Comment by tptacek a day ago
Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away. There is no profession with less claim to the moral high ground of worker rights than ours.
Would vim or python be created by a company? It’s hard to see how they take jobs away
Open source software is not just different in the license, it’s different in the design
Linux also doesn’t take jobs away - the majority of contributors are paid by companies, afaik
> Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away.
How true that is depends on what sort of software you write. Very little of what I've accomplished in my career can be fairly described as "automating other people's jobs away".
You're automating the 1's and 0's. There could be millions of people in an assembly like line of buttons, being paid minimum wage to press either the 1 or 0 button to eventually trigger the next operation.
Now all those jobs are gone because of you.
Bit of a tangent but...
Haven't we been automating jobs away since the industrial revolution? I know AI may be an exception to this trend, but at least with classical programming, demand goes up, GDP per capita goes up, and new industries are born.
I mean, there's three ways to get stuff done: do it yourself, get someone else to do it, or get a machine to do it.
#2 doesn't scale, since someone still has to do it. If we want every person to not be required to do it (washing, growing food, etc), #3 is the only way forward. Automation and specialization have made the unthinkable possible for an average person. We've a long way to go, but I don't see automation as a fundamentally bad thing, as long as there's a simultaneous effort to help (especially those who are poor) transition to a new form of working.
We have always automated, because we can.
What is qualitatively different this time is that it affects intellectual abilities - there is nothing higher up in the work "food chain". Replacing physical work you could always argue you'd have time to focus on making decisions. Replacing decision making might mean telling people go sit on the beach and take your universal basic income (UBI) cheque, we don't need you anymore.
Sitting on the beach is not as nice as it sounds for some; if you don't agree, try doing it for 5 years. Most people require work to have some sense of purpose, it gives identity, and it structures their time.
Furthermore, if you replaced lorry drivers with self-driving cars, you'd destroy the most commonly held job in North America as well as South America, and don't tell me that they can be retrained to be AI engineers or social media influencers instead (some can only be on the road, some only want to be on the road).
I agree that we have been able to automate a lot of jobs, but it's not like intellectual jobs have completely replaced physical labor. Electricians, phlebotomists, linemen, firefighters, caregivers, etc, etc, are jobs that current AI approaches don't even scratch. I mean, Boston dynamics has barely been able to get a robot to walk.
So no, we don't need to retrain them to be AI engineers if we have an active shortage of electricians and plumbers. Now, perhaps there aren't enough jobs—I haven't looked at exact numbers—but we still have a long ways to go before I think everything is automated.
Everything being slop seems to be the much more likely issue in my eyes[1].
[1] https://titotal.substack.com/p/slopworld-2035-the-dangers-of...
> as long as there's a simultaneous effort to help (especially those who are poor) transition to a new form of working.
Somehow everyone who says this misses that never in the history of the United States (and most other countries tbh) has this been true.
We just consign people to the streets in industrial quantity. More underserved to act as the lubricant for capitalism.
But... My local library has a job searching program? I have a friend who's learning masonry at a government sponsored training program? It seems the issue is not that resources don't exist, but that these people don't have the time to use them. So it's unfair to say they don't exist. Rather, it seems they're structured in an unhelpful way for those who are working double jobs, etc.
I see capitalism invoked as a "boogey man" a lot, which fair enough, you can make an emotional argument, but it's not specific enough to actually be helpful in coming up with a solution to help these people.
In fact, capitalism has been the exact thing that has lifted so many out of poverty. Things can be simultaneously bad and also have gotten better over time.
I would argue that the biggest issue is education, but that's another tangent...
> So it's unfair to say they don't exist. Rather, it seems they're structured in an unhelpful way for those who are working double jobs, etc.
I'll be sure to alert the next person I encounter working UberEats for slave wages that the resources exist that they cannot use. I'm sure this difference will impact their lives greatly.
Edit: My point isn't that UberEats drivers make slave wages (though they do): My point is that from the POV of said people and others who need the aforementioned resources, whether they don't exist or exist and are unusable is fucking irrelevant.
> Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away.
Depends what you write. What I work on isn't about eliminating jobs at all, if anything it creates them. And like, actual, good jobs that people would want, not, again, paying someone below the poverty line $5 to deliver an overpriced burrito across town.
> "Computers" used to be people! Literally, people.
Not always. Recruitment budgets have limits, so it's a fixed number of employees either providing services to a larger number of customers thanks to software, or serving fewer customers or do so less often without the software.
Thank you for the link, the reference you're making slipped past me. That said, I think my point still holds: software doesn't always have to displace workers, it can also help current employees scale their efforts when bringing on more people isn't possible.
I'm unable and unwilling to shadowbox with what you think I'm actually experiencing.
That's fine; read it as me speaking to the whole thread, not challenging you directly. Technology drives economic productivity; increasing economic productivity generally implies worker displacement. That workers come out ahead in the long run (they have in the past; it's obviously not a guarantee) is besides my point. Software is automating software development away, the same way it automated a huge percentage of (say) law firm billable hours away. We'd better be ready to suck it up!
> Automating jobs away is good for workers. Not bad.
Sure, if you completely disregard the past 200 years or so of history.
I often think about the savage job-destroying nature of the open source community: hundreds of thousands of developers working tirelessly to unemploy as many of their peers as possible by giving away the code they've written for free.
(Interesting how people talk about AI destroying programming jobs all the time, but rarely mention the impact of billions of dollars of code being given away.)