Unemployable is a charged word. A lot of outdated professions still have professionals. There are still professional horse drawn carriages.
If the AI performance gains are 50% improvement, and companies decide they rather cut costs and pocket the difference, could be due to many factors, that leaves millions out of a job. And those performance gains are coming for many white collar jobs. I guess your premise is mass unemployment is not worth worrying about, so okay then.
Marginal changes in productivity can make huge impacts to industries employment rates.
People still pay thousands of dollars for wedding photographers even though everyone at the wedding also has a camera and many are taking their own pictures.
I am not a software engineer and it seems to me if someone has experience as a software engineer before LLMs, they have skills no one will really be able to acquire again in the same way.
I would expect current software engineers to eat the entire non-customer facing back office in the next ten years.
> People still pay thousands of dollars for wedding photographers even though everyone at the wedding also has a camera and many are taking their own pictures.
Wedding photography used to be the lowest in the pecking order of professional photography. Now all the photojournalists, travel magazine and corporate events photographers are as good as extinct. Even the arts market for photography been on decline for years.
That's because you're not aware enough of being spied on at every single step you make. The issues are now more or less invisible (the tracking being more, and the lobotomized adblockers being less)
Ai training can be thought of like human training (school), much of what you learn shapes you but you forget the details. We need to continue to have real sources of info.
At what cost? See discussion here. And who bears the burden of that cost?
Sure you can look away from child labor providing you the latest iphones or lithium mines for the same or electric cars destroying pristine tropical jungles and entire ecosystems, many folks do so very comfortably. Then some others don't.
You participate in $the_thing so surely you must support $the_thing, right?
I would get value from stealing, I don't steal from people. The argument or question isn't about if it has value to some people, the question is, does the value to some people outweigh the costs that are imposed on others.
Said another way, a novel is about the experience of reading every word of implementation, whereas software is sufficient to be a black box, the functional output is all that matters. No one is reading assembly for example.
We’re moving into a world where suboptimal code doesn’t matter that much because it’s so cheap to produce.
1. Disagree. Plenty of companies still care about impact as a key metric in promotion processes so if working more increases impact, then it can increase rewards.
2. Not all this type of work is transactional. I’ve “worked” many extra hours for the pleasure of it, in which case it’s not working instead of living, it is living. This is the spirit of OPs article IMO.
Are the incompetent people your coworkers?
Ideally you can be solving your customers problems, which is a nice terminating lens of “always useful”, tho you may still want to pick and choose.
If the AI performance gains are 50% improvement, and companies decide they rather cut costs and pocket the difference, could be due to many factors, that leaves millions out of a job. And those performance gains are coming for many white collar jobs. I guess your premise is mass unemployment is not worth worrying about, so okay then.
Marginal changes in productivity can make huge impacts to industries employment rates.
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