I wouldn’t be so dismissive: “force multiplier” means job loss unless there’s a large amount of work which isn’t currently being done. As you live in a society, it really is important to think about what happens if we get the mass layoffs almost all of the executive-class are promising. There are some new jobs around the tech itself, but that doesn’t help those people unless they can land one of the new jobs – and even the most excited proponents should ask themselves who is buying their product in a world with, say, 50% fewer white collar jobs.

It’s also worth noting that while our modern use of Luddite is simply “anti-technology”, there was a lot more going on there. The Napoleonic wars were savaging the economy and Luddism wasn’t just a reaction to the emergence of a new technology but even more the successful class warfare being waged by the upper class who were holding the line against weavers attempts to negotiate better terms and willing to deploy the army against the working class. High inflation and unemployment created a lot of discontent, and the machines bore the brunt of it because they were a way to strike back at the industrialists being both more exposed and a more acceptable target for anyone who wasn’t at the point of being willing to harm or kill a person.

Perhaps most relevant to HN is that the weavers had previously not joined together to bargain collectively. I can’t help but think that almost everyone who said “I’m too smart to need a union” during the longest run of high-paying jobs for nerds in history is going to regret that decision, especially after seeing how little loyalty the C-suite has after years of pretending otherwise.

> I wouldn’t be so dismissive: “force multiplier” means job loss unless there’s a large amount of work which isn’t currently being done.

I think there is a massive amount of work that's currently not being done, industry-wide. Everywhere I've worked has had something like 4-10X more work to do than staff to do it. The feature and bug backlogs just endlessly grow because there is no capacity to keep up. Companies should be able to adopt a force multiplier without losing staff: It could bring that factor down to 2-5X. The fact that layoffs are happening industry-wide shows that leadership might not even know what their workers could be doing.