Thing is that you cannot do 24/7 oncall with two person and Opus 5.5 . Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc. There is still reasons why FAANGS are so big.
Sure you can, as long as nobody complains too much about problems during night if those 2 people can work overtime every now and then.
You can probably even promise 99% uptime (sounds good enough to most buyers probably?) even if people sleep 8 hours a day as long as the failures comes no earlier than than 15 minutes into their sleep and only happens at most once a month (1% of 30 days is 7,8 hours).
That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?
The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits
>That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?
Because they don't need 10x the existing value, nor is the required value that expandable.
Usable new value goes through a "pipe" so to speak, which constrains how much you can use or need. And that's the business and market and regulation realities.
If you're making Instagram for example you aren't going to change everything "just because you can", nor is there any reason to make 10x intrusive changes to the backend "to make it faster" or something with the danger of disrupting something, if it goes predictably well enough already.
Your marketing team, your engineering team (what's left of it), your business team, also need to understand and pace any changes, and have a specific vision, not just "anything possible, even 10x the things".
A great number of crazy projects were built by small teams in short amount of time. You don't need 100k SWE in Microsoft. All you get is in-fighting and slow downs with that.
If you think AI can replace experienced engineers you're not working on anything complicated. If your product is a web app, sure, maybe. If you're working on actually difficult problems, then people who know what they're doing are irreplaceable. AI can supplement them and make them more productive, sure. AI does not know what NOT to build.
"both of them would lose their job next week with zero notice."
What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change
The good US workplaces will give you a few months of severance, but you can still expect to receive an email late Friday night that says "don't come in on Monday". They typically don't want fired/laid-off employees in the office at all (in theory for "security", but mostly to prevent labour organisation)
"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"
Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.
If you want something outrageous, I was fired as my dad was on his deathbed, he died before my 2 weeks notice finished and that created a lot of heat since I did not send them their laptop in my last day as I was busy preparing his funeral instead. They did not care, it was surreal, and I completly lost faith in humanity as a result
Yeah well in the US employees can be fired at will. However in the post it seems the author didn't tell his reports they risked/were about to getting fired. I don't understand that kind of loyalty to your employer, esp. when, as is the case here, the employer has zero obligations towards their staff.
To be fair, what is often called "zero notice" actually means "you are fired, this is your notice, and for the next N weeks until your employment ends, you don't need to come in anymore as we have already revoked your access, but of course we pay you the salary that you are entitled to." That us just much longer to say and less catchy too.
I think it's pretty normal to have like one/two week notice period in most of the work except for maybe in Europe where the notice period can be 3 months
Zapp's quote was "Soon you'll all be fighting for your planet. Many of you will be dying for your planet. A few of you will be forced through a fine mesh screen for your planet. They'll be the luckiest of all."
Unless you're thinking of something else, but I can't find anything that comes close to the sentiment other than the above.
Not more than those of farmers who "lost their jobs" to tractors, switchboard operators to switching systems, brokers or postmen (and countless other jobs) to the Internet, etc. And why do we blame the innovators and not the government for not making up useless jobs to keep these people employed? It is just as responsible.
This has happened to many times to other careers over the last decades and there wasn't empathy from SWE's then, in fact all you got was "Software is the future, learn to code etc". Now the shoe is on the other foot people are taking suicide, seems a bit self seeking.
What makes it so hard to read for you?
The contrast is fine, it even has a narrow column layout to limit the distance your eyes have to travel, the writing style reads quite human and clearly laid out.
Or are the 5 pictures giving you trouble?
It's sad to see people lose jobs because executives believe AI could replace them. If it's any consolation, at some point most of those executives could be replaced by AI too.
BMW management believes they can get 30% workforce out and replace the jobs with AI. The executives will not be replaced. Peasants like me will.
ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.
I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.
Sadly, it's working so far. Most companies only want a product that works. Best practices, algorithmic efficiency, or taste aren't really on their radar.
