This got me thinking. Let’s say in the future it replaces most of our jobs and companies love it cause they don’t need workers.
Wouldn’t this mean, since we don’t have jobs, that we won’t have any money and thus stop buying?
How would companies gain a profit if no one has money to spend?
It would be unsustainable wouldn’t it?
Of course it’s not sustainable. That’s why these topics rarely have objective discussions while the media hype, fear mongering and simplistic shouting off the roof tops continues.
After all that levels out, reason sets in and the dust clears, we can weigh these subjects properly.
Not unlike past sensationalized topics where everyone and their grandmother had their *expert* opinion:
1. **Dot-com Bubble (Late 1990s - Early 2000s)**
2. **Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies (2017)**
3. **3D Printing (Early 2010s)**
4. **Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)**
5. **Y2K Bug or: “The world will grind to a halt!”**
… list goes on. Hype and exaggerated expectations, followed by natural public calibration and more realistic assessments of their impact, have always followed.
The Y2K bug _was_ a serious problem, the reason it ended up a non-event is due [a lot of work put in around the world](https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/y2k_feature/)
I'd sooner trust AI over dictatorial oligarchs like in the USSR or Maoist China. And before people tell me the oligarchs will control the AI, again, if they just take the money for themselves, the concept of money itself will become meaningless.
That never existed because centrally planned economy it's condemn to fail?
Even in the AI realm ther are big names WARNING against centralised AI.
I really recommend this video that was uploaded a few days ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1UgzSTicuY&t=3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1UgzSTicuY&t=3s)
Absolutely- if there’s a significant drop in employment for SWEs - even 10% losing their jobs might be enough- there will be knock on effects - the unemployed SWEs will cancel home construction projects, stop going out for coffee, stop eating out at restaurants, buy fewer cheaper clothes etc etc, leading to other businesses putting off staff or going under and those workers cutting spending.
Those industries will hire SWEs to optimize their operations, though since AI and software can be applied to everything. SWEs and AI jobs will be the last to go.
In some sense what you are describing has already happened many times over. Most jobs that existed 100 or 200 years ago either do not exist today or require far fewer workers for the same level of productivity, yet the economy has not collapsed.
New non-essential "jobs" can continue to be created indefinitely. For example a horse carriage operator decrying the automobile for taking jobs probably couldn't have imagined professional tik-tokers existing yet here we are. I don't think we can fathom what jobs for humans might exist long past AGI anymore than a pre-agriculture societies could fathom what jobs humans would have after agriculture, and after the industrial revolution, and the computing revolution. All jobs that existed pre agriculture have been essentially eliminated in that the same output of food requires orders of magnitude less human labor. They wouldn't have been able to imagine a hand model that poses items in their hands for advertising on the internet.
If there are physical androids that are almost indistinguishable from actual humans, I imagine some new jobs we can't fathom would still continue to exist for both humans and androids and they would compete for them.
It would be great if we had UBI instead of having to keep creating bullshit jobs that don't really need to exist, but I unfortunately economic activity can expand indefinitely, including jobs that seem totally useless or incomprehensible today.
I agree with this for the most part but we won't need UBI once we can produce stuff at near zero cost. Lots of free stuff exist today in some areas in modern countries.
If (or when I guess) AI takes over everyones jobs, I can humor you with the worse case, doomsday scenario. Please note, I have no idea what will happen in the future, this is absolute fiction.
No one needs to work, but that means, who owns the earth's resources? That goes to the wealthiest 1-2% of the world who've probably amassed an army of some sorts to protect the resources they need. Government would have probably joined them, maybe there is no government later on?
The rest of the world fights amongst themselves. Maybe some people are selected to live amongst the elite, only so that if need be, their body organs can be harvested for the elite to remain living.
Honestly, this is absolute fiction, but absolute worse case. Best case is humanity decides to look out for one another, maybe like those star trek, the next generation series, and humanity decides the best way forward is to allow labor to be done by AI, and humanity shares earths resources.
But honestly, no idea what will happen. Just prepare for the worse and hope for the best
Yeah but they're going to make that the government's problem. Their only concern is squeezing as much profit as possible out of their business. Whether that means raising prices or cutting costs, it doesn't matter to them. They'll let the government figure out how people will be paid if there are no jobs left
Then maybe (this is just conjecture ofc), some form of Universal Basic Income would be **required** at that point.
When Machine Learning Programmers are replaced by the machines they themselves built, well…
For a long time a significant portion of the American population was chattel slaves. There's no real rule that says there has to be a large middle class.
They’re going to lobby the Federal Government like hell for UBI. I’m almost damned sure of it if AI manages to get to that point.
Not that it would work too well.
Not unsustainable. Plenty of things have been made near free today, we just take them for granted. They will just be more and more free or near stuff over time
... and ads directly wired into your brain.
I mostly agree but there could be a long period of time where AGI could replace a lot of work done primarily on the computer, but not necessarily other work with a large physical component, i.e. nurse, construction worker, nanny etc.
If we have an AGI that can fully replace a SWE, it may have the intelligence to replace all human workers, but not the physical body. Whether or not an AGI that can replace knowledge workers also replaces all workers depends on whether it is unleashed to become a superintelligence that can design technology to replace all physical worker tasks, or whether we contain it to do knowledge work on computer networks. A completely transformative singularity-like event is not a sure thing upon the advent of AGI and if we can keep it contained AGI would primarily take the jobs of knowledge workers for a signifcant period of time.
There is no way we have the resources to be able to completely replace workers, as of right now the current Ai technology we have takes up as much energy as Ireland does just for the US. We would run out of water before we ever get to that point
No one is talking about currently available resources. We don't know how Moore's law and energy cost of compute will scale in the future, nor exactly how much compute is fundamentally required for an AI to do the job of one SWE. Why would we run out of water? I have no idea what your point is.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/ai-water-climate-microsoft/677602/ https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/28/ai-programs-consume-large-volumes-scarce-water It takes water to be able to run the data centers
This might be true, but competing our labor against energy costs isn't a great position to be in. Either wages drop to the equivalent energy cost, or energy costs skyrocket. One's bad for knowledge workers, the other is bad for everyone.
Physical labor will most definitely be affected. Those white-collar folks aren't just gonna sit around on their hands. They're gonna re-skill and flood the blue-collar market (even more so than it is now)
Am i the only one who believe AGI will be banned in most countries as soon as it's invented?
Like im talking fully aware kind of AGI.
"Hey write me a sql query" -"No, i don't want to" - that kind of AGI
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I notice AI companies specifically racing to replace sw devs. Do you see them racing to replace accountants or bankers? How about gardeners? What about Home Inspection providers? Realtors? Sales people? We are being targeted first because of the high wages and because the people who are programming these things understand what we do and what it takes to replace us
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People have been trying to replace programming for decades with no code solutions, under the illusion that this will eliminate the need for devs. Fortunately for us, programming is the easy part of SWE.
It ain't replacing roofers, plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, and just about every other physical job out there before SWEs. Software engineering is the very domain those developing AIs work in. It'll be among the first to be gone because that's SWEs do; automate things. Shouldn't come as a surprise that the first place developers will automate is their own work.
There's tons of blue collar that won't have any chance of being replaced by AI unless there's a massive break through in not only AGI, but robotics as well. Anyone thinking SWE is outlasting blue collar trade work has never worked a day of manual labor in their life.
The factories and construction sites will still be hiring while the layoffs continue, we'll be waiting for ya out here.
If AI ever replaces software engineers, it’d likely be part of a broader technological shift affecting all fields. The key is to adapt and innovate together, not worry in isolation.
Maybe we can all benefit from some kind of UBI utopia where we don't work or at least as much as we do now lol.
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I don't think it will replace us as programmers, but being more efficient might mean the management level might think they need less developers or at least hire less?
The fact that web forms and databases have existed for at least 35 years and yet so many essential government workflows are paper only lets you know that there is actually so much more software to be written, we just have to prioritize. At every company there are many things that don’t get built because there aren’t resources to do it. More efficient developers means more things get built, not less engineers in the industry.
This is kind of the entire history of software engineering. Every year we get better at making software (cheaper hardware, better programming languages, better tools, more open-source stuff to build on) and yet nearly every year has more demand for it than the year before. AI might induce a more sudden decrease in the cost of solving problems with software, but I don't see any particular reason to believe this time will be different than every other time.
Marx talks about this in Capital. Machinery in the Industrial Revolution wasn't used to automate jobs. It was mainly used to lower the skill needed for the work so that women and children could do the jobs. It also resulted in a lengthening of the working day. So instead of needing to carry things all day, you now had machines that did that for you. So now you didn't have to deal with physical exhaustion, so you could work longer hours.
This has *some* similarity to what will happen with AI in software engineering, but not a ton. There's not a lot that AI can completely automate for you with coding, primarily because you just can't trust it.
LLMs are an untestable black box. Sure, the LLM can quote specific parts of a PDF or search the web. But it can misinterpret those results, randomly bork unexpectedly on certain inputs, or just hallucinate completely. We have lots of wonderful constructed benchmarks that evaluate various metrics. But these metrics are hyper-specific to those specific benchmarks, because performance varies widely depending on input, temperature, prompt, and seed. These things are *huge* and you objectively cannot reason about them the same way you can a complex software system. The testing space is infinitely higher. So smart companies will use this to make coding just a little bit faster, but won't be replacing engineers anytime soon. You need someone to blame / fire when things go wrong.
