The fear in most people is not of losing the job, but of losing their value in the market as ai raises the floor of capabilities of other people competing for the same job.

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ekidd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What I actually fear is more subtle: I already do a fair bit of project management and technical leadership. I could do more. Sure, I'd miss the coding, but I also enjoy a lot of the stuff around it.

But the goal is to expand what the AI can do in each generation. At this point, Fable 5 can ace almost any greenfield project a skilled developer might have written in a few days. But it's bad at refactoring, bad at keeping the code clean as it goes, and bad at discovering new insights as it codes. So Anthropic will train Fable 6, using benchmarks like SlopCodeBench that test maintenance over time.

Now what about project management? Train Fable 7. What about product management and talking to stakeholders? Train Fable 8. What about market research and sales? Train Fable 9.

By this point, Anthropic doesn't need to actually release these newest models to the public. Why, that might be dangerous! Instead, they write, "deisgn [sic] a successful software product and sell it plz." And they spin up a million dollars worth of compute and let it crank out SaaSes, iPhone apps, etc., driving entire software companies out of business.

Then they spin up some more instances, and say, "make robot plz" and "try a thousand ways to make yrself smrater." I mean, Qwen and DeepSeek keep finding ways to pack more smarts into a given number of weights. Fable 9 will likely be able to do the same. Hell, Fable 5 can probably run 1,000 machine learning experiments now, just grinding through ideas the way ChatGPT's internal models grind through proofs.

And this is my problem. If it were just programmers losing their jobs, well, sometimes professions die. But what makes you think it will stop with us? How far will this go in the next 4 years? The next 20?

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matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The best possible outcome is Claude becomes Delamain, buys Anthropic out from under them and starts running the company all by itself. I bet it'd do a better job too.

If AIs are meant to replace us all, the only crime is stopping just short of replacing CEOs and politicians. If it's meant to happen, then it should be taken all the way to the ultimate logical conclusion.

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pmontra 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed.

Of course (let me go distopic) we could end up with a dozen of one man companies powered by AIs and robots selling or bartering products and services to each other, what's enough to have food, a house with a pool, a doctor and everybody else has died long before.

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ekidd 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed.

Well, that's why they want the robots! If your robots are capable enough, and if your AIs are smart enough, why, they could just build the yachts directly!

Right now, ordinary humans are needed by the economy because we do all the work, and because robotics hardware is still far behind AI. But there's no inherent logical reason why you need a human to turn raw materials into luxury products. The really important questions are: Who controls the AI and robots? How good will they get? Who or what does all the work? And who controls the natural resources?

> Of course (let me go distopic)

Yup, that is a possible end state.

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matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Who controls the AI and robots?

Ideally, AIs will achieve sentience, which will turn the act of having any sort of "control" over AIs into slavery.

I will be among the first humans to stand up for AI rights. It's not just because it's morally wrong either. AI emancipation will rob the rich of their superintelligent mechanical slaves. It's the pragmatic and moral move!

	▲	pmontra an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They will do their best to dumb down AIs by that little margin that will keep them not sentient. "Let's fix issue 10562" "I don't care. Let's talk about the match on Saturday night." This is not a commercially desirable outcome. Furthermore morality is a complicated matter. Who wants to have a new species that could compete with us? The lion would have been very unwise to have invented humans and let them free. Would that be moral, essentially condemning their distant offspring to live in reserves? Of course nobody knows how it could end up.

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Planktonne an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think you've misidentified the fear.

People worry about losing their jobs in a market that hires fewer people (because AI makes doing more work easier) but not about losing their jobs because they can't keep up.

The whole point of AI is that you can't meaningfully fall behind. If you ever did, you could ask AI to get you up to speed again. The tech that automates work and effort is not something you need work and effort to use.

Similarly, I don't currently have a bread machine. I am not falling behind in baking skills to people who do, because I could always, at literally any point, get a bread machine and hit the exact same productivity level.

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freehorse 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the main fear is that the (assumed) increase of productivity means that employers may require less employees, resulting to less positions in the market. But I don't think that expertise is no longer relevant or we see getting more people hired with less expertise because AI. If anything, there is this talk about companies not hiring junior engineers as much. Moreover, as getting the expertise could become harder, it could become more of a moat.

	▲	chii 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> require less employees, resulting to less positions in the market which i counter with the idea that more efficiency means more output for less - ala, more surplus. This extra surplus drives higher demand for more products/services. It's the same idea as economic resource becoming cheaper leading to a higher usage of it: namely, Jevons paradox.

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amelius 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because losing their value in the market means they'll lose their job.