1. The tax deduction change where costs couldn't be classified as an expense.
2. The saturation in people joining coding. At one point in time everyone wanted to be part of a bootcamp to earn that sweet coding salary.
3. Rising interest rates means the era of borrowing at low costs is over.
etc.
AI is last on my list for the reasons that people are being laid off. And its not because AI isn't helping people, rather it isn't helping people enough to justify the current layoffs.
And lets be honest - AI and employment is the hot topic right now. You should expect executives to say that they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and looking at time savings.
Once upon a time everyone wanted to add ML to their product. This is just going with the flow. Otherwise their stock prices will take a massive hit. Others yet want to showcase that they are doing everything to extract better margins. These statements can be slightly deceiving.
What does 30% of the code mean exactly? How much of it is going into the products and making into the market?
For now, AI is a convenient scapegoat. Maybe it becomes a force to reckon with and truly leads to people being laid off. Not today.
AI is on the top of rumors, but it's not a real cause of layoffs, just a nuance. And a great excuse. "Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work" is highly exaggerated. Only AI tools approved for employee are Gemini, NotebookLM, Cursor, Warp 2, plus a few other. AI generated github PR review is a joke most of the times, and Slack AI is like a slot machine: sometimes got right, mostly not.
When the article mentions "tech-adjacent," I think it is worth keeping in mind that this includes a broad swath of jobs that would never had qualified for amortizing salaries as R&D. For example, I'm skeptical that the tax change will have an impact on the number of television and film producers that are currently unemployed due to a huge slowdown in greenlighting projects from streaming services. I feel there is a contraction happening (though, practically, it doesn't always appear that way) that is a greater source of consternation than amortizing developer salaries will alleviate.
AFAIKT 1. was reverted in the OBBB. And I suspect my recent influx of recruiter outreaching email is related to that. Give it 3 more months and things may trend upward.
Tbf, tfa only gave it an even chance. He's not saying things are gonna turn bad, he merely observes multiple issues which could create an anti-synergy which would likely end badly if realized.
Don't worry -- soon after that, there will be high demand for human coders as companies scramble to hire to rewrite all the buggy and vuln-ridden AI-hallucinated software. We're on the verge of two revolutions in tech, not one.
I shared your view a year ago. Hell half my posts here on HN are arguing against the annoying hype. Today I make heavy use of AI and my code quality has gone up, not down. It's better tested, better factored, with better error handling covering more edge cases
AI code is only buggy if no-one is guiding or reviewing it
I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
I view AI like a gas pedal. For an experienced driver it can really help. For someone new, straight into a wall. For some code you go straight for hours and barely touch the steering wheel. For some code it's all wheel and too much gas is a mistake.
That said, we will need less coders overall. Just like you don't need human drafters or calculators in the same way. It will cut the bottom out of the industry, and entry level will be expected operate like a senior from 10 years ago.
>> Most workers, and most work days, are just drudgery. Answering emails. Writing up quarterly plans. Reviewing metrics. Building applications that do something with data.
Yes. Those jobs are going to disappear. If your role's primary value is shuffling paper around an org, or putting minor edits on something before forwarding, your job is going to disappear to AI in the next 1-3 years.
Or AI-initiated human process optimization in the next 2-5 years, which I think is an underappreciated second wave.
To define that: if we 10x or 100x the productivity of certain roles, won't companies look at the remaining unaccelerated human speedbumps and ask "Is it really that important we have a person do that? Because it's now costing us substantial latency and throughput of the process as a whole."
And in many cases they'll likely conclude that no, it's not critical that a human be involved at that point. So poof those jobs as well.
As a result, we'll have many fewer humans being much more productive.
Tbd on whether that produces enough surplus (and equal allocation of it) to balance out the job losses.
If there are no people, there won't be a need for managers to exist either. Who/What are the managers going to manage? The office air?
Eventually whoever that is running the business has to be smart enough to figure out everything, and the margin for error will be small in a economic environment where every one is already poor and can't spend to buy your things.
I remember the days of socialist India. If everyone is poor its impossible to do the good things like research, development, innovation. The reason is simple, with no one having money to buy your things, you will never make profits to invest in them.
I think new devs could probably get use of it as a replacement for SO or Google. But if they slam on it and think they can vibe code a whole app, they are going to have a bad time.
But NOS may be better. It might make you faster but it doesn't make you better.
> I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
Always will, it's a question of how many people we need, not if. Well, until AGI (which I'm very bearish on in the near or even intermediate term) or some other monumental shift
He's essentially saying that it's a complete guess how long the job of a programmer exists, and when it will change over to essentially product manager, of which you'll need a lot less.
That works because you are a senior developer who knows how to properly use the AI tools. What 10 years from now? What happens when senior devs are retiring and we do t have replacements since we replaced junior devs with AI?
I am senior developer and have easily and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. Nothing has changed for me and my team mates who do use it are slower than me and often don’t know what the Pr actually does.
You chose to invest in the downward career slope. That’s why your opinion has changed. If you continued to resist it you wouldn’t be looking to remove yourself from the auditing/coding position.
How is investing in something that improves my productivity and output quality a downward career slope? Continuing to use a hand saw when there are power tools available seems like the downward slope..
If AI gets to a point where I'm fully able to be removed from auditing/coding positions.. well there won't be any coding positions left for anyone
> often don’t know what the Pr actually does
this is on them for being lazy. I thoroughly review the code AI produces. I don't commit it if I don't understand it
Analogizing AI to power tools is like analogizing building an IKEA bookshelf to outsourcing the job to a TaskRabbit.
Power tools automate manual hand movements, but you still need to follow the manual and know what fits where. Or you can spend money on a contractor from TaskRabbit to do it for you, perhaps badly.
LLMs make it faster to generate code, sure. Automating boilerplate code isn't too unlike using a drill to fit a screw.
But witting software writ large still requires thinking, something that the companies providing these services are heavily incentivized to remove.
> How is investing in something that improves my productivity and output quality a downward career slope?
> I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
You don’t think relying on a system you yourself are predicting will replace you isn’t investing in a downward slope. Wait until you find out Llms are helping suppress your wages.
> this is on them for being lazy.
Just like you gave into Llms you became lazy about writing code. That is the trend with Llms, to do less work as you’ve been pointing out.
Not using LLMs doesn't make them go away. Whether they suppress wages or replace anyone is completely out of my control. Avoiding them just means I'd be producing below my potential
> you became lazy about writing code
I haven't, though. I still do the same amount of work except now I get more done. Now more of my energy goes into architecture, testing, specs, making sure it's built well instead of the lower level wiring things together
I use them for their perfect memory and as a creativity buddy, not for them to think for me
> and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years.
I'm not sure that's much of an achievement, to be honest. If you tried it and it turned out to be not useful for you, fine, I'm on your side. But refusing to try for the sake of it seems backwards. I mean, then why use CI, version control and those fancy IDEs anyway? Notepad is a perfectly cromulent text editor (and what is code, if not text, anyway?) and my local build.bat and deploy.bat do their job nicely and quickly.
Poetry is text too. It is a misleading categorization.
> I mean, then why use CI, version control and those fancy IDEs anyway?
CI, version control, and IDEs do not think for you.
Resisting using LLMs to do the code that you know perfectly well how to do is like resisting using maps to tell you to make "now make a left turn" to travel from A to B, when you have gone from A to B a zillion fucking times. It is perfectly sensible, specially if you want to retain your skills and mental acuity.
Anecdotally, I know individuals (ok, Dad /g) who can no longer negotiate even the most simple routes without the stupid map thing walking them through all the turns. Routes that were taken for years without these gizmos now require the gizmo.
This is an unfortunate 'experiment' we are conducting in this field. The actual lasting results (or damages) are unknown as of yet. We have some idea though.
I used to be like you and then I decided to get up to speed on where things stand a couple of months ago.
I hate using it but I can write issues in gitlab, send them to aider, and it will spit out working solutions complete with test coverage.
Right now I think I'm maybe still faster just writing things myself but this feels incredibly tenuous. I'm certain that in a year vibe driven development will be faster.
There is no programmer's union. When the industry decides it's time to get rid of developers because vibe coding is faster than mid level developers, there is no counter.
The only developers left will be either true 100x geniuses or vibe coders. I'm not the former so I am trying to make sure I can become the latter long enough to last a few extra years.
Regardless of how much you personally want to resist, this is what is going to happen.
While we engineers understand how to judge and evaluate AI solutions, I am not sure Business Owners (BO) care.
BO's are ok with a certain percentage of bugs/rework/inefficiency/instability. And the tradeoff of eliminating (or marginalizing) Engineering may be worth the increased percentage of unfavorable outcomes.
> I'm overjoyed that you only encountered serious "engineers".
Nowhere did I say this. At all. I said I havent heard 'works on my machine' said by serious engineers. That does not mean that I have ONLY met serious engineers.
Precisely. Businesses are okay with bugs if it helps them enter a market faster or stave off competition. Bug fixes are mostly considered maintainancd which is outsourced or "cost-optimized"
Probably depends on BO/stakeholder as well. B2B solution that has a low risk of killing anyone? Maybe fuck it, let the model have its way.
Technology that controls software that keeps people alive, controls infrastructure, etc., uhhhh I don't think so. I guess we're just waiting for the first news story of someone's pacemaker going haywire and shocking them to death because the monitoring code was vibed through to production.
B2B AI LLM vibe-SaaS that has a 10% chance to become profitable and a 10% chance to gift away all money invested into the business ever while leaving founders on the receiving end of 100 lawsuits.
> Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small?
I think it's large. Think about the software that goes into something like air travel - ATC, weather tracking, the actual control software for the aircraft... I am aware that nothing is perfect, but I'd at least like to know that a person wrote those things who could be held accountable.
This exactly. Instead of adding Adobe adding AI features to Acrobat that I don't want or need, I would like it to fix the fact that it still can't convert a DOCX to a PDF without messing up the tabs.
The lack of devs that understand the domain knowledge and the codebase will be the main issue.
I would say that the current capabilities of genAI is like a junior dev, sometimes even a mid-level. But one main difference is that a dev is slowly learning and improving and at some point will become a senior dev and also domain specialist.
If there is a codebase created by genAI, then it’s equivalent as if all devs left the company, so no one knows why some piece of code was created in a certain way, if it was part of the business logic or some implementation detail
I wonder if the codebase will be understandable at all.
You can most often “get used” to a codebase because they authors tend to stick to the same patterns in many ways, and they are somewhat coherent across time. After a bit you can kinda guess in what file is a feature implemented etc etc.
Will this still be true with ai doing most of the work?
Claude is really good about documenting what it has done. I’ve also had some good luck with “I’m interested in this part of the codebase please explain it to me”
And “this part is not working let’s diagnose”
I’ve been doing a lot of productionization of nontechnical vibecoding. And I provide a lot of feedback on best practices (one of which is to ask “is this best practices for security and data protection?”)
That being said there’s no replacement for a real knowledgeable human software engineer.
The rate at which AI is capable of producing code is intractable for humans to deal with. Right now the bottleneck is human reviewers. If AI ever becomes effective at generating provably correct code, it's joever.
The proofs are not meant for human consumption. It's for the AI to know to try again rather than spit out hallucinations. Of course there's a leap of faith somewhere here.
It's also likely that there are thousands who aren't hustle-culture oriented who have been looking for so long that they don't even count as unemployed anymore.
I love love love Claude Code. It's my weapon of choice. However, we're still a ways off.
The most recent thing I did prior to typing this comment was have it look at a cosmosdb integration and recommend changes to my CosmosClientOptions to reduce CPU, based on a few exceptions I'm seeing.
It recommended 5 changes to 5 settings, and every single one of them was outside of the allowed range for those 5 settings. I told it as much, and asked nicely (always nicely, I don't want to be on the Singularity's naughty list) to try again, those aren't valid values. It came back with 4/5 values within the allowed scope, one still outside of the scope, and 2 of the 4 that were accurate were the same values that I already have configured.
Not there yet. Better every day, but definitely not there.
Why not? Seems to match the trend of tech innovation creating more demand for tech.
The reality is lots of software problems can’t be solved with the level of “intelligence” LLMs have. And if they could, it wouldn’t be just software in danger - it’d be every human profession. Even the physical ones, since AI would quickly figure out how to build machinery to automate those.
The industry might evolve to "AI Please rewrite the faulty code and redeploy, eating the cost of inefficiencies as business expense, instead of hiring back to the Full Software Engineering Employment Levels".
Because it's just cope. Look at the current reality. Are companies rushing to fix bad or even buggy code written by human devs? No, not in most cases. In most cases, if a piece of code "works", it is left the hell alone. And that's the thing about AI code: it does work. The quality is irrelevant in the overwhelming majority of cases (especially if it's other AIs that are adding to it, which is the case more and more often).
