I started to get more curious on this, especially beyond the obligatory “genAI will do everything.”
What are your thoughts on societal impact.
As I see it currently: knowledge work is (surprisingly?) the first group of people seeing massive job losses and replacements from work. In the past “knowledge” was a scarce resource, now the AI delivering knowledge will become the sparse resource. So people owning / hosting it can sell it and make lots of money-> in the current setup this means the few rich in AI will get richer.
In addition letting money work for yourself will also stay (investment) so again rich people will become richer.
Interesting is the question about physical labor. The economics of pushing atoms in the physical world is nowhere near the economics of pushing electrons (bytes), so if you are not part of group 1 (entrepreneurs) or group 2 (investors), doing physical work is something that will earn you some money (I also expect care work to stay, since people will probably prefer for a long time to have humans care for them).
But this means that still group 1 and 2 will be the big winners, paying some money to group 3.
Where do you disagree? Where do you see a different outcome? I’m curious to learn about your thoughts
You will also see long term affects in the industry as the pre-AI generation leaves the market.
It was already hard for entry level developers to break the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle. It is even harder now.
Before there was always some simple busy work that senior developers didn’t have time to do so you would hire a junior level developer who needed to be told exactly what to do. LLMs are already as competent as a junior developer. Why hire them?
I see the next level of hallowing out to be mid level experienced “ticker takers” who just take well defined business use cases off the board and do the work. For non software companies, a lot of that work has already been outsourced to SaaS offerings where businesses hire a consulting company to do the implementation (various ERPs, EHR/EMR systems, Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc)
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