This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for.
The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over the direction or use of AI. You are doomed to have your life disrupted and changed by it, with no input whatsoever. To quote the article, your six shillings a day can become six shillings a week, and you are left to just deal with it however you can. You are "free" to go find some other six shilling a week job. If you can.
And if you think, "Oh, every technology is like this, it's always been this way", you are right. You have always been at the whims of the owning class, and barring a change towards economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives, it likely always will be.
Cthulhu_ · 51m ago
> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs
Things are cyclic, nothing new; the previous big scare was (is?) outsourcing, where for the same price as one developer in western / northern Europe or SF you can hire five from eastern Europe or India. But that hasn't affected employability of the one developer, as far as I'm aware.
I'm not even thinking of skill level, I'm sure that's comparable (but honestly I don't know / care enough), but both outsourcing and AI require the same things - requirements. I've grown up in this country (the Netherlands) and automatically have intrinsic knowledge of e.g. government, taxes, the energy sector, transportation, etc, so much that I'm not even consciously aware of a lot of things I know. If you spend a LOT of time and effort, you could - eventually - break that down into requirements and work orders or whatever that someone else could process. But it's much more efficient to do it yourself or just hire someone from around here.
WalterBright · 1h ago
> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs
Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day.
> economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives
History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.
asmxyz · 1h ago
There are _other options_!
You're argument is that the only two alternatives are that the ruling class and owning class be separate groups of people, or the same group of people. And either way the labor class if F'ed.
You're right that having the ruling class and the owning class being the _same people_ is terrible. That's what we're living in right now!
But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?
WalterBright · 1h ago
The labor class is free to form collectives and cooperatives. There's no law against it.
Bezos started Amazon with $300,000. I'm sure it wouldn't take too long for workers to raise that kind of money, after all, $300,000 to buy a house is considered cheap.
On the other hand, the history of businesses being confiscated and handed over to the workers has not been a successful one.
whatshisface · 1h ago
But startups are worker-owned, insofar as the founders are able to profit from it.
mm263 · 1h ago
$600,000 after inflation
whatshisface · 1h ago
That's kind of a silly example, your congressman could write a bill allocating 53% of cars to the two seater lobby and 47% to the four seat lobby.
WalterBright · 1h ago
And what if 62% wanted two seaters?
Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns.
Sounds smart, right?
What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population changes, etc. The result was massive misallocation by the DoE - Californian had shortages of gas, Florida had gluts. That sort of situation has never happened before.
All that nonsense disappeared literally overnight when Reagan repealed all gas price and allocation controls with his very first Executive Order. I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.
What you're suggesting is called "central economic planning". It is constantly tried again and again, and it never ever works. (The failures of it are always classified as "unintended side effects", though they are entirely predictable.)
ta1243 · 1h ago
> I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.
I don't think the history here is as neat as you have laid out. To be clear: this is not a defense of central planning.
WalterBright · 42m ago
I lived through the gas shortages. I remember the day the gas lines ended. They never returned in the 45 years since, despite all sorts of wars and global crises and exploding oil refineries and Hooties shooting at tankers. All gone literally overnight with the stroke of Reagan's pen.
The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either.
(Except during WW2, where gas shortages were caused by gas rationing.)
AnIrishDuck · 33m ago
Well first, we have this:
> The Jimmy Carter administration began a phased deregulation of oil prices on April 5, 1979, when the average price of crude oil was US$15.85 per barrel ($100/m3).
So, the process wasn't really an instant wave of a wand, or stroke of a pen. We also have this:
> Starting with the Iranian revolution, the price of crude oil rose to $39.50 per barrel ($248/m3) over the next 12 months (its all-time highest real price until March 3, 2008).[11] Deregulating domestic oil price controls allowed U.S. oil output to rise sharply from the large Prudhoe Bay fields, while oil imports fell sharply.
We also have silliness like this:
> Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.[13] The average vehicle of the time consumed between two and three liters (about 0.5–0.8 gallons) of gasoline an hour while idling, and it was estimated that Americans wasted up to 150,000 barrels (24,000 m3) of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.
So we have counterfactuals: if there was no Iranian revolution, would the effects of Carter's gradual deregulation have been felt sooner? If there was no 1973 oil shortage, would the reduction in waste have made a difference? What effect did people simply believing that the crisis was over have?
I don't propose answers to these questions; they are, in my opinion, unknowable.
I suggest that economic narratives such as the one you propose do not capture the entire picture. You had downward pressure on prices due to deregulation and expanding supply, and upwards pressure due to geopolitics and waste.
These things do not happen instantly, they take time to play out. I suggest caution when attempting to derive cause and effect from single events in complex systems.
AnIrishDuck · 6m ago
I'll also note that all of this still mostly reinforces your main thesis.
One major issue with central planning is that it usually lacks the internal feedback mechanisms necessary to properly account for all of these factors.
Price signals usually work faster, and thus more efficiently! The USSR even had an economic reform where they introduced mechanisms that could be described as "shadow prices" within their own system [1]. It was the driving force behind one of the independent discoveries of linear programming.
I'd highly recommend "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" [2] and the novel (historical economic fiction, a nerd's nerd literary category if there ever was one) Red Plenty to learn more.
Doesn't every nationwide firm engage in central economic planning?
WalterBright · 29m ago
Yup. But they have competitors!
brooke2k · 52m ago
I feel this is a slightly disingenuous argument - mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors. The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service. Gas lines are one thing - waiting fifteen hours in the emergency room to be seen, only to be charged thousands of dollars for some tylenol and a pat on the head is another.
WalterBright · 37m ago
> mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors
Absolutely correct. But public regulation is quite resistant to course correction. Private companies have to face competitors and adapt or fail.
> The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service
The US healthcare system is massively regulated and interfered with by the law and things like people are forced to buy Obamacare and forced to contribute to Medicare and Medicare massively distorts market forces.
Healthcare in the US was affordable before the government got involved.
brooke2k · 7m ago
Public regulation also course-corrects, it just does so through democracy rather than competition.
I would argue that democracy is a superior method in most instances, because its motives are driven by the motives of the population as a whole, whereas capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Where we agree I think is in the assertion that United States government tends to run things very poorly. In my opinion, however, this is not because central planning is inherently bad, but because our democracy is very weak, and we allow politicians to be controlled by corporate interests rather than the interests of the people that they represent.
EDIT: Oh, and for the record I disagree with the take that the US healthcare system is bad because it has too much regulation - but that's an entirely separate discussion that I don't think is worth going into.
schmidtleonard · 1h ago
I have a whole list of things I'd like from my car that the market does not provide because it is more profitable not to. Why do I get the feeling that instead of seeing this as a horror story you would scold me for unreasonable expectations, even though it is the identical mirror form of the horror story you just told?
WalterBright · 1h ago
Mass production reduces costs by standardizing things. But still, car companies offer a wide range of options if you're willing to wait for your order. If Ford doesn't provide what you want, there's GM, Toyota, Hyundai, etc. There's no shortage of variety.