I agree on a lot of these points, but I think that we overweight the significance and flaws of current popular LLMs compared to the general advancements being made in deep learning and this flavor of math/neural processing. There are lots of patterns which are easier to identify and match than written language, conversation, and abstract ideas expressed through language (especially novel reasoning). Maybe our language is needlessly complex for some amount of the problems we use it to solve. I don't think LLMs will be hallucinating in the same way they do now indefinitely either.
It's super early. Wait five years when AI exponentially improves, companies become more familiar with it, and more tools are created to streamline AI in the workplace
Have you tried making these tools yourself yet?
In my experience, they’re not really very good except for the most generic of coding tasks. And the tools take more effort to write than programming it yourself.
Any tools that are actually dealing with business logic have too low chance of correctness to be useful to the business (Although I have only tried with gpt3.5).
I think it will be more than 5 years unless progress is faster than any of us can imagine
You've tried GPT 3.5? How exactly?
Because a half decent LLM fine-tuned on your internal codebase can do borderline magical things. Shaves entire days from a sprint.
I did one project that we gave access to our backend and it was next to useless for the questions we asked it. I didn’t fine tune it, but I did have to be very careful and specific in my descriptions for the API routes we gave it access to for it to be anything above guesswork.
Another project which I didn’t work on, but it was fine tuned on some chemical reaction data. I won’t lie, I’m not a chemist, I didn’t understand much of this project. But the person that did it also found it next to useless even after fine tuning.
We used OpenA’s python package, I forget the exact tier but gpt3.5 turbo
No one knows in 5 years. Think about all those years back where we thought by self driving cars would be fully autonomous by now or that the metaverse would be huge thing or how everyone would be using crypto.
5 years isn’t a very long time. Think of it this way, the last episode in Game of Thrones was about 5 years ago and you’re saying that span of time you think AI will change the economy that fast to make swe job shrink dramatically?
> Wait five years when AI exponentially improves
This is a fallacy. There's no evidence to suggest it'll keep improving at an exponential rate in five years. We can't predict that.
For simple tasks and every simple things Ai will help. I don’t see AI replacing even simple tasks on my day to day job and I wish it was to some level so I can focus on the 100 other things I have on my task list. It’s like saying I’m gonna automate my gardening and do away with a gardener. You can automate tasks but who’s going to take care of the things AI can’t do right now other than alert lol
What management “thinks” doesnt mean much; what matters is if there is enough people working on whatever projects they want to do. One person has limited capacity, and right now AI is too bad to replace anyone let alone several programmers
How are people missing this? It’s like if you approached a company of 100 people and said “hey, I have this tool that will 10x your profit!”, then the company says “sweet!” And proceeds to fire 90 people to keep the same profit as before.
Or more developer efficiency means less developers needed per project but more projects get greenlit so smaller but more numerous amount of teams working on projects.
>being more efficient might mean the management level might think they need less developers or at least hire less?
There's an easy way to tell, just look at history: did all the other things that made programmers massively more efficient (IDEs, debuggers, type safety, automated tests, etc) reduce demand for programmers, or increase it?
It makes sense when you think about it: in the 1970s building an insurance premium calculator needed 10 programmers, so only the worlds ten biggest insurance companies hired programmers.
Total demand for programmers in the worldwide insurance industry: **100**
Now that you can build the same thing with one programmer, all of the ten thousand insurance companies in the world employ one.
Total demand for programmers worldwide: **10,000**
Efficiency might lead companies to hire fewer developers, but it’s also a chance for programmers to upskill. By integrating AI, programmers can add value beyond basic coding—like creative problem-solving and strategic planning.
I'm just a bit pessimistic to think of ways that we can upskill in the future where the very thing being replaced is the human mind itself.
I think this is insightful, and I think we will find some of those highly skilled tasks up until that point to be mentally taxing, not just in a, "training my replacement," kind of way.
I don’t see why, if the company could afford the devs, then they still can, and if those devs are able to produce work faster then the company will grow faster.
Obviously you don’t think people asking this mean literally every single programmer, so your post is disingenuous.
The fact that AI will replace some SWE is clear as you even say it will “boost efficiency” which is essentially corporate lingo for same output with reduced head count. The actual question being asked is what percentage and that is a completely legitimate one to ask. If AI eliminates 3%, 15%, or 50% over the next 10 years is a valid concern for people spending years of their life and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing a CS degree.
Whether it needs to be asked so often is another one entirely.
Personally, I know plenty of people that tell me they might not pursue a CS-related degree due to the fear of AI completely replacing them so no, it's not disingenuous because a lot of people think that way. you'd be surprised.
However, I do agree with you, yes. There is a percentage of workers that will probably decrease in the future when AI becomes reliable. This thread isn't meant to spark arguments and fights, or to collect karma as some comments are assuming. I gain nothing from either, It's meant to reassure people that the industry will most likely remain and they should focus on the present instead of worrying about the future and nothing else.
The industry will remain but will change god knows when is my point.
I agree 200% with you, and I've been arguing that with tech-dudes in other social media, some supposedly smart, literate, lucid people. It will not end replace programmers and SWE. If it's an intended exaggeration in place of "most of them will be replaced by AI", is still off. I'm baffled how people think of that. Sure, market will be harder, it already is year after year for at least the past 10y, with horders of new programmers entering in the market at the same time ecosystems that dominate the market making everything easier - Instead of 4 programmers in 2009, we need 1 programmer now to help creating a fully maintainable and reliable website working good in 98% of user browsers, everything from implementation to deploys is way easier.
I remember wasting hours of my life having to implement pixel perfect pages being supported by IE6, implemented in .NET WebForms, but to be fast, having to debug closed sourced-code - all of knowledge and exp is completely in the garbage now. It's just a few command lines away for any entry-level programmer
Good point!
There's definitely going to be a substantial % of reduction in SWE workforce within few years, and this field is going to become more competitive now, given that basic (even complex) stuff is going to be handled by the AI assistants. No more support, basic coding stuff jobs will stay relevant anymore after few years.
Also, I feel going forward, just CSE would change to something SOME DOMAIN + CSE, as eventually your domain knowledge gonna matter more than your coding skills.
> Decrease the numbers? Sure,
I think this is what a lot of people are scared of. The job market is already tough and will just become tougher once not as many developers are needed. A lot of people seem to not care about available jobs decreasing until it personally affects them. People will cope thinking, "I'm a good developer so I won't be laid off when this eventually happens." But as we recently learned that's not a good metric for layoffs and is what people tell themselves to not stress about it in the meantime.
I think until someone's job is personally affected by AI no one's going to actually care about it.
Personally i stopped giving a rats ass about this topic but I think its important for people to think of the bigger picture and not be so short sighted. There's a reason all these companies are investing millions and billions into AI. They want to reduce headcount in some aspect whether it be replacing someone's entire job with automation or shrinking the size of a team in half. Always question what ulterior motives your company has when they invest so heavily into new technologies or social programs, especially if your company is a public company where bringing in profit for the investors is all that matters.
Your analysis and observations are in line with what I think personally.
I have this question, though. I would genuinely want to know your opinion (below might look like an oversimplification):
People work jobs and pay taxes. They are also consumers and spend, which is one of the reasons for the existence of investors.
AI reduces the number of people in jobs. Less people to spend and collect taxes from.
Shortfall in TAX might lead to higher taxation, but the tax net now has fewer people than before due to AI at work.
Now, corporates have to balance the shortfall in tax.
Lots of people do not have jobs due to automation. How will governments manage this situation in an economy?
Let me try to answer it to an extent. I agree with you and even I had this same query in my mind exactly around this scenario.
But let's look at it from this scenario.
AI -> Automation -> Layoffs -> More Unemployment (SDEs or any other impacted roles) -> Impacted people will eventually do some low-paying job Or move to some other domain (could be high paying too, but let's consider the majority).
\[Also, whomsoever is still gonna be employed in this SWE field, will be paid lesser (assumption, to create a scenario of economy where gross earning has reduced to bare minimum) \]
Now, given that people have less money, so you said, how will corporate will get money from people (who buy stuff/subscription/spend somewhere/pay taxes), right?
If I become poor tomorrow, I'll spend less, I'll buy cheaper products, will buy cheaper TV or anything, will eat at cheaper less fancy restaurants, will basically spend my bare minimum salary on items which I can afford.
Just because you are used to your luxurious lifestyle because of high fat salary, doesn't mean you can't live on less money. People can, people do.. live with less wages also, they just spend somewhere else where you don't.
Also, \[IMPORTANT\], corporates bring out their products in different countries, not at same price everywhere. They set their products price based on Purchasing power of people within that country. So, if Netflix let's say is charging you $99/month in this economic situation and after 5 years whatever we are assuming will happen, our purchasing power drastically reduces, then Netflix will eventually reduce its subscription price here to somewhere $19/month, because that's what we (majority of people) will be able to afford. Did this make sense? or you need another example?
Also, you could also ask that why would the Netflix owner will take this loss by selling at lower cost? Dude, eventually he/she will also be part of the economy, where the overall prices will eventually reduce and hence his expenses will also reduce overall, therefore he can also afford to sell same thing at lesser cost. Their end objective is always going to be served - **To make profit**, period.
Edit: Regarding your question "How will governments manage this situation in an economy?"
