Ok let’s give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I’m a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write “good” code, readable and so.
However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don’t sleep at night because of this.
I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.
For now, I’m not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I’m sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive…
Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.
I don’t think you are disturbed by AI, but y Capitalism doing anything they can to pay you as little as possible. From a pure value* perspective assuming your niche skills in c++ are useful*, you have nothing to worry about. You should be paid the same regardless. But in our society, if you being replaced by someone “good enough”, will work for the business then yes you should be worried. But AI isn’t the thing you should be upset by.
*This is obviously subjective, but the existence of AI with you troubleshooting vs fully replacing you is out of scope here.
This is a real danger in a long term. If advancement of AI and robotics reaches a certain level, it can detach big portion of lower and middle classes from the societys flow of wealth and disrupt structures that have existed since the early industrial revolution. Educated common man stops being an asset. Whole world becomes a banana republic where only Industry and government are needed and there is unpassable gap between common people and the uncaring elite.
Right. I agree that in our current society, AI is net-loss for most of us. There will be a few lucky ones that will almost certainly be paid more then they are now, but that will be at the cost of everyone else, and even they will certainly be paid less then the share-holders and executives. The end result is a much lower quality of life for basically everyone. Remember what the Luddites were actually protesting and you’ll see how AI is no different.
This is exactly what I see as the risk. However, the elites running industry are, on average, fucking idiots. So, we have been seeing frequent cases of them trying to replace people whose jobs they don’t understand, with technology that even leading scientists don’t fully understand, in order to keep those wages for themselves, all in-spite of those who do understand the jobs saying that it is a bad idea.
Don’t underestimate the willingness of upper management to gamble on things and inflict the consequences of failure on the workforce. Nor their willingness to switch to a worse solution, not because it is better or even cheaper but because it means giving less to employees, if they think that they can get away with it.
White collar never should have been getting paid so much more than blue collar and I welcome seeing the Shift balance out, so everyone wants to eat the rich.
Actually I see that the other way around. Blue collar should have never been paid so much less than white collar.
Rich will have weapons and technology. I see 1984 + hunger games scenario more likely.