This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for.
The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over the direction or use of AI. You are doomed to have your life disrupted and changed by it, with no input whatsoever. To quote the article, your six shillings a day can become six shillings a week, and you are left to just deal with it however you can. You are "free" to go find some other six shilling a week job. If you can.
And if you think, "Oh, every technology is like this, it's always been this way", you are right. You have always been at the whims of the owning class, and barring a change towards economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives, it likely always will be.
> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs
Things are cyclic, nothing new; the previous big scare was (is?) outsourcing, where for the same price as one developer in western / northern Europe or SF you can hire five from eastern Europe or India. But that hasn't affected employability of the one developer, as far as I'm aware.
I'm not even thinking of skill level, I'm sure that's comparable (but honestly I don't know / care enough), but both outsourcing and AI require the same things - requirements. I've grown up in this country (the Netherlands) and automatically have intrinsic knowledge of e.g. government, taxes, the energy sector, transportation, etc, so much that I'm not even consciously aware of a lot of things I know. If you spend a LOT of time and effort, you could - eventually - break that down into requirements and work orders or whatever that someone else could process. But it's much more efficient to do it yourself or just hire someone from around here.
I know of two major examples - one personal and one word-of-mouth - where a major US company successfully took their Covid era remote work knowledge, applied it to outsourcing, and successfully replaced most of their US onshore developers with offshore.
> Who owns MSFT? You, probably, through your 401k.
All or nothing fallacy. People have VASTLY different degrees of ownership, and this is reflected in their degree of control.
> Nobody is stopping you from creating a coalition of similarly minded shareholders
Such coalitions already exist. They have names like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity Investments [1]. Good luck competing with them. Especially if you abdicate your role in democracy, don't agitate for legal change, and restrict yourself to only market-based means of change (not BlackRock and ilk though - they use every lever available to them, they don't handicap themselves).
This isn’t a false dichotomy because I’m not even representing two separate choices.
I get that you alone have probably an insignificant amount of control, but forming a coalition would allow you to make change.
I’m aware that there are asset managers. Whose assets do you think they’re managing? Yours!
Do you own VOO? Awesome, that’s why Vanguard owns 10% of almost every large cap company.
Take control of those shares and go make change.
Look up John Chevedden. He owns a minimal amount of shares in companies where he causes huge changes. They call him the “corporate gadfly” [1]
Don’t be lured into thinking that you have to invest your money into a predesigned portfolio because it maximizes returns. If you care about control then maximize control. You already have the power!
> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs
Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day.
> economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives
History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.
You're argument is that the only two alternatives are that the ruling class and owning class be separate groups of people, or the same group of people. And either way the labor class if F'ed.
You're right that having the ruling class and the owning class being the _same people_ is terrible. That's what we're living in right now!
But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?
The labor class is free to form collectives and cooperatives. There's no law against it.
Bezos started Amazon with $300,000. I'm sure it wouldn't take too long for workers to raise that kind of money, after all, $300,000 to buy a house is considered cheap.
On the other hand, the history of businesses being confiscated and handed over to the workers has not been a successful one.
Some startups are worker-owned through stock grants, but those grants are rarely evenly distributed. The founders hold the majority as long as they can.
It is a good practice for companies to include stock as part of the pay package. It encourages alignment of the company with the employees. Very, very successful companies follow this model, such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.
It seems to indicate that if Amazon was employee-owned today, the first thing they would vote to do is convert future hires into non-owners, because that's what the founders did when it was actually employee-owned.
I mean, it probably depends on the type of employee. I assume folks doing deliveries or working in warehouses aren't getting stock packages. I wonder if the admin or accounting folks do.
> But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?
I wonder how many people who repeat things like this know that Bezos owns less than 10% of Amazon. About 2/3rds of Amazon is owned by institutional investors, much of which is in turn owned by individuals in their 401ks and other retirement plans. So "the people" own more of Amazon than Jeff Bezos already.
If you're implying that the government should confiscate Jeff Bezos' personal ownership stake in the business he created and redistribute it to other people, that's a very different topic. It's in the realm of fantasy, not reality, so I don't consider it very interesting. At minimum, it should be noted that if the government gets into the business of confiscating shares from people, the value of those shares will plummet as investors move their money into safer investments, so it wouldn't be a simple numerical wealth transfer from Bezos to others.
Regardless, there's nothing stopping people from getting together and starting an employee-owned collective company that enters the market. They can compete in the market and try to hire away talent from the other corporations.
Yes, Bezos only owns ~10%, but I think it's fair to say that, of Amazon employees and owners, he has more than 10% of the power within Amazon.
If warehouse workers want better conditions they have to solve a national coordination problem without getting crushed. If Bezos wants their working conditions to be more efficient he has to write a memo.
Edit: to connect this back to ownership. This disparity is directly responsible for determining whether profits pay fair wages or got to Bezos and the other owners.
Given the low pay and harsh conditions of the people who create the wealth of Amazon, I do not see confiscating it from the current owners as a Bad Thing
There are probably better means to achieve better ends, but the status quo is very fucking rotten
I have a whole list of things I'd like from my car that the market does not provide because it is more profitable not to. Why do I get the feeling that instead of seeing this as a horror story you would scold me for unreasonable expectations, even though it is the identical mirror form of the horror story you just told?
Mass production reduces costs by standardizing things. But still, car companies offer a wide range of options if you're willing to wait for your order. If Ford doesn't provide what you want, there's GM, Toyota, Hyundai, etc. There's no shortage of variety.
There's also a small cottage industry of people who will make fully custom cars for you. They're pretty expensive, though, as they don't benefit from economies of scale.
Because Mr. Bright has a long, storied comment history of neolibertarian fantasies being wielded as a cudgel against anyone who dares envision a future that does not align with his own.
Speaking from experience with them in another thread. Your best bet is to ignore the bait and move on to more fruitful discussions.
With all due respect, and I mean that sincerely as you've accomplished far more than I have, you aren't here for debate. Your viewpoint is stuck in the cold war mentality where Soviet communism was a failure (it did, but that doesn't mean that everything they touched was bad) and America and its brand of Free Market capitalism is perfect (it isn't) and responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall for all the "debate" that actually occurs. Other long time posters here know better than to engage, but hey, you caught me waiting on Claude.
Having lived through communism I can say the only good things were equality of men and women (in my communist country there were just as many women doctors, engineers, managers, accountants as men) and equality between people (students from Africa were very much welcomed). Everything else though was miserable: our free healthcare, our free cold apartments that had electricity 2 hours a day, our free education, our cheap on paper but non-existent food and medicaments.
All attempts at communism failed. Did you know that there have historically been 20,000 communes founded in the US? I wonder what happened to them!
I never said American free markets were perfect. They certainly aren't. But they are very successful.
> responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall
I could say the same of the people I respond to! I don't expect to change anyone's mind here. The average stay at a commune is about 2 years, after which the members leave, cured of the notion that communism is better. I encourage you to join one.
I would consider co-op businesses a form of small scale communism, and they have steadily been growing in number for many decades with both workers/owners and customers praising them.
I also would consider many nation level communist movements that are held up as examples of failed communism to not really represent basic communist values very well at all, and to be mostly a thin PR cover for changes and turnover within the ruling class. Its not like the USSR was actually paying fair or equal dividends to the working class citizens who they claimed owned and controlled the country, the vast majority of the wealth, power, and control was still mostly diverted to a small class of elite.
Communes of that sort don't really have anything to do with Communism. At least not the political traditions that the word is typically associated with originating with thinkers like Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Mao, Kropotkin, &c. Which specifically define communism as a level of economic development with certain specific prerequisites that none of these "intentional community commune" projects even attempt to meet.
Communism as a pure failure is literally propaganda, but I don't have time to cover the full comparative history of economic development under capitalism and socialism in a comment. All human projects have flaws and it's hard to compare them if you don't get into the nitty-gritty of both the successes and failures.
My take would be to scold you to start your own company that provides the features you want from your car if it's not already being provided by the marketplace
I'd have more luck petitioning the Central Car Design Committee because
> it is more profitable not to
...and if anyone thinks this is ridiculous, I'd ask them if they are for or against repealing all of our current motor vehicle regulations. If "for," they have admitted to being a hopeless libertarian, and if "against," they have acknowledged that important reasonable features can be incompatible with the profit motive of a free market and it no longer seems so strange that I might have a list which is more of the same.
> I'd have more luck petitioning the Central Car Design Committee because
Highly doubtful. Command economies have far less variety in what they offer. This isn't theoretical either just look at western cars vs Soviet cars. There's this mistaken belief that if the free market can't provide some good then a command economy could, but the reality is that if a free market can't provide a good then the chance that a command economy could is even more doubtful. Command economies tend to be very bad at allocating resources efficiently as outlined by Hayek in "The Use of Knowledge in Society".
Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns.
Sounds smart, right?
What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population changes, etc. The result was massive misallocation by the DoE - Californian had shortages of gas, Florida had gluts. That sort of situation has never happened before.
All that nonsense disappeared literally overnight when Reagan repealed all gas price and allocation controls with his very first Executive Order. I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.
What you're suggesting is called "central economic planning". It is constantly tried again and again, and it never ever works. (The failures of it are always classified as "unintended side effects", though they are entirely predictable.)
> I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.
I lived through the gas shortages. I remember the day the gas lines ended. They never returned in the 45 years since, despite all sorts of wars and global crises and exploding oil refineries and Hooties shooting at tankers. All gone literally overnight with the stroke of Reagan's pen.
The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either.
(Except during WW2, where gas shortages were caused by gas rationing.)
> The Jimmy Carter administration began a phased deregulation of oil prices on April 5, 1979, when the average price of crude oil was US$15.85 per barrel ($100/m3).
So, the process wasn't really an instant wave of a wand, or stroke of a pen. We also have this:
> Starting with the Iranian revolution, the price of crude oil rose to $39.50 per barrel ($248/m3) over the next 12 months (its all-time highest real price until March 3, 2008).[11] Deregulating domestic oil price controls allowed U.S. oil output to rise sharply from the large Prudhoe Bay fields, while oil imports fell sharply.
We also have silliness like this:
> Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.[13] The average vehicle of the time consumed between two and three liters (about 0.5–0.8 gallons) of gasoline an hour while idling, and it was estimated that Americans wasted up to 150,000 barrels (24,000 m3) of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.
So we have counterfactuals: if there was no Iranian revolution, would the effects of Carter's gradual deregulation have been felt sooner? If there was no 1973 oil shortage, would the reduction in waste have made a difference? What effect did people simply believing that the crisis was over have?
I don't propose answers to these questions; they are, in my opinion, unknowable.
I suggest that economic narratives such as the one you propose do not capture the entire picture. You had downward pressure on prices due to deregulation and expanding supply, and upwards pressure due to geopolitics and waste.
These processes do not resolve instantly, they take time to play out. I suggest caution when attempting to derive cause and effect from single events in complex systems.
I'll also note that all of this still mostly reinforces your main thesis.
One major issue with central planning is that it usually lacks the internal feedback mechanisms necessary to properly account for all of these factors.
Price signals usually work faster, and thus more efficiently! The USSR even had an economic reform where they introduced mechanisms that could be described as "shadow prices" within their own system [1]. It was the driving force behind one of the independent discoveries of linear programming.
I'd highly recommend "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" [2] and the novel (historical economic fiction, a nerd's nerd literary category if there ever was one) Red Plenty to learn more.
The 79 oil crisis and rationing was caused by the disruption of oil from the Iran, but the US suffered much more from the disruption of the oil from Iran than other countries that also relied on this oil. It would be wrong to ignore the role the government played in making this oil disruption significantly worse.
From "The U.S. Petroleum Crisis of 1979", PHILIP K. VERLEGER, JR. Here are some examples of problems that were identified:
>...On February 28, 1979, DOE published the following notice in the Federal Register: "It is essential that refiners enter the spring driving season with adequate gasoline stocks to meet seasonal demand requirements. We recognize that gasoline stocks are currently at adequate levels for this time of year, which is usually a period of low demand. Recent industry data indicate that total stocks are now in excess of 265 million barrels, which is less than last year's record high levels during the same period but above the average levels of previous years. Our concern is that these stocks not be drawn down precipitously as soon as the impacts of the Iranian shortfall are felt by refiners. Refiners are urged to keep stocks high enough to meet expected demand during the 1979 summer driving season, even if it is necessary to restrict somewhat the amount of surplus gasoline that is made available to purchasers currently" The implementation of these instructions had the effect of restricting the volume of gasoline available to service stations to between 80 and 90 percent of 1978 levels. This reduction was greater than the reduction in total gasoline supplies.
>...In April 1979, DOE ordered the fifteen largest refiners to sell 7.8 million barrels of crude oil to smaller firms that were unable to obtain supplies on the world market at competitive prices. …These transfers probably reduced the volume of gasoline produced in the second quarter because the refineries that purchased the crude oil had only a limited capacity to produce gasoline, while the refineries that sold it could have produced more. ...In addition to reducing the supply of gasoline, the buy/sell program appears to have affected the geographic distribution of crude oil and gasoline. This is because the primary recipients of the crude oil were refineries in the Midwest and the gulf coast areas, while the sellers were companies that were marketing throughout the nation.
>...…In April, DOE turned its attention to the low stock of distillate fuel oil … Two impacts were observed on domestic markets. First, excessive stocks of heating oil were accumulated. Second, companies may have been influenced to increase gasoline stocks in anticipation of the mandator yield controls that DOE threatened to impose.
>...Price controls on gasoline may have also created an incentive to withhold gasoline from the market when the prices of crude oil were rising rapidly. …In summary, the refiners had the capacity and the knowledge to take advantage of this opportunity. Ironically, the instructions from DOE to the companies were to do precisely what was most profitable.
>...In addition to encouraging the buildup of stocks, DOE may have added to the shortages by creating an incentive to reduce the output of crude oil. Although it is difficult to estimate what domestic supplies of crude oil might have been in the absence of any restriction, a DOE announcement in November that control levels of the base period were to be reviewed may have constrained production in the first half of 1979.
Yes and no. A large national firm like Starbucks has a national annual plan. However, this national plan is made up of a lot of little regional plans which are then combined together. This national plan is then executed. Execution relative to plan is assessed every quarter; and every quarter the plans (both national and regional) are adjusted. This assessment and these adjustments are done at both national level and also at regional level.
I feel this is a slightly disingenuous argument - mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors. The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service. Gas lines are one thing - waiting fifteen hours in the emergency room to be seen, only to be charged thousands of dollars for some tylenol and a pat on the head is another.
> mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors
Absolutely correct. But public regulation is quite resistant to course correction. Private companies have to face competitors and adapt or fail.
> The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service
The US healthcare system is massively regulated and interfered with by the law and things like people are forced to buy Obamacare and forced to contribute to Medicare and Medicare massively distorts market forces.
Healthcare in the US was affordable before the government got involved.
Public regulation also course-corrects, it just does so through democracy rather than competition.
I would argue that democracy is a superior method in most instances, because its motives are driven by the motives of the population as a whole, whereas capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Where we agree I think is in the assertion that United States government tends to run things very poorly. In my opinion, however, this is not because central planning is inherently bad, but because our democracy is very weak, and we allow politicians to be controlled by corporate interests rather than the interests of the people that they represent.
EDIT: Oh, and for the record I disagree with the take that the US healthcare system is bad because it has too much regulation - but that's an entirely separate discussion that I don't think is worth going into.
Democracy cannot adapt efficiently to crises. For example, we elect a President every 4 years. You've got a long wait. A company can adapt overnight.
> capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Absolutely correct. And competition is what drives prices relentlessly downwards.
The democratically elected government in the 70s that tried to manage the nation's gas prices and allocations with the best of intentions failed miserably.
