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Anyone who is an employee drawing a salary should be extremely hopeful that AI productivity doesn't work. Why should we be eager to find out that some new tech

Anyone who is an employee drawing a salary should be extremely hopeful that AI productivity doesn't work. Why should we be eager to find out that some new tech is going to undercut us and replace us, devaluing us even more than we already are?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
simonw 1y ago
Do you benefit from open source? Open source packages are the biggest productivity boost of my entire career, at no point did I think "wow, I wish these didn't exist, they're a threat to my livelihood".
- didibus 1y ago
  I've always thought that I'd probably be paid even more and have the choice of many more jobs if open source didn't exist. Could it be there'd be less jobs because it would have prevented some businesses to bootstrap and stay afloat? That's also possible. And this is really the thing with AI, some think it'll grow the pie, therefore increasing the demand for developers. Some think it'll just shrink the size of the piece of pie that's for developers. If we could predict the former, and be sure of it, I doubt anyone would be against AI. Aside that though, as a developer, you are also concerned with, is this actually making my job better/faster/more-fun. Or am I just forced into an annoying process of using a tool that doesn't help and will just cause more problems I'll have to deal with.
  - simonw 1y ago
    I am so confident that open source expanded the job market. Prior to open source software development was awful. We spent all of our time re-inventing wheels - or, if we were lucky, licensing expensive badly shaped wheels from vendors and crossing our fingers that they would work (because we couldn't fix them if they didn't). As a result, very few companies developed software - it's not worth hiring a software engineer if it takes them six months to deliver that initial login screen. Open source started taking off about 25 years ago, and software productivity skyrocketed. The result was a multi-decade boom in jobs and salaries for us software engineers.
    - didibus 1y ago
      It's plausible, I just want to point out it's hard to know if that's just coincidental, as opposed to causal.
    - thunky 1y ago
      > We spent all of our time re-inventing wheels Still do. At least back then it probably felt more like we were doing something new because 8000 versions of the same thing wasn't right at your fingertips.
- fragmede 1y ago
  The thing about open source, is that it came from a programmer in the halls of academia, MIT. But imagine the idea came from a Harvard Business School MBA instead. "You should do a bunch of work for free, and then give it to me for free, and uh, you can figure out a business model later." Does that sound remotely sane? I have no leg to stand on, I owe my career to proprietary software building on top of open source code, but lately I have been wondering what that alternate world would look like. As it stands, if you want to write software and sell it, you've got at most a couple of months before someone open sources a clone of your project. Sure, there's no guarantee it'll be anywhere near as good. Photoshop is still king. But one can't help but wonder what the proprietary IBM world would have been like.
  - simonw 1y ago
    We lived in that world prior to ~2000. It sucked. Programmers spent all of their time reinventing the wheel - so much so that when I was at university around 2001-2004 one of the biggest topics was "software reusability". How could we get out of the trap of writing the same things over and over again? Back then the answer was supposed to be OOP. With hindsight, the answer was open source - in particular robust library ecosystems like PyPI and NPM.
    - Yoric 1y ago
      Hey, I'm old enough to remember "components" being a research topic in academia, with researchers theorizing what we know today as services & APIs. It looked more fun on paper, FWIW.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  If someone released an open source software that immediately replaced the software you were working on and you lost your job, what then? What if that happened across the entire industry overnight? What if every single time you sat down to write a piece of software, someone immediately produced the Open Source version of it? That's what people are hoping AI is going to do to us Why would I support that
  - simonw 1y ago
    > If someone released an open source software that immediately replaced the software you were working on and you lost your job, what then? WordPress did that to the commercial CMS industry. Linux did that to the commercial Unix industry (RIP, Sun Microsystems). > That's what people are hoping AI is going to do to us I think those people are full of crap, and I mostly ignore them.
- Yoric 1y ago
  Good point. Open-source does replace entire companies, but typically with better products that other companies can build upon, and in the end, this expands the demand for software. AI is expected to replace developers, and I believe that it will empower non-techies to develop highly-functional mockups, which will in turn increase the amount of (crappy) software on the market, which I believe will in turn increase the demand for people who can fix this software – if we multiply the number of apps by 1,000, even if only 1% of the apps need quality, this still means that we've increased the demand for software developers 10x. So I actually think that, within a few years, AI will increase our job security as software developers. It's going to be a rocky few years, of course, but I think we'll be better off, at least until the rest of our dystopian timeline catches up. Now, what I hate is the dishonesty of AI companies. I mean, as software developers, we strive on rigor: good documentation, compilers and JITs that speed up our code without changing its behavior, APIs and tools that work as claimed, etc. AI companies and their PR, on the other hand, peddle magic thinking and gaslighting. That's the exact opposite of rigor. And this keeps assaulting my sanity.
kbelder 1y ago
Should we be wary of any productivity gains? Should be looking for ways to work slower? I can go back to just one monitor.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  If I personally do not benefit from productivity gains, then why should I be excited about them? If productivity gains mean that either me or a coworker is laid off, and my boss makes more money, why should I care about the that? Having a job is not a favor that people with money are doing for employees, it is an exchange of services for money I provide a service. So do most people. Anything that gives the people with money a way to avoid paying for my service is bad for most of us
  - munksbeer 1y ago
    This is a slightly shallow way of looking at productivity gains. You benefit from productivity gains across every industry. Without consumers, there is no capital. So you, the consumer, benefit from increased productivity, even if it means that somewhere, someone, lost out. We just have to go back to the original luddite example. It is cliche for a reason. A quote: "The tragedy is that although these groups of workers did suffer from the deployment of new technology, over time, the general population benefitted from cheaper clothes, lower prices and new jobs in other sectors of the economy." Obviously, as a developer, I don't want to lose my career. But am I a hypocrite? Are you a hypocrite for buying anything that is now manufactured by automation, putting people out of jobs? I'd say yes.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

simonw 1y ago

Do you benefit from open source? Open source packages are the biggest productivity boost of my entire career, at no point did I think "wow, I wish these didn't exist, they're a threat to my livelihood".