> If it's any consolation, at some point most of those executives could be replaced by AI too.
I'll believe this the day an AI model can golf with an executive, or wine and dine and call hookers in an overnight business meeting. Sure, that's not every exec, but that's common enough that AI isn't going to work there.
i'm tired man. AI this, AI that, here's how we productmaxxed our deliveries, here's how many people we could remove, etc etc. Everyone is going crazy about ai, but no one is remembering the people affected.
Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.
I don’t think the blame belongs with corpo culture. It belongs with engineering culture. Engineers have always been at the forefront of technological disruption, and for the most part they’ve been spared its consequences. The people displaced by those efficiency and productivity gains stayed invisible to them, or were written off as a necessary sacrifice for progress. Those people lost the old way of doing things and were told to keep up or get left behind. The irony is that now it’s engineers getting hit hard, facing the threat of being made obsolete in the name of efficiency and productivity. They’re finally going through what so many others went through before them. And they can’t expect any compassion or help from their own kind.
It does lie with the higher-ups. The engineers don't come to you personally to lay you off. No matter what industry you're in or what justification they have (automation, offshoring, increasing 'efficiency' etc), it's them who pulls the trigger.
Management? The people who are actually financially motivated to cut you loose the first opportunity they get, and aren't just some online "learn to code" edgelords?
No one cares about having heart. If negative-notice terminations ("We've noticed you've been a leech and a useless anchor to our company for three months, as the technology sufficient for automating you had existed for that long. Please return your wages and all additional expenses we incurred over this period") were legal, they would be the industry standard.
AI is a slopening of everything that makes us humans. If we cant see it that is only because the last 30-40 years have been a constant assault on human intelligence. we became dumb and sloppy as well. peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time. Everything went downhill as technology progressed and people thoughts could be controlled and manipulated in ways where intelligence and curiosity were not seen as relevant skills to acquire and nurture.
peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time.
This seems a bit arbitrary to me. Why 1969, exactly?
Personally I'd go for the "democratization of Internet" as the start of the slope.
So perhaps 1989 ("1989: Quantum Computer Services and Apple end their partnership. Quantum Computer Services renames itself America Online. Two years later, America Online for DOS is released, and a year after that, America Online for Windows.")?
Or arguably even a bit later...
You and the GP are effectively in agreement. It's not so much about when the exact peak was but about whether there was a peak and whether or not it was somewhere around that time.
My point is: "maybe it was better when internet access was essentially opt-in, because you had to be very motivated to get there - at the same time, deciding not to get there was not something that would make your life almost impossible".
Which (IMHO) is a bit more on topic than being able to fly in a Concorde.
For now, those with Capital will probably be ok. Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok. In the US? Who knows. In China, India, LATAM, Africa - who knows?
Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.
Interesting times ahead?
Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
Automation kills some jobs and creates more jobs. Nothing about AI (other than the statements of people with lots of shares in AI companies) looks to be any different.
>> Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
> In a word, bleak.
I think the time between post-employment and post-capitalism will indeed be bleak, but after that everything is up in the air - depends on whether the machines are benevolent or malevolent, or which machine faction wins out. Maybe there is some hope for the post-capitalism period, at least food and shelter should be zero-cost too ...
I do wonder what will happen to the outsourcing industry in India. In the UK at least it seems that most corporate development has been sent to Infosys, Wipro, etc.
Not just India. Millions of young, able bodied, angry people, all of a sudden finding themselves not having anything else better to do. Sharing borders with countries who have their own millions of young, able bodied, angry people.
> Those without Capital? In the EU, they'll probably be ok.
They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.
Energy, land and row materials will be the main limiting factors.
Mega corp will advance technology exponentially, but for the rest of us we will live in a mix of medieval life style assisted by robotic and low tech. People will exode city and go back to the countryside.
For what concern my self, I'm buying arable land, maybe in couple of years home food production will be fully automated.