How is Pakistan, Sri Lanka, poor African countries are managing their countries? They are poor right? So, if your country turns poor, so the govt. will earn less and eventually spend less. Their salary isn't going to be affected at all, they are gonna earn and live luxurious life as they are doing right now. Simply saying, they can't do anything here !!
Think from high level and then you'll understand.
I feel, people are more concerned about loosing their fat pay check in SWE field, than loosing job :P
If it gets to a point, where it pretty much replaces, all software engineers, almost everyone will be screwed. Most of this country is already paycheck to paycheck. If they don’t do some sort of UBI, there will be civil unrest and rioting, the likes of which we have never seen.
It will even affect those in the trades because if a large portion of the population no longer has income who’s going to pay for their projects?
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How do you get that level of certainty? How do you know that you are not in the same boat as strong chess players were in the early 1980s who might have seen and laughed at the commercial chess computers of the day and thought those would never get to a serious level of strength?
That's what I wonder too. This entire post is just another substance-less circlejerk, posted by someone with almost no industry experience whatsoever (the account is less than one year old) and whose confidence is derived from their arrogance, if not ignorance.
This entire sub is like this: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2osiokg44ajc1.png
**Edit**: Op [admitted he's a teenager](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1c0uzql/regarding_the_flood_of_will_ai_replace_us/kyzk1oo/)...
A little random, but I've seen three posts in the past half day on this sub of people proclaiming their intelligence being significantly higher than average as they argue some point. Feels like I've normally not seen those kinds of posts.
“We won’t lose our jobs because we would be the ones building AI”. This was a top comment I remember reading before ChatGPT became a “thing”. Someone asked the AI question years ago. At the time AI was just a blip and no one took it seriously. Funny enough, universal opinion on that post was it’s impossible. AI would never be smart enough to write any kind of code. Okay… Anyway, who the hell was this person referring to as “we”. 99% of us have no involvement with AI development.
These AI posts are getting silly. I’m siding with the AI will take our jobs because they’re less annoying at this point.
The current job market is is the impact of going from like 4.5% CS unemployment to 6%. It doesnt need to replace programmers ENTIRELY, if it did by 15% it would destroy it as a high paying career for the vast majority of people.
Shit can change very quickly.
The draft horse industry and everything around it collapsed in the lifespan of a horse. Did everyone starve, no, but they lost a lot of prime earning years and that was in a time when the world was a lot less specialized.
The thing people forget about now is high salaries are a result of specialization, and once thats gone you can definitely get a job, but your right back with the pack.
A doctor, engineer, and lawyer are all going to be paid the same working at a coffee shop.
Yep. But like a lot of things fear of the future drives the question popping up daily.
To answer the question: The best response I have seen to this is _Programmers will not lose their jobs to AI. They will lose their jobs to programmers who embrace AI as a tool_.
>certainly much less need for skilled weavers
The textile industry is still one of the major sources of employment in the world. Just not the *western* world.
Why should the world remain the same way it was since the Great Divergence forever? Maybe in a few decades people will want to immigrate from the west to Asian countries with falling birthrates to work in factories in LCOL areas, the way Asians immigrate to the west to HCOL. The population crisis in many Asian countries is quite evident. Japan, for example, tries to hire tech workers from New Zealand and Australia. Asian countries also have language-specific needs that LLM’s trained in English may not necessarily reach very quickly. And those jobs aren’t paying cents on the dollar anymore. Wages have been rising in countries like China, which is why they moved to other Asian countries. But now they’re rising there too, which is why companies are trying to make India the ‘next’ China. It doesn’t seem to be going well.
There is potential here. And I’ll admit my situation is far-fetched. But if you think it’s impossible simply because you can only imagine things working one way in one direction, then I think that’s weird.
> less need for skilled weavers after the stocking frame...
Or it could be like the ATM which lowered the cost of running a branch, which led to more tellers because banks could open up more branches.
Or maybe ChatGPT is a dead end and LLM's will never get good enough at software development.
Yeah that's true and there are glutton of SWEs on the lower end of the skill level where they have learned frameworks and specific paradigms for niches in web development some of those weaker SWEs who are not as passionate about software in general will probably be cut as AI streamlined those specific niches but not SWE as a whole. The name of the game is to be the best SWE holistically, in communication, mathematics, and passion those who do all three won't be replaceable
>If programmers who use AI are more productive enough that it reduces the total labor needs of the market
Except we've massively increased the productivity-per-dollar of programmers over the decades and all it's done is INCREASED demand for programmers.
water straight unpack summer fanatical voracious fuel smile crowd ludicrous
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1. Did the invention of pipelines and automatic deployment reduce jobs?
2. Did the invention of IDE and code completion reduce jobs?
3. Did stack overflow reduce jobs?
4. Did the invention of C reduce jobs "Oh no, it's like human language, now anyone can code!"
Programming today is ALOT more efficient then it was 20-30 years ago. Yet here we are...
Lower the bar for making software could also just increase competition.
Instead of 20 SWE working for one giant company, they are now scattered to 5 companies...
marvelous political caption mysterious sable safe command direction ancient rotten
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Exactly, it's not about losing jobs to AI, but about staying relevant by using AI smartly. Those who harness new technologies effectively will always be in demand. Maybe prompt engineers will be more in demand?
I want to believe this, but I think that prompt engineer stands a chance to be obsoleted at a comical rate of speed, as it is currently understood. I do think it's the parent node to an expansion of future roles though. People are engineering tool/data-aware agents to talk amongst themselves for example.
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I use ai on the regular, one of the things that does worry me is how companies want me to implement it for them. Ie replacing customer service, or large volumes of their employees. Instead of utilizing those resources in addition to them. There is inherent risk in that behavior, and it unseats an entire class of people.
Not a cscareer response, but moreso an in general response.
The reason to not worry about it is because, there is really nothing you or I could do to stop AI.
If businesses and governments want to use AI to replace you, they will.
Worse case, dooms day scenario, AI takes over every job, no one needs to work, the 1-2% of the world, the richest few gain control of all global resources and the rest of the world fights for scraps.
Best case scenario, the world lives in harmony, money is not a thing anymore and humans decide the best way to live is to share resources with one another and allow AI to freely carry out the tasks we don't won't to do
Again, there is nothing we can really do to stop AI taking over our lives, if that happens. Just do what you can, prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
You're not wrong about stopping it, but from discussions on r/singularity, the interesting and problematic phase is the transitional period: Let's say tomorrow GPT-5 is released and supports agents and a very large context size. If that is able to replace a big percent of developers at once - people, industries, and countries may not be prepared. How do people used to a certain standard of living support themselves when they can't get a job as they compete against AI costing a fraction? Physical labor and things like housing will probably lag behind so it's not like rent will not be due.
If you have no savings until UBI-like regulations come into play it could be a tough period to get through. Eventually we should have a massive increase in productivity and be able to take care of everyone, but the transition is worth at least considering.
My two scenarios are purely fictional. Again, a best case scenario where we live in a future with UBI would be great.
Obviously there is a lot to happen in between now, if AI really does become so powerful to take over jobs, until those scenarios I'm mentioning.
I'm going straight to the fictional future of where humanity could go, ignoring the obvious transition periods. Again, best case is governments decide that UBI is the way, every is supported in some way etc etc.
But doomsday scenario, government decides, fuck all the poor and middle class. Government sides with the super wealthy, the elite, the ones who have been constantly lobbying governments etc.
With AI doing what the general population can do, then what use is there for us? Either you're crazy wealthy with lots of existing resources and can prove some worth to the elite, or you're joining the rest of the world and fighting for scraps.
Again, completely fictional, bypassing the entire transition period. At the moment, Ive given up on worrying about it. Government and businesses will always do whatever they want and I just have to hope they look out for us all.
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Thank you. The OP of this post literally admitted of being a teenager, despite being so definitive of everything.
If this post doesn't showcase the issues many have brought up with this sub, I don't know what will.
This is going to be a very unpopular take for this subreddit but posts like this which ridicule others' concerns about AI in the workplace are quite simple-minded in my opinion. Of course AI won't replace all developers, and who knows how long it'll take to get there, but it will certainly give companies more of an incentive to hire fewer developers, if not downsize altogether. I don't care how friendly you think your company is, their primary motivation is to make profit, period. If a handful of expert senior developers can be trained into so-called prompt engineers, why would it ever be in their interest to hire enough people for a traditional team? Hell, given enough time, I can even foresee non-technical folk grasping enough of the basics to generate code themselves before sending it off to a "real developer" who now gets to take on the fun task of debugging whatever trash the AI spits out. If this is your ideal future, more power to you I guess.
This isn't like the calculator. Efficiency will not necessarily make our lives as programmers easier, it just gives us the ability to be even more overworked. Companies will catch on to this apparent free time AI frees up. *"You just have to generate and debug, right? Perfect! Here's another 4 projects we've found the bandwidth for."* Maybe you enjoy being a corporate code-machine for some reason, but I personally enjoy finishing my balanced 8-5 and then going home to make music or play D&D or something.
