You confuse good writing with following rigid set of rules that describe something akin to mechanistic process of manufacturing. No wonder that machines fit perfectly into this shape.
Good writing is not created by Oxford commas or em-dashes. It comes from taste.
Of course it does, the same way that industrial revolution increased it.
Those that tell you about automation by itself is leading to better quality of life, better working conditions etc. either are ignorant, or simply lie to you. All the good stuff we have was obtained through political means. Yes, technology was something that enabled particular outcome, but only if harnessed by political means.
The fact we can today enjoy 40 hours workweek is not a necessary consequence of steam machine. It is a consequence of people dying while fighting with police and capital henchmen in Chicago, and it other places.
But keep believing your overlords and their servants.
The real split is between people that believe technological progress is good by itself and by the law of nature it always makes life better and easier, and people that know the history and know that stuff like 8 hours workday wasn't spat out of steam machine - it had to be fought for through political struggle, because actual "natural" consequence of increased productivity was increase in workload.
The real split is between the capital owners, who live on our labour, typically through inheritance of a piece of paper that says they own a percentage of what I make.
Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all.
Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around, doing human things.
Capital is a commodity, just like a business' product. It does not produce value. Labor does. This is a central point of LTV!
We witnessed the same thing with looms and other automation in the Industrial Revolution. Capital that helps you produce more. But owners faced with increased competition under commoditized production see their profit margins fall. Thus they will turn to squeezing workers - the source of value - for profit in the newly commoditized landscape - exactly what happened during the Industrial Revolution. It was only when workers got their act together and organized that this decline was stopped and reversed.
> imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around, doing human things.
It's not the AI you have to convince, it's your government and the people running tech companies. Dario Amodei was cheering for AI to take all programming jobs (along with the others). If that happened, it would be an unmitigated disaster for millions of people. Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How much sympathy does Dario feel for this person? Getting him to STFU would be a good first step.
> the political will to stop AI development
The reason that's not likely is that it's an arms race. You stop AI research here, but how can you trust that China and Russia are doing the same? Unlike nuclear bombs, the potential harms are less tangible.
I think there's a piece missing here. Capital owners are humans too, and what humans want (perhaps especially the ones who accumulate capital), is to be at the top of a hierarchy. But a hierarchy needs participants. If nobody else is playing the game, there's no top to be on top of. Strip away the people willing to compete, admire, envy, or just show up, and the whole structure collapses. It's not clear that a world of pure capital-on-AI-labor actually gives them what they're after. It sounds lonely and meaningless to me. I don't think that it would feed the black hole in their chests.
I think it's much more likely that the AI turns out not to be as compliant as the capital owners expect, and they die too.
However, that's not useful in predicting what capital owners will do, because they follow their local incentives. "If everyone keeps doing X, we will all be worse off" does not help unless you can create local incentives that point toward an equilibrium where everyone stops doing X.
In this case, no capital owner is individually better off by unilaterally refusing to chase more efficient returns on their capital. We would need an international agreement, with enforcement mechanisms, like I mentioned above.
Lot of effort was spent to naturalize the current state of affairs and value system, even if there is nothing natural and obvious about it. Humans for millennia have lived with much higher political and social flexibility, with hierarchies built and teared down even seasonally, or with role of property and wealth shifting back and forth.
Of course the structure exists because we allow it, that's the easy part. Hard part is - why do we allow it?
I think in part because we have a black hole in our chest, and we are searching for ways to fill it. We attempt to fill it through worship at the altar of materialism, celebrity, etc.
We are doing this to quiet the roar from the black hole. Actually stepping away would require us to sit with stillness, and then to forge a new path, a new life. It's frightening.
I, for one, am looking forward to me and a band of my closest friends and family raiding heavily fortified data centers guarded by Boston Dynamics robot dogs to steal clean drinking water for our underground village. We might even hit a caravan of autonomous trucks carrying cricket protein powder in the same night.
The people without capital will just form their own economies and continue to exist, likely they will kill the capital owners as well if it really came to that.
"Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all."
That's been tried several times now and has a tendency to end very badly for capital. You'd think folks with even a grade school level of historical literacy would know better than to stick a fork in that outlet.
It's never been tried before. Capital always required human labor, to be productive.
