Glad someone is rational. I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.

This AI fear wave has outed that many people have not even the most basic grasp of economics, or the ability to carry a thought to its natural conclusion.

For example, I'll often see people espousing: "there will be no work left, better get rich now or you're screwed!". What's the point in getting rich if there will be no work left? Money is merely a means to an end; in this world with no work everyone will have the ends (goods and services) for free, or else goods and services will still have value and therefore jobs will still exist.

Another equally silly argument "only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable".

I've never seen completely verifiable software, but let's presume it exists! If software engineering can be replaced (or some large part of it) I will simply say to my LLM "please make me a piece of software that replaces my accountant/lawyer/...", for that matter I could just as equally say "please make me manufacturing software for a perfect humanoid robot and a plumber/bricklayer/electrician protocol". LLMs cannot do this? Then software engineers will move to solving these problems. If LLMs can do it, then the entire economy will be meaningless and Dario/Sam/Elon/etc... will be no richer than you or I.

But, as you say, LLMs are not close to being able to do any of this (and yes... I use Claude Code)

>> only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable

the thing most (especially non-devs) don't understand is that if software can be automated - 99% of all knowledge work will be replaced, as software is the ultimate automation.

There would be absolutely no issues automating accountants/lawyers/etc etc etc. Sure few will be left but 99% can be automated when software is that advanced.

Not only knowledge work, also a massive amount of blue collar jobs. AI already can guide you how to fix a lot of things or analyze issues with plumbing/electricity/you name it.

So if software goes down - everyone will go down.

> I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.

Yeah I've sort of noticed this on X for the brief time I was on there this weekend. The Claude Code creator was hyping it up to the moon, and when people called him out for it he said he would feel the same way if he wasn't making 1000 racks a year with it. Sure mate.

What people don't realise is if tech progresses to the point where everything is automated, the marginal cost of everything will basically go to zero. It would be better to give away food and shelter for free if it keeps things peaceful. And if not, people have revolted for far less.

That being said it's a complete utopia and once this bubble pops we are basically going to be where we were, but with excellent natural language parsing and generation, with some useful code generation and introspection tools, writing assistants, etc. Which will be great, but not world changing.