> The quality is irrelevant in the overwhelming majority of cases
Software quality is especially important in safety critical applications.
We should not expect an LLM trained solely on formally-verified code to produce formally-verified code. I don't think that also training on specs and hateful training material will fix that.
So then we're back to the original software engineering objectives of writing better SAST, DAST, Formal Method, side channel, and fuzzing tools for software quality assurance.
I've been to birthday parties that employed more people than "safety critical" software development. We're talking about 99.99% of the software development jobs evaporating.
> Is formal verification a required course or curriculum competency for any Computer Science or Software Engineering / Computer Engineering degree programs?
> Is there a certification for formal methods? Something like for Engineer status in other industries?
Referencing Marc Benioff making bold claims about AI isn't much evidence, he's pulling these numbers out of thin air. Despite claiming they won't hire software engineers in 2025, there are plenty of positions open at Salesforce for software engineers.
If it was just Marc Benioff preaching then it would indeed not deserve much attention. However, most big companies at this point have internal roadmap to reduce workforce by large amounts.
Agreed. I still think we're seeing layoffs due to _overhiring_ in 2020. AI makes a nice excuse when laying these people off because CEOs can say their huge investments in AI are starting to pay off because they don't need the humans.
Turns out, they never needed those humans in the first place.
That doesn't answer the other side of the problem though, that it's so hard to find work right now, even for folks who would typically be very easy to employ.
Layoffs are one of the only ways way to cut spending before quarterly reports when the market is already saturated. The other way is to make the products cheaper (enshittification).
As far as more employable candidates go, I don't think executives realize the vast limitations of LLM. You have to remember they aren't technical people. They're thinking managers with no training are going to replace skilled employees--that there was a secret magic button that the lowly employees all knew about and it's now in their hands.
Sam Altman said there were now going to be one-person, billion-dollar companies. Reading between the lines, since there's not enough money for every person to do that, what does he intend for the remainder to become?
Sure it does. If everybody overhired, then nobody needs to hire now. And the few places that do are inundated with all the laid-off job seekers, so odds on getting hired at one of them are very low.
At my employer the overhiring was in areas where there wasn't actually a business case. For example they staffed an entire internal team to build a unified portal between all of the software systems the company acquired through acquisitions. That team produced nothing and at great expense. They got laid off last year, and the funds re-allocated toward hiring in areas that produced revenue or reduced expenses.
Can someone please refer me to the hard data on "overhiring in 2020"?
I was laid off as part of the initial panic in early 2020. The job market for IT for the entirety of 2020 was dead. D-E-A-D. There was a _very_ small pickup in the summer when people got more optimistic about the vaccines but it waned very quickly.
I'm in the Midwest so it might have been different in the West but I doubt it was that much different.
There was _some_ pickup in 2021, when companies realized the end of the world isn't happening soon, but it was not very significant. IT job market never really normalized, there was some pickup in 2022 but by then LLM hype started causing layoffs to go up and openings down.
Assuming it's not already too late. By the time my dad started exercising, he already had stage 4 cancer (without knowing it). He only did it for half a month, and was gone 6 months later. Speed of execution matters.
I agree with many of the author's observations. I see a lot of the same thing in my circles.
Where my views differ are when it comes to the leap between layoffs and AI.
Corporate leadership is eager to reduce the biggest source of cost (employees) and happy to use AI as cover. But it's not the reality. AI isn't adding productivity to the company's bottom line in numbers big enough to rationalize the layoffs.
I can point to zero tech roles eliminated where AI performed the same function. Despite the fact me and everyone in my circles use AI on a daily basis and are big proponents of it.
I think the author's biggest incorrect assertion is accepting corporate PR as gospel like this:
>Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work. They're pushing what they call a "digital workforce" where AI agents handle customer service, sales, and even coding tasks.
All of these companies have great incentive to say AI is replacing workers. But so far no proof has been offered.
Eventually we will get a recession. For a lot of people that work in tech it feels like we are already in one.
But I do not share the author's concerns with AI taking everyone's jobs in the next few months or years.
But not because of tech, AI, or things like that. It's the rate of pay.
When prosperity is the thing that's receding, money counts more than ever because lack of money threatens more than could be imagined.
And even though it's not as common as it should be, employees can be fairly valued as an asset. In a good way, where you're much happier being valued like that than not.
So even a company that values their people more so than most, will have to make sacrifices on all fronts when the going gets rough, like they don't have to do for years in a row when things are merely non-ideal.
This can cause some of the highest-paid people to get kicked out much earlier, like few have seen before. Even in companies that are not trying to preserve as much head-count until things turn around, they may have no real choice.
A lot of non-tech high-dollar people are also being shed, and it looks like on the increase. Consumers may not have enough accumulated wealth any more to be able to bail out a consumer economy.
I was wondering how much was due to over hiring during the crazy 2020-2021. Multiple companies increased their headcount by more than 50%, or even by 100% during the two years. That does not make business or technical sense at all, as tech companies are supposed to scale their services with technology instead of people. Companies add people only if they want to invest in new areas, but exactly how many new areas can we get in merely two years?
50% or 100%? Which companies? All the biggest companies increased by some durin 2020~2022, but not really all that much more than their historical growth rates.
What did happen uniformly is that all essentially stopped hiring after 2022.
1. There are fewer new products normal people want to buy, especially in tech.
2. Inflation is making the everyday things people need more expensive.
3. VC money for the most popular products ran out and companies are jacking up prices.
4. Concerns over tech's impact on health is limiting tech use and more negative sentiment.
All of this is causing a slowdown in tech and AI could be the perfect fix:
1. Shiny new product for people to buy.
2. Reduce costs and increase margins right when it's most needed.
3. Justify more investment in the space (super intelligence = best VC investment ever).
4. Solve bread and butter problems in health, education, etc. if safety is prioritized.
My guess is that this need for AI is causing a lot of the tech sector to overestimate how quickly AI will revolutionize things, similar to getting "flying car" predictions right at the top of the automotive s-curve.
I believe AI will have a big impact in the long-term but no where close to as quickly as most people believe, and that the short-term impact will be limited to more narrow use cases. I also believe we're going to see a big rebound to people doing work in the next few years.
Many here likely disagree with me and it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.
I share the concern based on the current productivity expectations but I did stumble across something recently which makes me feel a lot better. There was a change in the tax code that coincides with the beginning of the post-pandemic layoffs[1]. This was changed back last month by the BBB which likely means a bunch of new R&D spend for big tech. I think this is why we are seeing intense M&A activity and if we can keep the AI hype under control it will probably lead to new hiring as well.
> 1. Layoffs and slowdown are global, not only in US.
Dunno about that. I've moved twice since 2022 (in Ireland), and the market is definitely less crazy but there's still (apparently) lots of work about. To be fair, I interview well and am pushing 15 years experience with a bunch of "prestigious" companies.
Definitely seemed like it much worse in the US. Then again, it was never as insane as the 2010's seemed for the US so maybe there was less over-hiring.
> 2. Expenses are still deductable, but over longer period. It makes no difference for big corporations.
The rate of change between full and 20% deduction definitely had a big impact on smaller companies hiring of software/data people. If you were a megacorp it mattered less but still not trivial.
In tech, change is the only constant. From embedded software in assembly to mobile/web development in javascript to jit-compiled python. This is not easy on engineers or on businesses as they have to keep reskilling at all times. The silver lining to AI is that it is poor at reskilling itself which is why the data-cutoff is circa 2024 for some models.
It’s constant, sure, but the rate of change is not. We’re still in the explosion brought about by silicon-based microprocessors, and that appears to be slowing down significantly as we’ve eked out all the easy gains in performance, power, and efficiency. I’m in the camp that believes, within my lifetime, tech innovation as we view it today will gradually slow and stagnate, resulting in a collapse of languages, models, and products into a handful of standards - and which every business, school, government, and person builds on top of or around until the next big explosion happens. It’s why Big Tech is so adamant about selling walled gardens: deep down, they know everyone is pining to be the next IBM juggernaut.
I think we’re seeing the early signs of that now, as everyone giddily trips over each other to rush into the “next big thing” rather than invest into the serious R&D necessary to make real gains. We’re managing modern technologies with centuries-old methods of corporate and political governance, complete with infighting and backstabbing. In a vacuum, no rational person would have ever backed the current explosion of LLMs given the more prescient problems facing the species, yet here we are squandering water and energy on prediction machines instead solar farms, battery storage, materials science, and infrastructure replacement.
I already see personal evidence in the IT side of things. For all the bickering supporters do between VMs and Containers and K8s and Public Cloud, all I see is just different ways of packaging software with differing sets of limitations or use cases. Everyone is so fiercely competing to make their chosen tech reign supreme over all that they pay no attention to us IT folks just wishing someone would make their container or Helm chart as easy to deploy and support as a modern Linux VM might be and integrating disparate tech instead of seeking to replace and dominate their competitors. There’s a very real attitude among my peers that, despite their advantages, containers are often little more than packages with extra steps and infrastructure for their existing use cases. Whether they’re right or wrong is irrelevant, because they’re making the decisions in their employer.
Change still feels fast and explosive because folks are focusing on niche research papers, extravagant moonshots, and the various implementations of things in SV circles. Outside those, however?
It’s slow. It’s stagnant. It’s boring, because nobody actually listens to what the physical majority has to say about products - only what the biggest paying customers (economic majority) want.
AI will definitely have an impact of non physical jobs, and it is hard to see it slowing down. Anyone in any big enough company can easily see right now that there is a top level initiative to reduce employee count by never before imagined margins. And the AI is already good enough to achieve some large reductions. It is hard to see how this will all unfold.
I can see the author's point but im failing to link it to ai. The ai im using now is a good as a productivity booster for otherwise already well defined problem-- and decently good engineers.
I dont think the layoffs are due to that. It is affecting entry jobs rather badly, but that (anecdotely) constitutes minority.
ADP's June employment report was pretty dismal, much worse than the blowout BLS report that came out the next day. It was more in line with the revision that came out 2 months later.
The ADP Chief economist said that the problem wasn't that companies are laying off, is that they aren't replacing attrition - - that they can get the same work done without doing so and hinted at AI productivity boost as a reason.
I know it's a raging battle here, but just simply having a search engine that works again is a huge productivity gain...
It might be informative to compare this with what happened when retailers introduced automated checkout machines. It seems that the net effect on staff sizes was not that dramatic. These stores need more anti-theft security people and some oversight. Not to mention the people they need for technical support. I wonder if there will develop a new category of skills for checking that AI produced code is correct, effective and optimal?
They also need more people to restock abandoned carts because I'm not going to wait for two other people who got stuck in their automated checkout lines to get help from the one ineffective person who is stuck with the job of making this stupidity work.
I've been wondering when the other shoe was going to drop as well. I'm not in a panic, but let's just say that when I occasionally look to re-balance my finances I am no longer moving anything into the stock market.
The trades sure aren't hurting. Where I live, a county of about 120k in the Rockies, appliance repair shops are booking six weeks out, and roofers can book out as long as six months.
This is going to change fast once the recession hits. Because what happens during recessions is that households abandon all but the most critical home repair and home improvement projects, and trade businesses shutter in large numbers.
If humans are replaced en masse by AI agents, companies will save billions until there is nobody left who can pay for their products and/or services because we're all destitute and on the dole. I'm scheduled to retire in about 9 years. I'm not sure I'm going to make it that long.
Very true, If you take the number of tech jobs lost over the last couple years(in article) and multiply out, say, roughly $125K gross salary yearly, cut that in half for taxes (and things i missed) and you still are out tens of billions of dollars that people wont have to spend on things, big things.
I don't see how nobody will feel that loss of purchasing...
Then again, we all know how detached the market is, someone from Schwab just yesterday telling me how things have "never been better."
Owners of capital and machine labor can continue making bank and driving demand, even if there are no more human laborers making any money.
Humans are not necessary for an economy. It’s an easily missed assumption, because until now we are the only intelligent units of labor, capital ownership and demand.
But corporations long ago become units of all three, and AIs effectively become citizens simply by acting through an umbrella corporation. Corporations are (in)famously already first class political participates, via their money.
As long as AIs/corporations are motivated to compete and survive, demand from humans won’t be necessary for the economy to keep growing.
If anything, the ease with which AI/robotics will adapt to space habitats, and the vast resources untapped in the solar system, will enable a potentially human-independent economic explosion.
