And the invention of AGI will have the same impact as the electricity, i mean, they're both inventions, right ? I can't wait for all these billions of new full time jobs coming to replace the current ones.
Farmers couldn't be replaced by low skill labor because they are low skill.
Farmer didn't stop existing, but we went from 80% of the population farming is to 1-10%. If farming automation had happened in 1800 when 80% of the workforce was working in agriculture, it'd have been a cataclysm.
I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers, mainly offset by their high salaries. Wait and see once vibecoding becomes the new norm.
And for software engineers, yeah, automation will wreck their jobs and their paychecks because software engineering's higher speed limit in efficiency is the speed of light, not a tractor's.
Great points. Besides if one look around even today beyond people who somehow still succeeding at software hustle, there are already tons of people fallen off IT gravy train. A lot of manual testers who would make decent living are now eliminated by automation. Software document writers jobs are kind of gone. Developers are supposed to create document themselves on Confluent wiki etc. A lot of prized SAP consultants and such from past are now downgraded to generic mid level project managers / IT managers if they were hold onto IT jobs at all.
I can list lot more jobs e.g exchange admins, app server admins, DBAs, they are either gone or far fewer available. And lot of people were not able to up-skill and fell out of race in just a matter of 15-20 years.
I feel like this begs for a careful analysis, we could probably drop a dozen more reasons as to why demand in devs and perhaps even in # of lines of code might plateau or decline in the near future, without even mentioning AI at any point.
I totally agree that there are whole host of reasons for this. One of them I think is plainly a ton of work which was novel and custom in past is now subsumed in base infrastructure of today's world. Despite big tech and other vendor keep pushing of new things lot of people and companies are finding base level acceptable for many tasks which would need custom work in past. So no growing demand custom software for everything.
We can already see for example as per Ericsson report[1] after exponential demand for mobile data and speed it is now plateauing and next decade will not see huge growth. As users are finding things they do and apps they use with phones are now fast/good enough.
There are two ways to think about your work in IT, one is as a person who really understands how to use a particular technology, and the other is as someone who can figure out how to use technology in general to achieve some particular end. Anybody who picks the first path might have a very well paid career for the few years that that technology is relevant, but will eventually crash out. You need to always be looking at the next thing and keeping your skills and knowledge up to date. Nobody ever guaranteed that Microsoft Outlook admins would have a career for life.
I am talking about aggregate distribution not individual motivation to do better. Of course some can do better, learn new things, update LinkedIn profile regularly, attend local networking events, take paid membership to enhance visibility in job search and so on.
The point is more and more people who survived with average skills or one time learning in past are not able to do so now. And it is not a complain about anything or anyone but observation that few people are seeing marked improvement in their lives with changing technology and many more are seeing degradation due to same changes.
Hi ! Thanks for ARC it's lots of fun. Did you think about expanding ARC beyond the current 32x32 relatively low dsl depth format ? Do you think there's anything to gain from it ?
I will never enter ARC Prize myself, since I'm organizing it. But the reason I made ARC in the first place was to work on it myself! I intend to solve it (outside of the context of the competition).
I had never thought about how close perception and reasoning are from a computational point of view, the parts of ARC that we call "reasoning" seem to just be operations that the human brain is not predisposed to solve easily.
A very interesting corollary is that the first AGIs might be way better thinkers than humans by default because of how they can seamlessly integrate new programs into their cognition in a perfect symbiosis with computers.
Perception is the representation of raw inputs into a form useful for further processing, but it is not a feed-forward computation. You repeatedly re-represent what you see as you keep looking. Particularly something like an ARC puzzle where you have to find a representation that reveals the pattern. That's what my ARC solver is about (I did not finish it for the deadline).
> A very interesting corollary is that the first AGIs might be way better thinkers than humans by default
I agree at least this far. Human System 2 cognition has some very severe limitations (especially working memory, speed, and error rate) which an AGI probably would not have. Beyond fixing those limitations, I agree with François that we shouldn't assume there aren't diminishing intelligence returns to better mental architectures.
I'm pretty sure there is less organic content in proportion today than before, first because monetization wasn't in fashion, it was less common/accessible, but also because people who make organic content are fighting with SEO focused people who monopolize attention time / steal & rewrite organic content very efficiently. Less people viewing your organic content = less motivation to spend time on it.
If only we could send all these money obsessed intermediaries & creators to an island somewhere, left to scalp & scam & plagiarize each other out.
Farmers couldn't be replaced by low skill labor because they are low skill.
Farmer didn't stop existing, but we went from 80% of the population farming is to 1-10%. If farming automation had happened in 1800 when 80% of the workforce was working in agriculture, it'd have been a cataclysm.
I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers, mainly offset by their high salaries. Wait and see once vibecoding becomes the new norm.
And for software engineers, yeah, automation will wreck their jobs and their paychecks because software engineering's higher speed limit in efficiency is the speed of light, not a tractor's.