People in the textile industry were well paid and given a place to live at one point in history. Then the auto loom showed up and they were kicked to the street to starve. I wouldn't want to try to live in any major US city on a blue collar salary.
Maybe one day AI will allow completely unskilled laypeople, ignorant of software, to build and deploy software end to end with no involvement from any software engineers, testers, SREs, anything. That would be the power loom of our time - the power loom allowed unskilled workers to completely replace skilled hand loom weavers with no drop in quality of output.
When that's possible, the world will be very different. Right at this moment, AI is still useless for unskilled workers trying to write software, it's just a productivity multiplier for skilled engineers.
This isn't an all-or-none scenario. It's not like all textile factories got auto-looms and the labor market collapsed overnight. Tools will improve, productivity will improve, and the demand for software development as a specialty will wane dramatically. Making simple tools using prompts will no longer require knowledge of data structures and algorithms, efficiency, networking, or anything else we get paid to know, and over time will shift to something white collar workers put on their resume next to MS Office. A tiny handful of specialist engineers will control development, and software creation as a commodity will essentially be automated. We will feel the impact of these changes LONG before that process is complete.
> When that's possible, the world will be very different. Right at this moment, AI is still useless for unskilled workers trying to write software, it's just a productivity multiplier for skilled engineers.
Depends on the software, and how much mediocrity the end user is willing to put up with.
A trivial prompt can spit out a web page with functioning JavaScript for a mediocre-but-playable version of Pong.
This may not be of interest to us, but our standards are not necessarily shared by normal people: in the wild, I've seen websites where the thumbnails were all loaded as full-sized images and merely displayed smaller, bottles on supermarket shelves whose labels had easily visible pixelation and JPEG artefacts.
Infamously, there's a lot of stuff done in Excel that really shouldn't be. Some genes had to be renamed because scientists kept using Excel, and Excel kept interpreting the gene's names as dates.
I get SMSes whose sender ID has obviously involved someone somewhere trying to record phone numbers as floats.
Even in places with high standards, the UI of the Calculator app on iOS still gets confused if I tap buttons too fast (before animations finish playing?).
Do you want to listen to a 10 brand new songs by 10 brand new artists using generative AI, or do you want to listen to 10 brand new Taylor Swift songs (that were created with the help of generative AI)?
While some people will be able to leverage this to good effect, I fear the established have much more to gain in this new world…
This, and also every textile worker didn't have an auto loom in their pockets, or a lawyer, or an accountant, or a copywriter....I mean who will be left besides leadership teams??
It’s funny you’re using “blue collar” to mean low skilled probably things like retail cashiers, but folks in trades actually make very livable wages in the US.