I have no idea where this will go but I'm really not optimistic about the future of software development work. AI is already scarily good today. Sure I can still add value as a senior right now.. but there's no reason why that has to continue to be the case
Solid summary I think, but reading “what the country does if some significant percentage of our 100 million knowledge workers gets laid off because of AI” confused me deeply.
Does verifying the difference between whole milk and oat milk qualify the barista as a knowledge worker?
The quote links to a BIS report which establishes that, yes, the 170-million strong US workforce really does have 100 million (actual) knowledge workers and baristas don't count. Service workers are outnumbered by computer jobs.
Why would he? I’ve been hearing concerns about national debt my whole life (including the 80s when interest rates were a hell of a lot higher than now), and I’m retirement age. I’m not saying those chickens won’t eventually come home to roost, but probably not anytime soon. The U. S. has become quite skilled at giving that tin can a swift kick down the road.
Because paying the interest on the debt is now the fourth leading cost of the federal government, and since we are running an ever-increasing deficit, it will only grow.
The OBBB, championed by the so-called "fiscally conservatives", accelerated this, but this will largely get ignored until/if a Democrat is in office again. Then large swaths of people will suddenly start caring about the national debt.
____ does good/poorly on HN is often repeated but usually never true. I see constant negativity on AI, and in fact I see it overwhelmingly more negative than positive takes. but i also have my own bias in what i see, and probably falling to the same phenomenon as you
While I have tremendous sympathy for anyone who loses their job, this feels very industry specific. Embedded and hardware spaces (like satellites) are doing really well, lots of advancement and hiring going on, while things such as data science are struggling to get relevant interviews. I'm also not a huge fan of industry specific hiring data, because it's usually tied to a specific HR/hiring software (like indeed), which holds hidden variables (like big companies may be more likely to use one hiring software than the other).
As a final note, however, most engineers will find a point in their career where the skills they've developed are obsolete or outdated, and that is terrifying to me.
So, the guy who's a founder of an AI company and makes money if he convinces people to buy into his AI project, is making some alarmist/doomer post about how crazy AI has gotten and how many jobs it's supposedly taking. He presents such thoughts as if they're some gnawing worry he just randomly needs to share.
Well, what do you know, the author just happens to sell an AI system that aims to "make humans better, rather than replacing them".
Surely his takes on the topic of how good AI is, and AI taking jobs, is impartial and objective, and not tied in any way to how he makes money if he manages to convince people of such thoughts.
Just because there is a conflict of interest doesn’t completely invalidate the argument being made. Marketing slop routinely makes it to the front page here and elsewhere with nobody batting an eye, but someone posting a personal take on their personal blog is now somehow a self-serving plug for…remind me where the product link is in that document again? I couldn’t find it.
Part of recognizing bias and conflicts of interest is also being able to recognize when, despite that, they’re still right.
How do you jump from “not attributable to AI“ to “must be a recession”? I think it would be true for jobs that are not separable from companies economic activity, but it isn’t true for a good portion of tech jobs. A car manufacturer can’t sell the same amount of cars while reducing a half of assembly workers, but most tech giants can maintain profitable parts of their business with a fraction of their workforce (if not indefinitely then at least for some time). Some work can be eliminated altogether, some might be outsourced to other countries, some split among existing workers. I think that’s what’s happening.
Why it is happening, though? Hard to say for sure, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be a combination of tighter availability of capital, shrinking addressable market (due to deglobalization & demographics) and AI competition requiring huge capex
The rich have been very effective at convincing the poor to use those guns against each other (and scientists) instead of the people responsible for their poverty.
It’s a cycle that is always interrupted by war or revolution. The wealthy in the US do not understand what a revolution is, they believe that laws written on paper are as unbreakable as the laws of physics. Laws only function when the vast majority of society agrees to abide by them. Once people have nothing left to lose, it will be too late.
I'm curious at which point the AIs are doing all the jobs of corporations, so that they can sell their products and services to... no one, since everyone is unemployed ?
Or is the strategy of everyone to sell to the same 0.01% of the population ?
(Also, hilarious that the author mentions UBI as a potential solution. UBI is a massive transfer of wealth. Governements are elected nowadays on the promise of guaranteeing wealth is not transfered - see the recent tax bill in the USA ; and any mention of "taxes" in a political campaign.)
UBI is just wealth flowing from the government to all individuals. The goal is redistribution. As a government, you can explicitly specify who wealth is being taken from by paying for UBI in taxes.
If you don't raise taxes to balance the budget, your choice is between kicking the can down the road with debt or printing money. Printing money is really just another form of redistribution drawn from the wealth of everyone holding that currency.
Naturally, doing so can lead to a crisis of confidence where the value of the currency collapses as people flee to other assets that are less likely to be devalued.
UBI, like any government spending, needs to be paid for. By taxes or financial disaster. I prefer taxes, personally.
I'm not a fan of UBI, but long term inflation is primarily determined by money creation rates. If UBI was funded by taxes, not printing, then we wouldn't expect any significant effect on long term inflation rates, although there might be some disruption in the short term.
I mean is it determined by money creation, or just influenced by/one of the factors? If business perceive people generally having more spending money, won't they raise prices accordingly?
In the absence of collusion, if a business can produce a product or service less expensively, giving them the ability to outcompete competitors, they will do so.
Even if UBI is funded by taxation, rather than deficit spending, isn't it possible that demand will increase for some products (e.g. basic necessities that UBI recipients will suddenly be able to spend more on), causing inflationary pressure on the prices of those products?
By that argument, UBI causes both inflation (for essential goods and services) and deflation (for luxury items and assets).
That's the economy reorienting itself around the new demand landscape. Those price spikes are the signal to producers to ramp up supply, which should push the price back down over time.
Inflation is highly problematic when it spirals. Events like collapse of trust in a currency or government can result in runaway inflation, which is a disaster by all accounts.
A one-time price spike caused by a one-time abrupt shift in demand is a very different scenario. Assuming the UBI is higher than the prices increases on necessities, we've successfully redistributed wealth and made those people better able to afford necessities, despite the fact that they cost x% more.
It's (mostly) determined by the delta between money creation and creation of "stuff" (by which I mean services as well as goods). If there's more stuff, then creating the same amount more money isn't inflationary.
I said "mostly" because there can be things like supply shocks... but I guess that means less stuff, so maybe even that isn't an exception.
I've never been a fan of UBI (and I'm often downvoted for that, ha ha). I like the idea of mandating an 18 hour work week or similar though. It still keeps the incentive to work — still rewards those who want to achieve more.
One wonders though what impact that will have on society — so much additional free time. More television binging? I hope not.
That is an American mindset: your job makes who you are. Like you have no identity without a job. Mainly because without a job you loose health insurance, housing, everything.
Folk need to work to justify their existence to themselves. Just yesterday, there was an article here about why people feel bad about themselves when they aren't being productive.
Our own psychology aside, people need to work because at present robots cannot make all the stuff we want. So if we (society as a whole) want all this stuff, then we need to work.
We have a duty to treat our fellow humans with dignity and humanity. I'm not sure that extends to providing for those who can work but won't, though - not when there's work that society as a whole needs done.
UBI is a more efficient allocation of already existing government services. Instead of a program for each and ever need a person may have, they're just given cash and those programs would be deprecated. It's more efficient. The rebuttal is sourced from those that have existing vested interest that these antiquated piece-meal programs continue to operate.
He's worried about what it says about the state of the industry and hiring. If people like that can't get jobs, those less talented who have been making less money, certainly won't.
Take the even more global view of the United States. We can grow more than enough good food for everyone, and there is plenty of land. We have water, working infrastructure, and all the other ingredients.
The rest is just giving people money to do what they please. Really. Do we need faster technology? Do we need to alloy new metals or develop new medicines?
No. We could live the spartan life of fifty years ago, or a hundred. The population will keep reliably replenishing. The rest is all just fashion.
When, not if, AI takes over crummy jobs that people don’t want to do, and society makes a mass change to deal with that, you’ll be surprised how fast it goes back to whatever equilibrium there is.
Daniel's freaking out about an ongoing correction still playing out from '21, and finding struts to support his argument like the "30-50% of the work" is being "done by AI" nonsense lines spouted by talking suits. This is hogwash. It's standard corporate brain fart miss the actual point. Yes, 50%+ of code written might be done by AI, but pretending this is "AI doing the work" reveals the tumor that is management misapprehension of what's going on.
There's a correction coming, but not the one Daniel's fearmongering about.
I've said this before, but the only thing that will convince me that these companies are actually laying people off due to AI will be when they start replacing their leadership staff with it.
Until that happens--IMO it's just an excuse to reduce the overhired workforce without tanking their stock.
Would they replace themselves in countries (e.g. Germany, France) where they have more of a civil responsibility, beyond countries like USA where they have a stock-holder responsibility?
- corporate social responsibility (CSR)
Does this mandate self-termination when financially reasonable?
The layoff chart, created by AI, would be more impactful (and simultaneously less confusing, which is rare!) if it expressed the 2025 value as an extrapolated run-rate, or as a predicted range.
Sure, it wasn't bad when IT caused automation and elimination of many job positions and entire occupations, both manual and office. Now that we're on the receiving end of it, it is a bad thing all of a sudden.
As for the upcoming crisis, there's an increase in inequality and further accumulation of wealth among fewer and fewer individuals. As long as these individuals continue to spend their newly acquired wealth to compensate for lower spend by the less fortunate (which is exactly what's been happening), the economy will be fine.
We’re damned both ways with AI. Either it’s a massive bubble that will pop or it does what it’s intended to do and automates a large portion of the workforce.
Edit: removed a comment about Ai investors getting bailed out because it was secondary to my main point
Investors weren't bailed out following the pop of the dot com bubble. I don't think that AI investors will be bailed out afterward if this is another bubble.
Investors in the dotcom bubble were different than the investors in AI, IMO. The current run is led by tech giants, not VCs. How much money are VCs throwing around, compared to FAAMG? They will find a way to get the money back, somehow.
Housing was another bubble, and those investors got bailed out. “Too big to fail”, I believe, is still the prevailing neoliberal wisdom. This is quite a large bubble and seemingly one of the only bright spots in the US economy.
I give it a 85%+ chance of a bailout when the tech bubble pops.
Dot com pop caused significant repercussions for many people. I don’t think GP implied the AI bubble would get bailed out, just that if it pops, life gets unpleasant for lots of folks.
Soon developers will wish they unionized or had a culture of collective bargaining and rights. You're labor, you just thought you were above it all. I'm not spiteful. I wish you luck and hope you guys organize.
after 30y of this business, i’m dumbfounded we haven’t organized. doctors, lawyers, plumbers etc seem to benefit hugely from professional orgs and unions in their corner.
i guess we are too well paid.
(all of the above make more than you do, and it’s because they are organized)
I share the same concerns as the author. People like to dispute individual issues by saying they’re caused by X or will even out with Y or the government can just do Z if the people voted for it, or that this is all irrelevant anyway because it’s never happened in the data before and therefore extremely unlikely or impossible to ever happen in the future.
And I just stare slackjawed at these people, at how they’re so focused on a narrow vertical or “historical data”, that they fail to even consider the larger picture. It’s why I trot out and bang my drum of “if we replace all the workers with AI then who is going to have money to spend to continue propping up the economy” every time boosters dismiss any social or economic concerns.
By a combination of neglect, malice, misinformation, partisanship, ignorance, and a cadre of new gods (“Big Data”, “the Algorithm”, the myriad of Rationalist cults, “AI”, crypto, etc), we have effectively stockpiled a warehouse full of leaking fuel barrels and dynamite and been commanded to take up smoking by our leaders and Capitalists, assured everything will turn out okay.
And you know what? Maybe it will turn out okay. Maybe this all is just a giant nothingburger. Maybe this is the start of a Golden Age of humanity, where dreams are attainable and fortune is infinite. Maybe this is just a speedbump on the path to extended lifespans, curing diseases, solving climate change. Maybe we’re just overreacting.
But the data sets, the lived experiences, the tone of existence doesn’t lie. Things are presently bad. The current patterns and trends suggest this will get a lot worse.
Maybe we’re wrong, but what I fear more is that we might be right and have done nothing.
Interesting that the author doesn't mention a reduction in working hours as a solution because I see that as THE solution. Federally mandate an 18 hour work week and job demand will soar. It's just as fanciful a thought as his other suggestions given how little power we have over the federal government to exercise our will.
Our entire economic system is built around ensuring we have scarcities of necessities (housing, mostly) so workers need to outcompete their peers to have access to said necessities. This results in reduced work weeks being a non starters as those who would like to avail of them are outbid by those who forego them.
But I'm not sure that 40hrs is the sweet spot. Other countries have chosen differently (with comparisons difficult to draw).
