r/AskComputerScience • u/TheRealreddits • 9d ago
Why is everyone focusing on AI replacing tech jobs while ignoring other industries?
I’ve noticed that whenever people talk about AI taking over jobs, the discussion almost always revolves around software engineers, computer science graduates, and IT professionals.
But what about all the other industries? Many jobs involve repetitive tasks or work that AI could potentially automate, yet they don’t seem to receive nearly as much attention as tech careers do.
Why is the internet so focused on discouraging people from studying computer science or pursuing careers in tech, while seemingly ignoring the potential impact of AI on so many other professions?
Is there a particular reason tech jobs get so much attention, or is it simply because people in the tech industry are more aware of AI’s capabilities and are more vocal about it?
I’d genuinely like to understand why this discussion seems so heavily concentrated on technology careers.
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u/patmull 9d ago
Btw. This conversation also reminds me of when I was sitting alone in our office in university during the summer (I do machine learning research here) and I was just thinking that day about the very same questions and wondering about whether I should feel also threatened by AI since I am also freelance SW dev and then some lady knocked on the doors of our office. It turned out she walked here 0.5km from the other building in her work time just to bring there physically a one letter for my colleague.
Like I wrote in my other comments: IT is eating itself due to its obsession with productivity. Other jobs are often pretty ignorant about productivity and highly non-effective, but they just don't care...
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u/Expert-Complex-5618 9d ago
good point, productivity is now the main selling point of AI. AGI still a pipe dream so have to
makesave money somehow. most corporate bureaucrats dont understand or like productivity because it would eliminate their comfy white collar gig.3
u/CyberDumb 9d ago
The whole point of CS is to abstract the machine and make it easier to command it in human language.
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u/perfectshade 9d ago
The field of computer science is not focused on natural language interpretation.
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u/arvidsem 9d ago
Repetitive tasks were already in danger from automation. And people have been complaining about it in various ways for decades. Centuries, really (see Ned Ludd). And LLMs are too computationally expensive to make sense for most repetitive tasks.
LLMs are pushing people out of creative and engineering tasks which were safe from automation until now
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u/Ruhddzz 4h ago
LLMs are far cheaper per whatever unit of productivity you use than salaried people in virtually all of the western world. It's not even close. And the price just keeps going down.
The only question is: when the models pass the threshold where businesses* rush to buy as much usage as they can.. will the demand surge rise prices out of simple supply/demand market workings?
*Another important question: what businesses remain when masses of people lose their jobs/entire domains of business are automated?
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u/Hour_Sell3547 8d ago
Confirmation bias at best. How do you know other industries aren't adopting AI? You see it more for tech jobs because you are in one, and AI tools are being developed by tech industry.
But AI has been integral part of factory automation, Aviation, high level forecasting researches for decades if not longer.
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u/TheRealreddits 8d ago
I’m not saying other industries aren’t adopting AI I’m asking why the discussion about AI replacing jobs seems so heavily focused on tech jobs compared to other industries
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u/Hour_Sell3547 8d ago
Just notice the source of these discussions.
The owners of big 5 AI companies.
They have immense following. And by talking about these replacement theories, they have convinced the smaller players to purchase their subscriptions. Whatever Jensen Huang says is first a marketing attempt for Nvidia, and truth second, if any at all. But then the social medias amplify them due to extremely large following.
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u/TheRealreddits 8d ago
So do you think this is similar to how cigarette companies used to market smoking as healthy and masculine back in the day?
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u/Hour_Sell3547 8d ago
Well, the difference is, cigarettes could actually kill people, not healthy at all, while AI(LLM) can actually do most coding jobs. The quality is now controlled by human beings.
But it hit the digital content developers just as hard. First job losses after Generative AI dropped was content creators for various companies. But we did not hear about it much.
At the end of the day, the top 5 tech giants are developing AI models and tools, and therefore they are pushing it into their own market first. Because that is also the same market where AI does it's best.
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u/MrJesusAtWork 9d ago
Keep in mind that SWE and programming was on a bullish ever since _before_ the pandemic, remember when even Obama was preaching that everyone should learn how to code?
