How to tell if AI threatens YOUR job

I can’t tell if a lot of programmers fear losing their jobs because, deep down, they don’t have much confidence in their skills and value, or if they actually <i>want</i> to get replaced by a supercharged autocomplete.<p>Just a year ago HN was full of existential dread over no code&#x2F;low code tools. How many jobs did those cost?<p>Going farther back in history it was outsourcing that would put programmers on the street.<p>I can remember way back when we got told that software building blocks would just snap together like Legos, making software development child’s play.<p>Why do we tech professionals keep predicting some new thing (or old thing getting a second wind) will make us obsolete? It’s like a mass case of imposter syndrome.<p>You can see in the headlines what actually threatens developer careers: bad management and greed. Look at the approx 150,000 people laid off in tech since last year and tell me how many lost their jobs because of a chatbot. Or no code tools. Zero.<p>Read David Graeber’s book <i>Bullshit Jobs</i>. If you recognize what you do in his descriptions, you have reason to worry.

Here&#x27;s the conclusion written by GPT-4:<p>In conclusion, the rise of generative AI is a transformative trend that will have a significant impact on the information economy and the job market. While certain types of jobs might be at greater risk than others, there is still room for adaptation and growth for individuals who proactively prepare for this shift. By focusing on tasks that are novel, unpredictable, and fragile, fostering high-trust relationships and interdisciplinary collaboration, and embracing AI tools to enhance productivity, it is possible to navigate these changes and secure a meaningful career in the evolving landscape. The key is to take action now and invest in the skills and strategies that will make you indispensable in a world where AI continues to advance.

One of our friends who is a graphic designer mentioned that he thought was going to be out of job in the next couple of years. My husband made the point that he was pretty sure that given whatever AI tools exist in the next couple of years, he still wouldn&#x27;t be able to do as good a job with them as our friend.<p>My sister is a translator so has been at the coal front of AI taking over her job. There is a lot of (less well-paid!) work now to check AI translations instead of translating from scratch. She&#x27;s decided not to do that (it&#x27;s harder in many ways that doing the translation in the first place) and only stick to full translation work. Some translations don&#x27;t need to be perfect, but for others the accuracy and quality matter or make a difference. I think she has a niche where she can still get work doing the latter (she has rare languages for a native English speaker and is a very good writer in English, and is also qualifying as a legal translator in the hope that legal translation stays human-based for longer!). But ultimately, there probably will be less full translation work around.

With this pace, only manual physical jobs will remain. Most of the office jobs will be replaced with virtual workers. AGI will have shock-collared humans building new data centers full of TPU&#x2F;GPUs. Maybe some farmers to feed those as well. Everyone else is on their own. Ah, and humans should be locked away from nuclear weapons for their own safety.

I don&#x27;t really get the comments from HN people. I could understand my neighbour (non-tech) saying &quot;Ha ha, you software engineers will become jobless because of AI&quot;, but the HN crowd saying that? Here&#x27;s my rationale:<p>- AI is a catalyzer. It will let us do more with less<p>- Most of the companies out there are greedy. They don&#x27;t look for stability, but for growth<p>- If right now, it takes a company X resources to build product Y in N months, then with AI the company will have to decide between a) build the same product Y with X&#x2F;10 resources and in N&#x2F;10 months, or b) build 10 different products with X resources and in N months. Greedy companies will not choose option &#x27;a&#x27; because that options leads to stability; they will choose option &#x27;b&#x27; which is the one that leads to (hyper) growth<p>Just imagine your usual startup in 2024 invigorated with AI:<p>- Founder 1: I want to build product X. Cool, with this AI thingy I can hire only 1 engineer, 1 product manager and maybe 1 designer to build what it would have cost 20 engineers, 2 managers and 3 designers in 2020.<p>- Founder 2: Cool. So we just hire 3 people and launch X in 1 month, right?<p>- Founder 1: Well, we could do that. Or, we could hire 20 engineers, 2 managers and 3 designers to build not just product X, but also product Y and product Z. Right? I mean, why should we limit ourselves with one product only? What if it fails? At least if we launch 3 products, we&#x27;ll have more chances of &quot;winning&quot;<p>- Founder 2: brilliant!<p>So, AI will just boost customer demands and greedy companies (the majority of companies). There will be plenty of jobs for all of us. If you don&#x27;t believe this, not long ago, Twitter had around 7000 employees. Yeez, could you believe that? And Twitter had technology of the 21st century!<p>My bet is that AI will enable tech companies to look more like Google: small-medium companies will be able to do A LOT more (e.g., we&#x27;ll see small companies launching complete G-suite-like software in less than 6 months, we&#x27;ll see YouTube-like competitors like we see nowadays TODO lists)... but that won&#x27;t be achieved with 10 or 20 engineers only.

Somebody ought to save somewhere safe a copy of the internet as it was in the 2021 - full of mostly human-generated content. As the time goes on - it will become ever more valuable as the material to train your AI models on - that isn’t itself chock full of AI generated surrogate.<p>If it isn’t saved - we will all be soon employed to sort and create the ever diminishing share of “genuine organic human-produced content” from the all-consuming ocean of AI-induced echolalia.

I think people overstimate the time spent on writing new code and underestimate time spent maintaining existing code.<p>The point of maintenance is to minimize changes as much as possible and only change what you must. The AI has the advantage that it can type out syntactically valid code it has already seen very quickly.<p>When you are starting from a blank slate this capability is perfectly adequate as you go from nothing to something and there are no preexisting constraints. Just take a look at all the people claiming they can build a twitter clone in a week.<p>Does this obsolete the developers working on twitter?<p>Once you have a working product you will spend the vast majority of the time dealing with pre-existing constraints. Most developers might end up stuck in &quot;maintenance hell&quot; where you have to read dozens of files of code and dozens of pages of production logs, all to change one line of code.<p>I personally am spending weeks on a feature that is broken in an aesthetically unpleasing way but more importantly, I am not allowed to break what already works.

The conclusion section is amazing, highly recommend at least skimming to there if not RTFA.

This was very enjoyable, thank you. After reading this article I am _less_ concerned about my job activities being taken over by LLMs. In fact they could help me with tedious BS so I can spend more time troubleshooting real problems.

The &quot;AI taking jobs&quot; narrative is marketing for investors to make AI companies seem valuable. Besides being used to make customer service even more unpleasant, don&#x27;t expect to see too many AI-related job losses in most industries. While there is a chance it will press down wages for people in the graphics&#x2F;commercial art industries, unless there&#x27;s a major development&#x2F;pivot in AI, it will have a major impact on employment. Let&#x27;s not forget how impressed we were by voice assistance and where it ended up.

The real question is if AI will eat jobs faster than economy can expand to create new applications on it.<p>First we automate known jobs with AI - then we realise everyone else has AI and get the same efficiencies, competition just got much harder - then we need to find a way to surpass competition by extracting even more from AI.<p>So we&#x27;re back to needing people to drive AI to its max potential.

&gt;So if you’re a programmer like me, you’re probably safe!<p>Phew!

GPT won’t replace your job, but with time it’ll lead to tools that increases developer productivity significantly. So when each developer is more productive you don’t need as many of them. And as we see with history increase with productivity is not tied with an increase in pay.

All this discussion of lost jobs. The intangible are lost to AI; the tangible are lost to robots. I&#x27;m starting to think that Zardoz is a documentary from the future.

The answer is yes