4 ms·

I'm curious how all of the progress will be seen if it does indeed result in mass unemployment (but not eradication) of professional software engineers.

simonw 9mo ago
I nearly added a section about that. I wanted to contrast the thing where many companies are reducing junior engineering hires with the thing where Cloudflare and Shopify are hiring 1,000+ interns. I ran out of time and hadn't figured out a good way to frame it though so I dropped it.
ori_b 9mo ago
My prediction: If we can successfully get rid of most software engineers, we can get rid of most knowledge work. Given the state of robotics, manual labor is likely to outlive intellectual labor.
- beardedwizard 9mo ago
  "Given the state of robotics" reminds me a lot of what was said about llms and image/video models over the past 3 years. Considering how much llms improved, how long can robotics be in this state? I have to think 3 years from now we will be having the same conversation about robots doing real physical labor. "This is the worst they will ever be" feels more apt.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - chii 9mo ago
    but robotics had the means to do majority of the physical labour already - it's just not worth the money to replace humans, as human labour is cheap (and flexible - more than robots). With knowledge work being less high-paying, physical labour supply should increase as well, which drops their price. This means it's actually less likely that the advent of LLM will make physical labour more automated.
  - Davidzheng 9mo ago
    Robotics is coming FAST. Faster than LLM progress in my opinion.
    - wh0knows 9mo ago
      Curious if you have any links about the rapid progression of robotics (as someone who is not educated on the topic). It was my feeling with robotics that the more challenging aspect will be making them economically viable rather than simply the challenge of the task itself.
      - beardedwizard 9mo ago
        I mentioned military in my reply to the sibling comment - that is the most ready example. What anduril and others are doing today may be sloppy, but it's moving very quickly.
    - throw1235435 9mo ago
      The question is how rapid the adoption is. The price of failure in the real world is much higher ($$$, environmental, physical risks) vs just "rebuild/regenerate" in the digital realm.
      - beardedwizard 9mo ago
        Military adoption is probably a decent proxy indicator - and they are ready to hand the kill switch to autonomous robots
        throw1235435 9mo ago
        Maybe. There the cost of failure again is low. Its easier to destroy than to create. Economic disruption to workers will take a bit longer I think. Don't get me wrong; I hope that we do see it in physical work as well. There is more value to society there; and consists of work that is risky and/or hard to do - and is usually needed (food, shelter, etc). It also means that the disruption is an "everyone" problem rather than something that just affects those "intellectual" types.
- BobbyJo 9mo ago
  I would have agreed with this a few months ago, but something Ive learned is that the ability to verify an LLMs output is paramount to its value. In software, you can review its output, add tests, on top of other adversarial techniques to verify the output immediately after generation. With most other knowledge work, I don't think that is the case. Maybe actuarial or accounting work, but most knowledge work exists at a cross section of function and taste, and the latter isn't an automatically verifiable output.
  - throw1235435 9mo ago
    I also believe this - I think it will probably just disrupt software engineering and any other digital medium with mass internet publication (i.e. things RLVR can use). For the short term future it seems to need a lot of data to train on, and no other profession has posted the same amount of verifiable material. The open source altruism has disrupted the profession in the end; just not in the way people first predicted. I don't think it will disrupt most knowledge work for a number of reasons. Most knowledge professions have "credentials' (i.e. gatekeeping) and they can see what is happening to SWE's and are acting accordingly. I'm hearing it firsthand at least locally in things like law, even accounting, etc. Society will ironically respect these professions more for doing so. Any data, verifiability, rules of thumb, tests, etc are being kept secret. You pay for the result, but don't know the means.
    - coffeebeqn 9mo ago
