I had a thought about AI - suppose they are successful at making software engineers obsolete - not totally but enough that the field becomes another moderately paying shitty job only done by people who couldn't figure out what they wanted to do or who are very passionate about some obscure thing for some reason - like geology for example, instead of a meal ticket to the upper middle class and a well-paying career.
They think that if an engineer makes $100k, then making a machine that produce the work of 100 million of them, that machine would be worth $10/T per year. This certainly wouldn't be the case as the supply and demand would dictate that as cost goes down, there's going to be more demand, but not to an infinite degree, and the overall contribution to the economic output would probably be within 2x of what we have today, it's just that something that used to cost a lot, is suddenly very cheap and widely available.
There'd be an economic bottleneck somewhere else. I think most people nowadays understand that A: technology in general has hit diminishing returns and B: it has gotten increasingly sinister overtones.
Fundamentally I think the job of engineer is to translate a business or real life scenario into logic. This is true for any kind of engineer, and is not restricted to software.
I held and continue to hold that software engineer shouldn't be constrained to any specific language. And extrapolate to the entire engineering field, the engineering profession will continue to exist because to first translate a business or real life scenario into logic, you would need to describe it accurately - the rest of the translation is rote work. That describing things accurately is a skill I see most common (but still not common enough) among engineers, even if that is done in English.
I agree with you. In the industry today I feel there there are software engineers and there are programmers. The engineers design, architect, and invent. The programmers do the rote work. Of course it's not black and white, but that's at the extremes of the spectrum.
I'm hoping that AI programming pushes more people toward the engineering side and as it takes over the rote work side. There will be people far to the programmer side that might be put out of a job, but the creative, innovative, inventive engineering positions will persist.
Yes you are right. This is Marx 101 and has been understood for 170 years. It's called the increasing organic composition of capital and drives the declining rate of profit that in turn drives imperialism, the declassing of the western industrial proletariat, and the march to world war.
They think that if an engineer makes $100k, then making a machine that produce the work of 100 million of them, that machine would be worth $10/T per year. This certainly wouldn't be the case as the supply and demand would dictate that as cost goes down, there's going to be more demand, but not to an infinite degree, and the overall contribution to the economic output would probably be within 2x of what we have today, it's just that something that used to cost a lot, is suddenly very cheap and widely available.
There'd be an economic bottleneck somewhere else. I think most people nowadays understand that A: technology in general has hit diminishing returns and B: it has gotten increasingly sinister overtones.