First thing that came to mind when I started seeing news about companies needing developers to clean up AI code, was the part of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Charlie's father is fired from the toothpaste factory because they bought this new machine to produce the toothpaste, but then they re-wire him for an higher salary because the machine keeps breaking and they need someone to fix it.

AI (at least this form of AI) is not going to take our jobs away and let us all idle and poor, just like the milling machine or the plough didn't take people's jobs away and make everyone poor. it will enable us to do even greater things.

Well, sometimes innovation does destroy jobs, and people have to adapt to new ones.

The plough didn't make everyone poor, but people working in agriculture these days are a tiny percentage of the population compared to the majority 150 years ago.

(I don't think LLMs are like that, tho).

Touching on this topic, I cannot recommend enough "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" which (among other things) illustrates the story of dockworkers: there were entire towns dedicated to loading ships.

But the people employed in that area have declined by 90% in the last 60 years, while shipping has grown by orders of magnitude. New port cities arose, and old ones died. One needs to accept inevitable change sometimes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

> it will enable us to do even greater things.

Just as gun powder enabled greater things. I agree with you just humans have shown, time after time, an ability to first use innovation to make lives miserable for their fellow humans.

The amount of luddites angrily answering this comment and downvoting me for seeing with a positive view a new great revolution for human knowledge and productivity, is very funny when coming from a website supposedly dedicated to innovation :)

In my country, we also have a class (they have achieved the status of social class IMO) that expects to keep their jobs and get ever increasing privileges while not having to upgrade their competences or even having to learn anything new during all their life: our public workers.

I doubt anyone is hiring ai ghostbusters to cleanup after ai slop. Couple of people added that to their linkedin (ewww) to ride the anti-slop hype.

In reality most devs can cleanup after themselves.

Industrial revolution caused a massive shift from fairly self-sustained agrarian communities to living horrible poverty in urban factory and mining towns, just look up numbers of children deceased during work in the 19th Century England. It did not make everyone poorer - it made plenty of people helluva lot richer - but it did increase the number of those in poverty and the effects of their destitude. The mega rich capitalists class greated by the industrialisation replaced the old aristocrats being able to buy goverments and leaders to do their bidding, smashing worker’s rights and unions created to defend the workers from the effects of industrial capitalism with police violence, William Hearst and the like were able to essentially control public opinion since they owned the newspapers…Sound familiar? We are not entering an era descriped on an utopian scifi, but just returning to the good old 19th century.

Except I still doubt whether AI is the new Spinning Jenny. Because the quality is so bad and because it can’t replace human’s in most things or doesn’t necessarily even speed the prodiction in a sognificant way, we might just be facing another IT-bubble and financial meltdown, since US seems to have but all of the eggs in a one basket.

>it will enable us to do even greater things.

It doesnt do this.