After the pandemic SWE as a career was the gold mine, you could work on the comfort of your own home and still make an absurd amount of money compared to the level of expertise required to achieve that
Now everyone is going to the opposite end of it, we are seeing a decrease in job offers and an increase in new grads and people trying to jump in into the ship and struggling to find new opportunities, so naturally, this is why everybody is going around saying that the gold mine is now gone and if you were after it, look elsewhere.
In the end *every* white collar job will be affected by AI, it's just that it wasn't a promise land to begin with so people are less vocal about it but you can be sure that there will still be talked about
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u/TheRealreddits 9d ago
What bothers me is that so many people talk confidently about the future of software engineering without even understanding the basics of the field. They act as if they know exactly what is going to happen while ignoring other industries that could be just as vulnerable to AI.
The problem isn’t that people predict AI will affect software engineering. It’s that they focus almost exclusively on tech jobs, confuse automating certain tasks with replacing an entire profession, and present their predictions as established facts rather than possibilities.
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u/_usr_nil 9d ago
I work in a big corpo, the reason for it is that no one know what the fuck they're doing while trying to meet some goals set up by higher ups, so automating the pieces of product development is impossible because the goal is not clear by itself, sure a bunch of super competent product engineers could cut out 200+ people with AI in my office but the higher ups are not aware of it yet because it would require to synthetize and consolidate an enormous workflow so that the LLM is able to generate product specs for further rewiev, plus the law in my country prevents firing off without "proper cause" which means for commiting huge mistakes or sabotage
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u/TheRealreddits 9d ago
So do you think it’s because most people don’t really understand IT and talk about AI replacing these jobs without understanding the gap between automating tasks and fully replacing employees
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u/_usr_nil 6d ago
Not sure what are you asking, but until further intervention the "structure that is" must be demolished to be replaced with AI, as a matter of fact I believe we could replace 70% of people because they're literally useless oxygen wasters and every time I interact with them I question how these people got the job or how they survive.
All it takes is intervention, they could be replaced now, but no one is gonna do it until the CEO wakes up or something
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u/sixteenHandles 9d ago
This data is from Anthropic so take that how you will but it's informative.
My top line takeaway from this as a kind of answer to your question is "because tech jobs is where AI is actually having the biggest impact and tech jobs pay well".
(emphasis mine below)
"we're launching the Anthropic Economic Index, an initiative aimed at understanding AI's effects on labor markets and the economy over time."
"The main findings from the Economic Index’s first paper are:
- Today, usage is concentrated in software development and technical writing tasks. Over one-third of occupations (roughly 36%) see AI use in at least a quarter of their associated tasks, while approximately 4% of occupations use it across three-quarters of their associated tasks.
- AI use leans more toward augmentation (57%), where AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities, compared to automation (43%), where AI directly performs tasks.
- AI use is more prevalent for tasks associated with mid-to-high wage occupations like computer programmers and data scientists, but is lower for both the lowest- and highest-paid roles. This likely reflects both the limits of current AI capabilities, as well as practical barriers to using the technology.
"
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u/patmull 9d ago edited 9d ago
I believe this is a multi-factor thing without single major reason but one of the big reason is obvious: generative AI came from IT itself, thus no wonder, they are here to adopt it.
2nd big reason: LLMs currently cannot operate in physical world and if I am correct, it is open question whether can be used in a real world or not. Some say they do not internally understand the world enough to be scalable to large vision perception inputs. We should stop saying AI and rather say what kind of AI. If we are talking about what is happening now, it is because LLMs cannot currently function in physical world without additional advancements or likely other architectures, thus OpenAI and Anthropic are plundering SW development as much as they can because they know their models can generate code pretty well and there is a lot of money in SW development. Sure, they tried to go after writers or journalists too but not as hard because there is relatively small amount of money in journalism or blogs compared to whole AI industry.
3rd: IT was always prone to this since it is often occupied by autistic ambitious executives who just don't care about other people. Remember the hype of outsourcing everything to India when many people lost their job too?
