of automation. You may think that you will just level up and learn the new skill set of managing AIs, but the AI companies will be collecting the data to automate that too. Often by watching you.

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Also worth pointing out Anthropic is a sponsor of The Economist. Probably muddies the water some more.

A "sponsor"? As in buys some ads? The Economist's take on AI is hardly uncritical.

Judging by the amount of insider interviews it's more than just ads.

Longtime subscriber. Pretty disappointed in how biased their coverage is.

The most critical piece they have put out on AI is oh no it's so powerful it's hacking everything. It's like being in a job interview and saying your biggest weakness is you work too hard.

>Longtime subscriber. Pretty disappointed in how biased their coverage is.

>The most critical piece they have put out on AI is oh no it's so powerful it's hacking everything. It's like being in a job interview and saying your biggest weakness is you work too hard.

What do you think they've missed? Otherwise, all you've demonstrated so far is "their stance on AI doesn't match mine", not that they're "biased". If I was reading HN 5 years ago it would be people saying how economist is biased for or against crypto because the most critical/supportive piece doesn't say it'll go to 0, or will replace all of finance, respectively.

I mean that's a fair take.

But, for me it's not so much that it doesn't match my view. I'm honestly mixed on the whole thing (I am probably most concerned about the finances). It's more that the articles they write seem to align with the eb and flow of anthropics media tempo. This week it's FOMO, next week it's panacea, hack all the things week, followed by mild financial concerns with a but it will be fine tacked at the end. The articles tend to lack concreteness too. Maybe, it's just what reading The Economist is like when it's a domain you actually understand and follow closely?

Honestly, though I could probably say the same for a lot of publications these days.

This makes no sense outside of SV.

If you work in the broader corporate world, your heads-down work may typically be writing software, but you're really more like staff IT. You get promoted into some kind of management role like "architect" and end up owning all the implementation instead of just the code.

You get passed the football a lot because that's more effective teamwork. You have weight in meetings because the business is smart enough to realize you are not just writing code. Your maintenance is basically all the operations short of the accounting and client manager stuff for that project.

AI is irrelevant unless you're really feeling a time crunch and have little alternative. Nobody cares how you do it. The meetings are a way bigger deal than the code. These types of devs are the equivalent of a bureaucrat who can sign off on a construction job and then grab a shovel.

This is the actual "future" of dev work... ahem it looks a lot like the past and present for everyone else.

> AI is basically irrelevant unless you're really feeling a time crunch and have little alternative

Which is all of our industry. You're lucky if you're in a pocket outside of timr crunch.

I'm just describing what an actual career looks like beyond the first 5 years of grinding away at a startup and then giving into "the man" or whatever.

I guess it's true that corporate doesn't like hiring junior devs, but I'm not sure it was ever any other way. I'm not seeing where the fire is at. Corporate won't pay you SV wages either, but it's still respectable six-figures. You probably don't get stock either, but everyone gets a management bonus unless they're contractors. This is just basic middle america and it's the vast majority of the workforce.

I'm not trying to piss anyone off when I say this, but all the scifi doomer shit is wildly out of touch and preys on the inexperienced. You should question who is behind it.

ok, explain a potential day in the life of this senior, where they are not required to code with AI.

I'm clearly not going to convince you with that attitude, but hopefully others reading can benefit from the long view.

fwiw, I was challenging you because your assumptions are not at all what I see around in teams across companies I work with. so was taking the other side and trying to probe further.

Also an analogy with the globalization of manufacturing era. People have I think been prone to assuming that the West has a "magic ingredient" which entitles it to revenues from skilled work forever. A presumption that people overseas, especially in the "south" and "east", wouldn't acquire the same skills or culture. The idea that it is so absolutely critical to software development to be in an office in Silicon Valley that it's worth paying enormous premiums even relative to the rest of America and the West (+).

That is being disrupted. Ironically, by American AI firms who want a cut of all software engineering salaries globally.

(+) UK software developer working for an American multinational here, aware that my salary is "great by UK standards but not by American ones"

The WFH aficionados that emerged during Covid had no concept of bargain power or power structures.

Dunno why there was such resistance from the owning class afterwards with return to office mandates.

> The WFH aficionados that emerged during Covid had no concept of bargain power or power structures.

IMO the wrong thing to point at.

How many of us have ever, even before Covid, been in a trade union?

Unions definitely know about bargain power and power structures, yet also get it wrong when new tech arrives.

The only crime here is stopping before AI replaces the CEOs and politicians.

They should go first tbh, but the system we've allowed them to create mean they'll go last. The same is true of mass redundancies etc. And even when they do go there's golden handshakes/parachutes etc involved. No real skills apart from going to business school and having the right social circle, most of em.

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