That still seems super naive, at least if its extended to software engineering. Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded. I don't see how AI will improve that.
The problem isn’t whether or not companies need us— it’s about how many of us they need (demand), and how many of us there are (supply), because that determines our value. Companies pay people what they’ll work for, not based on how much they contribute to the bottom line; in economics, paying more than you have to for anything, including labor, is the irrational path. A steady, high demand for software developers has kept salaries high because that’s the only way they could get capable people to work for them.
The higher-end of markets aren’t immune to this. As the demand for lower-level workers drops, people will upskill trying to move up rather than get lopped off. Since there are fewer positions the further up the hierarchy you get, you don’t need a huge increase in supply to affect demand. That’s when you start seeing the most experienced, highest-earning people getting shit-canned because someone is willing to do a good-enough version of their role for 2/3 their sizable salary.
This can all happen without a single entire role being completely automated out of existence.
Go for it. I got out of that ridiculous ouroboro of an industry years ago. That might be great for you, but surely you can’t imagine VC funding enough startups to save the software labor market? The tech workforce is giant. Do you think there are tens or hundreds of thousands of ways to make unique new software products where even a single digit percentage are commercially viable? Software isn’t fungible: it needs to solve specific problems that people have, and do it well enough to deal with the hassle of switching software.
This isn’t an individual problem— it’s an industry-wide problem.
(I pulled the 2/3 number out of a hat to illustrate the point. I put exactly zero analysis into that.)
> If what you describe happens (33% cut to salaries) then the bar for your own startup to be worth it is suddenly lower.
That sounds like a material reduction in quality of life. Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money. IMHO, that's not a good trade off.
> Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money.
It is also ignoring scalability issues in the sense that if a large number of people now working regular jobs in tech are forced down this path, the amount of competition among these startups would be astronomical which would result is downward pressure on both the ability to fundraise and the ability to generate revenue for your particular startup.
Impossible for me to believe each individual startup founder would find some profitable niche to fit into.
The value-cost ratio is all that matters to a company. Yes, that implies that they are assuming all variations of value are achievable by AI which isn’t true and probably won’t ever be.
But they do think that, nearly all of them. Because they don’t understand value. This has been true since the very first corporation.
And that’s the problem. They will see a totally cheesed and squeezed metric telling them AI can reach 40% of the value of a “ ___ engineer “ at 10% of the cost and lay off engineers until shit starts exploding.
And the stock market will strongly reward that decision.
> I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.
Employees in knowledge work don’t generate constant value at all times. And companies want value at all times (that needs to be ever increasing). You’re not disposable at all point in time if you’re providing value at that point in time.
I was and I did. Now there's nobody on the team who can fulfil something we promised to our biggest customer a few months ago. Shrug not my problem because I don't work there.
> I think if you’re legitimately providing value to the company, you aren’t disposable.
Businesses want worker fungibility and to reduce bus favor from having single point of failures. That usually, but not always, flies in the face of irreplaceability.
Companies shutdown profitable divisions/products because they aren't profitable enough. 'Providing value' is determined at a whim and by metrics out of your control.
Only quibble that in some areas like the games industry, being disposable (qua susceptibility to layoffs) was closer to the status quo well before AI came around.
>Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded.
I'm sorry but this is simply false. Nothing has really changed on the ground for SWEs. Nothing at all. Compensation is still sky high. Interviews are still the same. Career progression is the same. Everything takes the same amount of time. It's all business as usual for software engineering as a profession. AI is just one more tool in the toolkit; some devs use it, some don't. No engineering org has fallen for any hype in a meaningful way. Ultimately SWE teams on the frontline are busy doing what they always do, mostly in the way that they've always been doing.
The only thing that's changed in a remarkable way is how disconnected the rhetoric on social media is from ground reality. Anyone telling you AI is even replacing 5% of SWEs in the industry is a jobless hack.
