alt Hacker News>On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work. Who wins in the market?
The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.
Replies
it completely depends on the elasticity and shape of the supply and demand curves. Some will choose to reduce headcount, some will choose to build more. Depends on the business and the nature of the industry.
This... It's weird how companies and people think adding something is the same as adding value. Feature creep was an issue even before AI, now we see one worse feature being added after the next (does anyone even know all the touch controls of iOS or even macOS, as an example), with some expectation of that there will be money coming in because of it.
I benefit greatly from AI myself, but I use it to augment my capabilities, not as a slot machine for building things nobody will ever use, which seems to be the norm based on the products I use.
A lot of the fired then make a Discord and casually replicate the company's product.
That's how it will eventually pan out, but I guess the company gets a bag before the collapse.