Think about the Industrial Age transition from individual craftspeople working on small shops using hand tools to make things into working in factories on large-scale assembly lines. The latter is wildly more productive than the former. If you owned a business that employed a bunch of cobblers, then moving them all out of their little shops into one big factory where they can produce 100x as many shoes means you just got yourself 100x richer.

But for an individual cobbler, you basically got fired at one job and hired at another. This may come as a surprise to those who view work as simply an abstract concept that produces value units, but people actually have preferences about how they spend their time. If you're a cobbler, you might enjoy your little workshop, slicing off the edge of leather around the heel, hammering in the pegs, sitting at your workbench.

The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.

You might not want to quit that job and get a different job running a shoe assembly line in a factory. Now, if the boss said "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x raises" then perhaps you might be more excited about putting down your hammer. But the boss isn't saying that. He's saying "all of the cobblers at the other companies are doing this to, so where are you gonna go?".

Of course AI is a top-down mandate. For people who enjoy reading and writing code themselves and find spending their day corralling AI agents to be a less enjoyable job, then the CEO has basically given them a giant benefits cut with zero compensation in return.

Yup. It’s what I’ve come to realize. My job is probably safe, as long as I will be willing to adapt. I have still not even tried AI once, and don’t care for it, but I know at one point I probably will have to.

I don’t actually think it’ll be a productivity boost the way I work. Code has never been the difficult part, but I’ll definitely have to show I have included AI in my workflow to be left alone.

Oh well…

> Now, if the boss said "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x raises" then perhaps you might be more excited about putting down your hammer.

... is now the moment to form worker cooperatives? The companies don't really have privileged access to these tools, and unlike many other things that drive increased productivity, there's not a huge up-front capital investment for the adopter. Why shouldn't ICs capture the value of their increased output?

The industrial revolution was extremely hard on individual craftspeople. Jobs became lower paying and lower skilled. People were forced to move into cities. Conditions didn't improve for decades. If AI is anything comparable it's not going to get better in 5-10 years. It will be decades before the new 'jobs' come into place.

Unfortunately, I would expect the boss to say, "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x the shoes to repair".

>Think about the Industrial Age transition from individual craftspeople working on small shops using hand tools to make things into working in factories on large-scale assembly lines.

I wouldn't analogize the adoption of AI tools to a transition from individual craftspeople to an assembly line, which is a top-down total reorganization of the company (akin to the transition of a factory from steam power to electricity, as a sibling commenter noted [0]). As it currently exists, AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the individual level, not a total corporate reorganization. Continuing your analogy, it's more akin to letting craftspeople bring whatever tools they want to work, whether those be hand tools or power tools. If the power tools are any good, most will naturally opt for them because they make the job easier.

>The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.

That's certainly a part of it, but I also think workers enjoy and strive to be productive. Why else would they naturally adopt things like compilers, IDEs, and frameworks? Many workers enjoyed the respective intellectual puzzles of hand-optimizing assembly, or memorizing esoteric key combinations in their tricked-out text editors, or implementing everything from scratch, yet nonetheless jumped at the opportunity to adopt modern tooling because it increased how much they could accomplish.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976955

Blacksmiths pretty much existed until the ‘50s and ‘60s for most of the world, making bespoke tools and things. Then they just vanished, for the most part.

We are probably on a similar trajectory.