By my reckoning, there's a significant chance most software engineers will be unemployable within a few years. But I'm not 100% confident that there'll be a utopia waiting for us, as an alternative.
Sorry, when I wrote 'all', I meant people all over the world (not just in China).
Individuals can still get unlucky. Just like a coal miner might be out of a job, when solar panels become effectively free.
Software engineers are a pretty small part of the general population. And they can move into general white collar work afterwards. Perhaps at a drop in pay compared to software engineering, but still pretty cushy by the standards of ordinary people.
(And if we manage to automate all white collar work to be done cheaply and reliably by machines, well, then we are in utopia.)
Ostensibly there is no reason this isn't already happening at large companies. I used to think it was an expertise bias, since the impact of LLMs is inversely proportional to your own ability - but I think this is also no longer the case. Even if you're extremely skilled, they can already greatly supplement, if not supplant, you on implementation and increasingly even planning/architecture.
So my new pet theory is that this is one of the few times we're seeing a positive effect from the heads of all of these big businesses being part of weird public (e.g. WEF) and private (e.g. Bohemian Club) orgs where they get to together and conspire to conquer the world or whatever. Rapid replacement of labor would be horrifically self defeating, because you'd end up not only tanking your own economy but having a bunch of angry and increasingly desperate people with a whole lot of time on their hands. That doesn't tend to end well for the powers that be.
So I think there's going to be a conscious effort to transition between this era, and whatever comes next, in a more controlled way than $$$ YOLO $$$.
> So my new pet theory is that this is one of the few times we're seeing a positive effect from the heads of all of these big businesses being part of weird public (e.g. WEF) and private (e.g. Bohemian Club) orgs where they get to together and conspire to conquer the world or whatever.
On what account? It's certainly true that these people are part of these orgs. And it's also certainly true that they're discussing 'mental automation' (as a catch-all for LLM stuff) and its economic/social consequences amongst themselves. And finally it's also true that they're not really acting as much on LLMs as they ostensibly could, when normally they'd do pretty much anything, regardless of longer term consequences, if it'd increase next quarter's margins by a point or two.
I think the only assumption that's meaningfully debatable is whether the current SOTA are able to supplant labor to a more significant degree or not. And while I suppose that's going to inextricably remain an opinion, I think it's reasonably objective to say that hallucination rates have sharply declined, and overall code quality/coherence is sharply up.
