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The last time my family was replaced by technology

154 points - today at 1:06 PM

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megalomanu
today at 2:04 PM
Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
bhelkey
today at 7:24 PM
There is a quote from a CGP Grey video from a bit over a decade ago, "There isn't a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right." [1]
A couple hundred years ago, something like 70% of the population worked in agriculture. Technology replaced almost all of these jobs.
So far, we have reimagined old professions and created brand new ones. Is this ability of ours limitless?
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CMFj75kBQlU
harimau777
today at 6:11 PM
Have any of these articles actually addressed HOW software developers are supposed to retrain for good jobs? Personally I have neither the money nor the years to go back to college to get a livable job.
mrbonner
today at 7:59 PM
I’ve been coding for over 20 years. I may not be the perfect coder, but for me, the real goal has always been solving problems and coding is just a side effect. If I could solve an operational problem with Excel, I would! Code, once created, is a liability I have to carry.
So I’m embracing AI-assisted coding with open arms. It’s not that I don’t enjoy coding. it’s that this approach lets me solve problems faster than ever before.
zug_zug
today at 1:30 PM
And my great great grandpa thought horses would lose all their jobs to cars. And they all did and it was never the same again.
There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
CrzyLngPwd
today at 9:48 PM
So naive.
Automation will take everything it can in a race to the bottom towards higher profits.
Your great great grandfather changed, and the automation didn't keep up.
This time it will, and there will be no safe harbor.
markus_zhang
today at 8:03 PM
Other than Uber and Uber eats, I can’t imagine myself doing anything other than those. I might get a security guard certificate and guard empty halls during the night, which quite suits me.
Not a handyman, not suitable for physical jobs, I think I’m cooked! This is the fear that is always on my head.
rckt
today at 1:46 PM
Amazing. I bet this can really help thousands of programmers who are simply not needed, because companies decided to replace them with AI agents. These philosophical ponders are very comfortable to do when your ass is safe. Most of people don’t have this privilege.
> what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
It never was the code. The code is how you solve problems, make stuff happen. The code is a tool. It’s people’s brain that is of value. People learn how to use these tools the best they can. And now they are told that they should become mere supervisors for the AI agents. Simply by trusting the output and QA-ing the result. Because no human can keep track of the AI’s generated mess.
Havoc
today at 1:56 PM
I don’t particularly like the horse to engine angle because it doesn’t capture the issue well.
When we automated physical activity people that were crowded out moved into knowledge work. Now we’re automating knowledge work so people move into ???
Leisure? Become a useless class? UBI? Something else entirely?
hn9zmdcaou
today at 1:28 PM
My grandad ran a small letterpress shop and when phototypesetting came in he didn't retrain, he just did smaller and smaller jobs until it was wedding invitations.
zeven7
today at 2:46 PM
Well written, and good to reflect on.
However, the one thing I feel like is missed by some in these conversations is that what's being built is a general purpose thinking machine, not a coding machine. How are we going to transition from writing code to solving problems when the machines are solving the problems?
0c3ca83
today at 1:45 PM
The last hundred times we automated things, we automated muscles. Today, the number of people employed purely for their muscle is very small.
This time is the first time we've automated higher level reasoning.
alimail
today at 9:22 PM
The grandfather must also have survived two world wars. The transition from horse to cars happened within a broader context and was greased by blood.
I find it curious that this is often elided when discussing technological transition. Sure the whip makers went away but they probably also ended up dead in a trench.
delichon
today at 1:42 PM
Back in the '70s my dad used to tell a joke about his dad. He said that my grandfather had a job that supported his whole large family while my dad was growing up. But unfortunately technology caught up with him, and he was replaced by a device just this big, and he held his fingers apart to demonstrate.
Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."
Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.
It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, and so was the pickle slicer.
In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.
alexpotato
today at 7:55 PM
I think we are very much in the below scenario:
"I'm a carpenter and electric power tools were just invented.
In the short term, people are asking if we need all these carpenters.
In the long term, people will want bigger houses and therefore the demand for carpenters will go up"
We are in the "short term" part of the above.
My real question is how long we spend in that period before moving on to the next one.
soundworlds
today at 9:13 PM
I am already seeing more companies hire people who are developer-adjacent, especially now with AI-assistance.
I don't think software developers are going away, but likely headed more in-house, as each company can cheaply have bespoke software made and maintained.
voidmain
today at 1:56 PM
You are not the farrier in this analogy. You are the horse.
techteach00
today at 6:56 PM
I just wanted to point something out. I hear people say the AI revolution is the biggest one since the industrial revolution. I think it's the biggest revolution since the one that just preceded us, the information (computer) age. So we're still going fairly in order revolution wise.
pavinjoseph
today at 6:45 PM
So far the impact of LLMs have been very much overstated. Like most (all?) tools, they require a human in the loop to work as intended. This fear of being replaced by an LLM is unfounded and irrational.
