alt Hacker NewsBut when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers?
In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?
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Wake me up when a peer reviewed study finds even a 2X increase in senior developer productivity
With farming, you couldn't just start your own farm, because it requires farmland, and there's only so much of that. But those 6 software engineers can start their own companies, fire up their own team of agents. There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.
There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work.
Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work.
For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!
They build tractors, or sell tractors, or work in agricultural research and development...
>what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers?
They need to go into business for themselves, and become capital owners, who benefit from AI, not workers who are replaced by it. AI won't be able to compete at entrepreneurship unless robots are given autonomy and property rights like humans, which is quite unlikely to happen any time soon.
Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.