I do agree. I think it's most important point - that while yes, people rightfully point out that past automation in the long term and averaged across everyone did have probably a positive impact on income, that's not what is prompting the current investments in it. The investments only make sense in the context of and clearly are a bet on reduced payroll.
Reduced payroll to a large portion of the members of the already struggling and shrinking middle class. Thinking that some natural law says that jobs that will come back will automatically also be middle class
This is what makes me uneasy the most right now: The promise of reduced payroll can only materialize if there are no replacement jobs created by AI - otherwise the labor cost would just shift to a different position. So mass unemployment it is then?
At the same time, the same people are also hard at work dismantling the social security net that makes prolonged unemployment survivable.
I don't know, I think there's a real possibility that this ends up increasing the demand for software engineers rather than decreasing. The lower barrier to entry will mean lots more projects pursued by lots more people, and they'll eventually need help. And all the things non-tech companies would like to do but can't afford a whole software team, now they can launch with a couple engineers. All the stuff that has been on tech companies' backlogs forever, they can start tackling and then start the new initiatives they've been dreaming about but too busy managing firedrills and KLO.
I think as software gets cheqper to build then there's just going to be a lot more of it, for use cases we aren't even thinking about yet. And the more software there is, the more challenges it will create to manage it. Our jobs will be a lot different, but I think anyone who is laying off humans right now to save a bit of cash is really short sighted. It's going to be a long time before AI can do everything a software engineer does. (think about accountants, seems like they could have been replaced long ago, but it's still a huge industry). But the time between now and then, software engineers will be the highest ROI employees there are.
The investment makes sense even if you think there will be replacement jobs created because nobody wants to be left behind.
If you are spending X on payroll to do Y, and your competitor is now spending X on payroll to do both Y and Z, then they can (a) undercut you on selling Y, and (b) sell Z that you can't even compete with.
(Or, even if you aren't directly going to ever Z yourself, the replacement jobs could be somewhere else entirely. You actually hope this is the case - if there are no replacement jobs, the market for selling Y might shrink, if everyone has less money.)
Its really short term thinking. What do those employers think all the software developers are going to do when they get home. The're going to start competing companies.
As an indie game developer it's mind boggling that MS can fire 9000 staff and makes me wonder how even more flooded the indie game market can get :)
Reduced payroll to a large portion of the members of the already struggling and shrinking middle class. Thinking that some natural law says that jobs that will come back will automatically also be middle class