Democracy also created the FAA, which used to regulate airline schedules, routes, and fares. Having lived through that era, too, I can attest how costly and inefficient that was. Air fares are amazingly low since, and the scheduling is very tight and efficient at placing airplanes where the people want to use them.
> this is not because central planning is inherently bad
Nobody has ever managed to make it work. Consider rent control. Endless variations of it are implemented, and all produce the "unintended" side effects of higher prices and shortages.
The US healthcare system is pretty far from privately run. It’s more an example of regulatory capture and incumbents freezing out new entrants via extensive government regulations.
This person is praising Reagan in terms of economics - I wouldn't even call it slightly disingenuous; it is entirely disingenuous. Walter commonly has absurd takes on this site; I wouldn't fight too hard in conversation.
> Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day.
Are you suggesting that suppression of wages is what gave us "more interesting things" to do?
> History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
How is this different from the "free market" assigning me a job?
> For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.
Concessions are the price to pay for living in a civilized society.
It's kind of a meme at this point that any kind of economic control for laborers = communism. That's not just a jump you're allowed to make, sorry. There are a plethora of nations outside the US which have stronger protections for labor, and they're doing quite well. It's not 1965 anymore, we have to start making real big boy arguments.
This happens anyway, lol. Go to a car lot and you will see the majority of cars available are black, white, silver, and maybe red. Your car will have a stereo. Your car will probably have 4 seats, not 2. Dealers stock the most common configurations and, maybe this is not your experience, but my experience is that they will twist themselves into knots to avoid helping customers make custom orders for exactly what they want, even though the manufacturer has a fancy configurator page where you can do exactly that.
I've never had trouble ordering what I wanted from the options list. That usually means needing to pay more, though.
If you want custom leather seats, you can drive your car off the lot into one of many shops that offer such services, or other customizations. Me, I drove to the stereo shop to put a better stereo in (back when the factory ones were terrible).
There are many reality shows on TV featuring shops what will custom build a car to your specifications.
This is by far my biggest concern about "A.I." and "smart" robots... Not the technology itself, but what the "ruling class" intend to do with it / how they intend to use it. Their primary concern is not "worker productivity" these days. It's "How can I replace the maximum number of workers (ideally all of them) so that I can keep most / all of the profits / benefits for myself (and the shareholders)?" It's always been about profit, but they now finally see a potential to entirely rid themselves of "those pesky poors" and their annoying paychecks once and for all.
Do you really want a return to the days when "women's work" was spending every free moment spinning and weaving cloth by hand? When cloth was so valuable there was a profession called "rag pickers"? Where new clothes were rare, hand me downs were the usual, and people wore clothes until they disintegrated? And poor people made clothes out of flour sacks?
Those days were after the rich had commenced urbanization by driving the agrarian workers off the land and encouraging them to find work at dismal wages in the city, made it a crime to be a vagrant, and funded charities that collaborated with judges to force the poor into workhouses where they could enjoy abuse, degradation and misery from cradle to early grave.
That’s not what the Luddites wanted. They praised the technology itself and recognised it would save a lot of time. But they also recognised that they the workers wouldn’t reap any of those benefits, they’d just lose their jobs.
Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? If so, you are incredibly naive.
The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.
When wages are raised by the government, job losses happen. 16,000 to 36,000 people lost their jobs when California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers.
> Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases?
During WW2, production needed to increase, so hours were increased to 60 hour weeks. The labor force, very patriotic, was all for this. Production increased for a few weeks, and then fell below what was produced in a 40 hour week. Companies wanting to maximize profits are aware of this effect.
Also, if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve. The reason for this is the Law of Supply and Demand pushes those two lines together. The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.
> The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.
Minimum wage is one indicator of critically substandard living. Here is a small sampling of some others:
well over minimum wage + below the poverty line
no discernible exits off path to unhoused retirement
current, recurring or impending homelessness
food insecurity and recurring hunger
medically triggered impoverishment
only possible caregiver for loved one with medical issues
> if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve
If you count inflation in medical and housing costs as an increase in wages, the "wedge" disappears, yes -- but why would you do that for any other purpose than making the wedge disappear?
No, it's very telling that labor saving devices, which have squished the largest industry into economic insignificance many times over, have not resulted in the ability for normal people to work less. Clearly, the benefits have gone elsewhere. "The benefits went into technology! Think of the iPhones!" The median financed smartphone is 1/50th the cost of median rent, try again.
employers pay for the massively increased medical costs directly though? Its not hard to see that when medical costs increase by 6-10% they would hesitate to increase wages
Put it this way: If the government increases my tax by $10k per year and my employer increases my gross salary $10k per year in response, did I get a pay raise?
Also, it's known that as medical prices rise, the percentage of the prices that insurance actually pays goes down. Are you sure they're paying more?
Also, why do countries with universal healthcare have such cheaper healthcare of a similar quality?
Because the correct comparison would be with total compensation, of which wages are only a portion.
Total compensation is the costs to an employer to hire some one. It includes:
1. contributions to retirement plans
2. so-called "employer paid" social security contributions
3. sick and paid vacation days
4. employer paid health insurance
5. stock plans
6. 401k plans
7. other payroll taxes
Last time I checked, these often added 40% or more over the takehome pay.
Also, the pay is based on the value the employee as an individual provides, not the value the company as a whole created. Just like the compensation for pro football players varies in a single team.
Beyond Social Security contributions, which is legally mandated, most workers don't get the remaining items on your list. (And #7 is just double-counting #2.)
It's like saying, a CEO gets a housing allowance and travel allowance and can expense most of their meals, so the entry level worker is doing okay.
> 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.
Far too high. Abject failure. The US's minimum wage is approximately the wage where you could work 24/7 and break even. Anyone working at that wage is in a very bad situation or someone else is paying all their bills.
Also, if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve.
This hasn't been true for at least two decades. Employee compensation severely lags productivity increases, and the capital class captures the entirety of the benefit of that lag.
The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.
No. If that were true CEOs and VCs would get paid pennies, and most software programmers would get paid close to minimum wage today (programs are slower and buggier than they were 20 years ago despite having 100x or more increase in hardware resources and offering the same or reduced functionality).
You might be interested to know that political discussions are not allowed in the D forums (or any non-programming topics). We also don't discuss politics at the D conferences.
> You are so politically naive and indoctrinated
How can you be sure it's not the other way around? :-)
Even unions are up against it though. in the Netherlands, there have been multiple strikes from e.g. the train operators; they demand a 10% wage increase, after the train company downsized a lot during the pandemic, but who were then unable to upsize again as traffic resumed and who even now don't have the same amount of travelers as they did in 2020.
But they're not profitable. They've made a loss for five years in a row, requiring government subsidies to stay operating (because them going bankrupt would make big parts of the country grind to a halt). Ticket prices are so high that it's barely cheaper than driving, and as soon as you travel with two or more people it's cheaper to just own a car. (Or even rent one; I traveled to the other side of the country once for a concert, my own car was in the garage. Did the math, it was cheaper and more convenient (door-to-door) to rent a car, pay the surcharge for long distance, pay the €35 in fuel, etc than it was to buy return tickets for three people)
The answer (I think, I'm no economist / politician / etc) isn't unionising and demanding better treatment, because the limits of the capitalist system they operate in have been reached. The answer is to stop trying to make it profitable. Re-privatize it: trains and public transit are a huge and hugely important nationwide economic driver, an essential service that capitalism can't be trusted with because the owners will try and get as much money out of it as possible, the employees get overworked and exploited and will shut the system down (as is their right) out of protest, and the people will have to deal with the consequences.
Just in my small bubble, the train strikes led to people not going to the office, missing events, lunch orders that either had too much stock that had to be discarded or that were cancelled entirely, costing that company thousands in income, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-union. I'm anti-capitalist though.
> Actually, what are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people?
Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The universe doesn't owe us value on human-written software.
Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
Well, as someone who considers themselves to be a "software craftsman," I have come to the conclusion that the work I do will never be valued, and will always be considered "too expensive." Since I work for free, that's not an issue for me, but that's economically unfeasible for most folks.
The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. Anyone that tries, will get driven out of business. Some clever folks will figure out how to do "slightly better" stuff, and charge more for it, but a good way to go out of business, is to focus on Quality as a principal axis.
That's basic market dynamics. It is what it is, and is neither evil, nor good.
It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.
I guess the saddest thing, is that I have really wanted to help teach my techniques to others, but have found that no one wants to learn, so I gave up on that, many years ago.
> The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff.
This seems to be one of the brutal truths of the modern world, and as far as I can tell it applies to everything. There's always a race to the bottom to make everything as cheaply as possible, and the further the industry goes down that "cheapness" scale, the more "quality" loses market share, the more expensive "quality" must be in order to operate at all, and finally things that used to be just "normal" and not too expensive are now luxury goods.
Consider textiles, carpentry, masonry, machine tooling, appliances, etc. etc.
This doesn't feel like a good outcome, but I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it.
I can see both sides of it. There’s a fancy bread bakery by where I live. I go infrequently, the bread is great. But it’s expensive, most of the I just want a cheap loaf from Target, as do most people.
Instead of broad employment of artisan breadsmiths, we have people doing email work, because it’s more economically valuable. If the government mandated a higher quality of bread, we’d be slightly richer and bread and slightly poorer in everything else.
I've actually thought over my career that software is one of the last places for well compensated craftmanship. In the sense of solving unique problems for good pay. I think that was due to:
- the explosion of software needs due to the internet
- the scalability of software solutions (zero marginal cost for additional copies is a hell of a drug)
I still think that is true, but it may be fading away for many people. That said, the newer devs that I've met that have found jobs tend to find them at bespoke consulting shops (rather than product companies).
I think there will always be room for quality craftmanship in software, but it will be boutique, the same way that there is craftmanship for high quality furniture or cabinetry. ~95% is manufactured mass market and cheap, ~5% is high quality bespoke and expensive.
> It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.
Why can't you get a team together?
I dream of working on big and meaningful things ever since a teenager (and I'm 45 currently) but yeah, I can't afford doing it for free. I keep being a drone.
But if somebody were to stretch out a helping hand and pay me to do the big and meaningful things I'll likely accept two days later.
It is a lot more expensive to do high-Quality work, than it is to do shoddy (or, to be fair, barely acceptable) work. You need to hire more experienced (expensive) people, and then, you need to hire better managers, because you don't want the usual crap managers in charge of them.
And then, you need to pay for the time they take, "polishing the fenders."
Once you have an established brand, you can do these kinds of things, but it's pretty much impossible to start from scratch (without deep, patient pockets).
Well money is always the rub. And many people, once they become better off, become stingy and paranoid and don't want to reinvest -- which I completely understand, especially if they didn't have rich parents and trust fund(s) and had to grind their boots off to get where they are. If I ever make it I know I am absolutely joining that exact group. I owe the world nothing -- definitely not after decades of abuse and zero appreciation.
> it's pretty much impossible to start from scratch (without deep, patient pockets).
Well, I was not referring to myself here, FWIW. I ain't ever going below $10k a month (not to mention that for any meaningful life plans $18k - $25k a month is much more strategically desirable) but I was somewhat referring to many certain techies here on HN who (1) have the talents and tech skills and (2) are very well-off and could work for charity wages for 5+ years without a problem (think $3k - $5k a month).
I am just very sad that these people, who are in a 10x better position than I ever was for 23+ years of career, did not group up and did not create the next-gen lab experience, the likes of which we haven't seen since the days of UNIX. :/
As for the rest of the world, the owning class are quite fine with what they already have -- they know tech currently is not 100% reliable but they are never making 5x the investment for what they see as a 10% improvement (which is exactly the part where they are wrong -- but these people can't think beyond 2-3 quarters ahead anyway).
Yes, I have been fortunate to be in a position to pay it back (not forward). I'm nowhere near as well-off as a substantial portion of the folks here, but I have enough to live (humbly), and get the equipment I need to do my work.
But I also know that I am an outlier, and, quite frankly, an anachronism.
Just a little while ago, I made a new release of this app[0]. I talked to someone this morning, and realized that they had no idea that you could swipe the screen, to get to different times.
I added a small label to the bottom of the main screen, telling folks that they could swipe to see different times. I had to translate it to Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese, which ChatGPT was ideal for (I don't think that I'd use it for bulk translations, but it was great for a "spot translation").
That kind of thing may seem silly, but it's also exactly the kind of thing that many, many apps don't do. It's quite easy to say that "any power user knows to swipe," but that often excludes a huge number of folks. Since I started hiding the main time selection control panel, swiping has become the main navigation technique.
> it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore
It is if you stay niche. It’s called market gardening. It will never equal farm automation for employment or revenue, but it’s a thing you can do as long as not too many people do it. The same happened to woodworking, and manufacturing. What you see are shops that can remanufacture parts that have either aged out of the manufacturer’s warehouse or where the material is the expensive part and reworking it is cheaper and almost as fast as ordering a new one.
The consumer base of these is smaller, so the supply has to be smaller as well, but not zero.
this comment implies the real "other shoe" for which im waiting to drop.
im ok with nothing. if software dev is nearly completely automated to the point there are effectively no dev jobs then there is a much more important economic condition to address
im a basic state-school student who learned the memorable bit about Keynes regarding automating labor which still hasnt come to pass. at the time i kind of found it unbelievable we continue to work so much when then point of automation is working less, but i was a college slacker so any excuse to avoid work seemed like a good point to me.
to conclude this preamble: i have a sinking sense of momentum and my circles of midwit friends stare at each other like deer in the headlights with no idea on whats next after jobs dry up
my question: are there movements to prepare the society for the impending mass automation and layoffs? people still seem to want jobs, because society demands it, but are there movements by significant political or idea leaders to finally get off the work treadmill and go toward a Keynes-style chill out? i dont know where to start and any direction is appreciated
* i understand ai layoffs is a media scapegoat for the real issues with taxable R&D and interest rates. mass automation of jobs and real workforce replacement by ai is probably on a timescale 2x to 5x of the 10 year runway im expecting
If you're in America, there probably will not be a chill-out. Look into the philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, whom has been cited favorably by J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. We are heading towards techno-fascism. The working population which would have been furloughed is probably going to be redirected to the manual labor jobs currently being vacated by the aggressive deportation of "the worst of the worst" immigrant workers within our borders. The loss of these displaced people will necessitated a new underclass to work the fields, clean the chickens, etc. This underclass will be composed of prisoners-cum-indentured servants and slaves, which are legally provided for by the 13th amendment.
It's grim but understandable in a way. I was writing quickly but I can expound more on any point if you want. I don't think we're locked into it yet, but if you read into Curtis Yarvin then you will see he was extremely prescient in the 2010s era. I refer to this brand of technofascist monarchism, self-branded as The Dark Enlightenment, as Yarvinism.
He is not the only one, but he is the most prominent. I've been considering starting a website to track things like The New Apostolic Reformation, The Seven Mountains Mandate, Curtis Yarvin, the two billionaires trying to get rid of the separation of church and State in Texas, and others.
There is a right-wing christofascist movement attempting to bulldoze democracy via technology. Peter Thiel is basically running the surveillance tech of our government. Look into what he's said about bulldozing government with technology. He knows his ideas are so unpalatable that he has to subvert democracy to get his ideas implemented.
This is the most prominent threat to our secular, freedom-loving, democratic way of life. It unfortunately receives very little air time.
EDIT: also look into this account's namesake, Edward Bernays, aka the father of modern propaganda.
Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary).
> Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?
That should be horrifying. It should be the red flag that spurs action against a gross system of exploitation and goal misalignment. For all the crowing about AI misalignment wiping out humanity, we have actual economic misalignment leaving humans homeless, starving, and dying of curable illness not from lack of supply or demand, but purely from placing profit above all.
