alt Hacker NewsThe bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build. The more of the latter they can take on, the fewer knowledge workers are needed at all. So rather than 5% of every knowledge worker's salary going into tokens, 100% of the knowledge worker's total employment cost goes into tokens and you get a 20x productivity boost as a theoretical minimum across those tasks.
That's the game. There's a view you could take of this that this is just a growing of the pie: with those cost dynamics a lot more "small businesses" get a vast amount of leverage, so the overall economy grows without replacing the knowledge workers. I'm not sure I trust the MBA class to have that view.
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This is the same argument that has been historically made for outsourcing developers. Get 20 more devs for the cost of 1 dev in the US.
I suspect that AI will fail to pan out to the same extent for the same reason why outsourcing hasn't fully panned out (even though every company tries it after getting big enough).
The problems that will come up will be and always have been ongoing maintenance. AI is great at writing new code without a brain behind it, but once you get to the point where you need to refactor code, you start really needing someone with coding experience to guide the AI or veto it's mistakes.
I don't think that's really fixable even with a lot better AI. It's not something that ultimately comes out of the likes of github data.
I'm not saying that AI isn't going to make things better, btw, I just don't think we'll see a 20x improvement. Probably more like 1.5 or 2x.
Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs?
It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class of independently wealthy people.
Producing a thing has always been cheap since personal computers existed. From mail-order software companies' times to SaaS times, producing a sellable MVP was an initial cost that is relatively small compared to the later cost of expansion and maintenance. Marketing and selling was and still is the hardest part.
Why do you think of knowledge workers as a fungible commodity?
What makes you think the people who used to build (or would have built) software will switch into the industry of "knowing that the thing was the right thing to build", as opposed to something cooler like surgery, city planning or experimental physics? The roles within a tech company are not the only jobs in the world.
> The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build
“There’s more capital than good ideas to fund” has been a complaint from the likes of A16z & other VCs for a long time now. It’s why we ended up with stuff like NFTs getting funded.
If knowledge workers get laid off in mass, you can expect political curbs on AI adoption.
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>The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build
I would argue that that's been the case for quite some time before AI. As an example, what innovative amazing world-changing products have Google or Meta launched in the past decade with their very high numbers of very talented and highly-compensated engineers? The issue with most big tech companies are leadership, strategy, and product direction. I'm not saying that they don't make any profits, just that they probably aren't "building [the right thing]".
AI for product development and management would be far more impactful than automating rote coding tasks / building React UIs that mirror API structures IMO.