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The last time my family was replaced by technology

339 points · 641 comments · megalomanu

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anotha_one · 1790774790 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
hn9zmdcaou · 1790774883 · focus · HN ↗
My grandad ran a small letterpress shop and when phototypesetting came in he didn't retrain, he just did smaller and smaller jobs until it was wedding invitations.
1. anotha_one · 1790775073 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
2. rayiner · 1790775522 · focus · HN ↗
  “Retraining” is mostly a myth. Former skilled workers just downgrade to service jobs, pushing out younger, less skilled workers in the process.
  The NYT touched on this issue in a podcast about NAFTA: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/podcasts/the-daily/american-politics-trade.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/podcasts/the-daily/americ.... AI is going to be NAFTA on steroids. Politicians will be able to point to growing top-like GDP to say it was a good thing. But it’s going to brutally hit a lot of people and most of those folks will never regain a secure economic footing.
  1. bluGill · 1790793878 · focus · HN ↗
    Some skilled workers retrained. Many of them refused to learn.
    Don't be the old dog who can't learn new tricks.
    11101010010001 · 1790795332 · focus · HN ↗
    Most of the time, you just have to learn what makes the new trick the same as the old trick.
    pessimizer · 1790800538 · focus · HN ↗
    Retraining for typesetters meant becoming "prepress" guys, and going from the wide array of tools and hand skills they used to need to Photoshop, Illustrator, and digital imposers and plates. In the process, the job went from a middle-class job to a minimum-wage job, and the bosses who used to respect you (after the union that used to protect you disappeared) became fly-by-night scumbags who treated you like dirt.
    As far as I can tell, the entire business for someone who was good at running a press is fancy wedding invitations and business cards with raised type. I am speaking as someone who waltzed into (and later out of) prepress because I knew the digital tools, made no money, and talked with those guys a lot about the past. This discussion would be while we were printing wedding invitations and fancy business cards.
    It's simply a different, low-status job now. Retraining is no different than training the first time, because if you want to make a living you either have to somehow be better than the people who started with the new tools (and the new tools don't require as many people) and maybe get into printing packaging or manuals, or you need to do something completely different, and compete with people just starting their careers.
    Going to college again is not a trivial thing. The mortgage will still be due.
    bluGill · 1790808502 · focus · HN ↗
    Right, retraining often means a major switch. I don't want to go back to college either...
    archagon · 1790800941 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd like to think that the work I'm doing is more than just a dog trick.
    Actually, I feel really sorry for the engineers who clearly do denigrate their own abilities to such an extent. Please: have some self-respect.
zug_zug · 1790775034 · focus · HN ↗
And my great great grandpa thought horses would lose all their jobs to cars. And they all did and it was never the same again.
There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
1. ForHackernews · 1790775204 · focus · HN ↗
  Intuitively I think we all understand that the % of jobs not doable by steam and iron approaches 0 over time.
  1. bluefirebrand · 1790790807 · focus · HN ↗
    Give us a single example of a job that you believe can never be done by robots or AI.
    chasd00 · 1790795080 · focus · HN ↗
    reality tv star. I think AI/robotics would have a hard time being that irrational and illogical consistently.
    robwayne · 1790808702 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel like Neuro-sama is essentially already that, but for the Twitch / YT crowd instead of television. It's trivial to train a model to maximize engagement (as one can see _gestures broadly_), so I'm sure if we can get robots looking nice and human, we'll have Futurama's _All My Circuits_ in no time.
    Though I guess there was a token human on that show, so maybe you're right!
    ForHackernews · 1790797851 · focus · HN ↗
    Waiter at a fancy restaurant.
    fragmede · 1790798382 · focus · HN ↗
    The last job is going to be hairdresser, because billionaires have wives (not to assume all billionaires are men), and those wives will want a human to gossip to.
2. Pet_Ant · 1790775286 · focus · HN ↗
  Worse, it was just almost all horses. There are a few in Central Park pulling tourists and that’s enough for the Pollyanna’s to point to and go “See! We’ll be fine!”
  1. ForHackernews · 1790775417 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    swid · 1790775953 · focus · HN ↗
    > the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
    Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
    ForHackernews · 1790776172 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    0c3ca83 · 1790776589 · focus · HN ↗
    > Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist?
    We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
    I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
    layla5alive · 1790778086 · focus · HN ↗
    LLMs have much better cognitive empathy than most humans have limbic+cognitive empathy - the therapists will also be automated - friction like licensing bodies will slow it down but not stop it.
    demilicious · 1790792200 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m not sure how to respond to this before I know if it’s satire or not?
    foobar10000 · 1790795793 · focus · HN ↗
    Unfortunately not satire - modern models can be trained to be better than humans in recognizing emotions straight off camera.
    Tanjreeve · 1790837131 · focus · HN ↗
    That is not even 1% of what therapists do. Let alone medical ones/psychiatrists.
    queenkjuul · 1790872605 · focus · HN ↗
    People like that always have such dismal opinions about what people actually do, it's insane
    andersonpico · 1790855203 · focus · HN ↗
    recognizing emotion is not the main thing for therapy, having a human on the other side is the only essential
    InfiniteAscent · 1790849499 · focus · HN ↗
    You need one if you think engineers have automated the artists.
    layla5alive · 1790776065 · focus · HN ↗
    Because the capitalists have very big guns and a monopoly on violence.
    Its very easy to imagine a better world.
    Its much harder to imagine the Scrooges in power willfully giving it up so that we can build that better world.
    ForHackernews · 1790776331 · focus · HN ↗
    It's okay, I'll just use AI to vibengineer a viral basilisk that only targets those who violate the NAP.
    AnimalMuppet · 1790776572 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not just the Scrooges in power. Previous attempts to actually make a better world often made a worse one, and not just because of capitalist opposition.
    layla5alive · 1790778356 · focus · HN ↗
    If you mean attempts like centralized communism - absolutely - and the failure mode should have been obvious from human nature: centralizing great power incentivizes corruption.
    We don't fully know the failure modes of every alternative yet, but that doesn't mean powerful central governments + capitalism is the best alternative.
    ipsod · 1790780141 · focus · HN ↗
    Interestingly, the Amish shape their lives around this sort of thing. With any technology, they ask themselves, "Does this make us dependent?" If the answer is yes, they refuse it.
    bluGill · 1790793633 · focus · HN ↗
    They are more and more adopting modern technology. And where they haven't directly they have found ways to use it and be just as dependent while appearing to not. Go visit one and you discover they want to borrow your phone to buy things from Amazon...
    ipsod · 1790795153 · focus · HN ↗
    As it turns out, even the Amish "live in a society".
    0c3ca83 · 1790776427 · focus · HN ↗
    If you're not economically useful, what pressure would you be able to bring against the government if it does things you don't like? Keep in mind that we're also automating the police force.
    Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested.
    TFNA · 1790776847 · focus · HN ↗
    This is the Chinese century, and even if China charts a somewhat different course than Western capitalism, it still believes that human beings should spend most of their days in some employment, even if it is just makework. A population with most leisure time is viewed as very threatening to social stability. I can see that model being exported to the rest of the world far more than I can imagine your utopia.
    someonebaggy · 1790777394 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you got a citation that the Chinese government believes in makework?
    TFNA · 1790778068 · focus · HN ↗
    The Chinese social-safety net, for individuals not covered by unemployment insurance, is strongly centered around public sector jobs (公益性岗位) that, if you see them in practice, are often plainly makework: the essence of the work has been mechanized/automated, but human beings will still be directed to be somewhere all day and look busy. There is no paying those people a dole while they stay home like in sone other countries.
    trollbridge · 1790801325 · focus · HN ↗
    Many of these jobs are things that improve quality of life for everyone else, too, like street beautification programmes. They do this alongside coming up with robotic means to also sweep streets, but yes, they find ways to hire people to just "make this place look nicer".
    fragmede · 1790778940 · focus · HN ↗
    Chinese State Council: 2026 Employment Priority Strategy
    <a href="http://big5.www.gov.cn/gate/big5/www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/202606/content_7072481.htm" rel="nofollow">http://big5.www.gov.cn/gate/big5/www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/...
    generic92034 · 1790840915 · focus · HN ↗
    Looking at the age structure of the Chinese population I have doubts that it will be "their century".
    sceptic123 · 1790781606 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn't the end of the humanity also the end of capitalism?
    sellmesoap · 1790790848 · focus · HN ↗
    It'll turn into some starwars robot slave trading, Capitalism will be fine!
    layer8 · 1790790908 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you expect competing AIs to give up on private ownership of the means of production and using them for profit?
    kbelder · 1790793854 · focus · HN ↗
    And vice versa.
    gattr · 1790795099 · focus · HN ↗
    Not necessarily! In "Saturn's Children" by Stross, humanity managed to wipe itself out, but post-humans (evolved from former, ahem, entertainment androids) are doing just fine across the Solar System. There's a plot point where one of them discovers that some corporation back on Earth inherited full property rights to her body due to an old pre-human-extinction EULA, and she'll be recycled for parts if she ever sets foot in their jurisdiction (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
    alastairr · 1790784181 · focus · HN ↗
    > HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
    That's an underrated comment! Totally agree. So so much of discussion on this topic sort of assumes business as usual (both literally and figuratively) and that AI quickly diffuses through the economy, sucking up all economically useful activity, with humans falling by the wayside as inevitable collateral damage.
    There's a failure of imagination taking place here that there's no other outcome. Capitalism is an evolved solution to how human community works, but is not inevitable.
    pixl97 · 1790792072 · focus · HN ↗
    Massive changes in technology pretty much always involve wars and a reshuffling of power. This doesn't have much to do with capitalism at all. It's more of a question of how are those that currently have power going to adjust. In the case of technology we quite often see this end up with a concentration of power.
    How to maintain stability in a world filled with greedy people in power that don't want to give up a single penny is a good question to ask at this point.
    QDwQ1 · 1790799581 · focus · HN ↗
    See also: Russia, 1917
    bluefirebrand · 1790790421 · focus · HN ↗
    > HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism
    HN is literally owned and operated by venture capitalists why are you surprised by this.
    runarberg · 1790798812 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    fodkodrasz · 1790801744 · focus · HN ↗
    I guess op wasn't surprised, just called out for those who should maybe consider this angle of the situation also.
    harimau777 · 1790791334 · focus · HN ↗
    What's your proposal for ending capitalism in our working lifetimes?
    pixl97 · 1790792575 · focus · HN ↗
    Explain a world in which capitalism ends without a fight?
    carlosjobim · 1790795040 · focus · HN ↗
    It will happen. Communism ended without a fight.
    pmontra · 1790796290 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a very loose definition of feudalism. However if you take in account nepotism and bribery, which are more and more widespread around the world, maybe we get close to that exchange of land for loyalty that was the basis of feudalism.
    fodkodrasz · 1790795158 · focus · HN ↗
    The world where humanity ends without a fight due to capitalism "winning"...
    Telaneo · 1790797285 · focus · HN ↗
    Who said it needed to happen without a fight?
    runarberg · 1790798622 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    selimthegrim · 1790810015 · focus · HN ↗
    This may shock you but there are still in fact humans who drag around carts every day
    duskdozer · 1790856573 · focus · HN ↗
    Is it really that crazy though? Or is it an acknowledgement that the people in power would think like Peter Thiel and if given the choice between ending capitalism or ending humanity, would pick ending humanity?
  2. bluGill · 1790793441 · focus · HN ↗
    Horses where the plaything of the rich. Farmers were using oxen not horses for the most part. However the modern plow (invented in the mid 1830s - John Deere being the best known inventor, but others were inventing them about the same time) needed the faster speed of a horse to work well, but if the previous farming technology worked for you then oxen (or donkeys ... - there are several other work animals used in different areas for farming) were better.
    There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.
    Game_Ender · 1790794456 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you have a citation for the horse number? My research [0] shows we have a 1/5 out peak number in ~1900 and our population has 5x since then. This means per capita horses in the country is down 96%, while absolute count is down 80%. Both are huge numbers.
    0 - <a href="https://datapaddock.com/usda-horse-total-1850-2012/" rel="nofollow">https://datapaddock.com/usda-horse-total-1850-2012/
    pfdietz · 1790796234 · focus · HN ↗
    The page you linked doesn't count recreational horses.
    Game_Ender · 1790811677 · focus · HN ↗
    Good call! They have info on general population which shows about double the number of horses I originally thought (at least in 2016), and declining at a good clip of 10%+/decade) . So drop is still large but just a bit smaller.
    The general point is before cars horses were used a lot, entire industries were based around them and our now gone. The toy factor does not compensate because of cost and inconvenience of owning a horse.
    0 - <a href="https://datapaddock.com/" rel="nofollow">https://datapaddock.com/
  3. pfdietz · 1790796177 · focus · HN ↗
    The number of horses in the US is down by about a factor of 3 from the peak in 1920. They're mostly recreational now though.
3. plastic-enjoyer · 1790775674 · focus · HN ↗
  >There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
  Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.
  1. layla5alive · 1790778660 · focus · HN ↗
    It is clear that at the limit, machines will be more capable in nearly every way. I suppose there might be some room for a few exceptions like working around big electromagnets that machines can't get close to... Does that sound great? Is there something else you had in mind which would be reserved for humans and fulfilling?
4. DoctorDabadedoo · 1790775744 · focus · HN ↗
  As someone that works in robotics/automation, it pains me to see people in creative/office verticals getting all the shit with AI these days while hard labor positions, the one that everyone could be doing a bit less because they take a toll on you (working the fields, farms, hazardous tasks) remain pretty much the same.
  1. AnimalMuppet · 1790776467 · focus · HN ↗
    If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.
    We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
    fragmede · 1790778711 · focus · HN ↗
    How long do you give it?
    sceptic123 · 1790781559 · focus · HN ↗
    We're waiting for the point that replacing the humans is the cheaper option. Not sure that robot plumbers are in our near future.
    fragmede · 1790781649 · focus · HN ↗
    What's your definition of "near future"? 3 months? 1 year? 5? 10? 50? 100?
    layer8 · 1790790651 · focus · HN ↗
    Not the other commenter, but we won’t have robot plumbers in 10 years. Maybe in 50.
    AnimalMuppet · 1790782755 · focus · HN ↗
    To the start of it? Maybe two years?
    To the end of it? Maybe 40?
    keeda · 1790785990 · focus · HN ↗
    I looked into this (or rather, had Google Deep Research do a 30-page report on it!) and it's still a very long way off. So long, that the AI, or any reference it found, would not even give me a rough timeline, but I suspect it is multiple decades away. The main blocker is a very severe crunch in the supply chain of critical materials, mostly rare earth elements which are essential to make those high power density + high precision motors feasibly.
    Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.
    This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.
    All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.
    Borealid · 1790794352 · focus · HN ↗
    That doesn't make intuitive sense to me.
    First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be.
    If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.
    AnimalMuppet · 1790799647 · focus · HN ↗
    > If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear
    That totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.
    Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it significantly affect the economics.
    ploxiln · 1790801062 · focus · HN ↗
    Mining is not limited by human labor, we already use huge machines (and some robots) controlled by a few humans. The limitations are investment in huge machines and processing plants, and regulations on where/how you can mine/process.