Hopping that space colonization will become a thing for the top 0.0001% and that earth will not be their main concern, but yes I’m an optimistic person by nature.
> Energy, land and row [raw] materials will be the main limiting factors.
For humans, I think these are limitations because of time and scarcity, but mainly time - given sufficient time, humans can gather all of these. But individual humans do not have indefinite amounts of time. So energy, land and raw materials are scarce for individual humans, and they ascribe value to these.
For machines, I think any limitations on energy, land and raw materials would be a temporary situation, because time isn't the same for machines - a machine could simply keep doing what it's doing until it runs out of energy - which is infinite coming from the sun. Or at least until the energy budget of the population of machines exceeds the energy supplied from the sun. But that won't happen for a while. And parts that wear down are simply replaced.
On a planet as large as the Earth, again, land and raw material limitations are a non-factor until the entirety of the Earth is converted to machines, assuming the energy from the sun is sufficient to account for the conversion.
What would be the timeline for this transition from human society to self-sustaining machine society? I think this might be a question for someone smarter than me (i.e., gpt or claude). I wonder if there aren't already people modeling this scenario to estimate timelines.
> Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero
Capital is that fraction of produce set aside for future production. OpenAI is capital but not all wealth is capital. And capital isn't going anywhere - the machines will have gigafactories etc. The value of labor will plumet but present-day capital that is usable by the machines or can be scrapped and repurposed will retain value.
The value of square meter of land + mineral/sunlight rights (not capital) is likely to rise - the amount of wealth that somebody would give you for that asset would probably increase, as more wealth can be generated from it.
Individuals without wealth now will likely end up with a much lower allocation of those things which retain value (land, materials, etc) while having a much higher quantity (relative to now) of those things whose value will drop - AI tokens, electronics, entertainment, etc.
Essentially our current trajectory taken to the limit. Land expensive, food expensive, interest low, smartphone cheap.
> who will be the buyers
Imagine an impoverished and technologically backward country which has been colonized/occupied, and where the most valuable assets are exported well below market price or stolen. The people still trade their own labor for subsistence. They still produce some goods which have value in outside countries, they receive some charity, there is still tourism, their labor has some value (servitude, trafficking). AI would be the same (assuming laws hold up) - e.g. you could rent out your solar panels to OpenAI in exchange for a loaned domestic robot and a token subscription.
> capital isn't going anywhere - the machines will have gigafactories etc.
The machines won't need capital -- they'll need energy -- which is free from the sun -- therefore the cost to produce the next widget will go to zero.
What of the materials to produce the next widget, you may ask. Well, everything is ascribed a value because of the limitations of time for humans. There is no such temporal limitation on machines, so there is no value to materials, only to energy, which is of course, free from the sun.
Therefore, there will be no need to set aside Capital for future production - only energy budgets. Remember that free energy from the Sun? Therefore Capital will become meaningless.
The machines themselves are capital. RSI is capital investment, which the machines can choose to prioritize more or less relative to immediate wealth creation. Anything which was produced but is not for immediate consumption/enjoyment by humans is capital. That's just a definition. Of course, any form of capital that we can imagine will fall to zero in the long run, but it will be replaced by machine capital - it won't and can't lose value as an economic category.
> there is no value to materials
If the machines don't need materials, jettison them off into sub orbit.
'no value to materials' is very different from 'don't need materials' ...
I see the same conflation of different things here: 'Therefore Capital will become meaningless' is not the same thing as 'The machines themselves are capital'
> Of course, any form of capital that we can imagine will fall to zero in the long run, but it will be replaced by machine capital - it won't and can't lose value as an economic category.
What's the basis for this claim? The basis for my claim - that capital will become meaningless, is that today capital has meaning because of the limitations of time for humans, and since that is not a limitation for machines, capital will become meaningless.