      I mean law and accounting usually have a “right” answer that you can verify against. I can see a test data set being built for most professions. I’m sure open source helps with programming data but I doubt that’s even the majority of their training. If you have a company like Google you could collect data on decades of software work in all its dimensions from your workforce
      - District5524 9mo ago
        It's not about invalidating your conclusion, but I'm not so sure about law having a right answer. At a very basic level, like hypothetical conduct used in basic legal training matrerials or MCQs, or in criminal/civil code based situations in well-abstracting Roman law-based jurisdictions, definitely. But the actual work, at least for most lawyers is to build on many layers of such abstractions to support your/client's viwepoint. And that level is already about persuasion of other people, not having the "right" legal argument or applying the most correct case found. And this part is not documented well, approaches changes a lot, even if law remains the same. Think of family law or law of succession - does not change much over centuries but every day, worldwide, millions of people spend huge amounts of money and energy on finding novel ways to turn those same paragraphs to their advantage and put their "loved" ones and relatives in a worse position.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > If we can successfully get rid of most software engineers, we can get rid of most knowledge work Software, by its nature, is practically comprehensively digitized, both in its code history as well as requirements.
- 9dev 9mo ago
  That’s the deep irony of technology IMHO, that innovation follows Conway's law on a meta layer: White collar workers inevitably shaped high technology after themselves, and instead of finally ridding humanity of hard physical labour—as was the promise of the Industrial Revolution—we imitate artists, scientists, and knowledge workers. We can now use natural language to instruct computers generate stock photos and illustrations that would take a professional artist a few years ago, discover new molecule shapes, beat the best Go players, build the code for entire applications, or write documents of various shapes and lengths—but painting a wall? An unsurmountable task that requires a human to execute reliably, not even talking about economics.
Madmallard 9mo ago
Why would it? The ability to accurately describe what you want with all constraints managed and with proactive design is the actual skill. Not programming. The day PMs can do that and have LLMs that can code to that, is the day software engineers en masse will disappear. But that day is likely never. The non-technical people I've ever worked for were hopelessly terrible at attention to detail. They're hiring me primarily for that anyway.
legulere 9mo ago
Even if it will make software engineering drastically more productive, it’s questionable that this will lead to unemployment. Efficiency gains translate to lower prices. Sometimes this leads to very few additional demand, as can be seen with masses of typesetters that lost their jobs. Sometimes this leads to a dramatically higher demand like you can see in the classic Jevons paradox examples of coal and light bulbs. I highly suspect software falls in the latter category
- kingstnap 9mo ago
  Software demand is philosophically limited by the question of "What can your computer do for you?" You can describe that somewhat formally as: {What your computer can do} intersect {What you want done (consciously or otherwise)} Well a computer can technically calculate any computuable task that fits in bounded memory, that is an enormous set so its real limitations are its interfaces. In which case it can send packets, make noises, and display images. How many human desires are things that can be solved with making noises, displaying images, and sending packets? Turns out quite a few but its not everything. Basically I'm saying we should hope more sorts of physical interfaces come around (like VR and Robotics) so we cover more human desires. Robotics is a really general physical interface (like how ip packets are an extremely general interface) so its pretty promising if it pans out. Personally, I find it very hard to even articulate what desires I have. I have this feeling that I might be substantially happier if I was just sitting around a campfire eating food and chatting with people instead of enjoying whatever infinite stuff a super intelligent computer and robots could do for me. At least some of the time.
fullstackchris 9mo ago
This overly discussed thesis is already laughable - decent LLMs have been out for 3 years now and unemployment (using US as example) is up around 1% over the same time frame - and even attributing that small percentage change completely to AI is also laughable