There are several competing influences here: inflation, AI productivity gains (TBD but nonzero), existing legislation around health insurance obligations, social/economic inertia, etc. And definitely others I'm not smart enough to think of!
It'd be interesting, if it was possible, to ramp down the 40hrs by an hour or two every year, keeping other components (esp healthcare) in step, to see where the inflection point is. I feel confident that we could get down to 32hrs without major negative drama. I agree that 18hrs (suggested elsewhere) would be violent.
I think a lot of people would love to live frugally and work less but it’s hard to pull off. Wage arbitrage in low CoL locations works with remote work but that’s been drying up. And of course access to health care and good education is an issue if you require either.
Yeah that’s interesting. Imagine what could happen if AI allowed us to work fewer hours and in exchange there was a program to enable people to pursue volunteer programs in their communities
Some “it takes a village” type of mentoring for children. Or programs to spend time with the elderly. Get outside and get involved in public works projects like repairing parks and waterways.
Total fantasy, for sure, but that’s what revolutionary new tech like AI could actually benefit society by letting humans be more human.
> A very large number of people dread Monday, and that's not because they show up Monday morning and bring all their creativity and brilliance. It's because it's clocking in and clocking out on a job they'd rather not be doing.
This is a management problem. I don't think it's that hard to figure out how to motivate people. Give them some autonomy and respect. This isn't even hidden knowledge.
But businesses and managers for some reason totally forget this, and treat everyone as cogs in a machine and completely replaceable, monitored by metrics.
Life has many stresses, but things can actually be OK with each of us, despite commotion and problems. In my church of 17.5 million members in most countries, we have made promises with God to help each other and we try to help others in need, in many nations ($1.5 billion last year and growing). That is far from the total level of need, but God has also promised to help us and guide us as individuals and families if we really strive to keep our promises and do our part; He has promised peace in this life and eternal life in the world to come. And there are programs for developing and serving in employment, education, resilience, service to community, etc. And very local congregation has a bishop (unpaid) with access to resources to help meet needs and achieve self-reliance.
More at my site (in profile; no sales and low stylistic ambition), if you click on "Things I want to say" (about 1/2-way down), then "On peace amid commotion" (also about 1/2-way down), then skim that page and click at least the last link. Then read the entire page and click the links that seem most interesting.). We really can be OK despite things. (Thoughtful comments appreciated with any downvotes.)
I don't want to come off as insensitive, and as a developer with a few years of experience and about to graduate, I'm obviously a bit worried about AI as well. However, this reads like an American overpanicking because they're used to living with a certain employment and economic stability that is just not the norm in most of the world, and are coming to terms with instability for the first time.
I come from a country where emigrating in search of new work, or trying to reinvent yourself and switch jobs, driving an Uber or flipping burgers if necessary to stay afloat, etc. is the norm. We've had a lot of political and economic instability, science and health defunding, etc., and yes, it's not great, but also people just... live on, and manage to do okay.
Yes, I know about the recent advancements in AI, but barring the AGI case which I believe is a bit overblown in this article, I think the rest, especially the Trump situation, tariffs, unrest, etc., will pass as well.
I think there's some truth to this. There's lots of room in the middle of the pack.
But that would be a serious, violent, downgrade from the American self-image. We are bred on American Exceptionalism. If this myth is destroyed, we don't have a replacement ideology.
The ROW can decide that Americans are silly people who should get over themselves. But that will not convince Americans to accept the change calmly. And when Americans are not calm, the ROW suffers too. One way or another.
I think the so-called elites are already smelling blood in the water, from the way some billionaires are investing in doomsday bunkers.
What strikes me as odd as that, even with all the signs of an impeding crisis, US's oligarchs still double down on eliminating the little social safety nets that the US managed to provide to it's population. It's as if they learned nothing from the french revolution, and they think they can exist in a world where society succumbs to poverty and mysery. No wonder we're seeing tech bros pushing for a US dictatorship.
I'm worried too. I share most of his concerns, but I'm going to go one step further.
We have a president who is 1) prone to make seat-of-the-pants decisions and 2) prone to over-reach presidential power. And we're going to have a population that is 1) desperate for a quick fix and 2) not willing to let anything stand in the way. The combination is a recipe for further erosion (or the complete destruction) of separation of powers, and also for catastrophic mistakes. If we slide into tyranny (whether or not it keeps a democratic facade) and have Trump - with no restraints - trying to fix the economy, God help us all.
If we look back at all types of mechanization, all that happens is we keep our jobs, they get more complex and the jobs get harder and more technical.
in 2-10 years if my job as a software engineer is speedily porting and upgrading banking code with AI assitants then cool.
But I don't think we're going to see a crash. Human development doesn't stop. We're going to keep making new stuff and that takes people.
I’m not confident that AI can be used in place of human knowledge workers.
If you’re in software and maintaining a React application front end I can see the appeal: it takes so much code just to add a button. And it’s not like the web platform is going to get good.
It’s automated copy-pasting from stack overflow and GitHub. That can be useful.
But it’s also pretty meh. Humans stop reading code deeply enough to catch errors when they read more than a couple hundred lines of code in an hour. Someone still has to be liable for those errors when they cause harm to customer businesses and assets. Maybe AI and agent tooling will get good enough to keep that error rate low enough to be tolerable.
But maybe not.
What is concerning is that capital is getting so much support from the state. Labourers are being left in the lurch. I think part of that “redistribution of wealth,” needs to involve getting capital to support and work with labour instead of just exploiting it and squeezing everyone dry.
It’s wealth inequality and climate at the end of the day.
This article has been written once a week since the beginning of capitalism. Just insert your preferred $flavor_of_the_week global issues as supporting evidence for it.
Unfortunately we know from hundreds of years of experience now that the only actual way of identifying a recession is in hindsight. Everything else is just doomerism.
> Homelessness skyrockets because people can't pay their rent, but now it's whole families on the streets
> We start to see unrest and/or riots against "the rich" because there are no jobs, and people are being evicted
> Crime goes up significantly
Arguably once a good percentage of people become unhoused, we are no longer living in a fair society. IT SHOULD break down into violence. But then so say "Crime goes up significantly". What crime? There is no society where a crime can be defined.
I think some of his worries are well founded and others are not. I believe AI is not going to replace everyone or even most. Instead, it will eventually be seen for what it is - not actually intelligent, and the bubble that was built on those hopes and dreams will collapse, kicking off a market crash. At the same time, Trump's tariffs are going to spike inflation, preventing the Fed from cutting. That will further Trump's fight with Powell, which will lead to him installing a puppet. Said puppet will cut rates, leading to record-setting inflation that could lead us into something resembling the Great Depression. That is a very likely outcome, in my opinion.
Those people will go back to doing whatever they would have been doing before the technology revolution, which actually wasn’t so long ago…
Like maybe go work at a shipyard. We can only build two ships a year it seems…
The technology revolution was so long ago that tech is all I’ve done, and I’m retired now. You think shipyard workers woke up one day in the 80s and said, “fuck welding, imma gonna go program me some computers?”
I’ll just skip over the part where you ignored a lot of those jobs going overseas and are not coming back.
We can talk about excessively wealthy individuals all day, but I'm pretty sure that most knowledge workers are not going to be on the receiving side of wealth redistribution. This is even more likely to be true for the programmers affected by these tech layoffs.
There has been convergence of many events:
1. The tax deduction change where costs couldn't be classified as an expense.
2. The saturation in people joining coding. At one point in time everyone wanted to be part of a bootcamp to earn that sweet coding salary.
3. Rising interest rates means the era of borrowing at low costs is over.
etc.
AI is last on my list for the reasons that people are being laid off. And its not because AI isn't helping people, rather it isn't helping people enough to justify the current layoffs.
And lets be honest - AI and employment is the hot topic right now. You should expect executives to say that they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and looking at time savings.
Once upon a time everyone wanted to add ML to their product. This is just going with the flow. Otherwise their stock prices will take a massive hit. Others yet want to showcase that they are doing everything to extract better margins. These statements can be slightly deceiving.
What does 30% of the code mean exactly? How much of it is going into the products and making into the market?
For now, AI is a convenient scapegoat. Maybe it becomes a force to reckon with and truly leads to people being laid off. Not today.
AI is on the top of rumors, but it's not a real cause of layoffs, just a nuance. And a great excuse. "Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work" is highly exaggerated. Only AI tools approved for employee are Gemini, NotebookLM, Cursor, Warp 2, plus a few other. AI generated github PR review is a joke most of the times, and Slack AI is like a slot machine: sometimes got right, mostly not.
When the article mentions "tech-adjacent," I think it is worth keeping in mind that this includes a broad swath of jobs that would never had qualified for amortizing salaries as R&D. For example, I'm skeptical that the tax change will have an impact on the number of television and film producers that are currently unemployed due to a huge slowdown in greenlighting projects from streaming services. I feel there is a contraction happening (though, practically, it doesn't always appear that way) that is a greater source of consternation than amortizing developer salaries will alleviate.
AFAIKT 1. was reverted in the OBBB. And I suspect my recent influx of recruiter outreaching email is related to that. Give it 3 more months and things may trend upward.
Tbf, tfa only gave it an even chance. He's not saying things are gonna turn bad, he merely observes multiple issues which could create an anti-synergy which would likely end badly if realized.
Don't worry -- soon after that, there will be high demand for human coders as companies scramble to hire to rewrite all the buggy and vuln-ridden AI-hallucinated software. We're on the verge of two revolutions in tech, not one.
I shared your view a year ago. Hell half my posts here on HN are arguing against the annoying hype. Today I make heavy use of AI and my code quality has gone up, not down. It's better tested, better factored, with better error handling covering more edge cases
AI code is only buggy if no-one is guiding or reviewing it
I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
I view AI like a gas pedal. For an experienced driver it can really help. For someone new, straight into a wall. For some code you go straight for hours and barely touch the steering wheel. For some code it's all wheel and too much gas is a mistake.
That said, we will need less coders overall. Just like you don't need human drafters or calculators in the same way. It will cut the bottom out of the industry, and entry level will be expected operate like a senior from 10 years ago.
Or as the article put it:
>> Most workers, and most work days, are just drudgery. Answering emails. Writing up quarterly plans. Reviewing metrics. Building applications that do something with data.
Yes. Those jobs are going to disappear. If your role's primary value is shuffling paper around an org, or putting minor edits on something before forwarding, your job is going to disappear to AI in the next 1-3 years.
Or AI-initiated human process optimization in the next 2-5 years, which I think is an underappreciated second wave.
To define that: if we 10x or 100x the productivity of certain roles, won't companies look at the remaining unaccelerated human speedbumps and ask "Is it really that important we have a person do that? Because it's now costing us substantial latency and throughput of the process as a whole."
And in many cases they'll likely conclude that no, it's not critical that a human be involved at that point. So poof those jobs as well.
As a result, we'll have many fewer humans being much more productive.
Tbd on whether that produces enough surplus (and equal allocation of it) to balance out the job losses.
If there are no people, there won't be a need for managers to exist either. Who/What are the managers going to manage? The office air?
Eventually whoever that is running the business has to be smart enough to figure out everything, and the margin for error will be small in a economic environment where every one is already poor and can't spend to buy your things.
I remember the days of socialist India. If everyone is poor its impossible to do the good things like research, development, innovation. The reason is simple, with no one having money to buy your things, you will never make profits to invest in them.
Maybe NOS is a better analogy, since even the newest of drivers is going to need and get use out of the gas pedal.
I think new devs could probably get use of it as a replacement for SO or Google. But if they slam on it and think they can vibe code a whole app, they are going to have a bad time.
But NOS may be better. It might make you faster but it doesn't make you better.
> I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
Always will, it's a question of how many people we need, not if. Well, until AGI (which I'm very bearish on in the near or even intermediate term) or some other monumental shift
It makes me wonder if at some point people will regard writing code the same way they regard writing assembly
>someone in the middle
In the middle between AI and what?
The requirements.
He's essentially saying that it's a complete guess how long the job of a programmer exists, and when it will change over to essentially product manager, of which you'll need a lot less.
It could be decades... Or next month.
That works because you are a senior developer who knows how to properly use the AI tools. What 10 years from now? What happens when senior devs are retiring and we do t have replacements since we replaced junior devs with AI?
Presumably, AI has advanced in 10 years?
Do you believe there's a threshold to how good this stuff can get, or do you think it's all infinite upside?
A materialist could logically conclude that it still has some way to go.
Obviously not infinite, but humans have very real limitations too. We've all seen them.
> What happens when senior devs are retiring and we do t have replacements since we replaced junior devs with AI?
