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Its really weird how you all are begging to be replaced by llms, you think if agentic workflows get good enough you're going to keep your job? Or not have your salary reduced by 50%?

If Agents get good enough it's not going to build some profitable startup for you (or whatever people think they're doing with the llm slot machines) because that implies that anyone else with access to that agent can just copy you, its what they're designed to do... launder IP/Copyright. Its weird to see people get excited for this technology.

None of this good. We are simply going to have our workforces replaced by assets owned by Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. We'll all be fighting for the same barista jobs, or miserable factory jobs. Take note on how all these CEOs are trying to make it sound cool to "go to trade school" or how we need "strong American workers to work in factories".

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> Its really weird how you all are begging to be replaced by llms, you think if agentic workflows get good enough you're going to keep your job? Or not have your salary reduced by 50%?

The computer industry (including SW) has been in the business of replacing jobs for decades - since the 70's. It's only fitting that SW engineers finally become the target.

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I think a lot of people assume they will become highly paid Agent orchestrators or some such. I don't think anyone really knows where things are heading.
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I’m someone who’d like to deploy a lot more workers than I want to manage.

Put another way, I’m on the capital side of the conversation.

The good news for labor that has experience and creativity is that it just started costing 1/100,000 what it used to to get on that side of the equation.

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If LLMs truly cause widespread replacement of labor, you’re screwed just as much as anyone else. If we hit say 40% unemployment do you think people will care you own your home or not? Do you think people will care you have currency or not? The best case outcome will be universal income and a pseudo utopia where everyone does ok. The “bad” scenario is widespread war.

I am one of the “haves” and am not looking forward to the instability this may bring. Literally no one should.

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I agree with you and have similar thoughts (maybe, unfortunately for me). I personally know people who outsource not just their work, but also their life to LLMs, and reading their exciting comments makes me feel a mix of cringe, fomo and dread. But what is the engame for me and you likes, when we finally would be evicted from our own craft? Stash money while we still can, watching 'world crash and burn', and then go and try to ascend in some other, not yet automated craft?
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Yeah, that's a good question that I can't stop thinking about. I don't really enjoy much else other than building software, its genuinely my favorite thing to do. Maybe there will be a world where we aren't completely replaced, we have handmade clothes still after all that are highly coveted. I just worry its going to uproot more than just software engineering, theoretically it shouldn't be hard to replace all low hanging fruit in the realm of anything that deals with computer I/O. Previous generations of automation have created new opportunities for humans, but this seems mostly just as a means of replacement. The advent of mass transportation/vehicles created machines who needed mechanics (and eventually software), I don't see that happening in this new paradigm.

I don't think that's going to make society very pleasant if everyone's fighting over the few remaining ways to make livelihood. People need to work to eat. I certainly don't see the capitalist class giving everyone UBI and letting us garden or paint for the rest of our lives. I worry we're likely going to end up in trenches or purged through some other means.

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Most folks don't seem to think that far down the line, or they haven't caught on to the reality that the people who actually make decisions will make the obvious kind of decisions (ex: fire the humans, cut the pay, etc) that they already make.
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they think they're going to be the person making that decision

but forgot there's likely someone above them making exactly the same one about them

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You don't hate AI, you hate capitalism. All the problems you have listed are not AI issues, its this crappy system where efficiency gains always end up with the capital owners.
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Well I honestly think this is the solution. It's much harder to do French Revolution V2 though if they've used ML to perfect people's recommendation algorithms to psyop them into fighting wars on behalf of capitalists.

I imagine llm job automation will make people so poor that they beg to fight in wars, and instead of turning that energy against he people who created the problem they'll be met with hours of psyops that direct that energy to Chinese people or whatever.

We will see.

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