> What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had (...)

I think you're confusing your cherry-picked comparison with reality.

LLMs are eliminating the need to have a vast array of positions on payrolls. From copywriters to customer support, and even creative activities such as illustration and even authoring books, today's LLMs are already more than good enough to justify replacing people with the output of any commercial chatbot service.

Software engineering is being affected as well, and it requires far greater know-how, experience, and expertise to meet the hiring bar.

> And when you talk about applying this same tech, so confidently, to domains far more nuanced and complex than (...)

Yes, your tech job is also going to be decimated. It's not a matter of having PMs write code. It's an issue of your junior SDE armed with a LLM being quite able to clear your bug backlog in a few days while improving test coverage metrics and refactoring code back from legacy status.

If a junior SDE can suddenly handle the workload that previously you required a couple of medior and senior developers, why would a company keep around 4 or 5 seasoned engineers when an inexperienced one is already able to handle the workload?

That's where the jobs will vanish. Even if demand remains there, it dropped considerably as to not justify retaining so many people in a company's payroll.

And what are you going to do, them? Drive a Uber?

▲

taormina 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> LLMs are eliminating the need to have a vast array of positions on payrolls. From copywriters to customer support, and even creative activities such as illustration and even authoring books, today's LLMs are already more than good enough to justify replacing people with the output of any commercial chatbot service.

I'd love a source to these claims. Many companies are claiming that they are able to layoff folks because of AI, but in fact, AI is just a scapegoat to counteract the reckless overhiring due to free money in the market over the last 5-10 years and investors are demanding to see a real business plan and ROI. "We can eliminate this headcount due to the efficiency of our AI" is just a fancy way to make the stock price go up while cleaning up the useless folks.

People have ideas. There are substantially more ideas than people who can implement ideas. As with most technology, the reasonable expectation is to assume that people are just going to want more done by the now tool powered humans, not less things.

▲

motorest 4 days ago | parent [-]

> I'd love a source to these claims.

Have you been living under a rock?

You can start getting up to speed by how Amazon's CEO already laid out the company's plan.

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/amazon-generative...

> (...) AI is just a scapegoat to counteract the reckless overhiring due to (...)

That is your personal moralist scapegoat, and one that you made up to feel better about how jobs are being eliminated because someone somewhere screwed up.

In the meantime, you fool yourself and pretend that sudden astronomic productivity gains have no impact on demand.

▲

huimang 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

These supposed "productivity gains" are only touted by the ones selling the product, i.e. the ones who stand to benefit from adoption. There is no standard way to measure productivity since it's subjective. It's far more likely that companies will use whatever scapegoat they can to fire people with as little blowback as possible, especially as the other commenter noted, people were getting hired like crazy.

Each one of the roles you listed above is only passable with AI at a superficial glance. For example, anyone who actually reads literature other than self-help and pop culture books from airport kiosks knows that AI is terrible at longer prose. The output is inconsistent because current AI does not understand context, at all. And this is not getting into the service costs, the environmental costs, and the outright intellectual theft in order to make things like illustrations even passable.

▲

motorest 4 days ago | parent [-]

> These supposed "productivity gains" are only touted by the ones selling the product (...)

I literally pasted an announcement from the CEO of a major corporation warning they are going to decimate their workforce due to the adoption of AI.

The CEO literally made the following announcement:

> "As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done," Jassy wrote. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs."

This is not about selling a product. This is about how they are adopting AI to reduce headcount.

	▲	baconbrand 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The CEO is marketing to the company’s shareholders. This is marketing. A CEO will say anything to sell the idea of their company to other people. Believe it or not, there is money to be made from increased share prices.

▲

taormina 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Congratulations for believing the marketing. He has about 2.46 trillion reasons to make this claim. In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue.

▲

XenophileJKO 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think your assumption is probably a little backwards. It will be a senior SDE clearing the slate I think. Ones that embrace the technolocy and are able to accelerate their work. At that level of effeciency the cost is still way way lower than it is for a larger team.

When it gets to the point that you don't need a senior engineer doing the work, you won't need a junior either.

▲

motorest 4 days ago | parent [-]

> I think your assumption is probably a little backwards. It will be a senior SDE clearing the slate I think.

I don't think you understood the point I made.

My point was not about Jr vs Sr, let alone how a Jr is somehow more capable than a Sr.

My point was that these productivity gains aren't a factor of experience of seniority, but they do devalue the importance of seniority to perform specific tasks. Just crack open a LLM, feed in a few prompts, and done. Hell, junior developers no longer need to reach out to seniors to as questions about any topic. Think about that for a second.

	▲	rpdillon 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Just as an anecdote that might provide some context, this is not what I've observed. My observation is that senior engineers are vastly more effective at knowing how to employ and manage AI than junior engineers. Junior engineers are typically coming to the senior engineers to learn how to approach learning what the AI is good at and not good at because they themselves have trouble making those judgments. I was working on a side project last night, and Gemini decided to inline the entire Crypto.js library in the file I was generating. And I knew it just needed a hashing function, so I had to tell it to just grab a hashing function and not inline all of Crypto.js. This is exactly the kind of thing that somebody that didn't know software engineering wouldn't be able to say, even as simple as it is. It made me realize I couldn't just hand this tool to my wife or my kids and allow them to create software because they wouldn't know to say that kind of thing to guide the AI towards success.