alt Hacker NewsAs if there will be hiring in the fullness of time.
There will come a day when you can will an entire business into existence at the press of a button. Maybe it has one or two people overseeing the business logic to make sure it doesn't go off the rails, but the point is that this is a 100x reduction in labor and a 100,000x speed up in terms of delivery.
They'll price this as a $1M button press.
Suddenly, labor capital cannot participate in the market anymore. Only financial capital can.
Suddenly, software startups are no longer viable.
This is coming.
The means of production are becoming privatized capital outlays, just like the railroads. And we will never own again.
There is nothing that says our careers must remain viable. There is nothing that says our output can remain competitive, attractive, or in demand. These are not laws.
Knowledge work may be a thing of the past in ten years' time. And the capital owners and hyperscalers will be the entirety of the market.
If we do not own these systems (and at this point is it even possible for open source to catch up?), we are fundamentally screwed.
I strongly believe that people not seeing this - downplaying this - are looking the other way while the asteroid approaches.
This. Is. The. End.
Replies
Oh are compilers going away? Or personal computers for that matter?
If the barrier to button-pressed companies goes that high up, the cost to run/consume the product also goes up. Making hand-rolled products cheaper.
Slower paced to roll out things? Sure.
That's the precarious balance these LLMs providers have to make. They can't just move on without the people feeding it data and value. The machine is not perpetual.
That AI would happily turn us all into paperclips to burnish its perf numbers.
The degree to which any business is sociopathic or psychopathic towards humans will be the limiting factor.
Microsoft is already working on turning the trust of their users into as many paperclips as possible
And never forget that we collectively cheered it on as the asteroid's crater got deeper and wider.
This is pure fantasy. Even if LLM's eventually became this capable (they will not), your whole scenario doesn't make sense any sense.
What is far more likely is that governments use AI to oppress their citizens with robots and drones. That is the thing to be scared of.
In the words of Mark Fisher (in the words of Zizek?): it seems that its easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
There could be opportunities we haven't anticipated.
What if labor organizes around human work and consumers are willing to pay the premium?
At that point, it's an arms race against the SotA models in order to deepen the resolution and harden the security mechanisms for capturing the human-affirming signals produced during work. Also, lowering the friction around verification.
In that timeline, workers would have to wear devices to monitor their GSR and record themselves on video to track their PPG. Inconvenient, and ultimately probably doomed, but it could extend or renew the horizon for certain kinds of knowledge work.