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The crazy part about this is if you compare it not to US wages but european, for instance in the UK where the median software hourly wage is somewhere around $3
by zipy124 6mo ago
The crazy part about this is if you compare it not to US wages but european, for instance in the UK where the median software hourly wage is somewhere around $35-40 an hour, then humans are already cheaper than the best models.
- allan_s 6mo agothat's what I'm telling my non-tech friends when they say "Looking to how fast AI progress and robotics, me as an electrician, will a robot soon take my job?" I reply to them "My job as a software engineer will be replaced sooner than yours, because for your job, the robot will be much more expensive than the minimal wave, and you don't need to buy a human"
- drzaiusx11 6mo agoI wouldn't discount the worries outside of tech however. A cheap human laborer that leans on AI to provide their checklist and described actions for tasks is definitely in scope to replace hard won hands on knowledge from experience in industry professionals. You no longer have to watch 30 YouTube videos to learn and distill a task as a layperson in a field involving manual labor. I rebuilt my house from the studs, did my own electrical and plumbing, etc. This took a significant amount of training and research back in the day. I worked under my father for a decade before making this attempt. My father is a journeyman electrician and carpenter. I think any able bodied human could soon forgo much of that and simply get a breakdown of actions to perform in a particular order and get similar results.
- darepublic 6mo agoI tried to use gpt for various handy work. While it does help I don't think it can adequately substitute for hard won hands. Maybe next gen if you provide a video stream and the llm can view the exact situation. Even then though I wouldn't discount the difficulty of learning dexterity when you've been a coddled white collar worker your whole life
- drzaiusx11 6mo agoI wasn't suggesting white collar workers attempt blue collar work. I'm merely saying that cheap day laborers with basic experience won't have to lean on their industry mentorship model (journeyman etc) as much and can complete jobs on their own. On the cheap. Today's models are insufficient for someone with 0 hands on experience, especially when limited to text modalities. However, I don't doubt the future ones you describe are coming though, if they're not already here.
- boston_clone 6mo agoIs your opinion here grounded in experience from working in that field, or is it speculation?
- drzaiusx11 6mo agoThis question seems a bit of a non sequitur. I worked along side my father in the trades for over a decade (to pay for college, my house, etc) as I've already stated in my parent post. Unless you're asking about something else?
- GorbachevyChase 6mo agoI have a lot of AI written software, and it doesn’t cost me anywhere close to what I’ve been quoted for other software projects in the past. I’ve had a guy spend over six months, full-time, on a CRUD application for permits. He didn’t even finish. I made a working prototype in Django, which was tossed to re-implement in PHP for some reason.
- avidiax 6mo agoMy understanding is that this is normalized to the "best human" for the tasks. An AI only doing a task correctly 50% of the time may in-fact be better than your N% chance of hiring a highly capable human for that task, and especially for contracting a human to a 1-2 hour task. But your successful use of AI is still predicated on a human who can judge output and break the work into smaller tasks that fit the skill ceiling of the AI, which is currently no more than tasks that take a skilled human 2 hours.
- GorbachevyChase 6mo agoFalse. That guy spent 6 months goofing off for something I can have in minutes. Nothing is a 1-2 hour task for a human working outside of a hobby. Procurement will involve half a dozen people at least and hours of meetings and scope development. And what quality assurance is provided in an hour? Your word? And this is better than my own vibes? I just want to put this plainly. Programmers are often completely delusional about their own productivity and nobody can reliably define work quality in the field. The whole field is a mess, and I’m glad product owners and users are finally being empowered.
- segmondy 6mo agoHumans are not cheaper than AI models. Let's go with $35 an hour. 24365 = 8760 8760$35 = $306,600 Yeah, a human working non stop will run $300k. Now you said, the "best" models. I personally reckon that 80-90% of most work don't need the best models. They need a good model, and good models are super cheap. i.e, the tiny gemma4 or qwen3.6 models will be sufficient for most of those work. AI cloud usage cost goes up near linearly, but local cost doesn't. So say someone built an under $10k system, with perhaps dual RTX 5090. That same system will be able to easily run 20 parallel requests. The only cost is electricity. You can run it 24/7. For 1 year, that's ~$6million. 20 humans will also have overhead of electricity, real estate and other things which far exceed the cost of electricity for just AI. The thing AI agents are lacking is agency and autonomy. As they get closer and closer, the majority of humans competing in the same sort of tasks will have no chance.
- zipy124 6mo agoI'm going by the graph in the original artical, not stating a point. I mean if their cost lines on the graph are to be believed, then the number I quoted is cheaper.
- ac29 6mo ago> So say someone built an under $10k system, with perhaps dual RTX 5090. That same system will be able to easily run 20 parallel requests. The only cost is electricity. You can run it 24/7. For 1 year, that's ~$6million I dont see how you get anywhere close to $6M of tokens out of a pair of 5090s. The class of model they could run is fairly small and extremely cheap to run via API (my math says running Gemma4-31B for 24 hours costs less than $1 on OpenRouter). Even with 20x concurrent requests you are orders of magnitude away from $6M/yr.
- segmondy 6mo agoI never said that, my point is that paying 20 people at $35 for 24/7 is about $6 million. You can replace that with a $10k system running 20 parallel requests for a year and save lots of money.
- rcbdev 6mo agoSoftware developers average about 80 - 120€/h in Austria. How are UK rates so bad?
- zipy124 6mo agoA quick google seems to suggest the median software pay in Austria is about €60k. That translates to an hourly wage of roughly 31€/h . Your range of 80-120 gives a yearly wage of like 155k-234k which is clearly far too high for an average.
- mike_hearn 6mo agoThe discrepancy is probably consulting vs salaried.
- zipy124 6mo agoEven consulting/free-lance compared to employed, the difference is not 3x...
- rcbdev 6mo agoIf you start talking about salaried work, you have to account for Austria's 5 weeks of mandatory PTO, infinite paid sick days (with a pay reduction after 6 weeks, clock resets each year), additional paid care leave (Pflegefreistellung) for sick family, paid maternity / paternity leave, etc. in contrast with whatever the British system offers. For developers in Austria who choose salaried work, the math tends to add up with at least 2 months off each year, union protection etc. You'd have to be an expert on labor law in every country you seek to honestly compare. The only clean way to simply compare earnings is freelance rates.
- zipy124 6mo agoEven consulting/free-lance compared to employed, the difference is not 3x...