The alternatives that may cause such mass displacement like World Models and such are yet to be proven.
its_ethan
today at 8:06 PM
This reminds me of a TIME article by former Governor of Indiana, Eric Holcomb
https://time.com/7346751/ai-impact-american-manufacturing/
hangrybear666
today at 1:41 PM
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
ar7hur
today at 1:46 PM
I like this article, but it took decades for cars to take over: we needed to build vehicles, build roads, build up gas production and distribution... as Bill Gates wrote, one of the differences with the AI disruption is how fast it's coming, since it's almost immaterial (except data centers of course). It may be too fast for humans to adapt like they did in the previous revolutions.
joshstrange
today at 1:56 PM
> But it makes me wonder: what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?
This exactly. Look, I "love" code but only because of what it allows me to do and there is plenty of code/coding that I don't love. Not to be too hippy-dippy but I'm a builder, I like to build things. Build things for myself, build things for others. The code was _always_ a means to an end.
Sure, it was cool I had this skill that many people didn't have but I also used to have skill in managing the windows machines and things like the registry. When I first switched to macOS I felt lost, I had this "skill" that was no longer needed but after a while I realized that was a good thing, I wasn't wasting my time fiddling with crap that was just getting in the way of _using_ my computer.
Similarly I may mourn the loss of writing code but at the end of the day code was just a way for me to build, if there are better tools to build (LLMs) then I'm all for it.
makerofthings
today at 1:52 PM
Yes, but this time, we're the horse.
danesparza
today at 2:08 PM
The Industrial Revolution took over 100 years. You could argue that WW1 and WW2 were direct, structural consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
This has taken months to up-end multiple industries.
I don't think the article makes a fair comparison.
philipodonnell
today at 2:07 PM
I don’t know, somehow the pace seems different, these transitions felt more like the last generation retiring, and the next generation doing something different, instead of it happening to everyone at the same time.
shovas
today at 1:53 PM
I think the analogy of moving from horses to engines breaks down when going from code to AI as AI can quite plausibly work on itself. It's a fundamentally different game we're playing this time. And there were as many engine jobs as horse jobs (maybe more). The whole point of AI is super human productivity. Even the idea of just using AI means you need less humans because one human with AI can out-produce multiple humans without. It's very difficult to imagine a future where AI can do every job and things don't turn into a sci-fi dystopia.
233mhz
today at 1:43 PM
> something happened once in the past and turned ok hence you should never ever worry about other vaguely similar things ever again
That's how it sounds to me
RRRA
today at 6:03 PM
Funny thing for me, it was NEVER the code...
ACS_Solver
today at 1:57 PM
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.
This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).
I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.
As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.
A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.
the_real_cher
today at 7:54 PM
I think the big problem is that nowadays, you can't simply switch professions any more, A.I. can do just about anything white collar, and there's only limited amount of blue collar jobs to go around.
So the future is going to be interesting.
narmiouh
today at 2:35 PM
On the one hand, it makes sense to think of this as just another revolution as it keeps things familiar, keeps the ground underneath us intact and lets hope it goes this way.
On the other hand, if long horizon independent problem solving with almost zero human intervention or support is realized in these models 1-5 years down, then it will lead not to new tech, but essentially a new species of workers that can replace humans at all tasks, In that case, humans wouldn't really have the upper hand as an economical resource to get any work done.
zombittack
today at 1:59 PM
sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.
We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.
Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.
vonnik
today at 2:02 PM
I wish the author had gone deeper
khalic
today at 1:33 PM
What a refreshingly positive read
hypfer
today at 2:11 PM
The difference here is that the car was not a centralized cloud service, owned by select few billionaires.
So the post does need an asterisk, referring to how it all hinges on availability of open weights and inference hardware.
w10-1
today at 8:42 PM
"My family" - a nice anecdotal frame. No worries here. After all, labor savers for production has evolved for millennia. And you should only worry about the impact to yourself, and be glad your lot is better than your ancestors'.
But our society today has very extensive systems with very few deciders, who are largely enmeshed in social and legal constraints to ensure our reliance is safe and effective (at least in the large/long run).
The concern is about that constraint system being displaced - minimally with decider over-reliance on AI (still subject to guardrails?), or maximally with AI itself (no internal guardrails). Slop (in software, medical services, and military targeting) is just the symptom.
That replacement/shift has already been a corrosive side-effect of capitalism, as elites slowly cede loyalty and professional standards to competitive pressure, but even now most constraints allow replacement of bad actors (if demonstrable). AI reliance just makes that shift irreversible. People no longer have incentives or opportunities to spend the decades required to lead effectively, so organizations could never revert the heartless efficient machine elites back to the available incompetent and oblivious humans.