... AI eats senior devs. Vibe coding front-end devs inherit the earth. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Clzx434IV6o
What's your workflow/tool set?
I am senior developer and have easily and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. Nothing has changed for me and my team mates who do use it are slower than me and often don’t know what the Pr actually does.
You chose to invest in the downward career slope. That’s why your opinion has changed. If you continued to resist it you wouldn’t be looking to remove yourself from the auditing/coding position.
How is investing in something that improves my productivity and output quality a downward career slope? Continuing to use a hand saw when there are power tools available seems like the downward slope..
If AI gets to a point where I'm fully able to be removed from auditing/coding positions.. well there won't be any coding positions left for anyone
> often don’t know what the Pr actually does
this is on them for being lazy. I thoroughly review the code AI produces. I don't commit it if I don't understand it
Analogizing AI to power tools is like analogizing building an IKEA bookshelf to outsourcing the job to a TaskRabbit.
Power tools automate manual hand movements, but you still need to follow the manual and know what fits where. Or you can spend money on a contractor from TaskRabbit to do it for you, perhaps badly.
LLMs make it faster to generate code, sure. Automating boilerplate code isn't too unlike using a drill to fit a screw.
But witting software writ large still requires thinking, something that the companies providing these services are heavily incentivized to remove.
> How is investing in something that improves my productivity and output quality a downward career slope?
> I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
You don’t think relying on a system you yourself are predicting will replace you isn’t investing in a downward slope. Wait until you find out Llms are helping suppress your wages.
> this is on them for being lazy.
Just like you gave into Llms you became lazy about writing code. That is the trend with Llms, to do less work as you’ve been pointing out.
You saving time the same thing as being lazy.
Not using LLMs doesn't make them go away. Whether they suppress wages or replace anyone is completely out of my control. Avoiding them just means I'd be producing below my potential
> you became lazy about writing code
I haven't, though. I still do the same amount of work except now I get more done. Now more of my energy goes into architecture, testing, specs, making sure it's built well instead of the lower level wiring things together
I use them for their perfect memory and as a creativity buddy, not for them to think for me
> and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years.
I'm not sure that's much of an achievement, to be honest. If you tried it and it turned out to be not useful for you, fine, I'm on your side. But refusing to try for the sake of it seems backwards. I mean, then why use CI, version control and those fancy IDEs anyway? Notepad is a perfectly cromulent text editor (and what is code, if not text, anyway?) and my local build.bat and deploy.bat do their job nicely and quickly.
> what is code, if not text, anyway?
Poetry is text too. It is a misleading categorization.
> I mean, then why use CI, version control and those fancy IDEs anyway?
CI, version control, and IDEs do not think for you.
Resisting using LLMs to do the code that you know perfectly well how to do is like resisting using maps to tell you to make "now make a left turn" to travel from A to B, when you have gone from A to B a zillion fucking times. It is perfectly sensible, specially if you want to retain your skills and mental acuity.
Anecdotally, I know individuals (ok, Dad /g) who can no longer negotiate even the most simple routes without the stupid map thing walking them through all the turns. Routes that were taken for years without these gizmos now require the gizmo.
This is an unfortunate 'experiment' we are conducting in this field. The actual lasting results (or damages) are unknown as of yet. We have some idea though.
I never said I didn’t try it. You said that.
I used to be like you and then I decided to get up to speed on where things stand a couple of months ago.
I hate using it but I can write issues in gitlab, send them to aider, and it will spit out working solutions complete with test coverage.
Right now I think I'm maybe still faster just writing things myself but this feels incredibly tenuous. I'm certain that in a year vibe driven development will be faster.
There is no programmer's union. When the industry decides it's time to get rid of developers because vibe coding is faster than mid level developers, there is no counter.
The only developers left will be either true 100x geniuses or vibe coders. I'm not the former so I am trying to make sure I can become the latter long enough to last a few extra years.
Regardless of how much you personally want to resist, this is what is going to happen.
I didn’t say I don’t invest or use automation or other AI. I said I don’t use Llms. There’s a huge difference.
There are many examples of buggy and vuln-ridden non-AI-hallucinated software. Never been a rush to fix them.
I've been thinking about this lately.
While we engineers understand how to judge and evaluate AI solutions, I am not sure Business Owners (BO) care.
BO's are ok with a certain percentage of bugs/rework/inefficiency/instability. And the tradeoff of eliminating (or marginalizing) Engineering may be worth the increased percentage of unfavorable outcomes.
>>While we engineers understand how to judge and evaluate AI solutions
Usually no one really care. Target is to close a ticket, not to make a good software.
"Works fine on my machine" - heard this many times. But user don't have a beefy m4 pro machine with ultra fast fiber. No one care.
Yeah but the ‘works fine on my machine’ is usually said by jr/inept devs
I havent heard that around serious engineers
Their title and salary are serious, though.
Isn't that the no true Scotsman fallacy?
I'm overjoyed that you only encountered serious "engineers".
My professional experience is that at least 3/4 of the people riding software should not be because they write horrible code horribly.
But since I live in a place where you have to pass licensing exams to call yourself an "engineer", Maybe my experience is different than yours
Hi, you did not understand what I wrote.
> I'm overjoyed that you only encountered serious "engineers".
Nowhere did I say this. At all. I said I havent heard 'works on my machine' said by serious engineers. That does not mean that I have ONLY met serious engineers.
Precisely. Businesses are okay with bugs if it helps them enter a market faster or stave off competition. Bug fixes are mostly considered maintainancd which is outsourced or "cost-optimized"
Probably depends on BO/stakeholder as well. B2B solution that has a low risk of killing anyone? Maybe fuck it, let the model have its way.
Technology that controls software that keeps people alive, controls infrastructure, etc., uhhhh I don't think so. I guess we're just waiting for the first news story of someone's pacemaker going haywire and shocking them to death because the monitoring code was vibed through to production.
Think more business risk than risk to humans.
B2B AI LLM vibe-SaaS that has a 10% chance to become profitable and a 10% chance to gift away all money invested into the business ever while leaving founders on the receiving end of 100 lawsuits.
Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small? medical devices, and maybe some control software? Oh and probably defense too
I don't feel much better ( as someone who has spent their career in consumer electronics )
> Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small?
I think it's large. Think about the software that goes into something like air travel - ATC, weather tracking, the actual control software for the aircraft... I am aware that nothing is perfect, but I'd at least like to know that a person wrote those things who could be held accountable.
But how many people are there? Comparing to 100k in Meta? To millions from Indian body shops?
This exactly. Instead of adding Adobe adding AI features to Acrobat that I don't want or need, I would like it to fix the fact that it still can't convert a DOCX to a PDF without messing up the tabs.
The lack of devs that understand the domain knowledge and the codebase will be the main issue.
I would say that the current capabilities of genAI is like a junior dev, sometimes even a mid-level. But one main difference is that a dev is slowly learning and improving and at some point will become a senior dev and also domain specialist.
If there is a codebase created by genAI, then it’s equivalent as if all devs left the company, so no one knows why some piece of code was created in a certain way, if it was part of the business logic or some implementation detail
I wonder if the codebase will be understandable at all.
You can most often “get used” to a codebase because they authors tend to stick to the same patterns in many ways, and they are somewhat coherent across time. After a bit you can kinda guess in what file is a feature implemented etc etc.
Will this still be true with ai doing most of the work?
Claude is really good about documenting what it has done. I’ve also had some good luck with “I’m interested in this part of the codebase please explain it to me” And “this part is not working let’s diagnose” I’ve been doing a lot of productionization of nontechnical vibecoding. And I provide a lot of feedback on best practices (one of which is to ask “is this best practices for security and data protection?”)
That being said there’s no replacement for a real knowledgeable human software engineer.
The rate at which AI is capable of producing code is intractable for humans to deal with. Right now the bottleneck is human reviewers. If AI ever becomes effective at generating provably correct code, it's joever.
But will humans understand the proofs?
Oh…
The proofs are not meant for human consumption. It's for the AI to know to try again rather than spit out hallucinations. Of course there's a leap of faith somewhere here.
The proof either passes the SAT solver in a reasonable amount of time, or it doesn't.
Somebody will have to write proof verifier, and that in many ways will be harder than writing some CRUD app that they want proof verifier to validate.
We might even end up increasing the demand and pay for devs if this happens to pass.
We have many of those that are perfectly fine. Writing proofs is still quite hard, especially proofs that actually say something about your program.
Proving something is correct is a far harder exercise, than writing a broken but acceptable version of that thing.
The good news is there are several thousand newly unemployed software engineers on the market…
It's also likely that there are thousands who aren't hustle-culture oriented who have been looking for so long that they don't even count as unemployed anymore.
Or maybe I'm just projecting.
"Use our agentic coding model version n+1, it will fix all your buggy and vuln-ridden source and you won't have to apologize to your CEO/board!"
I wouldn’t bet on this
Just become a black hat then. It will be easy to find problems in everything but the very top percent of AI generated software.
I had Claude Code do some of the challenges at defcon, it was doing surprisingly well.
(I did make sure the challenges didn’t ban AI).
I love love love Claude Code. It's my weapon of choice. However, we're still a ways off.
The most recent thing I did prior to typing this comment was have it look at a cosmosdb integration and recommend changes to my CosmosClientOptions to reduce CPU, based on a few exceptions I'm seeing.
It recommended 5 changes to 5 settings, and every single one of them was outside of the allowed range for those 5 settings. I told it as much, and asked nicely (always nicely, I don't want to be on the Singularity's naughty list) to try again, those aren't valid values. It came back with 4/5 values within the allowed scope, one still outside of the scope, and 2 of the 4 that were accurate were the same values that I already have configured.
Not there yet. Better every day, but definitely not there.
[dead]
Why not? Seems to match the trend of tech innovation creating more demand for tech.
The reality is lots of software problems can’t be solved with the level of “intelligence” LLMs have. And if they could, it wouldn’t be just software in danger - it’d be every human profession. Even the physical ones, since AI would quickly figure out how to build machinery to automate those.
The industry might evolve to "AI Please rewrite the faulty code and redeploy, eating the cost of inefficiencies as business expense, instead of hiring back to the Full Software Engineering Employment Levels".
>> Why not?
Because it's just cope. Look at the current reality. Are companies rushing to fix bad or even buggy code written by human devs? No, not in most cases. In most cases, if a piece of code "works", it is left the hell alone. And that's the thing about AI code: it does work. The quality is irrelevant in the overwhelming majority of cases (especially if it's other AIs that are adding to it, which is the case more and more often).
> The quality is irrelevant in the overwhelming majority of cases
Software quality is especially important in safety critical applications.
We should not expect an LLM trained solely on formally-verified code to produce formally-verified code. I don't think that also training on specs and hateful training material will fix that.
So then we're back to the original software engineering objectives of writing better SAST, DAST, Formal Method, side channel, and fuzzing tools for software quality assurance.
Ok, then 10% of the current IT workforce will be allocated to the critical applications. The rest 90% will be replaced with Claude SuperGPT CODER 6.2.
Like ~100k people in Meta - nothing critical there, right? Many thousands could be replaced with AI-coders there.
I've been to birthday parties that employed more people than "safety critical" software development. We're talking about 99.99% of the software development jobs evaporating.
I think we're talking like 100% of everyone gets a new power saw!
Compare traditional woodworking with modern carpentry on quality, longevity, and marginal efficiency.
From "Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18965964 :
> Which universities teach formal methods?
> Is formal verification a required course or curriculum competency for any Computer Science or Software Engineering / Computer Engineering degree programs?
> Is there a certification for formal methods? Something like for Engineer status in other industries?
Referencing Marc Benioff making bold claims about AI isn't much evidence, he's pulling these numbers out of thin air. Despite claiming they won't hire software engineers in 2025, there are plenty of positions open at Salesforce for software engineers.
If it was just Marc Benioff preaching then it would indeed not deserve much attention. However, most big companies at this point have internal roadmap to reduce workforce by large amounts.
I'm not saying I necessarily doubt this, but how do you know what the internal roadmaps of "most" big companies are?
Is this really because if AI or is it because of economic hardships ?
I’m just one consumer but due to inflation my spending is down massively. Also because of all the doom predictions. I’m saving way more money.
I’m sure this is slowing things down and as I said, because of the piece of eggs , I’m can’t be the only one spending less.
If you look at reality. Companies at the top of the revenue pyramid just don’t pay enough tax, and it’s borked everything.
only if they over hired during ZIRP. AI is just an excuse
Agreed. I still think we're seeing layoffs due to _overhiring_ in 2020. AI makes a nice excuse when laying these people off because CEOs can say their huge investments in AI are starting to pay off because they don't need the humans.
