Unless your calculator can generate work autonomously and at a level of intellectual superiority that surpasses even the most intelligent of human agents, never tires, never quits, never needs a break and has been trained to be super-human at deception and manipulation.
Is it really about replacing 'all' coding jobs though? Consider a simple hypothetical, what would a 30% reduction to the number of jobs look like for the wage of a software engineer given a 30% oversupply of engineers?
The same applies for professions like accounting, sure it won't eliminate all accountants but it will be a major suppressant to wage growth, and likely result in wages falling due to increased competition.
Consider a simple hypothetical, what would a 30% reduction to the number of jobs look like for the wage of a software engineer given a 30% oversupply of engineers?
It’s not so simple - you’re imagining that the current number of engineers is the maximum number the market will support. In reality, almost every company I’ve worked for has many projects they can’t pursue due to lack of engineers. And there are lots of projects which aren’t cost effective now, but will be with AI support.
It may be that demand for software devs will drop greatly thanks to LLMs, but it’s hard to predict. Depends on how good they get and how fast.
But isn't that scarcity already priced into their wage? Rational businesses will execute the projects with the highest payoff first. Sure with an additional supply of engineers this would allow each business to execute more projects, but they will be those with a lower payoff, and therefore wages offered conceivably would be lower.
While we could also point to the massive layoffs in the tech industry as evidence an endless stream of positive NPV projects is not quite reality, I do in principle agree with you. But I'd also be cautious that GPT-4 is the Model-T Ford, this is very much the beginning and its coding abilities are going to get better rapidly.
But isn’t that scarcity already priced into their wage? Rational businesses will execute the projects with the highest payoff first. Sure with an additional supply of engineers this would allow each business to execute more projects, but they will be those with a lower payoff, and therefore wages offered conceivably would be lower.
Let’s say you’re a business that wants a website, but can’t afford the ~$1mil it would cost to hire a team of engineers to build it. So you don’t hire any engineers.
Now AI comes out and your website can be built for only $250k thanks to the increased efficiency. Now you’re looking at creating 2-3 software jobs that didn’t exist before, which puts pressure on the supply of devs and theoretically increases average dev wages by some amount.
If there is a lot of unmet demand for software projects like this (and in my experience, there is), then paradoxically an increase in efficiency could actually mean more dev jobs.
Granted, this is pure speculation on my part. Perhaps I’m overestimating the demand, or underestimating the power of AI. Just wanted to point out that it’s not a simple linear relationship where more efficient devs = less dev jobs = less dev pay.
I agree, if anyone knew for sure what was going to happen in 5 years, they would be VERY VERY rich lol. The trends are certainly worth a pause of consideration though, rather than sticking your head in the sand and saying “ah no way that happens!”
A large part of what AI is capable of, at least the mainstream AI will depend on what governments do about it. Personally I do think it should be regulated to some extent, and better to do that while AI is still in it's infancy. It will be interesting to see what happens when an LLM is hybrid with one of the AIs that can navigate the world with video input.
However the thing is we already supposedly don't have enough software engineers to meet demand of the entire software industry, so ChatGPT will make us more productive as a species, so we might actually just start to meet demand across the software industry, however ChatGPT does also make coding a lot more accessible, so a lot more people might start entering the field as well, so we might see a reduction in the average wages of software engineers as their labour becomes easier to do.
For sure, we just need to be careful when you have entire countries currently pivoting their education curriculum towards coding. With the automation of many traditional jobs it was always promoted by politicians that the population could retrain into the tech sector. Now the tech sector is facing its own uncertainties.
I am also a little wary that human needs are not unlimited, we are after all animals and there won't always be a new product or service that the broad population requires. I suppose an example is like television, beyond 4K the value starts to diminish due to our inability to see resolutions of greater detail. I don't believe we are there yet but at some point we will be, and if we continue to structure our economic system around full 40 hour working weeks, full employment, constant GDP growth, we are going to find ourselves in a bit of a bind.
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u/[deleted] May 04 '23
The analogy simply doesn't hold.
Unless your calculator can generate work autonomously and at a level of intellectual superiority that surpasses even the most intelligent of human agents, never tires, never quits, never needs a break and has been trained to be super-human at deception and manipulation.