Maybe the result is just wealth transfer, or health, but I'd expect the high-value use to be in a military where very few people can combat many (as is happening in Ukraine now), making the military a preferred option for anyone with resources.
The distribution of (and checks on) responsibility - up, down, across companies and political systems - was intended to constrain agents to organizational goals, but it effectively kills any internal change by requiring near-unanimity and overcoming people's dependence on their jobs. So even if a super-majority of people agreed on some negative projection of AI usage AND had the resources to put work and investments at risk, it still wouldn't be enough to change this trajectory.
globular-toast
today at 1:42 PM
My grandad on one side of the family was a market gardener. He didn't become a farmer.
My great grandad on the other side was a lighterman[0]. He didn't become a ship captain.
Sometimes professions really are just gone. In both cases in my family it was due to consolidation of resources and concentration of capital/power. Technology was just a catalyst for that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighterman
glimshe
today at 1:34 PM
There are two key elements in the current AI fearmongering:
1) People think they can predict the future
2) People think humans can't adapt
The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.
Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.
Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.
alecst
today at 1:50 PM
Humans ourselves are a technology. We have incredibly flexible brains and dexterous hands. Up to now, we could always do things that robots couldn't. That was where our job security came from.
But what happens when a robot can do anything a human can? When a cheap machine can do anything you can do but faster and better, what makes you different from a horse in the 1920s?
This is what the article misses and what people have trouble accepting. Yea, this is a technological revolution, but unlike the Industrial Revolution, you can't just upskill your way out of it.
sublinear
today at 1:57 PM
How many of these do we really need? Nothing is happening, and a lot of people are upset about it.
They wanted to make money, or at least be a part of history during a transformational era. No dice.
customguy
today at 2:28 PM
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I LOVE playing "product designer" with LLM. The thing I normally hate and never do, write and update "design docs" being my only lever is awesome. I do already hate how it seems to turn development into a much less social activity. It's great that we don't need other people and a lot of time for some things now, but it's also not.
But more importantly, because I also like solving problems and seeing people thrive, I can't overlook that it's all based on stuff taken without consent, how artists were made "obsolete" by what plasters me with slop every day (already, and we didn't even get started). And they're not even going "okay, now that we proved it can work with stolen stuff, let's do it proper". No, this is "the new world now", just keep pushing and squeezing and extract more "value". So wtf? Well, I like solving problems, I love games! One cool game is "catch the thief", another is "call out the sociopath". So let's?
But we can't, because we're not building this after deliberation and discussion, we're being herded into it and then make rationalizations for foregone conclusions made in our absence against our interests. Building systems nobody understands that keep making more systems nobody even tries to understand is not some hyper-efficient future, it's no future at all, and nobody with power (however wishy-washy that phrase is) wants to live under any of that, you can be assured.
So this all seems more like an airlock to me, an abattoir, not a spaceship that just happens to be kinda dirty and stinky because the focus is on so much grander things. How insincere and stupid so much of it is just can't be overlooked, and very much unlike other technological advancements where the results speak for themselves, where the results (or the improved process to get them), pull something, make it inevitably seep everywhere it is useful. There is so much pushing and hyping, and so precious little good stuff to make for the really bad stuff, all the slop that is produced and clogs up inter-human channels.
This is not even progress, this is just subversion, that's my thesis. It's deliberately driven for the easily predictable bad effects it will have.
mentalgear
today at 9:58 PM
[flagged]
anotha_one
today at 1:26 PM
[dead]
anotha_one
today at 1:31 PM
[dead]
vividfrier
today at 1:51 PM
[dead]
ahs7
today at 1:34 PM
[dead]
1982766
today at 1:37 PM
[dead]
asd18
today at 1:42 PM
People are flagging in real time. Maybe the grandfather would have thought you are cowards and frauds who abuse him to push a vibe coding company.
Krei-se
today at 6:39 PM
Aside the fact the author sells ai services, training, whatever i can not understand the view how knowledge workers will be replaced while every employee is now forced and expected to work 10-fold and hiring is halted because shortsighted deciders and ... money.
The effect on the market is pure GREED and wishful thinking as none of the people in charge of HR or decision making have any idea how this technology actually works.
Also - why is everyone comparing this to the industrial revolution? And not f.e. invention of vaccines. No it HAS to be the big big story or you cannot make money with it.
All while the actual results are well, great. Helpful, sure. But so are vaccines!
Don't buy into this bs, any service or course. d2l.ai is free and wont be stupidly useless next month like whatever hype we sell this week.
As the doom stories lose novelty now we get the feel good "my grandpa" stories.
jrochkind1
today at 5:56 PM
"what if what we loved about this job was never only the code?"
The phrasing is very LLM. Apparently what you loved about writing blog posts wasn't the writing either, since looks like you are having AI do it too!

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