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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

I’m lost when I read these sort of comment chains. Free Gemini works just fine for me. Maybe it’s because I don’t use it for programming? How many programmers really exist out there? Surely it can’t support the weight of investment that exists in AI already. It’s just such a small pool of the human race.

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First, they come for the programmers, and next the mathematicians. Then it will be the biologists, lawyers and doctors. Humanities will stake it out a little bit longer because AI isn’t human, but AI companies would be dammed if they don’t try. Eventually, with advancements in robotics, stabs at increasingly more physical sciences will also be attempted. Eventually, AI will have its hand in the pie of all knowledge work, if it is possible. Not to mention all the roles like tech support and customer service. Once they have gotten as far as they think they can go, they will try to turn up the prices. However, they might struggle to do so as models are becoming a commodity. This is why they are arguing for regulation and stating that only they can tame these beasts.

I think as long as we have open weighted models there will always be competition. Sure Anthropic could raise their prices but it wont take long for someone else to undercut them. The quality may not be as good but people would probably prefer to pay 1% of the cost for 75% of the quality.

There's plenty of competition. Of course, Anthropic can raise their own prices, but people will just switch. They've done that in the past, when other companies had better offers.

> First, they come for the programmers, and next the mathematicians. Then it will be the biologists, lawyers and doctors. [...] Eventually, with advancements in robotics, stabs at increasingly more physical sciences will also be attempted. Eventually, AI will have its hand in the pie of all knowledge work, if it is possible.

You seem to think raising productivity is a bad thing?

> Humanities will stake it out a little bit longer because AI isn’t human, [...]

This is really silly. Many languages other than English don't use related words to describe 'humans' and 'humanities'. Will it be easier in those languages? Should we rename mathematics to 'humathematics' or so, to make it harder for AI to take over?

> You seem to think raising productivity is a bad thing?

Higher productivity means very little to people whose labor plummets in value over the course of a couple of years. One day they won't be needed anymore, maybe that's good for you.

Ever since at least the industrial revolution we had this same song and dance play out again and again. Yet, unemployment rates around the world are the world are fairly steady (and vary mostly in line with how business-friendly local regulations and taxes are, and so far not much with the current state of technology).

I'm a software developer by trade. I welcome the coming brave new world in which machines can do all the software.

At the moment, they ain't quite there yet, alas.

With that argument we'd all be unemployed ever since agriculture (which 90% of the populace was working in a few hundred years ago) was invaded by machines. Turns out, people get other stuff to do and are as overworked as ever.

Baristas are my favoured example.

People often bring up something like "oh, someone will need to maintain the robots that just took your job." But that's seldom where the new jobs are, at least not en masse: the whole point of automation is to use less labour on the task in aggregate afterwards.

Baristas making overpriced fancy coffee is something the western world started to want to afford in the 1990s and 2000s, because we were getting rich enough thanks to lots of automation and technological progress in other areas. Coffee-making itself hadn't see much progress.

The new jobs can be anywhere in the economy, it doesn't have anything to do with the jobs that got automated or replaced.

US has 1.4-4.4M programmers and devops, but considering they are more costly than many other professions, it’s quite meaningful to economy. Plus now you have non programmers doing agentic programming to speedup their work - i know nondev project managers, financial advisors, marketers and lawyers rolling their own mini apps now.

Also even if your Gemini is giving you nonprogramming output, underneath the model is most likely generating code for certain tasks.

> How many programmers really exist out there? Surely it can’t support the weight of investment that exists in AI already. It’s just such a small pool of the human race

I dont consider myself a programmer but use LLMs almost exclusively for coding.

The number of people able to create useful software today is much much larger than it used to be and arguably a minority of these people are/were "programmers"

Why did this get downvotes? :o

Free Gemini has at least one subtle mistake on every scientific or programming task I ask it. It's usually in the right ballpark but I guess I do stuff outside its training locus.

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