> increases in worker productivity at best increase demand for labor, and at worst result in massive disruption - they never result in the same pay for less manual work.
Exactly. Strongly agree with that. This closed world assumption never holds. We would only do less work if nothing else changes. But of course everything changes when you lower the price of creating software. It gets a lot cheaper. So, now you get a lot of companies suddenly considering doing things that previously would be too expensive. This still takes skills and expertise they don't have. So, they get people involved doing that work. Maybe they'll employ some of those but the trend is actually to employ things that are core to your company.
And that's just software creation. Everything else is going to change as well. A lot of software we use is optimized for humans. Including all of our development tools. Replacing all that with tools more suitable for automatic driving by AI is an enormous amount of work.
And we have decades worth of actively used software that requires human operators currently. If you rent a car, some car rental companies still interface with stuff written before I was born. And I'm > 0.5 century old. Same with banks, airline companies, insurers, etc. There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that. Along with all the stuff for which the ambition level just went up by 10x. And all the rest.
> There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that.
I don’t think typing code was ever the problem here. I’m doubtful this got any cheaper.
There's a big difference between typing assembler, cobol or whatever; or typing something more modern in terms of what the resulting code does. And also there's a good reason why programmers aren't paid in characters/words/lines/bytes whatever per hour: they are mostly not typing but thinking. The amount of thinking they do is a constant. The amount of typing they do is a constant. But there's a big step change in productivity for the resulting stuff.
Exactly. Strongly agree with that. This closed world assumption never holds. We would only do less work if nothing else changes. But of course everything changes when you lower the price of creating software. It gets a lot cheaper. So, now you get a lot of companies suddenly considering doing things that previously would be too expensive. This still takes skills and expertise they don't have. So, they get people involved doing that work. Maybe they'll employ some of those but the trend is actually to employ things that are core to your company.
And that's just software creation. Everything else is going to change as well. A lot of software we use is optimized for humans. Including all of our development tools. Replacing all that with tools more suitable for automatic driving by AI is an enormous amount of work.
And we have decades worth of actively used software that requires human operators currently. If you rent a car, some car rental companies still interface with stuff written before I was born. And I'm > 0.5 century old. Same with banks, airline companies, insurers, etc. There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that. Along with all the stuff for which the ambition level just went up by 10x. And all the rest.