It’s also silly to try predicting the future 5 years from now, IMO. Historically progress is very unpredictable. It often plateaus when you least expect it.
It’s good to be cautious and not in denial, but i usually ignore people who talk so authoritatively about the future. It’s just a waste of time. Everyone thinks they are right.
My recommendation is have a very generous emergency fund and do your best to be effective at work. That’s the only thing you can control and the only thing that matters.
I'm reading Maintenance of Everything and it has a section about the switch from artisan-crafted weapons to making uniform parts that feels comparable to this.
French military had pioneered a way to make fully interchangeable weapon parts, but the French public fought back in fear of the jobs of the artisans who used to hand-make weapons. Over the next 20 years they completely lost their edge on the battlefield, nothing could be repaired in the field. Other countries embraced the change, could repair anything in the field with cheap and precise spare parts, and soon fostered in the industrial revolution.
The artisans stopped being people who made weapons, the artisans became people who made machines that made weapons.
> The artisans stopped being people who made weapons, the artisans became people who made machines that made weapons.
Although many French artisans become unemployed because British industrial productivity made them uncompetitive. It was one of the causes of the French Revolution.
What would things look like to make someone with currently ~10 years of experience unemployable?
It's possible the job might change drastically, but I'm struggling to think of any scenario that doesn't also put most white collar professions out of work alongside me, and I don't think that's worth worrying about
Unemployable is a charged word. A lot of outdated professions still have professionals. There are still professional horse drawn carriages.
If the AI performance gains are 50% improvement, and companies decide they rather cut costs and pocket the difference, could be due to many factors, that leaves millions out of a job. And those performance gains are coming for many white collar jobs. I guess your premise is mass unemployment is not worth worrying about, so okay then.
Marginal changes in productivity can make huge impacts to industries employment rates.
People still pay thousands of dollars for wedding photographers even though everyone at the wedding also has a camera and many are taking their own pictures.
I am not a software engineer and it seems to me if someone has experience as a software engineer before LLMs, they have skills no one will really be able to acquire again in the same way.
I would expect current software engineers to eat the entire non-customer facing back office in the next ten years.
> People still pay thousands of dollars for wedding photographers even though everyone at the wedding also has a camera and many are taking their own pictures.
Wedding photography used to be the lowest in the pecking order of professional photography. Now all the photojournalists, travel magazine and corporate events photographers are as good as extinct. Even the arts market for photography been on decline for years.
> I guess your premise is mass unemployment is not worth worrying about, so okay then
My point wasn't that it's not a big deal. My point there is that if AI ends up taking a large % of white collar work you're going to have a huge portion of the population in the same boat. Maybe an overly optimistic view but that'll end up forcing change through politics
..I also think this is a ridiculously low % chance of happening and it would take something close to AGI to bring about. I don't know how you can use AI regularly and think we're anywhere close to that
Contracting an incurable illness that renders me blind and thus unable to work is just as likely and not something I spend time worrying about
> Marginal changes in productivity can make huge impacts to industries employment rates
Maybe? We also have Jevon's paradox. Software is incredibly expensive to build right now - how many more applications for it can people find if the cost halves?
> I'm struggling to think of any scenario that doesn't also put most white collar professions out of work alongside me
You don't need to be out of a job to struggle. Just for your pay to remain the same (or lower), for your work conditions to degrade (you think jQuery spaguetti was a mess? good luck with AI spaguetti slop) or for competition to increase because now most of the devving involves tedious fixing of AI code and the actual programming heavy jobs are as fought for as dev roles at Google/Jane Street/etc.
Devving isn't going anywhere but just like you don't punch cards anymore, you shouldn't expect your role in the coming decades to be the same as the 90s-25s period.