    You can't just have a robot start mining/processing rare earths, anywhere in the country. You need permits, and a lot of money. I guess that didn't stop AI companies ... but there isn't an "infinite" novelty/hype premium for rare-earths, like there is for LLMs.
    carlosjobim · 1790794861 · focus · HN ↗
    Robots have been used in industry for decades already. Most jobs won't be worth investing in the robot doing it, since human labour is cheaper than the capital investment.
  2. fl4regun · 1790795668 · focus · HN ↗
    don't we already have lots of machines that do things like this though? Even if its human operated: excavators, combines, tractors, and other heavy machinery have reduced the physical burden involved in sustaining large societies tremendously.
    asdff · 1790801854 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes there are fewer hands on the job site but there are still hands at all. This is increasingly becoming not the case in the future. The goal is to fully eliminate all hands and all minds. There will be no more sponges of newly available labor. Then what happens exactly no one really knows or even wants to meaningfully try to answer, because the implications are too disturbing.
  3. jawilson2 · 1790798514 · focus · HN ↗
    I would agree with you, if we taxed the ever-living fuck out of AI companies to enable UBI, so that the people replaced with robots did not end up homeless.
    trollbridge · 1790801194 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, first these AI companies would have to turn a profit.
    eloisius · 1790824269 · focus · HN ↗
    Ideologically I don't consider myself to be a communist or even leftist, so I'm confused by my own reaction as well, but maybe mandatory joint-stock where the government takes a large chunk of equity of any AI enterprise off the bat and manages it like a sovereign wealth fund is the right answer.
    trollbridge · 1790861736 · focus · HN ↗
    No thanks. The last thing I want is the government with even more motivation to shove AI into everything in order to make it "profitable".
5. skybrian · 1790776333 · focus · HN ↗
  In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. (Unless something drastic changes.) That means how long it will take for robots to be practical matters. We don’t know how long it will be, but driverless cars have been coming for 15 years now and they’re still unavailable in most places.
  People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.
  Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
  1. sashank_1509 · 1790793529 · focus · HN ↗
    You seem to be living under a rock. Yes driverless cars started in 2009, but in 2026 it is very much here. Waymo recently crossed a milestone of more 500k trips I think, we will have millions of driverless cars in the coming years (we’re at 10k right now)
    bluGill · 1790793827 · focus · HN ↗
    Waymo still doesn't serve my city. We get too much snow/ice in winter and so they are slow to expand here.
    chasd00 · 1790795377 · focus · HN ↗
    There's always exceptions. To not beat a dead horse(hah!) you can still find people on horseback in the drive through line at Starbucks in Texas from time to time.
    bluGill · 1790797708 · focus · HN ↗
    The cities Waymo serves are the exception even in the US, and worldwide it is even more an exception.
    fragmede · 1790798294 · focus · HN ↗
    I give them til 2030 for that to become false in the US, maybe 2040 for the entire rest of the world.
    asdff · 1790804072 · focus · HN ↗
    For a while waymo didn't even serve the hillier parts of where they were deployed. These roads are challenging conditions for even a human rideshare driver, when you are down to about a cars width of winding road, with a moving truck trying to pass in front of you, and a dump truck trying to move behind you, cars increasingly piling on either end, no way to turn around or back out, everyone increasingly honking and cussing as if that would lubricate things. It is kind of hilarious in a way seeing how quickly things effectively blow up in those street conditions with just the perfect storm of two slightly larger vehicles passing at once.
    Now you can imagine a waymo in this mix how it would just be on its knees in a situation like that. How is a waymo to interpret "fucking move already you dumb fuck" into any sort of meaningful instruction?
    I'm reminded of that story about activists in SF requesting a dozen waymos at once at some one way street and creating a localized denial of service attack essentially.
    queenkjuul · 1790873248 · focus · HN ↗
    Waymo works in a single digit number of cities with extremely rare, highly favorable climates, and still operate only on fixed pre-mapped routes. And it's taken 17 years to get that far.
    We are still a long way from a self driving car being the default type of car
6. commandlinefan · 1790776671 · focus · HN ↗
  But the horses themselves got the better end of the deal - they spend all their time in the field eating hay rather than pulling carts.
  1. mrguyorama · 1790777743 · focus · HN ↗
    No. The horses were made redundant and no longer exist in such quantities
    So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.
    Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.
    The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?
    Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
    bluGill · 1790793770 · focus · HN ↗
    There are more horses today than ever... Oxen got the short end of the deal - almost nobody uses oxen even though historically they were the backbone labor of the farm, while the horse was for the right.
    handedness · 1790795037 · focus · HN ↗
    > There are more horses today than ever...
    The global horse population peaked in the 1910s.
    bluGill · 1790797813 · focus · HN ↗
    The only data I can find ignores the majority of horses today - recreational riders. If you can find a better citation I'd stand corrected, but everything I can find counts race horses and horses used for farming.
    OroPla · 1790799913 · focus · HN ↗
    Apparently there are around 60M horses currently, while there's no world wide data for 1910.
    Horse ownership isn't what it used to be, but the horse population seems fine.
    rootusrootus · 1790796291 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    OroPla · 1790799450 · focus · HN ↗
    You'd be surprised how easy it is to start a war, engineer water shortages and famines.
    andruby · 1790805441 · focus · HN ↗
    Looking at the news in the US, it feels like the wealthy and powerful are working that problem.
    rootusrootus · 1790806562 · focus · HN ↗
    So long as they can keep us fighting amongst ourselves in meaningless culture wars. If there is ever a broad alignment of populists spanning left to right, it could get spicy.
  2. Hamuko · 1790780591 · focus · HN ↗
    Or on the shelves of Tesco.
  3. reasonableklout · 1790793413 · focus · HN ↗
    The phrase "sent to the glue factory" comes from this era where many horses made redundant were sent to be slaughtered for meat or raw materials.
7. dsign · 1790791994 · focus · HN ↗
  > I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
  I also think that will be the case. However, not all the jobs are worth being automated. Say, if you are a modern-day horse-riding instructor, I very much doubt the robots will come knocking the door to take your job. Not because they can't, but because the headache is not economically worth it.
  1. zamadatix · 1790793159 · focus · HN ↗
    It'd be uneconomical today but I don't see any reason to believe it will always be that way.
    About the only thing I can guarantee will have some constancy are "for the sake of being human" things, much like buying handmade bowls is something you can do out of pure preference/taste/ideology even though it's cheaper to buy massed produced ones.
    frt2 · 1790795105 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m sorry but this is a legit brain dead take. Seek help.
  2. asdff · 1790803550 · focus · HN ↗
    I can see that going away too. Eventually the average horse rider is going to be someone of stature of a saudi prince at the rate horse ownership coupled with inequality is going. They'd probably be all about buying the Gemini horse teacher over learning from some lesser birth stableboy.
khalic · 1790775234 · focus · HN ↗
What a refreshingly positive read
1. 1982766 · 1790775504 · focus · HN ↗
  That is inherent to propaganda.
  1. khalic · 1790775605 · focus · HN ↗
    No il isn’t, fear mongering is way more common for propaganda. What makes you think it’s the case here?
glimshe · 1790775262 · focus · HN ↗
There are two key elements in the current AI fearmongering:
1) People think they can predict the future
2) People think humans can't adapt
The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.
Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.
Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.
1. Forgeties79 · 1790775524 · focus · HN ↗
  Why is it whenever people try to downplay the efficacy of LLM’s evangelists go “there’s literally never been anything like this,” but the moment people critique them or try to weigh their impact on society the response is “well it’s nothing we haven’t seen before”?
  The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation. We are clearly experiencing a moment of sorts, and anybody who is worried about what the fallout will be is just handwaved away as ignorant fear mongers. Unless you are the head of these companies doing it in a disingenuous way to pump up your valuation, then suddenly it’s legitimate - but not so legitimate that we should do anything besides let the US government build a moat for them!
  1. embedding-shape · 1790775880 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    Forgeties79 · 1790779301 · focus · HN ↗
    We have never seen governments leverage so heavily, so quickly, for a speculative technology.
    embedding-shape · 1790781893 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    Forgeties79 · 1790790693 · focus · HN ↗
    > definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger",
    And faster. More, bigger, faster. Which substantively changes the situation the same way a musket stops venn diagraming as a “firearm” at some point when compared to a 50-round automatic rifle.
  2. maomao5 · 1790779324 · focus · HN ↗
    Because they're liars. Plain and simple. Lying is a virtue as long as the lie is powerful enough to sustain attention.
  3. glimshe · 1790779613 · focus · HN ↗
    You're mixing a bunch of different "people" in the same bag. I'm not the one saying "there's never been anything like this before".
    The investment is massive, but not bigger than other projects by an order of magnitude. Major wars were bigger than AI. The dot com bubble was 2-3T dollars.
    Forgeties79 · 1790780945 · focus · HN ↗
    If we’re comparing war between entire nations to speculative economic investment than I’m not sure I need to make any more points.
    win311fwg · 1790783082 · focus · HN ↗
    There may not be so much in the way of soldiers in the field guns blazing, but we are very much seeing a 'cold war' emerging with AI at the centre of it. The incentives for nations to spend are essentially the same in cold and hot wars.
2. yCombLinks · 1790776407 · focus · HN ↗
  Adapt, sure, but is my life better or worse after adapting? It's a fair question and a fair worry. The goal of most AI companies seems to be to replace some amount of labor with AI. Look how that worked out for our factory workers. They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.
  1. win311fwg · 1790782516 · focus · HN ↗
    > They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.
    The tech crowd used to say that only the "dumb" ones did that. They said those who were "smart like us" were much more adaptable, learning to code and whatnot to find new, often even better careers. It will be interesting to see if the emperor has clothes.
    achierius · 1790823713 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you not see how you're doing the same thing now? Not all people in tech so dismissed the struggles of others -- but you are.
    win311fwg · 1790834077 · focus · HN ↗
    I do not dismiss the cognitive struggles of those in tech. I am recognizing it.
    win311fwg · 1790836344 · focus · HN ↗
    No, and obviously neither can you, else you would have explained yourself. Best to not post while under the influence of silly emotions. That is what those tech people who called those manufacturing people "dumb" did and, like this, wasn't useful.
    achierius · 1790887208 · focus · HN ↗
    Silly emotions? I'm not the one gleefully celebrating the ruin of others (including families). You've chosen to 'other' a broad group of people with diverse experiences and backgrounds. "Those tech people" certainly include some people who called manufacturers 'dumb', but it also includes many (most?) who didn't, and even some who used to be "manufacturing people".
    You say "who cares if they suffer? They're obviously all just bad people". The people who attacked blue collar workers said "who cares if they suffer? They're obviously all just dumb people (and thus bad)." So the bulk of people who you decry are not guilty of what you claim. But you are!
    win311fwg · 1790888232 · focus · HN ↗
    > You say "who cares if they suffer? They're obviously all just bad people".
    This comment aside, I do not see that text anywhere, lest my own comments. Get back to us when you return to reality.
    > The people who attacked blue collar workers said "who cares if they suffer? They're obviously all just dumb people (and thus bad)."
    Whether or not calling them "dumb" was justified, there no implication of "who cares if they suffer". In fact, in the context I remember, those comments were made around trying to figure out how to help those who were deemed "dumb".
ahs7 · 1790775274 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
1982766 · 1790775476 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://usetandem.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://usetandem.ai/ has excellent flagging support. No one cares about your fucking grandfather, you liars.
hangrybear666 · 1790775710 · focus · HN ↗
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
1. ipsod · 1790776550 · focus · HN ↗
  Can you not seek mastery with the new tools, though?
  It does feel a bit like building on quicksand, but coding has always been that way for me. Well, less so with embedded than webdev, but still.
  1. VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · 1790791990 · focus · HN ↗
    I used to find joy in knowing how things worked inside-out. Whether it was Postgres, or browser engines, or some detail about compilers... I used to find joy in developing the little techniques that made programming NOT building on quicksand. There was satisfation in what you had done being robust.
    Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like. When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)
    Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers? It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face). I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.
    It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.
    sellmesoap · 1790793788 · focus · HN ↗
    When I would code by hand I often found I was concerned with the house of cards in my head, am I remembering the right variable names, did I forget something that would lead to an exploit, etc. Now I can direct the LLM to do the work and the skill is split between having an understanding of the interactions of the technologies, choosing tech that will be less of a pain to update/migrate. You can even put some LLM-bow grease into finding more efficient approaches catching corner cases etc. And just by asking I can have test frameworks setup, I can drill into some pet peeve and it takes less time. Now we still have lots of ops moments, like the radicel distributed git forge forgetting to use encryption for private repos, and I run into this class of problem in my own casual LLM use, but that's where our taste and attention to detail powers need to be spent in this modern developer world.
    VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · 1790939896 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks for your perspective
    I think one thing that troubles me is that I so far have gotten quite far by 'caring about the little things'.
    Now we live in a world where this feels, for the most part, unsustainable to keep up with. When directing LLMs to code something up, it's still occasional useful to have the knowledge and experience of those little things earned over years, but at the same time 1) it seems like I run into fewer opportunities to add to that experience and 2) it seems like you can often just prompt LLMs to 'grill' a design a few times, it will probably surface some of the most important tradeoffs
    sellmesoap · 1790967587 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, the grilling part is where the LLM energy drain is for me, I haven't released any of the software I've been working on yet because they lack polish in my opinion. They may have nobel goals, but no point unleashing more slop on the world. Often when I ask for a correction something new breaks, or it reveals the next corner the model and I didn't think about. I've seen the models come a long way in a short time. I'm tinkering and paying by the token for deepseek flash picked for its economy and using it to teach myself and form opinions on languages and frameworks that are new to me. It's hard to describe the worth of these opinions, but I think they're important, kinda like why I read a lot of HN looking for morsels of sentiment around the tech industry as represented here.
    Rumple22Stilk · 1790798002 · focus · HN ↗
    It's funny though, llms are quite terrible at most things really.
    They can build things, but it's all terrible really. Their "ideas" are terrible.
    VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · 1790940631 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, I'm somewhat minded to agree with you, but they are fast enough, cheap enough and don't get bored of tedious work, which makes them passable at many things. Maybe.
    I feel caught between two worlds, I know people both very 'for' and very 'against'. The business is very keen for people to use them to go faster.
    For non-trivial changes, output so far does not meet my quality standard and I tend to spend a lot of time cleaning up after them, probably more than I would have spent doing the work myself. This being much more boring, I hasten to add.
    Their comments suck so I feel like I have to go in and rewrite them all.
    fragmede · 1790799242 · focus · HN ↗
    How do LLMs work? Yes there's a model and there's inference, but dig deeper. How can you, today, with < $50, train a small GPT-2 class model, how do you fine tune it, what training data do you give it, how do you give it training data, what algorithms do you use for reinforcement learning, what even is RLHF? You don't have to know any of those details to use ChatGPT, just like you don't need to know how a D flip-flop works in a CPU to write some code that runs on one, but if you're looking for feeling like you know what's going on, at their heart, LLMs are still next word prediction engines, so knowing, deeply, how that engine is created and works, would be my idea of mastery of it. Karpathy has a good set of tutorials on this.
    jplusequalt · 1790880225 · focus · HN ↗
    >How do LLMs work? Yes there's a model and there's inference, but dig deeper. How can you, today, with < $50, train a small GPT-2 class model, how do you fine tune it, what training data do you give it, how do you give it training data, what algorithms do you use for reinforcement learning, what even is RLHF? You don't have to know any of those details to use ChatGPT, just like you don't need to know how a D flip-flop works in a CPU to write some code that runs on one, but if you're looking for feeling like you know what's going on, at their heart, LLMs are still next word prediction engines, so knowing, deeply, how that engine is created and works, would be my idea of mastery of it. Karpathy has a good set of tutorials on this.
