> technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious
I already have friends experiencing technological unemployment. Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Several designers I know are changing careers. Not to mention, the voiceover artist profession will probably cease to exist besides this last batch of known voices. Writer, editor - these were dependable careers for friends, once. A friend travelled the world and did freelance copyediting for large clients.
People keep trying to tie these two things together, forgetting the fact that ZIRP also ended 3 years ago, and that combined with the end of the COVID-era employer credits are when the layoffs really began. I won't say LLMs are having no impact at all on employment, but not to the degree where the job pool has dried up. Companies were encouraged to over-hire for years, and now that the free money is gone, they're acting logically. I believe if ZIRP came back we'd see workforces expand again and AI would just be seen as another useful tool.
Yup, Claude Opus 4.5 + Claude Code feels like its teetering right on the edge of Jevon's Paradox. It can't work alone, and it needs human design and code review, if only to ensure it understands the problem and produces maintainable code. But it can build very credible drafts of entire features based on a couple of hours of planning, then I can spend a day reading closely and tweaking for quality. But the code? It's professional work, and I've worked with contractors who did a lot worse.
So right now? Opus 4.5 feels like an enormous productivity booster for existing developers (which may indirectly create unemployment or increase the demand for software enough to create jobs), but it can't work on large projects on an ongoing basis without a knowledgeable human. So it's more like a tractor than anything else: It might cause programmer unemployment, but eh, life happens.
But I can increasingly see that it would only take about one more breakthrough, and next gen AI models might make enormous categories of human intellectual labor about as obsolete as the buggy whip. If you could get a Stanford grad for a couple of dollars an hour, what would the humans actually do? (Manual labor will be replaced slower. Rod Brooks from the MIT AI Lab had a long article recently on state of robotics, and it sounds like they are still heavily handicapped by inadequate hardware: https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... )
Jevon's Paradox and comparative advantage won't protect you forever if you effectively create a "competitor species" with better price-performance across the board. That's what happened to the chimps and Homo neanderthalensis. And they didn't exactly see a lot of economic benefits from the rise of Homo sapiens, you know?
"Inadequate hardware" is a truly ridiculous myth. The universal robot problem was, and is, and always will be an AI problem.
Just take one long look at the kind of utter garbage human mind has to work with. It's a frame that, without a hideous amount of wetware doing data processing, can't even keep its own limbs tracked - because proprioreception is made of wet meat noise and integration error. Smartphones in 2010 shipped with better IMUs, and today's smartphones ship with better cameras.
Modern robot frames just have a different set of tradeoffs from the human body. They're well into "good enough" overall. But we are yet to make a general purpose AI that would be able to do "universal robot" things. We can't even do it in a sim with perfect sensors and actuators.
Read Brooks' argument in detail, if you haven't. He has spent decades getting robots to play nicely in human environments, and he gets invited to an enormous number of modern robotics demonstrations.
His hardware argument is primarily sensory. Specifically, current generation robots, no matter how clever they might be, have a physical sensorium that's incredibly impoverished, about on par with a human with severe frostbite. Even if you try to use humans as teleoperators, it's incredibly awkward and frustrating, and they have to massively over-rely on vision. And fine-detail manual dexterity is hopeless. When you can see someone teleoperate a robot and knit a patterned hat, or even detach two stuck Lego bricks, then robots will have the sensors needed for human-level dexterity.
I did read it, and I found it so lacking that it baffles me to see people actually believe it to be a well-crafted argument.
Again: we can't even make a universal robot work in a sim with perfect sensor streams! If the issue was "universal robots work fine in sims, suffer in real world", then his argument would have had a leg to stand on. As is? It's a "robot AI caught lacking" problem - and ignoring the elephant in the room in favor of nitpicking at hardware isn't doing anyone a favor.
It's not like we don't know how to make sensors. Wrist-mounted cameras cover a multitude of sins, if your AI knows how to leverage them - they give you a data stream about as rich as anything a human gets from the skin - and every single motor in a robot is a force feedback sensor, giving it a rudimentary sense of touch.
Nothing stops you from getting more of that with dedicated piezos, if you want better "touchy-feely" capabilities. But do you want to? We are nowhere near being limited by "robot skin isn't good enough". We are at "if we made a perfect replica of a human hand for a robot to work with, it wouldn't allow us to do anything we can't already do". The bottleneck lies elsewhere.
The refrigerator put paid to the shipping-ice-from-the-arctic-circle industry quickly as well. The main shock is for the people who write stuff we read, as they never expected to be in a profession that could be automated away. Lots and lots of stuff has been automated away, but we never heard their voices.
I think it's too early for AI to have impacted software work at a systemic level. There are various reasons the market is crap right now, like how you're (perhaps unknowingly) competing with cheap foreign labor in your own metro centers for tech work.
AI is just the other pincer that will finish the kill shot.
I already have friends experiencing technological unemployment. Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Several designers I know are changing careers. Not to mention, the voiceover artist profession will probably cease to exist besides this last batch of known voices. Writer, editor - these were dependable careers for friends, once. A friend travelled the world and did freelance copyediting for large clients.
ChatGPT was just released three years ago.