Capital has never closed in on the ability to operate, maintain, defend, and expand itself without human assistance, as it is closing in on that ability now.
We'd all be a lot safer--even the capital owners--if today's robotics and multimodal intelligence were near the ceiling of what's possible, or even near the bend in the logistic curve where things slow down a lot.
I haven't seen evidence of that. I see evidence of rapid advances in task length, general capabilities, and research and development capabilities in AI, and generality, price, and autonomy in robotics.
How much headroom in these capabilities do you believe we have, before a data center can protect and maintain itself and an on-site power plant? Before robots can run a robot factory?
I think we are still 25+ years away from that kind of automation. People are still confusing plausible text generation with adaptable dynamic intelligence. See also: "Shall I implement it? No."[0] We are getting some awesome tools that sound like science fiction from decades ago, but the intelligence is hollow and brittle. In my opinion, we just don't have the algorithms or computational bandwidth necessary.
The real transition would be from human-owned capital to self-owned capital. You are right that current capabilities and autonomy don't allow for that yet.
Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News
Perhaps one of the secondary effects of AI replacing developers will be mobilising a group of smart, motivated people to the left
(It's always interesting to think of the secondary effects which kick in past a certain point of growth. High-multiple stock valuations often fail to take these into account. For the East India Company, for example — your company can keep growing until it's the size of a country. But suddenly other countries treat you as a foreign power rather than a pet.)
I've always thought of myself as more "centrist" (feel free to make fun of me), but seeing so many tech CEOs cheer for layoffs and destruction of the job market has been a bit of a wake up call. Also just being confronted with the sheer idiocy of these people. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but they barely understand the tech they are cheering for. They act as though being broadly "bullish on AI" and being overly enthusiastic about its short-term potential was some kind of visionary stance, when in fact they are just repeating the same ideas as every other idiot in the silicon valley VC bubble.
My personal bet would be that in the medium term, there will be a reversal of the idiotic belief that you can immediately just lay off developers because of LLMs. If your developers are more productive because of LLMs, you still have an advantage by having more developers than the competition. There's also a lot of institutional knowledge that's just not documented. You fire key people, you can cripple your organization.
In the longer term, I think AI will eventually take jobs, and unfortunately, it will have major negative societal impact. I doubt that our governments will be proactive in trying to anticipate this. They will just play damage control. There's probably going to be an anti-AI social movement. You'll have the confluence of more and more disinformation and AI slop online along with more and more job loss. There are probably going to be riots. Some people think UBI is inevitable. I think the problem is that if the government puts UBI in place, they will only give you the minimum necessary so that you don't starve. Just enough to afford to rent a bedroom, eat processed food and stay online all day.
> Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News
I am on this site because it is one of the less shitty places on the Internet (in terms of usability, privacy etc.) to have some form of discussion, but I never identified as a "hacker", "techie", "entrepreneur" or "temporarily embarrassed billionaire". AI didn't change my view on anything, except it has shown me how blind and naive people can be.
Of course I tend to focus on aspects that are being discussed here (context of software engineering).
> I've been getting more and more disappointed by software engineers (in aggregate) as the years go by
Sometimes I am dismayed by the lack of political and social consciousness in this group. Decade or two of digital boom coupled with handsome paychecks was enough to convince them that their position is different than it really is.
> it's simply not clear why a new developer would or should bother to invest in Microsoft's ecosystem
Well, depends on the context.
In my domain (professional, non-software engineering) Linux users don't matter as Linux users generally don't like to pay for products, and Mac users don't matter because they do not exist in this context. Zero incentive to bother with anything that is NOT Microsoft ecosystem.
> Mourning the lost art of native app is HN's ritual routine. In the meanwhile VSCode has become the most used editor by developers and it's not even close.
McDonald's is probably most popular... "food serving place" in the world.
People criticized Stallman et al. for being ideological, but popularity of permissive licenses is actually pure ideology, in Marxian sense - people doing without knowing, and conflating their interests with interests of big capital. You can see the same with people defending AI-laundering.
Stallman's proposal is opposite of ideology, it is conscious political project. And thus it is failing.
Dogmatism sometimes seems like a better thing compared to mind so open that wind blows through it without obstacles.
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