We’ve been automating every single industry that we touched for decades without a single word, bringing up tepid responses like “it’s capitalism” or “business is business” when called out on it.

But now that the time has comes for us to automate and change, we’re all up in arms and using ridiculous arguments like this post to fight it.

The hypocrisy is mind blowing

Idk, if I look at major os software it looks to me like the west still holds a huge number of brilliant contributors.

Just look how MS try to get rid of

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47881805

i will never forget to program in ruby. neither c. The question is how usable it will be in the next years. I would love to be able to only code ruby forever. Everywhere.

The West started to forget how to code a long time before AI. At first, it was the work visas to bring programmers in, then it was outsourcing. At this point, I'm not even sure if AI is doing more harm than good in this department as it might be able to bring some jobs back to the "West", if it turns out that it's cheaper than outsourcing.

The outsourcing was shedding more of the trivial jobs, while trying to keep key positions at home, but increasingly, it also started to lose the key positions too. It's possible that AI can make it so that the key positions will be harder to justify to outsource... but, who knows... maybe not.

Why do millions need to code? When we industrialized million lost the knowledge to sewn a garment. Why a few specialized worker producing self building solution is that bad?

I mean beyond the obvious hacker news bias.

If you like it nobody will remove it to you as a hobby. But the artisanal aspect of coding as a production mechansim is dying, and it was about time.

> The defense industry thought peace would last forever, too.

Not really since they are always pushing for more wars.

I can't not write the tired comment of how ridiculous it is to criticize AI and then use AI to write your article. It's tired, but so is this writing style.

For the actual problem, I fear this can't be solved by warning people, the pain will need to be felt. The system we live in, basically free market capitalism, cannot do anything else except local optimization. Maybe it's for the best, I don't know. The alternative of top down planning wouldn't have this problem, but it would have other problems. I work for a mid size somewhat luxury brand, and the major goal right now is cost cutting and AI for efficiency everywhere instead of using it to create better products or better ways to reach out customers. When I think about who will buy our luxury products if all jobs were optimized out of existence, I don't have an answer, but again I think the pain will need to be felt to change course.

> After spending an additional $69 million and years of reverse engineering, they finally produced viable Fogbank. Then discovered the new batch was too pure. The original had contained an unintentional impurity that was critical to its function.

Same thing that happened to the unfortunate Dr. Jekyll!

This will end with the way of COBOL with a few people that still have the expert-level understanding of refactoring old code without causing outages or service disruption.

We’ll see, but right now I now see developers 24/7 hooked onto their agents and in the future we will experience a de-skilling problem which clean code, best practices, security and avoiding NIH syndrome will be all flushed down the toilet.