There's also a small cottage industry of people who will make fully custom cars for you. They're pretty expensive, though, as they don't benefit from economies of scale.
derektank · 1h ago
My take would be to scold you to start your own company that provides the features you want from your car if it's not already being provided by the marketplace
schmidtleonard · 1h ago
I'd have more luck petitioning the Central Car Design Committee because
> it is more profitable not to
...and if anyone thinks this is ridiculous, I'd ask them if they are for or against repealing all of our current motor vehicle regulations. If "for," they have admitted to being a hopeless libertarian, and if "against," they have acknowledged that important reasonable features can be incompatible with the profit motive of a free market and it no longer seems so strange that I might have a list which is more of the same.
jack_h · 1h ago
> I'd have more luck petitioning the Central Car Design Committee because
Highly doubtful. Command economies have far less variety in what they offer. This isn't theoretical either just look at western cars vs Soviet cars. There's this mistaken belief that if the free market can't provide some good then a command economy could, but the reality is that if a free market can't provide a good then the chance that a command economy could is even more doubtful. Command economies tend to be very bad at allocating resources efficiently as outlined by Hayek in "The Use of Knowledge in Society".
stego-tech · 1h ago
Because Mr. Bright has a long, storied comment history of neolibertarian fantasies being wielded as a cudgel against anyone who dares envision a future that does not align with his own.
Speaking from experience with them in another thread. Your best bet is to ignore the bait and move on to more fruitful discussions.
WalterBright · 52m ago
I merely point out that economic history shows that economic freedom works better than any other system.
Besides, I enjoy debate, like other people enjoy playing football. If you don't, why are you here?
fragmede · 15m ago
With all due respect, and I mean that sincerely as you've accomplished far more than I have, you aren't here for debate. Your viewpoint is stuck in the cold war mentality where Soviet communism was a failure (it did, but that doesn't mean that everything they touched was bad) and America and its brand of Free Market capitalism is perfect (it isn't) and responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall for all the "debate" that actually occurs. Other long time posters here know better than to engage, but hey, you caught me waiting on Claude.
brendoelfrendo · 1h ago
This happens anyway, lol. Go to a car lot and you will see the majority of cars available are black, white, silver, and maybe red. Your car will have a stereo. Your car will probably have 4 seats, not 2. Dealers stock the most common configurations and, maybe this is not your experience, but my experience is that they will twist themselves into knots to avoid helping customers make custom orders for exactly what they want, even though the manufacturer has a fancy configurator page where you can do exactly that.
WalterBright · 30m ago
I've never had trouble ordering what I wanted from the options list. That usually means needing to pay more, though.
If you want custom leather seats, you can drive your car off the lot into one of many shops that offer such services, or other customizations. Me, I drove to the stereo shop to put a better stereo in (back when the factory ones were terrible).
There are many reality shows on TV featuring shops what will custom build a car to your specifications.
dontlaugh · 2h ago
This was the Luddites’ position. Organised labour should one again take up this principled position.
Join a trade union!
WalterBright · 1h ago
Do you really want a return to the days when "women's work" was spending every free moment spinning and weaving cloth by hand? When cloth was so valuable there was a profession called "rag pickers"? Where new clothes were rare, hand me downs were the usual, and people wore clothes until they disintegrated? And poor people made clothes out of flour sacks?
nancyminusone · 53m ago
Sure would be nice to make clothes from flour sacks again, but alas; today's sacks are made of polypropylene.
dontlaugh · 1h ago
That’s not what the Luddites wanted. They praised the technology itself and recognised it would save a lot of time. But they also recognised that they the workers wouldn’t reap any of those benefits, they’d just lose their jobs.
Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? If so, you are incredibly naive.
WalterBright · 1h ago
The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.
When wages are raised by the government, job losses happen. 16,000 to 36,000 people lost their jobs when California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers.
> Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases?
During WW2, production needed to increase, so hours were increased to 60 hour weeks. The labor force, very patriotic, was all for this. Production increased for a few weeks, and then fell below what was produced in a 40 hour week. Companies wanting to maximize profits are aware of this effect.
Also, if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve. The reason for this is the Law of Supply and Demand pushes those two lines together. The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.
WarOnPrivacy · 1h ago
> The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.
Minimum wage is one indicator of critically substandard living. Here is a small sampling of some others:
well over minimum wage + below the poverty line
no discernible exits off path to unhoused retirement
current, recurring or impending homelessness
food insecurity and recurring hunger
medically triggered impoverishment
only possible caregiver for loved one with medical issues
schmidtleonard · 1h ago
> if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve
If you count inflation in medical and housing costs as an increase in wages, the "wedge" disappears, yes -- but why would you do that for any other purpose than making the wedge disappear?
No, it's very telling that labor saving devices, which have squished the largest industry into economic insignificance many times over, have not resulted in the ability for normal people to work less. Clearly, the benefits have gone elsewhere. "The benefits went into technology! Think of the iPhones!" The median financed smartphone is 1/50th the cost of median rent, try again.
daedrdev · 48m ago
employers pay for the massively increased medical costs directly though? Its not hard to see that when medical costs increase by 6-10% they would hesitate to increase wages
Cthulhu_ · 44m ago
Even unions are up against it though. in the Netherlands, there have been multiple strikes from e.g. the train operators; they demand a 10% wage increase, after the train company downsized a lot during the pandemic, but who were then unable to upsize again as traffic resumed and who even now don't have the same amount of travelers as they did in 2020.
But they're not profitable. They've made a loss for five years in a row, requiring government subsidies to stay operating (because them going bankrupt would make big parts of the country grind to a halt). Ticket prices are so high that it's barely cheaper than driving, and as soon as you travel with two or more people it's cheaper to just own a car. (Or even rent one; I traveled to the other side of the country once for a concert, my own car was in the garage. Did the math, it was cheaper and more convenient (door-to-door) to rent a car, pay the surcharge for long distance, pay the €35 in fuel, etc than it was to buy return tickets for three people)
The answer (I think, I'm no economist / politician / etc) isn't unionising and demanding better treatment, because the limits of the capitalist system they operate in have been reached. The answer is to stop trying to make it profitable. Re-privatize it: trains and public transit are a huge and hugely important nationwide economic driver, an essential service that capitalism can't be trusted with because the owners will try and get as much money out of it as possible, the employees get overworked and exploited and will shut the system down (as is their right) out of protest, and the people will have to deal with the consequences.
Just in my small bubble, the train strikes led to people not going to the office, missing events, lunch orders that either had too much stock that had to be discarded or that were cancelled entirely, costing that company thousands in income, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-union. I'm anti-capitalist though.
breakyerself · 1h ago
Software engineers needs a lot more organization
blooalien · 34m ago
This is by far my biggest concern about "A.I." and "smart" robots... Not the technology itself, but what the "ruling class" intend to do with it / how they intend to use it. Their primary concern is not "worker productivity" these days. It's "How can I replace the maximum number of workers (ideally all of them) so that I can keep most / all of the profits / benefits for myself (and the shareholders)?" It's always been about profit, but they now finally see a potential to entirely rid themselves of "those pesky poors" and their annoying paychecks once and for all.
kevmo314 · 1h ago
> Actually, what are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people?
Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The universe doesn't owe us value on human-written software.
Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
ChrisMarshallNY · 1h ago
Well, as someone who considers themselves to be a "software craftsman," I have come to the conclusion that the work I do will never be valued, and will always be considered "too expensive." Since I work for free, that's not an issue for me, but that's economically unfeasible for most folks.
The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. Anyone that tries, will get driven out of business. Some clever folks will figure out how to do "slightly better" stuff, and charge more for it, but a good way to go out of business, is to focus on Quality as a principal axis.
That's basic market dynamics. It is what it is, and is neither evil, nor good.
It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.
I guess the saddest thing, is that I have really wanted to help teach my techniques to others, but have found that no one wants to learn, so I gave up on that, many years ago.
burlesona · 57m ago
> The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff.
This seems to be one of the brutal truths of the modern world, and as far as I can tell it applies to everything. There's always a race to the bottom to make everything as cheaply as possible, and the further the industry goes down that "cheapness" scale, the more "quality" loses market share, the more expensive "quality" must be in order to operate at all, and finally things that used to be just "normal" and not too expensive are now luxury goods.