    Knowing how an LLM is built, is trained, inferences, isn't "mastery" in the sense that crafts people use the word.
    Mastery to a craftsmen is as much a product of mechanical performance as it is knowledge. For a software craftsmen, that means knowing how to code, debug, and architect a software application by hand.
    VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · 1790939528 · focus · HN ↗
    This, plus since you can't realistically run these LLMs at home, the motivation to get invested in them is not really there (for me at least)
    I mean, yes I do find the mathematical background of LLMs fascinating, but it's not going to be something that I can put to practical use (much), if that makes sense?
    ipsod · 1790799336 · focus · HN ↗
    I've always been either entirely self-directed, choosing my own goals, or almost entirely self-directed, being given high-level goals, and getting to choose my own means to accomplish them. So my opinions are probably different from somebody who was a smaller part in a chain.
    You say that you liked learning how things worked inside out, whether it was Postgres or whatever. You can still do that. You can learn it at a high level, and then it becomes like a magic word in your arsenal. You don't have to know or remember the details of implementation, but only the nature of its costs, benefits, and synergies with other systems. You just have to remember that high-level abstraction, maybe just a single vocabulary word, of a low-level reality - the exact syntax is really no longer a concern.
    The better the agents get, the less there is playing manager. Really your job now is to have an execute vision. Execution is largely a function of having a map of the high level vision and low-level realities in your head.
    Also, there is developing personal libraries. You may find that in your business you repeatedly tackle similar problems. You develop and refine a library that your future agents can utilize. You develop prompts that make your work more automatic and more robust. And when I say you, I mean, you direct your agents to do it.
    It's not so different from what it always was, except that years get compressed into months. What was slow and tedious is now... Not.
    I don't know how much advantage I have in this new world, having programmed (sometimes more, sometimes less) for 30 years. My brother has never written a line of code in his life. He's been heavy into AI for a while, and he has developed some really incredible stuff. I think he may have already outpaced me.
  2. sashank_1509 · 1790793768 · focus · HN ↗
    Did a tailor gain mastery of the sweatshop machine? Did mastery of the automated sewing machines give the same joy to the tailor or was it mind numbing meaningless activity that he would be happier to be free of.
  3. chasd00 · 1790798108 · focus · HN ↗
    > It does feel a bit like building on quicksand
    that's a good analogy and puts into words the way i've always felt about software development. Every so often the entire industry rolls over into something new. I've been here 30 years now and, in my experience, the skill that counts is being able learn new skills. To go back to the analogy, to build something new on top of what you've built in the past before it's swallowed by the quicksand.
2. apt-apt-apt-apt · 1790790572 · focus · HN ↗
  How can you say there are no challenges and things to master when working with AI? Unless you are just doing "Make this. LGTM. Now make this".
  1. zbentley · 1790791897 · focus · HN ↗
    > "Make this. LGTM. Now make this".
    I think well north of 90% of people in software engineering have job expectations that, when assisted/automated with AI, boil down to exactly that.
    It's a pain in the ass to work at such a job and find challenges or things to master--your superiors don't want you to do that, there's not enough time in the day, and you're tired from LGTM-now-make-this work.
    That's most software jobs, because that's what most software companies want.
  2. hangrybear666 · 1790848679 · focus · HN ↗
    Because I literally can just burn tokens instead of using any of my brain cells and the outcome is way better than what I would have achieved thinking deeply and intricately about the implementation because Opus 5.5 at xhigh implements way better than I ever could and I'm paid well and have studied for years and it's not a low-level environment at all.
    Since opus 4.8 the tools have started surpassing me and now they are far gone, so implementing by hand would mean sacrificing quality and my main goal as an engineer has always been quality so even though I hate it, I must use the best tool for the job.
globular-toast · 1790775747 · focus · HN ↗
My grandad on one side of the family was a market gardener. He didn't become a farmer.
My great grandad on the other side was a lighterman[0]. He didn't become a ship captain.
Sometimes professions really are just gone. In both cases in my family it was due to consolidation of resources and concentration of capital/power. Technology was just a catalyst for that.
[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighterman" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighterman
asd18 · 1790775769 · focus · HN ↗
People are flagging in real time. Maybe the grandfather would have thought you are cowards and frauds who abuse him to push a vibe coding company.
delichon · 1790775775 · focus · HN ↗
Back in the '70s my dad used to tell a joke about his dad. He said that my grandfather had a job that supported his whole large family while my dad was growing up. But unfortunately technology caught up with him, and he was replaced by a device just this big, and he held his fingers apart to demonstrate.
Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."
Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.
It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, along with the pickle slicer.
In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.
1. parpfish · 1790776461 · focus · HN ↗
  I’m trying to figure out this joke. Is the punchline that he was a gigolo and he got replaced be sextoys?
  1. delichon · 1790776564 · focus · HN ↗
    That was my interpretation but nobody ever explained it.
  2. fragmede · 1790779641 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorta. The lead in makes you think it's Grandpa's money work job that's being replaced. Then we find out that Grandma replaced Grandpa with a vibrator, which is to say Grandpa was replaced sexually, not economically. Grandpa was not a gigolo, the confusion is where the funny happens (it doesn't, now that I've explained it).
  3. LoganDark · 1790794184 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the punchline is that workplace romance usually gets both parties fired, regardless of who initiated. Hence, doing "things" with the pickle slicer means the pickle slicer gets fired for participating...
    Tadpole9181 · 1790795726 · focus · HN ↗
    They're both misdirection jokes.
    The first one sounds like the dad was replaced by computers. But then reveals the dad is a sex worker and being replaced by sex toys.
    The second one sounds like the person was being intimate with dangerous kitchen equipment, then reveals that a "pickle slicer" is a job for a human and not a machine.
2. someonebaggy · 1790777460 · focus · HN ↗
  It may be funny when it's a joke, not so when it's real.
  1. delichon · 1790777960 · focus · HN ↗
    My grandpa was a shoemaker. The real change in technology left his family in poverty in Chicago during the depression. I didn't hear anyone joke about that, directly.
    Jewish humor is frequently about laughing at your own pain. There's a genre of Jewish jokes created in concentration camps.
  2. [deleted] · 1790805515 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
233mhz · 1790775835 · focus · HN ↗
> something happened once in the past and turned ok hence you should never ever worry about other vaguely similar things ever again
That's how it sounds to me
1. mrguyorama · 1790778091 · focus · HN ↗
  Don't forget blatantly ignoring all the times something similar happened in the past and didn't turn out fine.
  Sticking your fingers in your ears and singing "Lalalalalala" will in fact sometimes work for some people, and that is not a good argument for everyone to do it.
0c3ca83 · 1790775927 · focus · HN ↗
The last hundred times we automated things, we automated muscles. Today, the number of people employed purely for their muscle is very small.
This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.
1. wccrawford · 1790776439 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm not sure I can quite agree with that. I'd say that spreadsheets definitely reduced the need to manually calculate things, and calculators before that, and the abacus before that.
  I basically agree with your "higher level reasoning", but not your statement that we previously only automated muscles.
  1. ZeWaka · 1790804453 · focus · HN ↗
    see: when 'computer' was a job title
2. win311fwg · 1790783801 · focus · HN ↗
  Compilers automated higher level reasoning, at least to a small degree. LLMs themselves are basically just compilers with a much, much, much more expansive set of keywords.
  (No, compilers are not deterministic)
  1. 0c3ca83 · 1790784490 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you describe the last time you asked your compiler how you should best approach a business problem?
    People aren't just using AI for writing code, but for all of their decision making. They're far from limited to writing code.
    win311fwg · 1790787728 · focus · HN ↗
    > Can you describe the last time you asked your compiler how you should best approach an interpersonal problem
    Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem. It compiled that into a description of how to deal with it.
    > People aren't just using AI for writing code
    Compilers have never been about producing code in particular, though, even if that is where they are most commonly used. A LaTeX compiler, for example, outputs books. To think they are about code exclusively is a grave misunderstanding of what a compiler is.
    0c3ca83 · 1790791001 · focus · HN ↗
    > Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem.
    The LLM usage I see from most people has the LLM write out the specification, asking clarifying questions as needed. If you're using LLMs as you describe, you're using them ineffectively.
    win311fwg · 1790792280 · focus · HN ↗
    > The LLM usage I see from most people has the LLM write out the specification
    If the LLM is writing the specification, what purpose does the person serve? That is not what I'm seeing out in the wild, though. Outside of research labs, LLMs don't do anything until the user initiates.
    > asking clarifying questions as needed.
    Sure. Even the earliest, most primitive compilers would seek clarification if there was something it didn't understand in full.
    0c3ca83 · 1790805859 · focus · HN ↗
    > Sure. Even the earliest, most primitive compilers would seek clarification if there was something that it felt required more information. That's expected.
    Can you tell me what the last question GCC asked you was, and can you rate its coherence in comparison to your colleagues questions?
    LoganDark · 1790794290 · focus · HN ↗
    > Sure. I wrote out specification that described the problem. It compiled that into a description of how to deal with it.
    I might just not know enough compilers, but didn't you write the specification of how to approach the problem, not the problem itself?
    win311fwg · 1790798828 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think I knew how to approach the problem. There would have been no benefit in using the compiler if I did. Kind of like, if we want to talk about code, many coders don't know how to solve a hashmap. They don't need to. The compiler figures it out for them, as it did me for my problems. I'd call the input I gave a specification of the problem, but words are in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.
    If we take "write the specification of how to approach the problem" at literal value, you might be narrowly thinking of a low-level compiler, or what sometimes gets called a transpiler? However, compilers encompass a much wider spectrum than that. Generally they enable users to operate at higher levels of abstraction.
    LoganDark · 1790804545 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you're talking about more than just a compiler, though standard libraries are often distributed with the compiler. Take Rust for example, it's not like the compiler has special integration with hash maps, it's just that the standard library has a standard implementation and the compiler lets you refer to that implementation without having to repeat it yourself. In a way you're just including parts of another spec in yours. Specifications do this all the time, for example by using English. You don't have to define all the levels of abstraction, only the ones that matter.
    Even so, I'd argue that you still have to define how to use those abstractions rather than only the result you'd like to achieve with them. Sure, maybe the abstraction has a ".achieve_the_result()" method, and calling that method is how you achieve it, but often there's a bunch of stuff you fit together to achieve a solution to your problem and the compiler doesn't necessarily do that for you.
    I think there actually may be some compilers that get closer to this, for example some problems can be expressed quite elegantly in Haskell or APL and the compiler will do a lot of black magic behind the scenes to get you a performant program (somehow). But for most traditional compilers you are still going to have to define how to approach your problem, even if that involves operating on elements that are defined in libraries.
    gspr · 1790803414 · focus · HN ↗
    > Compilers have never been about producing code in particular, though, even if that is where they are most commonly used. A LaTeX compiler, for example, outputs books. To think they are about code exclusively is a grave misunderstanding of what a compiler is.
    And what, pray tell, are those books output by TeX? That's right, PDF or PostScript code.
  2. gspr · 1790803278 · focus · HN ↗
    This is a tired, idiotic analogy. For one, if LLMs are compilers, they're terrible compilers because they can't be reasoned about the way one wants to reason about a compiler (but I assume you have a weird take here since you claim compilers are non-deterministic).
    But more importantly, if you insist on treating LLMs like compilers, then the source language – natural prose – is the worst programming language ever invented. Coding the world in brainfuck is a better idea than where you lot is suggesting we go.
  3. awsglkhj · 1790805509 · focus · HN ↗
    > (No, compilers are not deterministic)
    Having used, designed, and written compilers, this is news to me. Please, elaborate.
    fragmede · 1790805651 · focus · HN ↗
    tldr: Race conditions when building on multi-cpu systems (which is all of them these days), and timestamps sneaking in everywhere.
    0c3ca83 · 1790805803 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh, no. Timestamps. Truly the sign of higher level reasoning.
3. cloudie78 · 1790791427 · focus · HN ↗
  > This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.
  That’s very generous of you to call it that way.
  It’s a parody at best.
  1. 0c3ca83 · 1790805925 · focus · HN ↗
    That's an optimistic view -- and even if it is, as the cryptographers like to say, "attacks only get better".
4. munificent · 1790805657 · focus · HN ↗
  > Today, the number of people employed purely for their muscle is very small.
  I also believe we underestimate how much that costs us too. Yes, it is good that fewer people are breaking their bodies on brutal physical jobs.
  But there are many people in the world for whom their physical strength and dexterity are perhaps their most valuable asset. With the loss of those jobs came a loss of an avenue of meaning for them.
  I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that the whole manosphere alt-right conservative thing going on in the US is driven in part by a generation of young men who don't find intellectual work to be appealing but don't see many alternatives out there either. It's telling how closely Gamergate is tangled up in that world and how many games are basically simulations of heavily physical prestigious roles.
  A recent Onion headline really hits the nail on the head: "'This Here Is Probably Our Bestselling Love Seat,' Says Man Who Would Have Been Powerful, Revered Warrior 4,000 Years Ago"
  1. AlienRobot · 1790868128 · focus · HN ↗
    I think a more obvious effect is that now everyone is obese.
rckt · 1790775972 · focus · HN ↗
Amazing. I bet this can really help thousands of programmers who are simply not needed, because companies decided to replace them with AI agents. These philosophical ponders are very comfortable to do when your ass is safe. Most of people don’t have this privilege.
> what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
It never was the code. The code is how you solve problems, make stuff happen. The code is a tool. It’s people’s brain that is of value. People learn how to use these tools the best they can. And now they are told that they should become mere supervisors for the AI agents. Simply by trusting the output and QA-ing the result. Because no human can keep track of the AI’s generated mess.
ar7hur · 1790775975 · focus · HN ↗
I like this article, but it took decades for cars to take over: we needed to build vehicles, build roads, build up gas production and distribution... as Bill Gates wrote, one of the differences with the AI disruption is how fast it's coming, since it's almost immaterial (except data centers of course). It may be too fast for humans to adapt like they did in the previous revolutions.
1. phoronixrly · 1790776144 · focus · HN ↗
  And it threatens not a single profession, but all people doing intellectual work.
  1. ipsod · 1790779552 · focus · HN ↗
    Doing all work, IMO. I'm doing intellectual work that replaces manual labor.
2. parpfish · 1790776268 · focus · HN ↗
  Unfortunately, work from home made it easy for companies to realize how easily a chat window could fulfill employee interactions
3. spiclk · 1790776508 · focus · HN ↗
  The current trend of comparing AI development to the development of motorised personal transport makes it very easy to remind everyone that undoing the effects of decades of blind "progress" once the negative externalities become unavoidable is much easier said than done.
alecst · 1790776240 · focus · HN ↗
Humans ourselves are a technology. We have incredibly flexible brains and dexterous hands. Up to now, we could always do things that robots couldn't. That was where our job security came from.