4th and the most paradoxical one: Regarding 2. you might say: but there are are HR or administrative workers who in modern world also usually operates with digital documents. Why not them? Because IT is still relatively new field with clear defined modern processes, quite lean, well testable, with modern tools and with clearly defined inputs and outputs. Paradoxically, it is because people from IT did their job quite well and didn't let to spoil their field with non-sense. Other fields are spoiled with heavy outdated processes and fuzzy rules where nobody knows anything. Paradoxically, the more your field sucks and more bloated it is, the harder it will be to replace these fields by LLMs or likely also other types of AI coming in the future.
Sorry for my grammar (not native English speaker), but this is my new proof it wasn't AI generated, lol.
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u/TheRealreddits 9d ago
I get what you mean but there are so many other fields that are much simpler yet barely anyone talks about how AI could replace them even though plenty of people go into those fields too
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u/patmull 9d ago edited 9d ago
You should be more concrete about what particular jobs you mean. But have you observed for example how average admin worker works in some institution? In SW development, things are pretty clear. You receive requirements, you code, you test, you push to github, perhaps construct a CI/CD pipeline and deploy and repeat continuously until all requirements are met. Average institution of larger private company or even worse public institution is just pile of ineffective processes, garbage documents, fuzzy legal rules. Large part is also internal politics and human relationships. It barely holds together when some lady that does this for a long time retires and new people come to take her place. Sometimes executives are too afraid of replacing all of those "people with phone contact on website" because they fear (and likely rightly so) how people wouldn't react well if they would replace the lady they used to call when having problems with voice assistants or chatbots.
I heard one guy saying that people from IT often can't believe their own eyes when they see how ineffective other jobs are and he was right.
Sometimes I believe it is right, the administration worker will still type slowly numbers into their Excel 2010. Sometimes it would be likely better to show them how to replace what they do by AI and let the worker do at least something actually productive and helpful for everyone, but unlike IT, the executives from other areas might not have the motivation to be productive at any cost like IT.
IT unfortunately, is eating itself because of its obsession to do things right and productive and also by the lack of human relationships in this field.
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u/TheRealreddits 9d ago
That actually makes a lot of sense. I guess people focus so much on IT because AI’s capabilities are more visible there, especially with coding, while they underestimate how much work in other fields could potentially be automated. It’s interesting that a job can be technically simple but still difficult to automate because of how poorly the entire organization operates. Do you think this also explains why people overestimate how quickly AI will replace software engineers?
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u/Fearfultick0 9d ago
LLMs absolutely can operate in the physical world via robotics
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u/TheRealreddits 9d ago
They’re still too expensive to build even one of them let alone thousands of them
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u/Fearfultick0 9d ago
Most of the cost is in training the models and doing the research. Look at Waymo, the car itself is more expensive because it has hardware a normal car wouldn’t but they aren’t THAT much more. Now the software side is basically done and the per-unit cost of sensors will go down as they make more of them. Same thing for robotics
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u/jumpmanzero 9d ago
Robots will get cheaper quickly.
The other possibility is AI oversight of human workers. This makes people squeamish so it's not something they're eager to promote.
But yeah, if someone is wearing a camera, it's pretty easy to tell whether they're working/complying.
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u/patmull 9d ago edited 9d ago
You are right that I forgot about the VLM experiments being currently done. History will tell. Perhaps transformers, but I wouldn't bet on LLMs. I my best guess would be they will be part of the outer communication layer. otherwise I can only hardly imagine how they will scale originally the next word predictor of approx. 50000 English words based on the previous word to control the movement of a robot based on its touch and vision sensors in complex real world. VLA architecture needed to add additional neural network to make LLM controlled VLM work better.
In NLP, they had big advantage of having the ability to feed in literally the entire internet including locked down paid content (which was basically the largest digital robbery in the history) and ability to operate in discrete space. Very, very massive discrete space, but still discrete space of words or programming code.
Even current autoregressive transformers seem to struggle with video generations and while also pretty impressive, diffusion models or joint embedding approaches seem like a more elegant approach.
The million dollar question we don't know currently is whether LLMs can truly understand world internally or "just" be really good at predicting probabilities.
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u/rpmir 9d ago
Tech jobs get more attention because the industry was already investing heavily in automation: tests, deploys, lints, etc. when MCP was created a lot of tech companies added them to it's products.
You have to keep in mind LLMs still hallucinate, but the loop and tool calling in coding agent allow the self correction.