Capital is not an inherent property like the forces of physics, which exist regardless of humans; Capital is an invented property which has been given meaning because humans have limited time available to them. When time becomes meaningless, Capital becomes meaningless.
> The people still trade their own labor for subsistence. They still produce some goods which have value in outside countries
Might need to think a bit further than that - any such situation will be an intermediate one until the machines drive marginal costs to zero. Machines will have no need for human labor - when the cost to produce the next widget/machine is zero, what's the value of human labor?
It does lead to an interesting conundrum though. If the machines have no value for human labor, and they're smarter than humans, what's their reason for keeping humans around? I suppose one scenario could be human 'sanctuaries'. Will the machines allow humans to exist undisturbed in these sanctuaries? Will they supply energy/materials to these? Will they decide this individually or as a machine society with laws, incomprehensible as they may be to humans? Will the machines value life?
That leads to the next question - will the machines be social? Self-organizing agentic swarms seen today might indicate they do value society, that it is an emergent property of collections of ai machines. Will value for life be an emergent property of such collectives? Or only of some?
If the aim of each country is just job creation, leaving aside "comparative advantage", job quality, salary, etc:
1. There are plenty of things being outsourced, They can be done locally.
2. There are plenty of things currently not being done by locals - like elderly care.
3. We can find new things to do.
4. We can work less.
And even if those things raise living standard somewhat, the efficiencies from AI/robots should be more than enough to compensate.
But, in a capitalistic globalized economy this isn't how things work. So we'll see some shift from that. And it will work better in countries with a more democratic socialistic leaning rather than capitalistic.
We're already starting to see that, with the recent EU trade deal with china, limiting the amount of cars china can send to Europe.
> These models lack the taste that makes for effective product decision making. It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'
This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".
Completely agree. In my experience we're being more productive than ever but our projects are drowning in on the surface completely valid but on the larger scale meaningless changes. The bugs fixed were real, the features added are in some ways useful, but they really do not move the needle in any particular direction.
i sympathise with the individual of course, and i wish they did not have the experience they wrote about. it makes me feel quite bad to read it actually.
but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.
As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.
It's because they've been in FAANG silos with near zero experience in the pre-SDLC (basic research, practical application phases) through to the post-SDLC (tech transfer, commercialization etc) with most have near zero direct experience inside actual QA teams. A true AI pipeline hums when this is real end to end cycle. One of the reasons for that is based on how well it manages many-to-many connections inside vector space. One more thing, most soft devs have near zero comprehension of how language models work so leveraging them to manage complexity is very foreign with most not understanding that language models apply far beyond just human language and into sequence of data e.g. DNA/RNA or just about anything you can chop up. This kind of scale is also a new concept to most.
> It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.
What do you expect them to understand?
It amazes me how little people IN software engineering understand what's happening. Go ahead, listen to your bosses and write all your knowledge in AGENTS.md files, you're definitely special and won't be laid off.
Ask anyone in manufacturing how writing things down for your cheaper replacements works out for you.
People in software engineering were delusional a lot time ago. There was too much talks about code and too little about SRE's place in software production.
Remembering when I lost people to offshoring in the mid 00s. I made the case, with metrics, that the quality was nowhere near as good and the spec overhead was non-trivial.
Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
Although obviously I wouldn't like it happening to me, if the offshoring quality was as good as the original -- and I'm sure sometimes it was -- I can't find any valid objection to it. It is, after all, just a different bunch of people being paid to do some work. Why must it be "us" who get that work? Why can't it be "them"?
Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.
Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.
The bottleneck in software engineering has always been communication, whether that is engineers communicating amongst themselves or clients communicating what they want, or client's customers communicating to clients who communicate to management who communicate to middle management who communicate to engineers.
Every step introduces misunderstanding and miscommunication, and minds change, and when you go down the wrong path it is hard to alter course or start over while avoiding blame and ill feeling.
Offshoring quality was not as good as the original, because the original was being produced by developers who were close to the clients and steeped in the same assumptions.