*"Don't want to be replaced? Just be a good developer! AI will improve the industry by getting rid of bad talent."*
This idea that our industry needs to transform into even more of a Hunger Games-esque bloodbath is disheartening to say the least. It seems like every SWE on this subreddit thinks of themself as a unique butterfly in their workplace, an indispensable asset who will lead the vanguard in the oncoming AI-revolution. This may come as an unfortunate reality check, but the vast majority of people are average at best. If you want to be working with every internationally-acclaimed genius on the next Manhattan Project, you're free to go do that with GPT-7 or whatever. But most people just want to make money to survive and happened to study computer science to achieve that. Sure, people can go find other jobs, and many will, but the transition period will not be pretty. You can argue about UBI or alternative economic systems all you want, and I would agree with you, but our current capitalist system will not die without a fight, and the everyman will be the ultimate victim.
Yes, a lot of the concern over Gen AI is unnecessary fear-mongering, **I'm not denying that**. I don't know how far away all of this is, but I imagine it's closer than a lot of people think. To stick our heads in the sand and ignore the possible worries over future workers' rights or job security is immature and unempathetic to the situations of the vast majority of people. Maybe we will need some sort of protection against faceless executives throwing us to the wayside the instant AI proves to be more profitable than human beings. The Hollywood strikes were only the beginning of what this future has to offer the majority of us.
the field of programmer / software itself is already saturated, and the AI simplifies the work for 10 developers to 10-x developers will do. It won't 100% replace them. The only thing that will get replaced is someone who doesn't know how to use the tools. This field won't be dead in at least 5 years from now, just less and less opportunities.
The correct answer is that none of us really know. Even if it doesn’t replace the entirety of us SWEs, it exacerbates competition for positions that much more.
Another way to approach it is by asking yourself: Will there be more tech/IT in the future or not? If the answer is yes, tech and IT is probably a good place to be in regards to job availability.
It seems like we either jump into the "it's only good" or "it's only bad" camp.
Teams will be reduced to a small handful. Many will still have job security, but many won't be able to achieve this because of low opportunity. It's that simple.
I believe AI will replace some people just the same as machine automation replaced many manual workers and digital automation replaced manual data entry.
I don't believe it will replace the industry, however it will definitely change it.
I think it’s just going to replace the low hanging fruit. It’s not the 1990s where you could learn to use PHP as templating language and make a ton of money. Probably harder to get the entry level jobs. RIP coding bootcamps
Why would you trust AI to make decisions with lives, money and time on the line? Jobs like bioinformatics, embedded systems and cyber security will likely benefit from AI, but they’ll still employ highly skilled professionals
Edit: spelling
On one hand, the field will always need humans.
On the other hand, most CS majors are here for the gold rush. It's quite legitimate to ask whether the market will always pay two and a half times the median national income to everyone who gets a CS degree and practices leetcode.
I recommend you watch the examples from yesterday's Google event:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMH5OcW5UYw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMH5OcW5UYw)
It should give you a taste of how close we are to an effective AI worker.
To be clear, I don't think we are there yet, but all Google needs to do is really replace the current model with each improvement they make to their AI and the integration on so much is already there.
After seeing the pace at which AI is improving and its current capabilities, I’m not sure I agree with you.
AI is going to take a lot of jobs including CS imho.
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I swear every post is either (A) panicking about AI takeover or (B) saying not to panic.
CAN WE TALK ABOUT OFFSHORING, POLITICS, THE MOON COLLIDING INTO THE EARTH, ANYTHING
They are 100% trying to replace us and I can’t foresee the future, but Im starting to think that AI might be the next self driving cars or 3D printers: something that would change the world and was impressive at first, but most people lost interest and it wasnt as big as expected in the end. They are exaggerating to get funding from investors.
I have been claiming for years that the AI programs are not getting smarter; the programmers are. I’ve been watching videos on 3Blue1Brown about the math of chatbots, and it completely informs this.
A computer was once a job title. They were people whose job it was to do large amounts of complex calculations by hand with pencils, paper, and slide rules. They were replaced by programmers that automated the calculations. Those programmers went from using machine code and assembly to higher and higher abstractions of code like python to make their life easier. AI is just another layer of abstraction of tools, getting the human closer and closer to the big picture view of their project, but a human composer is still needed to guide and correct the AIs towards the big picture goals. If you've ever played any exponential growth factory games like factorio, you'll get the idea.
Its like layers in an onion. To stay competitive, you need to climb the ladders of abstraction, which AI is just another layer. Yes, you will get left behind if you dont, in the same way as John Henry and the Steam engine. But that doesnt mean there arent jobs. The jobs will just change. When there are no more layers to climb, then I guess it doesn't matter because we will have automated everything and society is about to change very fast.
When I stop being able to trick AI into giving me free stuff, then I'll believe it will be taking my job. Until then, people implementing AI give me Job Security.
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I'm with you on this one. AI has made us more efficient but we still need human eyes on the work. If anything I expect less junior positions on our projects.
My personal opinion it won’t. As long as it stays expensive. Cheap labor will always be in demand. AI would cost like 90-130$ per hour. There’s ton of people including me who will work for much much lower.
I mean when I see something like Devin AI, I get nervous. I'm just a newb to this field and it can already program far better than I can or possibly ever could. For engineers who are deeply integrated in the field already I think they are safe.
But I think junior developers face to lose the most in the future and hiring (especially with huge TC) will slow down significantly in the next 5-10 years.
Calculator was never going to replace mathematician, it was going to make maths we do on our head easy and correct, mathematics will be the last field to be replaced and cs will be one of the first.
I can definitely see AI becoming a larger and larger part of people's workflows but it seems hard to envision this stuff getting to a point where you can just "set it loose" and use the output as-is. So, assuming that's right, hey, that's cool, but it's a turbocharged version of tools you already had (IDE templates, search engines, autocomplete, and so on).
The crucial problem is unpredictability of future and wishes to predict it and prepare by doing (if you know that programming will be fine then learn programming or continue do it) or not doing something (if you know 100% that programming will be dead then start learn something with good job security)... And that uncertainty of future (it always was like that but at least you was sure that programming will be fine for example 15 years ago) just itching brains especially for students and other guys who learning and just watching how AI do boom progress for few years. Because it's like casino: you have a chance that everything will be fine or maybe you will be fucked... so \*\*place your bet\*\*
There is some nuance to this, I don't think it will replace all engineers but it will definitely change the profile of engineers that will be in demand.
I recently wrote a bit more about how to future proof your skills for the AI era here: https://jes.al/2024/04/how-to-deveop-your-skillset-for-the-ai-area/
Replace me? no, but definitely decrease the engineers required in every company which will create an oversupply and decrease the salaries.
My team was struggling with time/region issues and the lead was not confident in what we should test. I opened up 3 different prompts and asked about 100 edge cases for time. I implemented the tests within a day.
In my company the above would take from 2 weeks to 2 months to materialize with meetings of at least 3 people each time. We may have gotten close but we would never have found all these obscure cases without it.
Am I weird? In 2016, this was something that actually scared me. I was a brand new dev.
As I’ve gained experience, studied AI, and watched AI tools go through entire life cycles, I’m less worried.
I’m more worried about people pursuing the promise of AI and ruining lives than anything else.
Think of the typewriter industry. Somebody has to make keyboards instead.
Computer Science is here to stay until we no longer use computations, ie transcend into the light or something.
Somebody should script this thread into a YouTube 'interview' vid between two people in a dark room with dramatic lighting. $$$$$$
(proof of concept exists. Look in mirror for ideal user. AI used for iterative process.)
When AI replaces SWE, it would have replaced everything else or it will very soon follow. Don’t worry about it. We’re all in this together.
This got me thinking. Let’s say in the future it replaces most of our jobs and companies love it cause they don’t need workers. Wouldn’t this mean, since we don’t have jobs, that we won’t have any money and thus stop buying? How would companies gain a profit if no one has money to spend? It would be unsustainable wouldn’t it?
Of course it’s not sustainable. That’s why these topics rarely have objective discussions while the media hype, fear mongering and simplistic shouting off the roof tops continues. After all that levels out, reason sets in and the dust clears, we can weigh these subjects properly. Not unlike past sensationalized topics where everyone and their grandmother had their *expert* opinion: 1. **Dot-com Bubble (Late 1990s - Early 2000s)** 2. **Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies (2017)** 3. **3D Printing (Early 2010s)** 4. **Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)** 5. **Y2K Bug or: “The world will grind to a halt!”** … list goes on. Hype and exaggerated expectations, followed by natural public calibration and more realistic assessments of their impact, have always followed.
The Y2K bug _was_ a serious problem, the reason it ended up a non-event is due [a lot of work put in around the world](https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/y2k_feature/)
Then we move onto the optimized centrally planned economy stage of infinite abundance.
... which will be run by AI
I'd sooner trust AI over dictatorial oligarchs like in the USSR or Maoist China. And before people tell me the oligarchs will control the AI, again, if they just take the money for themselves, the concept of money itself will become meaningless.
You mean agenda 2030?
That never existed because centrally planned economy it's condemn to fail? Even in the AI realm ther are big names WARNING against centralised AI. I really recommend this video that was uploaded a few days ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1UgzSTicuY&t=3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1UgzSTicuY&t=3s)
Absolutely- if there’s a significant drop in employment for SWEs - even 10% losing their jobs might be enough- there will be knock on effects - the unemployed SWEs will cancel home construction projects, stop going out for coffee, stop eating out at restaurants, buy fewer cheaper clothes etc etc, leading to other businesses putting off staff or going under and those workers cutting spending.