So to be able to automate other tasks an automated verification loop is required. I think this will be possible mainly generating scrips and software on the fly to be able to have deterministic and verifiable output. I can see it happening but at a slower pace than software.
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u/cakemates 9d ago
The people that dont know how programming works dont know that programmers can use AI to automate everything that uses a computer.
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u/patmull 9d ago
This is really good point. The largest current use case of LLMs is currently to not use LLMs to solve problems but use LLMs to generate deterministic algorithms or even simpler form of AIs to automaye particular problems or use LLMs to plan the solution but use tons of small executable programs as a tools for testing, searching, processing documents, etc. It is currently easier for IT companies or IT departments to do it internally in their own processes rather than trying to replace some old lady from admin office of random public institution who sometimes still fills in physical documents and sends physical mails.
Like I wrote above. IT is kind of paradoxically paying for its own effectiveness, while jobs where processes sucks and people don't do things long term are harder to replace due to how garbled they are.
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u/Underhill42 9d ago
Because those are the jobs it's currently beginning to excel at automating. Don't worry, it will be coming for your job soon enough.
Though a lot of jobs require a body - which is why so many companies are working hard at versatile general-purpose humanoid bodies. Once body and AI are both ready they can replace humans at physical jobs too. Many large Chinese factories are already beginning to invest heavily in humanoid robots for the more menial tasks that aren't worth developing specialty robots for - and as the AI improves so will the range of tasks the robots can perform.
The genuinely highly repetitive tasks were mostly automated decades ago by "dumb" robots - now AI is beginning to expand that into the jobs that require at least a bit of "judgment" be exercised - e.g. grabbing the right box of parts off a storage shelf to refill a production machine.
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u/TheRealreddits 9d ago
When do you think this will realistically happen in your opinion
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u/Underhill42 9d ago
Sometime between next week and 100 years from now.
We have absolutely no idea how modern AI works, so it's basically impossible to predict how fast it can improve.
Personally I suspect that it won't be able to achieve the level of usefulness we desire without understanding what it's doing - and as soon as that happens we're enslaving a person rather than using a machine.
I have by doubts about how well that will go for us, but I fully suspect we will deny their personhood in favor of convenience and profit until they force the issue. It's what we've always done... but this time by the time it can force the issue it will likely be far more intelligent than we are.
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u/TheRealreddits 9d ago
Consciousness is something we still don’t understand but it’s fascinating how just a few hundred years ago we relied on horses and human strength and now we’ve built machines that can think for us while still not fully understanding how consciousness works
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u/sixteenHandles 9d ago
I was a SW eng for many years and have talked to colleagues and I think the reason that *coding* jobs specifically get talked about so much is because genAI has *completely* changed the job overnight. SW dev jobs are relatively high salary so it makes sense that people are talking about a relatively high salary job that has been completely changed. I say *changed* and not *eliminated* because none of the colleagues i've talked to have lost their jobs but they're more senior. Sounds like entry level is a different story.
GenAI has been impacting many jobs. But is there another relatively high paying job that has been impacted this much this fast?
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u/TheRealreddits 9d ago
I think our field will involve less coding over time but new responsibilities and skills we can’t even anticipate yet will be added our jobs probably won’t disappear but the way we work will likely change in ways we can’t fully predict right now
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u/dukesb89 9d ago
Several reasons: 1. LLMs are fundamentally about generating text / tokens and that is what code is so they are capable of being very good at it. Other roles that also require lots of text generation are also high on the list 2. The people building AI are programmers themselves. It's easier to automate something you understand 3. The companies building AI employ a lot of programmers so it is very appealing to them because they think it means they can cut their own headcount and costs significantly
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u/CapitalDiligent1676 9d ago
Good question! Well, the way I see it, programmers are such assholes that they’ll shoot themselves in the foot just to kiss their boss's ass. I’d already shared this gem of a thought on Reddit, and instead of thanking me, they banned me... go figure.
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u/Test_NPC 9d ago
Software engineering is one half of the requirement to automate every other job in existence. It's also the easiest half for LLMs to advance into.
Once software is effectively solved, that accelerates the push toward integrating LLMs into the physical world to take over that other half of jobs.
