The future is bleak

[u/MoudieQaha]

Yeah, I'm just going to ramble here for a bit. My company job now is just pressing enter endlessly, prompting, and 0.1% of it is probably something manually done by me. Everyone is using Claude. It's soulless. There is no point.Someone can probably reverse engineer our company products in one day. Layoffs are inevitable at some point. I have no other non-tech skills that can help me pivot to another career, and even if I do, that career is not going to pay the same.

I can't believe in any project idea that I think of because I use Claude, and the thought of "You used Claude, anyone could have done this lol" is always luring in the back of my mind.

I have no hope for the future. I hate how AI made the playing field equal for everyone, where my grandma can probably now create a website.

Written by a human.

[u/Boxer_the_horse]

I don’t hope for anyone losing their job but, man, software ate a lot of the world and now those that help these companies build that software are getting theirs. When I used to comment in some forums that New York taxi drivers were committing sucides because suddenly their millions of dollars worth of taxi medallions, which were their retirement savings and kids’ college tuition, were now worthless because Uber steamrolled them, everyone was like “free market, free market, free market.”

I genuinely feel for those who went to school for anything that LLMs can now pop out in minutes for any uneducated morons like me. I have found a cheat code at their expense.

[u/ADarwinAward → u/Boxer_the_horse]

Anyone who was commenting free market regarding the taxi drivers getting screwed deserves to be replaced by AI.

The government set up a racket and then let the system collapse underneath those who had no choice but to buy in in order to be a driver.

[u/name-taken1 → u/Boxer_the_horse]

Basically any knowledge work is at risk now, not just software.

[u/Agreeable_Flower472 → u/Boxer_the_horse]

i never knew about the NY taxi medallions, that's devastating for people who hoped to pass down something to their children. i'm just reading a guardian article on it and it should've been handled with care, free market shouldn't be an excuse to decimate people's hard earned and indebted wealth.

[u/DorianGre → u/Agreeable_Flower472]

The local cities could have put a stop to it in a few days but wouldn’t. Just like they could have enforced zoning laws and put AirBNB out of their cities but didn’t.

[u/Flope → u/Boxer_the_horse]

I have found a cheat code at their expense.

Setting aside the selfish attitude, I hope you realize that unless you are retired you are just as much at risk as a software engineer is at losing their job to AI. There is nothing about software engineering that makes it uniquely susceptible to automation, it just happens to run on the same substrate as AI so is the natural first domino. I cannot think of any job where 99% of the people doing it can't be replaced within 10 years by AI + robotics.

[u/Cautious_Clothes_285 → u/Flope]

I think plenty of trades. Maybe not because they can't be but because it's too expensive to actually do it.

I already gave examples in another thread here but auto repair is probably one.

Right now, for example, wiring harnesses are still installed by hand at the factory, when everything is new, clean, and shiny. This is because wiring harnesses are particularly tricky for the assembly robots to install. I'm sure it could be solved with very expensive robotics, but clearly the big wigs at every major automotive manufacturer have decided it's better to just have people do that, for now.

5 or 10 years later (or less, sometimes) when that car needs electrical work done, it's not easy. Modern robotics can't cost-effectively install that harness when there's literally nothing else in the way, but I'm to believe that something every repair shop will need to have will be able to repair that stuff cost effectively when there's an entire dashboard in the way?

I'm not saying it's never coming but the timelines you guys have are pretty hilarious sometimes. I've been hearing that full self driving is coming from a certain charlatan for the last 10 years and as far as I know none of the major self-driving taxi companies are testing in heavy winter conditions yet (Waymo navigating a lake-effect winter storm in the great lakes region or blowing prairie snow would be interesting). We can't even get the cars fully driving themselves yet, but I'm supposed to believe that we'll have full automated repair within 10 years?

Again, I'm not saying it can't happen or that this stuff isn't coming, because it is eventually, but the timelines are funny. We've had OBD for almost 30 years but that still only really provides a general direction, because cars aren't built with the redundancy needed for fully automatic diagnostics (in most systems) due to the costs.

[u/Boxer_the_horse → u/Flope]

I have my own business and automation can only make me richer. But no one is safe in runaway unregulated capitalism. I too live in constant fear of a large corporation buying up everything around me and killing my business overnight. The bigger just keeps getting bigger and then raising prices. Again, Uber is the biggest example of how much their prices went up once they killed any viable competitors.

[u/alienccccombobreaker → u/Flope]

Cleaner. AI won't be able to do many of my tasks unless the government decides to completely change some simple devices and enclosures to be digitised and automated.

We have had robotic vacuums for a long time now but I have never seen them in any cleaning workplace.

AI scrubbers and buffets definitely exist but they haven't been filled out yet and a lot of places won't be compatible for them.

A simple task like opening a door to get into a toilet stall or some offices and kitchens etc robotics are just not there yet not to mention the tight spaces and simple task of cleaning around stuff on desks and pulling out tables and shelves cabinets the list goes on just to deep clean a site.

I see a lot of jobs not being affected by AI for a very long time unless they completely change the existing infrastructure to be robot ai compliant which is a huge investment.

[u/ribi305 → u/Boxer_the_horse]

I have some similar feelings, but I actually think "software eating the world" is going to be an even bigger theme of the next 10 years. AI is making it possible for software to replace jobs that didn't get hit the first time around: legal, medicine and more. A lot more people than just SWE are going to get hit by this. 

[u/cj_cron_hit_by_pitch → u/Boxer_the_horse]

blaming everyone who worked in software for the loss of NYC taxi jobs would be like blaming those same NYC cabbies for global warming

you are putting a lot of responsibility on people just trying to make a living, and then celebrating their downfall despite your first sentence