Consider textiles, carpentry, masonry, machine tooling, appliances, etc. etc.
This doesn't feel like a good outcome, but I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it.
gallerdude · 49m ago
I can see both sides of it. There’s a fancy bread bakery by where I live. I go infrequently, the bread is great. But it’s expensive, most of the I just want a cheap loaf from Target, as do most people.
Instead of broad employment of artisan breadsmiths, we have people doing email work, because it’s more economically valuable. If the government mandated a higher quality of bread, we’d be slightly richer and bread and slightly poorer in everything else.
hinkley · 1h ago
> it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore
It is if you stay niche. It’s called market gardening. It will never equal farm automation for employment or revenue, but it’s a thing you can do as long as not too many people do it. The same happened to woodworking, and manufacturing. What you see are shops that can remanufacture parts that have either aged out of the manufacturer’s warehouse or where the material is the expensive part and reworking it is cheaper and almost as fast as ordering a new one.
The consumer base of these is smaller, so the supply has to be smaller as well, but not zero.
boogieknite · 1h ago
this comment implies the real "other shoe" for which im waiting to drop.
im ok with nothing. if software dev is nearly completely automated to the point there are effectively no dev jobs then there is a much more important economic condition to address
im a basic state-school student who learned the memorable bit about Keynes regarding automating labor which still hasnt come to pass. at the time i kind of found it unbelievable we continue to work so much when then point of automation is working less, but i was a college slacker so any excuse to avoid work seemed like a good point to me.
to conclude this preamble: i have a sinking sense of momentum and my circles of midwit friends stare at each other like deer in the headlights with no idea on whats next after jobs dry up
my question: are there movements to prepare the society for the impending mass automation and layoffs? people still seem to want jobs, because society demands it, but are there movements by significant political or idea leaders to finally get off the work treadmill and go toward a Keynes-style chill out? i dont know where to start and any direction is appreciated
* i understand ai layoffs is a media scapegoat for the real issues with taxable R&D and interest rates. mass automation of jobs and real workforce replacement by ai is probably on a timescale 2x to 5x of the 10 year runway im expecting
edwardbernays · 48m ago
If you're in America, there probably will not be a chill-out. Look into the philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, whom has been cited favorably by J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. We are heading towards techno-fascism. The working population which would have been furloughed is probably going to be redirected to the manual labor jobs currently being vacated by the aggressive deportation of "the worst of the worst" immigrant workers within our borders. The loss of these displaced people will necessitated a new underclass to work the fields, clean the chickens, etc. This underclass will be composed of prisoners-cum-indentured servants and slaves, which are legally provided for by the 13th amendment.
boogieknite · 41m ago
thank you for the recommendation and holy god this is grim
edwardbernays · 15m ago
It's grim but understandable in a way. I was writing quickly but I can expound more on any point if you want. I don't think we're locked into it yet, but if you read into Curtis Yarvin then you will see he was extremely prescient in the 2010s era. I refer to this brand of technofascist monarchism, self-branded as The Dark Enlightenment, as Yarvinism.
He is not the only one, but he is the most prominent. I've been considering starting a website to track things like The New Apostolic Reformation, The Seven Mountains Mandate, Curtis Yarvin, the two billionaires trying to get rid of the separation of church and State in Texas, and others.
There is a right-wing christofascist movement attempting to bulldoze democracy via technology. Peter Thiel is basically running the surveillance tech of our government. Look into what he's said about bulldozing government with technology. He knows his ideas are so unpalatable that he has to subvert democracy to get his ideas implemented.
This is the most prominent threat to our secular, freedom-loving, democratic way of life. It unfortunately receives very little air time.
EDIT: also look into this account's namesake, Edward Bernays, aka the father of modern propaganda.
stego-tech · 1h ago
Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary).
> Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?
That should be horrifying. It should be the red flag that spurs action against a gross system of exploitation and goal misalignment. For all the crowing about AI misalignment wiping out humanity, we have actual economic misalignment leaving humans homeless, starving, and dying of curable illness not from lack of supply or demand, but purely from placing profit above all.
To see defeatists and fatalists jump in comments and say "that's just how it is" while prostrating themselves in worship to the almighty share price should infuriate us as a species, for these are humans who willingly accept their own demise at the hands of others rather than doing anything of value for their own self-preservation, let alone preservation of the species.
RHSeeger · 1h ago
> That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"?
I don't understand this statement. These things aren't unprofitable. Doing these things a specific way is unprofitable. Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale. Is it sad that a small, family farm isn't really a great way to make a living nowadays? Sure. But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity; "creating food" is, but there's lots of ways to do that.
And, honestly, if we _ever_ get to the point where we can fabricate food from raw elements (a la Star Trek), then that will be a little sad, too... but still "creating food".
Freak_NL · 40m ago
The replicator in Star Trek doesn't seem plausible to me any more. Flawlessly outputting a cup of Earl Grey?
The computer-based drinks machine onboard the Heart of Gold on the other hand… Trying to order tea there now sounds suspiciously like a bout of futile prompt-engineering; trying to goad an LLM into giving you tea, but ending up with something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
zimzam · 1h ago
What are you talking about? Inexpensive food is a boon to society.
Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor.
For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased to less than 1% of what it once was.
Of course the person spending 100+x the effort to grow corn will not be economically competitive - why would we want anything different?
You are not making an argument you think you are making. We switched from one set of problems to another set of problems that didn't exist before industrial agriculture: soil erosion, pest explosion, entire harvests wiped out by disease because genetic uniformity, which means one pathogen can destroy everything - think Irish potato famine but now it's scientific and modern.
The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.
Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.
stego-tech · 1h ago
I was directly replying to the poster above me's own arguments in favor of "doing nothing". At no time did I denigrate inexpensive food, only highlighted that their own perspective that food production is unprofitable when it is in fact necessary for every human to survive, should horrify them.
That being said, if you're going to get on your data soapbox and try to tear down an argument I didn't make in the first place, then I will challenge you to "square the circle" between OPs argument that food production is not profitable; the fact 200 million children (and half a billion people globally) are malnourished; and that these stats are somehow acceptable in a world that collectively throws out a billion meals per day.
kevmo314 · 1h ago
> are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains
Sure, I can believe that, but...
> doing anything of value for their own self-preservation
Even your own comment relies on some metric of value.
I agree that profit motives are not an ideal metric of value but as your comment suggests, we as a species do rely on some metric of value. I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.
stego-tech · 1h ago
> I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.
That attitude is the equivalent of a frog in a boiling pot going, "I won't leave until you have a better idea of where to go."
Value is - and always will be - subjective. Whenever society forms a centralized definition of value, it is immediately gamed and exploited by those who seek profit and power. Currency and profit are extreme forms of Goodhart's Law, the civilizational equivalent to "Tickets Closed" or "Lines of Code Written" KPIs.
To demand objective measure of subjectivity is to fight a fool's battle.
kevmo314 · 1h ago
That's fair but not a convincing argument if you're seeking to show that the pot is boiling. I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me".
stego-tech · 1h ago
> I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me".
Which would be a fair counter-argument to have if so many of you (and people like you) weren't also trying to drag those of us looking to escape back into the fucking pot.
If you want to sit and boil, fine, but for chrissakes let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that. Your staunch refusal to confront reality is your problem, but your insistence on harming others so you don't have to confront reality should be criminal.
kevmo314 · 43m ago
> let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that
Ok? Who is stopping you? Nobody here is prohibiting you from continuing to write code by hand and doing whatever you wish. Certainly if you're going to assert that that's criminal, of course I'm not interested in your vinegar.
sundaeofshock · 1h ago
If we don’t figure out a way to keep people alive and relatively happy, the metric may become pitchforks per angry mob.