simonw 9mo ago

I nearly added a section about that. I wanted to contrast the thing where many companies are reducing junior engineering hires with the thing where Cloudflare and Shopify are hiring 1,000+ interns. I ran out of time and hadn't figured out a good way to frame it though so I dropped it.

ori_b 9mo ago

My prediction: If we can successfully get rid of most software engineers, we can get rid of most knowledge work. Given the state of robotics, manual labor is likely to outlive intellectual labor.

beardedwizard 9mo ago
"Given the state of robotics" reminds me a lot of what was said about llms and image/video models over the past 3 years. Considering how much llms improved, how long can robotics be in this state? I have to think 3 years from now we will be having the same conversation about robots doing real physical labor. "This is the worst they will ever be" feels more apt.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- chii 9mo ago
  but robotics had the means to do majority of the physical labour already - it's just not worth the money to replace humans, as human labour is cheap (and flexible - more than robots). With knowledge work being less high-paying, physical labour supply should increase as well, which drops their price. This means it's actually less likely that the advent of LLM will make physical labour more automated.
- Davidzheng 9mo ago
  Robotics is coming FAST. Faster than LLM progress in my opinion.
  - wh0knows 9mo ago
    Curious if you have any links about the rapid progression of robotics (as someone who is not educated on the topic). It was my feeling with robotics that the more challenging aspect will be making them economically viable rather than simply the challenge of the task itself.
    - beardedwizard 9mo ago
      I mentioned military in my reply to the sibling comment - that is the most ready example. What anduril and others are doing today may be sloppy, but it's moving very quickly.
  - throw1235435 9mo ago
    The question is how rapid the adoption is. The price of failure in the real world is much higher ($$$, environmental, physical risks) vs just "rebuild/regenerate" in the digital realm.
    - beardedwizard 9mo ago
      Military adoption is probably a decent proxy indicator - and they are ready to hand the kill switch to autonomous robots
      - throw1235435 9mo ago
        Maybe. There the cost of failure again is low. Its easier to destroy than to create. Economic disruption to workers will take a bit longer I think. Don't get me wrong; I hope that we do see it in physical work as well. There is more value to society there; and consists of work that is risky and/or hard to do - and is usually needed (food, shelter, etc). It also means that the disruption is an "everyone" problem rather than something that just affects those "intellectual" types.
BobbyJo 9mo ago
I would have agreed with this a few months ago, but something Ive learned is that the ability to verify an LLMs output is paramount to its value. In software, you can review its output, add tests, on top of other adversarial techniques to verify the output immediately after generation. With most other knowledge work, I don't think that is the case. Maybe actuarial or accounting work, but most knowledge work exists at a cross section of function and taste, and the latter isn't an automatically verifiable output.
- throw1235435 9mo ago
  I also believe this - I think it will probably just disrupt software engineering and any other digital medium with mass internet publication (i.e. things RLVR can use). For the short term future it seems to need a lot of data to train on, and no other profession has posted the same amount of verifiable material. The open source altruism has disrupted the profession in the end; just not in the way people first predicted. I don't think it will disrupt most knowledge work for a number of reasons. Most knowledge professions have "credentials' (i.e. gatekeeping) and they can see what is happening to SWE's and are acting accordingly. I'm hearing it firsthand at least locally in things like law, even accounting, etc. Society will ironically respect these professions more for doing so. Any data, verifiability, rules of thumb, tests, etc are being kept secret. You pay for the result, but don't know the means.
  - coffeebeqn 9mo ago
    I mean law and accounting usually have a “right” answer that you can verify against. I can see a test data set being built for most professions. I’m sure open source helps with programming data but I doubt that’s even the majority of their training. If you have a company like Google you could collect data on decades of software work in all its dimensions from your workforce
    - District5524 9mo ago
      It's not about invalidating your conclusion, but I'm not so sure about law having a right answer. At a very basic level, like hypothetical conduct used in basic legal training matrerials or MCQs, or in criminal/civil code based situations in well-abstracting Roman law-based jurisdictions, definitely. But the actual work, at least for most lawyers is to build on many layers of such abstractions to support your/client's viwepoint. And that level is already about persuasion of other people, not having the "right" legal argument or applying the most correct case found. And this part is not documented well, approaches changes a lot, even if law remains the same. Think of family law or law of succession - does not change much over centuries but every day, worldwide, millions of people spend huge amounts of money and energy on finding novel ways to turn those same paragraphs to their advantage and put their "loved" ones and relatives in a worse position.
JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> If we can successfully get rid of most software engineers, we can get rid of most knowledge work Software, by its nature, is practically comprehensively digitized, both in its code history as well as requirements.
9dev 9mo ago
That’s the deep irony of technology IMHO, that innovation follows Conway's law on a meta layer: White collar workers inevitably shaped high technology after themselves, and instead of finally ridding humanity of hard physical labour—as was the promise of the Industrial Revolution—we imitate artists, scientists, and knowledge workers. We can now use natural language to instruct computers generate stock photos and illustrations that would take a professional artist a few years ago, discover new molecule shapes, beat the best Go players, build the code for entire applications, or write documents of various shapes and lengths—but painting a wall? An unsurmountable task that requires a human to execute reliably, not even talking about economics.

Madmallard 9mo ago

Why would it? The ability to accurately describe what you want with all constraints managed and with proactive design is the actual skill. Not programming. The day PMs can do that and have LLMs that can code to that, is the day software engineers en masse will disappear. But that day is likely never. The non-technical people I've ever worked for were hopelessly terrible at attention to detail. They're hiring me primarily for that anyway.

legulere 9mo ago

Even if it will make software engineering drastically more productive, it’s questionable that this will lead to unemployment. Efficiency gains translate to lower prices. Sometimes this leads to very few additional demand, as can be seen with masses of typesetters that lost their jobs. Sometimes this leads to a dramatically higher demand like you can see in the classic Jevons paradox examples of coal and light bulbs. I highly suspect software falls in the latter category

kingstnap 9mo ago
Software demand is philosophically limited by the question of "What can your computer do for you?" You can describe that somewhat formally as: {What your computer can do} intersect {What you want done (consciously or otherwise)} Well a computer can technically calculate any computuable task that fits in bounded memory, that is an enormous set so its real limitations are its interfaces. In which case it can send packets, make noises, and display images. How many human desires are things that can be solved with making noises, displaying images, and sending packets? Turns out quite a few but its not everything. Basically I'm saying we should hope more sorts of physical interfaces come around (like VR and Robotics) so we cover more human desires. Robotics is a really general physical interface (like how ip packets are an extremely general interface) so its pretty promising if it pans out. Personally, I find it very hard to even articulate what desires I have. I have this feeling that I might be substantially happier if I was just sitting around a campfire eating food and chatting with people instead of enjoying whatever infinite stuff a super intelligent computer and robots could do for me. At least some of the time.

fullstackchris 9mo ago

This overly discussed thesis is already laughable - decent LLMs have been out for 3 years now and unemployment (using US as example) is up around 1% over the same time frame - and even attributing that small percentage change completely to AI is also laughable