To see defeatists and fatalists jump in comments and say "that's just how it is" while prostrating themselves in worship to the almighty share price should infuriate us as a species, for these are humans who willingly accept their own demise at the hands of others rather than doing anything of value for their own self-preservation, let alone preservation of the species.
> That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"?
I don't understand this statement. These things aren't unprofitable. Doing these things a specific way is unprofitable. Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale. Is it sad that a small, family farm isn't really a great way to make a living nowadays? Sure. But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity; "creating food" is, but there's lots of ways to do that.
And, honestly, if we _ever_ get to the point where we can fabricate food from raw elements (a la Star Trek), then that will be a little sad, too... but still "creating food".
The replicator in Star Trek doesn't seem plausible to me any more. Flawlessly outputting a cup of Earl Grey?
The computer-based drinks machine onboard the Heart of Gold on the other hand… Trying to order tea there now sounds suspiciously like a bout of futile prompt-engineering; trying to goad an LLM into giving you tea, but ending up with something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
And if you phrase your question wrong, you have a chance of triggering a Chain of Thought process that gets stuck in a loop "analysing" some utterly irrelevant part of the problem (here, "why would anyone want to order tea?"), locking up important subsystems of other systems on the network in the process.
> Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale
The agricultural practices you hint at only make sense in a boardroom. I'm sure it seems rational or logical, but it's not based in experience or ethics.
> But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity;
It is probably the foundational discipline of humanity. Cultivating and cooking food is what allowed us to do everything since.
What are you talking about? Inexpensive food is a boon to society.
Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor.
For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased to less than 1% of what it once was.
Of course the person spending 100+x the effort to grow corn will not be economically competitive - why would we want anything different?
You are not making an argument you think you are making. We switched from one set of problems to another set of problems that didn't exist before industrial agriculture: soil erosion, pest explosion, entire harvests wiped out by disease because genetic uniformity, which means one pathogen can destroy everything - think Irish potato famine but now it's scientific and modern.
The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.
Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.
This is an excessively romanticized view of traditional farming. If you look at the astonishing death tolls from famine throughout human history, including in living memory, it is pretty clear why, for all its problems, industrial agriculture is still a far superior approach.
Food security requires food production at levels which demand industrialized agriculture, for better or worse.
Maybe a false dichotomy. For ex, modern transportation could have been in service to sustainable agricultural models, providing resiliency between communities.
You are missing the point. The point isn't that the legacy methods of agriculture are unequivocally better. They have their downsides, some of the downsides are pretty severe. The point is that abolishing traditional farming in favour of industrial agriculture yielded unforeseen costs, the ones that were never even hypothesized when we started scaling agriculture. Now with AI and agents, we'll reap those unforeseen costs again. The profits will go into the pockets of the owners, the unforeseen costs (which include the costs of switching from one system to another) will become the society's burden to bear, as it was with industrial-scale agriculture.
+1 on seeing like a state. But combining small plots into mega farms did create more food. It just did so at the loss of variety and knowledge and local control and ultimately freedom as you say. See enclosing the commons in England in the 18-19th century
I need to finish seeing like a state and will defer to your expertise, but this raised a question in me: why are we still limping along if our farming techniques are doomed like this? Did we never adapt in recognition of the flaws of monoculture?
We adapted, that's why the pesticide industry is so big. I'm not a great agriculture expert, but from my understanding it's an uphill battle against nature and we are winning for now.
I find that 38 hours per acre for corn figure a bit inflated as someone who use to plant 2 acres of corn each year using a 1901 corn planter and harvesting it by hand with my father. It never took the two of us more than a day to harvest the entirety of the corn, store it in our corn crib, and bundle all the corn stalks, while working at a fairly leisured pace. Tilling, fertilizing, and planting only took a day and only required one person for the first two, granted we did use a 1940 farmall tractor, but like I said its not like we were working at any real speed trying to get it done as if we needed it to survive. It was just a cheap and easy way to get corn to fatten up a cow or two before slaughter. It is also an absolutely miniscule amount of work compared to the amount of food it produced. Using 1900 corn yields (we didnt actualy weigh our own yields), it was over 3,000 pounds of corn, and it was likely much higher growing a more modern variety. Going by bulk grain corn prices at the local Tractor Supply the value rivals or exceeds the average local wage, and if it was sweet corn would surpass local wages multiple times over, so doesn't seem like a bad deal at all.
I was directly replying to the poster above me's own arguments in favor of "doing nothing". At no time did I denigrate inexpensive food, only highlighted that their own perspective that food production is unprofitable when it is in fact necessary for every human to survive, should horrify them.
That being said, if you're going to get on your data soapbox and try to tear down an argument I didn't make in the first place, then I will challenge you to "square the circle" between OPs argument that food production is not profitable; the fact 200 million children (and half a billion people globally) are malnourished; and that these stats are somehow acceptable in a world that collectively throws out a billion meals per day.
> are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains
Sure, I can believe that, but...
> doing anything of value for their own self-preservation
Even your own comment relies on some metric of value.
I agree that profit motives are not an ideal metric of value but as your comment suggests, we as a species do rely on some metric of value. I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.
> I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.
That attitude is the equivalent of a frog in a boiling pot going, "I won't leave until you have a better idea of where to go."
Value is - and always will be - subjective. Whenever society forms a centralized definition of value, it is immediately gamed and exploited by those who seek profit and power. Currency and profit are extreme forms of Goodhart's Law, the civilizational equivalent to "Tickets Closed" or "Lines of Code Written" KPIs.
To demand objective measure of subjectivity is to fight a fool's battle.
That's fair but not a convincing argument if you're seeking to show that the pot is boiling. I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me".
> I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me".
Which would be a fair counter-argument to have if so many of you (and people like you) weren't also trying to drag those of us looking to escape back into the fucking pot.
If you want to sit and boil, fine, but for chrissakes let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that. Your staunch refusal to confront reality is your problem, but your insistence on harming others so you don't have to confront reality should be criminal.
> let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that
Ok? Who is stopping you? Nobody here is prohibiting you from continuing to write code by hand and doing whatever you wish. Certainly if you're going to assert that that's criminal, of course I'm not interested in your vinegar.
Life would certainly be easier if we could all choose which things done by other people affect us and vice versa. Then we could have these simple "if you don't like it, leave" arguments hold water and air pollution wouldn't exist and herd immunity wouldn't be a thing and we wouldn't even need police.
There is a big gap between the other commenter's desire to write code by hand and air pollution.
Look, as a programmer I also love writing code by hand, however it's childish to suggest that if I can no longer make a living doing so because automated code production is more profitable that that's equivalent to boiling in a pot or suffering from air pollution.
There are substantiative risks with AI, such as a potential for a singularity, that would make for an actual compelling argument. Some engineer's desire to make a living writing code by hand does not. That's a luxury.
Yeah that's totally possible but I suspect if AI really does take over software, the number of people who will riot over software quality is going to be dwarfed by the number of people who are happier that they can get their chats GPT'd faster.
What makes you think that capitalists will stop with software developers? If AI can truly eliminate software jobs, then most knowledge based jobs will be at risk of elimination.
Let’s be honest; capital wants to eliminate all labor, and damn the consequences. People are not going to willingly give up lives of comfort for abject squalor. This will not go well.
I don't think they will but I also don't think abject squalor is the way to describe artisanal work.
On top of that, I agree that capitalists continue to eliminate jobs but I also think they create jobs in other sectors. The reason I don't buy into doomsday scenarios is I don't believe they will eliminate all the jobs at once.
I only happen to be a software engineer. If I was born 250 years ago, I'm sure I would've found a creative innovation outlet through another industry.
This also assumes that non human written code will be of any use to humans and no one has shown that to be possible, it is all humans patching it up so far.
industry only ever seems to want to hire people with the word Senior in their title.They almost never want to create people with the word Senior in their title.
I suggest that the first ladder that got pulled up is the one on the ground.
No one wants to train new entrants to the field. Not training junior workers seems like a natural extension to that.
Maybe companies should provide some sort of incentive for the juniors they trained to stay with them. As it is, the obvious and rational choice is always to leave for another company that will pay you 25% more whenever you feel undervalued.
In centuries past apprentices would pay their junior positions, in time picking up paid work as the progressed to senior, then eventually taking on apprentices of their own (and be paid)
We already require juniors to go through a 4 years university degree. It takes a fair bit of time of real world work to get to the senior level. So unless we expect people to do another 5 years of schooling, I am not sure how this will happen (and even in that scenario I believe there is a difference between hands on, on the job experience and classroom experience).
it happened with architecture degrees in the uk. it went from 3 years to 7 years, as the skill levels and implicit knowledge required increased over time.
There are a lot of issues brought up in this post, but I want to discuss one in particular: technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications.
We can say that technological progress occurs when a new method is employed to deliver a product or service with some "more desirable" blend of qualities: it's created/delivered faster, cheaper, with a more desirable mix of resource inputs, and/or results in a more valuable/desired output.
Sometimes it's quite obvious when a technology is superior to another as almost all the qualities of it are advantageous: it's made faster, less expensively, and the result is better with such a gap between it and the old way that there's just no denying that the new way is better.
Sometimes the new technology is really a mix of qualities. Let's focus on the mix that generally gets the most attention: the new way is faster/cheaper but the output is not of a higher quality. Sometimes this new way of cheaper+faster but lower quality "wins out" and the consumer prefers it.
And now the crux of it: why is it so common that discussion concerning these shifts is rooted in everything except the consumer?
An imperfect and potentially flawed example: a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer. The old way of making a superior product still exists and some consumers still prefer it but most do not.
Fundamentally, this is a shift that is rooted in the perception, true or not, of the consumer that the new way is more desirable.
Some folks are not happy with the higher prices of the outputs of old ways of doing things or the effects that the new ways have on jobs, the economy, and/or society.
Fundamentally, this has to do with consumer preference and that's where any blame should be meted out.
Homo economicus to the rescue! Every consumer has perfect knowledge, spending power, and access to effectively unlimited choice which is why when they want lower quality things it's a calculated, careful decision weighing all the options and the long term impacts on both themselves and the future of the industry.
Monopolies and pricing power clearly destroy this utopia but even without those I try to remember Pratchett's "boots theory" whenever I start to blame the consumer for "accepting" abuse from the capital in power of what gets made, when, and for whom.
Yep, capitalism fails in a few ways in the long run. Monopolies, imperfect competition, etc., which is why regulation is required to optimize the system.
Regulation against ruling class will never happen. They hire the regulators, more or less, with a few nice and hopeful exceptions, but they're vanishingly rare.
I believe the science knows how to fix capitalism, and has known for decades. But nobody from the rules wants that.
> technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications
I seem to recall that a mathematician wrote a paper about this around 1995 which got a lot of press attention. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, though. Nor his methods.
> a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer
They don't know it'll fall apart faster, to begin with… and then by the time they do, they've already spent enough of their clothes budget that they can't afford to buy proper cloth, and it's hard to find that nowadays anyway, so they'll just have to buy more of the low-quality stuff.
A defense of the Luddites against sewing machines was honestly not something I expected. Support for the Luddites in general, sure I can predict that, but the claim that sewing machines are bad, exploitative, produce "shitty" cloth, serve only the pursuit of profit...
> We're going to run out of people with the word "Senior" in their title
Probably not, but job title inflation has made it so that apparently 5 years of experience is enough to be given a "senior" title. I've got like 15 but still feel like a medior at best. Yeah this is humblebragging, whatever it's a throwaway internet comment.
This is a funny comment because startups have been churning out sub-3 year "seniors" for years. If you're not a principal engineer after 5 years what are you even doing?
I have a relative who works in healthcare. The introduction of AI for medical notes has led her level+1 manager to ask folks to increase their patient numbers in response to the extra time saved not having to manually code charts.
The initial response was some grumbling about unionization of the doctor-class. But now they're just kinda going along with it while also complaining loudly. Profit Über alles.
The value of vibe coding isn't that it writes good or sustainable code. It's that you can build a sufficiently non-shitty prototype of a concept as a non IT expert to validate the use case and secure proper assistance.
From a change leadership perspective, walking in the door with a shitty prototype beats pitching vaporware every day of the week and twice on Sundays. And the fact amateurs can deliver (basic, crappy) "things" without budget accelerates growth.
My first projects were 80% copied off Github and some intro tutorials. Know what? They still work. We banked seven figures off of them so far...
In terms of risk, building a prototype and getting a quick win really de-risks a project. Smart decision makers' world is a game of risk - they have tolerance in some areas, less tolerance in others. If you can materialize a quick win from a prototype, it's significantly less risky that sight-unseen work.
Coders often don't think in terms of a broad investment portfolio, but that's how I've seen good executives phrase things. AI makes it cheaper and easier to build that prototype - I've been loving it for my own projects, because of how quickly I can deliver that first software.
The article hints at that when it describes vibe coding as “fancy UX”, but fails to connect the dots.
Essentially, we now have a system that can turn a simple problem description into an interactive tool for that problem. Even if it still does so very imperfectly, it’s easy see already the beginnings of a powerful and empowering new paradigm.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Most of the discussion here seems to focus on the events of the past repeating themselves in almost the same manner, and ignoring the differences, which are substantial.
We're not talking about goods produced in bulk, but rather about a new intelligence that helps produce job shop type goods. That intelligence itself isn't a physical good though, and it can be copied freely and run elsewhere at almost no cost, and copyright won't save it. It's like toothpaste out of the tube once it's on the internet.
If we want to keep on track with the analogy to frame weaving machines, the difference is that capital and the availability of power were required to use those machines, which provided the moat required to protect profits.[Econ 101]
Models can be copied, and all of the investment in training used freely by anyone possessing a copy. This might have been how DeepSeek was trained, we'll never know. This is clearly different than in the case of weaving machines.
So instead of the cost of cloth, the cost of thought is going to drop considerably, and the quality of that artificial thought is (likely) at the lowest point it'll ever be. I can already run quantized versions of Deepseek on my CPU with 32 Gb of RAM. The future really doesn't seem to have an upper limit on what can be run locally.
With the ability to run models locally, the costs of running models will always have competition to lower prices. The other force is the capture of prompts and responses, whether covert or in the open, for other use, which must always be kept in mind.
The ability to build completely new things, will, I think, help to usher in a new era of innovation and allow anyone, anywhere, to start up companies to service the world.
[Econ 101] - In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.
> In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.
This is all "perfectly spherical cow" economic theory which does not apply in reality. Do we really have a free and fair marketplace? Where's the competition that's shown up and been able to get any kind of substantial piece of the outsized profit of Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google?
Yes, many competitors show up, and are promptly purchased for quit a bit of cash and/or stock. Many of these purchases shouldn't make it past anti-monopoly laws, but the regulators are captured.
However, the oversized profits are a significant source of incentive for investment in alternatives. Kharma will catch up.
> In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.
What you should have learned is that in an idealized, perfectly rational, perfectly competitive market this is true, and you should have also learned that such markets do not exist in reality, not least of all because rational choice theory does not accurately model human behavior, but also because perfect competition is not an attainable condition.
As a software security person, I don't think the security objections to LLMs are going to pan out. I think LLMs are going to be a strong net positive for security:
* The tooling and integration stuff people complain about now ("the S in MCP") isn't really load-bearing yet, and a cottage industry of professional services and product work will go into giving it the same overcomplicated IAM guardrails everything else has; today, though, you just do security at a higher or lower level.
* LLM code generation is better at implementing rote best-practices and isn't incentivized to take shortcuts (in fact, it has some of the opposite incentives, to the consternation of programmers like me who prize DRY-ness). These shortcuts are where most security bugs live.
* LLMs can analyze code far faster than any human can, and vulnerabilities that can be discovered through pure pattern matching --- which is most vulnerabilities --- will be easy pickings. We've already had a post here with someone using o4 to find new remote kernel vulnerabilities, and that's a level of vuln research that is way, way more hardcore than what line-of-business software ordinarily sees.
