alt Hacker NewsThe fear in most people is not of losing the job, but of losing their value in the market as ai raises the floor of capabilities of other people competing for the same job.
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I think the main fear is that the (assumed) increase of productivity means that employers may require less employees, resulting to less positions in the market. But I don't think that expertise is no longer relevant or we see getting more people hired with less expertise because AI. If anything, there is this talk about companies not hiring junior engineers as much. Moreover, as getting the expertise could become harder, it could become more of a moat.
I'm far above that floor so I'm not worried.
What worries me is the job is transforming into something that a different type of person than me enjoys.
I think you've misidentified the fear.
People worry about losing their jobs in a market that hires fewer people (because AI makes doing more work easier) but not about losing their jobs because they can't keep up.
The whole point of AI is that you can't meaningfully fall behind. If you ever did, you could ask AI to get you up to speed again. The tech that automates work and effort is not something you need work and effort to use.
Similarly, I don't currently have a bread machine. I am not falling behind in baking skills to people who do, because I could always, at literally any point, get a bread machine and hit the exact same productivity level.
Because losing their value in the market means they'll lose their job.
What I actually fear is more subtle: I already do a fair bit of project management and technical leadership. I could do more. Sure, I'd miss the coding, but I also enjoy a lot of the stuff around it.
But the goal is to expand what the AI can do in each generation. At this point, Fable 5 can ace almost any greenfield project a skilled developer might have written in a few days. But it's bad at refactoring, bad at keeping the code clean as it goes, and bad at discovering new insights as it codes. So Anthropic will train Fable 6, using benchmarks like SlopCodeBench that test maintenance over time.
Now what about project management? Train Fable 7. What about product management and talking to stakeholders? Train Fable 8. What about market research and sales? Train Fable 9.
By this point, Anthropic doesn't need to actually release these newest models to the public. Why, that might be dangerous! Instead, they write, "deisgn [sic] a successful software product and sell it plz." And they spin up a million dollars worth of compute and let it crank out SaaSes, iPhone apps, etc., driving entire software companies out of business.
Then they spin up some more instances, and say, "make robot plz" and "try a thousand ways to make yrself smrater." I mean, Qwen and DeepSeek keep finding ways to pack more smarts into a given number of weights. Fable 9 will likely be able to do the same. Hell, Fable 5 can probably run 1,000 machine learning experiments now, just grinding through ideas the way ChatGPT's internal models grind through proofs.
And this is my problem. If it were just programmers losing their jobs, well, sometimes professions die. But what makes you think it will stop with us? How far will this go in the next 4 years? The next 20?