The combination of these two things could lead to a situation where there is a massive, startup-dominated market for engineers who can take projects from 0.5 to 1, as well as for consulting companies or services that help founders to do the same.
Another pair of hopes is that a) the LLM systems plateau at a level where any use on complex or important projects requires expert knowledge and prompting, and b) that because of this, the hype of using them to replace engineers dies down. This would hopefully lead to a situation where they are treated like any other tool in our toolbox. Then, just like no one forces me to use emacs or vim (despite the fact that they unambiguously help me to be at least 2x more productive), no one will force me to use LLMs just for the sake of it.
It doesn’t even have to be people with no idea what they’re doing. If you lay off enough smart people from big tech companies, those people might put together small companies that directly compete with larger ones at a fraction of the cost.
These small companies will only be able to sell through basically scam marketing.
I doubt that
Focusing on option 2 and software development, teams and companies will only downsize if the demand for software doesn’t increase. Make the same amount of stuff you do now but with less people.
What I think will happen is that enough companies will choose to do things that they couldn’t afford or weren’t possible without AI (and new companies will be created to do the same) to offset the ones that choose to cut costs and actually increase the amount of people making software.
I am pretty sure these are well known economic ideas but I don’t know the specific terminology for it.
We are already hitting the limits of demand in many areas of life. The fundamental currency that is not growing is human attention.
Sure, now you can be a musician and use AI to help you make an album in a weekend. Great. So can a million other people. Who's going to listen to them? Everyone is already inundated with more music than they could ever listen to in a lifetime.
Now someone who's never written a line of code can vibe code an app and upload it to an app store. Great. So can a million other people. Who's going to install those apps? When was the last time you found yourself thinking, "I wish I had more unmaintained apps on my phone!"?
Now someone who aspires to be a "writer" but lacks the willpower to craft sentences can throw a couple of bullet points at an AI and get a thousand word article out. Great, so can a million other people. Who wants to read more AI slop text on the web? There are already a million self-published authors whose books never get read. That's not going to get better when there are a billion of them.
All of us, every single one of us, is already drowning in information overload and is stressed out because of it. The last thing any of us want is more stuff to pay attention to. All of this AI generated stuff will just be thrown into the void and ignored by most.
You don't need to create the next Facebook, Shopify, X etc.... Because it already exists and controls the market.
Mass unemployment, consolidation of all AI-related benefits in the hands of a few, an increase in demand that doesn't outpaced the loss of employment, increase in capabilities (not AGI) that mean a few chosen people can do most things without hiring other people, etc.
I know it is the classic sci-fi dystopia where somehow despite endless advances in tech and automation, the masses can't figure out how to make it work for themselves and end up living in shanty towns on top of each other waiting for gifts from the elite, or scraping in dirt outside the cities, but come on... I just don't see that as being credible.
I read this take a lot but I don't buy it. This isn't guaranteed by any means. And even if it does happen, isn't it just as likely that AI is deployed into those companies too and they don't actually result in any job growth?
In the old days change was slow enough that few people got displaced from jobs requiring any substantial skill (although there was local devastation: for example, court reporters.)
Now, however, we are seeing change happening faster than people's careers. You can not realistically retrain into another high skill job--you're going to be the last to be hired. (There's a good reason Social Security Disability has cutoffs a 50 and 60 for how much change can be required!) And, likewise, someone who has worked a desk for decades is not going to be hired for a physical job. (Assuming they even can do it. I can't think of any physical job that wouldn't have me in a lot of pain in weeks at the most.)
More armies of one. That single team of five now becomes 30 teams of one or two each.
Which largely how automation resulted in more jobs - the cost decrease induced demand. Think about how cheap cameras, laptops & internet up-ended traditional media. We went from 3-4 channels on TV in the 60s, to 3-400 channels on cable by the 90s, to 115 million channels on YouTube right now. Because anyone with a basic phone can record and edit content, which used to require millions of dollars in equipment and took years to learn to do. And people are happy to do so for a fraction of the revenue a TV station would require.