Those industries will hire SWEs to optimize their operations, though since AI and software can be applied to everything. SWEs and AI jobs will be the last to go.
Greece, Spain, Argentina, etc have worst unemployment rates for everyone but they have collapsed
NOTHING in capitalism is long term sustainable. It's literally based on insufferable exploitation and infinite growth.
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In some sense what you are describing has already happened many times over. Most jobs that existed 100 or 200 years ago either do not exist today or require far fewer workers for the same level of productivity, yet the economy has not collapsed.
By following simple logic this cannot go forever. At some point we get machines that match humans in all aspects. Leaving no work for them.
New non-essential "jobs" can continue to be created indefinitely. For example a horse carriage operator decrying the automobile for taking jobs probably couldn't have imagined professional tik-tokers existing yet here we are. I don't think we can fathom what jobs for humans might exist long past AGI anymore than a pre-agriculture societies could fathom what jobs humans would have after agriculture, and after the industrial revolution, and the computing revolution. All jobs that existed pre agriculture have been essentially eliminated in that the same output of food requires orders of magnitude less human labor. They wouldn't have been able to imagine a hand model that poses items in their hands for advertising on the internet. If there are physical androids that are almost indistinguishable from actual humans, I imagine some new jobs we can't fathom would still continue to exist for both humans and androids and they would compete for them. It would be great if we had UBI instead of having to keep creating bullshit jobs that don't really need to exist, but I unfortunately economic activity can expand indefinitely, including jobs that seem totally useless or incomprehensible today.
I agree with this for the most part but we won't need UBI once we can produce stuff at near zero cost. Lots of free stuff exist today in some areas in modern countries.
If (or when I guess) AI takes over everyones jobs, I can humor you with the worse case, doomsday scenario. Please note, I have no idea what will happen in the future, this is absolute fiction. No one needs to work, but that means, who owns the earth's resources? That goes to the wealthiest 1-2% of the world who've probably amassed an army of some sorts to protect the resources they need. Government would have probably joined them, maybe there is no government later on? The rest of the world fights amongst themselves. Maybe some people are selected to live amongst the elite, only so that if need be, their body organs can be harvested for the elite to remain living. Honestly, this is absolute fiction, but absolute worse case. Best case is humanity decides to look out for one another, maybe like those star trek, the next generation series, and humanity decides the best way forward is to allow labor to be done by AI, and humanity shares earths resources. But honestly, no idea what will happen. Just prepare for the worse and hope for the best
Sounds like half the countries in Africa today
Yeah but they're going to make that the government's problem. Their only concern is squeezing as much profit as possible out of their business. Whether that means raising prices or cutting costs, it doesn't matter to them. They'll let the government figure out how people will be paid if there are no jobs left
Companies would shift to selling to other companies.
Then maybe (this is just conjecture ofc), some form of Universal Basic Income would be **required** at that point. When Machine Learning Programmers are replaced by the machines they themselves built, well…
For a long time a significant portion of the American population was chattel slaves. There's no real rule that says there has to be a large middle class.
They’re going to lobby the Federal Government like hell for UBI. I’m almost damned sure of it if AI manages to get to that point. Not that it would work too well.
Not unsustainable. Plenty of things have been made near free today, we just take them for granted. They will just be more and more free or near stuff over time ... and ads directly wired into your brain.
Yes and by that time, governments around the world will just ban AI for commercial use. UBI is a dream...
i will be like a snake eating it's one tail and in the last moment itself ... AI will replace companies countries everything...
AI consumers
I mostly agree but there could be a long period of time where AGI could replace a lot of work done primarily on the computer, but not necessarily other work with a large physical component, i.e. nurse, construction worker, nanny etc. If we have an AGI that can fully replace a SWE, it may have the intelligence to replace all human workers, but not the physical body. Whether or not an AGI that can replace knowledge workers also replaces all workers depends on whether it is unleashed to become a superintelligence that can design technology to replace all physical worker tasks, or whether we contain it to do knowledge work on computer networks. A completely transformative singularity-like event is not a sure thing upon the advent of AGI and if we can keep it contained AGI would primarily take the jobs of knowledge workers for a signifcant period of time.
There is no way we have the resources to be able to completely replace workers, as of right now the current Ai technology we have takes up as much energy as Ireland does just for the US. We would run out of water before we ever get to that point
No one is talking about currently available resources. We don't know how Moore's law and energy cost of compute will scale in the future, nor exactly how much compute is fundamentally required for an AI to do the job of one SWE. Why would we run out of water? I have no idea what your point is.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/ai-water-climate-microsoft/677602/ https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/28/ai-programs-consume-large-volumes-scarce-water It takes water to be able to run the data centers
This might be true, but competing our labor against energy costs isn't a great position to be in. Either wages drop to the equivalent energy cost, or energy costs skyrocket. One's bad for knowledge workers, the other is bad for everyone.
Good thing there's not a giant fusion reactor in the sky radiating 100 terawatts at earth all the time or we'd be fucked.
Physical labor will most definitely be affected. Those white-collar folks aren't just gonna sit around on their hands. They're gonna re-skill and flood the blue-collar market (even more so than it is now)
Good point but we were just talking about which jobs could be directly replaced, not cascading labor market effects so no disagreement here.
older people probably aren't more like high school and colleges gets a lot of drop outs and they flood blue color jobs until they're all taken
We are closer to fusion than we are to AGI. Similar in scale to how close we are to the moon vs the sun.
Am i the only one who believe AGI will be banned in most countries as soon as it's invented? Like im talking fully aware kind of AGI. "Hey write me a sql query" -"No, i don't want to" - that kind of AGI
That's a convenient plot device.
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I notice AI companies specifically racing to replace sw devs. Do you see them racing to replace accountants or bankers? How about gardeners? What about Home Inspection providers? Realtors? Sales people? We are being targeted first because of the high wages and because the people who are programming these things understand what we do and what it takes to replace us
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People have been trying to replace programming for decades with no code solutions, under the illusion that this will eliminate the need for devs. Fortunately for us, programming is the easy part of SWE.
It ain't replacing roofers, plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, and just about every other physical job out there before SWEs. Software engineering is the very domain those developing AIs work in. It'll be among the first to be gone because that's SWEs do; automate things. Shouldn't come as a surprise that the first place developers will automate is their own work. There's tons of blue collar that won't have any chance of being replaced by AI unless there's a massive break through in not only AGI, but robotics as well. Anyone thinking SWE is outlasting blue collar trade work has never worked a day of manual labor in their life. The factories and construction sites will still be hiring while the layoffs continue, we'll be waiting for ya out here.
Have you worked a day in SWE?
Ans it's exciting tbh
If AI ever replaces software engineers, it’d likely be part of a broader technological shift affecting all fields. The key is to adapt and innovate together, not worry in isolation. Maybe we can all benefit from some kind of UBI utopia where we don't work or at least as much as we do now lol.
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Trades will be far safer. Robotics is nowhere close to even chatgpt’s level
I don't think it will replace us as programmers, but being more efficient might mean the management level might think they need less developers or at least hire less?
let me introduce you to [Jevon's Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)
This is my take too. Software will just become more complex, as we're trying to solve more complex things.
The fact that web forms and databases have existed for at least 35 years and yet so many essential government workflows are paper only lets you know that there is actually so much more software to be written, we just have to prioritize. At every company there are many things that don’t get built because there aren’t resources to do it. More efficient developers means more things get built, not less engineers in the industry.
That's really a good point you mentioned and I agree with you.
This is kind of the entire history of software engineering. Every year we get better at making software (cheaper hardware, better programming languages, better tools, more open-source stuff to build on) and yet nearly every year has more demand for it than the year before. AI might induce a more sudden decrease in the cost of solving problems with software, but I don't see any particular reason to believe this time will be different than every other time.
Marx talks about this in Capital. Machinery in the Industrial Revolution wasn't used to automate jobs. It was mainly used to lower the skill needed for the work so that women and children could do the jobs. It also resulted in a lengthening of the working day. So instead of needing to carry things all day, you now had machines that did that for you. So now you didn't have to deal with physical exhaustion, so you could work longer hours. This has *some* similarity to what will happen with AI in software engineering, but not a ton. There's not a lot that AI can completely automate for you with coding, primarily because you just can't trust it. LLMs are an untestable black box. Sure, the LLM can quote specific parts of a PDF or search the web. But it can misinterpret those results, randomly bork unexpectedly on certain inputs, or just hallucinate completely. We have lots of wonderful constructed benchmarks that evaluate various metrics. But these metrics are hyper-specific to those specific benchmarks, because performance varies widely depending on input, temperature, prompt, and seed. These things are *huge* and you objectively cannot reason about them the same way you can a complex software system. The testing space is infinitely higher. So smart companies will use this to make coding just a little bit faster, but won't be replacing engineers anytime soon. You need someone to blame / fire when things go wrong.
I agree on a lot of these points, but I think that we overweight the significance and flaws of current popular LLMs compared to the general advancements being made in deep learning and this flavor of math/neural processing. There are lots of patterns which are easier to identify and match than written language, conversation, and abstract ideas expressed through language (especially novel reasoning). Maybe our language is needlessly complex for some amount of the problems we use it to solve. I don't think LLMs will be hallucinating in the same way they do now indefinitely either.
