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> You don't think anyone designs software? It just magically appears?

Do you actually write software for money?

Most commercial software is never designed, it evolves, over the course of repeated "agile" "sprints". Every two weeks, someone hacks together something that kinda-sorta works and then that is released.

Eventually (often many years later) the thing becomes so complex and unwieldy that it's impossible to add any more features, so someone gets angry, throws it away, and starts again growing a new monster.

Careful, if they ban your Google account, they might ban you from everything: gmail, google drive, adwords, app engine, youtube, voice, android...

I don't think "software engineering" is a real thing. So-called software "engineers" do not practice engineering in the way that a mechanical engineer or a civil engineer does. Consider: How often do bridges collapse? How often do elevators plunge to their doom? How often does some critical piece of software utterly fail? [0]

> They simply pass messages back and forth.

So you claim. We're about to conduct a real-life experiment to see which is more valuable: passing messages back and forth to the computer, or passing messages back and forth to the customer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...

For the record, I don't think AI is likely to replace those parts of the work, at least not in the near term (15-20 years). But at many companies, the people interfacing with stakeholders or users — deciding what problems need solving and how to solve them — are product owners or project managers, not software engineers.

I think there will be a convergence where AI enables more POs to create software directly, and more SEs move up the value chain to work on product-level problem solving.

I think the difference is the Luddites weren't happily designing and building innovative new looms for 50 years and now suddenly surprised-Pikachu that the automated-loom-maker has come for them.

What did you think "disruption" meant? Vibes, papers, new Javascript frameworks?

> If software engineering goes the way of the dodo, I suspect most other white collar jobs are also displaced (anything done entirely on the computer, really).

Strongly disagree with this. In contrast to most jobs, software engineering is unusually self-contained, with short feedback loops and immediate validation. You (or Claude) implements the feature, you run the tests, you fix the bugs.

Most white collar jobs are nothing like this: lawyers have to prepare briefs (AI can help here) but they have to file briefs, they have to wait weeks or months for rulings, they have to argue in court. Marketing execs might spend millions preparing a new campaign, launch it for the holiday season, and it has to be right the first time. Most white collar work involves judgement, anticipation, and ambiguity in a way that software doesn't.

Software lets you guess-and-check over and over again until it works.

Pharmacy techs work regular hours.

Good pay, low barrier to entry, pleasant. Pick two.

If you're unemployed, you won't need to pay 2 grand/month for someone else to watch your children, and you don't have to pay San Francisco rents if you're not working there.

Waiter at a fancy restaurant.

You don't have any buffer at all? You're spent your entire inflated software developer salary for the entire time you've had it?

There are many fast-track teaching certification programs for people who already have a university degree https://tntpteachingfellows.org/

Healthcare is another growing field that's easy to get into with only 1- or 2-year certification programs for some positions.

> Humans ourselves are a technology.

Grim.

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...

It's okay, I'll just use AI to vibengineer a viral basilisk that only targets those who violate the NAP.

Yes, most of the work many people do is virtually meaningless.

Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist? Does your work contribute anything to yourself or other humans around you?

Or do you get paid a lot of money to sit in an office and update JIRA tickets about tracking ad conversions and increasing engagement OKRs?

Presumably you are a human, not a horse, yes? Presumably there is more to your life than dragging around carts all day every day?

HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.

Intuitively I think we all understand that the % of jobs not doable by steam and iron approaches 0 over time.

If they surface after the IPO, everyone who matters will have already gotten paid.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/07/25/spacexs-performanc...

But does crazy speedup of tasks actually yield more productivity? Or does it yield greater numbers of pointless tasks?

Anecdotally, I've seen management using AI to produce more and more flashy looking dashboards and interactive displays of various metrics. Will this help our bottom line?

How does this compare to Persona? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona

Yes I was referring to Altman's "WorldCoin" eyeball-scanning scheme.

Better than the eyeball-scanning ghouls.

Well, good luck with that. Consider reading When Prophecy Fails to steel yourself for the possibility that 2036 ends up largely the same as 2026, only with more spam and surveillance.

> Is there any other way to interpret this?

Sure: Destructive actions have a lower bar than constructive ones.

My company doesn't pay me millions, but I were motivated to do so, I could probably cost my company millions. Similar principle here: regardless of whether the CEO is any good, simply by virtue of their position they can tank the stock by making wild moves that undermine confidence.

Imagine a generic human blob CEO with minimal VORP[0], you could swap him out with anyone else in the organisation and get the same results. But if he gets on twitter and announces, "This company is trash and I'm leaving this trash fire," he's going to cost them millions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player

I could point out that that as far as economy-impacting labor goes, it's almost all machines already today. At least in the developed world, few people do any kind of work that isn't at least partially mechanized. You don't see it because lawnmowers and spreadsheets are "normal" machines in your mind.

You're making the "this time it's different" case that AI will be categorically different from every other form of labor-saving automation that's come before it. I work with these models every day and I'm not buying it.

Now you're already hedging and narrowing your claims: "almost" none, "some" physical" labor. For someone who claims to be willing to stake his whole bank account, you're not that confident.

Why do you think restaurants with waiters keep opening when the automat has existed since 1895? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quisisana

You are also probably unfamiliar with the history of the sewing machine and its impact on society. As AI has already poisoned search engines, here's an AI slop overview that hits some of the main points: https://sciencepedia.blog/sewing-machine-societal-importance

> I kind of am skeptical of the notion that there are any tech people who have not always held similar beliefs

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your totally-not-in-an-insular cult members.

A thousand years is a long time, and the world will be so different that it's hard to make any concrete predictions. But yes, if I had to wager, I'd bet that what humans conceive of as "labor" in 3026 will still be whatever difficult or annoying bits are done by humans.

In 1026 nearly all labor was agricultural labor. If you told a Roman peasant that magical self-driving contraptions could sow and reap the fields, he might wonder what could possibly be left for humans to do in such a world. And yet, here we are, and I still have to update JIRA tickets.

For my myself, I expect AI to prove a more transformative technology than Docker but less transformative than the sewing machine.

If you all believe in the same prophecy and hang out at the same orgies together, I'm willing to call that a "cult", at least in the colloquial sense.

I'm not sure how else we are to interpret the behavior of the AI doomers & the AI developers (who are frequently the same people)

You mean the sandbox that wasn't airgapped from the public internet? The one that wasn't even a separate VM? The one that was barely a chroot? That sandbox?

There was a NYT piece about this recently. They are believers in a millennialist cult in which the arrival of an omnipotent machine-god is thought inevitable, and the only question is whether it will be "aligned" (good) or "misaligned" (evil).

They are the good heroes racing to make sure they bring forth the Aligned God because if they fail, surely the bad people will raise the Misaligned Devil.

Ref w/gift link https://x.com/sapinker/status/2096236079477096630