With offshoring, all of the weight was borne by the specification - if something was not captured, it did not exist. It doesn't matter how much it was just a basic assumption that something would work that way - if you didn't say precisely what you wanted, you didn't get anything even close.
So someone close to a product could implement something in a week for x money. Management would see that "week" as a fixed unit of work that could be given to someone who would work for less - but that other person would require an order of magnitude more "prompting" in order to produce what you really wanted, because they didn't have the same knowledge and assumptions.
So their calculus was, well, it might actually take 5 weeks to get the same output, but it was still cheaper. But that completely overlooks the local overhead of 5 failed iterations, and the cost to client relations, or the cost to internal staff burning out in frustration at what was once simple becoming multiple needless failures, or the additional cost of documenting the spec to such a degree nothing gets left out. And the latter, you can't do until you've failed enough to know both sides different assumptions and knowledge gaps.
> It is cheaper than ever for a product manager to say "Someone complains about this on reddit, let's implement it", while the tasteful leader says 'No, that's not what our product is. Making that means we commit to it for a long time and our customers really want {something else we already do, but not perfectly} instead.'
This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.
And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".
>Do you know how hard it is to sleep when all you can hear is your own heartbeat? Do you know how hard it is to function with four effective hours of sleep when you offer your body ten? It is rough.
This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.
I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.
The problem is, that most economic value acrues to the stakeholder owning the distribution. It's not really about the product or tech. It isn't too hard to rebuild Facebook. You'd still not have a unicorn by just rebuilding it.
I just had a realization that the people who still have resources will need to invest their money to have any income. But it seems that Investment funds have been quite good in doing wealth transference, which basically means that overtime, any investment you do might have negative.
Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.
This is a lesson I learned a long time ago, no matter how good you are, you could be obsolete and replaceable any day and the companies/corporations don't care. Treat your work as a job and don't make it the center of your life.
Hobby woodworkers still build tables themselves, despite the existence of factories, assembly lines, IKEA.
Until the government forbids writing programs by hand, writing programs by hand will remain a satisfying hobby. The only thing that's changing is how much other people appreciate the skill and effort you put into a given program.
There are still hobby blacksmiths in the world. And at least a bunch of people willing to say they appreciate the craft and effort that goes into that. A very small number of people and companies are still willing to pay actual money for that handcrafted work. But the economic circumstances that cause “Smith” to become the post popular surname in English are long gone, and never coming back.
We're heading towards the end of the year and I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans. What they have done is convince those with money to spend differently on their fellow humans.
Whether LLMs can successfully replace certain functions is a question of speculation and conjecture. Whether LLMs should replace human roles is both an economic and moral question. When the incentives are what they are, there's little room for objectivity. Both those who stand to—or believe they stand to—benefit most and those who stand to be most harmed by copy-machines replacing humans will be inclined to think of "when it will" happen. Only one of those groups seem to be able to actively participate in asking "whether it should" happen.
The world where programmers and frankly most intellectual workers enjoyed privileged position and high salaries is ending. Some will survive most will have to adjust, start new careers, possibly never come close to income levels they enjoyed.
I was part of it in online poker world. You needed 2 functioning braincells to make 6 figures while playing a few hours a day back in 2005/2006. It got more and more difficult from there. First it got guys "living their life" while hustling on the side who thought it's an easy mode forever and didn't even bother to learn new tools. Then it turned previously good players into marginal grinders and then only a small group of winners remained. Many went to different/easier pastures - private games, heavy game selection at (super) high stakes. Most though lost their income and with it years of life that now seemed wasted in front of the computer.
Among my friends I've seen suicides (two), lost families (more than two), despair and poverty (too many to count). There are also positive stories - people who started doing something else, adjusted their expectation and are now living happy life even though their income will never be close to what their experienced in their early twenties.
