Riveting stuff. Hard to see how he could be replaced.
Framing it as "AI" only leads to ignoring the responsibility of those who are making those decisions. It's exactly the same argument behind justifying things as "market forces": it allows everything and makes nobody responsible for it.
In my industry -- software engineering -- AI is being blamed for a job market that tumbled a year before GPT even entered the mainstream. There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. Nevertheless, it is easy to blame AI because it doesnt force us to really examine the causes and thus no policy changes would result.
In SWE-land, we done hire people because of three reasons
1. better open source means you dont need to build it on your own
2. More h1/h4/opt visa workers means you can have loyal and under-market pay workers without attrition risk (even Trump with all his power couldnt tackle this lobby)
3. offshore -- us healthcare and benefits are too expensive, easier to just send the work to other countries
In 2020 there was a global pandemic called COVID-19 that had a pronounced affect on the world economy. Stimulus cheques were given to companies to keep them afloat through this time. Tech companies spent that new capital on hiring and them layed off a lot of workers when they weren't able to sustain them.
A big reason you saw layoffs is because we had massive hiring sprees from short term capital through stimulus cheques.
These days, when a company tells you they are laying off good workers and replacing them, with software that cannot fact check its output, because their audience cannot tell the difference, you should believe them and consider if that is really what you want the world to become.
It also rubs me the wrong way since "AI" quite literally means everything from LLMs to how the ghosts in Pacman move.
Like, you don't hate AI. You hate the way it's being used. It would be weird to say "I hate that computers have the ability to transpose spoken language to text". Or "I can't stand the ambient listening tool being used to treat my father's UTI's while he has Alzheimer's". Or even better "I hate that my credit card company is trying to determine whether someone is fraudulently using it".
And what's worse is that it treats this is a relatively new problem. But rich people abusing the system to make more money at the cost of making others poor is hardly a new thing.
What people seem to be against is progress, or at least the rate of progress. We certainly should stop and think and assess the repercussions of the rate of progress and the response we should have were it to threaten to destabilize society. I don't think we should say, oh, A.I., this is where I will fight. We need to be rational and assess the consequences and find rational answers to ensure social stability (we don't want famine or Hoovervilles).
The job has changed. At the same time, the quality and quantity expectations are changing as well. You don't get away with doing the same amount of documentation anymore. AI tools enable more documentation and more comprehensive documentation. So, having that now becomes the norm.
But if your job is getting paid per word for text, then yes, that market is a bit smaller now. But it's not all gone and people still get hired to coordinate the documentation writing process or for high quality journalism.
But if you were writing filler content for a news paper or low value (it has to be there, but nobody cares) documentation for some software component, then yes, your job is definitely at risk.
Yeah, I'd built a whole lifestyle around armed robbery, and the cops had the gall to arrest me. It was dramatically disruptive!
Seriously, you do not have a "right" to keep doing whatever you've been doing, even if it wasn't destructive. Nobody owes you that. People aren't your serfs.
Nobody would miss washroom attendants disappearing either. That is different from automating away the stuff that makes life interesting. Like AI startups telling you that their robot will spend time with your friends and family, so you don't have to. Being disgusted by that is not being a luddite, it's being a well adjusted human with aspirations beyond doomscrolling AI slop on tiktok/youtube.
“The influence of the automobile has driven the horse from the city’s streets,” according to the article. “The blacksmith now earns his livelihood by straightening automobile axles, repairing broken springs and welding frames.”
https://www.americanfarriers.com/articles/8921-examining-the...
I also had this feeling during the 2020 crash... and during the 2008-2012 crash...
wccrawford•1mo ago
I can't even paint them in a sinister light. They couldn't afford me, and now they had a way to get all the work done with their other developers that were less senior. They were clearly sad to let me go, but they didn't see that they had any choice financially. They weren't a big FAANG company with jillions of dollars. They only had a couple dozen employees.
I do wonder how people are going to get to be senior anything in the future, though. It's only going to be people who are really into it that are willing to work that hard to make it happen. The alternative, AI, is just so much easier than it's hard to justify putting that much effort into learning it, unless it's your thing.
btreecat•1mo ago
oneeyedpigeon•1mo ago
(Of course, I'm not being 100% serious, and your personal financial situation may be at odds with the tone of this comment)
happytoexplain•1mo ago
The problem is that in most cases businesses can afford you, but they choose to be "unable to". It's called budgeting, and the ceiling only represents existential limits for small or dying businesses. The rest of the time, it is defined only to maximize profit, which means using their power to shift the negative part of economic changes onto individuals as much as mathematically possible, rather than the business suffering proportionately.
Schlagbohrer•1mo ago
This problem is acute with older hardware and manufacturing engineers who drank all the corporate propaganda they've been fed for decades. I once worked with a senior manufacturing engineer who didn't clock his overtime because he didn't want the huge, multinational corporation we worked for to go bankrupt.
wccrawford•1mo ago
No amount of "budgeting" was going to cover those unexpected circumstances, which they had already tried to work through in other ways.
I want to be mad, but I can't.
JeanMarcS•1mo ago
AI is a great assistant. Letting go the more experienced dev is a bad move.
We work in a field where you should understand what it is you're doing.
We had a wave of "dev" who where told that assembling libraries and API as Lego is the way. It's only a sub part.
Now with the AI fuzz, people think it's kind of magic and do everything by its own. It's not.
You can gain a lot of time with AI if you know how to prompt and are capable to understand what it spits out.
But beting the future of your business on less experimented junior for saving a couple thousand dollars is not a clever move.
(Again, my opinion)
palmotea•1mo ago
Exactly, some businesses even do stuff like this:
> https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/4cfau7?rsrc=cshare&sm...
> How do the wealthy get so wealthy? Mostly by some form of cheating. One way that's relevant to one current case is depicted in Philip Roth's 2004 novel 'The Plot Against America':
> "Every subcontractor when he comes into the office on Friday to collect money for the lumber, the glass, the brick, Abe says, 'Look, we're out of money, this is the best I can do,' and he pays them a half, a third -- if he can get away with it, a quarter -- and these people need the money to survive, but this is the method that Abe learned from his father. He's doing so much building that he gets away with it..."
sixtyj•1mo ago
Nobody wants to stop using AI but people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future and people bored by AI. But as there will be an interrupted continuity the next generation will be…
Competition is hard so we have to use AI to stay competitive - last time I read similar was… testimonies of concentration camp guards when they were asked why they overlooked atrocities.
mooreds•1mo ago
Can you tell me more? Everything I've read indicates it affects juniors/new devs more. Is that what you mean by a 'senior-free' future? One in which there are no seniors in 10-20 years because there are no juniors now?
Or something else?
sixtyj•1mo ago
If we don’t accept/hire juniors (as companies think they are inefficient) to their first positions then how can they become seniors in their branch?
TBH I don’t have a solution for that.