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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don't think people see automation per se as a negative. Rather, they are skeptical of our ability to restructure our society, and fear the social impact of automation in that context.

I mean, what happens when AI replaces programmers? When a designer can "write a program" just by telling a computer in natural language what he wants to do? Not only will most of HN be out of work, but many of our hobbies will be irrelevant. Who will read a blog post about Rust making it easier to write correct concurrent software when some AI is going to handle that much better than a human ever could?

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Sure, but the focus should be on how to restructure society as opposed to bemoan automation. It's worth noting that automation of jobs has been going on for a long time now, and nobody would want to go back to doing any of them.

> and nobody would want to go back to doing any of them.

there are what, 7 billion people on earth. there is probably somebody who would want to go back to society of manual labor.

I think there is a real difference between an automated loom replacing humans for one particular task, and a highly dexterous robot that can replace humans for any task requiring manual manipulation.

> and nobody would want to go back to doing any of them.

I'm sure at some point in the recent past you could have found some formerly employed factory workers who would disagree. It's true, jobs replaced by automation tend to be jobs that people would rather not do, but the loss of employment itself is a different matter. A crappy job is better than no job at all.

Again, my point is that it's the fault of the society for not providing a good transition path as opposed to the automation itself.

Major restructurings of society tend to evoke violent resistance in some sectors.

I'll be making a prediction here. Coders will be mostly replaced by AIs before automated cars will have become a mainstream.

I make the opposite prediction. I think there will be more coding jobs in 20 years than there are today.

Yes. And these jobs will be taken by AIs.

A lot can happen in 20 years and I expect AI to be involved in programming as robots are involved in automotive manufacturing. I think programming is one of the harder jobs to completely replace with machines.

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