* LLMs enable instrumentation and tooling that were cost-prohibitive previously: model checking, semantic grepping, static analysis. These tools all exist and work today, but very few projects seriously use them because keeping all the specs and definitions up to date and resolving all the warnings is too much time for not enough payoff. LLMs don't have that problem.
LLM-generated code (and LLM tooling) will inevitably create security vulnerabilities. We have not invented a way to create bug-free code; would have been big if true! Opponents of industry LLM use will point to these vulnerabilities and go "see, told you so". But each year we continue using these tools, I think the security argument is going to look weaker and weaker. If I had to make a bet, I'd say it ceases being colorable within 3 years.
I'm not terribly worried about code generated security vulnerabilities, but point 3 feels like a cat and mouse game that most companies won't have the resources to stay on top of, so they'll have to outsource it to one of the existing cloud or AI providers. Maybe that's a reality even without AI but it feels like we're heading towards full on extortion from about 4 major companies.
Also I don't think you covered my biggest concern with LLM security, a company making an Amazon basics version of your business model and claiming "AI did it". I'm 50/50 on that one though, it's also possible everyone things with AI you can go full NIH syndrome and take back all the software that we've handed off to various SAAS providers.
The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury. At the time of the industrial revolution it was common for a family to spend 15-25% of their annual income just on clothing. A single shirt from that era would cost the equivalent of £2,000 today when considering material and labor. New clothes were something you may be able to afford once a year, if at all. Like the article says, weavers were the equivalent of PhD scientists who could charge whatever they wanted for their skills (and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time). Great if you're the weaver, not so for everyone else.
So the industrial revolution wasn't a conspiracy to put down the lower classes. The lower classes were in fact the biggest benefactors of the industrial revolution.
If software can go the same way, I'd say good riddance. The profession has always kept free from gatekeepers, and that's a good thing.
> The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury.
Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA.
> and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time
Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to the expense of clothing.
Oh, wait, no I don't, because people still bought clothing and wore it regularly. They just also had economies around mending clothing, updating it, tailoring it, altering it, reusing and recycling it. Rather than building an economic system of destruction for the sake of a handful of profiteers, it was an economy of artisans who provided a staple resource at reasonable rates and quality to support themselves. Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear, people took care of it - and themselves - for longer periods of time. Techniques were used to keep articles sturdy for longer, rather than disposable machine stitches that fall apart in a washing machine.
Experts and artisans are not "gatekeepers", they are skilled craftspeople worthy of respect and deserving of compensation for their skills. To demand anyone be able to do anything of any complexity is to demand a complete elimination of anything that differentiates humans from one another, to create a homogenous mass of genetics with no incentive to grow and evolve.
Nobody is "gatekeeping" software developers, or Doctors, or plumbers, or weavers, or artists. Those all take skill, and people with a suitable level of skill can easily pass good credentials checks and tests.
Cloth of any decent quality is not hard to alter to fit, often clothes were made with extra material with the expectation of being altered likely multiple times to fit different people.
Also people did't really buy cow feed at the time, they were grazed on nearby fieldgrass in the summer and fed harvested hay grasses from their own fields in the winter. And it doesn't take all that much work to use a scythe to cut literal tons of grasses. With just a minimum of practice you can cut 2-3 acres of grass a day without straining yourself, provided you are fit, which any pre-modern farmer would be.
A lot of "us" don't have the time to do programming as a hobby -- even if we started off that way.
Many of "us" don't accept blanket grouping with privileged others who had thousands of opportunities to improve the general IT area but were too cool to do it and invented yet another LISP interpreter instead.
And then they come to HN and use "we" as a big convenient scapegoat, obviously to escape responsibility.
Most of "us" are trying to have some semblance of a life, man.
Whoever could collect $200k+ a year and be comfortable should have been helping the IT area. Not me who still doesn't have his own house in his 40s.
Wild overreactions is exactly what we need -- f.ex. the Linux kernel's gross negligence of security is no longer good enough is one thing that regularly comes to mind.
New geopolitics are in place, too. Our entire branch should do much, much better than they currently do.
One prediction: cybersecurity jobs might see some surge in the EU. Maybe.
In general though, I would work on transparently syncing world-wide database with partitions for personal data (photo galleries, contacts, calendars, media collections, game saves, anything at all) that is akin to, but much better than, torrents -- another very good example.
In general I am extremely mad at the privileged techies who just wrote philosophical essays about what "we" should be doing... while they themselves spent their riches on expensive (and likely sub-par quality) food in the restaurants of a certain coastal US city.
I knew what was this all about the moment I glimpsed at the title on the front page, my neural nets must have been trained to output that from the few tokens I guess, which makes me think maybe all this AI stuff isn't that different from what's happening in real brains. I bet others too had similar experience.
So the AI thing is happening, maybe its not with this particular tech we have today but they are on to something and we probably better embrace it.
Humans rolled the ladder up behind on so many things. Very few people will survive the planet Earth without the tools and abstractions we built over the many Millenia's and that's how we all live like kings. Any misery out there in the world is a result of our inability to manage it, not because the resources are scarce.
The Luddites, as explained in the article were indeed about the way tech is being adopted. All that tech eventually reached every corner of the world and not every place had Luddites.
Programming computers by hand is shitty anyway, good riddance. Finally we are about to have machines that can be programmed without thinking about the intricacies of programming that have nothing to do with the thing we want to achieve.
All the tech left behind still does have aficionados, maybe in 10 years we can watch someone program a computer using Java on the Primitive Technology channel.
This post is really all over the place and, I think, misses the main thing here: pretty much every advancement in automation across history has sacrificed some fidelity and craftsmanship. That's the cost of automation. Yet we have continually added more and more automation to our lives because the net value is dramatically higher for the bulk of our civilization.
Yes, we lose (or pidgeon-hole) artisans and craftsmen. But even in his "woe the times" example of AI kludging together two game properties into a painting, where the lighting isn't right and furry tail is not ideal, etc., etc... That $500 image is something no one could have created 20 years ago with a computer. This isn't centuries of artisan skills we are talking about. What about the artisan who would have been paid $500 to paint it with actual paints on an actual canvas? You can mourn progress in every direction if you like, but I don't think it changes a single thing about the trajectory of where we are going.
Now that AI is coming for my job as a programmer I'm not going to get twisted about it - my job didn't exist when I was a kid and it won't exist (certainly not in the same form) when my kid is an adult. And that's ok, it was a "job of opportunity". And that job has changed dramatically over 20 years. AI is just the continuation of that change.
I started in SE because it was fun to make computers do stuff. Programming has only ever been a tool to achieve that goal, and often a frustrating one. AI is just a better tool. If the job becomes "a guy that talks to the AI" that will still be programming because at the end of the day the computer can't do anything without someone telling it what to do.
> pretty much every advancement in automation across history has sacrificed some fidelity and craftsmanship. That's the cost of automation
Can you help me think through how this looks when considering car manufacturing? Originally hand made cars were things of craftsmanship, but significantly lower quality and reliability than those produced with tiny tolerances on insane production lines. I'd take a modern car over a handmade one just about any day of the week.
I mean one of the main complaints of the luddites was decreasing cloth quality despite the looms originally being able to produce higher quality cloth comparable to their own traditional weaving techniques. Powered looms and the dozens of other loom improvements from the previous 100+ years didn't inherently produce poor quality cloth, they were adjusted to produce lower quality cloths after they were already in operationin factories in order to increase profit margins. Powered looms were originally just modified hand looms, not some radically different design from the ground up. The flying shuttle predates powered looms and the luddites.
0. The people must take their governments back from corporate technofeudal overlords.
1. Society must shift away from lionizing unbounded capitalism.
2. Workers must form employee-owned co-ops for more stability and better morale and share profits of their labor more fairly rather than extracting maximum amounts for the ownership class that will fire them whenever it suits them.
The most pressing issue to me currently regarding LLMs is the blatant, flagrant change in tone of the "leadership/ownership" class towards employees.
It comes off as little other than thinly veiled contempt for the people that actually make the business function.
We've seen, most recently, Jassy come out and say "we're gonna need a lot less people", Zuckerberg doing his "replacing engineers" shtick on several occasions, all the commentary from the Anthropic CEO/Altman etc.
Even if none of this comes to pass, I've never witnessed such open "threats" in my lifetime.
I can't square this perspective with that of the LLM advocates that run to defend every legitimate criticism of LLM use--unless you're one of the aforementioned or in a similar position, why would you want to defend software that's primary purpose is to displace you?
They are literally telling you that's why they're investing in it. I don't get it.
I've kinda seen this already play out in a completely different context. Outsourcing & audit world. It's sufficiently commoditized that you can efficiently outsource.
If you're sending the first say 12-months worth of experience work to india then local gang straight out of college end up with a pretty tangible gap. There are key formative experiences missing. The programming equivalent of fighting with manual array memory management. Or shooting yourself in foot with a pointer.
Worse they don't realise that they're missing pieces. By necessity you start them off at a higher level and their understanding ends up fuzzy for lack of better word. It's not their fault...to them it looks normal, to the previous gen it's all "how can you not know this"
Xe's stuff is always excellent, and this is no different. What's disappointing is the amount of energy and effort wasted by people to come into the comments and espouse their desire to give up on addressing any of their concerns.
"It's just how things are."
"That's what generates profit."
"If that's what the market demands, who are we to judge?"
"Guess we do nothing."
We've all heard it before. We get it, so many HN and Tech folks have thrown in the towel and given up on changing anything within their own lives, or within the lives of others. So many more are content just "going along with the ride", abdicating all responsibility to an imagined god in various forms ("invisible hand of the free market" being most common among our peers).
For the rest of us who want to actually discuss the merits of the piece, we're sidelined by those who found reward in the path of libertarian ideals and seek to punish or discipline those of us who seek to make any sort of change or improvement beyond direct profit motives. Serious discussions of organization and direction are derailed in favor of blatant troll bait and bad-faith arguments.
This, I think, is also what Xe is trying to highlight: those in the position to enact the most positive change are staunchly refusing to do so, which in turn exacerbates the harms caused. Too few people with too much power and too much capital believe themselves to be more knowledgeable and intelligent than anyone else, denigrating any thoughts that may come from the slime beneath them on the ladder. When Xe said "Rolling the ladder up behind us", they make it very clear who they're speaking to:
> Look, CEOs, I'm one of you so I get it. We've seen the data teams suck up billions for decades and this is the only time that they can look like they're making a huge return on the investment.
They're basically shouting that "the call is coming from inside the house", and that the only place - right now - to address these harms are by and from the people inside said house. Nobody is coming to save us, but history books are filled with examples of what happens to those classes, those societies, those civilizations for whom greed becomes all consuming, standards of living collapse, and meaningful progress stagnates.
> Maybe the problem really is winner-take-all capitalism.
> We get it, so many HN and Tech folks have thrown in the towel and given up on changing anything within their own lives, or within the lives of others.
It’s hilarious to read such defeatist takes on the current state of things on a site called Hacker News. The classical definition of a hacker was someone who wielded tech to circumvent power imbalances in whatever form.
Now I fear we have plenty of technologists that are happy to use tech to further cement and centralize existing power structures. IMO, this has been brewing for the past ten years or so, where technologists wrongly believe they have an in to this power just because they work for a FAANG.
You are labor. Where you work does not matter. So long as you need to work, you are labor. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Doctors are finding out this same lesson.
The way out is to build ventures that don’t involve the capital class. Autonomy and independence are worthy goals to strive for.
I'm a pro artist who does a lot of furry commissions and has been getting constant downvotes on this place for expressing my unhappiness ever since this massive abuse of "fair use" began, thanks for being on my side, Xe <3
Just as alchemists always dreamed of turning lead into gold, there is a dream that people have had for decades of writing less and less code: Open source. Scaffolds. Code generators. No-code tools. Coding Agent LLMs.
If vibe coding goes away, it will be because it has been replaced with something even more hands off. Perhaps vibe prompting. Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something. Maybe even take a genetic approach where you score the fitness of various software for a certain solution and AI will cross mutate the genes. This will be a change of that rivals our shift from hunter/gatherers to the agricultural revolution.
> Honestly though, the biggest impact I've seen across my friends has been what's happened to art commissions
Given the author's eccentricities, when I read "art commissions," I immediately suspected they really meant "furry porn art commissions." Then a few paragraphs later:
> A friend of mine runs an image board for furry art. He thought that people would use generative AI tools as a part of their workflows to make better works of art faster. He was wrong, it just led to people flooding the site with the results of "wolf girl with absolutely massive milkers showing her feet paws" from their favourite image generation tool in every fur color imaginable, then with different characters, then with different anatomical features. There was no artistic direction or study there. Just an endless flood of slop that was passable at best.
This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for.
The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over the direction or use of AI. You are doomed to have your life disrupted and changed by it, with no input whatsoever. To quote the article, your six shillings a day can become six shillings a week, and you are left to just deal with it however you can. You are "free" to go find some other six shilling a week job. If you can.
And if you think, "Oh, every technology is like this, it's always been this way", you are right. You have always been at the whims of the owning class, and barring a change towards economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives, it likely always will be.
> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs
Things are cyclic, nothing new; the previous big scare was (is?) outsourcing, where for the same price as one developer in western / northern Europe or SF you can hire five from eastern Europe or India. But that hasn't affected employability of the one developer, as far as I'm aware.
I'm not even thinking of skill level, I'm sure that's comparable (but honestly I don't know / care enough), but both outsourcing and AI require the same things - requirements. I've grown up in this country (the Netherlands) and automatically have intrinsic knowledge of e.g. government, taxes, the energy sector, transportation, etc, so much that I'm not even consciously aware of a lot of things I know. If you spend a LOT of time and effort, you could - eventually - break that down into requirements and work orders or whatever that someone else could process. But it's much more efficient to do it yourself or just hire someone from around here.
I know of two major examples - one personal and one word-of-mouth - where a major US company successfully took their Covid era remote work knowledge, applied it to outsourcing, and successfully replaced most of their US onshore developers with offshore.
> hasn't affected employability of the one developer
I wonder, combo that r&d rule, general economics, saturation in the field
The norm for new grads seems to be "apply at least 2000 times, get 1 job"
the one developer
one dev to rule them all, and in darkness bind them
sounds like a 10x dev to me
> Things are cyclic, nothing new
Must be a convenient worldview
> the previous big scare was (is?) outsourcing,
I was replaced by outsourcing
Seriously. Fuck off
The owning class is different today than it was in Ned’s time.
Who owns MSFT? You, probably, through your 401k.
Nobody is stopping you from creating a coalition of similarly minded shareholders and effecting change.
Unless you stuff your cash under your mattress, you are the owning class.
> Who owns MSFT? You, probably, through your 401k.
All or nothing fallacy. People have VASTLY different degrees of ownership, and this is reflected in their degree of control.
> Nobody is stopping you from creating a coalition of similarly minded shareholders
Such coalitions already exist. They have names like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity Investments [1]. Good luck competing with them. Especially if you abdicate your role in democracy, don't agitate for legal change, and restrict yourself to only market-based means of change (not BlackRock and ilk though - they use every lever available to them, they don't handicap themselves).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms
This isn’t a false dichotomy because I’m not even representing two separate choices.
I get that you alone have probably an insignificant amount of control, but forming a coalition would allow you to make change.
I’m aware that there are asset managers. Whose assets do you think they’re managing? Yours!
Do you own VOO? Awesome, that’s why Vanguard owns 10% of almost every large cap company.
Take control of those shares and go make change.
Look up John Chevedden. He owns a minimal amount of shares in companies where he causes huge changes. They call him the “corporate gadfly” [1]
Don’t be lured into thinking that you have to invest your money into a predesigned portfolio because it maximizes returns. If you care about control then maximize control. You already have the power!
