Humans ourselves are a technology. We have incredibly flexible brains and dexterous hands. Up to now, we could always do things that robots couldn't. That was where our job security came from.

But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?

This is what the article misses and what people have trouble accepting. Yea, this is a technological revolution, but unlike the Industrial Revolution, you can't just upskill your way out of it.

sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.

We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.

Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.

The last hundred times we automated things, we automated muscles. Today, the number of people employed purely for their muscle is very small.

This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.

My grandad ran a small letterpress shop and when phototypesetting came in he didn't retrain, he just did smaller and smaller jobs until it was wedding invitations.

And my great great grandpa thought horses would lose all their jobs to cars. And they all did and it was never the same again.

There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.

I think the analogy of moving from horses to engines breaks down when going from code to AI as AI can quite plausibly work on itself. It's a fundamentally different game we're playing this time. And there were as many engine jobs as horse jobs (maybe more). The whole point of AI is super human productivity. Even the idea of just using AI means you need less humans because one human with AI can out-produce multiple humans without. It's very difficult to imagine a future where AI can do every job and things don't turn into a sci-fi dystopia.

I don’t particularly like the horse to engine angle because it doesn’t capture the issue well.

When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???

Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?

Back in the '70s my dad used to tell a joke about his dad. He said that my grandfather had a job that supported his whole large family while my dad was growing up. But unfortunately technology caught up with him, and he was replaced by a device just this big, and he held his fingers apart to demonstrate.

Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."

Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.

It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, along with the pickle slicer.

In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.

> But it makes me wonder: what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?

This exactly. Look, I "love" code but only because of what it allows me to do and there is plenty of code/coding that I don't love. Not to be too hippy-dippy but I'm a builder, I like to build things. Build things for myself, build things for others. The code was _always_ a means to an end.

Sure, it was cool I had this skill that many people didn't have but I also used to have skill in managing the windows machines and things like the registry. When I first switched to macOS I felt lost, I had this "skill" that was no longer needed but after a while I realized that was a good thing, I wasn't wasting my time fiddling with crap that was just getting in the way of _using_ my computer.

Similarly I may mourn the loss of writing code but at the end of the day code was just a way for me to build, if there are better tools to build (LLMs) then I'm all for it.

You are not the farrier in this analogy. You are the horse.

I like this article, but it took decades for cars to take over: we needed to build vehicles, build roads, build up gas production and distribution... as Bill Gates wrote, one of the differences with the AI disruption is how fast it's coming, since it's almost immaterial (except data centers of course). It may be too fast for humans to adapt like they did in the previous revolutions.

Yes, but this time, we're the horse.

Amazing. I bet this can really help thousands of programmers who are simply not needed, because companies decided to replace them with AI agents. These philosophical ponders are very comfortable to do when your ass is safe. Most of people don’t have this privilege.

> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.

I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.

That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.

> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.

This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).

I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.

As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.

A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.

Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.

> something happened once in the past and turned ok hence you should never ever worry about other vaguely similar things ever again

That's how it sounds to me

How many of these do we really need? Nothing is happening, and a lot of people are upset about it.

They wanted to make money, or at least be a part of history during a transformational era. No dice.

There are two key elements in the current AI fearmongering:

1) People think they can predict the future

2) People think humans can't adapt

The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.

Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.

Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.

People are flagging in real time. Maybe the grandfather would have thought you are cowards and frauds who abuse him to push a vibe coding company.

What a refreshingly positive read

My grandad on one side of the family was a market gardener. He didn't become a farmer.

My great grandad on the other side was a lighterman[0]. He didn't become a ship captain.

Sometimes professions really are just gone. In both cases in my family it was due to consolidation of resources and concentration of capital/power. Technology was just a catalyst for that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighterman

As someone that works in robotics/automation, it pains me to see people in creative/office verticals getting all the shit with AI these days while hard labor positions, the one that everyone could be doing a bit less because they take a toll on you (working the fields, farms, hazardous tasks) remain pretty much the same.

But the horses themselves got the better end of the deal - they spend all their time in the field eating hay rather than pulling carts.

In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. (Unless something drastic changes.) That means how long it will take for robots to be practical matters. We don’t know how long it will be, but driverless cars have been coming for 15 years now and they’re still unavailable in most places.

People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.

Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.

Worse, it was just almost all horses. There are a few in Central Park pulling tourists and that’s enough for the Pollyanna’s to point to and go “See! We’ll be fine!”

>There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.

Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.

Intuitively I think we all understand that the % of jobs not doable by steam and iron approaches 0 over time.