Turns out, they never needed those humans in the first place.
That doesn't answer the other side of the problem though, that it's so hard to find work right now, even for folks who would typically be very easy to employ.
Layoffs are one of the only ways way to cut spending before quarterly reports when the market is already saturated. The other way is to make the products cheaper (enshittification).
As far as more employable candidates go, I don't think executives realize the vast limitations of LLM. You have to remember they aren't technical people. They're thinking managers with no training are going to replace skilled employees--that there was a secret magic button that the lowly employees all knew about and it's now in their hands.
Sam Altman said there were now going to be one-person, billion-dollar companies. Reading between the lines, since there's not enough money for every person to do that, what does he intend for the remainder to become?
Sure it does. If everybody overhired, then nobody needs to hire now. And the few places that do are inundated with all the laid-off job seekers, so odds on getting hired at one of them are very low.
At my employer the overhiring was in areas where there wasn't actually a business case. For example they staffed an entire internal team to build a unified portal between all of the software systems the company acquired through acquisitions. That team produced nothing and at great expense. They got laid off last year, and the funds re-allocated toward hiring in areas that produced revenue or reduced expenses.
Fair point. Depressing, but it makes sense.
[dead]
Can someone please refer me to the hard data on "overhiring in 2020"?
I was laid off as part of the initial panic in early 2020. The job market for IT for the entirety of 2020 was dead. D-E-A-D. There was a _very_ small pickup in the summer when people got more optimistic about the vaccines but it waned very quickly.
I'm in the Midwest so it might have been different in the West but I doubt it was that much different.
There was _some_ pickup in 2021, when companies realized the end of the world isn't happening soon, but it was not very significant. IT job market never really normalized, there was some pickup in 2022 but by then LLM hype started causing layoffs to go up and openings down.
I know things are bad, we all know things are bad. But first you’ve got to get mad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug
Here’s the thing: We’re in the complaining stage. It doesn’t hurt enough yet. When it does, we’ll stop complaining and do something.
Complaining is a good first step! That’s how it starts.
Assuming it's not already too late. By the time my dad started exercising, he already had stage 4 cancer (without knowing it). He only did it for half a month, and was gone 6 months later. Speed of execution matters.
1,000% yes. Make our WANTS known: 1) to ourselves, and 2) then to the world. And then, be the change that we want.
- "knowing is half the battle" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c71nqMqmiaw
- "be the change you want to see in the world" - https://josephranseth.com/gandhi-didnt-say-be-the-change-you...
Personally I want a more human-first world, and a less money-first world. This touches on many areas needing change.
The thing is... do we really need so many developers and marketers?
I read it as a more general statement, not just tech workers.
I agree with many of the author's observations. I see a lot of the same thing in my circles.
Where my views differ are when it comes to the leap between layoffs and AI.
Corporate leadership is eager to reduce the biggest source of cost (employees) and happy to use AI as cover. But it's not the reality. AI isn't adding productivity to the company's bottom line in numbers big enough to rationalize the layoffs.
I can point to zero tech roles eliminated where AI performed the same function. Despite the fact me and everyone in my circles use AI on a daily basis and are big proponents of it.
I think the author's biggest incorrect assertion is accepting corporate PR as gospel like this:
>Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work. They're pushing what they call a "digital workforce" where AI agents handle customer service, sales, and even coding tasks.
All of these companies have great incentive to say AI is replacing workers. But so far no proof has been offered.
Eventually we will get a recession. For a lot of people that work in tech it feels like we are already in one.
But I do not share the author's concerns with AI taking everyone's jobs in the next few months or years.
"Tech" layoffs are a canary.
But not because of tech, AI, or things like that. It's the rate of pay.
When prosperity is the thing that's receding, money counts more than ever because lack of money threatens more than could be imagined.
And even though it's not as common as it should be, employees can be fairly valued as an asset. In a good way, where you're much happier being valued like that than not.
So even a company that values their people more so than most, will have to make sacrifices on all fronts when the going gets rough, like they don't have to do for years in a row when things are merely non-ideal.
This can cause some of the highest-paid people to get kicked out much earlier, like few have seen before. Even in companies that are not trying to preserve as much head-count until things turn around, they may have no real choice.
A lot of non-tech high-dollar people are also being shed, and it looks like on the increase. Consumers may not have enough accumulated wealth any more to be able to bail out a consumer economy.
> Tech layoffs by year
I was wondering how much was due to over hiring during the crazy 2020-2021. Multiple companies increased their headcount by more than 50%, or even by 100% during the two years. That does not make business or technical sense at all, as tech companies are supposed to scale their services with technology instead of people. Companies add people only if they want to invest in new areas, but exactly how many new areas can we get in merely two years?
50% or 100%? Which companies? All the biggest companies increased by some durin 2020~2022, but not really all that much more than their historical growth rates.
What did happen uniformly is that all essentially stopped hiring after 2022.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
Here's another possibility:
1. There are fewer new products normal people want to buy, especially in tech.
2. Inflation is making the everyday things people need more expensive.
3. VC money for the most popular products ran out and companies are jacking up prices.
4. Concerns over tech's impact on health is limiting tech use and more negative sentiment.
All of this is causing a slowdown in tech and AI could be the perfect fix:
1. Shiny new product for people to buy.
2. Reduce costs and increase margins right when it's most needed.
3. Justify more investment in the space (super intelligence = best VC investment ever).
4. Solve bread and butter problems in health, education, etc. if safety is prioritized.
My guess is that this need for AI is causing a lot of the tech sector to overestimate how quickly AI will revolutionize things, similar to getting "flying car" predictions right at the top of the automotive s-curve.
I believe AI will have a big impact in the long-term but no where close to as quickly as most people believe, and that the short-term impact will be limited to more narrow use cases. I also believe we're going to see a big rebound to people doing work in the next few years.
Many here likely disagree with me and it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.
I share the concern based on the current productivity expectations but I did stumble across something recently which makes me feel a lot better. There was a change in the tax code that coincides with the beginning of the post-pandemic layoffs[1]. This was changed back last month by the BBB which likely means a bunch of new R&D spend for big tech. I think this is why we are seeing intense M&A activity and if we can keep the AI hype under control it will probably lead to new hiring as well.
[1]: https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-micro...
I don't think this tax change had huge impact. Two reasons:
1. Layoffs and slowdown are global, not only in US.
2. Expenses are still deductable, but over longer period. It makes no difference for big corporations.
> 1. Layoffs and slowdown are global, not only in US.
Dunno about that. I've moved twice since 2022 (in Ireland), and the market is definitely less crazy but there's still (apparently) lots of work about. To be fair, I interview well and am pushing 15 years experience with a bunch of "prestigious" companies.
Definitely seemed like it much worse in the US. Then again, it was never as insane as the 2010's seemed for the US so maybe there was less over-hiring.
> 2. Expenses are still deductable, but over longer period. It makes no difference for big corporations.
The rate of change between full and 20% deduction definitely had a big impact on smaller companies hiring of software/data people. If you were a megacorp it mattered less but still not trivial.
> We're already primed to fight with each other because we no longer share a common reality.
This is the really scariest part to me.
Me too.
In tech, change is the only constant. From embedded software in assembly to mobile/web development in javascript to jit-compiled python. This is not easy on engineers or on businesses as they have to keep reskilling at all times. The silver lining to AI is that it is poor at reskilling itself which is why the data-cutoff is circa 2024 for some models.
It’s constant, sure, but the rate of change is not. We’re still in the explosion brought about by silicon-based microprocessors, and that appears to be slowing down significantly as we’ve eked out all the easy gains in performance, power, and efficiency. I’m in the camp that believes, within my lifetime, tech innovation as we view it today will gradually slow and stagnate, resulting in a collapse of languages, models, and products into a handful of standards - and which every business, school, government, and person builds on top of or around until the next big explosion happens. It’s why Big Tech is so adamant about selling walled gardens: deep down, they know everyone is pining to be the next IBM juggernaut.
I think we’re seeing the early signs of that now, as everyone giddily trips over each other to rush into the “next big thing” rather than invest into the serious R&D necessary to make real gains. We’re managing modern technologies with centuries-old methods of corporate and political governance, complete with infighting and backstabbing. In a vacuum, no rational person would have ever backed the current explosion of LLMs given the more prescient problems facing the species, yet here we are squandering water and energy on prediction machines instead solar farms, battery storage, materials science, and infrastructure replacement.
I already see personal evidence in the IT side of things. For all the bickering supporters do between VMs and Containers and K8s and Public Cloud, all I see is just different ways of packaging software with differing sets of limitations or use cases. Everyone is so fiercely competing to make their chosen tech reign supreme over all that they pay no attention to us IT folks just wishing someone would make their container or Helm chart as easy to deploy and support as a modern Linux VM might be and integrating disparate tech instead of seeking to replace and dominate their competitors. There’s a very real attitude among my peers that, despite their advantages, containers are often little more than packages with extra steps and infrastructure for their existing use cases. Whether they’re right or wrong is irrelevant, because they’re making the decisions in their employer.
Change still feels fast and explosive because folks are focusing on niche research papers, extravagant moonshots, and the various implementations of things in SV circles. Outside those, however?
It’s slow. It’s stagnant. It’s boring, because nobody actually listens to what the physical majority has to say about products - only what the biggest paying customers (economic majority) want.
AI will definitely have an impact of non physical jobs, and it is hard to see it slowing down. Anyone in any big enough company can easily see right now that there is a top level initiative to reduce employee count by never before imagined margins. And the AI is already good enough to achieve some large reductions. It is hard to see how this will all unfold.
I can see the author's point but im failing to link it to ai. The ai im using now is a good as a productivity booster for otherwise already well defined problem-- and decently good engineers.
I dont think the layoffs are due to that. It is affecting entry jobs rather badly, but that (anecdotely) constitutes minority.
ADP's June employment report was pretty dismal, much worse than the blowout BLS report that came out the next day. It was more in line with the revision that came out 2 months later.
The ADP Chief economist said that the problem wasn't that companies are laying off, is that they aren't replacing attrition - - that they can get the same work done without doing so and hinted at AI productivity boost as a reason.
I know it's a raging battle here, but just simply having a search engine that works again is a huge productivity gain...
It might be informative to compare this with what happened when retailers introduced automated checkout machines. It seems that the net effect on staff sizes was not that dramatic. These stores need more anti-theft security people and some oversight. Not to mention the people they need for technical support. I wonder if there will develop a new category of skills for checking that AI produced code is correct, effective and optimal?
They also need more people to restock abandoned carts because I'm not going to wait for two other people who got stuck in their automated checkout lines to get help from the one ineffective person who is stuck with the job of making this stupidity work.
My first real job in software was QA/Test (90s) and it seems my last job will be too.
I've been wondering when the other shoe was going to drop as well. I'm not in a panic, but let's just say that when I occasionally look to re-balance my finances I am no longer moving anything into the stock market.
The trades sure aren't hurting. Where I live, a county of about 120k in the Rockies, appliance repair shops are booking six weeks out, and roofers can book out as long as six months.
This is going to change fast once the recession hits. Because what happens during recessions is that households abandon all but the most critical home repair and home improvement projects, and trade businesses shutter in large numbers.
If humans are replaced en masse by AI agents, companies will save billions until there is nobody left who can pay for their products and/or services because we're all destitute and on the dole. I'm scheduled to retire in about 9 years. I'm not sure I'm going to make it that long.
Very true, If you take the number of tech jobs lost over the last couple years(in article) and multiply out, say, roughly $125K gross salary yearly, cut that in half for taxes (and things i missed) and you still are out tens of billions of dollars that people wont have to spend on things, big things.
I don't see how nobody will feel that loss of purchasing... Then again, we all know how detached the market is, someone from Schwab just yesterday telling me how things have "never been better."
According to other people, the robots will also be consumers.
Us "regular folk" are really just in for the ride now aren't we?
Owners of capital and machine labor can continue making bank and driving demand, even if there are no more human laborers making any money.
Humans are not necessary for an economy. It’s an easily missed assumption, because until now we are the only intelligent units of labor, capital ownership and demand.
But corporations long ago become units of all three, and AIs effectively become citizens simply by acting through an umbrella corporation. Corporations are (in)famously already first class political participates, via their money.
As long as AIs/corporations are motivated to compete and survive, demand from humans won’t be necessary for the economy to keep growing.
If anything, the ease with which AI/robotics will adapt to space habitats, and the vast resources untapped in the solar system, will enable a potentially human-independent economic explosion.
We’ve orchestrated our own demise by valuing ever increasing revenue above all else. The cancer must grow, to hell with the host.
