In aggregate it was good for society, but it was a disaster for a lot of people and a lot of areas. This is the theme of e.g. The Grapes of Wrath.
We should welcome automation and efficiency, but also address the situation of the "losers" of the development and not just expect the invisible hand will sort everything out.
Can you elaborate why having a less diverse farming economy is good for every individual? Automation didn’t invent commodities so it’s unrelated to the advent of a food surplus. It might make obtaining surplus easier but it didn’t give more purpose to people by forcing them to sell their land to a bigger corporation. Even if 50% of farmers don’t want to be farmers anymore doesn’t mean they’d gladly give up their job for a recliner and ubi.
200 years ago, 80% of Americans worked in farming. 150 years ago, that was still over half. It’s now under 2%.
If you’ve seen the work hours and work ethic of farmers, it’s safe to say that most of those people got other jobs that take far less work than farmers did/do.
Closer to our field, I think we’d have far worse work lives (fewer of us employed and much lower pay) if we had to code everything in assembler still. The creation of more powerful abstractions and languages allowed more of us to become software devs and make a living this way than if all we had were the less productive tools of the early days of computing.
Many people lost their livelihoods though in each transition. I find each life valuable but that's just me - yes we are better in aggregate long term but in some ways it is paved with their sacrifice.
If we can find a way to support those displaced even that would be a much better start. e.g. re-education funds, training schools/government run apprenticeships on projects, etc. Especially if the scale of the displacement is large. We all only have the one life IMV - its about giving those lives the opportunities to pivot. Ageism, and gatekeeping will stop many from changing careers.
I think in the success case (still TBD), that it will increase productivity to the point where things that can’t be affordably addressed by software will now be able to be addressed with software.
I expect that anyone who is a skilled dev today will be fine. Expectations and competition might be higher, but so will production and value creation.
I think the demand will come, just as Excel didn’t put finance people out of jobs in aggregate.
Why would "primary benefactor" be the most relevant question rather than mere "benefactor"? If my life is improved by something, I don't care that someone else's life is improved by more; I don't want to reject that improvement out of spite, jealousy, or envy.
Bankers (and customers) benefited from ATMs as far more bank locations became economically sustainable and bank tellers could do higher value work (and do so more safely).
Millions of software developers continue to benefit from improvements in productivity, the resulting value creation, and the resulting high pay in our sector from ever more productive languages and frameworks. Can you imagine how little pay you'd make trying to sling websites in assembly language at less than 1% of the pace of today?
> Millions of software developers continue to benefit from improvements in productivity
You're absurdly naive if you think developers will see the most benefit. We will have fewer developers just as we have fewer farmers and factory workers. When labor is automated it becomes owned by fewer people, this is historically consistent for over a hundred years across every sector. Thousands of towns have collapsed under this sort of change and effects are felt for generations.
> Can you imagine how little pay you'd make trying to sling websites in assembly language at less than 1% of the pace of today
Productivity gains do not align with income gains, this is a complete strawman. Developers today may be 100x more productive, but they do not have a 100x higher income.
Ask yourself, where did that value go — and is that fair? We're creating the automation and someone else is taking the lions share of the benefit. We're being conned.
You seem hyper-focused on the share of benefit going to others and I am much more focused on the share of benefit going to my family. My family benefits enormously from the value created through technology development and I have benefited enormously from being able to work in a field where I am generously rewarded for doing things that I happily do free in my spare time. If I work on someone else's technology puzzles instead of my own, they are able and willing to pay me a well-above median salary in exchange.
I genuinely hope that they think they're getting rich as part of that exchange (and work to ensure that outcome happens), because that's the very best way that I know how to make the overall situation, including the benefits for me and my family, continue.
If you think I'm being conned in this exchange, thanks for the concern, but I'll tell you that I'm working hard to ensure that it keeps happening.
> they are able and willing to pay me a well-above median salary in exchange.
AI is what they're doing to try to stop this, when we work on AI we're enabling it.
They are making much more money for themselves than they are for you. Your salary is overhead. They will stop paying you if they can and they are trying to use AI to do it.
In a fair agreement you would have more time to spend with your family because you would earn a higher share of the profit and need to work less for it.
If I wanted to keep all of the value I created for myself, I'd start my own business and own all of it.
I don't, because I highly value the structure and capital that others have put up to create the company I work for. They offload an enormous amount of risk and overhead and, so long as they pay me what we've agreed, I'm happy for them to keep the portion of value that is above what they pay out to me and my colleagues.
The agreement is fair to my eyes, because I've agreed to it and both sides have kept up their ends. If yours is not fair to your eyes, perhaps you should change it, possibly up to striking out on your own and keeping 100% of the surplus value you create.
> it will increase productivity to the point where things that can’t be affordably addressed by software will now be able to be addressed with software
employing humans is something that couldn't be affordably addressed by software, and is what they're trying to now address with software
this is good for owners, and bad for workers
thusly AI is bad for workers as a class, and you're betting that you're one of the workers they decide to keep
all I have left to say on the matter is, good luck
It can be difficult to understand the various countries’ laws and their practical application for employers, requiring country-by-country study.
The same policies that provide strong protections for employees against being terminated can serve as a barrier against those same employees being hired in the first place. Different countries have chosen different points in that regard. Netherlands is stronger than the US for employee protections, but not as strong as Germany. France offers even more protections for employees.
Employers can’t treat EU as a single country, because, well, it’s not. They have to understand the laws and usually incorporate in each country. (None of this is complaining that it ought to be some other way, but rather just observing why you don’t see typical non-giant companies offering “anywhere in EU remote” roles [and agreeing with your analogy to North America].)
Indeed. Our 100 year old house has exactly the right-sized roof overhangs to shade to the bottom of the upper floor windows for the peak sun periods in the summer while still letting much of the winter sun in.
Then, for the lower floor we accomplish a similar effect with tall, deciduous plantings.
Curious to hear your thoughts on the "Bridge Freezes Before Road Surface" signs.
To me, that seems like a sign where the "let nature sort it out" way of learning is too dangerous to just YOLO it sign-less (despite generally agreeing that we have too many warning signs).
;) I doubt it's a difference in chemistry or physics. Ambient temps play a large role, so the Gulf Stream's and elevation's influence does as well (dry adiabatic lapse rate is 5.5°F per 1000 ft or 9.8°C per km).
Does anyone seriously argue that mere millionaires shouldn’t exist? That’s a level of wealth that permits only around $50K/yr in retirement, assuming it's 100% liquid/investable. If a retiree had a paid-off house at the median price level, they'd have less than $30K/yr in retirement if they had to remain "not a millionaire".
Nearly 10% of Americans are millionaires (at least at the household level, not necessarily per-person). It's around 6% for UK and France.
But those numbers aren't meaningful in a scenario in which that revenue were redistributed in social housing, public healthcare, and national insurance. I don't think the world needs, or can carry, any millionaires. Public affluence--public luxuries--like housing, libraries, schools, universities, trains, parks, museums etc, do far more for human welfare, and far less ecological damage.
I guess I never saw it that way and struggle to think of example usage as a noun.
Human technology, human race, human rights, human error, human nature, human history, human power. Always an adjective.
I still cant think of a common noun usage, let alone an alternative noun reading for human resources. People don't say "hello human".
It is weird to see comments talking about "HR" as some euphemism or double speak. Maybe I'm the outlier, but I don't understand any other meaning besides managing the resource that is humans.
That covers lots of things- managing the liability, procurement, retention, firing, of the workforce.
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