I used to wonder if a Butlerian Jihad was plausible or just an interesting plot device. Now, it seems more plausible every day.
kevmo314 · 1h ago
Yeah that's totally possible but I suspect if AI really does take over software, the number of people who will riot over software quality is going to be dwarfed by the number of people who are happier that they can get their chats GPT'd faster.
sundaeofshock · 1h ago
What makes you think that capitalists will stop with software developers? If AI can truly eliminate software jobs, then most knowledge based jobs will be at risk of elimination.
Let’s be honest; capital wants to eliminate all labor, and damn the consequences. People are not going to willingly give up lives of comfort for abject squalor. This will not go well.
kevmo314 · 21m ago
I don't think they will but I also don't think abject squalor is the way to describe artisanal work.
On top of that, I agree that capitalists continue to eliminate jobs but I also think they create jobs in other sectors. The reason I don't buy into doomsday scenarios is I don't believe they will eliminate all the jobs at once.
I only happen to be a software engineer. If I was born 250 years ago, I'm sure I would've found a creative innovation outlet through another industry.
th0ma5 · 1h ago
This also assumes that non human written code will be of any use to humans and no one has shown that to be possible, it is all humans patching it up so far.
WarOnPrivacy · 1h ago
industry only ever seems to want to hire people with the word Senior in their title.They almost never want to create people with the word Senior in their title.
I suggest that the first ladder that got pulled up is the one on the ground.
No one wants to train new entrants to the field. Not training junior workers seems like a natural extension to that.
teeray · 46m ago
It’s a Volunteer’s Dilemma: why train juniors when you can hire the juniors other companies trained to become seniors?
ta1243 · 1h ago
In centuries past apprentices would pay their junior positions, in time picking up paid work as the progressed to senior, then eventually taking on apprentices of their own (and be paid)
whatshisface · 1h ago
I guess universities will eventually backfill that gap with training that focuses on senior skills. Eventually.
thmsths · 52m ago
We already require juniors to go through a 4 years university degree. It takes a fair bit of time of real world work to get to the senior level. So unless we expect people to do another 5 years of schooling, I am not sure how this will happen (and even in that scenario I believe there is a difference between hands on, on the job experience and classroom experience).
jdee · 12m ago
it happened with architecture degrees in the uk. it went from 3 years to 7 years, as the skill levels and implicit knowledge required increased over time.
djoldman · 26m ago
There are a lot of issues brought up in this post, but I want to discuss one in particular: technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications.
We can say that technological progress occurs when a new method is employed to deliver a product or service with some "more desirable" blend of qualities: it's created/delivered faster, cheaper, with a more desirable mix of resource inputs, and/or results in a more valuable/desired output.
Sometimes it's quite obvious when a technology is superior to another as almost all the qualities of it are advantageous: it's made faster, less expensively, and the result is better with such a gap between it and the old way that there's just no denying that the new way is better.
Sometimes the new technology is really a mix of qualities. Let's focus on the mix that generally gets the most attention: the new way is faster/cheaper but the output is not of a higher quality. Sometimes this new way of cheaper+faster but lower quality "wins out" and the consumer prefers it.
And now the crux of it: why is it so common that discussion concerning these shifts is rooted in everything except the consumer?
An imperfect and potentially flawed example: a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer. The old way of making a superior product still exists and some consumers still prefer it but most do not.
Fundamentally, this is a shift that is rooted in the perception, true or not, of the consumer that the new way is more desirable.
Some folks are not happy with the higher prices of the outputs of old ways of doing things or the effects that the new ways have on jobs, the economy, and/or society.
Fundamentally, this has to do with consumer preference and that's where any blame should be meted out.
duskwuff · 5m ago
> technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications
I seem to recall that a mathematician wrote a paper about this around 1995 which got a lot of press attention. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, though. Nor his methods.
Cthulhu_ · 1h ago
> We're going to run out of people with the word "Senior" in their title
Probably not, but job title inflation has made it so that apparently 5 years of experience is enough to be given a "senior" title. I've got like 15 but still feel like a medior at best. Yeah this is humblebragging, whatever it's a throwaway internet comment.
vultour · 51m ago
This is a funny comment because startups have been churning out sub-3 year "seniors" for years. If you're not a principal engineer after 5 years what are you even doing?
Veedrac · 1h ago
A defense of the Luddites against sewing machines was honestly not something I expected. Support for the Luddites in general, sure I can predict that, but the claim that sewing machines are bad, exploitative, produce "shitty" cloth, serve only the pursuit of profit...
duskwuff · 4m ago
Power looms are not the same thing as sewing machines.
mrtksn · 1h ago
I knew what was this all about the moment I glimpsed at the title on the front page, my neural nets must have been trained to output that from the few tokens I guess, which makes me think maybe all this AI stuff isn't that different from what's happening in real brains. I bet others too had similar experience.
So the AI thing is happening, maybe its not with this particular tech we have today but they are on to something and we probably better embrace it.
Humans rolled the ladder up behind on so many things. Very few people will survive the planet Earth without the tools and abstractions we built over the many Millenia's and that's how we all live like kings. Any misery out there in the world is a result of our inability to manage it, not because the resources are scarce.
The Luddites, as explained in the article were indeed about the way tech is being adopted. All that tech eventually reached every corner of the world and not every place had Luddites.
Programming computers by hand is shitty anyway, good riddance. Finally we are about to have machines that can be programmed without thinking about the intricacies of programming that have nothing to do with the thing we want to achieve.
All the tech left behind still does have aficionados, maybe in 10 years we can watch someone program a computer using Java on the Primitive Technology channel.
ChrisMarshallNY · 1h ago
> Vibe coding is payday loans for technical debt
Stealing it...
blakesterz · 1h ago
There's a photo on that page with this description:
"A picture of two patches of wild grass bifurcated by a retaining pond"
I was just thinking how I'd describe that different, and how many different ways it could be described.
Groxx · 1h ago
Perhaps even a thousand words worth of description is possible
riskable · 51m ago
A thousand tokens.
tptacek · 1h ago
As a software security person, I don't think the security objections to LLMs are going to pan out. I think LLMs are going to be a strong net positive for security:
* The tooling and integration stuff people complain about now ("the S in MCP") isn't really load-bearing yet, and a cottage industry of professional services and product work will go into giving it the same overcomplicated IAM guardrails everything else has; today, though, you just do security at a higher or lower level.
* LLM code generation is better at implementing rote best-practices and isn't incentivized to take shortcuts (in fact, it has some of the opposite incentives, to the consternation of programmers like me who prize DRY-ness). These shortcuts are where most security bugs live.
* LLMs can analyze code far faster than any human can, and vulnerabilities that can be discovered through pure pattern matching --- which is most vulnerabilities --- will be easy pickings. We've already had a post here with someone using o4 to find new remote kernel vulnerabilities, and that's a level of vuln research that is way, way more hardcore than what line-of-business software ordinarily sees.
* LLMs enable instrumentation and tooling that were cost-prohibitive previously: model checking, semantic grepping, static analysis. These tools all exist and work today, but very few projects seriously use them because keeping all the specs and definitions up to date and resolving all the warnings is too much time for not enough payoff. LLMs don't have that problem.
