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This is the midwit argument.
A better argument is that AI will create an even more extreme power law distributions of return to human capital and cognitive performance. You'll see software firms that used to need 100s of developers to work on various pieces of the codebase turn into 10 elite engineers plus their own hand-crafted code LLM. That same firm used to have 100+ sales people to cover various territories, now it just has a single LLM on 24/7 that can answer all the questions of prospects and only turns them over to an elite sales team of 10 when they get to a qualified position.
All of a sudden, we're at 30%+ unemployment because the marginal utility of the bottom 30% of cognitive performers is literally negative. It's not that they can't do anything, it's that whenever anyone thinks of something for them to do, there's an LLM on the way already.
I think we're actually starting to see this already. Anec-data-lly, I'm hearing that junior devs are having a really hard time getting jobs because a lot of what they used to do really is 90% handled by an LLM. Senior devs, especially those that can architect out whole systems, are just fine.
The AI doom scenario isn't paperclips or co-opted nukes, it's an economic shock to an already fragile political system that crashes the whole thing and we decide to start killing each other. To be clear, I still think that that scenario is very, very unlikely, but "killer robot overlords" is 100% Sci-Fi.
Are there really swarms of "junior devs" out there writing code so menial that their whole job can be replaced by an LLM? This is just totally discordant with my experience. Back when I started they threw an active codebase at me and expected me to start making effective changes to a living system from the get. Sure, it wasn't "architecting whole systems", but there is no way you could type the description of the first intern project I built years ago into an LLM and get anything resembling the final product out.
These systems that claim to write code just aren't there. Type in simple code questions and you get decent answers, sure. They perform well on the kind of thing that appears in homework problems, probably because they're training on homework problems. But the moment I took it slightly off the beaten path, I asked it how to do some slightly more advanced database queries in a database I wasn't familar with, the thing just spat out a huge amount of plausible but totally incorrect information. I actually believed it and was pretty confused later that day when the code I wrote based on the LLM's guidance just totally did not work. So I am incredulous that there is really any person doing a job out there which could be replaced by this type of program.
The junior devs graduating college over the past 5 years are drastically less capable than before. There are fully diploma'ed CS majors who do not understand basic data structures. Yes, this is a problem.
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Yes, or close to it. Used to be stack overflow was full of them trying to get real devs to do their work for them.
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Thanks for the kind words.
Yes, that is one possibility (ie the tech advances enough that it kills some but not all jobs so those at the top become Uber rich and those at the bottom UBI). Of course that ignores the possibility that the situation you describe is a mid point; not the end.
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