7 ms·

"To OpenAI, these endeavors legitimately contribute to benefiting humanity: building more and more useful AI tools; bringing those tools and the necessary infra

• WalterBright 1y ago
  > How does increasing the productivity of software engineers benefit anyone but employers? The same reason a tractor benefits society, not just the farmer. Labor is free'd up for other uses, like inventing computers.
  • bgwalter 1y ago
    The tractor analogy is ancient and the economic system is entirely different. Who is going to pay laid off software engineers to spend time on inventing anything? Fortunately, "AI" decreases productivity in software engineering, so this question is academic. But the Atlantic should mention these issues.
    • pas 1y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill-biased_technological_change https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill-biased_technological_c...
    • simonw 1y ago
      > Fortunately, "AI" decreases productivity in software engineering Citation needed.
      • bgwalter 1y ago
        My own experiences, just like you state your personal experiences on your blog, which (unfortunately) other entities like the NYT cite.
      • Joker_vD 1y ago
        Today, a software engineer's time is split between writing code and reviewing code. There is only so much code a software engineer can meaningfully review in a day, without going numb and starting to skip mistakes. Taking away the "writing code" part does not increase the amount of time they can spend on reviewing the code: it's hard-bound by their human nature. So if your software engineers were already operating at the optimal level of writing/reviewing split — then they were limited by their ability to review code, not to write it. So they will stay at this frontier even if you make AI write the code.
        • simonw 1y ago
          I have found plenty of other ways to improve my productivity as a software engineer without having LLMs write a single line of production code: - Understanding code: I can dump thousands of lines of undocumented code into a large context model and get back architectural outlines, API usage examples or even full documentation. I can also ask questions directly of the codebase. - Debugging. The newer reasoning models are extremely good at deciphering a test failure or stack trace and pinpointing the potential causes of the bug, sending me right to the relevant code. - Suggesting where to make edits. I've started asking models for a high level implementation plan based on the codebase and dumping in an issue thread - they frequently spot parts of the code I forgot I would need to update. - "What should I test?" - dump in a diff and get back a checklist of branches I need to add test coverage for At this point, if you can't find ways to make yourself more productive as a programmer with LLMs I have to conclude that you just aren't trying very hard.
    • fallingknife 1y ago
      If you can invent, build, operate, or fix useful things, there will always be someone willing to pay you.
      • WalterBright 1y ago
        Debugging a car is very similar to debugging code.
    • WalterBright 1y ago
      > Who is going to pay laid off software engineers to spend time on inventing anything? Over my career, I've known many software engineers who were laid off. The ones I kept track of: 1. got another job, sometimes in another field 2. started their own business 3. retired 4. became a consultant
  • neepi 1y ago
    Not everything is a tractor. Sometimes it’s a gun or a Pinto.
  • micromacrofoot 1y ago
    just don't look at how farming in america is going when this extends too far though
    • mdaniel 1y ago
      DDG: john deere drm
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • lmm 1y ago
    That worked back when employers actually had to compete for labour, or unions were strong enough to negotiate with them on equal terms. Now productivity gains go entirely to the holders of capital.
    • WalterBright 1y ago
      Proof that employers compete for labor lies in every job where the pay exceeds minimum wage.
      • TFYS 1y ago
        They compete, but the level of competition has gone down and the share of income labor gets has decreased as a result.
        • WalterBright 1y ago
          > the share of income labor gets has decreased as a result. Does it? ROI stays generally about the same. The reason is simple: highly profitable businesses attract competition, causing their prices to fall.
          • TFYS 1y ago
            It does, at least according to the statistics and research we have. Labor share of income has been decreasing during the last few decades. The reason is also simple: without strong interference from governments, markets have a tendency to concentrate and form monopolies. Winners are rewarded with more advantages over their competitors, and over time one or two winners will emerge and get large enough that it's near impossible to compete with them, even if the competitors can resist the urge to get rich quick by selling the business to the dominant players. Capital also has a much easier time organizing politically than the poor masses, so over time the government will also introduce policies that benefit capital over labor, as we can very clearly see.
  • 3rdDeviation 1y ago
    I think that's a misplaced analogy. The farmer owns the farm and benefits directly from the improvement in operating margins. A software engineer does not own the farm, only the owner would benefit from improved productivity. They're actually getting paid less per hour given they're more productive in this hypothetical.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • db48x 1y ago
      Except that many software engineers _do_ own the farm. A large percentage work in startups where equity is a big part of the pay.
      • dmd 1y ago
        Now there's the HN bubble for you. I would be shocked if more than a tenth of a percent of people who write code for a living work in startups, period.
    • fallingknife 1y ago
      Only a small minority of farm workers owned the farms they worked on even back before tractors. And the tractors didn't do much to help most of those owners either. Industrial farm equipment increased the area a single farmer can work so far beyond what he could before that it made no sense for owners of the time to each have their own equipment and most sold their land and consolidated the industry into much larger farms. Farm employment went from 90% of all workers before the industrial revolution down to a bit over 1% today in the US. And maybe it happens to software engineers next. So what? The economy looks completely different today than it did 50 years ago, which was completely different than 50 years before that, and that shouldn't stop just because some people feel childishly entitled to do the same work for their whole lives even it if it is obsolete. I'll just change careers like I have done twice before. There's a massive shortage of electrical/plumbing/hvac contractors. There's a massive shortage of nurses / doctors that will only get worse as the population gets older. Not as cushy as my mid six figure tech job, but I have no god given right to that. And there's plenty more opportunity beyond that for anyone willing to take it, so if any other engineers want to cry about it, their tears will be wasted on me.