[1] https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-23-19/s72319-6733874-207512....
> Nobody is stopping you from creating a coalition of similarly minded shareholders
Sweet lies.
> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs
Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day.
> economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives
History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.
There are _other options_!
You're argument is that the only two alternatives are that the ruling class and owning class be separate groups of people, or the same group of people. And either way the labor class if F'ed. You're right that having the ruling class and the owning class being the _same people_ is terrible. That's what we're living in right now!
But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?
The labor class is free to form collectives and cooperatives. There's no law against it.
Bezos started Amazon with $300,000. I'm sure it wouldn't take too long for workers to raise that kind of money, after all, $300,000 to buy a house is considered cheap.
On the other hand, the history of businesses being confiscated and handed over to the workers has not been a successful one.
But startups are worker-owned, insofar as the founders are able to profit from it.
Some startups are worker-owned through stock grants, but those grants are rarely evenly distributed. The founders hold the majority as long as they can.
It is a good practice for companies to include stock as part of the pay package. It encourages alignment of the company with the employees. Very, very successful companies follow this model, such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.
It seems to indicate that if Amazon was employee-owned today, the first thing they would vote to do is convert future hires into non-owners, because that's what the founders did when it was actually employee-owned.
Not entirely sure what you're saying here. Amazon still provides stock to employees as part of the comp package, AFAIK.
I mean, it probably depends on the type of employee. I assume folks doing deliveries or working in warehouses aren't getting stock packages. I wonder if the admin or accounting folks do.
$600,000 after inflation
> But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?
I wonder how many people who repeat things like this know that Bezos owns less than 10% of Amazon. About 2/3rds of Amazon is owned by institutional investors, much of which is in turn owned by individuals in their 401ks and other retirement plans. So "the people" own more of Amazon than Jeff Bezos already.
If you're implying that the government should confiscate Jeff Bezos' personal ownership stake in the business he created and redistribute it to other people, that's a very different topic. It's in the realm of fantasy, not reality, so I don't consider it very interesting. At minimum, it should be noted that if the government gets into the business of confiscating shares from people, the value of those shares will plummet as investors move their money into safer investments, so it wouldn't be a simple numerical wealth transfer from Bezos to others.
Regardless, there's nothing stopping people from getting together and starting an employee-owned collective company that enters the market. They can compete in the market and try to hire away talent from the other corporations.
Yes, Bezos only owns ~10%, but I think it's fair to say that, of Amazon employees and owners, he has more than 10% of the power within Amazon.
If warehouse workers want better conditions they have to solve a national coordination problem without getting crushed. If Bezos wants their working conditions to be more efficient he has to write a memo.
Edit: to connect this back to ownership. This disparity is directly responsible for determining whether profits pay fair wages or got to Bezos and the other owners.
"2/3 of Amazon is owned by institutional investors" is a long-ass way from "Amazon is owned by the people who work at Amazon".
Given the low pay and harsh conditions of the people who create the wealth of Amazon, I do not see confiscating it from the current owners as a Bad Thing
There are probably better means to achieve better ends, but the status quo is very fucking rotten
The problem isn't reducing payroll costs and increased productivity, it is the consolidation of wealth.
If we can do twice as much with half of the labour people should work 20h weeks, not be unable to afford a home.
I have a whole list of things I'd like from my car that the market does not provide because it is more profitable not to. Why do I get the feeling that instead of seeing this as a horror story you would scold me for unreasonable expectations, even though it is the identical mirror form of the horror story you just told?
Mass production reduces costs by standardizing things. But still, car companies offer a wide range of options if you're willing to wait for your order. If Ford doesn't provide what you want, there's GM, Toyota, Hyundai, etc. There's no shortage of variety.
There's also a small cottage industry of people who will make fully custom cars for you. They're pretty expensive, though, as they don't benefit from economies of scale.
Because Mr. Bright has a long, storied comment history of neolibertarian fantasies being wielded as a cudgel against anyone who dares envision a future that does not align with his own.
Speaking from experience with them in another thread. Your best bet is to ignore the bait and move on to more fruitful discussions.
I merely point out that economic history shows that economic freedom works better than any other system.
Besides, I enjoy debate, like other people enjoy playing football. If you don't, why are you here?
With all due respect, and I mean that sincerely as you've accomplished far more than I have, you aren't here for debate. Your viewpoint is stuck in the cold war mentality where Soviet communism was a failure (it did, but that doesn't mean that everything they touched was bad) and America and its brand of Free Market capitalism is perfect (it isn't) and responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall for all the "debate" that actually occurs. Other long time posters here know better than to engage, but hey, you caught me waiting on Claude.
Having lived through communism I can say the only good things were equality of men and women (in my communist country there were just as many women doctors, engineers, managers, accountants as men) and equality between people (students from Africa were very much welcomed). Everything else though was miserable: our free healthcare, our free cold apartments that had electricity 2 hours a day, our free education, our cheap on paper but non-existent food and medicaments.
All attempts at communism failed. Did you know that there have historically been 20,000 communes founded in the US? I wonder what happened to them!
I never said American free markets were perfect. They certainly aren't. But they are very successful.
> responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall
I could say the same of the people I respond to! I don't expect to change anyone's mind here. The average stay at a commune is about 2 years, after which the members leave, cured of the notion that communism is better. I encourage you to join one.
I would consider co-op businesses a form of small scale communism, and they have steadily been growing in number for many decades with both workers/owners and customers praising them.
I also would consider many nation level communist movements that are held up as examples of failed communism to not really represent basic communist values very well at all, and to be mostly a thin PR cover for changes and turnover within the ruling class. Its not like the USSR was actually paying fair or equal dividends to the working class citizens who they claimed owned and controlled the country, the vast majority of the wealth, power, and control was still mostly diverted to a small class of elite.
Communes of that sort don't really have anything to do with Communism. At least not the political traditions that the word is typically associated with originating with thinkers like Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Mao, Kropotkin, &c. Which specifically define communism as a level of economic development with certain specific prerequisites that none of these "intentional community commune" projects even attempt to meet.
Communism as a pure failure is literally propaganda, but I don't have time to cover the full comparative history of economic development under capitalism and socialism in a comment. All human projects have flaws and it's hard to compare them if you don't get into the nitty-gritty of both the successes and failures.
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My take would be to scold you to start your own company that provides the features you want from your car if it's not already being provided by the marketplace
I'd have more luck petitioning the Central Car Design Committee because
> it is more profitable not to
...and if anyone thinks this is ridiculous, I'd ask them if they are for or against repealing all of our current motor vehicle regulations. If "for," they have admitted to being a hopeless libertarian, and if "against," they have acknowledged that important reasonable features can be incompatible with the profit motive of a free market and it no longer seems so strange that I might have a list which is more of the same.
> I'd have more luck petitioning the Central Car Design Committee because
Highly doubtful. Command economies have far less variety in what they offer. This isn't theoretical either just look at western cars vs Soviet cars. There's this mistaken belief that if the free market can't provide some good then a command economy could, but the reality is that if a free market can't provide a good then the chance that a command economy could is even more doubtful. Command economies tend to be very bad at allocating resources efficiently as outlined by Hayek in "The Use of Knowledge in Society".
That's kind of a silly example, your congressman could write a bill allocating 53% of cars to the two seater lobby and 47% to the four seat lobby.
And what if 62% wanted two seaters?
Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns.
Sounds smart, right?
What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population changes, etc. The result was massive misallocation by the DoE - Californian had shortages of gas, Florida had gluts. That sort of situation has never happened before.
All that nonsense disappeared literally overnight when Reagan repealed all gas price and allocation controls with his very first Executive Order. I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.
What you're suggesting is called "central economic planning". It is constantly tried again and again, and it never ever works. (The failures of it are always classified as "unintended side effects", though they are entirely predictable.)
> I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.
Not in the UK, due to a fragile supply chain.
https://news.sky.com/story/supply-crisis-catastrophic-panic-...
We saw it when the Evergiven closed the Suez. We see it whenever irational consumer behaviour caused unpredicable behaviour.
The Randian world you are so enamoured with is one of fragility, because buffers and margins reduces profit.
Or are those "unintended side effects"?
There were ... many other factors involved in the gas shortages of the 70s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis
I don't think the history here is as neat as you have laid out. To be clear: this is not a defense of central planning.
I lived through the gas shortages. I remember the day the gas lines ended. They never returned in the 45 years since, despite all sorts of wars and global crises and exploding oil refineries and Hooties shooting at tankers. All gone literally overnight with the stroke of Reagan's pen.
The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either.
(Except during WW2, where gas shortages were caused by gas rationing.)
Well first, we have this:
> The Jimmy Carter administration began a phased deregulation of oil prices on April 5, 1979, when the average price of crude oil was US$15.85 per barrel ($100/m3).
So, the process wasn't really an instant wave of a wand, or stroke of a pen. We also have this:
> Starting with the Iranian revolution, the price of crude oil rose to $39.50 per barrel ($248/m3) over the next 12 months (its all-time highest real price until March 3, 2008).[11] Deregulating domestic oil price controls allowed U.S. oil output to rise sharply from the large Prudhoe Bay fields, while oil imports fell sharply.
We also have silliness like this:
> Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.[13] The average vehicle of the time consumed between two and three liters (about 0.5–0.8 gallons) of gasoline an hour while idling, and it was estimated that Americans wasted up to 150,000 barrels (24,000 m3) of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.
So we have counterfactuals: if there was no Iranian revolution, would the effects of Carter's gradual deregulation have been felt sooner? If there was no 1973 oil shortage, would the reduction in waste have made a difference? What effect did people simply believing that the crisis was over have?
I don't propose answers to these questions; they are, in my opinion, unknowable.
I suggest that economic narratives such as the one you propose do not capture the entire picture. You had downward pressure on prices due to deregulation and expanding supply, and upwards pressure due to geopolitics and waste.
These processes do not resolve instantly, they take time to play out. I suggest caution when attempting to derive cause and effect from single events in complex systems.
I'll also note that all of this still mostly reinforces your main thesis.
One major issue with central planning is that it usually lacks the internal feedback mechanisms necessary to properly account for all of these factors.
Price signals usually work faster, and thus more efficiently! The USSR even had an economic reform where they introduced mechanisms that could be described as "shadow prices" within their own system [1]. It was the driving force behind one of the independent discoveries of linear programming.
I'd highly recommend "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" [2] and the novel (historical economic fiction, a nerd's nerd literary category if there ever was one) Red Plenty to learn more.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform 2. https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...
All true. Why didn't gas lines ever appear after 1980? We had crises like 9/11 and the pandemic - but no gas shortages.
Prices did go up and down, but gas was always available.
The 79 oil crisis and rationing was caused by the disruption of oil from the Iran, but the US suffered much more from the disruption of the oil from Iran than other countries that also relied on this oil. It would be wrong to ignore the role the government played in making this oil disruption significantly worse.
From "The U.S. Petroleum Crisis of 1979", PHILIP K. VERLEGER, JR. Here are some examples of problems that were identified:
>...On February 28, 1979, DOE published the following notice in the Federal Register: "It is essential that refiners enter the spring driving season with adequate gasoline stocks to meet seasonal demand requirements. We recognize that gasoline stocks are currently at adequate levels for this time of year, which is usually a period of low demand. Recent industry data indicate that total stocks are now in excess of 265 million barrels, which is less than last year's record high levels during the same period but above the average levels of previous years. Our concern is that these stocks not be drawn down precipitously as soon as the impacts of the Iranian shortfall are felt by refiners. Refiners are urged to keep stocks high enough to meet expected demand during the 1979 summer driving season, even if it is necessary to restrict somewhat the amount of surplus gasoline that is made available to purchasers currently" The implementation of these instructions had the effect of restricting the volume of gasoline available to service stations to between 80 and 90 percent of 1978 levels. This reduction was greater than the reduction in total gasoline supplies.
>...In April 1979, DOE ordered the fifteen largest refiners to sell 7.8 million barrels of crude oil to smaller firms that were unable to obtain supplies on the world market at competitive prices. …These transfers probably reduced the volume of gasoline produced in the second quarter because the refineries that purchased the crude oil had only a limited capacity to produce gasoline, while the refineries that sold it could have produced more. ...In addition to reducing the supply of gasoline, the buy/sell program appears to have affected the geographic distribution of crude oil and gasoline. This is because the primary recipients of the crude oil were refineries in the Midwest and the gulf coast areas, while the sellers were companies that were marketing throughout the nation.
>...…In April, DOE turned its attention to the low stock of distillate fuel oil … Two impacts were observed on domestic markets. First, excessive stocks of heating oil were accumulated. Second, companies may have been influenced to increase gasoline stocks in anticipation of the mandator yield controls that DOE threatened to impose.
>...Price controls on gasoline may have also created an incentive to withhold gasoline from the market when the prices of crude oil were rising rapidly. …In summary, the refiners had the capacity and the knowledge to take advantage of this opportunity. Ironically, the instructions from DOE to the companies were to do precisely what was most profitable.
>...In addition to encouraging the buildup of stocks, DOE may have added to the shortages by creating an incentive to reduce the output of crude oil. Although it is difficult to estimate what domestic supplies of crude oil might have been in the absence of any restriction, a DOE announcement in November that control levels of the base period were to be reviewed may have constrained production in the first half of 1979.
Doesn't every nationwide firm engage in central economic planning?
Yes and no. A large national firm like Starbucks has a national annual plan. However, this national plan is made up of a lot of little regional plans which are then combined together. This national plan is then executed. Execution relative to plan is assessed every quarter; and every quarter the plans (both national and regional) are adjusted. This assessment and these adjustments are done at both national level and also at regional level.
Were the Soviet Union plans not also made of the plans of individual regions? (did you ever wonder what the Soviet Union was a Union of?)
Yup. But they have competitors!
It sounds like the issue is competitors or the absence thereof more so than central allocation based on market forecasts being possible or impossible.
> It sounds like the issue is competitors
You nailed it.
I feel this is a slightly disingenuous argument - mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors. The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service. Gas lines are one thing - waiting fifteen hours in the emergency room to be seen, only to be charged thousands of dollars for some tylenol and a pat on the head is another.
> mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors
Absolutely correct. But public regulation is quite resistant to course correction. Private companies have to face competitors and adapt or fail.
> The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service
The US healthcare system is massively regulated and interfered with by the law and things like people are forced to buy Obamacare and forced to contribute to Medicare and Medicare massively distorts market forces.
Healthcare in the US was affordable before the government got involved.
Public regulation also course-corrects, it just does so through democracy rather than competition.
I would argue that democracy is a superior method in most instances, because its motives are driven by the motives of the population as a whole, whereas capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Where we agree I think is in the assertion that United States government tends to run things very poorly. In my opinion, however, this is not because central planning is inherently bad, but because our democracy is very weak, and we allow politicians to be controlled by corporate interests rather than the interests of the people that they represent.
EDIT: Oh, and for the record I disagree with the take that the US healthcare system is bad because it has too much regulation - but that's an entirely separate discussion that I don't think is worth going into.
Democracy cannot adapt efficiently to crises. For example, we elect a President every 4 years. You've got a long wait. A company can adapt overnight.
> capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Absolutely correct. And competition is what drives prices relentlessly downwards.
The democratically elected government in the 70s that tried to manage the nation's gas prices and allocations with the best of intentions failed miserably.
Democracy also created the FAA, which used to regulate airline schedules, routes, and fares. Having lived through that era, too, I can attest how costly and inefficient that was. Air fares are amazingly low since, and the scheduling is very tight and efficient at placing airplanes where the people want to use them.
> this is not because central planning is inherently bad
Nobody has ever managed to make it work. Consider rent control. Endless variations of it are implemented, and all produce the "unintended" side effects of higher prices and shortages.