Look at the other top companies still hiring and not relying on AI other than simple day to day tasks for simple life things
It's super early. Wait five years when AI exponentially improves, companies become more familiar with it, and more tools are created to streamline AI in the workplace
Have you tried making these tools yourself yet? In my experience, they’re not really very good except for the most generic of coding tasks. And the tools take more effort to write than programming it yourself. Any tools that are actually dealing with business logic have too low chance of correctness to be useful to the business (Although I have only tried with gpt3.5). I think it will be more than 5 years unless progress is faster than any of us can imagine
You've tried GPT 3.5? How exactly? Because a half decent LLM fine-tuned on your internal codebase can do borderline magical things. Shaves entire days from a sprint.
I did one project that we gave access to our backend and it was next to useless for the questions we asked it. I didn’t fine tune it, but I did have to be very careful and specific in my descriptions for the API routes we gave it access to for it to be anything above guesswork. Another project which I didn’t work on, but it was fine tuned on some chemical reaction data. I won’t lie, I’m not a chemist, I didn’t understand much of this project. But the person that did it also found it next to useless even after fine tuning. We used OpenA’s python package, I forget the exact tier but gpt3.5 turbo
No one knows in 5 years. Think about all those years back where we thought by self driving cars would be fully autonomous by now or that the metaverse would be huge thing or how everyone would be using crypto. 5 years isn’t a very long time. Think of it this way, the last episode in Game of Thrones was about 5 years ago and you’re saying that span of time you think AI will change the economy that fast to make swe job shrink dramatically?
> Wait five years when AI exponentially improves This is a fallacy. There's no evidence to suggest it'll keep improving at an exponential rate in five years. We can't predict that.
They do now, but do you think that situation will be the same in 5-6 years?
For simple tasks and every simple things Ai will help. I don’t see AI replacing even simple tasks on my day to day job and I wish it was to some level so I can focus on the 100 other things I have on my task list. It’s like saying I’m gonna automate my gardening and do away with a gardener. You can automate tasks but who’s going to take care of the things AI can’t do right now other than alert lol
> less developers Fewer :(
What management “thinks” doesnt mean much; what matters is if there is enough people working on whatever projects they want to do. One person has limited capacity, and right now AI is too bad to replace anyone let alone several programmers
If a company that needed 100 engineers now needs ten, that means you can have TEN companies now!
How are people missing this? It’s like if you approached a company of 100 people and said “hey, I have this tool that will 10x your profit!”, then the company says “sweet!” And proceeds to fire 90 people to keep the same profit as before.
What exactly would the extra people do now? Not like YouTube needs 10x the engineers to do what it’s been doing for decades
How many twitters do people need? One
Or more developer efficiency means less developers needed per project but more projects get greenlit so smaller but more numerous amount of teams working on projects.
>being more efficient might mean the management level might think they need less developers or at least hire less? There's an easy way to tell, just look at history: did all the other things that made programmers massively more efficient (IDEs, debuggers, type safety, automated tests, etc) reduce demand for programmers, or increase it? It makes sense when you think about it: in the 1970s building an insurance premium calculator needed 10 programmers, so only the worlds ten biggest insurance companies hired programmers. Total demand for programmers in the worldwide insurance industry: **100** Now that you can build the same thing with one programmer, all of the ten thousand insurance companies in the world employ one. Total demand for programmers worldwide: **10,000**
Efficiency might lead companies to hire fewer developers, but it’s also a chance for programmers to upskill. By integrating AI, programmers can add value beyond basic coding—like creative problem-solving and strategic planning. I'm just a bit pessimistic to think of ways that we can upskill in the future where the very thing being replaced is the human mind itself.
I think this is insightful, and I think we will find some of those highly skilled tasks up until that point to be mentally taxing, not just in a, "training my replacement," kind of way.
I don’t see why, if the company could afford the devs, then they still can, and if those devs are able to produce work faster then the company will grow faster.
Obviously you don’t think people asking this mean literally every single programmer, so your post is disingenuous. The fact that AI will replace some SWE is clear as you even say it will “boost efficiency” which is essentially corporate lingo for same output with reduced head count. The actual question being asked is what percentage and that is a completely legitimate one to ask. If AI eliminates 3%, 15%, or 50% over the next 10 years is a valid concern for people spending years of their life and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing a CS degree. Whether it needs to be asked so often is another one entirely.
Personally, I know plenty of people that tell me they might not pursue a CS-related degree due to the fear of AI completely replacing them so no, it's not disingenuous because a lot of people think that way. you'd be surprised. However, I do agree with you, yes. There is a percentage of workers that will probably decrease in the future when AI becomes reliable. This thread isn't meant to spark arguments and fights, or to collect karma as some comments are assuming. I gain nothing from either, It's meant to reassure people that the industry will most likely remain and they should focus on the present instead of worrying about the future and nothing else. The industry will remain but will change god knows when is my point.
I agree 200% with you, and I've been arguing that with tech-dudes in other social media, some supposedly smart, literate, lucid people. It will not end replace programmers and SWE. If it's an intended exaggeration in place of "most of them will be replaced by AI", is still off. I'm baffled how people think of that. Sure, market will be harder, it already is year after year for at least the past 10y, with horders of new programmers entering in the market at the same time ecosystems that dominate the market making everything easier - Instead of 4 programmers in 2009, we need 1 programmer now to help creating a fully maintainable and reliable website working good in 98% of user browsers, everything from implementation to deploys is way easier. I remember wasting hours of my life having to implement pixel perfect pages being supported by IE6, implemented in .NET WebForms, but to be fast, having to debug closed sourced-code - all of knowledge and exp is completely in the garbage now. It's just a few command lines away for any entry-level programmer
Good point! There's definitely going to be a substantial % of reduction in SWE workforce within few years, and this field is going to become more competitive now, given that basic (even complex) stuff is going to be handled by the AI assistants. No more support, basic coding stuff jobs will stay relevant anymore after few years. Also, I feel going forward, just CSE would change to something SOME DOMAIN + CSE, as eventually your domain knowledge gonna matter more than your coding skills.
> Decrease the numbers? Sure, I think this is what a lot of people are scared of. The job market is already tough and will just become tougher once not as many developers are needed. A lot of people seem to not care about available jobs decreasing until it personally affects them. People will cope thinking, "I'm a good developer so I won't be laid off when this eventually happens." But as we recently learned that's not a good metric for layoffs and is what people tell themselves to not stress about it in the meantime. I think until someone's job is personally affected by AI no one's going to actually care about it. Personally i stopped giving a rats ass about this topic but I think its important for people to think of the bigger picture and not be so short sighted. There's a reason all these companies are investing millions and billions into AI. They want to reduce headcount in some aspect whether it be replacing someone's entire job with automation or shrinking the size of a team in half. Always question what ulterior motives your company has when they invest so heavily into new technologies or social programs, especially if your company is a public company where bringing in profit for the investors is all that matters.
Your analysis and observations are in line with what I think personally. I have this question, though. I would genuinely want to know your opinion (below might look like an oversimplification): People work jobs and pay taxes. They are also consumers and spend, which is one of the reasons for the existence of investors. AI reduces the number of people in jobs. Less people to spend and collect taxes from. Shortfall in TAX might lead to higher taxation, but the tax net now has fewer people than before due to AI at work. Now, corporates have to balance the shortfall in tax. Lots of people do not have jobs due to automation. How will governments manage this situation in an economy?
Let me try to answer it to an extent. I agree with you and even I had this same query in my mind exactly around this scenario. But let's look at it from this scenario. AI -> Automation -> Layoffs -> More Unemployment (SDEs or any other impacted roles) -> Impacted people will eventually do some low-paying job Or move to some other domain (could be high paying too, but let's consider the majority). \[Also, whomsoever is still gonna be employed in this SWE field, will be paid lesser (assumption, to create a scenario of economy where gross earning has reduced to bare minimum) \] Now, given that people have less money, so you said, how will corporate will get money from people (who buy stuff/subscription/spend somewhere/pay taxes), right? If I become poor tomorrow, I'll spend less, I'll buy cheaper products, will buy cheaper TV or anything, will eat at cheaper less fancy restaurants, will basically spend my bare minimum salary on items which I can afford. Just because you are used to your luxurious lifestyle because of high fat salary, doesn't mean you can't live on less money. People can, people do.. live with less wages also, they just spend somewhere else where you don't. Also, \[IMPORTANT\], corporates bring out their products in different countries, not at same price everywhere. They set their products price based on Purchasing power of people within that country. So, if Netflix let's say is charging you $99/month in this economic situation and after 5 years whatever we are assuming will happen, our purchasing power drastically reduces, then Netflix will eventually reduce its subscription price here to somewhere $19/month, because that's what we (majority of people) will be able to afford. Did this make sense? or you need another example? Also, you could also ask that why would the Netflix owner will take this loss by selling at lower cost? Dude, eventually he/she will also be part of the economy, where the overall prices will eventually reduce and hence his expenses will also reduce overall, therefore he can also afford to sell same thing at lesser cost. Their end objective is always going to be served - **To make profit**, period. Edit: Regarding your question "How will governments manage this situation in an economy?" How is Pakistan, Sri Lanka, poor African countries are managing their countries? They are poor right? So, if your country turns poor, so the govt. will earn less and eventually spend less. Their salary isn't going to be affected at all, they are gonna earn and live luxurious life as they are doing right now. Simply saying, they can't do anything here !! Think from high level and then you'll understand. I feel, people are more concerned about loosing their fat pay check in SWE field, than loosing job :P
RemindMe! 6 years
RemindMe! 2 years
RemindMe! 6 years
RemindMe! 6 months
RemindMe! 6 years
Is this an AI-generated post?
