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Comment by drivebyhooting | Hacker News Reader

Nobody seems to care about AI automating coders out of a job.

If anyone can just prompt all their basic “information needs” however how sloppy, then what remains of the economy? Health care, child care, handyman?

Most people won’t even pay for ad free YouTube. I don’t think any software business can survive AI as a substitute good even if it’s inferior (and it might not be).

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I've been automating myself out of a job as long as I've been a coder, which has become a considerable span of time; that is my job.

same here, been automating my work for 40 years starting with a data entry job I had in 1994 as an office temp, wrote a C program to do the whole thing for me, hung out on IRC all day where I made connections to get my first dot-com job

somehow I still keep having work to do!

> Nobody seems to care about AI automating coders out of a job.

Have people ever really broadly cared about the IT professionals behind their devices?

IT professionals have been automating people out of jobs for years. Why would anyone worry about them?

Wait, were we the bad guys all this time by making things objectively better?

Meanwhile housing, health care, food, energy, and things like college all get more expensive while wages are stagnant (and falling when inflation adjusted). Now on top of that we toss a new jobs disrupting technology into the mix.

You’re making a lot of things objectively better, but none of them are the essentials that people need.

I’m not saying it’s bad to make AI bots or video games or network apps. I’m saying that the blanket statement “we make things better” is oblivious to a lot of realities.

AI is making things objectively better too :)

It's making things objectively worse for the vast majority of humans. It only appears better for an extremely thin minority of people using it.

After decades of enshitification, I have trouble reading this as "objectively better for those made wealthy by working in or investing in tech."

This attitude is why society has turned on the tech bros.

Yes, this is why no one really feels sorry about the LLM code situation other than other coders. Believe it or not, before the current iteration of LLMs(around 2015-2020), coders were still gloating about how they were going to replace other professional jobs (law, medicine, dentists, finance, etc.) in due time, and they and researchers were going to be the only people with white-collar jobs. There is a delicious irony of how it all ended up shaking out.

what sort of automation are we talking about?

Nope, because there's always been an executive to shaft said engineers out of success. But they went to business school, so I guess what's yours is theirs. I think that's biz 101.

> If anyone can just prompt all their basic “information needs” however how sloppy, then what remains of the economy? Health care, child care, handyman?

That kinda describes a lot of “not the USA” developed countries since quite some time.

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