Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

I do embedded development, I've tried a ton of models and all of them end up hallucinating and wasting my time with the very obscure and undocumented things I work with every day. Maybe if you're in webdev land, AI will replace you, I don't know I have as much hope in AI as I had in website builders and no-code platforms

No.

We are in an hype fase. VC's pump money into it because it is the current hype, before this it was NFT's and crypto. The fase "AI" or a better name for it is LLM or GenAI will also pass. VC money will run out. There is no real business model yet that can support the enormous amounts of resources needed to train it and to run them.

Hardware is not fast enough yet.. it could be sustainable when it runs locally on my hardware. Till that time I see this as another hype we shouldn't pay a lot of attention to.

I sure as hell hope so.

If you are a framework junkie that cannot write original logic or standup some small original application you are already largely irrelevant but your employer just hasn’t determined how to replace you. Everybody else pays the price for that inefficiency.

Software is littered with developers that cannot program. If there is some magic solution that makes these people suddenly irrelevant the world is in a better place. Consider the manual transcription jobs that instantly evaporated because of photocopying.

Who is “us”?

All software engineers are different.

AI reduces toil and only dumb work (and even struggle at this often in real world).

So if you’re doing dumb work (because of legacy, bureaucracy, poor management or any dumb reason) — yes, you’re going to be obsolete sooner or later.

“Good” news are

a) ai needs another major jump or two to be realistic and scalable tool for dumb work e2e. And those steps are not yet invented.

B) bureaucracy and poor management is stronger than the strongest ai, so there is always be some vacancies even for dumbest work

Marshall Brain explores this idea in a short story, Manna. It is scary, and prescient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)

available free online from the author: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

> I can’t do without the help of AI in my daily development work. I use ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and various AI-driven design platforms. AI can help me improve my efficiency by at least 30%. For some HTML pages or pure algorithm modules, AI code accounts for 80%, and only a small amount of modification is required.

If you replace "AI" with "StackOverflow", would you still feel the same?

At some point in time, AI will become mighty. In certain areas it is already. For example, predictions of failures of machinery.. weather forecasting (Google has a weather model), etc.. what you are talking about as "AI" is LLM. LLM is not AI. It's a part of a lot different technologies and techniques. Also know as machine learning. So please, keep it divided.

LLMs won't replace you in this round at statistically composing text/code. But may be in the next. The best thing about this, still a human is needed to do the reasoning instead of the LLM. But when this can be done (f.e. with a combination of different ML techniques and LLM) then we have to talk what can be done about it.

We can talk now, but each solution for the question "what will happen to working people, when AI rise" is just a game of thoughts and in the end lead to the only conclusion:

You get rid of it and work further OR you stop working and let AI do it for you. It will be in the time of the transition, surely a lot of people will become unemployed. But at some point, the whole economy and money does not make sense anymore. Just imagine AI produces you the parts you need with a 3D printer on your sign. So when we come to this point, we've transformed as society so much, that your question is not important anymore.

(I think in Europe it will be started early to find solutions to the threat, a AI tax or something like this. With this AI tax the people who lost their jobs will be supported..

Amerika, India, Afrika (as example) are the countries where a lot people living in that care by themselves for their lives. No helping state. There will be big problems, as no social/governed safety net existing.)

> AI can help me improve my efficiency by at least 30%

How did you measure it? Did you measure the efficiency that Intellisense, codegen, tools, etc.. provided to you before ChatGPT/copilot and what would be the delta?

Someday - yes. But for now, the rate of improvement of AI has slowed down. They all show that they have beaten another benchmark, but there's no breakthrough similar to GPT-3.5.

No. AI will make most of our current work, Yes. Then we will figure out what we do that AI can't do. That's how tech evolves since always

Bluntly, Yes.

There will be less jobs out there for software engineers since AI can pretty much do them for cheap and very fast, OpenAI talked about driving down the cost of intelligence, and now this is what is happening for all models that are being released.

Right now LLM’s like GPT-4o and Claude have gotten to the intelligence of a mid-level level engineer.

The company I was in was so fascinated by this that they closed job openings for junior employees, laid them off, and are thinking about laying off some senior engineers after carrying out a trial of AI tools like cursor, copilot and others.

I can only imagine the same thing is happening across other companies and especially startups that cannot afford many senior engineers, they will just use AI and only one senior engineer.

Expect more layoffs and less job openings unfortunately.

AI or not, has there ever been a 50 year span in human history where the majority of jobs didn't get redundant? Technology evolves. Newer jobs spring up to replace the ones that were lost. People adjust to the new reality, and our lives are better because of it.

Yes software dev has 10 good years left

> I can’t do without the help of AI

Yikes. Maybe you shouldn’t be in software engineering? Not a great look, professionally.

someday but not too soon.

i fucking love claude 3.5 but i still catch it slippin.

as johnson wang of nvidia said, ai wont replace you, but you will be replaced by people who uses AI.

i think the former will eventually come, but the latter is already here.