On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work.

Who wins in the market?

It's not a uniform answer. There are times and places where the first one wins, as well as a mixed strategy. But I think broadly speaking the majority answer is the second.

>On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work. Who wins in the market?

The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.

10x the work requires exponentially more communication and coordination. At least according to Brooks "Mythical Man-Month" thesis. There's more to creating a marketable product than churning out code. I'm not aware that AI really changes this.

Most non-commoditized reasonable paying jobs are a product of information asymmetry. Anything that shrinks that asymmetrical surface is a threat to jobs. The company you are missing is the one that fires 99 of their engineers, hires 200 generally lower performing but far cheaper engineers and uses AI to accelerate their output.

Now whether or not that would actually work given the reality of the AI output is a question, but that's the general premise.

Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 horses two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. One company fires 90 horses and buys 10 cars. The other company keeps all its horses.

Do the horses win in the market?

I don’t think anyone has figured how to do 10x the work yet as we don’t know what the work is. AI cannot (yet) define the work that needs to be done, for some definition of needs to be done, and we need humans to figure that out for now. Us humans cannot work fast enough so we still build the same stuff but with less people.

The one who fires 90 engineers, just to see how things go with the 10, and then scales back up with cheaper off-shore talent if they can't keep up with demand.