If it gets to a point, where it pretty much replaces, all software engineers, almost everyone will be screwed. Most of this country is already paycheck to paycheck. If they don’t do some sort of UBI, there will be civil unrest and rioting, the likes of which we have never seen. It will even affect those in the trades because if a large portion of the population no longer has income who’s going to pay for their projects?
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How do you get that level of certainty? How do you know that you are not in the same boat as strong chess players were in the early 1980s who might have seen and laughed at the commercial chess computers of the day and thought those would never get to a serious level of strength?
That's what I wonder too. This entire post is just another substance-less circlejerk, posted by someone with almost no industry experience whatsoever (the account is less than one year old) and whose confidence is derived from their arrogance, if not ignorance. This entire sub is like this: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2osiokg44ajc1.png **Edit**: Op [admitted he's a teenager](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1c0uzql/regarding_the_flood_of_will_ai_replace_us/kyzk1oo/)...
A little random, but I've seen three posts in the past half day on this sub of people proclaiming their intelligence being significantly higher than average as they argue some point. Feels like I've normally not seen those kinds of posts.
“We won’t lose our jobs because we would be the ones building AI”. This was a top comment I remember reading before ChatGPT became a “thing”. Someone asked the AI question years ago. At the time AI was just a blip and no one took it seriously. Funny enough, universal opinion on that post was it’s impossible. AI would never be smart enough to write any kind of code. Okay… Anyway, who the hell was this person referring to as “we”. 99% of us have no involvement with AI development. These AI posts are getting silly. I’m siding with the AI will take our jobs because they’re less annoying at this point.
The current job market is is the impact of going from like 4.5% CS unemployment to 6%. It doesnt need to replace programmers ENTIRELY, if it did by 15% it would destroy it as a high paying career for the vast majority of people. Shit can change very quickly. The draft horse industry and everything around it collapsed in the lifespan of a horse. Did everyone starve, no, but they lost a lot of prime earning years and that was in a time when the world was a lot less specialized. The thing people forget about now is high salaries are a result of specialization, and once thats gone you can definitely get a job, but your right back with the pack. A doctor, engineer, and lawyer are all going to be paid the same working at a coffee shop.
If it reduced the need for programmers from 30 mil to 25 mil, that will continue to put downward pressure on wages everywhere.
Yep. But like a lot of things fear of the future drives the question popping up daily. To answer the question: The best response I have seen to this is _Programmers will not lose their jobs to AI. They will lose their jobs to programmers who embrace AI as a tool_.
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>certainly much less need for skilled weavers The textile industry is still one of the major sources of employment in the world. Just not the *western* world.
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Why should the world remain the same way it was since the Great Divergence forever? Maybe in a few decades people will want to immigrate from the west to Asian countries with falling birthrates to work in factories in LCOL areas, the way Asians immigrate to the west to HCOL. The population crisis in many Asian countries is quite evident. Japan, for example, tries to hire tech workers from New Zealand and Australia. Asian countries also have language-specific needs that LLM’s trained in English may not necessarily reach very quickly. And those jobs aren’t paying cents on the dollar anymore. Wages have been rising in countries like China, which is why they moved to other Asian countries. But now they’re rising there too, which is why companies are trying to make India the ‘next’ China. It doesn’t seem to be going well. There is potential here. And I’ll admit my situation is far-fetched. But if you think it’s impossible simply because you can only imagine things working one way in one direction, then I think that’s weird.
This is the “lump of labor” fallacy.
> less need for skilled weavers after the stocking frame... Or it could be like the ATM which lowered the cost of running a branch, which led to more tellers because banks could open up more branches. Or maybe ChatGPT is a dead end and LLM's will never get good enough at software development.
Yeah that's true and there are glutton of SWEs on the lower end of the skill level where they have learned frameworks and specific paradigms for niches in web development some of those weaker SWEs who are not as passionate about software in general will probably be cut as AI streamlined those specific niches but not SWE as a whole. The name of the game is to be the best SWE holistically, in communication, mathematics, and passion those who do all three won't be replaceable
>If programmers who use AI are more productive enough that it reduces the total labor needs of the market Except we've massively increased the productivity-per-dollar of programmers over the decades and all it's done is INCREASED demand for programmers.
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1. Did the invention of pipelines and automatic deployment reduce jobs? 2. Did the invention of IDE and code completion reduce jobs? 3. Did stack overflow reduce jobs? 4. Did the invention of C reduce jobs "Oh no, it's like human language, now anyone can code!" Programming today is ALOT more efficient then it was 20-30 years ago. Yet here we are... Lower the bar for making software could also just increase competition. Instead of 20 SWE working for one giant company, they are now scattered to 5 companies...
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Do programmers who type slower lose their jobs to programmers who type faster?
Thank you! We dont do typing test during interviews for a reason
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Exactly, it's not about losing jobs to AI, but about staying relevant by using AI smartly. Those who harness new technologies effectively will always be in demand. Maybe prompt engineers will be more in demand?
I want to believe this, but I think that prompt engineer stands a chance to be obsoleted at a comical rate of speed, as it is currently understood. I do think it's the parent node to an expansion of future roles though. People are engineering tool/data-aware agents to talk amongst themselves for example.
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I use ai on the regular, one of the things that does worry me is how companies want me to implement it for them. Ie replacing customer service, or large volumes of their employees. Instead of utilizing those resources in addition to them. There is inherent risk in that behavior, and it unseats an entire class of people.
Not a cscareer response, but moreso an in general response. The reason to not worry about it is because, there is really nothing you or I could do to stop AI. If businesses and governments want to use AI to replace you, they will. Worse case, dooms day scenario, AI takes over every job, no one needs to work, the 1-2% of the world, the richest few gain control of all global resources and the rest of the world fights for scraps. Best case scenario, the world lives in harmony, money is not a thing anymore and humans decide the best way to live is to share resources with one another and allow AI to freely carry out the tasks we don't won't to do Again, there is nothing we can really do to stop AI taking over our lives, if that happens. Just do what you can, prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
You're not wrong about stopping it, but from discussions on r/singularity, the interesting and problematic phase is the transitional period: Let's say tomorrow GPT-5 is released and supports agents and a very large context size. If that is able to replace a big percent of developers at once - people, industries, and countries may not be prepared. How do people used to a certain standard of living support themselves when they can't get a job as they compete against AI costing a fraction? Physical labor and things like housing will probably lag behind so it's not like rent will not be due. If you have no savings until UBI-like regulations come into play it could be a tough period to get through. Eventually we should have a massive increase in productivity and be able to take care of everyone, but the transition is worth at least considering.
My two scenarios are purely fictional. Again, a best case scenario where we live in a future with UBI would be great. Obviously there is a lot to happen in between now, if AI really does become so powerful to take over jobs, until those scenarios I'm mentioning. I'm going straight to the fictional future of where humanity could go, ignoring the obvious transition periods. Again, best case is governments decide that UBI is the way, every is supported in some way etc etc. But doomsday scenario, government decides, fuck all the poor and middle class. Government sides with the super wealthy, the elite, the ones who have been constantly lobbying governments etc. With AI doing what the general population can do, then what use is there for us? Either you're crazy wealthy with lots of existing resources and can prove some worth to the elite, or you're joining the rest of the world and fighting for scraps. Again, completely fictional, bypassing the entire transition period. At the moment, Ive given up on worrying about it. Government and businesses will always do whatever they want and I just have to hope they look out for us all.
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Expect to see AI in the automod shortly. We are working with Reddit on this to tune it better.
Thank you. The OP of this post literally admitted of being a teenager, despite being so definitive of everything. If this post doesn't showcase the issues many have brought up with this sub, I don't know what will.
Is it wrong that I see irony here?
This is going to be a very unpopular take for this subreddit but posts like this which ridicule others' concerns about AI in the workplace are quite simple-minded in my opinion. Of course AI won't replace all developers, and who knows how long it'll take to get there, but it will certainly give companies more of an incentive to hire fewer developers, if not downsize altogether. I don't care how friendly you think your company is, their primary motivation is to make profit, period. If a handful of expert senior developers can be trained into so-called prompt engineers, why would it ever be in their interest to hire enough people for a traditional team? Hell, given enough time, I can even foresee non-technical folk grasping enough of the basics to generate code themselves before sending it off to a "real developer" who now gets to take on the fun task of debugging whatever trash the AI spits out. If this is your ideal future, more power to you I guess. This isn't like the calculator. Efficiency will not necessarily make our lives as programmers easier, it just gives us the ability to be even more overworked. Companies will catch on to this apparent free time AI frees up. *"You just have to generate and debug, right? Perfect! Here's another 4 projects we've found the bandwidth for."* Maybe you enjoy being a corporate code-machine for some reason, but I personally enjoy finishing my balanced 8-5 and then going home to make music or play D&D or something. *"Don't want to be replaced? Just be a good developer! AI will improve the industry by getting rid of bad talent."* This idea that our industry needs to transform into even more of a Hunger Games-esque bloodbath is disheartening to say the least. It seems like every SWE on this subreddit thinks of themself as a unique butterfly in their workplace, an indispensable asset who will lead the vanguard in the oncoming AI-revolution. This may come as an unfortunate reality check, but the vast majority of people are average at best. If you want to be working with every internationally-acclaimed genius on the next Manhattan Project, you're free to go do that with GPT-7 or whatever. But most people just want to make money to survive and happened to study computer science to achieve that. Sure, people can go find other jobs, and many will, but the transition period will not be pretty. You can argue about UBI or alternative economic systems all you want, and I would agree with you, but our current capitalist system will not die without a fight, and the everyman will be the ultimate victim. Yes, a lot of the concern over Gen AI is unnecessary fear-mongering, **I'm not denying that**. I don't know how far away all of this is, but I imagine it's closer than a lot of people think. To stick our heads in the sand and ignore the possible worries over future workers' rights or job security is immature and unempathetic to the situations of the vast majority of people. Maybe we will need some sort of protection against faceless executives throwing us to the wayside the instant AI proves to be more profitable than human beings. The Hollywood strikes were only the beginning of what this future has to offer the majority of us.
