People here in these comments are largely just naive or unable to understand things outside of some nerd fantasy or something. If white collar jobs become untenable, the economy will just collapse. The idea people will suddenly go to the trades and work on "solar power" as someone said just mind-numbing nonsense. It would be a very unstable situation and "pulling wire for the county" would not be the main focus of the day.
So people working in white collar jobs are holding the economy hostage? That's basically your point. But society has shown it is far more resilient than narratives like this would make you believe. We seem to have survived through a lot events such as the 2008 crash and covid as recent examples. And yet there is no "collapse" except in the most extreme cases. Even some countries that are in war have not yet "collapsed".
The west has transitioned away from a manufacturing economy into a service economy. We gave China all the manufacturing while we (the US) transitioned into a 'service' economy. Once the service economy is run by AI, there will be no jobs here. Manufacturing ain't coming back...well maybe once everyone is impoverished and willing to work 40 hours a week for their bread ration.
Grandparent poster is making the claim that the economy is structured in a certain way. Their claim is that simply dismantling the existing structure of labour and economy is something that will have a very negative effect.
Also the COVID part is a false analogy / non sequitur. COVID was expected to end. Surviving COVID doesn't mean the economy can survive permanent shocks.
Everything either eventually ends or we adapt, and Covid shut down a lot of blue collar work. Society is resilient and has proven to be many times over not just with Covid.
> The idea people will suddenly go to the trades and work on "solar power" as someone said just mind-numbing nonsense.
That is pretty obvious and mostly correct idea. I don't understand why people who have even a little bit of common sense about how the economy works thinks that mass layoffs of programmers or office workers will destroy the economy.
Do you realize that there is software out there that are not simple React apps? The models are clearly advanced but I think the world is a lot more complex than you seem to think.
I have basically vibe-coded a guidance system for air defence interceptors in 6 weeks. It works. Took getting my hands dirty with soldering and some mechanical work to test, but Cursor was guiding me on even that. And i started with understanding concepts like "what is a quaternion" and "why doesn't an infrared camera have a concept of exposure time even as it does have a framerate".
I had a "wow it can vibe code a React app" moment 1.5 years ago. AI evolved a lot since.
I admit i had to hire contractors to do designs for 3D printing. I don't know how to outsource it to AI yet, maybe i can't.
If you a degree already, you don't necessarily have to go for four years for another degree, you will have to take the courses for your major and a small amount of additional requirements versus a first degree.
What are you talking about? Why do you call out "Western world," this seems like the reflexive idea of the left that the West is some brutish downtrodden hellhole. What's weird is what you are describing is the opposite. It is much more common in the West to be able to change your career than in the East, by an enormous margin. In many places in the East, a tremendous amount of career possibilities are removed from kids from tests they take having barely begun puberty. How many Adam Steltzner's do you think there are outside of the West? What are we talking about? As far as your specific situation with 2012, I have no idea but this is not laid at the feet of the Western world.
Maybe you should ask AI to review your statistics and reasoning. A large amount of 16-22 year old kids are in school. And retirees 80+ are retired. I don't see how any of this is relevant to the idea of what would happen to the economy if there is an employment collapse. I don't know that this would also seem like a utopian dream to someone in the 1800s; I'm not sure what that means. I think someone from the 1800s would be surprised by a great many things and that statistic would probably be low on their list.
Are you a programmer because this doesn't logically follow. An LLM can be trained on a book but that doesn't mean it will perfectly implement the principles "learned" in in that book for all future prompts and problems. Also, I think what is more fundamentally being said here is more about you as the potential reader, yes you can prompt the AI for something and it will give you a response but it will likely not give you a complete enough of a response that would confer upon you an equivalent level of understanding as an expert for your use-case.
Volume 1 is actually a really good book. Randall Hyde is a great author on this subject. HN has changed a lot from what it once was. It's just filled with a lot of this kind of snark and nonsense. What else would you expect when the most common take on AI on HN is this insane idea that "LLMs are just like a compiler was?" But, its not everyone. If you're interested in this topic then I think it will be worth working through.
I think there is more in this world than is dreamt of in your philosophy. The crowd on HN now is very different than it used to be rest assured there are many people self-teach themselves the equivalent of a university curriculum. I mean, nerds actually exists, they're not all humdrum corpo worker bees trying the maximize their employers' value and then just hiking or whatever.
reply