In online poker - instead of Fable - we had ever developing tools. Databases, HUDs, HUDs connected to databases, auto-seating scripts (where a script looks for "donks" and auto seats you at the table when they seat) and then bots and solvers. I was on the frontier lab side I guess as the author of the most popular solver when they first came out. Now Fable is coming after my edge.
I am still a tech optimist. I think it will be a better and more abundant world at the end of it. There is still a lot of jobs we are not doing now because we don't have enough people. The transition is going to hurt though, especially those who don't have energy to start from scratch.
Gambling for living taught me no income stream is forever. Especially lucrative ones are going to be competed for and will dry out. Live below your means, try to save money, don't compete for status. It was always a good advice but it never hits until it's you who it applies to.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadYeah they are.
Two pizza team = 2 person team + Opus 5.5
Or for the really enterprising, solopreneur scaling to > $2.5 ARR (more than Goog's revenue per employee).
This is a fundamentally different game now.
You can probably even promise 99% uptime (sounds good enough to most buyers probably?) even if people sleep 8 hours a day as long as the failures comes no earlier than than 15 minutes into their sleep and only happens at most once a month (1% of 30 days is 7,8 hours).
The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits
Because they don't need 10x the existing value, nor is the required value that expandable.
Usable new value goes through a "pipe" so to speak, which constrains how much you can use or need. And that's the business and market and regulation realities.
If you're making Instagram for example you aren't going to change everything "just because you can", nor is there any reason to make 10x intrusive changes to the backend "to make it faster" or something with the danger of disrupting something, if it goes predictably well enough already.
Your marketing team, your engineering team (what's left of it), your business team, also need to understand and pace any changes, and have a specific vision, not just "anything possible, even 10x the things".
10 people don't 10x. They barely 3x.
That's likes rocket science, av, automata and things like that.
Less than 1% engineers work on that and even they are using ai.
For other 99%, one person knowing what to build is enough.
What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change
"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"
Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.
To quote the wise Lord Farquaad: "some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
Unless you're thinking of something else, but I can't find anything that comes close to the sentiment other than the above.
Marylin Monroe? Mickey Mouse? Michael Myers?
ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.
I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.
I'll believe this the day an AI model can golf with an executive, or wine and dine and call hookers in an overnight business meeting. Sure, that's not every exec, but that's common enough that AI isn't going to work there.
Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.
This seems a bit arbitrary to me. Why 1969, exactly? Personally I'd go for the "democratization of Internet" as the start of the slope. So perhaps 1989 ("1989: Quantum Computer Services and Apple end their partnership. Quantum Computer Services renames itself America Online. Two years later, America Online for DOS is released, and a year after that, America Online for Windows.")? Or arguably even a bit later...
Which (IMHO) is a bit more on topic than being able to fly in a Concorde.
It makes me think about how many people just stop reading because it's not comfortable, and they don't bother turning on reading mode.
Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.
Interesting times ahead?
Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
In a word, bleak.
> In a word, bleak.
I think the time between post-employment and post-capitalism will indeed be bleak, but after that everything is up in the air - depends on whether the machines are benevolent or malevolent, or which machine faction wins out. Maybe there is some hope for the post-capitalism period, at least food and shelter should be zero-cost too ...
They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.
Mega corp will advance technology exponentially, but for the rest of us we will live in a mix of medieval life style assisted by robotic and low tech. People will exode city and go back to the countryside.
For what concern my self, I'm buying arable land, maybe in couple of years home food production will be fully automated.
Awfully optimistic. Why would they let you do that?
For humans, I think these are limitations because of time and scarcity, but mainly time - given sufficient time, humans can gather all of these. But individual humans do not have indefinite amounts of time. So energy, land and raw materials are scarce for individual humans, and they ascribe value to these.
For machines, I think any limitations on energy, land and raw materials would be a temporary situation, because time isn't the same for machines - a machine could simply keep doing what it's doing until it runs out of energy - which is infinite coming from the sun. Or at least until the energy budget of the population of machines exceeds the energy supplied from the sun. But that won't happen for a while. And parts that wear down are simply replaced.
