I simply don't believe that there is an infinite demand for the kinds of things that can be done by generating text.
How many insurance policies does anyone need to contract, how much legal advice does anyone need to hear, how many movies does anyone need to watch, and how much software does must support that demand, so that everyone can stay employed in an AI accelerated service sector?
The new opportunities could well be that labor costs go down so much that the minimum wage is lowered and sweatshops return to developed countries.
I'm sure some aspiring sweatshop owners could be excited by that possibility, I don't think a lot of software developers or TV show writers are eager to be sewing sneakers for a pittance.
We already live in a world where supply would greatly outstrip demand if we weren't constantly being convinced (or convincing ourselves) to spend money on services we don't need. The only real lack of supply is around things like housing and food as far as I can tell, which is curious considering how long those problems have been around.
For some reason programmers start thinking that we'll transition away from a whole world of societies built around the concept of individual ownership, i.e. your landlord charging you rent, company owners owning the company and the resulting product and paying you what they deem the work you own is worth, and move towards something like communism, all because people working in IT or marketing departments are having a hard time.
I'm sorry but us programmers didn't invent capitalism, and it wasn't our consent under the condition of having a good run under it what kept it in place.
If AI only blows away programming, sure you are probably right. If AI blows away white collar labor, which is at least half of jobs, then yeah something would give way.
And if AI blows away all white collar labor, those former white color workers will be unable to afford much blue collar labor, which will hurt the blue collar labor market too.
It's hard to imagine how making insurance sales cheaper for the brokers, churning out astrology apps faster, AI boyfriend bots or running ad campaigns with fewer and lower paid designers is going to drive 10% GDP growth in developed and middle income countries, that's the sort of figures you see when very poor countries finish rolling out electrification, sanitation and transportation.
Also what constitutes ownership here? Couldn't some Enterprising Individuals open 100 shell companies, pool together resources and form the Legalize Asbestos Consortium, the Consortium buys a plot of land and then each stakeholder of the Consortium counts as an owner of the plot of land?
FWIW, it sounds like the judge may be open to ruling against such an action. From his decision at https://aboutblaw.com/blQg:
> Even if Plaintiff had made a “vote dilution” or “one person/one vote” claim under the Equal Protection Clause, it fails. Plaintiff does not assert facts that would adequately support such a claim. Plaintiff does not allege... that natural person voters are a minority or are politically cohesive [or] that entity property owners vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the preferred candidates of natural persons.
Although he also notes that the recent Callais case, severely weakening section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, may change this - and, of course, waiting until the Legalize Asbestos Consortium is doing its thing and trying to file a lawsuit is much more complex than preemptively saying "only natural persons can vote."
Oh? Which industry regularly uses this as a part of standard business for consumers? Unless... you're just pretending to be too obtuse to understand the extremely obvious implication here.
Also a lot of middle managers. Many organizations enthusiastically adopting AI are doing so because they want to appeal to the authority of the bots and bludgeon colleagues with it.
LLMs are very easy to pick up, the point of them for their makers is to commoditize skill and knowledge, you can't be left behind in learning to use them, AI providers don't have economic incentives to make them into anything other than appliances.
The people more at risk of being left behind are the ones that don't learn when not to trust their output.
Right, bridging the gap of knowledge by getting closer to that of the clerical workers of the company, because pure software knowledge is no longer as valuable. That will probably make your salary closer to theirs, and that'll be a pretty big adjustment.
My uncle leads IT support teams, the org is measuring AI use in writing reports and tickets. The org has very poorly structured and obsolete processes (he's trying to straighten them up as he goes), AI will probably amplify the lack of structure, by making it easier for the work to _look_ as if someone carefully reviewed the issues and followed procedure.
A friend is a team lead in an org that's mandating vibecoding via "Devin", a lesser known player an "architect" chose after shallow review. The company also has endemic process issues and simply can't do deployments reliably, it's behind the times in methodology in every other respect. Higher ups are placing their trust in a B-list agentic tool instead of fixing the problems.
Anyway, I wouldn't be caught dead working at either of those two shops even before the AI rollout, but this is what's going on in the IT underworld.
