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Change can be upsetting. Compilation used to be done by people. People used to write assembler for a living. Entire languages like Cobol, Fortran, Smalltalk cam
by jillesvangurp 9mo ago
Change can be upsetting. Compilation used to be done by people. People used to write assembler for a living. Entire languages like Cobol, Fortran, Smalltalk came and went. You might still find paid (well paid even) work doing these things of course but it's a bit niche at this point. Things like Cobol are not likely to be picked for new projects. And unless you work in a museum, anything involving punch cards is probably not a thing anymore. There are a lot of professions that were common fifty years ago that no longer aren't.
I get that people are emotional about change impacting them; and maybe still a bit in denial even. But regardless how people feel, it's probably not going to majorly change the outcome. What I sketched in my earlier comment is that it is maybe not as black and white as jobs disappearing and everybody being out of work. AI tools require people with programming skills to be most effective. That points to a change of the type of work.
Some might resent that and give up or maybe try to stick to their current gigs for as long as they last. I don't think this is all changing overnight. But on a scale of a few years, it's going to impact the job market quite a bit.
- xhevahir 9mo agoYour attitude is Panglossian, and even your concession that these changes are "going to impact the job market quite a bit" massively underestimates the danger we could be facing. As opposed to what happened in any previous era, we're talking about the replacement of workers across practically all white-collar career fields, all happening over the course of a few years. There will be nowhere for these workers to go but down, into low-paid and precarious service work—assuming they can still find work even in these industries, which will have become more crowded with workers of all sorts; the skilled trades are likely to face a frightful race to the bottom as well. How many years of such creative destruction do you think our economic and political systems can weather before something truly disastrous happens?