alt Hacker NewsSoftware engineers have spent the last 40 years automating away other people's jobs. The discomfort only seems to start when the automation points inward.
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Have they? I keep seeing this little snippet of wisdom being thrown about everywhere in these AI discussions as a gotcha, but to me it seems like moving jobs into dirt cheap 3rd world countries with slave labor is the biggest culprit for job loss than any kind of automation from software.
If anything software engineers have spawned in uncountable numbers of jobs that never would've existed before, is what my intuition tells me.
Haven't mechanical engineers done the same thing (steam engines, trains,...)? The whole applied science is about using knowledge to remove tediousness (and now adding it back). A lot of jobs have been removed.
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I want to make people’s jobs easier and more interesting, I never want to make them redundant.
This did happen once. 3 people were laid off, I think directly based on things I said to drive the completion of some automation. That was the last time I ever measured something in man-hours to make a point. I’ll never do it again. That was over 12 years ago.