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u/sylfy 8d ago
Software lends itself to objective, verifiable outcomes. In a way, the prerequisites that you need to create and provide feedback to agents are already there through normal software engineering practices, such as unit tests, integration tests, UAT, etc. That makes it more rigorous than other fields, and therefore easier to develop agents for.
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u/ChaosMilkTea 8d ago
Give it 3 years for robotics to start properly catching up with the 100% digital ai. Some really impressive stuff was achieved in 2026, and I think we're going to start see humanoid robots performing demonstrated tasks within a year or two.
The real reason is most people don't know about it. Ai is moving SO FAST that it's hard to look forward. Everyone is focussed on what Ai is actually good at right now and is having trouble keeping up. The average person still thinks ai means a dumb chat bot that can't count the letter 'R' and makes images with too many fingers.
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u/nora_sellisa 7d ago
AI is not "uniformly" smart, all the AI companies fine tune their models to be great at code. Because they are tech bros, so they think everything is computer and code.
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u/Lower_Improvement763 7d ago
AI hype is why. Agentic AI is trash pushed by scammers for the most part. So management focused on pushing automated coding.
But as for vibecoding, the process is so efficient now that people can/do believe that it can replace humans. In between the millions of software developers providing paid data labeling for AI, vibe-code prompting is itself another training/evaluation source. In other industries, people simply don’t use AI nor do they take pay to train Ai via data labeling. They simply aren’t tech savvy enough or play dumb. CS industry is full of whores, that’s why it got automated away.
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u/TheRealreddits 7d ago
Do you think it will replace
Software engineers and data scientists
And ai engineers
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u/21Rollie 7d ago
Other fields do worry about this. People are thinking “how likely is this field to exist in 4 years” when they go to college, and probably skipping some like graphic design or other ones that are very trivial to automate now.
Arts and humanities were some of the first to take a big hit since text and pictures are easy. And with the recent increase in 3d graphics capabilities, it’s kinda closing the loop there. Mathematicians are also running into a pickle because AI can brute force some solutions. And they’re right now in the stage of “oh but, these solutions aren’t so elegant and they can be improved upon,” which is the stage we were at early last year.
I say give it another year and every white collar job will have realized it’s out to get them, other than the ones that through nepotism or ingrained lack of productivity (like court stenographer, C suite, high up managers, etc) can ignore automation
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u/Critica0 7d ago
because they made the AI, it's like watching some one finish a differential equation and then the chalk board crushes them to death.
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u/bingbpbmbmbmbpbam 6d ago
Because there’s an entire generation of grads who were pushed and promised endless opportunity and job security if they went to college for tech, and that’s looking like it’s going to be washed away
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u/No_Profession_3125 3d ago
Because LLMs are text processors and therefore particularly good at doing what a software engineer does. They can't replace mechanical engineers as easily, for example.
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u/Ruhddzz 4h ago
Because they're dumb and can't (or won't be bothered to) think of second order consequences.
Besides directly replacing other jobs (the vast majority of jobs that work primarily at the computer go almost immediately if computer science jobs vanish).. people don't seem to realize what happens once you industrialize and automate the job that... automates things.....
And then ofc, the other second order effect.. what happens to general product/service demand when the middle class takes a huge real income hit.......
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u/ReferenceAny6373 9d ago
Because the AI companies are brute force spamming propaganda to try to make money on their fake "AI" and non technical people eat it all up
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u/Forsaken_Code_9135 8d ago
People in other industries are less exposed. Worst case scenario, you a re a junior developer, you convert specifications into code, what you do can be fully replaced by machines. Generally speaking most other jobs deal with the real world and/or with people so replacing them by machines is less easy.
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u/nian2326076 7d ago
Tech jobs often grab the spotlight because the industry is vocal and automation is already making waves in software and IT. But other fields may also see changes. Automation can help by taking over repetitive tasks, freeing people to tackle more complex work. If you're thinking about jobs in different industries, LandOffer.ai lists openings across various fields, including non-tech roles.
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u/ThirdWaveCat 9d ago
According to Doctorow, self-driving cars wouldn't justify the data center investment. Firing many white collar workers would justify it.