The US healthcare system is pretty far from privately run. It’s more an example of regulatory capture and incumbents freezing out new entrants via extensive government regulations.
This person is praising Reagan in terms of economics - I wouldn't even call it slightly disingenuous; it is entirely disingenuous. Walter commonly has absurd takes on this site; I wouldn't fight too hard in conversation.
> Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day.
Are you suggesting that suppression of wages is what gave us "more interesting things" to do?
> History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
How is this different from the "free market" assigning me a job?
> For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.
Concessions are the price to pay for living in a civilized society.
It's kind of a meme at this point that any kind of economic control for laborers = communism. That's not just a jump you're allowed to make, sorry. There are a plethora of nations outside the US which have stronger protections for labor, and they're doing quite well. It's not 1965 anymore, we have to start making real big boy arguments.
This happens anyway, lol. Go to a car lot and you will see the majority of cars available are black, white, silver, and maybe red. Your car will have a stereo. Your car will probably have 4 seats, not 2. Dealers stock the most common configurations and, maybe this is not your experience, but my experience is that they will twist themselves into knots to avoid helping customers make custom orders for exactly what they want, even though the manufacturer has a fancy configurator page where you can do exactly that.
I've never had trouble ordering what I wanted from the options list. That usually means needing to pay more, though.
If you want custom leather seats, you can drive your car off the lot into one of many shops that offer such services, or other customizations. Me, I drove to the stereo shop to put a better stereo in (back when the factory ones were terrible).
There are many reality shows on TV featuring shops what will custom build a car to your specifications.
This is by far my biggest concern about "A.I." and "smart" robots... Not the technology itself, but what the "ruling class" intend to do with it / how they intend to use it. Their primary concern is not "worker productivity" these days. It's "How can I replace the maximum number of workers (ideally all of them) so that I can keep most / all of the profits / benefits for myself (and the shareholders)?" It's always been about profit, but they now finally see a potential to entirely rid themselves of "those pesky poors" and their annoying paychecks once and for all.
This was the Luddites’ position. Organised labour should one again take up this principled position.
Join a trade union!
Do you really want a return to the days when "women's work" was spending every free moment spinning and weaving cloth by hand? When cloth was so valuable there was a profession called "rag pickers"? Where new clothes were rare, hand me downs were the usual, and people wore clothes until they disintegrated? And poor people made clothes out of flour sacks?
Those days were after the rich had commenced urbanization by driving the agrarian workers off the land and encouraging them to find work at dismal wages in the city, made it a crime to be a vagrant, and funded charities that collaborated with judges to force the poor into workhouses where they could enjoy abuse, degradation and misery from cradle to early grave.
Sure would be nice to make clothes from flour sacks again, but alas; today's sacks are made of polypropylene.
That’s not what the Luddites wanted. They praised the technology itself and recognised it would save a lot of time. But they also recognised that they the workers wouldn’t reap any of those benefits, they’d just lose their jobs.
Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? If so, you are incredibly naive.
The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.
When wages are raised by the government, job losses happen. 16,000 to 36,000 people lost their jobs when California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers.
> Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases?
During WW2, production needed to increase, so hours were increased to 60 hour weeks. The labor force, very patriotic, was all for this. Production increased for a few weeks, and then fell below what was produced in a 40 hour week. Companies wanting to maximize profits are aware of this effect.
Also, if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve. The reason for this is the Law of Supply and Demand pushes those two lines together. The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.
> The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.
Minimum wage is one indicator of critically substandard living. Here is a small sampling of some others:
> if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve
If you count inflation in medical and housing costs as an increase in wages, the "wedge" disappears, yes -- but why would you do that for any other purpose than making the wedge disappear?
No, it's very telling that labor saving devices, which have squished the largest industry into economic insignificance many times over, have not resulted in the ability for normal people to work less. Clearly, the benefits have gone elsewhere. "The benefits went into technology! Think of the iPhones!" The median financed smartphone is 1/50th the cost of median rent, try again.
employers pay for the massively increased medical costs directly though? Its not hard to see that when medical costs increase by 6-10% they would hesitate to increase wages
Put it this way: If the government increases my tax by $10k per year and my employer increases my gross salary $10k per year in response, did I get a pay raise?
Also, it's known that as medical prices rise, the percentage of the prices that insurance actually pays goes down. Are you sure they're paying more?
Also, why do countries with universal healthcare have such cheaper healthcare of a similar quality?
Now include profit (surplus) in your analysis.
Wage grow has not kept pace with corporate profitability. Why?
Because the correct comparison would be with total compensation, of which wages are only a portion.
Total compensation is the costs to an employer to hire some one. It includes:
1. contributions to retirement plans
2. so-called "employer paid" social security contributions
3. sick and paid vacation days
4. employer paid health insurance
5. stock plans
6. 401k plans
7. other payroll taxes
Last time I checked, these often added 40% or more over the takehome pay.
Also, the pay is based on the value the employee as an individual provides, not the value the company as a whole created. Just like the compensation for pro football players varies in a single team.
Beyond Social Security contributions, which is legally mandated, most workers don't get the remaining items on your list. (And #7 is just double-counting #2.)
It's like saying, a CEO gets a housing allowance and travel allowance and can expense most of their meals, so the entry level worker is doing okay.
Am corrected. Updated question:
Now include profit (surplus) in your analysis.
Total compensation has not kept pace with corporate profitability. Why?
--
> Just like the compensation for pro football players varies in a single team.
Then why do professional athletes have unions?
> 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.
Far too high. Abject failure. The US's minimum wage is approximately the wage where you could work 24/7 and break even. Anyone working at that wage is in a very bad situation or someone else is paying all their bills.
Also, if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve.
This hasn't been true for at least two decades. Employee compensation severely lags productivity increases, and the capital class captures the entirety of the benefit of that lag.
The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.
No. If that were true CEOs and VCs would get paid pennies, and most software programmers would get paid close to minimum wage today (programs are slower and buggier than they were 20 years ago despite having 100x or more increase in hardware resources and offering the same or reduced functionality).
Whenever I see you post on HN I’m reminded about “don’t meet your heroes”. You are so politically naive and indoctrinated for someone so smart.
You might be interested to know that political discussions are not allowed in the D forums (or any non-programming topics). We also don't discuss politics at the D conferences.
> You are so politically naive and indoctrinated
How can you be sure it's not the other way around? :-)
Even unions are up against it though. in the Netherlands, there have been multiple strikes from e.g. the train operators; they demand a 10% wage increase, after the train company downsized a lot during the pandemic, but who were then unable to upsize again as traffic resumed and who even now don't have the same amount of travelers as they did in 2020.
But they're not profitable. They've made a loss for five years in a row, requiring government subsidies to stay operating (because them going bankrupt would make big parts of the country grind to a halt). Ticket prices are so high that it's barely cheaper than driving, and as soon as you travel with two or more people it's cheaper to just own a car. (Or even rent one; I traveled to the other side of the country once for a concert, my own car was in the garage. Did the math, it was cheaper and more convenient (door-to-door) to rent a car, pay the surcharge for long distance, pay the €35 in fuel, etc than it was to buy return tickets for three people)
The answer (I think, I'm no economist / politician / etc) isn't unionising and demanding better treatment, because the limits of the capitalist system they operate in have been reached. The answer is to stop trying to make it profitable. Re-privatize it: trains and public transit are a huge and hugely important nationwide economic driver, an essential service that capitalism can't be trusted with because the owners will try and get as much money out of it as possible, the employees get overworked and exploited and will shut the system down (as is their right) out of protest, and the people will have to deal with the consequences.
Just in my small bubble, the train strikes led to people not going to the office, missing events, lunch orders that either had too much stock that had to be discarded or that were cancelled entirely, costing that company thousands in income, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-union. I'm anti-capitalist though.
You’ll often find trade unionists are also anti-capitalist, some are even socialists or communists.
Software engineers needs a lot more organization
> Actually, what are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people?
Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The universe doesn't owe us value on human-written software.
Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
Well, as someone who considers themselves to be a "software craftsman," I have come to the conclusion that the work I do will never be valued, and will always be considered "too expensive." Since I work for free, that's not an issue for me, but that's economically unfeasible for most folks.
The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. Anyone that tries, will get driven out of business. Some clever folks will figure out how to do "slightly better" stuff, and charge more for it, but a good way to go out of business, is to focus on Quality as a principal axis.
That's basic market dynamics. It is what it is, and is neither evil, nor good.
It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.
I guess the saddest thing, is that I have really wanted to help teach my techniques to others, but have found that no one wants to learn, so I gave up on that, many years ago.
> The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff.
This seems to be one of the brutal truths of the modern world, and as far as I can tell it applies to everything. There's always a race to the bottom to make everything as cheaply as possible, and the further the industry goes down that "cheapness" scale, the more "quality" loses market share, the more expensive "quality" must be in order to operate at all, and finally things that used to be just "normal" and not too expensive are now luxury goods.
Consider textiles, carpentry, masonry, machine tooling, appliances, etc. etc.
This doesn't feel like a good outcome, but I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it.
I can see both sides of it. There’s a fancy bread bakery by where I live. I go infrequently, the bread is great. But it’s expensive, most of the I just want a cheap loaf from Target, as do most people.
Instead of broad employment of artisan breadsmiths, we have people doing email work, because it’s more economically valuable. If the government mandated a higher quality of bread, we’d be slightly richer and bread and slightly poorer in everything else.
I've actually thought over my career that software is one of the last places for well compensated craftmanship. In the sense of solving unique problems for good pay. I think that was due to:
- the explosion of software needs due to the internet
- the scalability of software solutions (zero marginal cost for additional copies is a hell of a drug)
I still think that is true, but it may be fading away for many people. That said, the newer devs that I've met that have found jobs tend to find them at bespoke consulting shops (rather than product companies).
I think there will always be room for quality craftmanship in software, but it will be boutique, the same way that there is craftmanship for high quality furniture or cabinetry. ~95% is manufactured mass market and cheap, ~5% is high quality bespoke and expensive.
> It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.
Why can't you get a team together?
I dream of working on big and meaningful things ever since a teenager (and I'm 45 currently) but yeah, I can't afford doing it for free. I keep being a drone.
But if somebody were to stretch out a helping hand and pay me to do the big and meaningful things I'll likely accept two days later.
> and pay me to do the big and meaningful things
Ay, there's the rub...
It is a lot more expensive to do high-Quality work, than it is to do shoddy (or, to be fair, barely acceptable) work. You need to hire more experienced (expensive) people, and then, you need to hire better managers, because you don't want the usual crap managers in charge of them.
And then, you need to pay for the time they take, "polishing the fenders."
Once you have an established brand, you can do these kinds of things, but it's pretty much impossible to start from scratch (without deep, patient pockets).
Well money is always the rub. And many people, once they become better off, become stingy and paranoid and don't want to reinvest -- which I completely understand, especially if they didn't have rich parents and trust fund(s) and had to grind their boots off to get where they are. If I ever make it I know I am absolutely joining that exact group. I owe the world nothing -- definitely not after decades of abuse and zero appreciation.
> it's pretty much impossible to start from scratch (without deep, patient pockets).
Well, I was not referring to myself here, FWIW. I ain't ever going below $10k a month (not to mention that for any meaningful life plans $18k - $25k a month is much more strategically desirable) but I was somewhat referring to many certain techies here on HN who (1) have the talents and tech skills and (2) are very well-off and could work for charity wages for 5+ years without a problem (think $3k - $5k a month).
I am just very sad that these people, who are in a 10x better position than I ever was for 23+ years of career, did not group up and did not create the next-gen lab experience, the likes of which we haven't seen since the days of UNIX. :/
As for the rest of the world, the owning class are quite fine with what they already have -- they know tech currently is not 100% reliable but they are never making 5x the investment for what they see as a 10% improvement (which is exactly the part where they are wrong -- but these people can't think beyond 2-3 quarters ahead anyway).
Yes, I have been fortunate to be in a position to pay it back (not forward). I'm nowhere near as well-off as a substantial portion of the folks here, but I have enough to live (humbly), and get the equipment I need to do my work.
But I also know that I am an outlier, and, quite frankly, an anachronism.
Just a little while ago, I made a new release of this app[0]. I talked to someone this morning, and realized that they had no idea that you could swipe the screen, to get to different times.
I added a small label to the bottom of the main screen, telling folks that they could swipe to see different times. I had to translate it to Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese, which ChatGPT was ideal for (I don't think that I'd use it for bulk translations, but it was great for a "spot translation").
That kind of thing may seem silly, but it's also exactly the kind of thing that many, many apps don't do. It's quite easy to say that "any power user knows to swipe," but that often excludes a huge number of folks. Since I started hiding the main time selection control panel, swiping has become the main navigation technique.
[0] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/VirtualMeetingFinder
> it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore
It is if you stay niche. It’s called market gardening. It will never equal farm automation for employment or revenue, but it’s a thing you can do as long as not too many people do it. The same happened to woodworking, and manufacturing. What you see are shops that can remanufacture parts that have either aged out of the manufacturer’s warehouse or where the material is the expensive part and reworking it is cheaper and almost as fast as ordering a new one.
The consumer base of these is smaller, so the supply has to be smaller as well, but not zero.
this comment implies the real "other shoe" for which im waiting to drop.
im ok with nothing. if software dev is nearly completely automated to the point there are effectively no dev jobs then there is a much more important economic condition to address
im a basic state-school student who learned the memorable bit about Keynes regarding automating labor which still hasnt come to pass. at the time i kind of found it unbelievable we continue to work so much when then point of automation is working less, but i was a college slacker so any excuse to avoid work seemed like a good point to me.
to conclude this preamble: i have a sinking sense of momentum and my circles of midwit friends stare at each other like deer in the headlights with no idea on whats next after jobs dry up
my question: are there movements to prepare the society for the impending mass automation and layoffs? people still seem to want jobs, because society demands it, but are there movements by significant political or idea leaders to finally get off the work treadmill and go toward a Keynes-style chill out? i dont know where to start and any direction is appreciated
* i understand ai layoffs is a media scapegoat for the real issues with taxable R&D and interest rates. mass automation of jobs and real workforce replacement by ai is probably on a timescale 2x to 5x of the 10 year runway im expecting
If you're in America, there probably will not be a chill-out. Look into the philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, whom has been cited favorably by J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. We are heading towards techno-fascism. The working population which would have been furloughed is probably going to be redirected to the manual labor jobs currently being vacated by the aggressive deportation of "the worst of the worst" immigrant workers within our borders. The loss of these displaced people will necessitated a new underclass to work the fields, clean the chickens, etc. This underclass will be composed of prisoners-cum-indentured servants and slaves, which are legally provided for by the 13th amendment.
thank you for the recommendation and holy god this is grim
It's grim but understandable in a way. I was writing quickly but I can expound more on any point if you want. I don't think we're locked into it yet, but if you read into Curtis Yarvin then you will see he was extremely prescient in the 2010s era. I refer to this brand of technofascist monarchism, self-branded as The Dark Enlightenment, as Yarvinism.
He is not the only one, but he is the most prominent. I've been considering starting a website to track things like The New Apostolic Reformation, The Seven Mountains Mandate, Curtis Yarvin, the two billionaires trying to get rid of the separation of church and State in Texas, and others.
There is a right-wing christofascist movement attempting to bulldoze democracy via technology. Peter Thiel is basically running the surveillance tech of our government. Look into what he's said about bulldozing government with technology. He knows his ideas are so unpalatable that he has to subvert democracy to get his ideas implemented.
This is the most prominent threat to our secular, freedom-loving, democratic way of life. It unfortunately receives very little air time.
EDIT: also look into this account's namesake, Edward Bernays, aka the father of modern propaganda.
Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary).
> Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?