That layoffs-each-year graph is a prime example of "that's not a suitable graph for that data".
I have no idea where this will go but I'm really not optimistic about the future of software development work. AI is already scarily good today. Sure I can still add value as a senior right now.. but there's no reason why that has to continue to be the case
Solid summary I think, but reading “what the country does if some significant percentage of our 100 million knowledge workers gets laid off because of AI” confused me deeply.
Does verifying the difference between whole milk and oat milk qualify the barista as a knowledge worker?
The quote links to a BIS report which establishes that, yes, the 170-million strong US workforce really does have 100 million (actual) knowledge workers and baristas don't count. Service workers are outnumbered by computer jobs.
They do run computers at Starbuck’s. Can’t imagine a definition that includes 1B people globally, 1/10th in the US.
BLS link 404’d for me:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-5/pdf/what-is-the-gig-ec...
Surprised he didn’t also mention US national debt and servicing it as interest rates rise.
Why would he? I’ve been hearing concerns about national debt my whole life (including the 80s when interest rates were a hell of a lot higher than now), and I’m retirement age. I’m not saying those chickens won’t eventually come home to roost, but probably not anytime soon. The U. S. has become quite skilled at giving that tin can a swift kick down the road.
I generally agree but servicing costs alone are over a trillion a year and have doubled in the last five or so, which is worrying. I don’t see how current leadership can address this https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-big-beautiful-bill-federa...
True, but as a percentage of GDP we're at historical (peacetime) highs.
Because paying the interest on the debt is now the fourth leading cost of the federal government, and since we are running an ever-increasing deficit, it will only grow.
The chickens are flocking around the roost now.
> US national debt and servicing it
The OBBB, championed by the so-called "fiscally conservatives", accelerated this, but this will largely get ignored until/if a Democrat is in office again. Then large swaths of people will suddenly start caring about the national debt.
The wealth gap and wages not keeping up with inflation is a large part of the problem.
There's no trickle down just trickle up. Giving Bezos, Zuckerberg, Benoiff, corporations more money isn't going to create more jobs.
If there's no money for consumers to spend these B2C companies will have less need for B2B software that most of us build.
Why did this fall off the first page so hard? Regardless of the quality of the post, it was getting good engagement I thought.
At least it isn’t flagged? Negative takes on AI do poorly here
____ does good/poorly on HN is often repeated but usually never true. I see constant negativity on AI, and in fact I see it overwhelmingly more negative than positive takes. but i also have my own bias in what i see, and probably falling to the same phenomenon as you
Seems like a great opportunity for a non-traditional candidate with some backbone to pull an FDR on this Herbert Hoover.
Sure, provided they're not thoroughly wrung out by the compromised apparatus of their party - or just disappeared by Hoover*.
Assuming that's a reasonable analogue - I'm not super knowledgeable about that era of US history so can't say for sure
While I have tremendous sympathy for anyone who loses their job, this feels very industry specific. Embedded and hardware spaces (like satellites) are doing really well, lots of advancement and hiring going on, while things such as data science are struggling to get relevant interviews. I'm also not a huge fan of industry specific hiring data, because it's usually tied to a specific HR/hiring software (like indeed), which holds hidden variables (like big companies may be more likely to use one hiring software than the other).
As a final note, however, most engineers will find a point in their career where the skills they've developed are obsolete or outdated, and that is terrifying to me.
So, the guy who's a founder of an AI company and makes money if he convinces people to buy into his AI project, is making some alarmist/doomer post about how crazy AI has gotten and how many jobs it's supposedly taking. He presents such thoughts as if they're some gnawing worry he just randomly needs to share.
Well, what do you know, the author just happens to sell an AI system that aims to "make humans better, rather than replacing them".
Surely his takes on the topic of how good AI is, and AI taking jobs, is impartial and objective, and not tied in any way to how he makes money if he manages to convince people of such thoughts.
Just because there is a conflict of interest doesn’t completely invalidate the argument being made. Marketing slop routinely makes it to the front page here and elsewhere with nobody batting an eye, but someone posting a personal take on their personal blog is now somehow a self-serving plug for…remind me where the product link is in that document again? I couldn’t find it.
Part of recognizing bias and conflicts of interest is also being able to recognize when, despite that, they’re still right.
what product does he sell
Many commenters say that AI is overblown and they're right. But the rise in labor precarity in almost all sectors is real.
If the effect size isn't attributable to AI, then it must be the case that we have been in an unacknowledged recession for over a year.
How do you jump from “not attributable to AI“ to “must be a recession”? I think it would be true for jobs that are not separable from companies economic activity, but it isn’t true for a good portion of tech jobs. A car manufacturer can’t sell the same amount of cars while reducing a half of assembly workers, but most tech giants can maintain profitable parts of their business with a fraction of their workforce (if not indefinitely then at least for some time). Some work can be eliminated altogether, some might be outsourced to other countries, some split among existing workers. I think that’s what’s happening. Why it is happening, though? Hard to say for sure, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be a combination of tighter availability of capital, shrinking addressable market (due to deglobalization & demographics) and AI competition requiring huge capex
> We start to see unrest and/or riots against "the rich" because there are no jobs, and people are being evicted
I am surprised this has not already happened. The combination of rampant inequality and lax gun laws (in some states) is very explosive.
The rich have been very effective at convincing the poor to use those guns against each other (and scientists) instead of the people responsible for their poverty.
good old 'panem et circensis' at work:
we're never had more effective 'circensis' (Tiktok, video-games, etc.)
the 'panem' part? yeah, that might be a problem, given (further) inflation
It’s a cycle that is always interrupted by war or revolution. The wealthy in the US do not understand what a revolution is, they believe that laws written on paper are as unbreakable as the laws of physics. Laws only function when the vast majority of society agrees to abide by them. Once people have nothing left to lose, it will be too late.
the gun laws are stricter in the States with more inequality
A trivial google shows thats wrong, it doesn’t look to be a strong correlation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
[dead]
I'm curious at which point the AIs are doing all the jobs of corporations, so that they can sell their products and services to... no one, since everyone is unemployed ?
Or is the strategy of everyone to sell to the same 0.01% of the population ?
(Also, hilarious that the author mentions UBI as a potential solution. UBI is a massive transfer of wealth. Governements are elected nowadays on the promise of guaranteeing wealth is not transfered - see the recent tax bill in the USA ; and any mention of "taxes" in a political campaign.)
For what it’s worth Salesforce.com is hiring Software Engineers.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr307625/software-eng...
This was one of the top jobs listed. Of course I have no idea if they are hiring people or not, but it’s at least listed.
new grads, too
Whats the rebuttal to UBI just causing massive inflation again?
UBI is just wealth flowing from the government to all individuals. The goal is redistribution. As a government, you can explicitly specify who wealth is being taken from by paying for UBI in taxes. If you don't raise taxes to balance the budget, your choice is between kicking the can down the road with debt or printing money. Printing money is really just another form of redistribution drawn from the wealth of everyone holding that currency. Naturally, doing so can lead to a crisis of confidence where the value of the currency collapses as people flee to other assets that are less likely to be devalued.
UBI, like any government spending, needs to be paid for. By taxes or financial disaster. I prefer taxes, personally.
I'm not a fan of UBI, but long term inflation is primarily determined by money creation rates. If UBI was funded by taxes, not printing, then we wouldn't expect any significant effect on long term inflation rates, although there might be some disruption in the short term.
I mean is it determined by money creation, or just influenced by/one of the factors? If business perceive people generally having more spending money, won't they raise prices accordingly?
Shouldn't they lose to a competitor who's happy to keep the lower margin and dominate the market?
If not, I'd call that a failure of anti-trust law, not UBI.
What if everyone raises prices simultaneously proportional to the UBI?
In the absence of collusion, if a business can produce a product or service less expensively, giving them the ability to outcompete competitors, they will do so.
Even if UBI is funded by taxation, rather than deficit spending, isn't it possible that demand will increase for some products (e.g. basic necessities that UBI recipients will suddenly be able to spend more on), causing inflationary pressure on the prices of those products?
By that argument, UBI causes both inflation (for essential goods and services) and deflation (for luxury items and assets).
That's the economy reorienting itself around the new demand landscape. Those price spikes are the signal to producers to ramp up supply, which should push the price back down over time.
Inflation is highly problematic when it spirals. Events like collapse of trust in a currency or government can result in runaway inflation, which is a disaster by all accounts. A one-time price spike caused by a one-time abrupt shift in demand is a very different scenario. Assuming the UBI is higher than the prices increases on necessities, we've successfully redistributed wealth and made those people better able to afford necessities, despite the fact that they cost x% more.
It's (mostly) determined by the delta between money creation and creation of "stuff" (by which I mean services as well as goods). If there's more stuff, then creating the same amount more money isn't inflationary.
I said "mostly" because there can be things like supply shocks... but I guess that means less stuff, so maybe even that isn't an exception.
I've never been a fan of UBI (and I'm often downvoted for that, ha ha). I like the idea of mandating an 18 hour work week or similar though. It still keeps the incentive to work — still rewards those who want to achieve more.
One wonders though what impact that will have on society — so much additional free time. More television binging? I hope not.
Why do folk "need" to work? To justify their existence? Don't we have a duty of care for fellow humans?
That is an American mindset: your job makes who you are. Like you have no identity without a job. Mainly because without a job you loose health insurance, housing, everything.
Curiously, and this is probably just me, but I find I need to work in order to enjoy (value) my leisure time. Odd, I know.
OK, then work. If I enjoyed 5:30am wake-up times, I wouldn't require others to replicate it.
To be sure. I was only answering as to why I find I need some sort of work.
Many people work so that other people don’t let them starve or put them in prison.
Folk need to work to justify their existence to themselves. Just yesterday, there was an article here about why people feel bad about themselves when they aren't being productive.
Our own psychology aside, people need to work because at present robots cannot make all the stuff we want. So if we (society as a whole) want all this stuff, then we need to work.
We have a duty to treat our fellow humans with dignity and humanity. I'm not sure that extends to providing for those who can work but won't, though - not when there's work that society as a whole needs done.
UBI is a more efficient allocation of already existing government services. Instead of a program for each and ever need a person may have, they're just given cash and those programs would be deprecated. It's more efficient. The rebuttal is sourced from those that have existing vested interest that these antiquated piece-meal programs continue to operate.
> These are people who've been making over $100-200K in tech or tech-adjacent for over a decade.
Oh, ok, these are the people the OP is worried about. If they have been at all reasonable with their money, they'll be fine...
He's not worried about whether they'll be okay.
He's worried about what it says about the state of the industry and hiring. If people like that can't get jobs, those less talented who have been making less money, certainly won't.
Take the even more global view of the United States. We can grow more than enough good food for everyone, and there is plenty of land. We have water, working infrastructure, and all the other ingredients.
The rest is just giving people money to do what they please. Really. Do we need faster technology? Do we need to alloy new metals or develop new medicines?
No. We could live the spartan life of fifty years ago, or a hundred. The population will keep reliably replenishing. The rest is all just fashion.
When, not if, AI takes over crummy jobs that people don’t want to do, and society makes a mass change to deal with that, you’ll be surprised how fast it goes back to whatever equilibrium there is.
It sounds like you're advocating for degrowth? Why would Americans willingly embrace being poorer?
Daniel's freaking out about an ongoing correction still playing out from '21, and finding struts to support his argument like the "30-50% of the work" is being "done by AI" nonsense lines spouted by talking suits. This is hogwash. It's standard corporate brain fart miss the actual point. Yes, 50%+ of code written might be done by AI, but pretending this is "AI doing the work" reveals the tumor that is management misapprehension of what's going on.
There's a correction coming, but not the one Daniel's fearmongering about.
I want to upvote this because I agree with your points, but can't because the last line is needlessly rude to the author.
Fair enough (and edited). I get angry at Chicken Littles spraying their anxieties all over other people because they can. It's not okay.
I do too. :)
But your earlier line about meds didn't even make sense in this context, if you think it through.
Now you have my upvote.
I've said this before, but the only thing that will convince me that these companies are actually laying people off due to AI will be when they start replacing their leadership staff with it.
Until that happens--IMO it's just an excuse to reduce the overhired workforce without tanking their stock.
They are firing leadership.
There's a ton of middle managers and high-ranking roles whose jobs are to basically supervise other people.
If the people go, they do too.
Many companies I’m familiar with were overstaffed with middle managers. Managers with 3 reports. I even know of one with a single report.
Layoffs are generally good for stock prices, at least in the very short term
Why would leadership replace themselves?
Would they replace themselves in countries (e.g. Germany, France) where they have more of a civil responsibility, beyond countries like USA where they have a stock-holder responsibility?