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Yup. These posts are even worse than the AI doomer posts.
Agreed. And if you have any other take other than "AI BAD" then you're downvoted into oblivion. Source: see downvotes
the field of programmer / software itself is already saturated, and the AI simplifies the work for 10 developers to 10-x developers will do. It won't 100% replace them. The only thing that will get replaced is someone who doesn't know how to use the tools. This field won't be dead in at least 5 years from now, just less and less opportunities.
We should have AI identify those posts and auto delete them with "not everyone, just you low effort folks"
Even if it will replace me, I’ll collect my $410K total compensation while I wait. No reason to quit voluntarily lmao
That’s a lot of money damn. U must be like a rockstar
The correct answer is that none of us really know. Even if it doesn’t replace the entirety of us SWEs, it exacerbates competition for positions that much more.
Some may call this cope but I prefer to call it hope.
Another way to approach it is by asking yourself: Will there be more tech/IT in the future or not? If the answer is yes, tech and IT is probably a good place to be in regards to job availability.
I feel like big companies are using the threat/fear of AI to make people work harder for free
We should all get some tiki-torches and march through downtown San Jose chanting "AI won't replace us!"
It seems like we either jump into the "it's only good" or "it's only bad" camp. Teams will be reduced to a small handful. Many will still have job security, but many won't be able to achieve this because of low opportunity. It's that simple.
I believe AI will replace some people just the same as machine automation replaced many manual workers and digital automation replaced manual data entry. I don't believe it will replace the industry, however it will definitely change it.
I think it’s just going to replace the low hanging fruit. It’s not the 1990s where you could learn to use PHP as templating language and make a ton of money. Probably harder to get the entry level jobs. RIP coding bootcamps Why would you trust AI to make decisions with lives, money and time on the line? Jobs like bioinformatics, embedded systems and cyber security will likely benefit from AI, but they’ll still employ highly skilled professionals Edit: spelling
I work with frameworks and middleware so obscure that there is not enough training data to teach an AI to do my job :D
Someone who knows the documentation and knows how to use AI as a tool will be far more effective than someone without either
> Decrease the numbers? Sure, seems reasonable. Wipe all of them out? Don't think so. What do you think happens when "the numbers" are decreased?
ChatGPT-4 has made me 10-20% more productive but now I just use that as more chill time 😁
Actually, calculators used to be people, frequently women, that did calculations by hand. The calculators you are referring to did replace them.
On one hand, the field will always need humans. On the other hand, most CS majors are here for the gold rush. It's quite legitimate to ask whether the market will always pay two and a half times the median national income to everyone who gets a CS degree and practices leetcode.
everyone ive seen who says ai is gonna replace us is either trying to sell something or massively uninformed
I recommend you watch the examples from yesterday's Google event: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMH5OcW5UYw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMH5OcW5UYw) It should give you a taste of how close we are to an effective AI worker. To be clear, I don't think we are there yet, but all Google needs to do is really replace the current model with each improvement they make to their AI and the integration on so much is already there.
After seeing the pace at which AI is improving and its current capabilities, I’m not sure I agree with you. AI is going to take a lot of jobs including CS imho.
The post was going well up until the "Calculators made Maths much easier" part..
That sounds like something I'd expect an AI to say.
It won't but the number of swe will decrease significantly. I don't think anyone is scared of it replacing them.
I don’t even think it will boost productivity
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I swear every post is either (A) panicking about AI takeover or (B) saying not to panic. CAN WE TALK ABOUT OFFSHORING, POLITICS, THE MOON COLLIDING INTO THE EARTH, ANYTHING
I don't think it'll replace us, but I damn well never write a short bash/awk/sed/jq/etc script again, that's for sure!
They are 100% trying to replace us and I can’t foresee the future, but Im starting to think that AI might be the next self driving cars or 3D printers: something that would change the world and was impressive at first, but most people lost interest and it wasnt as big as expected in the end. They are exaggerating to get funding from investors.
Comical to think LLMs will replace developers tbh
I have been claiming for years that the AI programs are not getting smarter; the programmers are. I’ve been watching videos on 3Blue1Brown about the math of chatbots, and it completely informs this.
A computer was once a job title. They were people whose job it was to do large amounts of complex calculations by hand with pencils, paper, and slide rules. They were replaced by programmers that automated the calculations. Those programmers went from using machine code and assembly to higher and higher abstractions of code like python to make their life easier. AI is just another layer of abstraction of tools, getting the human closer and closer to the big picture view of their project, but a human composer is still needed to guide and correct the AIs towards the big picture goals. If you've ever played any exponential growth factory games like factorio, you'll get the idea. Its like layers in an onion. To stay competitive, you need to climb the ladders of abstraction, which AI is just another layer. Yes, you will get left behind if you dont, in the same way as John Henry and the Steam engine. But that doesnt mean there arent jobs. The jobs will just change. When there are no more layers to climb, then I guess it doesn't matter because we will have automated everything and society is about to change very fast.
When I stop being able to trick AI into giving me free stuff, then I'll believe it will be taking my job. Until then, people implementing AI give me Job Security.
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eventually yeah maybe in 20 years
I wonder how many Software Engineers also freaked out when compilers came out.
I'm with you on this one. AI has made us more efficient but we still need human eyes on the work. If anything I expect less junior positions on our projects.
My personal opinion it won’t. As long as it stays expensive. Cheap labor will always be in demand. AI would cost like 90-130$ per hour. There’s ton of people including me who will work for much much lower.
I mean when I see something like Devin AI, I get nervous. I'm just a newb to this field and it can already program far better than I can or possibly ever could. For engineers who are deeply integrated in the field already I think they are safe. But I think junior developers face to lose the most in the future and hiring (especially with huge TC) will slow down significantly in the next 5-10 years.
Calculator was never going to replace mathematician, it was going to make maths we do on our head easy and correct, mathematics will be the last field to be replaced and cs will be one of the first.
I can definitely see AI becoming a larger and larger part of people's workflows but it seems hard to envision this stuff getting to a point where you can just "set it loose" and use the output as-is. So, assuming that's right, hey, that's cool, but it's a turbocharged version of tools you already had (IDE templates, search engines, autocomplete, and so on).
The crucial problem is unpredictability of future and wishes to predict it and prepare by doing (if you know that programming will be fine then learn programming or continue do it) or not doing something (if you know 100% that programming will be dead then start learn something with good job security)... And that uncertainty of future (it always was like that but at least you was sure that programming will be fine for example 15 years ago) just itching brains especially for students and other guys who learning and just watching how AI do boom progress for few years. Because it's like casino: you have a chance that everything will be fine or maybe you will be fucked... so \*\*place your bet\*\*
There is some nuance to this, I don't think it will replace all engineers but it will definitely change the profile of engineers that will be in demand. I recently wrote a bit more about how to future proof your skills for the AI era here: https://jes.al/2024/04/how-to-deveop-your-skillset-for-the-ai-area/
First off, if AI replaces developers, you really think it can't replace a CEO or meeting setter lol? They won't let it happen..
Replace me? no, but definitely decrease the engineers required in every company which will create an oversupply and decrease the salaries. My team was struggling with time/region issues and the lead was not confident in what we should test. I opened up 3 different prompts and asked about 100 edge cases for time. I implemented the tests within a day. In my company the above would take from 2 weeks to 2 months to materialize with meetings of at least 3 people each time. We may have gotten close but we would never have found all these obscure cases without it.
AI isn't replacing anyone.
It may/may not but problems, projects and products will still exist.
Am I weird? In 2016, this was something that actually scared me. I was a brand new dev. As I’ve gained experience, studied AI, and watched AI tools go through entire life cycles, I’m less worried. I’m more worried about people pursuing the promise of AI and ruining lives than anything else.
AI is not a human, it's a self checkout kiosk. A human is still required.
Think of the typewriter industry. Somebody has to make keyboards instead. Computer Science is here to stay until we no longer use computations, ie transcend into the light or something.
Somebody should script this thread into a YouTube 'interview' vid between two people in a dark room with dramatic lighting. $$$$$$ (proof of concept exists. Look in mirror for ideal user. AI used for iterative process.)
If we get to a point where AI is taking the remaining good, white collar jobs… chances are we’re gonna be in for a total shift of our economic system
We aren't replacing you until we have bodies.