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I'm not so sure. There is a Planet Money episode that talks about the effect the digital spreadsheet had on accounting employment: > Thanks to spreadsheets, th

I'm not so sure. There is a Planet Money episode that talks about the effect the digital spreadsheet had on accounting employment: > Thanks to spreadsheets, there are 400,000 fewer accounting clerks than in 1980, but 600,000 more regular accountants. Might something like GPT-6 cause employment to shift to higher value job responsibilities? https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/episode-606-spreadsheets https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/epis...

hindsightbias 4y ago
Developers are really dumb wanting to optimize code development.
- gwright 4y ago
  This seems like a pretty limited viewpoint. We could all be coding in assembler still but generally we find value in using something higher level. Does that make us all dumb?
- chii 4y ago
  as a programmer, i would be happy to automate myself out of a job. Because it means that the work i do is infinitely valuable, and i would have been rewarded correctly for it, in a functioning employment market.
Workaccount2 4y ago
People raise arguments like this frequently, but in every other case throughout history people were made obsolete by tools that intelligences use. Never before has the intelligence part been made obsolete though.
- gwright 4y ago
  Well you've changed the assertion a little bit there. I shared that one particular technical innovation shifted the mix of jobs towards more skilled jobs. That doesn't say anything about any individual person of course. Your statement says that "people were made obsolete", which I take to mean that some people are individually unable to switch to the more skilled jobs. I think the effect on current employees due to technical innovation is a reasonable issue to be concerned about but it's not the same phenomenon as the job "mix" changing towards more skilled jobs, even some that didn't exist before. The two phenomena aren't mutually exclusive either. We don't have too many stagecoach drivers these days but we do have a lot more "drivers".

hindsightbias 4y ago

Developers are really dumb wanting to optimize code development.

gwright 4y ago
This seems like a pretty limited viewpoint. We could all be coding in assembler still but generally we find value in using something higher level. Does that make us all dumb?
chii 4y ago
as a programmer, i would be happy to automate myself out of a job. Because it means that the work i do is infinitely valuable, and i would have been rewarded correctly for it, in a functioning employment market.

Workaccount2 4y ago

People raise arguments like this frequently, but in every other case throughout history people were made obsolete by tools that intelligences use. Never before has the intelligence part been made obsolete though.

gwright 4y ago
Well you've changed the assertion a little bit there. I shared that one particular technical innovation shifted the mix of jobs towards more skilled jobs. That doesn't say anything about any individual person of course. Your statement says that "people were made obsolete", which I take to mean that some people are individually unable to switch to the more skilled jobs. I think the effect on current employees due to technical innovation is a reasonable issue to be concerned about but it's not the same phenomenon as the job "mix" changing towards more skilled jobs, even some that didn't exist before. The two phenomena aren't mutually exclusive either. We don't have too many stagecoach drivers these days but we do have a lot more "drivers".