But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
This is what the article misses and what people have trouble accepting. Yea, this is a technological revolution, but unlike the Industrial Revolution, you can't just upskill your way out of it.
1. pyronite · 1790776349 · focus · HN ↗
  > But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
  I've already started to feel this.
  One thing that made us special was our intelligence. We were, and were always going to be (unless some alien form of life arrived), the most intelligent things on earth. Is that still true today?
  1. gatlin · 1790776824 · focus · HN ↗
    I weep for people whose scientistic reductionism has led to such devaluation of humanity. Robots don’t do anything and don’t think anything. Humans do things with and through them. What makes us special is that we exist and love one another.
  2. montagg · 1790776994 · focus · HN ↗
    We should start with the assumption that humans are valuable and deserve to live with dignity. Any philosophy that doesn’t have that at its center is broken.
    cjfd · 1790777255 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps. But are humans going to get what they deserve?
    yojo · 1790777564 · focus · HN ↗
    All the other great apes would like to have a word.
    Human exceptionalism is a lot harder to rationalize when there’s no longer anything exceptional about us.
    layla5alive · 1790777626 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes but same should have been true of animals and humans as a whole did not afford dignity or value to animals. Maybe we will get a taste of our own medicine this time.
    anilgulecha · 1790777660 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm curious where you are drawing the line. Why is a human different from a ape/dog/chicken now? I wonder: do they not deserve to live with dignity?
    fragmede · 1790778374 · focus · HN ↗
    Depends on who you ask. Some people might put it at opposable thumbs. Others might ask how many legs one has. Or language, or ability to count (crows can count up to 30). Memory (elephants have memories that go back over a decade).
    0c3ca83 · 1790786622 · focus · HN ↗
    We should, but to date anyone that wanted to be treated as though they were valuable and deserved dignity needed some way to apply pressure to ensure that.
    I'm not optimistic that this will change in the future -- but, I am watching automation erode the amount of pressure that humans can apply.
    QDwQ1 · 1790798675 · focus · HN ↗
    I have some bad news for you about how our society actually functions...
  3. pvab3 · 1790777677 · focus · HN ↗
    Very often the justification for why these things aren't terribly disruptive is that the very best of a certain trade or field will still have a useful skillset. Like the best graphic designers in the world are still more creative and skilled than AI, and the best writers are still better, the best programmers are still better, just that they're all more expensive and slower.
    But we're not taking into account how it affects the mediocre or average people in these fields. Roughly half of all of these people are below average. Maybe if you're the best you'll always have a job, but what about the guy who legitimately struggled to finish high school? The person who genuinely doesn't have the capacity to earn much more than minimum wage?
    zeven7 · 1790779768 · focus · HN ↗
    We're currently at the part of the story where chess AI can beat amateurs and is rapidly improving. Kasparov's not worried, he's an expert. He's more creative and skilled than an AI.
    Why would these machines stop improving at average this time?
    pvab3 · 1790783425 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn't say they weren't improving. My point is that if our justification is comparing the top 10% of performers to AI to justify human performance, that speaks poorly for the replacement of the bottom 10% of humans.
    0c3ca83 · 1790786690 · focus · HN ↗
    And why not the top 1% or the top 0.1% or the top 0.001%? Either AI stops improving, or we're in for a grim future for people.
2. win311fwg · 1790776702 · focus · HN ↗
  The economy long moved past the things we can do, hence "bullshit jobs". Our job security has come from our willingness to "look the other way", allowing the job creators to live out lives the rest of us can only imagine.
3. ForHackernews · 1790783191 · focus · HN ↗
  > Humans ourselves are a technology.
  Grim.
  <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
4. frt2 · 1790796976 · focus · HN ↗
  This is just nonsense.
  Humans are animals who throughout time have become conditioned to follow production processes for the betterment of society.
vividfrier · 1790776269 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
makerofthings · 1790776362 · focus · HN ↗
Yes, but this time, we're the horse.
1. miyoji · 1790777427 · focus · HN ↗
  Only if you accept that you are as stupid and unadaptable as a horse.
  1. makerofthings · 1790777832 · focus · HN ↗
    That is an unnecessarily rude and mean comment.
    miyoji · 1790779921 · focus · HN ↗
    You're the one calling people horses. I'm the one saying, "No, you're probably better than that." Which one of us is being rude here?
    makerofthings · 1790782190 · focus · HN ↗
    You. Clearly.
    jst1fthsdys · 1790786428 · focus · HN ↗
    Neigh. It is you.
    rootusrootus · 1790798513 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  2. zamadatix · 1790792485 · focus · HN ↗
    A less misanthropic alternative: The technology required to replace the person is much smarter and more adaptable than that which was needed to replace the horse. Because of this, you can end up in the horse's role in the story without having to be as dumb as a literal one so long as it's this other lever which moves instead.
shovas · 1790776439 · focus · HN ↗
I think the analogy of moving from horses to engines breaks down when going from code to AI as AI can quite plausibly work on itself. It's a fundamentally different game we're playing this time. And there were as many engine jobs as horse jobs (maybe more). The whole point of AI is super human productivity. Even the idea of just using AI means you need less humans because one human with AI can out-produce multiple humans without. It's very difficult to imagine a future where AI can do every job and things don't turn into a sci-fi dystopia.
Havoc · 1790776572 · focus · HN ↗
I don’t particularly like the horse to engine angle because it doesn’t capture the issue well.
When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???
Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?
1. AndrewDucker · 1790777543 · focus · HN ↗
  How are your plumbing skills?
  1. pvab3 · 1790777804 · focus · HN ↗
    You mean my meat proxy skills while wearing a Ratatouille machine-vision head camera that tells me what wrench to pick up and how to crimp the Pex rings?
    fragmede · 1790778646 · focus · HN ↗
    You're telling me Google Gemini robot 2 tying a trash bag isn't also gonna be able to crimp PEX rings?
    AndrewDucker · 1790780340 · focus · HN ↗
    It will. But having watched the video, I can tie one faster and cheaper. This week. Next week, who knows?
    sellmesoap · 1790792646 · focus · HN ↗
    The solution is probably a trash bag with a mini forklift compatible lift rings, an optical center mark, a ratcheting closure, and make a raspberry PI do the computing millions of dollars of tooling to make a robot compatible trash bag but it might be worth it, deploy the bean counters!
  2. rootusrootus · 1790796670 · focus · HN ↗
    Plumbing is kind of a hard job, definitely not fun for anyone above middle age. And given it will pay minimum wage, I think I'd just take a life of leisure instead.
    gspr · 1790800082 · focus · HN ↗
    Minimum wage? Where I live, the plumber median wage is pretty much exactly the national median.
    rootusrootus · 1790802541 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, but that is today. When AI decimates the knowledge fields, a whole lot of people are going to be looking at different career options. There will not be any shortage of people hoping to make money in the trades, and with that surge in supply will come a collapse in prices.
    gspr · 1790802997 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, then I understand you. But please, let's stop with this inevitability. If AI decimates, not when.
    asdff · 1790805727 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would it not? The economic incentives make it inevitable. Might as well expect water to not flow downhill.
    rootusrootus · 1790806123 · focus · HN ↗
    It is very plausible that LLMs never get to 100% replacement for knowledge workers and the winners will the people who use both, leaving behind the people who thought all they needed to do was cut costs by doing existing workloads without humans. It remains to be seen if the constraint on quantity of knowledge work was the people or the work.
    variadix · 1790821240 · focus · HN ↗
    It remains to be seen, but a reasonable argument against this is found in the progression of chess AI engines. After Kasparov was beaten there was still a period where the best humans working with machines were still better than the machines on their own. Eventually (around 2020 I think?) this was no longer the case, having even the best humans on Earth in the loop was a net negative. There are reasonable arguments against this, but I've found them mostly unconvincing.
    gspr · 1790843276 · focus · HN ↗
    > Why would it not? The economic incentives make it inevitable.
    Citation needed. Again, I wanna emphasize that I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying that it's not a given that it will.
    There is very little sign that current models can do anything but (at best!) augment most knowledge workers (with some exceptions). And there are very reasonable open questions about whether it's economically, and ecologically, sustainable to continue development at anything near the current pace. There is, in fact, plenty of indicators that even the current SoTA is the result of a financial overexertion.
    rootusrootus · 1790805962 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    georgemcbay · 1790818424 · focus · HN ↗
    > There will not be any shortage of people hoping to make money in the trades, and with that surge in supply will come a collapse in prices.
    And the worst case downward spiral will involve not only a surge in supply but a drastic drop in demand to go along with it.
    All of those previous "knowledge workers" scurrying for the trades not only become more labor supply, but without their cushy jobs they will no longer be able to afford to hire trades people to prop up the demand side.
    Double whammy.
  3. Havoc · 1790800273 · focus · HN ↗
    Actually had a plumber here earlier today which was an ordeal so have been asking that myself too...
  4. makeitdouble · 1790816354 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you heard about "physical AI" ?
    AndrewDucker · 1790838565 · focus · HN ↗
    See my response to the similar reply at the top of the thread
2. win311fwg · 1790780729 · focus · HN ↗
  The knowledge economy was already on the way out in favour of the performance economy even before LLMs. LLMs have also shown that they can produce in the performance space, of course, so it remains to be seen how valuable humans are in that position but so far it would appear that many are willing to pay for a "human connection".
  1. OroPla · 1790800375 · focus · HN ↗
    Plenty if not all people put more value into handmade things, but they can't afford to have everything handmade. An IKEA coffee table is $15. Handmade one from a woodworker is $400 - $1000.
    win311fwg · 1790802239 · focus · HN ↗
    Absolutely. Hence why we were already moving to the performance economy, where the consumer and the buyer end up being disparate entities.
3. smallmancontrov · 1790790031 · focus · HN ↗
  > Become a useless class?
  Like our capital class overlords?
4. ssfdg · 1790850319 · focus · HN ↗
  I agree with this too and I find this article extremely depressing.
  The AI "revolution" as described here is the wholesale outsourcing of vast swaths of thinking and decision-making to a single entity. A project coded with Claude is a project coded by Anthropic. A business whose decisions are made with ChatGPT is a business run by OpenAI.
  Is that what these people really want? To become a conduit through which two or three companies get to exert control over everything in the world?
joshstrange · 1790776589 · focus · HN ↗
> But it makes me wonder: what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
This exactly. Look, I "love" code but only because of what it allows me to do and there is plenty of code/coding that I don't love. Not to be too hippy-dippy but I'm a builder, I like to build things. Build things for myself, build things for others. The code was _always_ a means to an end.
Sure, it was cool I had this skill that many people didn't have but I also used to have skill in managing the windows machines and things like the registry. When I first switched to macOS I felt lost, I had this "skill" that was no longer needed but after a while I realized that was a good thing, I wasn't wasting my time fiddling with crap that was just getting in the way of _using_ my computer.
Similarly I may mourn the loss of writing code but at the end of the day code was just a way for me to build, if there are better tools to build (LLMs) then I'm all for it.
1. bananaflag · 1790776837 · focus · HN ↗
  Actually, what attracted me to programming was partly the code. When I saw those weird hieroglyphs on the screen and thought "I wonder how it would feel to understand that". Also when I found out that there were different "languages" to write code in and I thought you could get lost in them like in human languages. Generally, it felt like some sort of alien civilization. It never felt like "a tool to master".
2. sashank_1509 · 1790794156 · focus · HN ↗
  I too love building things, but by building things I mean the act of actually building it. Thinking of a problem, devising a solution and then executing the steps to solve the problem, if that doesn’t work, debugging and trying another method and so on. I am not and will never be a fan of buying things, where I just ask for something and it gets made which is what you’re a fan of if you’re honest to yourself.
voidmain · 1790776593 · focus · HN ↗
You are not the farrier in this analogy. You are the horse.
1. 12398744 · 1790777220 · focus · HN ↗
  No, he is the farmer all right:
  <a href="https://manuel.darcemont.fr/projects/" rel="nofollow">https://manuel.darcemont.fr/projects/
  We are the horses.
sublinear · 1790776634 · focus · HN ↗
How many of these do we really need? Nothing is happening, and a lot of people are upset about it.
They wanted to make money, or at least be a part of history during a transformational era. No dice.
ACS_Solver · 1790776667 · focus · HN ↗
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.
This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).
I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.
As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.
A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.
1. 8260337551 · 1790813070 · focus · HN ↗
  I've been seeing things the exact same way. There are those that want the end product as fast as possible and there are those that love the process and the struggle of getting there. The former group is the ones telling the latter group that they'll be left behind.
2. lomase · 1790843969 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
3. dorkwood · 1790844540 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
zombittack · 1790776753 · focus · HN ↗
sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.
We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.
Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.
1. sashank_1509 · 1790794625 · focus · HN ↗
  There’s no demand for human dexterity anyway, and it’s not about money. I like doing intellectual work.
  They are spending 1T to ruin the quality of work we do, also probably ruining our chances of securing a livelihood and then they want us to for some reason welcome it with open arms and openly say look how great this is and marvel at human obsolescence. Yeah no thanks.
vonnik · 1790776955 · focus · HN ↗
I wish the author had gone deeper
megalomanu · 1790777099 · focus · HN ↗
Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
1. 4ndrewl · 1790790245 · focus · HN ↗
  Sounds amazing. How on earth did he go from shoeing horses to learning about the internal combustion engine? Seems quite the leap that not everyone would be capable of.
  1. justonceokay · 1790792242 · focus · HN ↗
    Many people in life are underutilized and ready to step up to challenges if given the opportunity.
    ariwilson · 1790863433 · focus · HN ↗
    +1000. The best part of being a manager is when you can help a person achieve their potential.
  2. Toutouxc · 1790793783 · focus · HN ↗
    Shoeing horses properly is actually no joke and cars back then were laughably simple. I don’t see how any of that could feel relatable to people in software development now, when almost all jobs that require real smarts and competency require years of study and experience.
    ffreire · 1790796647 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think the story is meant to be taken as literally as I'm reading in this comment.
  3. megalomanu · 1790795092 · focus · HN ↗
    He just vibe-repaired cars!
    Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.
    And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.
    4ndrewl · 1790796045 · focus · HN ↗
    And he was probably very inquisitive too. Great story.
    forshaper · 1790798411 · focus · HN ↗
    This happened to my grandfather (blacksmith to working on cars and motorcycles), who was illiterate. From what I gather, it was a lifetime of trial-and-error-and-keep-what-works.
  4. doug_durham · 1790797971 · focus · HN ↗
    Early automobiles were very simple machines. I you knew how to repair a carriage or a wagon, you were pretty close to being able to work on an early automobile. You should check them out.
    Loughla · 1790801254 · focus · HN ↗
    Honestly I think people forget this fact. You don't have to go that far back to find vehicles that you absolutely could do anything to yourself with basic tools.
    We're fixing up a 1987 Jeep Wrangler for our son. I could strip it down to the frame with 3 or 4 tools. It's kind of amazing how simple cars were, and that was in the late 80's.
    ZeWaka · 1790803854 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah as long as you ignore the engine (ECU/PCM/TCUs) in cars in the 80s, they're quite simple. Go back to the early 70s-before and it's mostly all analog or trivial electronics.
    throw0101c · 1790808927 · focus · HN ↗
    > Yeah as long as you ignore the engine (ECU/PCM/TCUs) in cars in the 80s, they're quite simple.
