alt Hacker News"Normal tech" puts people out of careers every so often, and kinda randomly. Society has benefited as everyone who isn't put out of a job significantly outnumbers those who are.
I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.
I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level.
Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.
Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).
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> I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models.
That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".
> The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).
Yes, I'm still waiting for that. It's gonna lift productivity in what's a large sector in most economies. Of course, most companies will have to re-organise their processes to take full advantage, because eg truck drivers also perform all kinds of ad hoc labour around loading and unloading.
> LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.
I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.
> I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models
Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.
> But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.
The first agricultural revolution would have been one guy planting seeds with the expectation that edible crops would grow. That led to a huge population boom, but not to cities.
The industrial revolution didn't have the mechanics you're imagining. People left the country for cities because work was available in cities, not because it wasn't available at home. Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required, but that push factor never meant the surplus labor could leave. You can't leave without somewhere to go to.
>I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time.
You don't seem to get it. If what you said is true then the only reason why your job is gone first is because software moves faster than hardware. The chain reaction to get rid of all jobs has started.
After all, you can now automate the development of physical hardware including robots and their control algorithms. Then all we need to do is give the AI a job shop and mechanical engineering is done next.
And so on. Until every single job is gone.
We haven't really been able to figure out the responsibility thing properly yet. I'm ok with AI/LLMs but not so much on agentic stuff, a human always needs to be in the loop. If there's anything we learned from Robocop, is the need of a human decision maker. I'm not okay with a fully agentic radiology AI or a fully autonomous surgery robot, without a surgeon supervising.