didibus 1y ago
I've always thought that I'd probably be paid even more and have the choice of many more jobs if open source didn't exist. Could it be there'd be less jobs because it would have prevented some businesses to bootstrap and stay afloat? That's also possible. And this is really the thing with AI, some think it'll grow the pie, therefore increasing the demand for developers. Some think it'll just shrink the size of the piece of pie that's for developers. If we could predict the former, and be sure of it, I doubt anyone would be against AI. Aside that though, as a developer, you are also concerned with, is this actually making my job better/faster/more-fun. Or am I just forced into an annoying process of using a tool that doesn't help and will just cause more problems I'll have to deal with.
- simonw 1y ago
  I am so confident that open source expanded the job market. Prior to open source software development was awful. We spent all of our time re-inventing wheels - or, if we were lucky, licensing expensive badly shaped wheels from vendors and crossing our fingers that they would work (because we couldn't fix them if they didn't). As a result, very few companies developed software - it's not worth hiring a software engineer if it takes them six months to deliver that initial login screen. Open source started taking off about 25 years ago, and software productivity skyrocketed. The result was a multi-decade boom in jobs and salaries for us software engineers.
  - didibus 1y ago
    It's plausible, I just want to point out it's hard to know if that's just coincidental, as opposed to causal.
  - thunky 1y ago
    > We spent all of our time re-inventing wheels Still do. At least back then it probably felt more like we were doing something new because 8000 versions of the same thing wasn't right at your fingertips.
fragmede 1y ago
The thing about open source, is that it came from a programmer in the halls of academia, MIT. But imagine the idea came from a Harvard Business School MBA instead. "You should do a bunch of work for free, and then give it to me for free, and uh, you can figure out a business model later." Does that sound remotely sane? I have no leg to stand on, I owe my career to proprietary software building on top of open source code, but lately I have been wondering what that alternate world would look like. As it stands, if you want to write software and sell it, you've got at most a couple of months before someone open sources a clone of your project. Sure, there's no guarantee it'll be anywhere near as good. Photoshop is still king. But one can't help but wonder what the proprietary IBM world would have been like.
- simonw 1y ago
  We lived in that world prior to ~2000. It sucked. Programmers spent all of their time reinventing the wheel - so much so that when I was at university around 2001-2004 one of the biggest topics was "software reusability". How could we get out of the trap of writing the same things over and over again? Back then the answer was supposed to be OOP. With hindsight, the answer was open source - in particular robust library ecosystems like PyPI and NPM.
  - Yoric 1y ago
    Hey, I'm old enough to remember "components" being a research topic in academia, with researchers theorizing what we know today as services & APIs. It looked more fun on paper, FWIW.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
If someone released an open source software that immediately replaced the software you were working on and you lost your job, what then? What if that happened across the entire industry overnight? What if every single time you sat down to write a piece of software, someone immediately produced the Open Source version of it? That's what people are hoping AI is going to do to us Why would I support that
- simonw 1y ago
  > If someone released an open source software that immediately replaced the software you were working on and you lost your job, what then? WordPress did that to the commercial CMS industry. Linux did that to the commercial Unix industry (RIP, Sun Microsystems). > That's what people are hoping AI is going to do to us I think those people are full of crap, and I mostly ignore them.
Yoric 1y ago
Good point. Open-source does replace entire companies, but typically with better products that other companies can build upon, and in the end, this expands the demand for software. AI is expected to replace developers, and I believe that it will empower non-techies to develop highly-functional mockups, which will in turn increase the amount of (crappy) software on the market, which I believe will in turn increase the demand for people who can fix this software – if we multiply the number of apps by 1,000, even if only 1% of the apps need quality, this still means that we've increased the demand for software developers 10x. So I actually think that, within a few years, AI will increase our job security as software developers. It's going to be a rocky few years, of course, but I think we'll be better off, at least until the rest of our dystopian timeline catches up. Now, what I hate is the dishonesty of AI companies. I mean, as software developers, we strive on rigor: good documentation, compilers and JITs that speed up our code without changing its behavior, APIs and tools that work as claimed, etc. AI companies and their PR, on the other hand, peddle magic thinking and gaslighting. That's the exact opposite of rigor. And this keeps assaulting my sanity.

kbelder 1y ago

Should we be wary of any productivity gains? Should be looking for ways to work slower? I can go back to just one monitor.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
If I personally do not benefit from productivity gains, then why should I be excited about them? If productivity gains mean that either me or a coworker is laid off, and my boss makes more money, why should I care about the that? Having a job is not a favor that people with money are doing for employees, it is an exchange of services for money I provide a service. So do most people. Anything that gives the people with money a way to avoid paying for my service is bad for most of us
- munksbeer 1y ago
  This is a slightly shallow way of looking at productivity gains. You benefit from productivity gains across every industry. Without consumers, there is no capital. So you, the consumer, benefit from increased productivity, even if it means that somewhere, someone, lost out. We just have to go back to the original luddite example. It is cliche for a reason. A quote: "The tragedy is that although these groups of workers did suffer from the deployment of new technology, over time, the general population benefitted from cheaper clothes, lower prices and new jobs in other sectors of the economy." Obviously, as a developer, I don't want to lose my career. But am I a hypocrite? Are you a hypocrite for buying anything that is now manufactured by automation, putting people out of jobs? I'd say yes.