    Alec of Technology Connections just posted a video on this:
    * <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KoeY54M5VA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KoeY54M5VA
    coderenegade · 1790825276 · focus · HN ↗
    This was the video that earned my sub. Even though it covers stuff I mostly already knew, it's done in such a way that that it breaks down the whys that may not be apparent to people without a background in this stuff.
    This and the video on hybrids, are, imo important works, because they break things down in a way that disarms tribalism, and explain how it is that we got to where we are. There are very real stakes in ownership, right to repair, and freedom of movement that rest on people having a good baseline understanding of this stuff.
    e_l · 1790858222 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    coderenegade · 1790824900 · focus · HN ↗
    Even as late as the late 90s, probably into the mid 2000s for manuals. The complexity of vehicles from that era is mostly in understanding the role of the sensors (or that they even exist in the first place). Once you understand that, they go back to being pretty straightforward. I guess the exception here is probably immobilizers.
    The complexity of modern vehicles comes down to software coupling between the systems, which (to my knowledge) started with automatic transmissions, and then spread to everything else. In very modern vehicles, even the sensors register with the ECU and communicate on encrypted channels.
    The reason for these measures is ostensibly security and quality, but automakers don't seem to mind the fact that it also makes many repairs more difficult or impossible.
    eloisius · 1790819202 · focus · HN ↗
    My first car was a 1986 Grand Marquis and I spent every other weekend of high school fixing something on it. What an incredible waste of time: I worked a part time job so that I could afford to keep a car running so that I could drive between school, home, and my part time job instead of riding the bus.
    But it was easy to work on. My dad (not a mechanic) usually had a strong hunch about what the problem was. Lights went dim while you were driving and five minutes later it sputtered out? Alternator is dead. Flip through the manual to find a diagram of where all the bolts are, take it off, run to Auto Zone, get another one, bolt it on. By the end it was usually dark and I was finishing the job with a shop light hung under the hood.
    I drove a series of beaters from the 80s and 90s and did all my own repairs until my mid 20s. Alternators, water pumps, break pads, break lines, ignition solenoids. All of it is just parts that you unbolt and bolt a new one on. When I got my first modern car (a 2008!) one look under the hood made me realize I had joined the yuppie class and would not be changing my own spark plugs anymore.
    Loughla · 1791069323 · focus · HN ↗
    I always did my own maintenance including changing spark plugs. Then I bought a Subaru. That weird 4 cylinder has plugs facing slightly down that you either have to cut the wheel well cowl or UNMOUNT AND JACK THE MOTOR OUT OF THE ENGINE BAY to change.
    My solution was to use like 11 wobble extensions and pray that I didn't drop anything. 8 hours later I changed 4 plugs and understood why it cost $250 at the dealer to have them to it. Then I gladly started paying that money.
    skew-aberration · 1790833608 · focus · HN ↗
    Conversely, carriages (and other pre-automobile machines) were also surprisingly complicated. Steering mechanisms, leaf springs, brakes, and a variety of linkages including the horse harnesses themselves (which had to account for the animal's gait).
  5. trymas · 1790836869 · focus · HN ↗
    Early cars were called horseless carriages for a reason.
    Car bodies were carriages for few first decades of car history. So if you can fix and maintain horse carriage - you can maintain car carriage.
    Engines were simple too and designed to be maintained in a field environment with few tools. So it’s reasonable that this skill was learned, especially by mechanically inclined people.
  6. ahazred8ta · 1790872451 · focus · HN ↗
    In the late 1800s there was a cottage industry of mechanics and ironmongers selling and repairing small steam and kerosene engines used by rural mills and farms. There were horse drawn steam threshing machines. Bicycle repair shops sprang up. The Wright brothers got into the bicycle business before horseless carriages. There were many intermediate tech skills that led up to working on motorcars.
2. rtar-wiuz · 1790791843 · focus · HN ↗
  How fortunate that this touching story is aligned with your AI project:
  <a href="https://manuel.darcemont.fr/projects/" rel="nofollow">https://manuel.darcemont.fr/projects/
  <a href="https://usetandem.ai/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://usetandem.ai/pricing
  1. howunfortunate · 1790792962 · focus · HN ↗
    Shallow dismissal.
    Please consider that this family story likely motivates OP's worldview and projects, rather than the other way around.
3. asd176 · 1790793359 · focus · HN ↗
  The flagging here is better than in a Steinberger thread. Unreal and congrats.
  1. froh · 1790841192 · focus · HN ↗
    Steinberger as in Emil Steinberger?? I don't get it. what's the reference?
4. adamredwoods · 1790809432 · focus · HN ↗
  I appreciate your wholesome message, but I feel a bit is overlooked.
  Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
  Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
  Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
  Interesting historical read:
  <a href="https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-created-automobile/" rel="nofollow">https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-cr...
  >> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
  1. j4k0bfr · 1790840297 · focus · HN ↗
    Comparing programmers to farriers is definitely strange on the surface. However I think it's quite unfair to reject the authors premise due to the ephemeral nature of some software. And I think it's downright arrogant to assume moving from horses to cars wasn't seriously challenging for his ancestor. But yeah, I would love to chat with the old man about what that transition looked like.
    Also, AI adoption might look like it's moving fast for individuals, however I see many companies struggling to actually utilise it effectively. Business processes are slow moving political machines. Sure a large part of the software industry is ephemeral, indirectly providing capital value. However many jobs are still very tangible; embedded, backend web systems, networking etc etc. Instability in these systems absolutely results in tangible loss of value.
    It will absolutely take decades before we figure out 'correct' AI usage at an industry scale. Heck, even frontier labs are still undecided about best practices.
    P.S. ty for the article link, will read!
    dolmen · 1790845292 · focus · HN ↗
    > Comparing programmers to farriers is definitely strange on the surface.
    Just for another datapoint: two of my great-great-grandfathers in two family branches, in the same small village in France, were respectively farrier and black-smith, while I'm a software engineer. One son of the black-smith continued the trade as a side activity of being a plumber. So I had to think about how my career choice (and those of my siblings, uncles, cousins) relates to theirs.
    My own perspective on those trades is that transforming metal was the top engineering scale in the countryside in their era. In those times (XIXth century, early XXth), learning the job required to go work with different masters around France ("tour de France" had another meaning before cycling). While it was still manual work, it was highly skilled job which required both technical skills and creativity, which are also key skills for software engineering.
  2. Miraltar · 1790840854 · focus · HN ↗
    > In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
    ChatGPT was released in 2023 and we're still not out of the job for the most part. It doesn't feel slow but we might have these five to ten years.
    TeMPOraL · 1790843647 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, but do any of us have any idea where to go?
    The total market addressed by current-shaped LLMs is not "software development" - it's approximately all of white-collar jobs. And with recent advancements in robotics, blue-collar work isn't really much safer. Hardware is getting better, and the one thing that was stopping robotics from entering our own workplaces and living spaces, the ability to make decisions on the fly in heterogenous, unpredictable environment - the judgement - is literally what LLMs themselves are delivering.
    fragmede · 1790845030 · focus · HN ↗
    art and music for some, but personally I'm most interested in seeing where science goes. Reproducibility of experiments is gonna be first. How many experiments don't reproduce, or have unwritten biases in the papers. Fusion seems actually a decade away, finally. Research into better. treatments for diseases, how to help people be smarter, live their best life. There's plenty more to do now that making crud apps will soon be solved.
    dolmen · 1790845615 · focus · HN ↗
    Art and music? Ok for live performance. But recorded performance is directly in competion with genAI for revenue streams, with content used without permission for more genAI training.
    fifilura · 1790849332 · focus · HN ↗
    > There's plenty more to do now that making CRUD apps
    Throwback to HN anno 2021 everyone was complaining about their bread and butter was creating CRUD apps.
    TeMPOraL · 1790861803 · focus · HN ↗
    We didn't expect we'll automate high thinking faster than menial labor.
    amelius · 1790858328 · focus · HN ↗
    Photonics research, to make faster AI chips :)
    swader999 · 1790858569 · focus · HN ↗
    AI will do all of what you listed better, faster and cheaper by maybe Opus 9 or so.
    fragmede · 1790881912 · focus · HN ↗
    It can't though. You still need to run real trials on living humans, living their lives and taking experimental drugs/procedures/interventions and running statistics on them.
    TeMPOraL · 1790885412 · focus · HN ↗
    AI can do everything you described except the "living out a human life" - but it can iterate on ever better simulations of that, or worse, it may reward-hack and... well, I'd rather not be the human in that story.
    swader999 · 1791026846 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you really think humans are going to be the users? Sure for tomorrow and next month, but the clock is ticking. I got mad at our internal CS peeps the other day. They were demanding an internal tool. I was like we went through hell this summer replacing the front end so it's agent usable, just get Claude to do that. They were like oh...
    arcanemachiner · 1790848489 · focus · HN ↗
    November 2022
  3. andai · 1790852013 · focus · HN ↗
    See also:
    Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden (December 2025)
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199723">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199723
  4. whstl · 1790852900 · focus · HN ↗
    Another thing is that, unlike AI, automobiles were (somewhat kinda) going to "replace horses".
    The AI situation is similar to someone saying "see, we're gonna keep the horses exactly as they are, but replace farriers, trainers, grooms, stable hands, saddlers, vets, and coachmen with absolutely nobody other than some manager type".
    The AI industry can't really say they're gonna replace SaaS, because SaaS is the lifeline of their business.
    So they just claim they're gonna replace several classes of professionals.
5. chantepierre · 1790853015 · focus · HN ↗
  I appreciated reading the Barrois territoire quoted :)
6. phtrivier · 1790853194 · focus · HN ↗
  Out of curiosity, what was the timeline ? Cause I'm afraid that, when you mentioned "I don't know what the other farriers" did, the answer may be "they were sent to the front and died by the 1000s".
  Which starts to be my fear for the real "solution" to job displacement by AIs : people will just be sent to some far away conflict where they will transition to a career in "daffodil fertilization" :/
  1. pj_mukh · 1790862581 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean, the wars are also getting automated now. Sooo, no need to worry?
7. Ensorceled · 1790853199 · focus · HN ↗
  My father worked for the railroad as a blacksmith but he apprenticed to an old blacksmith who was a farrier before. There are still farriers to this day.
  Some of us will need to move on to other things but there will probably still be a lot of farrier type jobs around.
8. keybored · 1790861256 · focus · HN ↗
  Don’t worry about it. You’re just playing your part. The trite comparison to past successful innovations. The paragraph about the AI Revolution. The AI Inevitability Soothsaying (“Be willing to let go of the how to hold on to the why”).
  The perfect HN frontpage material.
  Of course I wrote the two preceding paragraphs before reading your webpage: “I am Co-founder and CTO of Tandem, an AI Assistant for SaaS apps.” Just another entrepenur with a psychological spin.
philipodonnell · 1790777241 · focus · HN ↗
I don’t know, somehow the pace seems different, these transitions felt more like the last generation retiring, and the next generation doing something different, instead of it happening to everyone at the same time.
danesparza · 1790777313 · focus · HN ↗
The Industrial Revolution took over 100 years. You could argue that WW1 and WW2 were direct, structural consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
This has taken months to up-end multiple industries.
I don't think the article makes a fair comparison.
1. cobbzilla · 1790791248 · focus · HN ↗
  The information revolution has been going on for >50 years. AI is one event in a broader arc. Wait 10 years when the humanoid robots become reasonably capable and affordable. We’re in the middle of it, but still so so far to go.
  1. rootusrootus · 1790798424 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    cobbzilla · 1790801323 · focus · HN ↗
    I’d agree that the word “reasonably” is carrying a lot here. But call it 20 years, no question. Look how far computers came from 1970 to 1990, that’s probably about the pace to expect, or faster.
hypfer · 1790777476 · focus · HN ↗
The difference here is that the car was not a centralized cloud service, owned by select few billionaires.
So the post does need an asterisk, referring to how it all hinges on availability of open weights and inference hardware.
customguy · 1790778527 · focus · HN ↗
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I LOVE playing "product designer" with LLM. The thing I normally hate and never do, write and update "design docs" being my only lever is awesome. I do already hate how it seems to turn development into a much less social activity. It's great that we don't need other people and a lot of time for some things now, but it's also not.
But more importantly, because I also like solving problems and seeing people thrive, I can't overlook that it's all based on stuff taken without consent, how artists were made "obsolete" by what plasters me with slop every day (already, and we didn't even get started). And they're not even going "okay, now that we proved it can work with stolen stuff, let's do it proper". No, this is "the new world now", just keep pushing and squeezing and extract more "value". So wtf? Well, I like solving problems, I love games! One cool game is "catch the thief", another is "call out the sociopath". So let's?
But we can't, because we're not building this after deliberation and discussion, we're being herded into it and then make rationalizations for foregone conclusions made in our absence against our interests. Building systems nobody understands that keep making more systems nobody even tries to understand is not some hyper-efficient future, it's no future at all, and nobody with power (however wishy-washy that phrase is) wants to live under any of that, you can be assured.
So this all seems more like an airlock to me, an abattoir, not a spaceship that just happens to be kinda dirty and stinky because the focus is on so much grander things. How insincere and stupid so much of it is just can't be overlooked, and very much unlike other technological advancements where the results speak for themselves, where the results (or the improved process to get them), pull something, make it inevitably seep everywhere it is useful. There is so much pushing and hyping, and so precious little good stuff to make for the really bad stuff, all the slop that is produced and clogs up inter-human channels.
This is not even progress, this is just subversion, that's my thesis. It's deliberately driven for the easily predictable bad effects it will have.
narmiouh · 1790778950 · focus · HN ↗
On the one hand, it makes sense to think of this as just another revolution as it keeps things familiar, keeps the ground underneath us intact and lets hope it goes this way.
On the other hand, if long horizon independent problem solving with almost zero human intervention or support is realized in these models 1-5 years down, then it will lead not to new tech, but essentially a new species of workers that can replace humans at all tasks, In that case, humans wouldn't really have the upper hand as an economical resource to get any work done.
zeven7 · 1790779581 · focus · HN ↗
Well written, and good to reflect on.
However, the one thing I feel like is missed by some in these conversations is that what's being built is a general purpose thinking machine, not a coding machine. How are we going to transition from writing code to solving problems when the machines are solving the problems?
1. sashank_1509 · 1790793301 · focus · HN ↗
  The honest AI boosters do claim we won’t solve problems anymore, we will live animals in a zoo, overseen by machines of loving grace.
  The retard AI boosters, tell us to be AI first, learn this harness bro, loops are yesterday, now it’s graphs, use 100 agents a minimum or be left behind, actually world will require 100X more software engineers.
  1. craftkiller · 1790805082 · focus · HN ↗
    > we will live animals in a zoo
    Why would we still be alive? Once we have advanced enough AI inside not only computers but robots, the rich will no longer need us. They will have the robots farm the land, clean their homes, fly their planes, etc. We will then have no income and therefore no way to feed ourselves. Most people do not own enough farm land to keep themselves alive.
    In the past, such imbalances of power were resolved because the rich still relied upon the poor for everything (security, food, etc). I think we're approaching the point where even armed insurrection is no longer an option with the advances in automated killing machines. We're not there yet, but it's coming.