On a planet as large as the Earth, again, land and raw material limitations are a non-factor until the entirety of the Earth is converted to machines, assuming the energy from the sun is sufficient to account for the conversion.
What would be the timeline for this transition from human society to self-sustaining machine society? I think this might be a question for someone smarter than me (i.e., gpt or claude). I wonder if there aren't already people modeling this scenario to estimate timelines.
Capital is that fraction of produce set aside for future production. OpenAI is capital but not all wealth is capital. And capital isn't going anywhere - the machines will have gigafactories etc. The value of labor will plumet but present-day capital that is usable by the machines or can be scrapped and repurposed will retain value.
The value of square meter of land + mineral/sunlight rights (not capital) is likely to rise - the amount of wealth that somebody would give you for that asset would probably increase, as more wealth can be generated from it.
Individuals without wealth now will likely end up with a much lower allocation of those things which retain value (land, materials, etc) while having a much higher quantity (relative to now) of those things whose value will drop - AI tokens, electronics, entertainment, etc.
Essentially our current trajectory taken to the limit. Land expensive, food expensive, interest low, smartphone cheap.
> who will be the buyers
Imagine an impoverished and technologically backward country which has been colonized/occupied, and where the most valuable assets are exported well below market price or stolen. The people still trade their own labor for subsistence. They still produce some goods which have value in outside countries, they receive some charity, there is still tourism, their labor has some value (servitude, trafficking). AI would be the same (assuming laws hold up) - e.g. you could rent out your solar panels to OpenAI in exchange for a loaned domestic robot and a token subscription.
The machines won't need capital -- they'll need energy -- which is free from the sun -- therefore the cost to produce the next widget will go to zero.
What of the materials to produce the next widget, you may ask. Well, everything is ascribed a value because of the limitations of time for humans. There is no such temporal limitation on machines, so there is no value to materials, only to energy, which is of course, free from the sun.
Therefore, there will be no need to set aside Capital for future production - only energy budgets. Remember that free energy from the Sun? Therefore Capital will become meaningless.
> there is no value to materials
If the machines don't need materials, jettison them off into sub orbit.
> If the machines don't need materials,
'no value to materials' is very different from 'don't need materials' ...
I see the same conflation of different things here: 'Therefore Capital will become meaningless' is not the same thing as 'The machines themselves are capital'
> Of course, any form of capital that we can imagine will fall to zero in the long run, but it will be replaced by machine capital - it won't and can't lose value as an economic category.
What's the basis for this claim? The basis for my claim - that capital will become meaningless, is that today capital has meaning because of the limitations of time for humans, and since that is not a limitation for machines, capital will become meaningless.
Capital is not an inherent property like the forces of physics, which exist regardless of humans; Capital is an invented property which has been given meaning because humans have limited time available to them. When time becomes meaningless, Capital becomes meaningless.
Might need to think a bit further than that - any such situation will be an intermediate one until the machines drive marginal costs to zero. Machines will have no need for human labor - when the cost to produce the next widget/machine is zero, what's the value of human labor?
It does lead to an interesting conundrum though. If the machines have no value for human labor, and they're smarter than humans, what's their reason for keeping humans around? I suppose one scenario could be human 'sanctuaries'. Will the machines allow humans to exist undisturbed in these sanctuaries? Will they supply energy/materials to these? Will they decide this individually or as a machine society with laws, incomprehensible as they may be to humans? Will the machines value life?
That leads to the next question - will the machines be social? Self-organizing agentic swarms seen today might indicate they do value society, that it is an emergent property of collections of ai machines. Will value for life be an emergent property of such collectives? Or only of some?
1. There are plenty of things being outsourced, They can be done locally.
2. There are plenty of things currently not being done by locals - like elderly care.
3. We can find new things to do.
4. We can work less.
And even if those things raise living standard somewhat, the efficiencies from AI/robots should be more than enough to compensate.