I hate the AI assistants for ticket-writing. The beneficial use there would be to prompt for possibly-useful information that's not present, or call out ambiguity and let the writer decide how to resolve any of that. Coaching, basically. Suggesting actual text to include, for people who aren't already excellent at ticket-writing, just leads to noisier tickets that take more work to understand ("did they really mean this, or did the LLM just prompt them to include it and they thought sure, I guess that's good?")
[EDIT] Oh and much of your post rings true for my org. They operate at a fraction the speed they could because of organizational dysfunction and failure to use what's already available to them as far as processes and tech, but are rushing toward LLMs, LOL. Yeah, guys, the slowness has nothing to do with how fast code is written, and I'm suuuuure you'll do a great job of integrating those tools effectively when you're failing at the basics....
Lots of organizations don't want to accept that their velocity issues are quality issues. It's often a view held by an old guard that was there when the business experienced growth by adding features, while not having to bear any maintenance burden. The people who remain are either also oblivious to this, or simply have stopped caring.
LLM-generated code hits all the right notes, it's done fast, in great volumes, and it even features what the naysayers were asking for. Each PR has 20 pages of documentation and adds some bulk to the stuff in the tests folder, that can sit there looking pretty. How wonderful! Hell, you can even do now that "code review" that some nerd was always complaining about, just ask the bot to review it and hit that merge button.
Then you ask the bot to generate the commands again for the deploy (what CI pipeline?) and bam! New features customers will love. And maybe data corruption.
A firm that is led by people who can envision, very clearly, revenue-generating and cost-reduction projects - wins. Writing code by hand is absolutely irrelevant. Who fucking cares. The former is what matters.
Code generation acceleration only matters when those pre-requisites are met. How did Apple go from the verge of bankruptcy to where it is today?
All Im seeing is most people are not smart at all - no wonder they are so impressed by LLMs! They can't think straight. I only see this become even worse over-time. Perhaps this is the stated goal.
Ticket writing is one thing. Does anyone see automated IT ticket resolution?
Seems tool vendors are introducing AI for issue resolution. But my sense is that in practice they struggle too with the real-life shitshow. Anyone try any of these systems yet?
Well before offices were computerized at all some of the manual processes turned out to be more effective than after full computerization was completely accomplished. Which was sometimes decades later so nobody could tell which workflows it actually applied to, or wouldn't believe it anyway by the 21st century.
It was truly quite rare to have such well-honed manual processes though, the "average" place had a lot of elements that were far from perfect but still benefited after the computerization dust had settled. Then at the opposite end of the spectrum were companies where everything was an absolute shitshow, maybe since the beginning.
That's kind of where Conway's Law comes from, if you benchmark against a manual shitshow that has built up over the years, and replace it with a computerized version, you get a shitshow on steroids. The only other choice would have been to spend the appropriate number of years manually undoing the shitshow before making any really bold moves.
Now AI can really take things to a whole 'nother level, not just on steroids but possibly violating Conway's Law . . . squared.
It brings up the Task Manager, that lets you forcibly stop processes, and this is a way for the (NY State) Government to take control of your printer, the analogy isn't bad.
On Windows XP this depended on whether you had joined a domain. On joined systems you got the security screen (same as previous Windows NT/2000), on other systems the task manager (same as Windows 9x).
Plenty of people will tell you that they enjoy solving business problems.
Well, I'll have to take their word for it that they're passionate about maximizing shareholder value by improving key performance indicators, I know I personally didn't sign up for being in meetings all day to leverage cross functional synergies with the goal of increasing user retention in sales funnels, or something along those lines.
I'm not passionate about either that or mandatory HR training videos.
How many insurance policies does anyone need to contract, how much legal advice does anyone need to hear, how many movies does anyone need to watch, and how much software does must support that demand, so that everyone can stay employed in an AI accelerated service sector?
The new opportunities could well be that labor costs go down so much that the minimum wage is lowered and sweatshops return to developed countries.
I'm sure some aspiring sweatshop owners could be excited by that possibility, I don't think a lot of software developers or TV show writers are eager to be sewing sneakers for a pittance.
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