2. shiandow · 1790847829 · focus · HN ↗
  You can't outsource understanding, and to the extent LLMs can understand anything they can only learn through training. So until LLMs can truly learn, rather than bringing themselves up to speed with huge contexts, you'll probably still want some people who understand what it's doing.
  I think Navier Stokes is a brilliant case study for all that it didn't do. An AI 'solved' a famous problem, of a kind that is impossible to cheat, yet the reaction is incredibly apathetic. Why? Because it apparently failed to do the thing people were hoping it would, but what exactly? Of course it also manages to fumble the delivery by antagonising the people most interested in the result, but still.
jrochkind1 · 1790790986 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
RRRA · 1790791439 · focus · HN ↗
Funny thing for me, it was NEVER the code...
harimau777 · 1790791864 · focus · HN ↗
Have any of these articles actually addressed HOW software developers are supposed to retrain for good jobs? Personally I have neither the money nor the years to go back to college to get a livable job.
1. Reubend · 1790792049 · focus · HN ↗
  The internet has made it easier than ever to learn new skills. You don't need college unless you're targeting a career that requires, or expects, a degree.
  1. lukan · 1790794856 · focus · HN ↗
    "unless you're targeting a career that requires, or expects, a degree."
    Unfortunately most well paying jobs do.
    IncreasePosts · 1790798189 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe there will be an inversion. Lots of white collar office jobs can be partially automated, or have their efficiency greatly increased by AI. But we still don't seem to be near widely deployed robots that finish drywall
    lukan · 1790798266 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you like working with dry walls? I don't. I can do it, but I ain't born for handywork.
    asdff · 1790801440 · focus · HN ↗
    You think the drywall company is going to hire you? Why would they hire someone in middle age with no experience when there are no shortage of 20 year olds who already know the trade?
    rayiner · 1790807939 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    eloisius · 1790823972 · focus · HN ↗
    There may be an inversion as white collar jobs sink, but not because drywalling is going to get better. All of my family work in trades and it's a lot harder and less stable than we office workers like fantasize, as much as I love the ending of Office Space too. It's cyclical and sometimes there's not enough work. Cost of materials is volatile and can eat into your income. And it's skilled. Programmers tend to think everything else is easy and if you can teach yourself React then electrical should be a no-brainer. That's to say nothing of start-up costs. It was incredible that we coders could bootstrap six-figure careers with a $4000 MacBook Pro. Trades workers need a truck, you need power tools, if you're not loosey-goosey then you need insurance. All of that costs a lot.
    That's for anyone joining the trade. Out-of-work middle-aged programmers with soft keyboard hands and little or no experience hanging dry wall? Why pay them any more than the 24 year old guy. AI may automate us out of our desk jobs, but the downward pressure of us transitioning to trade jobs, even at the bottom level, will only make those jobs less lucrative.
  2. adamredwoods · 1790808349 · focus · HN ↗
    Interviewers and hiring managers make that decision. I'd say the better paying jobs require a degree or training.
    physicallyIllfr · 1790828614 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
2. justonceokay · 1790792124 · focus · HN ↗
  Just like everyone else. I have a feeling your definition of “livable” is not in line with the reality that most people face. You share more in common with a stay-at-home mom going back to school to become a phlebotomist than you think. It’s just pride gets in the way
  1. hnlmorg · 1790794665 · focus · HN ↗
    A stay-at-home mom isn’t bringing any income in so has the luxury of being able to fail.
    Whereas many of us can’t take a loss of income for months while we retrain.
    Lagoon3384_SWE · 1790794888 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    ForHackernews · 1790797567 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    harimau777 · 1790798770 · focus · HN ↗
    Not enough buffer to take 3-5 years to rebuild a career is not the same as no buffer at all. Personally I have about a year of buffer which is no where near enough to meaningfully retrain.
    robocat · 1790824719 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you're ignoring risk.
    Even if you've saved enough for 1 to 3 years of university, there's a risk that you won't get a job especially if you're getting towards 40+.
    TeMPOraL · 1790844893 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe they're spending it so their kids can stay in school instead of going to work.
    queenkjuul · 1790871211 · focus · HN ↗
    I've been in this industry barely five years, 401k tax penalties are huge (and that's where a lot of the savings is), and rent is expensive
    hnlmorg · 1790876417 · focus · HN ↗
    Why are you assuming every white collar worker has got an inflated salary, or that they’ve had it for a while?
    And actually no, I can’t afford to be unemployed for a year. On COVIDs cost of living it would have been easy. But the current cost of living I’m not able to save even with my “inflated” salary. And the savings I do have isn’t going to stretch as far.
    I honestly don’t know how people save on lower incomes. I suspect they don’t. Which is why the debt crisis keeps worsening.
    I’m lucky enough to have assets but once they’re sold they’re gone. And most people don’t even have that luxury.
    OroPla · 1790798844 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't get it. Didn't you live way below your means so you can save up money for retirement? I've got enough money saved to get away with being jobless for about a decade.
    achierius · 1790802458 · focus · HN ↗
    Not everyone's had the luxury of saving for years and years. Some people just got into the industry (remember 'learn to code'? not to mention recent graduates), others had to work their way up through lower-wage roles (e.g. contracting) just to get to a place from where they could hope to save. Other people have family to take care of and can't just throw everything into their savings.
    OroPla · 1790806204 · focus · HN ↗
    Even back when I had to make do with $400 a month I was saving. Live out of a van to save on rent if you have to. There's always a way to live below your means and save.
    Of course there are exceptions, but I don't expect those to apply to anyone commenting here.
    pixl97 · 1790808715 · focus · HN ↗
    Since that time living out of a van has become a crime in a lot more places.
    achierius · 1790822991 · focus · HN ↗
    Live out of a van with children? Is that what you're suggesting people do? That's monstrous. You would rather put the weight of the world on a poor family's head than one iota of responsibility on the ruling class.
    jrek · 1790823709 · focus · HN ↗
    A bizarre perspective - you seem hung up on the virtue of saving but totally disconnected from the material implications - even if you saved 50% of your income for a year at that time, you’ve finished with $2400 in the bank - how long is that going to float you? About a week in my case.
    It’s plainly true that for a significant number of people, even those who satisfy your moral sensibilities around money, they won’t have had sufficient time at sufficient incomes to have enough saved for a significant period of unemployment to retrain.
    OroPla · 1790842940 · focus · HN ↗
    If you burn through $2400 in a week, there are lots of opportunities to make changes in your life to make do with less. I'm currently living off $240 a week and that includes going to a fancy restaurant, so I could cut that number down even more if I had to.
    jrek · 1790851150 · focus · HN ↗
    You have no idea what my circumstances or expenses are, and in fact they’re irrelevant. You seem still to have a strange inability to see beyond your own circumstances.
    OroPla · 1790852195 · focus · HN ↗
    You told me your expenses are $2400 a week. I told you that it is easy to get this number down since it's unlikely that you have to pay $2400 a week in life extending medications.
    hnlmorg · 1790891564 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not the GP but I will answer the following on their behalf:
    It's usually best not to make assumptions about other people's personal circumstances.
    queenkjuul · 1790871374 · focus · HN ↗
    Living out of a van is illegal here and good luck getting a job with no permanent address
    hn_acc1 · 1790803445 · focus · HN ↗
    Is that in cash, so if the stock market drops 80%, it's still true?
    triceratops · 1790805229 · focus · HN ↗
    If the stock market drops 80% and stays there for longer than a year it's Great Depression 2.0. Retraining won't do jack shit. There'll be breadlines, governments paying people to dig ditches and build trails in national parks.
    duskdozer · 1790855580 · focus · HN ↗
    And do you feel comfortable drawing all that down so that you're left with nothing at the end of the decade?
3. rayiner · 1790792422 · focus · HN ↗
  The same way clerical and manufacturing workers retrained when their jobs were replaced by computers/the Internet and robots. That is to say, most won’t.
  1. trollbridge · 1790801032 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, a lot of them retrained into call-centre type of jobs.
    Then the call centre jobs offshored (and now are being replaced by AI).
4. WalterBright · 1790792550 · focus · HN ↗
  Pretty much none of us are doing jobs that existed in colonial America.
  1. bombcar · 1790793032 · focus · HN ↗
    There's an off-color joke that could be made here but the real question is the speed of change - we gloss over it but there have been major changes that took centuries, and others that were quite fast, this one seems to be closer to the fast end.
  2. harimau777 · 1790798940 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes and? You'll be shocked to know that pretty much none of us were alive in colonial America.
  3. asdff · 1790801181 · focus · HN ↗
    How can you not see that this time its actually different? The very need for labor is being obviated. Every technological change we had before still required a need for labor often an massive need that justified an entire city population. That is the difference. For the first time in human history, economic output is being severed from requiring maintenance of a labor pool. Considering we are that labor pool, things do not bode so well for us. As you state, look at the relative lack of abundance of candlestick makers and horeshoe makers and basket weavers and other colonial jobs. We are essentially making ourselves extinct and we don't even realize this.
    WalterBright · 1790806007 · focus · HN ↗
    They said the same thing when the looms put weavers out of a job.
    asdff · 1790879465 · focus · HN ↗
    The loom still needs people to run it, you fool. This one doesn't. How are you so blind to this nuance?
    WalterBright · 1790885015 · focus · HN ↗
    Then everything would be free.
    nickpp · 1790837720 · focus · HN ↗
    > this time its actually different
    The older I get the more time I heard this. Never actually true. But always used by somebody asking for power, to protect me - of course.
    asdff · 1790879520 · focus · HN ↗
    There has never been a technology with the promise of obviating both knowledge and physical based labor before. Now there is. Sorry, but this is unprecedented. The hubris to imagine all will just be swell is astounding to me.
5. dasil003 · 1790792979 · focus · HN ↗
  In my experience, AI has given far more leverage to software engineers than anyone else, because they have a feel for what computers can do, what's easy, what's hard, what's performant, or poorly specified, etc. Therefore I think retraining is mostly about being willing to experiment with AI-assisted workflows and not being too tied to old ways of doing things. As long as you are focused on the problems you are solving, I think you'll do okay.
  What I'm more concerned about are the younger generation where all the learning tasks have been automated. I have faith that the strong, naturally curious engineering types will still learn to do great engineering, and honestly without some of the mental blocks and calcified assumptions that us greybeards have. But how do they get in the foot in the door and the reps needed to develop senior-level judgment is another question.
  In some sense we need the current mania to die down and the long-term maintenance implications of heavy AI assistance to become more apparent. Basically I think we need the AI bubble to pop and then 1-2 years for things to stabilize, and then we'll recalibrate on hiring expectations and best practices for AI usage. The current AI maximalist and doomer views I think are both basically driven by capitalist incentives and wishful thinking from investors and a reality check is going to come in some form (whether technically, socially or politically).
6. nullishdomain · 1790793273 · focus · HN ↗
  Many of us on this site have worked directly on projects where the efficiency gains ultimately reduced or eliminated positions. If you want to exit the development field, I think the answer is probably the same as for the people whose jobs we helped eliminate.
7. tripleee · 1790793755 · focus · HN ↗
  I know some people whose work was already almost completely eliminated by AI (language translation) and they're not doing great. Reality is there's no-one out there looking out for you except yourself and very close family/friends.
  1. chubot · 1790795194 · focus · HN ↗
    Just curious, what kind of jobs did they transition to? Or were they forced to take a break, or left in job application hell, etc?
    tripleee · 1790795650 · focus · HN ↗
    Doing mostly language tutoring last I checked.
  2. sdcfgy · 1790795536 · focus · HN ↗
    I know a language translator (Japanese/English) who is doing very well out of AI screwing up and causing damage.
    tripleee · 1790795720 · focus · HN ↗
    This might be the savior for software developers
    derpyzza · 1790850836 · focus · HN ↗
    kinda. there'd still be a lot less demand for software devs than there used to be, a lot of people would still be jobless/would have to pivot to some other career.
    duskdozer · 1790854756 · focus · HN ↗
    It could. But I'm not confident there will be a broad recognition of the fact if things become much worse than they are, or of the cause, or that there will be a desire to make things be better. There has been a long decline in quality in favor of optimizing for monetization and engagement, predating LLMs. But I do think there will be some pullback in things that actually matter if not in the SaaS FOTM.
    sasaf5 · 1790831450 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh yes, when LLMs fail at translating they don't make a visible error. They fill up with inferred meaning. Translators can only be replaced by LLMs if there's no consequence attached to the meaning of what's being translated.
8. shimman · 1790793828 · focus · HN ↗
  You retrain the same way that we told workers when we decimated the garment and manufacturing industries. You'll get the same amount of government support too.
  1. harimau777 · 1790799084 · focus · HN ↗
    Who's we? Personally, I've actively supported the traditional garment industry to the degree that it exists.
    trollbridge · 1790801171 · focus · HN ↗
    It used to be you could just buy (for example) jeans made in America for $20. I bought such a pair back in the late 1990s. There was no need to be busy trying to "support the traditional garment industry".
    Nowadays you'll be spending $40 (same price after adjusting for inflation) for something definitely not made in America, and probably of inferior quality too. Since the domestic garment industry has shrunk so much, the supply chains an economies of scale don't exist anymore to buy domestically-made garments of decent quality at those prices.
    rayiner · 1790808124 · focus · HN ↗
    As recently as the 1980s-90s (when I was a kid) 50-70% of American clothing was made in the U.S. Post-NAFTA, that declined to 3-10%.
    trollbridge · 1790954091 · focus · HN ↗
    We were also told it was important to help create good jobs in Mexico so there would be less desperation resulting in mass migration from Mexico to America. Good plan, right?
    Well, it was, until the factories in Mexico also closed as the jobs migrated to China, Vietnam, and so forth. So Mexico got to enjoy the same problems America had, except they were poorer to begin with.
    shimman · 1790830253 · focus · HN ↗
    That's my point. You are alone and your government doesn't care.
9. Wojtkie · 1790793869 · focus · HN ↗
  I would like to know the answer to this, too.
  Not really sure what I should be doing on the side since AI seems to be automating a lot of work that I do as an analytics engineer. Maybe in 10 years all I'm doing is feeding in markdowns and project specs to an LLM and reading test outputs. At what point are you just a technician?
  1. markus_zhang · 1790799611 · focus · HN ↗
    We are mostly already doing that now as DE.
  2. hwntw · 1790869063 · focus · HN ↗
    The bright side is that analytics engineer is a relatively modern job title, previously it was largely bundled in with data engineer, and before that, data scientist. So you're either already relatively early in your professional career or have adapted between programming disciplines once already.
    I also (personally! I'm in data engineering for my part) feel it's one of the safer roles from an AI perspective. Yes, you'll be writing a lot less code in the future, but that's never been the particularly difficult part of your job: SQL is dead easy to use.
    The difficult part is picking up all the business context and knowledge in order to work out the best ways of representing complicated and messy data for the business. AI can help to some degrees there, but if you're great at your job, your judgement is going to be built on so much business context that both can't be written down and would be too vast to feed into the model.
    Sure, AI can do some of the job, but you'll always thrash it in terms of quality (whilst getting to spend less time doing the busywork of just writing your thousandth predicate of the day!). And worst comes to worst, all the business knowledge you have in your head makes moving into analytics a far more viable lateral move.