• neepi 1y ago
  I learned years ago not to ask existential questions in a religious arena. The faithful get a little annoyed.
• elliotto 1y ago
  The fact that productivity gains are bad for employees (labour vs capital) should raise significant questions about the economic systems that we have in place. Instead, AI is treated as the boogeyman and progress is treated as the devil. These events should be an impetus towards class consciousness, but instead the hate is directed to the token producing machine. I wonder how much of this redirection is a deliberate psyop.
  • pydry 1y ago
    Of course. The humans laying you off are soft and squidgy and politically vulnerable and would prefer you jam your pitchforks into something else.
  • neepi 1y ago
    I think that argument is down the line. We haven’t established if there is a productivity gain yet. And it’s not just about productivity; there is quality too.
  • emp17344 1y ago
    Productivity gains boost the economy. The net result is job creation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy HN is often economically illiterate.
    • 29athrowaway 1y ago
      Job creation for robots, yes. Remember that now workers will come in two flavors, human and robot. But robots need no compensation, no health insurance, they don't have any rights, can work 24/7, they cannot sue the company because they have no legal representation, cannot steal from the company, they can suffer an "fatal" accident with minimal liability to the company, they can erase their memory of any liability to the company, will always say yes to everything, training them (for a human = pre-k, kindergarden, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school, etc) for them is transferring a file or receiving commands wirelessly from a central computer, they don't get bored and quit, they don't get unhappy and start looking for jobs. Good luck competing against that. Once one ML model automates a job, you can make a million copies of that model file and that job is gone. Similar to the Borg (one adapts, all adapt). Once robots start building robots, you get an exponential amount of robots that quickly take over. A human needs protection from temperature, noise, injuries, exposure to chemicals, exposure to biohazard, protection from other workers, from management, from animals, from their work equipment and gear, and... from robots! Every aspect of a human is protected including their privacy, biometrics, etc. On the other hand, robots require protection from: nothing. They are completely expendable and their cost will be driven down over time. If you make a robot 33% as productive as a human per unit of time, because it can work 24 hrs instead of 8 hrs, it has the same output. Society in 2025 is a pyramid scheme based on scarcity and now the base of the pyramid will be taken over by robots. The people who are left outside the system will be the government's problem. But unlike in the industrial age, large amounts of people will no longer be a key to power so their political representation and rights will be evaporate. There will be no universal basic income (that would result in humans multiplying geometrically and eating up all the resources). Robots will be the key to power therefore who controls the robots will control the government, that means, oligarchs or superhuman AI. And then at least one oligarch will give full autonomy to the AI to prevail against the other oligarchs (humans are bottlenecks), and in doing so the one who rules everything will be superhuman AI. You may think that people in the future will have cheap access to AGI and therefore be able to scrape a living somehow... the problem is that once large AI conglomerates get all the data they need, access to cheap AI will be cutoff and all the deskilled masses will be left with will be endless brainrot social media feeds and nothing to eat.
• 29athrowaway 1y ago
  The business model is to make power companies and NVIDIA rich.
• crazygringo 1y ago
  > How does increasing the productivity of software engineers benefit anyone but employers? It benefits every single consumer of the software products. They get more features faster, or pay less for the same set of features. That's the entire justification of the free market -- corporations benefit by benefiting consumers with better products via competition. > How do "AI" tools benefit humanity? Like literally every single other technological advance that makes things easier or more productive. Nothing special about it in that sense.
  • Joker_vD 1y ago
    > or pay less for the same set of features. Or pay the same, and the employers/shareholders pocket the difference? > That's the entire justification of the free market -- corporations benefit by benefiting consumers with better products via competition. That doesn't mean the prices would drop; if every corporation employs the same technology, and they were roughly at the same level of efficiency, they will stay relatively the same, so the relative costs won't change, and neither will the actual prices. The level of the profit margins will just go up in the industry as the whole, which has precedents in the history. Just postulating that the consumer surplus simply has to stay with the consumers doesn't translate to it actually staying with the consumers; companies have researched lots of ways to capture it over the last couple hundred years.
    • crazygringo 1y ago
      You're ignoring what I said in the first part, which is that consumers get more features faster. You're right that prices won't necessarily drop, but consumers are still getting more bang for their buck so the benefits are still there. And competition between companies ensures that no, the profit margins in the industry don't go up in the long-term. You can look up corporate profit margins yourself. They can go up briefly at times and they can go down, but there's no long-term trend of profit margins increasing over the decades. Competition is alive and well to ensure that benefits do indeed go to consumers in most cases where there aren't monopolies that need to be regulated.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• kurtis_reed 1y ago
  Well, as a first step towards understand economics, might I suggest reading an economics textbook?
  • bgwalter 1y ago
    What flavor? Keynesian, Chicago school, Marxist? They all say something different. The one I read called economics the "dismal science" on the first few pages. You do not need a textbook to see that all income of the middle classes goes to rent, health care and education, whereas 40 years ago the middle class could afford genuine Persian rugs. It will get worse.
  • fewdaysto2025 1y ago
    [dead]