Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News

Perhaps one of the secondary effects of AI replacing developers will be mobilising a group of smart, motivated people to the left

(It's always interesting to think of the secondary effects which kick in past a certain point of growth. High-multiple stock valuations often fail to take these into account. For the East India Company, for example — your company can keep growing until it's the size of a country. But suddenly other countries treat you as a foreign power rather than a pet.)

I've always thought of myself as more "centrist" (feel free to make fun of me), but seeing so many tech CEOs cheer for layoffs and destruction of the job market has been a bit of a wake up call. Also just being confronted with the sheer idiocy of these people. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but they barely understand the tech they are cheering for. They act as though being broadly "bullish on AI" and being overly enthusiastic about its short-term potential was some kind of visionary stance, when in fact they are just repeating the same ideas as every other idiot in the silicon valley VC bubble.

My personal bet would be that in the medium term, there will be a reversal of the idiotic belief that you can immediately just lay off developers because of LLMs. If your developers are more productive because of LLMs, you still have an advantage by having more developers than the competition. There's also a lot of institutional knowledge that's just not documented. You fire key people, you can cripple your organization.

In the longer term, I think AI will eventually take jobs, and unfortunately, it will have major negative societal impact. I doubt that our governments will be proactive in trying to anticipate this. They will just play damage control. There's probably going to be an anti-AI social movement. You'll have the confluence of more and more disinformation and AI slop online along with more and more job loss. There are probably going to be riots. Some people think UBI is inevitable. I think the problem is that if the government puts UBI in place, they will only give you the minimum necessary so that you don't starve. Just enough to afford to rent a bedroom, eat processed food and stay online all day.

> Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News

I am on this site because it is one of the less shitty places on the Internet (in terms of usability, privacy etc.) to have some form of discussion, but I never identified as a "hacker", "techie", "entrepreneur" or "temporarily embarrassed billionaire". AI didn't change my view on anything, except it has shown me how blind and naive people can be.

Of course I tend to focus on aspects that are being discussed here (context of software engineering).