    And that one is definitely AI proof. If all companies use AI for their analytics, they're going to be moving largely in lockstep with each other. Humans might be far worse, but often far better, so I'd be willing to bet that through sheer randomness that over time companies using human analytics will outperform those relying on AI.
10. Krei-se · 1790794138 · focus · HN ↗
  No - because as a software developer adapting IS the job.
  1. mahboi · 1790807537 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly. There have already been waves of software devs who lost their jobs because they didn't adapt to whatever newer tech it was last time.
11. sick_of_slop · 1790794342 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
12. guitarlimeo · 1790794415 · focus · HN ↗
  Lately I've been just thinking of hitting ALT+F4 on life for good, as a big FU to the megacorps (not that they would care, but it would give me the satisfaction at least)
  1. sarchertech · 1790795558 · focus · HN ↗
    There’s so much more you can do to get back at megacorps that will hurt them more than that. 1 less person in the world to oppose them is a win for them.
    I’ve never met you but based on your last 10 HN comments I think the world would be worse off without you in it.
  2. rootusrootus · 1790795598 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    guitarlimeo · 1790845542 · focus · HN ↗
    Getting permanently free from all this nonsense that plagues human societies wouldn't be satisfying to you?
    buggyipadmettoo · 1790985703 · focus · HN ↗
    It wouldn't be satisfying to you either, as you'd be dead.
  3. sodapopcan · 1790795864 · focus · HN ↗
    Just ALT+F4 on shitty tech, which is most of it. Ditching your smartphone is a small but good start.
  4. lukan · 1790798196 · focus · HN ↗
    "as a big FU to the megacorps"
    Where is the satisfaction in that?
    If you jump from a bridge, all it does, is that relatives of yours will receive the bill for cleaning up the blood and remains (on top of funeral etc).
  5. markus_zhang · 1790798824 · focus · HN ↗
    There are many ways to do that more effectively TBH.
  6. NotSuspicious · 1790800703 · focus · HN ↗
    I think of doing this except for suicide (which you shouldn't do) I fantasize about becoming a monk. That's a life role that can't be replaced with AI, provides meaning to yourself and to the community and guarantees you a certain amount of happiness – probably more than most jobs.
    TFNA · 1790801695 · focus · HN ↗
    Monasteries are wary about people inquiring because they can't hack it in the world. And because monasteries are businesses of a sort, they are concerned with what a middle-aged inquirer can bring to the table financially.
    achierius · 1790802678 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a very broad statement; the reality depends on the specific order and monastery in question. To be sure monasteries are wary about all who inquire, thus the usual two-year neophyte period. Beyond that some will expect more from novices, other less, but there are many stories of broken people retreating to monastic life even today. Indeed many (within the Church) expound that as a key role of monasteries, providing a place for people to escape from the world. If you just want to live a Godly life, you can do that in society; monasteries are precisely the place you go to do so outside of it.
    TFNA · 1790805370 · focus · HN ↗
    A pithy saying in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions is that people shouldn't consider monasticism if they want to run away from the world, but rather only if they want to run towards Christ. A significant part of the discernment process is weeding out the former.
    cindyllm · 1790811393 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  7. shimman · 1790821326 · focus · HN ↗
    If you're going to do this at least take down a data center or something. Most new constructions aren't insured at all.
  8. queenkjuul · 1790871426 · focus · HN ↗
    Only if you go out with a bang
  9. defyonce · 1790887756 · focus · HN ↗
    same, not like, for megacorps, but, in general, too tired of this plane of existence, and, nothing really interesting/exciting?
13. bruce511 · 1790795200 · focus · HN ↗
  So obviously each college is different. And your experience is not mine.
  But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.
  What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.
  You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.
  Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.
  1. tripleee · 1790795585 · focus · HN ↗
    This works if you're interested in running a business, but what well paying work doesn't require a degree or some kind of formal training certification?
    bruce511 · 1790832404 · focus · HN ↗
    There's a lot to unpack in your question.
    First you assume that being "interested" in the work is a requirement. I'm guessing 90% of people are doing work that doesn't interest them. But assuming that it's a requirement for you the question becomes, what are you interested in?
    Second you want well-paying work. I understand. Programmers got well paid. They lived above the standard of most. It's not surprising you'd want to keep that. But "well paying" is a spectrum. It depends on your life-style, location, eating habits and so on.
    And finally, lots and lots of jobs don't require a formal certification. Or one that isn't trivial to get. Ask the people you see everyday (including the software programmers, hardware designers, receptionists, assistants, book keepers, marketing and advertising people, sales, support, your vehicle mechanic and so on.) I suspect if you asked every dingle person you met in a day the ones that actually had this requirement would be a rounding error.
  2. dmkolobov · 1790795723 · focus · HN ↗
    Did you graduate yesterday? Have you actually lived in the world?
    My unmet needs are $2.5k rent and $2k childcare, per month. Then there's food, healthcare, car payments. There is pretty much zero wiggle room for us.
    ForHackernews · 1790798045 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    [deleted] · 1790798468 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    dmkolobov · 1790798661 · focus · HN ↗
    Your solution to childcare is permanent unemployment?
    This is Denver rent actually, and increasingly most urban centers.
    harimau777 · 1790798678 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think "just give up your existing community and move" is a viable option. That defeats the whole point since at that point the retraining isn't allowing you to maintain your quality of life.
    krapp · 1790799359 · focus · HN ↗
    It is a viable option. "Quality of life" is a luxury and programmers no longer belong to the class that can afford it. Do what everyone else does and go wherever the jobs are and live at whatever quality the market decides that you deserve.
    harimau777 · 1790799828 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you are missing the point of the discussion. The idea behind "just retrain" rhetoric is effectively "new technology won't destroy people's quality of life because they can just retrain!". If quality of life isn't maintained, then there is no reason to retrain at all, people can just get a minimum wage job and live in poverty.
    krapp · 1790800511 · focus · HN ↗
    The rhetoric was a lie. Capitalists lie. That new technology always creates a surplus of newer, better jobs and quality of life always improves for everyone was a lie. That you can "just retrain" and everything will remain the same was a lie.
    Even if you "retrain" your quality of life will go down because the market value of your life will go down as automation and AI improve, unless you're a member of the capitalist class. Which, if you need to work for a living at all, you aren't. No matter what you do unless you're personally wealthy your quality of life will go down. That's just what an efficient market does to most people, and AI is going to make the market brutally efficient.
    achierius · 1790802343 · focus · HN ↗
    I wonder how many sectors this will have to happen to until workers realize that nobody's safe. I was shocked to see journalists at major firms peddling the 'just learn to code' line a few years back, given how much their industry had contracted in the decades before.
    akoboldfrying · 1790816863 · focus · HN ↗
    It's more nuanced than a lie.
    Quality of life during the Industrial Revolution dropped considerably for most of the working population, but afterwards saw big improvements. You seem to be implying that life now is worse than before the IR. Are you? If not, in what way was the loss of jobs to mechanisation then more acceptable than it is now?
    TeMPOraL · 1790844755 · focus · HN ↗
    This is even more nuanced.
    The overall quality of life improved through and thanks to IR. But the quality of life of the people most affected, and their children, and their children's children - did not do so well.
    Technological progress automating away jobs lifts humanity as a whole, but it absolutely fucks over the people whose jobs got automated away, and the families of those people, and the communities they live in.
    munificent · 1790805175 · focus · HN ↗
    San Francisco is where the jobs are, and dropping your entire social network on the floor at exactly the moment you need it the most to help you is not good advice.
    flaunf221 · 1790807606 · focus · HN ↗
    Former tech workers can ask for advice from non-tech people who previously had to leave because they could no longer afford rising costs that happened due to influx of well paid IT jobs.
    krapp · 1790810875 · focus · HN ↗
    San Francisco was where the jobs you want were but now those jobs belong to a Claude account.
    munificent · 1790814317 · focus · HN ↗
    True.
    AndrewKemendo · 1790799833 · focus · HN ↗
    > just give up your existing community and move" is a viable option.
    That’s been how humanity has always worked, human migration is probably the largest single driver of social change in human history
    Millions of people migrate every year today, I’m not sure what you think the alternative is
    achierius · 1790801981 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it isn't. This is an incredibly modern phenomenon. We see examples of peoples moving en masse throughout history, yes, but the idea that everyday individuals should expect to leave their community is an incredibly recent one. Such would have seemed monstrous to people even a few hundred years ago. Fun fact: Socrates wasn't actually sentenced to death, he was sentenced to death or exile, and chose death over having to leave his home behind.
    > Millions of people migrate every year today
    A just society that doesn't force them to.
    AndrewKemendo · 1790812892 · focus · HN ↗
    The entire colonization of the planet by humans from 250,000BC to today would argue otherwise
    We’re physically built to be mobile - the extent you can take your community with you has always been relevant
    I’m sitting in Virginia USA with 50% of my neighbors being migrant families of 5+ people usually across three generations
    I’m not sure what data you’re working with. In fact there a whole lot of ignorant politicians that want to stop migration precisely because of how valuable of a tool it is.
    marcus_holmes · 1790819107 · focus · HN ↗
    Some humans moved their families from somewhere that they weren't safe, to somewhere that they could be safe, with the intention of settling there and building a living space their great-grandkids could be proud of.
    Some humans lived nomadically, moving all the time, as a way of life.
    Being forced to do the second because nowhere is stable enough to do the first is what we're talking about.
    oblio · 1790830623 · focus · HN ↗
    > The entire colonization of the planet by humans from 250,000BC to today would argue otherwise
    That colonization happened when there weren't other humans there. Later colonizations were either unsuccessful or led to very nasty events.
    Also, today jobs are concentrated in places where things are expensive.
    jplusequalt · 1790878996 · focus · HN ↗
    >The entire colonization of the planet by humans from 250,000BC to today would argue otherwise
    You're talking about time scales on the order of several thousand human generations.
    Take any human over the course of the last quarter million years, the chances are they didn't migrate away from their communities.
    customguy · 1790856674 · focus · HN ↗
    Migrating is one thing, having to migrate another.
    no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here
    -- from "Home" by Warsan Shire, <a href="https://www.amnesty.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/home-by-warsan-shire.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.amnesty.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/home-by-wa...
    bruce511 · 1790833435 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm assuming you're talking about people born in SF? Because the rest have already demonstrated a willingness to give up their community once in the pursuit of quality of life.
    Equally, if you are in SF you're about to feel the pain you've caused to the locals by moving there. Somewhat harshly, I could suggest that you didn't care about their existing community when you priced them out of their neighborhoods.
    So here's the rub. SF is somewhat different. It is a company town. If you don't work for the company you're moving. Sorry. There's certainly nothing else that can pay you the same money.
    On the up side, there are lots send lots of cheaper places to live. And chances are you can find a good job there doing something that adds value to that community.
    trollbridge · 1790800961 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm interested in how you expect someone to attend school/retrain without childcare. You can't generally bring your kids to class with you.
    tripleee · 1790801868 · focus · HN ↗
    In some other countries family generally takes this role: grandparents look after them
    adamredwoods · 1790807577 · focus · HN ↗
    Odd assumption that everyone has grandparents alive.
    pixl97 · 1790808582 · focus · HN ↗
    Or assumes their grandparents are allowed within 200 feet of any children.
    robocat · 1790823572 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    robocat · 1790884518 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    trollbridge · 1790861813 · focus · HN ↗
    I suppose you've got a point; if the middle class of Americans constantly have their careers destroyed, eventually we'll return to a third world sort of existence where childcare is provided by extended relatives.
    However, most people in America can't rely on grandparents for childcare. One reason is we have children much older than people in the third world do - if two generations have children at age 38, it's not very reasonable to be expecting a 76 year old to provide child care.
    stasomatic · 1790799199 · focus · HN ↗
    Only $2.5K rent? That's like free these days. For what though. I rented a 4K sq ft house in Charlotte three years ago and now paying $3.5K for not a modern 2bdr in Miami proper.
    dmkolobov · 1790800006 · focus · HN ↗
    For sure! Still more money than I can fathom bringing in if software engineering went away tomorrow.
    1300 sq ft house with a big yard for the toddler.
    stasomatic · 1790800783 · focus · HN ↗
    I keep telling my 22y who graduated from a university last year to go to a trade school (HVAC/ electric, plumbing). Too late for me as these require apprenticeships in the US.
    My HVAC contact in FL needs a $100 just to sniff the AC/boiler closet. That is, if I can get him to show up. I don't even know if he's licensed here, but he's definitely very experienced.
    DeluluDon · 1790801333 · focus · HN ↗
    1100 a month in Kansas City and $800 a month in Denver. Everybody wants to live on the coast.
    selimthegrim · 1790809561 · focus · HN ↗
    The Gulf Coast?
    queenkjuul · 1790860510 · focus · HN ↗
    $800 in Denver for what, a studio? A closet?
    1br in Denver was well over $1000 last i looked.
    yimmo_7 · 1790862310 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah lol $800 is like a bottom tier 1-room apartment or nearly derelict house where I am and that's a blown out rust belt shithole city.
    stasomatic · 1790810256 · focus · HN ↗
    The Charlotte house was (2022ish) $2.3K/month through a PE that bought out a lot of single-home houses to rent out. 2 story, 4bdr, 3 baths, a yard and a lawn, a huge deck. The area was very nice and so were the neighbors. My dog loved the deer.
    It wasn't urban enough for me, for someone working remote at the time, and few growth opportunities for my wife, but I regret moving to FL. Miami has become the least affordable city in the US relative to income.
    oblio · 1790830500 · focus · HN ↗
    > I rented a 4K sq ft house
    Excuse me, but what could you possibly do with a ~360sqm house than one half the size wouldn't do? A family of 4 for sure fits in even a smaller one.
    stasomatic · 1790861704 · focus · HN ↗
    Because that's how they are built in the US. I didn't need the extra space, but for the money, there wasn't much choice, really. I would have loved to rent a house half smaller at half price, but none were on the market. I barely went upstairs. My dog occupied it, at least.
    I could have rented a townhouse for $300-400 less, but then there are different constraints. Small or no yard, tiny kitchens, no garage etc.
    I was perfectly content with a 2200 sq ft ranch in Henderson Nevada.
    oblio · 1790862412 · focus · HN ↗
    > Because that's how they are built in the US.
    That's just sad. I knew that real estate was a pain in most countries around the world, but I never realized that choice in the land of freedom was that constrained. I guess in most places it's basically: "Detached House, Large".
    TeMPOraL · 1790844536 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a big part of the problem in these discussions.
    Those graduating today have plenty of buffer to reskill tomorrow. Those of us who graduated 20 years ago, have no chance.
  3. mitthrowaway2 · 1790795939 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know where you are, but when I hire mechanical engineers, I hire them from universities with accredited engineering programs. It's actually a legal requirement for the job in my jurisdiction. And if those engineers decide they want to become daycare teachers or knee surgeons, they do have to go back to university and re-train, even though they already learned how to think the first time.
    ForHackernews · 1790797477 · focus · HN ↗
    There are many fast-track teaching certification programs for people who already have a university degree <a href="https://tntpteachingfellows.org/" rel="nofollow">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.
    harimau777 · 1790799268 · focus · HN ↗
    Is that true for healthcare careers that don't have abysmal quality of life? All of the nurses I've known are working 60 hour weeks, night shifts, etc.