LLM-generated code (and LLM tooling) will inevitably create security vulnerabilities. We have not invented a way to create bug-free code; would have been big if true! Opponents of industry LLM use will point to these vulnerabilities and go "see, told you so". But each year we continue using these tools, I think the security argument is going to look weaker and weaker. If I had to make a bet, I'd say it ceases being colorable within 3 years.
threetonesun · 13m ago
I'm not terribly worried about code generated security vulnerabilities, but point 3 feels like a cat and mouse game that most companies won't have the resources to stay on top of, so they'll have to outsource it to one of the existing cloud or AI providers. Maybe that's a reality even without AI but it feels like we're heading towards full on extortion from about 4 major companies.
Also I don't think you covered my biggest concern with LLM security, a company making an Amazon basics version of your business model and claiming "AI did it". I'm 50/50 on that one though, it's also possible everyone things with AI you can go full NIH syndrome and take back all the software that we've handed off to various SAAS providers.
whatshisface · 1h ago
There are also non-llm advances in testing related to AI, like RL fuzzers.
paxys · 1h ago
The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury. At the time of the industrial revolution it was common for a family to spend 15-25% of their annual income just on clothing. A single shirt from that era would cost the equivalent of £2,000 today when considering material and labor. New clothes were something you may be able to afford once a year, if at all. Like the article says, weavers were the equivalent of PhD scientists who could charge whatever they wanted for their skills (and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time). Great if you're the weaver, not so for everyone else.
So the industrial revolution wasn't a conspiracy to put down the lower classes. The lower classes were in fact the biggest benefactors of the industrial revolution.
If software can go the same way, I'd say good riddance. The profession has always kept free from gatekeepers, and that's a good thing.
stego-tech · 1h ago
> The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury.
Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA.
> and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time
Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to the expense of clothing.
Oh, wait, no I don't, because people still bought clothing and wore it regularly. They just also had economies around mending clothing, updating it, tailoring it, altering it, reusing and recycling it. Rather than building an economic system of destruction for the sake of a handful of profiteers, it was an economy of artisans who provided a staple resource at reasonable rates and quality to support themselves. Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear, people took care of it - and themselves - for longer periods of time. Techniques were used to keep articles sturdy for longer, rather than disposable machine stitches that fall apart in a washing machine.
Experts and artisans are not "gatekeepers", they are skilled craftspeople worthy of respect and deserving of compensation for their skills. To demand anyone be able to do anything of any complexity is to demand a complete elimination of anything that differentiates humans from one another, to create a homogenous mass of genetics with no incentive to grow and evolve.
Nobody is "gatekeeping" software developers, or Doctors, or plumbers, or weavers, or artists. Those all take skill, and people with a suitable level of skill can easily pass good credentials checks and tests.
0x1ceb00da · 1h ago
> Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part
The article says clothing was passed down generations.
> Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear
What if the father's clothes don't fit the son? Now you have to choose between feeding your cows and buying a shirt.
schmidtleonard · 1h ago
> I don't fear the power loom. I fear the profit expectations of the factory owners.
Havoc · 1h ago
I've kinda seen this already play out in a completely different context. Outsourcing & audit world. It's sufficiently commoditized that you can efficiently outsource.
If you're sending the first say 12-months worth of experience work to india then local gang straight out of college end up with a pretty tangible gap. There are key formative experiences missing. The programming equivalent of fighting with manual array memory management. Or shooting yourself in foot with a pointer.
Worse they don't realise that they're missing pieces. By necessity you start them off at a higher level and their understanding ends up fuzzy for lack of better word. It's not their fault...to them it looks normal, to the previous gen it's all "how can you not know this"
...still the world keeps turning
stego-tech · 1h ago
Xe's stuff is always excellent, and this is no different. What's disappointing is the amount of energy and effort wasted by people to come into the comments and espouse their desire to give up on addressing any of their concerns.
"It's just how things are."
"That's what generates profit."
"If that's what the market demands, who are we to judge?"
"Guess we do nothing."
We've all heard it before. We get it, so many HN and Tech folks have thrown in the towel and given up on changing anything within their own lives, or within the lives of others. So many more are content just "going along with the ride", abdicating all responsibility to an imagined god in various forms ("invisible hand of the free market" being most common among our peers).
For the rest of us who want to actually discuss the merits of the piece, we're sidelined by those who found reward in the path of libertarian ideals and seek to punish or discipline those of us who seek to make any sort of change or improvement beyond direct profit motives. Serious discussions of organization and direction are derailed in favor of blatant troll bait and bad-faith arguments.
This, I think, is also what Xe is trying to highlight: those in the position to enact the most positive change are staunchly refusing to do so, which in turn exacerbates the harms caused. Too few people with too much power and too much capital believe themselves to be more knowledgeable and intelligent than anyone else, denigrating any thoughts that may come from the slime beneath them on the ladder. When Xe said "Rolling the ladder up behind us", they make it very clear who they're speaking to:
> Look, CEOs, I'm one of you so I get it. We've seen the data teams suck up billions for decades and this is the only time that they can look like they're making a huge return on the investment.
They're basically shouting that "the call is coming from inside the house", and that the only place - right now - to address these harms are by and from the people inside said house. Nobody is coming to save us, but history books are filled with examples of what happens to those classes, those societies, those civilizations for whom greed becomes all consuming, standards of living collapse, and meaningful progress stagnates.
> Maybe the problem really is winner-take-all capitalism.
mattgreenrocks · 2m ago
> We get it, so many HN and Tech folks have thrown in the towel and given up on changing anything within their own lives, or within the lives of others.
It’s hilarious to read such defeatist takes on the current state of things on a site called Hacker News. The classical definition of a hacker was someone who wielded tech to circumvent power imbalances in whatever form.
Now I fear we have plenty of technologists that are happy to use tech to further cement and centralize existing power structures. IMO, this has been brewing for the past ten years or so, where technologists wrongly believe they have an in to this power just because they work for a FAANG.
You are labor. Where you work does not matter. So long as you need to work, you are labor. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Doctors are finding out this same lesson.
The way out is to build ventures that don’t involve the capital class. Autonomy and independence are worthy goals to strive for.
deadbabe · 1h ago
Vibe coding is not going to go away.
Just as alchemists always dreamed of turning lead into gold, there is a dream that people have had for decades of writing less and less code: Open source. Scaffolds. Code generators. No-code tools. Coding Agent LLMs.
If vibe coding goes away, it will be because it has been replaced with something even more hands off. Perhaps vibe prompting. Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something. Maybe even take a genetic approach where you score the fitness of various software for a certain solution and AI will cross mutate the genes. This will be a change of that rivals our shift from hunter/gatherers to the agricultural revolution.
blibble · 1h ago
> Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something.
so you're saying the venture capitalists will soon be out of a job?
what a shame
deadbabe · 12m ago
Venture capitalists are basically startup farmers.
The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over the direction or use of AI. You are doomed to have your life disrupted and changed by it, with no input whatsoever. To quote the article, your six shillings a day can become six shillings a week, and you are left to just deal with it however you can. You are "free" to go find some other six shilling a week job. If you can.
And if you think, "Oh, every technology is like this, it's always been this way", you are right. You have always been at the whims of the owning class, and barring a change towards economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives, it likely always will be.
Things are cyclic, nothing new; the previous big scare was (is?) outsourcing, where for the same price as one developer in western / northern Europe or SF you can hire five from eastern Europe or India. But that hasn't affected employability of the one developer, as far as I'm aware.
I'm not even thinking of skill level, I'm sure that's comparable (but honestly I don't know / care enough), but both outsourcing and AI require the same things - requirements. I've grown up in this country (the Netherlands) and automatically have intrinsic knowledge of e.g. government, taxes, the energy sector, transportation, etc, so much that I'm not even consciously aware of a lot of things I know. If you spend a LOT of time and effort, you could - eventually - break that down into requirements and work orders or whatever that someone else could process. But it's much more efficient to do it yourself or just hire someone from around here.
Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day.
> economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives
History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.
You're argument is that the only two alternatives are that the ruling class and owning class be separate groups of people, or the same group of people. And either way the labor class if F'ed. You're right that having the ruling class and the owning class being the _same people_ is terrible. That's what we're living in right now!
But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?
Bezos started Amazon with $300,000. I'm sure it wouldn't take too long for workers to raise that kind of money, after all, $300,000 to buy a house is considered cheap.
On the other hand, the history of businesses being confiscated and handed over to the workers has not been a successful one.
Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns.
Sounds smart, right?
What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population changes, etc. The result was massive misallocation by the DoE - Californian had shortages of gas, Florida had gluts. That sort of situation has never happened before.
All that nonsense disappeared literally overnight when Reagan repealed all gas price and allocation controls with his very first Executive Order. I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.
What you're suggesting is called "central economic planning". It is constantly tried again and again, and it never ever works. (The failures of it are always classified as "unintended side effects", though they are entirely predictable.)
Not in the UK, due to a fragile supply chain.
https://news.sky.com/story/supply-crisis-catastrophic-panic-...
We saw it when the Evergiven closed the Suez. We see it whenever irational consumer behaviour caused unpredicable behaviour.
The Randian world you are so enamoured with is one of fragility, because buffers and margins reduces profit.
Or are those "unintended side effects"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis
I don't think the history here is as neat as you have laid out. To be clear: this is not a defense of central planning.
The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either.
(Except during WW2, where gas shortages were caused by gas rationing.)
> The Jimmy Carter administration began a phased deregulation of oil prices on April 5, 1979, when the average price of crude oil was US$15.85 per barrel ($100/m3).
So, the process wasn't really an instant wave of a wand, or stroke of a pen. We also have this:
> Starting with the Iranian revolution, the price of crude oil rose to $39.50 per barrel ($248/m3) over the next 12 months (its all-time highest real price until March 3, 2008).[11] Deregulating domestic oil price controls allowed U.S. oil output to rise sharply from the large Prudhoe Bay fields, while oil imports fell sharply.
We also have silliness like this:
> Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.[13] The average vehicle of the time consumed between two and three liters (about 0.5–0.8 gallons) of gasoline an hour while idling, and it was estimated that Americans wasted up to 150,000 barrels (24,000 m3) of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.
So we have counterfactuals: if there was no Iranian revolution, would the effects of Carter's gradual deregulation have been felt sooner? If there was no 1973 oil shortage, would the reduction in waste have made a difference? What effect did people simply believing that the crisis was over have?
I don't propose answers to these questions; they are, in my opinion, unknowable.
I suggest that economic narratives such as the one you propose do not capture the entire picture. You had downward pressure on prices due to deregulation and expanding supply, and upwards pressure due to geopolitics and waste.
These things do not happen instantly, they take time to play out. I suggest caution when attempting to derive cause and effect from single events in complex systems.
One major issue with central planning is that it usually lacks the internal feedback mechanisms necessary to properly account for all of these factors.
Price signals usually work faster, and thus more efficiently! The USSR even had an economic reform where they introduced mechanisms that could be described as "shadow prices" within their own system [1]. It was the driving force behind one of the independent discoveries of linear programming.
I'd highly recommend "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" [2] and the novel (historical economic fiction, a nerd's nerd literary category if there ever was one) Red Plenty to learn more.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform 2. https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...
Absolutely correct. But public regulation is quite resistant to course correction. Private companies have to face competitors and adapt or fail.
> The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service
The US healthcare system is massively regulated and interfered with by the law and things like people are forced to buy Obamacare and forced to contribute to Medicare and Medicare massively distorts market forces.
Healthcare in the US was affordable before the government got involved.
I would argue that democracy is a superior method in most instances, because its motives are driven by the motives of the population as a whole, whereas capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Where we agree I think is in the assertion that United States government tends to run things very poorly. In my opinion, however, this is not because central planning is inherently bad, but because our democracy is very weak, and we allow politicians to be controlled by corporate interests rather than the interests of the people that they represent.
EDIT: Oh, and for the record I disagree with the take that the US healthcare system is bad because it has too much regulation - but that's an entirely separate discussion that I don't think is worth going into.
There's also a small cottage industry of people who will make fully custom cars for you. They're pretty expensive, though, as they don't benefit from economies of scale.
> it is more profitable not to
...and if anyone thinks this is ridiculous, I'd ask them if they are for or against repealing all of our current motor vehicle regulations. If "for," they have admitted to being a hopeless libertarian, and if "against," they have acknowledged that important reasonable features can be incompatible with the profit motive of a free market and it no longer seems so strange that I might have a list which is more of the same.
Highly doubtful. Command economies have far less variety in what they offer. This isn't theoretical either just look at western cars vs Soviet cars. There's this mistaken belief that if the free market can't provide some good then a command economy could, but the reality is that if a free market can't provide a good then the chance that a command economy could is even more doubtful. Command economies tend to be very bad at allocating resources efficiently as outlined by Hayek in "The Use of Knowledge in Society".
Speaking from experience with them in another thread. Your best bet is to ignore the bait and move on to more fruitful discussions.
Besides, I enjoy debate, like other people enjoy playing football. If you don't, why are you here?
If you want custom leather seats, you can drive your car off the lot into one of many shops that offer such services, or other customizations. Me, I drove to the stereo shop to put a better stereo in (back when the factory ones were terrible).
There are many reality shows on TV featuring shops what will custom build a car to your specifications.
Join a trade union!
Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? If so, you are incredibly naive.
When wages are raised by the government, job losses happen. 16,000 to 36,000 people lost their jobs when California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers.
> Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases?
During WW2, production needed to increase, so hours were increased to 60 hour weeks. The labor force, very patriotic, was all for this. Production increased for a few weeks, and then fell below what was produced in a 40 hour week. Companies wanting to maximize profits are aware of this effect.
Also, if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve. The reason for this is the Law of Supply and Demand pushes those two lines together. The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.
Minimum wage is one indicator of critically substandard living. Here is a small sampling of some others:
If you count inflation in medical and housing costs as an increase in wages, the "wedge" disappears, yes -- but why would you do that for any other purpose than making the wedge disappear?
No, it's very telling that labor saving devices, which have squished the largest industry into economic insignificance many times over, have not resulted in the ability for normal people to work less. Clearly, the benefits have gone elsewhere. "The benefits went into technology! Think of the iPhones!" The median financed smartphone is 1/50th the cost of median rent, try again.
But they're not profitable. They've made a loss for five years in a row, requiring government subsidies to stay operating (because them going bankrupt would make big parts of the country grind to a halt). Ticket prices are so high that it's barely cheaper than driving, and as soon as you travel with two or more people it's cheaper to just own a car. (Or even rent one; I traveled to the other side of the country once for a concert, my own car was in the garage. Did the math, it was cheaper and more convenient (door-to-door) to rent a car, pay the surcharge for long distance, pay the €35 in fuel, etc than it was to buy return tickets for three people)
The answer (I think, I'm no economist / politician / etc) isn't unionising and demanding better treatment, because the limits of the capitalist system they operate in have been reached. The answer is to stop trying to make it profitable. Re-privatize it: trains and public transit are a huge and hugely important nationwide economic driver, an essential service that capitalism can't be trusted with because the owners will try and get as much money out of it as possible, the employees get overworked and exploited and will shut the system down (as is their right) out of protest, and the people will have to deal with the consequences.
Just in my small bubble, the train strikes led to people not going to the office, missing events, lunch orders that either had too much stock that had to be discarded or that were cancelled entirely, costing that company thousands in income, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-union. I'm anti-capitalist though.
Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The universe doesn't owe us value on human-written software.
Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. Anyone that tries, will get driven out of business. Some clever folks will figure out how to do "slightly better" stuff, and charge more for it, but a good way to go out of business, is to focus on Quality as a principal axis.
That's basic market dynamics. It is what it is, and is neither evil, nor good.
It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.
I guess the saddest thing, is that I have really wanted to help teach my techniques to others, but have found that no one wants to learn, so I gave up on that, many years ago.
This seems to be one of the brutal truths of the modern world, and as far as I can tell it applies to everything. There's always a race to the bottom to make everything as cheaply as possible, and the further the industry goes down that "cheapness" scale, the more "quality" loses market share, the more expensive "quality" must be in order to operate at all, and finally things that used to be just "normal" and not too expensive are now luxury goods.
Consider textiles, carpentry, masonry, machine tooling, appliances, etc. etc.
This doesn't feel like a good outcome, but I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it.
Instead of broad employment of artisan breadsmiths, we have people doing email work, because it’s more economically valuable. If the government mandated a higher quality of bread, we’d be slightly richer and bread and slightly poorer in everything else.
It is if you stay niche. It’s called market gardening. It will never equal farm automation for employment or revenue, but it’s a thing you can do as long as not too many people do it. The same happened to woodworking, and manufacturing. What you see are shops that can remanufacture parts that have either aged out of the manufacturer’s warehouse or where the material is the expensive part and reworking it is cheaper and almost as fast as ordering a new one.
The consumer base of these is smaller, so the supply has to be smaller as well, but not zero.
im ok with nothing. if software dev is nearly completely automated to the point there are effectively no dev jobs then there is a much more important economic condition to address
im a basic state-school student who learned the memorable bit about Keynes regarding automating labor which still hasnt come to pass. at the time i kind of found it unbelievable we continue to work so much when then point of automation is working less, but i was a college slacker so any excuse to avoid work seemed like a good point to me.
to conclude this preamble: i have a sinking sense of momentum and my circles of midwit friends stare at each other like deer in the headlights with no idea on whats next after jobs dry up
my question: are there movements to prepare the society for the impending mass automation and layoffs? people still seem to want jobs, because society demands it, but are there movements by significant political or idea leaders to finally get off the work treadmill and go toward a Keynes-style chill out? i dont know where to start and any direction is appreciated
* i understand ai layoffs is a media scapegoat for the real issues with taxable R&D and interest rates. mass automation of jobs and real workforce replacement by ai is probably on a timescale 2x to 5x of the 10 year runway im expecting
He is not the only one, but he is the most prominent. I've been considering starting a website to track things like The New Apostolic Reformation, The Seven Mountains Mandate, Curtis Yarvin, the two billionaires trying to get rid of the separation of church and State in Texas, and others.
There is a right-wing christofascist movement attempting to bulldoze democracy via technology. Peter Thiel is basically running the surveillance tech of our government. Look into what he's said about bulldozing government with technology. He knows his ideas are so unpalatable that he has to subvert democracy to get his ideas implemented.
This is the most prominent threat to our secular, freedom-loving, democratic way of life. It unfortunately receives very little air time.
EDIT: also look into this account's namesake, Edward Bernays, aka the father of modern propaganda.
> Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?
That should be horrifying. It should be the red flag that spurs action against a gross system of exploitation and goal misalignment. For all the crowing about AI misalignment wiping out humanity, we have actual economic misalignment leaving humans homeless, starving, and dying of curable illness not from lack of supply or demand, but purely from placing profit above all.
To see defeatists and fatalists jump in comments and say "that's just how it is" while prostrating themselves in worship to the almighty share price should infuriate us as a species, for these are humans who willingly accept their own demise at the hands of others rather than doing anything of value for their own self-preservation, let alone preservation of the species.
I don't understand this statement. These things aren't unprofitable. Doing these things a specific way is unprofitable. Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale. Is it sad that a small, family farm isn't really a great way to make a living nowadays? Sure. But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity; "creating food" is, but there's lots of ways to do that.
And, honestly, if we _ever_ get to the point where we can fabricate food from raw elements (a la Star Trek), then that will be a little sad, too... but still "creating food".
The computer-based drinks machine onboard the Heart of Gold on the other hand… Trying to order tea there now sounds suspiciously like a bout of futile prompt-engineering; trying to goad an LLM into giving you tea, but ending up with something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor.
For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased to less than 1% of what it once was.
Of course the person spending 100+x the effort to grow corn will not be economically competitive - why would we want anything different?
https://www.lhf.org/learning-fields/crops/corn/
The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.
Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.
That being said, if you're going to get on your data soapbox and try to tear down an argument I didn't make in the first place, then I will challenge you to "square the circle" between OPs argument that food production is not profitable; the fact 200 million children (and half a billion people globally) are malnourished; and that these stats are somehow acceptable in a world that collectively throws out a billion meals per day.
Sure, I can believe that, but...
> doing anything of value for their own self-preservation
Even your own comment relies on some metric of value.
I agree that profit motives are not an ideal metric of value but as your comment suggests, we as a species do rely on some metric of value. I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.
That attitude is the equivalent of a frog in a boiling pot going, "I won't leave until you have a better idea of where to go."
Value is - and always will be - subjective. Whenever society forms a centralized definition of value, it is immediately gamed and exploited by those who seek profit and power. Currency and profit are extreme forms of Goodhart's Law, the civilizational equivalent to "Tickets Closed" or "Lines of Code Written" KPIs.
To demand objective measure of subjectivity is to fight a fool's battle.
Which would be a fair counter-argument to have if so many of you (and people like you) weren't also trying to drag those of us looking to escape back into the fucking pot.
If you want to sit and boil, fine, but for chrissakes let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that. Your staunch refusal to confront reality is your problem, but your insistence on harming others so you don't have to confront reality should be criminal.
Ok? Who is stopping you? Nobody here is prohibiting you from continuing to write code by hand and doing whatever you wish. Certainly if you're going to assert that that's criminal, of course I'm not interested in your vinegar.
I used to wonder if a Butlerian Jihad was plausible or just an interesting plot device. Now, it seems more plausible every day.
Let’s be honest; capital wants to eliminate all labor, and damn the consequences. People are not going to willingly give up lives of comfort for abject squalor. This will not go well.
On top of that, I agree that capitalists continue to eliminate jobs but I also think they create jobs in other sectors. The reason I don't buy into doomsday scenarios is I don't believe they will eliminate all the jobs at once.
I only happen to be a software engineer. If I was born 250 years ago, I'm sure I would've found a creative innovation outlet through another industry.
I suggest that the first ladder that got pulled up is the one on the ground.
No one wants to train new entrants to the field. Not training junior workers seems like a natural extension to that.
We can say that technological progress occurs when a new method is employed to deliver a product or service with some "more desirable" blend of qualities: it's created/delivered faster, cheaper, with a more desirable mix of resource inputs, and/or results in a more valuable/desired output.
Sometimes it's quite obvious when a technology is superior to another as almost all the qualities of it are advantageous: it's made faster, less expensively, and the result is better with such a gap between it and the old way that there's just no denying that the new way is better.
Sometimes the new technology is really a mix of qualities. Let's focus on the mix that generally gets the most attention: the new way is faster/cheaper but the output is not of a higher quality. Sometimes this new way of cheaper+faster but lower quality "wins out" and the consumer prefers it.
And now the crux of it: why is it so common that discussion concerning these shifts is rooted in everything except the consumer?
An imperfect and potentially flawed example: a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer. The old way of making a superior product still exists and some consumers still prefer it but most do not.