That should be horrifying. It should be the red flag that spurs action against a gross system of exploitation and goal misalignment. For all the crowing about AI misalignment wiping out humanity, we have actual economic misalignment leaving humans homeless, starving, and dying of curable illness not from lack of supply or demand, but purely from placing profit above all.
To see defeatists and fatalists jump in comments and say "that's just how it is" while prostrating themselves in worship to the almighty share price should infuriate us as a species, for these are humans who willingly accept their own demise at the hands of others rather than doing anything of value for their own self-preservation, let alone preservation of the species.
> That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"?
I don't understand this statement. These things aren't unprofitable. Doing these things a specific way is unprofitable. Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale. Is it sad that a small, family farm isn't really a great way to make a living nowadays? Sure. But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity; "creating food" is, but there's lots of ways to do that.
And, honestly, if we _ever_ get to the point where we can fabricate food from raw elements (a la Star Trek), then that will be a little sad, too... but still "creating food".
The replicator in Star Trek doesn't seem plausible to me any more. Flawlessly outputting a cup of Earl Grey?
The computer-based drinks machine onboard the Heart of Gold on the other hand… Trying to order tea there now sounds suspiciously like a bout of futile prompt-engineering; trying to goad an LLM into giving you tea, but ending up with something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
And if you phrase your question wrong, you have a chance of triggering a Chain of Thought process that gets stuck in a loop "analysing" some utterly irrelevant part of the problem (here, "why would anyone want to order tea?"), locking up important subsystems of other systems on the network in the process.
> Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale
The agricultural practices you hint at only make sense in a boardroom. I'm sure it seems rational or logical, but it's not based in experience or ethics.
> But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity;
It is probably the foundational discipline of humanity. Cultivating and cooking food is what allowed us to do everything since.
What are you talking about? Inexpensive food is a boon to society.
Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor.
For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased to less than 1% of what it once was.
Of course the person spending 100+x the effort to grow corn will not be economically competitive - why would we want anything different?
https://www.lhf.org/learning-fields/crops/corn/
You are not making an argument you think you are making. We switched from one set of problems to another set of problems that didn't exist before industrial agriculture: soil erosion, pest explosion, entire harvests wiped out by disease because genetic uniformity, which means one pathogen can destroy everything - think Irish potato famine but now it's scientific and modern.
The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.
Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.
This is an excessively romanticized view of traditional farming. If you look at the astonishing death tolls from famine throughout human history, including in living memory, it is pretty clear why, for all its problems, industrial agriculture is still a far superior approach.
Food security requires food production at levels which demand industrialized agriculture, for better or worse.
Maybe a false dichotomy. For ex, modern transportation could have been in service to sustainable agricultural models, providing resiliency between communities.
You are missing the point. The point isn't that the legacy methods of agriculture are unequivocally better. They have their downsides, some of the downsides are pretty severe. The point is that abolishing traditional farming in favour of industrial agriculture yielded unforeseen costs, the ones that were never even hypothesized when we started scaling agriculture. Now with AI and agents, we'll reap those unforeseen costs again. The profits will go into the pockets of the owners, the unforeseen costs (which include the costs of switching from one system to another) will become the society's burden to bear, as it was with industrial-scale agriculture.
+1 on seeing like a state. But combining small plots into mega farms did create more food. It just did so at the loss of variety and knowledge and local control and ultimately freedom as you say. See enclosing the commons in England in the 18-19th century
I need to finish seeing like a state and will defer to your expertise, but this raised a question in me: why are we still limping along if our farming techniques are doomed like this? Did we never adapt in recognition of the flaws of monoculture?
We adapted, that's why the pesticide industry is so big. I'm not a great agriculture expert, but from my understanding it's an uphill battle against nature and we are winning for now.
I find that 38 hours per acre for corn figure a bit inflated as someone who use to plant 2 acres of corn each year using a 1901 corn planter and harvesting it by hand with my father. It never took the two of us more than a day to harvest the entirety of the corn, store it in our corn crib, and bundle all the corn stalks, while working at a fairly leisured pace. Tilling, fertilizing, and planting only took a day and only required one person for the first two, granted we did use a 1940 farmall tractor, but like I said its not like we were working at any real speed trying to get it done as if we needed it to survive. It was just a cheap and easy way to get corn to fatten up a cow or two before slaughter. It is also an absolutely miniscule amount of work compared to the amount of food it produced. Using 1900 corn yields (we didnt actualy weigh our own yields), it was over 3,000 pounds of corn, and it was likely much higher growing a more modern variety. Going by bulk grain corn prices at the local Tractor Supply the value rivals or exceeds the average local wage, and if it was sweet corn would surpass local wages multiple times over, so doesn't seem like a bad deal at all.
I was directly replying to the poster above me's own arguments in favor of "doing nothing". At no time did I denigrate inexpensive food, only highlighted that their own perspective that food production is unprofitable when it is in fact necessary for every human to survive, should horrify them.
That being said, if you're going to get on your data soapbox and try to tear down an argument I didn't make in the first place, then I will challenge you to "square the circle" between OPs argument that food production is not profitable; the fact 200 million children (and half a billion people globally) are malnourished; and that these stats are somehow acceptable in a world that collectively throws out a billion meals per day.
> are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains
Sure, I can believe that, but...
> doing anything of value for their own self-preservation
Even your own comment relies on some metric of value.
I agree that profit motives are not an ideal metric of value but as your comment suggests, we as a species do rely on some metric of value. I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.
> I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.
That attitude is the equivalent of a frog in a boiling pot going, "I won't leave until you have a better idea of where to go."
Value is - and always will be - subjective. Whenever society forms a centralized definition of value, it is immediately gamed and exploited by those who seek profit and power. Currency and profit are extreme forms of Goodhart's Law, the civilizational equivalent to "Tickets Closed" or "Lines of Code Written" KPIs.
To demand objective measure of subjectivity is to fight a fool's battle.
That's fair but not a convincing argument if you're seeking to show that the pot is boiling. I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me".
> I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me".
Which would be a fair counter-argument to have if so many of you (and people like you) weren't also trying to drag those of us looking to escape back into the fucking pot.
If you want to sit and boil, fine, but for chrissakes let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that. Your staunch refusal to confront reality is your problem, but your insistence on harming others so you don't have to confront reality should be criminal.
> let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that
Ok? Who is stopping you? Nobody here is prohibiting you from continuing to write code by hand and doing whatever you wish. Certainly if you're going to assert that that's criminal, of course I'm not interested in your vinegar.
Life would certainly be easier if we could all choose which things done by other people affect us and vice versa. Then we could have these simple "if you don't like it, leave" arguments hold water and air pollution wouldn't exist and herd immunity wouldn't be a thing and we wouldn't even need police.
There is a big gap between the other commenter's desire to write code by hand and air pollution.
Look, as a programmer I also love writing code by hand, however it's childish to suggest that if I can no longer make a living doing so because automated code production is more profitable that that's equivalent to boiling in a pot or suffering from air pollution.
There are substantiative risks with AI, such as a potential for a singularity, that would make for an actual compelling argument. Some engineer's desire to make a living writing code by hand does not. That's a luxury.
If we don’t figure out a way to keep people alive and relatively happy, the metric may become pitchforks per angry mob.
I used to wonder if a Butlerian Jihad was plausible or just an interesting plot device. Now, it seems more plausible every day.
Yeah that's totally possible but I suspect if AI really does take over software, the number of people who will riot over software quality is going to be dwarfed by the number of people who are happier that they can get their chats GPT'd faster.
What makes you think that capitalists will stop with software developers? If AI can truly eliminate software jobs, then most knowledge based jobs will be at risk of elimination.
Let’s be honest; capital wants to eliminate all labor, and damn the consequences. People are not going to willingly give up lives of comfort for abject squalor. This will not go well.
I don't think they will but I also don't think abject squalor is the way to describe artisanal work.
On top of that, I agree that capitalists continue to eliminate jobs but I also think they create jobs in other sectors. The reason I don't buy into doomsday scenarios is I don't believe they will eliminate all the jobs at once.
I only happen to be a software engineer. If I was born 250 years ago, I'm sure I would've found a creative innovation outlet through another industry.
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This also assumes that non human written code will be of any use to humans and no one has shown that to be possible, it is all humans patching it up so far.
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industry only ever seems to want to hire people with the word Senior in their title. They almost never want to create people with the word Senior in their title.
I suggest that the first ladder that got pulled up is the one on the ground.
No one wants to train new entrants to the field. Not training junior workers seems like a natural extension to that.
It’s a Volunteer’s Dilemma: why train juniors when you can hire the juniors other companies trained to become seniors?
Maybe companies should provide some sort of incentive for the juniors they trained to stay with them. As it is, the obvious and rational choice is always to leave for another company that will pay you 25% more whenever you feel undervalued.
I think pensions used to be that incentive.
In centuries past apprentices would pay their junior positions, in time picking up paid work as the progressed to senior, then eventually taking on apprentices of their own (and be paid)
I guess universities will eventually backfill that gap with training that focuses on senior skills. Eventually.
We already require juniors to go through a 4 years university degree. It takes a fair bit of time of real world work to get to the senior level. So unless we expect people to do another 5 years of schooling, I am not sure how this will happen (and even in that scenario I believe there is a difference between hands on, on the job experience and classroom experience).
it happened with architecture degrees in the uk. it went from 3 years to 7 years, as the skill levels and implicit knowledge required increased over time.
There are a lot of issues brought up in this post, but I want to discuss one in particular: technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications.
We can say that technological progress occurs when a new method is employed to deliver a product or service with some "more desirable" blend of qualities: it's created/delivered faster, cheaper, with a more desirable mix of resource inputs, and/or results in a more valuable/desired output.
Sometimes it's quite obvious when a technology is superior to another as almost all the qualities of it are advantageous: it's made faster, less expensively, and the result is better with such a gap between it and the old way that there's just no denying that the new way is better.
Sometimes the new technology is really a mix of qualities. Let's focus on the mix that generally gets the most attention: the new way is faster/cheaper but the output is not of a higher quality. Sometimes this new way of cheaper+faster but lower quality "wins out" and the consumer prefers it.
And now the crux of it: why is it so common that discussion concerning these shifts is rooted in everything except the consumer?
An imperfect and potentially flawed example: a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer. The old way of making a superior product still exists and some consumers still prefer it but most do not.
Fundamentally, this is a shift that is rooted in the perception, true or not, of the consumer that the new way is more desirable.
Some folks are not happy with the higher prices of the outputs of old ways of doing things or the effects that the new ways have on jobs, the economy, and/or society.
Fundamentally, this has to do with consumer preference and that's where any blame should be meted out.
Homo economicus to the rescue! Every consumer has perfect knowledge, spending power, and access to effectively unlimited choice which is why when they want lower quality things it's a calculated, careful decision weighing all the options and the long term impacts on both themselves and the future of the industry.
Monopolies and pricing power clearly destroy this utopia but even without those I try to remember Pratchett's "boots theory" whenever I start to blame the consumer for "accepting" abuse from the capital in power of what gets made, when, and for whom.
Hello fellow economics major :)
Yep, capitalism fails in a few ways in the long run. Monopolies, imperfect competition, etc., which is why regulation is required to optimize the system.
Regulation against ruling class will never happen. They hire the regulators, more or less, with a few nice and hopeful exceptions, but they're vanishingly rare.
I believe the science knows how to fix capitalism, and has known for decades. But nobody from the rules wants that.
> technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications
I seem to recall that a mathematician wrote a paper about this around 1995 which got a lot of press attention. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, though. Nor his methods.
> a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer
They don't know it'll fall apart faster, to begin with… and then by the time they do, they've already spent enough of their clothes budget that they can't afford to buy proper cloth, and it's hard to find that nowadays anyway, so they'll just have to buy more of the low-quality stuff.
A defense of the Luddites against sewing machines was honestly not something I expected. Support for the Luddites in general, sure I can predict that, but the claim that sewing machines are bad, exploitative, produce "shitty" cloth, serve only the pursuit of profit...
Power looms are not the same thing as sewing machines. Not even close.
Ah, you're right, thanks for the correction.
> We're going to run out of people with the word "Senior" in their title
Probably not, but job title inflation has made it so that apparently 5 years of experience is enough to be given a "senior" title. I've got like 15 but still feel like a medior at best. Yeah this is humblebragging, whatever it's a throwaway internet comment.
This is a funny comment because startups have been churning out sub-3 year "seniors" for years. If you're not a principal engineer after 5 years what are you even doing?
I have a relative who works in healthcare. The introduction of AI for medical notes has led her level+1 manager to ask folks to increase their patient numbers in response to the extra time saved not having to manually code charts.
The initial response was some grumbling about unionization of the doctor-class. But now they're just kinda going along with it while also complaining loudly. Profit Über alles.
The value of vibe coding isn't that it writes good or sustainable code. It's that you can build a sufficiently non-shitty prototype of a concept as a non IT expert to validate the use case and secure proper assistance.
From a change leadership perspective, walking in the door with a shitty prototype beats pitching vaporware every day of the week and twice on Sundays. And the fact amateurs can deliver (basic, crappy) "things" without budget accelerates growth.
My first projects were 80% copied off Github and some intro tutorials. Know what? They still work. We banked seven figures off of them so far...
In terms of risk, building a prototype and getting a quick win really de-risks a project. Smart decision makers' world is a game of risk - they have tolerance in some areas, less tolerance in others. If you can materialize a quick win from a prototype, it's significantly less risky that sight-unseen work.
Coders often don't think in terms of a broad investment portfolio, but that's how I've seen good executives phrase things. AI makes it cheaper and easier to build that prototype - I've been loving it for my own projects, because of how quickly I can deliver that first software.
The article hints at that when it describes vibe coding as “fancy UX”, but fails to connect the dots.
Essentially, we now have a system that can turn a simple problem description into an interactive tool for that problem. Even if it still does so very imperfectly, it’s easy see already the beginnings of a powerful and empowering new paradigm.
> Vibe coding is payday loans for technical debt
Stealing it...
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Most of the discussion here seems to focus on the events of the past repeating themselves in almost the same manner, and ignoring the differences, which are substantial.
We're not talking about goods produced in bulk, but rather about a new intelligence that helps produce job shop type goods. That intelligence itself isn't a physical good though, and it can be copied freely and run elsewhere at almost no cost, and copyright won't save it. It's like toothpaste out of the tube once it's on the internet.
If we want to keep on track with the analogy to frame weaving machines, the difference is that capital and the availability of power were required to use those machines, which provided the moat required to protect profits.[Econ 101]
Models can be copied, and all of the investment in training used freely by anyone possessing a copy. This might have been how DeepSeek was trained, we'll never know. This is clearly different than in the case of weaving machines.
So instead of the cost of cloth, the cost of thought is going to drop considerably, and the quality of that artificial thought is (likely) at the lowest point it'll ever be. I can already run quantized versions of Deepseek on my CPU with 32 Gb of RAM. The future really doesn't seem to have an upper limit on what can be run locally.
With the ability to run models locally, the costs of running models will always have competition to lower prices. The other force is the capture of prompts and responses, whether covert or in the open, for other use, which must always be kept in mind.
The ability to build completely new things, will, I think, help to usher in a new era of innovation and allow anyone, anywhere, to start up companies to service the world.
[Econ 101] - In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.
> In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.
This is all "perfectly spherical cow" economic theory which does not apply in reality. Do we really have a free and fair marketplace? Where's the competition that's shown up and been able to get any kind of substantial piece of the outsized profit of Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google?
Yes, many competitors show up, and are promptly purchased for quit a bit of cash and/or stock. Many of these purchases shouldn't make it past anti-monopoly laws, but the regulators are captured.
However, the oversized profits are a significant source of incentive for investment in alternatives. Kharma will catch up.
> In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.
