alt Hacker NewsI've been on a small adventure of posting more actively on HN since the release of Gemini 3, trying to stir debate around the more “societal” aspects of what's going on with AI.
Regardless of how much you value Cloud Code technically, there is no denying that it has/will have huge impact. If technology knowledge and development are commoditised and distributed via subscription, huge societal changes are going to happen. Image what will happen to Ireland if Accenture dissolves, or what will happen to the millions of Indians when IT outsourcing becomes economically irrelevant. Will Seattle become new Detroit after Microsoft automates Windows maintenance? What about the hairdressers, cooks, lawyers, etc. who provided services for IT labourers/companies in California?
Lot of people here (especially Anthropic-adjacent) like to extrapolate the trends and draw conclusions up to the point when they say that white-collar labourers will not be needed anymore. I would like these people to have courage to take this one step further and connect this resolution with the housing crisis, loneliness epidemic, college debts, and job market crisis for people under 30.
It feels like we are diving head first into societal crisis of unparalleled scale and the people behind the steering wheel are excited to push the accelerator pedal even more.
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I’ve been thinking, what if all this robotics work doesn’t result in AI automating the real world, but instead results in third world slavery without the first world wages or immigration concerns anymore?
Connect the world with reliable internet, then build a high tech remote control facility in Bangladesh and outsource plumbing, electrical work, housekeeping, dog watching, truck driving, etc etc
No AGI necessary. There’s billions of perfectly capable brains halfway around the world.
UBI (from taxing big tech) and retraining. In the U.S they'll have enough money to do this and it will still suck and many people won't recover the extreme loss of status and income (after we've been told our income and status are the most important things in life it's gonna be very hard for people to adapt to the loss of it). Countries like India and Philipines and Ukraine which are basically knowledge support hub without much original knowledge of their own yeah this is gonna be something for sure. Quite depressing.
I don't know, I'm a software engineer and I couldn't care less.
It will have impact on me in the long run, sure, it will transform my job, sure, but I'm confident my skills are engineering-related, not coding-related.
I mean, even if it forces me out of the job entirely, so be it, I can't really do anything if the status quo changes, only adapt.
It’s a class war where one side is publicly, openly, without reservation stating their intent to make people’s skillset built up through decades unemployable (those exact skillsets; may get some other work). The other side, meanwhile, are divided between some camps like the hardline skeptics, the people following the LLM evangelists, the one-man startup-with-LLM crowd, and the people worrying about the societal ramifications.
In other words. Only one side is even fighting the war. The other one is either cheering on the tsunami on or fretting about how their beachside house will get wrecked without making any effort to save themselves.
This is the sort of collective agency that even hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual wages/other compensation in American tech hubs gets us. Pathetic.
I don't buy the huge impact, should already have happened and didn't actually happened by now. The day I'll see all these ai hypers producing products that will replace current gen/old gen products like Windows, Excel etc I will buy it, for now it's just hype and ai dooming