> I'm sorry but this is simply false. Nothing has really changed on the ground for SWEs. Nothing at all. Compensation is still sky high. Interviews are still the same. Career progression is the same. Everything takes the same amount of time.
That's not remotely what I'm hearing or seeing from those who are on the job market.
The tech job market hasn't been "easy" for many years (basically since 2015 except for a ~2 year boom from mid 2020 to mid 2022). People always find different things to attribute the difficulty to. I remember way back in the day when bootcamps were the boogeyman.
I think the problem may be that consumerism is the only thing most people have left. Capitalism has already comodified culture, ground workers down to replacable cogs, and put home ownership out of reach. I think its reasonable for people to demand that some of those things be given back in exchange for abandoning consumerism.
Isn't that contradicted by the fact that data centers are increasing electric prices in the areas they are built? It seems to me that either the data centers are drawing power from the grid or the utilities are gouging people. Either one should be stopped.
I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details
trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition
and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues
(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)
but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap
hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon.
The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. So we would have to scale lumber work dramatically. It's also not a clean industry itself, reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel, and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive refineries.
IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the first place. There's some work on this right now, but like any massive engineering and ecological tampering, there will be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don't know how you prevent the dead plant matter from decomposing and releasing the carbon.
Algae blooms are typically the sign of something very wrong with an aquatic ecosystem (usually human-induced). This is in addition to the issues it causes in the rest of the local ecosystem by drastically reducing the light, nutrients, and oxygen available to other aquatic life.
I can't believe these ideas are being seriously suggested. Is it a win if we reduce CO2 but make the planet uninhabitable for other reasons?
You would have to do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans.
Maybe then the negative effects won't be life ending.
But how else do we sequester bulk carbon dioxide? You probably aren't going to engineer something more effective than plant matter. So yes, you seed a gigantic algae bloom out in the ocean, it does a lot of bad stuff to a part of the ocean, and maybe it nets out positive.
But hey, don't worry, nobody lets me make important decisions, so not exactly "seriously suggested". Smarter people than I will have a clear list of pros and cons to this plan, and will make a much smarter decision, which might be followed by politicians maybe.
But there's no carbon capture option that doesn't do something dramatic and somehow damaging. Any plan will be industrially the inverse of burning all that oil. Pulling it out of the air will be the largest industrial project we have ever done and require more electricity than extracted from all the oil we burnt ever. To grow trees to do it would require 1000x the lumber industry we have now. Sun shades can keep us cool but not take the carbon out of the air. Aerosol injection is going to have it's own externalities. "Crush a bunch of rock and let it chemically absorb the CO2" is extremely limited.
There's no clean option out of this anymore. There's no magic button. We could stop all carbon production today and we will still have significant impact.
> do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans
this is not how it works, like at all
pretty much all oceans are already at risk of ecologically collapsing even without climate change, and will be majorly affected by it (both directly and indirectly)
just because they are big doesn't mean thy can just compensate whatever you throw at them.
A huge problem being damage being not very visible to the average human until catastrophic (so humans are prone to not take actions). Like we already have gigantic dead zones all over the oceans.
Many effects of climate change fall into the "live will get very shitty but still survivable category".
But an ocean dying can lead to a chain reaction leading to a mass extinction event. Like not just a lot of animal dying, but a something like noticeable more then 50% of species going extinct. That includes most to all of humanities food supply.
Theoretically humans might be able to survive this, practically we are still speaking about a non negligible 2 digit chance for human extinction (not necessary directly by that, but other catastrophes like volcanoes, plagues or meteors still happen)
this are the kind of solutions with a high potential of having worse outcomes then not doing them
It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.
Developers aren't given time to test and aren't rewarded if they do, but management will rain down hellfire upon their heads if they don't churn out code quickly enough.
> everyone just uses AI to generate 10,000 line files of unit tests and nobody can verify anything
This is not a guaranteed outcome of requiring 100% coverage. Not that that's a good requirement, but responding badly to a bad requirement is just as bad.
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