Fundamentally, this is a shift that is rooted in the perception, true or not, of the consumer that the new way is more desirable.
Some folks are not happy with the higher prices of the outputs of old ways of doing things or the effects that the new ways have on jobs, the economy, and/or society.
Fundamentally, this has to do with consumer preference and that's where any blame should be meted out.
I seem to recall that a mathematician wrote a paper about this around 1995 which got a lot of press attention. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, though. Nor his methods.
Probably not, but job title inflation has made it so that apparently 5 years of experience is enough to be given a "senior" title. I've got like 15 but still feel like a medior at best. Yeah this is humblebragging, whatever it's a throwaway internet comment.
So the AI thing is happening, maybe its not with this particular tech we have today but they are on to something and we probably better embrace it.
Humans rolled the ladder up behind on so many things. Very few people will survive the planet Earth without the tools and abstractions we built over the many Millenia's and that's how we all live like kings. Any misery out there in the world is a result of our inability to manage it, not because the resources are scarce.
The Luddites, as explained in the article were indeed about the way tech is being adopted. All that tech eventually reached every corner of the world and not every place had Luddites.
Programming computers by hand is shitty anyway, good riddance. Finally we are about to have machines that can be programmed without thinking about the intricacies of programming that have nothing to do with the thing we want to achieve.
All the tech left behind still does have aficionados, maybe in 10 years we can watch someone program a computer using Java on the Primitive Technology channel.
Stealing it...
* The tooling and integration stuff people complain about now ("the S in MCP") isn't really load-bearing yet, and a cottage industry of professional services and product work will go into giving it the same overcomplicated IAM guardrails everything else has; today, though, you just do security at a higher or lower level.
* LLM code generation is better at implementing rote best-practices and isn't incentivized to take shortcuts (in fact, it has some of the opposite incentives, to the consternation of programmers like me who prize DRY-ness). These shortcuts are where most security bugs live.
* LLMs can analyze code far faster than any human can, and vulnerabilities that can be discovered through pure pattern matching --- which is most vulnerabilities --- will be easy pickings. We've already had a post here with someone using o4 to find new remote kernel vulnerabilities, and that's a level of vuln research that is way, way more hardcore than what line-of-business software ordinarily sees.
* LLMs enable instrumentation and tooling that were cost-prohibitive previously: model checking, semantic grepping, static analysis. These tools all exist and work today, but very few projects seriously use them because keeping all the specs and definitions up to date and resolving all the warnings is too much time for not enough payoff. LLMs don't have that problem.
LLM-generated code (and LLM tooling) will inevitably create security vulnerabilities. We have not invented a way to create bug-free code; would have been big if true! Opponents of industry LLM use will point to these vulnerabilities and go "see, told you so". But each year we continue using these tools, I think the security argument is going to look weaker and weaker. If I had to make a bet, I'd say it ceases being colorable within 3 years.
Also I don't think you covered my biggest concern with LLM security, a company making an Amazon basics version of your business model and claiming "AI did it". I'm 50/50 on that one though, it's also possible everyone things with AI you can go full NIH syndrome and take back all the software that we've handed off to various SAAS providers.
So the industrial revolution wasn't a conspiracy to put down the lower classes. The lower classes were in fact the biggest benefactors of the industrial revolution.
If software can go the same way, I'd say good riddance. The profession has always kept free from gatekeepers, and that's a good thing.
Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA.
> and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time
Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to the expense of clothing.
Oh, wait, no I don't, because people still bought clothing and wore it regularly. They just also had economies around mending clothing, updating it, tailoring it, altering it, reusing and recycling it. Rather than building an economic system of destruction for the sake of a handful of profiteers, it was an economy of artisans who provided a staple resource at reasonable rates and quality to support themselves. Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear, people took care of it - and themselves - for longer periods of time. Techniques were used to keep articles sturdy for longer, rather than disposable machine stitches that fall apart in a washing machine.
Experts and artisans are not "gatekeepers", they are skilled craftspeople worthy of respect and deserving of compensation for their skills. To demand anyone be able to do anything of any complexity is to demand a complete elimination of anything that differentiates humans from one another, to create a homogenous mass of genetics with no incentive to grow and evolve.
Nobody is "gatekeeping" software developers, or Doctors, or plumbers, or weavers, or artists. Those all take skill, and people with a suitable level of skill can easily pass good credentials checks and tests.
The article says clothing was passed down generations.
> Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear
What if the father's clothes don't fit the son? Now you have to choose between feeding your cows and buying a shirt.
If you're sending the first say 12-months worth of experience work to india then local gang straight out of college end up with a pretty tangible gap. There are key formative experiences missing. The programming equivalent of fighting with manual array memory management. Or shooting yourself in foot with a pointer.
Worse they don't realise that they're missing pieces. By necessity you start them off at a higher level and their understanding ends up fuzzy for lack of better word. It's not their fault...to them it looks normal, to the previous gen it's all "how can you not know this"
...still the world keeps turning
"It's just how things are."
"That's what generates profit."
"If that's what the market demands, who are we to judge?"
"Guess we do nothing."
We've all heard it before. We get it, so many HN and Tech folks have thrown in the towel and given up on changing anything within their own lives, or within the lives of others. So many more are content just "going along with the ride", abdicating all responsibility to an imagined god in various forms ("invisible hand of the free market" being most common among our peers).
For the rest of us who want to actually discuss the merits of the piece, we're sidelined by those who found reward in the path of libertarian ideals and seek to punish or discipline those of us who seek to make any sort of change or improvement beyond direct profit motives. Serious discussions of organization and direction are derailed in favor of blatant troll bait and bad-faith arguments.
This, I think, is also what Xe is trying to highlight: those in the position to enact the most positive change are staunchly refusing to do so, which in turn exacerbates the harms caused. Too few people with too much power and too much capital believe themselves to be more knowledgeable and intelligent than anyone else, denigrating any thoughts that may come from the slime beneath them on the ladder. When Xe said "Rolling the ladder up behind us", they make it very clear who they're speaking to:
> Look, CEOs, I'm one of you so I get it. We've seen the data teams suck up billions for decades and this is the only time that they can look like they're making a huge return on the investment.
They're basically shouting that "the call is coming from inside the house", and that the only place - right now - to address these harms are by and from the people inside said house. Nobody is coming to save us, but history books are filled with examples of what happens to those classes, those societies, those civilizations for whom greed becomes all consuming, standards of living collapse, and meaningful progress stagnates.
> Maybe the problem really is winner-take-all capitalism.
It’s hilarious to read such defeatist takes on the current state of things on a site called Hacker News. The classical definition of a hacker was someone who wielded tech to circumvent power imbalances in whatever form.
Now I fear we have plenty of technologists that are happy to use tech to further cement and centralize existing power structures. IMO, this has been brewing for the past ten years or so, where technologists wrongly believe they have an in to this power just because they work for a FAANG.
You are labor. Where you work does not matter. So long as you need to work, you are labor. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Doctors are finding out this same lesson.
The way out is to build ventures that don’t involve the capital class. Autonomy and independence are worthy goals to strive for.
Just as alchemists always dreamed of turning lead into gold, there is a dream that people have had for decades of writing less and less code: Open source. Scaffolds. Code generators. No-code tools. Coding Agent LLMs.
If vibe coding goes away, it will be because it has been replaced with something even more hands off. Perhaps vibe prompting. Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something. Maybe even take a genetic approach where you score the fitness of various software for a certain solution and AI will cross mutate the genes. This will be a change of that rivals our shift from hunter/gatherers to the agricultural revolution.
so you're saying the venture capitalists will soon be out of a job?
what a shame