What you should have learned is that in an idealized, perfectly rational, perfectly competitive market this is true, and you should have also learned that such markets do not exist in reality, not least of all because rational choice theory does not accurately model human behavior, but also because perfect competition is not an attainable condition.
As a software security person, I don't think the security objections to LLMs are going to pan out. I think LLMs are going to be a strong net positive for security:
* The tooling and integration stuff people complain about now ("the S in MCP") isn't really load-bearing yet, and a cottage industry of professional services and product work will go into giving it the same overcomplicated IAM guardrails everything else has; today, though, you just do security at a higher or lower level.
* LLM code generation is better at implementing rote best-practices and isn't incentivized to take shortcuts (in fact, it has some of the opposite incentives, to the consternation of programmers like me who prize DRY-ness). These shortcuts are where most security bugs live.
* LLMs can analyze code far faster than any human can, and vulnerabilities that can be discovered through pure pattern matching --- which is most vulnerabilities --- will be easy pickings. We've already had a post here with someone using o4 to find new remote kernel vulnerabilities, and that's a level of vuln research that is way, way more hardcore than what line-of-business software ordinarily sees.
* LLMs enable instrumentation and tooling that were cost-prohibitive previously: model checking, semantic grepping, static analysis. These tools all exist and work today, but very few projects seriously use them because keeping all the specs and definitions up to date and resolving all the warnings is too much time for not enough payoff. LLMs don't have that problem.
LLM-generated code (and LLM tooling) will inevitably create security vulnerabilities. We have not invented a way to create bug-free code; would have been big if true! Opponents of industry LLM use will point to these vulnerabilities and go "see, told you so". But each year we continue using these tools, I think the security argument is going to look weaker and weaker. If I had to make a bet, I'd say it ceases being colorable within 3 years.
I'm not terribly worried about code generated security vulnerabilities, but point 3 feels like a cat and mouse game that most companies won't have the resources to stay on top of, so they'll have to outsource it to one of the existing cloud or AI providers. Maybe that's a reality even without AI but it feels like we're heading towards full on extortion from about 4 major companies.
Also I don't think you covered my biggest concern with LLM security, a company making an Amazon basics version of your business model and claiming "AI did it". I'm 50/50 on that one though, it's also possible everyone things with AI you can go full NIH syndrome and take back all the software that we've handed off to various SAAS providers.
There are also non-llm advances in testing related to AI, like RL fuzzers.
The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury. At the time of the industrial revolution it was common for a family to spend 15-25% of their annual income just on clothing. A single shirt from that era would cost the equivalent of £2,000 today when considering material and labor. New clothes were something you may be able to afford once a year, if at all. Like the article says, weavers were the equivalent of PhD scientists who could charge whatever they wanted for their skills (and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time). Great if you're the weaver, not so for everyone else.
So the industrial revolution wasn't a conspiracy to put down the lower classes. The lower classes were in fact the biggest benefactors of the industrial revolution.
If software can go the same way, I'd say good riddance. The profession has always kept free from gatekeepers, and that's a good thing.
> The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury.
Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA.
> and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time
Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to the expense of clothing.
Oh, wait, no I don't, because people still bought clothing and wore it regularly. They just also had economies around mending clothing, updating it, tailoring it, altering it, reusing and recycling it. Rather than building an economic system of destruction for the sake of a handful of profiteers, it was an economy of artisans who provided a staple resource at reasonable rates and quality to support themselves. Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear, people took care of it - and themselves - for longer periods of time. Techniques were used to keep articles sturdy for longer, rather than disposable machine stitches that fall apart in a washing machine.
Experts and artisans are not "gatekeepers", they are skilled craftspeople worthy of respect and deserving of compensation for their skills. To demand anyone be able to do anything of any complexity is to demand a complete elimination of anything that differentiates humans from one another, to create a homogenous mass of genetics with no incentive to grow and evolve.
Nobody is "gatekeeping" software developers, or Doctors, or plumbers, or weavers, or artists. Those all take skill, and people with a suitable level of skill can easily pass good credentials checks and tests.
> Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part
The article says clothing was passed down generations.
> Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear
What if the father's clothes don't fit the son? Now you have to choose between feeding your cows and buying a shirt.
Cloth of any decent quality is not hard to alter to fit, often clothes were made with extra material with the expectation of being altered likely multiple times to fit different people.
Also people did't really buy cow feed at the time, they were grazed on nearby fieldgrass in the summer and fed harvested hay grasses from their own fields in the winter. And it doesn't take all that much work to use a scythe to cut literal tons of grasses. With just a minimum of practice you can cut 2-3 acres of grass a day without straining yourself, provided you are fit, which any pre-modern farmer would be.
Thomas Ptacek dismissed SWE AI concerns as hypocrisy, and I actually think he understated the argument. This is exactly what we get for:
- using BSD/MIT licenses instead of GPL licenses
- accepting absolutely no liability for security holes or data loss
- accepting absolutely no responsibility for poorly performing software that contributes to climate change
- shipping 17,000 web frameworks, founding one more blockchain startup, founding one more wrapper service around an MIT open source project
We're gonna turn around and be like "but what about the security issues" now? We made this bed.
Who is "we"?
A lot of "us" don't have the time to do programming as a hobby -- even if we started off that way.
Many of "us" don't accept blanket grouping with privileged others who had thousands of opportunities to improve the general IT area but were too cool to do it and invented yet another LISP interpreter instead.
And then they come to HN and use "we" as a big convenient scapegoat, obviously to escape responsibility.
Most of "us" are trying to have some semblance of a life, man.
Whoever could collect $200k+ a year and be comfortable should have been helping the IT area. Not me who still doesn't have his own house in his 40s.
Hey same team. Earnestly asking: what should we do? I have some ideas but honestly they're so radical they feel like wild overreactions.
Wild overreactions is exactly what we need -- f.ex. the Linux kernel's gross negligence of security is no longer good enough is one thing that regularly comes to mind.
New geopolitics are in place, too. Our entire branch should do much, much better than they currently do.
One prediction: cybersecurity jobs might see some surge in the EU. Maybe.
In general though, I would work on transparently syncing world-wide database with partitions for personal data (photo galleries, contacts, calendars, media collections, game saves, anything at all) that is akin to, but much better than, torrents -- another very good example.
In general I am extremely mad at the privileged techies who just wrote philosophical essays about what "we" should be doing... while they themselves spent their riches on expensive (and likely sub-par quality) food in the restaurants of a certain coastal US city.
> I don't fear the power loom. I fear the profit expectations of the factory owners.
I knew what was this all about the moment I glimpsed at the title on the front page, my neural nets must have been trained to output that from the few tokens I guess, which makes me think maybe all this AI stuff isn't that different from what's happening in real brains. I bet others too had similar experience.
So the AI thing is happening, maybe its not with this particular tech we have today but they are on to something and we probably better embrace it.
Humans rolled the ladder up behind on so many things. Very few people will survive the planet Earth without the tools and abstractions we built over the many Millenia's and that's how we all live like kings. Any misery out there in the world is a result of our inability to manage it, not because the resources are scarce.
The Luddites, as explained in the article were indeed about the way tech is being adopted. All that tech eventually reached every corner of the world and not every place had Luddites.
Programming computers by hand is shitty anyway, good riddance. Finally we are about to have machines that can be programmed without thinking about the intricacies of programming that have nothing to do with the thing we want to achieve.
All the tech left behind still does have aficionados, maybe in 10 years we can watch someone program a computer using Java on the Primitive Technology channel.
There's a photo on that page with this description:
I was just thinking how I'd describe that different, and how many different ways it could be described.Perhaps even a thousand words worth of description is possible
A thousand tokens.
This post is really all over the place and, I think, misses the main thing here: pretty much every advancement in automation across history has sacrificed some fidelity and craftsmanship. That's the cost of automation. Yet we have continually added more and more automation to our lives because the net value is dramatically higher for the bulk of our civilization.
Yes, we lose (or pidgeon-hole) artisans and craftsmen. But even in his "woe the times" example of AI kludging together two game properties into a painting, where the lighting isn't right and furry tail is not ideal, etc., etc... That $500 image is something no one could have created 20 years ago with a computer. This isn't centuries of artisan skills we are talking about. What about the artisan who would have been paid $500 to paint it with actual paints on an actual canvas? You can mourn progress in every direction if you like, but I don't think it changes a single thing about the trajectory of where we are going.
Now that AI is coming for my job as a programmer I'm not going to get twisted about it - my job didn't exist when I was a kid and it won't exist (certainly not in the same form) when my kid is an adult. And that's ok, it was a "job of opportunity". And that job has changed dramatically over 20 years. AI is just the continuation of that change.
I started in SE because it was fun to make computers do stuff. Programming has only ever been a tool to achieve that goal, and often a frustrating one. AI is just a better tool. If the job becomes "a guy that talks to the AI" that will still be programming because at the end of the day the computer can't do anything without someone telling it what to do.
...until SkyNet.
> pretty much every advancement in automation across history has sacrificed some fidelity and craftsmanship. That's the cost of automation
Can you help me think through how this looks when considering car manufacturing? Originally hand made cars were things of craftsmanship, but significantly lower quality and reliability than those produced with tiny tolerances on insane production lines. I'd take a modern car over a handmade one just about any day of the week.
I mean one of the main complaints of the luddites was decreasing cloth quality despite the looms originally being able to produce higher quality cloth comparable to their own traditional weaving techniques. Powered looms and the dozens of other loom improvements from the previous 100+ years didn't inherently produce poor quality cloth, they were adjusted to produce lower quality cloths after they were already in operationin factories in order to increase profit margins. Powered looms were originally just modified hand looms, not some radically different design from the ground up. The flying shuttle predates powered looms and the luddites.
3 things.
0. The people must take their governments back from corporate technofeudal overlords.
1. Society must shift away from lionizing unbounded capitalism.
2. Workers must form employee-owned co-ops for more stability and better morale and share profits of their labor more fairly rather than extracting maximum amounts for the ownership class that will fire them whenever it suits them.
The most pressing issue to me currently regarding LLMs is the blatant, flagrant change in tone of the "leadership/ownership" class towards employees.
It comes off as little other than thinly veiled contempt for the people that actually make the business function.
We've seen, most recently, Jassy come out and say "we're gonna need a lot less people", Zuckerberg doing his "replacing engineers" shtick on several occasions, all the commentary from the Anthropic CEO/Altman etc.
Even if none of this comes to pass, I've never witnessed such open "threats" in my lifetime.
I can't square this perspective with that of the LLM advocates that run to defend every legitimate criticism of LLM use--unless you're one of the aforementioned or in a similar position, why would you want to defend software that's primary purpose is to displace you?
They are literally telling you that's why they're investing in it. I don't get it.
It’s masks off for them, they were always sociopaths that see other people as a means to an end.
What if we train them and they leave?
What if you don't and they stay?
Yup. It's highly abusive behavior.
I've kinda seen this already play out in a completely different context. Outsourcing & audit world. It's sufficiently commoditized that you can efficiently outsource.
If you're sending the first say 12-months worth of experience work to india then local gang straight out of college end up with a pretty tangible gap. There are key formative experiences missing. The programming equivalent of fighting with manual array memory management. Or shooting yourself in foot with a pointer.
Worse they don't realise that they're missing pieces. By necessity you start them off at a higher level and their understanding ends up fuzzy for lack of better word. It's not their fault...to them it looks normal, to the previous gen it's all "how can you not know this"
...still the world keeps turning
Xe's stuff is always excellent, and this is no different. What's disappointing is the amount of energy and effort wasted by people to come into the comments and espouse their desire to give up on addressing any of their concerns.
"It's just how things are."
"That's what generates profit."
"If that's what the market demands, who are we to judge?"
"Guess we do nothing."
We've all heard it before. We get it, so many HN and Tech folks have thrown in the towel and given up on changing anything within their own lives, or within the lives of others. So many more are content just "going along with the ride", abdicating all responsibility to an imagined god in various forms ("invisible hand of the free market" being most common among our peers).
For the rest of us who want to actually discuss the merits of the piece, we're sidelined by those who found reward in the path of libertarian ideals and seek to punish or discipline those of us who seek to make any sort of change or improvement beyond direct profit motives. Serious discussions of organization and direction are derailed in favor of blatant troll bait and bad-faith arguments.
This, I think, is also what Xe is trying to highlight: those in the position to enact the most positive change are staunchly refusing to do so, which in turn exacerbates the harms caused. Too few people with too much power and too much capital believe themselves to be more knowledgeable and intelligent than anyone else, denigrating any thoughts that may come from the slime beneath them on the ladder. When Xe said "Rolling the ladder up behind us", they make it very clear who they're speaking to:
> Look, CEOs, I'm one of you so I get it. We've seen the data teams suck up billions for decades and this is the only time that they can look like they're making a huge return on the investment.
They're basically shouting that "the call is coming from inside the house", and that the only place - right now - to address these harms are by and from the people inside said house. Nobody is coming to save us, but history books are filled with examples of what happens to those classes, those societies, those civilizations for whom greed becomes all consuming, standards of living collapse, and meaningful progress stagnates.
> Maybe the problem really is winner-take-all capitalism.
> We get it, so many HN and Tech folks have thrown in the towel and given up on changing anything within their own lives, or within the lives of others.
It’s hilarious to read such defeatist takes on the current state of things on a site called Hacker News. The classical definition of a hacker was someone who wielded tech to circumvent power imbalances in whatever form.
Now I fear we have plenty of technologists that are happy to use tech to further cement and centralize existing power structures. IMO, this has been brewing for the past ten years or so, where technologists wrongly believe they have an in to this power just because they work for a FAANG.
You are labor. Where you work does not matter. So long as you need to work, you are labor. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Doctors are finding out this same lesson.
The way out is to build ventures that don’t involve the capital class. Autonomy and independence are worthy goals to strive for.
Your entire reply gets it, and I'd gladly pin this comment to the top if I could.
We need more Hackers.
> . I have a hoodie from AWS Re:Invent in 2022 that I'm going to have to throw out and replace because the sleeves are dying
What is the use of the right to repair, if we do not have the imagination to use it?
I patch my clothes
I'm a pro artist who does a lot of furry commissions and has been getting constant downvotes on this place for expressing my unhappiness ever since this massive abuse of "fair use" began, thanks for being on my side, Xe <3
Do we, or do we not, live in democratic societies?
If we do then we must ensure that we get the social benefits from new technologies, and we suppress the harm.
Does anyone still believe that "self interest" in the aggregate is what is best for society? I think it is clearly untrue
So we need to take collective action.
AI/LLMs are a "steam engine" moment. We can make life better for everyone. But we do need to change course, together, to get there
Vibe coding is not going to go away.
Just as alchemists always dreamed of turning lead into gold, there is a dream that people have had for decades of writing less and less code: Open source. Scaffolds. Code generators. No-code tools. Coding Agent LLMs.
If vibe coding goes away, it will be because it has been replaced with something even more hands off. Perhaps vibe prompting. Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something. Maybe even take a genetic approach where you score the fitness of various software for a certain solution and AI will cross mutate the genes. This will be a change of that rivals our shift from hunter/gatherers to the agricultural revolution.
> Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something.
so you're saying the venture capitalists will soon be out of a job?
what a shame
Venture capitalists are basically startup farmers.
> Honestly though, the biggest impact I've seen across my friends has been what's happened to art commissions
Given the author's eccentricities, when I read "art commissions," I immediately suspected they really meant "furry porn art commissions." Then a few paragraphs later:
> A friend of mine runs an image board for furry art. He thought that people would use generative AI tools as a part of their workflows to make better works of art faster. He was wrong, it just led to people flooding the site with the results of "wolf girl with absolutely massive milkers showing her feet paws" from their favourite image generation tool in every fur color imaginable, then with different characters, then with different anatomical features. There was no artistic direction or study there. Just an endless flood of slop that was passable at best.