The AI booster dream is that of job erasure. Even if one 'put AI into everything' fanatic gets her job now, it'll be ultimately meaningless because their ideology is that of permitting our irrelevance as well as ceding jobs and livelihoods to the people who own the profits from AI.
Speak for yourself. As an AI enthusiast and senior developer, my dream is to remove the many tedious tasks from the software engineering job. "Irrelevance" is the kind of extrapolation from the skeptics that we've been hearing since the dawn of computing.
my dream is to remove the many tedious tasks from the software engineering job
Which doesn't go against what I said, it's just an extremely micro-scale view that ignores everyone else also owning the same tooling. The first consequence of that is everyone's efficiency increasing and regular devs being left to deal with the new tedious parts of troubleshooting AIs, re-railing projects and hours of higher-level debugging. You will not be freed up to do the fun things, you will still work 8 hour days and the efficiency gained will just be a free bonus for your employer. The second consequence is job displacement, once there is enough automation to not require the current number of developers, you will not care about doing a tedious job, but just being able to do any job.
"Irrelevance" is the kind of extrapolation from the skeptics that we've been hearing since the dawn of computing.
It is literally what the leaders of the AI movement and the owners of the biggest AI labs are pushing. There has never been a time when businesses flaunted being able to cause such colossal society-wide job losses across many industries before this. This is not fear-mongering, I'm just listening to their promises.
What you said are just predictions. My personal experience is very different. AI is removing a lot of tedium from coding right now and is freeing my time to do more interesting things than writing tests, for instance - more time spent on design and architecture. This isn't a prediction, it's my reality today, as well as many friends in the industry.
I don't question your point that companies will just start keep pushing workers harder. In that case, it's business as usual and will work like all innovations that save time, the computer included.
Job displacement is a real possibility, but it comes with any new technology. Some of them displace jobs quickly, others not so much. AI will likely be a major job displacer and many people will have to adapt. Just like in the past, trying to slow down the technology won't work because the people in power want those savings. Again, I think this is the unfortunate "business as usual" of technological evolution. I have empathy for those who will be affected, but I also think of the flipside: we can create things that will improve people's lives like we did with many other job-displacing innovations.
About your last paragraph, of course they are saying that. They want US$2 trillion IPOs.
Comments
The AI booster dream is that of job erasure. Even if one 'put AI into everything' fanatic gets her job now, it'll be ultimately meaningless because their ideology is that of permitting our irrelevance as well as ceding jobs and livelihoods to the people who own the profits from AI.
Speak for yourself. As an AI enthusiast and senior developer, my dream is to remove the many tedious tasks from the software engineering job. "Irrelevance" is the kind of extrapolation from the skeptics that we've been hearing since the dawn of computing.
Which doesn't go against what I said, it's just an extremely micro-scale view that ignores everyone else also owning the same tooling. The first consequence of that is everyone's efficiency increasing and regular devs being left to deal with the new tedious parts of troubleshooting AIs, re-railing projects and hours of higher-level debugging. You will not be freed up to do the fun things, you will still work 8 hour days and the efficiency gained will just be a free bonus for your employer. The second consequence is job displacement, once there is enough automation to not require the current number of developers, you will not care about doing a tedious job, but just being able to do any job.
It is literally what the leaders of the AI movement and the owners of the biggest AI labs are pushing. There has never been a time when businesses flaunted being able to cause such colossal society-wide job losses across many industries before this. This is not fear-mongering, I'm just listening to their promises.
What you said are just predictions. My personal experience is very different. AI is removing a lot of tedium from coding right now and is freeing my time to do more interesting things than writing tests, for instance - more time spent on design and architecture. This isn't a prediction, it's my reality today, as well as many friends in the industry.
I don't question your point that companies will just start keep pushing workers harder. In that case, it's business as usual and will work like all innovations that save time, the computer included.
Job displacement is a real possibility, but it comes with any new technology. Some of them displace jobs quickly, others not so much. AI will likely be a major job displacer and many people will have to adapt. Just like in the past, trying to slow down the technology won't work because the people in power want those savings. Again, I think this is the unfortunate "business as usual" of technological evolution. I have empathy for those who will be affected, but I also think of the flipside: we can create things that will improve people's lives like we did with many other job-displacing innovations.
About your last paragraph, of course they are saying that. They want US$2 trillion IPOs.
Altman's flipped - "OpenAI's Altman says AI unlikely to lead to 'jobs apocalypse'" https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...