    ForHackernews · 1790800849 · focus · HN ↗
    Pharmacy techs work regular hours.
    Good pay, low barrier to entry, pleasant. Pick two.
    [deleted] · 1790801802 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    adamredwoods · 1790807435 · focus · HN ↗
    Not from the pharma workers I hear from in the US. But this is all anecdotal.
    jacquesm · 1790808964 · focus · HN ↗
    And get paid peanuts. And effectively they're told that they are disposable in the face of a pandemic.
    bruce511 · 1790831769 · focus · HN ↗
    You're right. There are several occupations which have legal entry requirements. You can't be a doctor without getting a medical degree.
    However the number of professions that require a formal degree is very small. (And notably, programming is not one of them.) If you take any large group of random people and asked them, you'd find close to all are not required to have a formal certification.
    Generally yes, people with (any) degree are more hirable to (any) job. The skills getting a degree are generally useful, and make a candidate more employable. But if you already have one, you already have that.
  4. trollbridge · 1790800903 · focus · HN ↗
    People don't get a degree in "generic doing things people want". They generally get one focused on a particular field.
    If someone's degree is in computer science, they're not going to be a good fit to be, say, an accountant or a nuclear engineer.
    refactor_master · 1790812626 · focus · HN ↗
    I know what you’re trying to say, but strictly speaking there are many examples of “hard-science” people moving towards and excelling in softer fields, while the opposite is almost never true.
    There was a saying where I went to high school: “the language programme students are not better at languages, they’re just worse at math”.
    bruce511 · 1790832911 · focus · HN ↗
    The language students were however better at writing and communications in general. They ended up in sales, marketing, advertising and everywhere else.(all under threat from AI as well.)
    But to further the GP question there are lots of examples of people not working in their degree in both directions. The entire computer industry was built by people without a Computer Science degree. Today huge numbers of programmers have no degree at all.
    To refer back to the original post about the farrier turned mechanic. Most comments seem to miss the point. Change is coming. You can lean into the change and prosper. Or fight the change and vanish. Those with enough vision, creativity, adaptability will continue to thrive.
14. bryanrasmussen · 1790795395 · focus · HN ↗
  well, I suppose the same way that other people whose jobs were lost due to automation over the years were supposed to retrain for good jobs? I doubt they had the money or years to go back to college to get a livable job either.
  1. zokier · 1790795819 · focus · HN ↗
    In the past there was always demand for "unskilled" (manual) labor where displaced workers could land to without long (re)training, and possibly even gain skills on the job. But that job marked has dramatically diminished especially in the west; there are only so many burgers to be flipped. Somewhat famously during industrial revolution displaced agricultural workers (e.g. farmhands) ended up mass-migrating to cities doing factory work under extremely exploitative conditions. And that never truly got resolved, we just brushed the issue under the rug by pushing manual labor to third world countries where the problems could remain out of sight.
  2. harimau777 · 1790798984 · focus · HN ↗
    Generally speaking they didn't. They either got lucky or their quality of life plummeted.
    bryanrasmussen · 1790842559 · focus · HN ↗
    hence why I put "supposed"
  3. pixl97 · 1790808863 · focus · HN ↗
    Hence why we had things like the rust belt with excessively high drug use.
    yimmo_7 · 1790862736 · focus · HN ↗
    You're just not creative or entrepreneurial enough to see the opportunity in it. Just become the drug dealer.
15. sdcfgy · 1790795462 · focus · HN ↗
  The trick is not to start in software and have something to fall back in to.
  In my case that’s mathematics in academia so I’m going to be starving to death.
  1. markus_zhang · 1790798685 · focus · HN ↗
    I started from sweeping floors and making survey calls at minimum wage. I think you can teach Math to high school students.
    harimau777 · 1790798908 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you checked how much high school teachers actually make? It's not much.
    markus_zhang · 1790799533 · focus · HN ↗
    Still better than sweeping floors definitely. And you can work as tutors if you are good with kids.
    forshaper · 1790800837 · focus · HN ↗
    you know I would go back to cleaning toilets if it paid the same as staring at a screen
    achierius · 1790802534 · focus · HN ↗
    Actually that's not generally true. Janitors at least work 12 months a year, many schoolteachers are paid ~9 despite being expected to work through them (on lesson prep &c).
    adamredwoods · 1790808116 · focus · HN ↗
    It's possible to make over 6 figures, but a lot of pay is dependent upon length of time teaching and/or which district to get into. Good districts rarely have openings.
    I'd say (not a teacher myself, but related to several) teaching is a lot more difficult than people give it credit for.
16. zeven7 · 1790796043 · focus · HN ↗
  Also what job do we retrain for?
17. zaptheimpaler · 1790797135 · focus · HN ↗
  We are all going to learn the hard way, this is what the economy is like for many people. Always on the precipice of losing everything and thus willing to do anything like the capital owners want it. The job of the future is nurse, diaper-changer, maid, prostitute for elderly retirees, welcome to an aging fascist society.
18. doug_durham · 1790798059 · focus · HN ↗
  You are presuming that you will need to retrain for a new job. Why do you think that?
  1. harimau777 · 1790798860 · focus · HN ↗
    Because I've been looking for a new job for several months and all of them either require significant retraining or don't pay nearly enough to maintain even a similar quality of life. I don't just mean they don't pay enough for luxury. I mean they don't pay enough to live in my community without a roommate.
19. Aurornis · 1790798064 · focus · HN ↗
  People in tech change roles and careers all the time. The vast majority of role or career changes do not involve going back to college.
  I would even recommend against going back to college unless someone has an extremely compelling case for a career change that requires it and the conviction to see it through.
  I'm hesitant to give examples because I know every example I give will be met with objections from "But I don't want to do that job" or "What if that gets replaced by AI too?". Look around you and you can should be able to identify some adjacent roles where you at least have an understanding of what the works like and you could learn the rest by taking on gradually more responsibility.
  There are a lot of jobs out there that aren't exciting, don't pay SWE level salaries, but nevertheless pay enough to support a family as evidenced by all of the people doing those jobs who support their families. Not every company or industry is interested in squeezing maximum efficiency out of their employees. I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
  I don't think SWE is going to disappear either, but it will look a lot different in years to come. If you can't or won't adapt to the new normal, one of those boring alternative careers might be worth pursuing.
  1. harimau777 · 1790798569 · focus · HN ↗
    I guess where I'm coming from is that I currently am trying to change careers. Everything I'm finding is either a 50% pay cut or is simply unwilling to consider anyone without 5-10 years of experience in that particular industry. Since I've already built a life here I can't really just move and a 50% pay cut isn't enough to live anywhere near a comfortable life; particularly since I have medical expenses that aren't covered by insurance.
  2. PorciiVorbesc · 1790799145 · focus · HN ↗
    >The vast majority of role or career changes do not involve going back to college.
    That was possible pre-2022 during the famous developer labor shortage. In the current market, companies expect seniority/experience in that specific stack they use for that, no more career changers.
    They either take you as a senior/expert to contribute from day one, or as a young and cheap newgrad/junior out of uni they expect to train on the job, but no more in-betweeners switching careers as they're not as experienced as the seniors on the market, nor are they as cheap and malleable as newgrads/juniors.
    Sure, in theory every developer can learn at home to do anything new related, but in the current job market, companies expect X-years of proven on the job experience with their stack, no more bootcampers, and no more self-taught-at-home types. The entry bar has risen significantly. At least where I live.
    Like I just saw on linkeidn a job posting from a large bank that was an hour old and it already had 100 applications, which probably means most applications are now AI botted, meaning yours will get lost in the noise and getting a call back for an actual interview is like rolling a dice.
    Not saying it's impossible to change(I did a couple of times), just that's it's much more difficult than in the good times, and will most likely also come with a paycut.
    eloisius · 1790823003 · focus · HN ↗
    To make matters even worse, if you do apply to these jobs the only thing you get back in return is your data being sold to even scummier organizations. I always use single-purpose emails for everything, so I know where things source from. Imagine my shock when a week or two after applying for jobs I started getting a steady stream of Super Intelligence emails offering to spruce up my resume, or to source leads for me, or some other sketchy service.
    Everything is commercialized now. Even the discard pile of resumes can be sold for pennies. A job application isn't a job application anymore: it's a desperation signal alerting predators to come extract some value.
    dolmen · 1790861829 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm glad to be protected by GDPR.
    PorciiVorbesc · 1790865758 · focus · HN ↗
    How? I'm still getting scam calls despite GDPR, because the scammers in India don't care about GDPR.
  3. rayiner · 1790807756 · focus · HN ↗
    > I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
    I think these jobs are actually the most likely to be replaced by AI. They have resisted automation to date because there's too much fuzz in the inputs/outputs to make it feasible to computerize. LLMs solve exactly that problem.
    jeremyjh · 1790823975 · focus · HN ↗
    Except for the part where they have absolutely no idea what the world is or how it works. They are good at software and math because of RLVR, but they can’t run a business.
    ben_w · 1790850576 · focus · HN ↗
    Kinda true (they have a mediocre idea of how the world works), but it's surprising how close they are given their general limitations and what it took to get disruptively good at software and maths.
    Like, sure, using an LLM as a CEO today will bankrupt you and some of the decisions leading to that are daft, but even despite that it's in the same "huh, interesting" kind of zone that early LLMs like InstructGPT and the first release of ChatGPT were with code. It could write short functions or small scripts for you, even then.
    jeremyjh · 1790855072 · focus · HN ↗
    Astra told me I can walk to the car wash to wash my car.
    ben_w · 1790856249 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, like I said, a mediocre idea of how the world works.
    > Again, the improvement in coding is due to RLVR, and it does not generalize to other domains. So it is meaningless to point to examples of that improvement.
    I can point at actual benchmarks for performance on business tasks. On the one hand, those lines go up; on the other, I just don't know how good those benchmarks are.
    > There are many ordinary behaviors and skills that are not feasible to RL at scale. The sampling efficiency is just way to low.
    Yes. A point I make myself on occasion. One of two perfectly valid ways to describe intelligence, and one by which all current machine learning really sucks.
    Like, if it was fully general, the trillion or so miles that Tesla cars have driven would have obsoleted the steering wheel long ago, rather than the closest we have being (yet another) pronouncement from Musk that this new car he's not actually made available for sale won't need one.
    jeremyjh · 1790866244 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s much harder than both code and cars because there is both more variety to the work and much work where the reward function takes months or years to resolve objectively.
    ben_w · 1790941353 · focus · HN ↗
    In general it could well be as you say, but the current failure modes are rather shorter-term than that.
    famouswaffles · 1790913273 · focus · HN ↗
    >Again, the improvement in coding is due to RLVR, and it does not generalize to other domains.
    Astra is one of the biggest examples of this being untrue. The model is cracked at computer use and vision/spatial tasks and reasoning. Driving, Operating Robots, Video Editing, 3D modelling, graphics are all things Astra was >>> at than any other model. Just because RLVR makes easier work of certain kinds of problems doesn't mean LLMs aren't fast improving on the other kinds, because they absolutely are.
    famouswaffles · 1790913377 · focus · HN ↗
    >They are good at software and math because of RLVR
    Software and Math is not the only thing LLMs are fast improving on. Astra is one of the biggest examples of this being untrue. The model is cracked at computer use and vision/spatial tasks and reasoning. Driving, Operating Robots, Video Editing, 3D modelling, graphics are all things Astra was >>> at than any other model.
    >but they can’t run a business.
    And it's the leader on VendingBench. Also most people cannot run a business.
20. econ · 1790802204 · focus · HN ↗
  Okay, I'll write one for you...
  <a href="https://soj.ooo/p/positivevibesonly/post/f467feb1453208a492d03365d30f5d62" rel="nofollow">https://soj.ooo/p/positivevibesonly/post/f467feb1453208a492d...
21. mahboi · 1790804595 · focus · HN ↗
  Senior devs shouldn't really need to retrain aside from learning how to use coding agents. The agents automated away the entry-level stuff.
22. munificent · 1790805245 · focus · HN ↗
  I have a friend who is a skilled UX designer and UI artist.
  He works at Best Buy now.
  1. physicallyIllfr · 1790828429 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  2. jambalaya8 · 1791004347 · focus · HN ↗
    Wonder what his next job move is gonna be able to be.
23. thewileyone · 1790848585 · focus · HN ↗
  "Vibe-coding rescue" is a new industry. Check it out.
Krei-se · 1790793583 · focus · HN ↗
Aside the fact the author sells ai services, training, whatever i can not understand the view how knowledge workers will be replaced while every employee is now forced and expected to work 10-fold and hiring is halted because shortsighted deciders and ... money.
The effect on the market is pure GREED and wishful thinking as none of the people in charge of HR or decision making have any idea how this technology actually works.
Also - why is everyone comparing this to the industrial revolution? And not f.e. invention of vaccines. No it HAS to be the big big story or you cannot make money with it.
All while the actual results are well, great. Helpful, sure. But so are vaccines!
Don't buy into this bs, any service or course. d2l.ai is free and wont be stupidly useless next month like whatever hype we sell this week.
As the doom stories lose novelty now we get the feel good "my grandpa" stories.
1. megalomanu · 1790795348 · focus · HN ↗
  Thank you for your comment. I didn't intend to tell a feel good story. I'm just a seed startup founder, I'm not DHH! I'm just sharing a personal story that helps me navigating into the storm. There is no message here, I guess I hadn't been clear enough.
pavinjoseph · 1790793948 · focus · HN ↗
So far the impact of LLMs have been very much overstated. Like most (all?) tools, they require a human in the loop to work as intended. This fear of being replaced by an LLM is unfounded and irrational.
The alternatives that may cause such mass displacement like World Models and such are yet to be proven.
1. sashank_1509 · 1790794860 · focus · HN ↗
  You’ve been living under a rock dude, have you even tried using it for maths or coding. No human in loop needed.
2. computerex · 1790795092 · focus · HN ↗
  LLM's went from generating incoherent garbage, to weird text that seems coherent but isn't (gpt-2), to what we have no with agents passing some of the hardest benchmarks, necessitating benchmark development just to be able to keep up with the rate of progress. They did this in about 5 years.
  The sheer rate of progress is what is meaningful. If LLM's agents were frozen now without any further improvement, your position would be must more defensible. But that's not what's happening, we are getting breakthroughs almost on a weekly basis.
  1. rootusrootus · 1790798191 · focus · HN ↗
    It feels to me like the advancements are not accelerating, though, like we're nearer the top of the S-curve than enthusiasts think we are. A lot of the recent advances seem as much a harness improvement as an actual model improvement. We've made exceptional progress in the last couple years, but spent an exceptional amount of money to do it. A moon shot, basically.
    Honestly, my gut feeling (worth every bit of what you are paying for it...) is that until we get actual intelligence instead of a good facsimile, we're not looking at an existential problem or a UBI-level problem, even, just a big change in tooling.
    computerex · 1790802256 · focus · HN ↗
    Hey I hope you are right. I, like so many of my fellow engineers, am not exactly thrilled at the prospect of my role changing from underneath my feet and the uncertainty that comes with it.
    We are making steady progress. It’s not exponential per se like we used to see but in my experience models are steadily getting better. Also breakthroughs can be sudden.
3. the8472 · 1790856455 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]

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