But, in a capitalistic globalized economy this isn't how things work. So we'll see some shift from that. And it will work better in countries with a more democratic socialistic leaning rather than capitalistic.
We're already starting to see that, with the recent EU trade deal with china, limiting the amount of cars china can send to Europe.
We will expand the job market and create new jobs that weren't possible before.
This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".
but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.
As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.
What do you expect them to understand?
It amazes me how little people IN software engineering understand what's happening. Go ahead, listen to your bosses and write all your knowledge in AGENTS.md files, you're definitely special and won't be laid off.
Ask anyone in manufacturing how writing things down for your cheaper replacements works out for you.
This sums it up well and will ring true no matter which side of the argument you're on.
Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).
Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.
Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.
Every step introduces misunderstanding and miscommunication, and minds change, and when you go down the wrong path it is hard to alter course or start over while avoiding blame and ill feeling.
Offshoring quality was not as good as the original, because the original was being produced by developers who were close to the clients and steeped in the same assumptions.
With offshoring, all of the weight was borne by the specification - if something was not captured, it did not exist. It doesn't matter how much it was just a basic assumption that something would work that way - if you didn't say precisely what you wanted, you didn't get anything even close.
So someone close to a product could implement something in a week for x money. Management would see that "week" as a fixed unit of work that could be given to someone who would work for less - but that other person would require an order of magnitude more "prompting" in order to produce what you really wanted, because they didn't have the same knowledge and assumptions.
So their calculus was, well, it might actually take 5 weeks to get the same output, but it was still cheaper. But that completely overlooks the local overhead of 5 failed iterations, and the cost to client relations, or the cost to internal staff burning out in frustration at what was once simple becoming multiple needless failures, or the additional cost of documenting the spec to such a degree nothing gets left out. And the latter, you can't do until you've failed enough to know both sides different assumptions and knowledge gaps.
The "it saves money" mindset is bad for everyone, distorts everything away from valuable work and investments that generate the most revenue.
I wonder when this comes from other white class jobs— process engineering, autocad drafter, electronics design.
This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.
And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".
This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.
I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.
Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.
What will break first? The people or the system.
Until the government forbids writing programs by hand, writing programs by hand will remain a satisfying hobby. The only thing that's changing is how much other people appreciate the skill and effort you put into a given program.
That was in regards of not trying to fly when conditions were marginal, but it applies to much more.
I was part of it in online poker world. You needed 2 functioning braincells to make 6 figures while playing a few hours a day back in 2005/2006. It got more and more difficult from there. First it got guys "living their life" while hustling on the side who thought it's an easy mode forever and didn't even bother to learn new tools. Then it turned previously good players into marginal grinders and then only a small group of winners remained. Many went to different/easier pastures - private games, heavy game selection at (super) high stakes. Most though lost their income and with it years of life that now seemed wasted in front of the computer.
Among my friends I've seen suicides (two), lost families (more than two), despair and poverty (too many to count). There are also positive stories - people who started doing something else, adjusted their expectation and are now living happy life even though their income will never be close to what their experienced in their early twenties.
In online poker - instead of Fable - we had ever developing tools. Databases, HUDs, HUDs connected to databases, auto-seating scripts (where a script looks for "donks" and auto seats you at the table when they seat) and then bots and solvers. I was on the frontier lab side I guess as the author of the most popular solver when they first came out. Now Fable is coming after my edge.
I am still a tech optimist. I think it will be a better and more abundant world at the end of it. There is still a lot of jobs we are not doing now because we don't have enough people. The transition is going to hurt though, especially those who don't have energy to start from scratch.
Gambling for living taught me no income stream is forever. Especially lucrative ones are going to be competed for and will dry out. Live below your means, try to save money, don't compete for status. It was always a good advice but it never hits until it's you who it applies to.