- corporate social responsibility (CSR)
Does this mandate self-termination when financially reasonable?
The layoff chart, created by AI, would be more impactful (and simultaneously less confusing, which is rare!) if it expressed the 2025 value as an extrapolated run-rate, or as a predicted range.
Sure, it wasn't bad when IT caused automation and elimination of many job positions and entire occupations, both manual and office. Now that we're on the receiving end of it, it is a bad thing all of a sudden.
As for the upcoming crisis, there's an increase in inequality and further accumulation of wealth among fewer and fewer individuals. As long as these individuals continue to spend their newly acquired wealth to compensate for lower spend by the less fortunate (which is exactly what's been happening), the economy will be fine.
We’re damned both ways with AI. Either it’s a massive bubble that will pop or it does what it’s intended to do and automates a large portion of the workforce.
Edit: removed a comment about Ai investors getting bailed out because it was secondary to my main point
Investors weren't bailed out following the pop of the dot com bubble. I don't think that AI investors will be bailed out afterward if this is another bubble.
Investors in the dotcom bubble were different than the investors in AI, IMO. The current run is led by tech giants, not VCs. How much money are VCs throwing around, compared to FAAMG? They will find a way to get the money back, somehow.
Housing was another bubble, and those investors got bailed out. “Too big to fail”, I believe, is still the prevailing neoliberal wisdom. This is quite a large bubble and seemingly one of the only bright spots in the US economy.
I give it a 85%+ chance of a bailout when the tech bubble pops.
Dot com pop caused significant repercussions for many people. I don’t think GP implied the AI bubble would get bailed out, just that if it pops, life gets unpleasant for lots of folks.
I think that the parent comment was edited after I replied. I wouldn't have said anything except for the original mention of an investor bailout.
Soon developers will wish they unionized or had a culture of collective bargaining and rights. You're labor, you just thought you were above it all. I'm not spiteful. I wish you luck and hope you guys organize.
after 30y of this business, i’m dumbfounded we haven’t organized. doctors, lawyers, plumbers etc seem to benefit hugely from professional orgs and unions in their corner.
i guess we are too well paid.
(all of the above make more than you do, and it’s because they are organized)
I share the same concerns as the author. People like to dispute individual issues by saying they’re caused by X or will even out with Y or the government can just do Z if the people voted for it, or that this is all irrelevant anyway because it’s never happened in the data before and therefore extremely unlikely or impossible to ever happen in the future.
And I just stare slackjawed at these people, at how they’re so focused on a narrow vertical or “historical data”, that they fail to even consider the larger picture. It’s why I trot out and bang my drum of “if we replace all the workers with AI then who is going to have money to spend to continue propping up the economy” every time boosters dismiss any social or economic concerns.
By a combination of neglect, malice, misinformation, partisanship, ignorance, and a cadre of new gods (“Big Data”, “the Algorithm”, the myriad of Rationalist cults, “AI”, crypto, etc), we have effectively stockpiled a warehouse full of leaking fuel barrels and dynamite and been commanded to take up smoking by our leaders and Capitalists, assured everything will turn out okay.
And you know what? Maybe it will turn out okay. Maybe this all is just a giant nothingburger. Maybe this is the start of a Golden Age of humanity, where dreams are attainable and fortune is infinite. Maybe this is just a speedbump on the path to extended lifespans, curing diseases, solving climate change. Maybe we’re just overreacting.
But the data sets, the lived experiences, the tone of existence doesn’t lie. Things are presently bad. The current patterns and trends suggest this will get a lot worse.
Maybe we’re wrong, but what I fear more is that we might be right and have done nothing.
Interesting that the author doesn't mention a reduction in working hours as a solution because I see that as THE solution. Federally mandate an 18 hour work week and job demand will soar. It's just as fanciful a thought as his other suggestions given how little power we have over the federal government to exercise our will.
Our entire economic system is built around ensuring we have scarcities of necessities (housing, mostly) so workers need to outcompete their peers to have access to said necessities. This results in reduced work weeks being a non starters as those who would like to avail of them are outbid by those who forego them.
I think this is probably correct.
But I'm not sure that 40hrs is the sweet spot. Other countries have chosen differently (with comparisons difficult to draw).
There are several competing influences here: inflation, AI productivity gains (TBD but nonzero), existing legislation around health insurance obligations, social/economic inertia, etc. And definitely others I'm not smart enough to think of!
It'd be interesting, if it was possible, to ramp down the 40hrs by an hour or two every year, keeping other components (esp healthcare) in step, to see where the inflection point is. I feel confident that we could get down to 32hrs without major negative drama. I agree that 18hrs (suggested elsewhere) would be violent.
I think a lot of people would love to live frugally and work less but it’s hard to pull off. Wage arbitrage in low CoL locations works with remote work but that’s been drying up. And of course access to health care and good education is an issue if you require either.
Yeah that’s interesting. Imagine what could happen if AI allowed us to work fewer hours and in exchange there was a program to enable people to pursue volunteer programs in their communities
Some “it takes a village” type of mentoring for children. Or programs to spend time with the elderly. Get outside and get involved in public works projects like repairing parks and waterways.
Total fantasy, for sure, but that’s what revolutionary new tech like AI could actually benefit society by letting humans be more human.
That change and everything else being equal means much less pay for workers. It is no golden bullet
It’s a US problem, but I think most people wouldn’t take a 50% cut in pay and a loss of health insurance (since they aren’t full time).
> Tech layoffs by year:
> 2022: 93,000 employees laid off
> 2023: 200,000 employees laid off (peak)
> 2024: 150,000 employees laid off
> 2025: 70,000 employees laid off (through July)
Any figures on how this compares with the COVID surge in hiring? As in, are we at a net-negative and if so by how much?
> A very large number of people dread Monday, and that's not because they show up Monday morning and bring all their creativity and brilliance. It's because it's clocking in and clocking out on a job they'd rather not be doing.
This is a management problem. I don't think it's that hard to figure out how to motivate people. Give them some autonomy and respect. This isn't even hidden knowledge.
But businesses and managers for some reason totally forget this, and treat everyone as cogs in a machine and completely replaceable, monitored by metrics.
Life has many stresses, but things can actually be OK with each of us, despite commotion and problems. In my church of 17.5 million members in most countries, we have made promises with God to help each other and we try to help others in need, in many nations ($1.5 billion last year and growing). That is far from the total level of need, but God has also promised to help us and guide us as individuals and families if we really strive to keep our promises and do our part; He has promised peace in this life and eternal life in the world to come. And there are programs for developing and serving in employment, education, resilience, service to community, etc. And very local congregation has a bishop (unpaid) with access to resources to help meet needs and achieve self-reliance.
More at my site (in profile; no sales and low stylistic ambition), if you click on "Things I want to say" (about 1/2-way down), then "On peace amid commotion" (also about 1/2-way down), then skim that page and click at least the last link. Then read the entire page and click the links that seem most interesting.). We really can be OK despite things. (Thoughtful comments appreciated with any downvotes.)
learn2plumb noobs
ok doomer the counter argument is obviously that it will be fine and keep getting better for the average person like it has for 100s of years
I don't want to come off as insensitive, and as a developer with a few years of experience and about to graduate, I'm obviously a bit worried about AI as well. However, this reads like an American overpanicking because they're used to living with a certain employment and economic stability that is just not the norm in most of the world, and are coming to terms with instability for the first time.
I come from a country where emigrating in search of new work, or trying to reinvent yourself and switch jobs, driving an Uber or flipping burgers if necessary to stay afloat, etc. is the norm. We've had a lot of political and economic instability, science and health defunding, etc., and yes, it's not great, but also people just... live on, and manage to do okay.
Yes, I know about the recent advancements in AI, but barring the AGI case which I believe is a bit overblown in this article, I think the rest, especially the Trump situation, tariffs, unrest, etc., will pass as well.
I think there's some truth to this. There's lots of room in the middle of the pack.
But that would be a serious, violent, downgrade from the American self-image. We are bred on American Exceptionalism. If this myth is destroyed, we don't have a replacement ideology.
The ROW can decide that Americans are silly people who should get over themselves. But that will not convince Americans to accept the change calmly. And when Americans are not calm, the ROW suffers too. One way or another.
Okay, so you don't make anymore money and die homeless. Whatever. To have to constantly worry about this for eternity is such a waste of life.
I gather you have never been homeless
I think the so-called elites are already smelling blood in the water, from the way some billionaires are investing in doomsday bunkers.
What strikes me as odd as that, even with all the signs of an impeding crisis, US's oligarchs still double down on eliminating the little social safety nets that the US managed to provide to it's population. It's as if they learned nothing from the french revolution, and they think they can exist in a world where society succumbs to poverty and mysery. No wonder we're seeing tech bros pushing for a US dictatorship.
<sarcasm> At least the Trump administration is opening up opportunities picking strawberries in triple digit heat </sarcasm>
He doesn't even get into the police state that is being methodically constructed around us by the regime.
I'm worried too. I share most of his concerns, but I'm going to go one step further.
We have a president who is 1) prone to make seat-of-the-pants decisions and 2) prone to over-reach presidential power. And we're going to have a population that is 1) desperate for a quick fix and 2) not willing to let anything stand in the way. The combination is a recipe for further erosion (or the complete destruction) of separation of powers, and also for catastrophic mistakes. If we slide into tyranny (whether or not it keeps a democratic facade) and have Trump - with no restraints - trying to fix the economy, God help us all.
If we look back at all types of mechanization, all that happens is we keep our jobs, they get more complex and the jobs get harder and more technical. in 2-10 years if my job as a software engineer is speedily porting and upgrading banking code with AI assitants then cool. But I don't think we're going to see a crash. Human development doesn't stop. We're going to keep making new stuff and that takes people.
I’m not confident that AI can be used in place of human knowledge workers.
If you’re in software and maintaining a React application front end I can see the appeal: it takes so much code just to add a button. And it’s not like the web platform is going to get good.
It’s automated copy-pasting from stack overflow and GitHub. That can be useful.
But it’s also pretty meh. Humans stop reading code deeply enough to catch errors when they read more than a couple hundred lines of code in an hour. Someone still has to be liable for those errors when they cause harm to customer businesses and assets. Maybe AI and agent tooling will get good enough to keep that error rate low enough to be tolerable.
But maybe not.
What is concerning is that capital is getting so much support from the state. Labourers are being left in the lurch. I think part of that “redistribution of wealth,” needs to involve getting capital to support and work with labour instead of just exploiting it and squeezing everyone dry.
It’s wealth inequality and climate at the end of the day.
This article has been written once a week since the beginning of capitalism. Just insert your preferred $flavor_of_the_week global issues as supporting evidence for it.
Unfortunately we know from hundreds of years of experience now that the only actual way of identifying a recession is in hindsight. Everything else is just doomerism.
> Homelessness skyrockets because people can't pay their rent, but now it's whole families on the streets
> We start to see unrest and/or riots against "the rich" because there are no jobs, and people are being evicted
> Crime goes up significantly
Arguably once a good percentage of people become unhoused, we are no longer living in a fair society. IT SHOULD break down into violence. But then so say "Crime goes up significantly". What crime? There is no society where a crime can be defined.
How about "activities we consider crimes today"?
A society always exists, even in a total dissolution of the previously-existing social order (which we are not truly contemplating here).
I think some of his worries are well founded and others are not. I believe AI is not going to replace everyone or even most. Instead, it will eventually be seen for what it is - not actually intelligent, and the bubble that was built on those hopes and dreams will collapse, kicking off a market crash. At the same time, Trump's tariffs are going to spike inflation, preventing the Fed from cutting. That will further Trump's fight with Powell, which will lead to him installing a puppet. Said puppet will cut rates, leading to record-setting inflation that could lead us into something resembling the Great Depression. That is a very likely outcome, in my opinion.
Those people will go back to doing whatever they would have been doing before the technology revolution, which actually wasn’t so long ago… Like maybe go work at a shipyard. We can only build two ships a year it seems…
The technology revolution was so long ago that tech is all I’ve done, and I’m retired now. You think shipyard workers woke up one day in the 80s and said, “fuck welding, imma gonna go program me some computers?”
I’ll just skip over the part where you ignored a lot of those jobs going overseas and are not coming back.
Who is going to be buying ships?
Telling people in tech to touch grass is not the best recipe for upvotes it appears.
> And I think that then leads to calls for:
> - Redistribution of wealth
We can talk about excessively wealthy individuals all day, but I'm pretty sure that most knowledge workers are not going to be on the receiving side of wealth redistribution. This is even more likely to be true for the programmers affected by these tech layoffs.