2 karma · joined January 4, 2022
Farmers couldn't be replaced by low skill labor because they are low skill.
Farmer didn't stop existing, but we went from 80% of the population farming is to 1-10%. If farming automation had happened in 1800 when 80% of the workforce was working in agriculture, it'd have been a cataclysm.
I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers, mainly offset by their high salaries. Wait and see once vibecoding becomes the new norm.
And for software engineers, yeah, automation will wreck their jobs and their paychecks because software engineering's higher speed limit in efficiency is the speed of light, not a tractor's.
A very interesting corollary is that the first AGIs might be way better thinkers than humans by default because of how they can seamlessly integrate new programs into their cognition in a perfect symbiosis with computers.
If only we could send all these money obsessed intermediaries & creators to an island somewhere, left to scalp & scam & plagiarize each other out.