alt Hacker NewsHow do you feel about software engineers who build open source libraries?
Open source has been responsible for enormous productivity boosts in our industry, because we don't all have to build duplicates of exactly the same thing time and time again.
But think of all of the jobs that were lost by people who would otherwise been employed building the 500th version of a CSS design system, or a template engine, or code to handle website logins!
What makes AI tools different? (And I actually do agree that they feel different, but I'm interested in hearing arguments stronger than "it feels different".)
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Because beforehand engineers could be reasonably confident that their work would simply accelerate a the growth of a growing pie; today, most expect that further development will be used, first and foremost, to replace labor. Most sectors do not grow indefinitely, so there's no reason to assume software has to.
To put it gently, yes it feels different: for people who haven't already saved a lifetime of SWE wages, this is the first credible threat to the sector in which they're employed since the dot com bubble. People need to work to eat.
Previously, open source software didn't contribute to automating away jobs, at least not at scale. Open Source libraries weren't potentially maintaining themselves (I know we aren't there yet, but that seems to be the goal).
You cannot compare any open source software, even as a whole, to the impact that LLMs have had on labor and are projected too. However, I might now argue it would have been better to not have so much open source, as its clearly being processed through these plagiarism laundering training regimes.
I don't really think LLMs, robotics and ML in general are going to increase GDP globally, they will instead just replace the inputs that were maintain the status quo (the workers). If they can't successfully replace human labor, it will at minimum greatly reduce its value, which is extremely dangerous.
Jobs grew greatly during the last 30 years of open source development but over the last 16 months we've had 350-400k SWE layoffs in the last 16 months in the USA. Many of these layoffs have been directly correlated to AI enhanced productivity. 25% of recent college graduates are unemployed. Jobs data is super unreliable at the moment, but we also will see large swaths of the lower skilled sectors, customer service for example, see huge layoffs in the coming 24 months.
Despite what C-Suites say about AI giving them more free time for their hobbies or whatever, they've yet to answer how people are going to afford those hobbies. Working as a barista lol? These same mouthpieces will say that llms are going to allow the same amount of engineers to get 10x more done, but they're not reflecting that in their business decisions. They are laying people off in swaths when equities are at all time highs, its abnormal.
I think its more likely the ruling classes will give us something to do by making us so poor that young men will beg to go fight wars. Put us to use on behalf of their conquest for more resources, that certainly did the trick in the 20s, 30s and 40s :/
Of course comparing open source and AI is like comparing apples and oranges, but the question makes a lot of sense. Just the first thing that comes to mind: open source is about transparency whereas LLMs are opaque by nature. This is a radical shift and challenge for engineering and has consequences way beyond it.
It's about the role of technologies in evolution, responsibility versus utilitarian take, etc. It should be developed and discussed seriously, but not in a buried sub-thread.