I'm not even a programmer (by profession, though hobby) and I must say I find the gleefulness in the article off-putting.
That said I do think it is useful from a societal perspective that programmers are both doing this and getting hit. I'm not going to celebrate someone's job being threatened but in this particular case I think that symmetry is a major societal win for surfacing the question as to how are we collectively as humanity going to figure this whole AI situation out.
See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had. It did wiped out a bunch of people's lives and did NOTHING to trigger discussions around what are we going to do here.
Twitter connected programmers feeling the heat with a large audience may prove better to spark discussion
> See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had.
Whenever someone writes something like this "nobody talks about it, nobody cared" I always think that just tells you more about the media sources and community of the author (you) than anything else.
Of course people talked about it. They are still talking about it. Of course they cared. They still care. Don't be ridiculous. Go talk to some human translators in real life.
"Nobody is talking about AI". Sounds even more ridiculous when written like that.
I think translators will predict what will happen with developers.
So far, what I see:
I have a few friends making a proper living translating AAA games from when I worked in the area. So far there's been a lot of talking but AI hasn't been able to replace them. Whether it's "yet" or not, I won't speculate.
I also know a few people doing freelance translation online, mainly through marketplaces. Those were mainly done in bulk, for websites/apps they never heard about, probably the websites/apps I worked for.
The second group is getting very very few jobs after AI.
Nah. OP's real point is that people didn't talk about translators _enough_. Of course people in the circle are devastated and are screaming at the top of their lungs right now, but at a societal level no one cared enough to for example seriously consider policy changes (like UBI for example).
In that context, a couple of programmers yelling about this on HN also isn't enough. If the group was big enough, we'd hear more talks from policy makers about it. But it's not.
Clearly the tech industry isn't big enough (nor at least, in enough lockstep enough) to push back against this either. So we're still the same as the translators.
Policy makers are very well aware of AI and its societal implications. But they also are aware that without the AI investments we’d be in a recession. Their horizons don’t span more than a couple years, what will happen to society in 15 years is none of their concern really.
On one hand, you are right about AI keeping the US from being in an official recession. On the other hand, I'm not sure how much longer they can gaslight their constituents into saying "the job market is great, unemployment is low" before that's starts becoming their problem.
Their only benefit here is that their most active voter base is also the least participating in the job market. But it seems like the current working class are starting to wake up.
Translator jobs aren't really getting wiped out according to the stats (in the US). Growth is still projected at 2% in the next 10 years.
They also have this to say about AI:
>Computer tools, including artificial intelligence (AI), are making the work of translators and localization specialists more efficient. However, many of these jobs cannot be entirely automated because computers cannot yet produce work comparable to what human translators do in most cases.
That said I do think it is useful from a societal perspective that programmers are both doing this and getting hit. I'm not going to celebrate someone's job being threatened but in this particular case I think that symmetry is a major societal win for surfacing the question as to how are we collectively as humanity going to figure this whole AI situation out.
See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had. It did wiped out a bunch of people's lives and did NOTHING to trigger discussions around what are we going to do here.
Twitter connected programmers feeling the heat with a large audience may prove better to spark discussion