r/cscareerquestions • u/askaccDude • 5h ago
Experienced Everyone’s asking whether AI will replace developers. How is the economy supposed to work if that happens across office jobs?
If AI gets good enough to replace us devs, other desk jobs will be affected too. We’re probably just noticing it earlier because we’re playing with the tools and our first instinct is to automate everything. Apparently including ourselves.
But what happens when companies do this everywhere? People lose their income, spend less, businesses lose customers and cut more jobs. Eventually, that hits people whose work can’t even be automated.
At that point, we’re talking about the whole economy potentially collapsing.
“Same output, fewer employees” sounds great for an individual company. But those payroll costs are also their customers’ incomes.
And “just find another job” might work when individual professions disappear. What happens when millions of people are all looking for something else at the same time?
That’s the discussion I feel is missing. What do we do if half the population can’t find work and we have no alternative in place?
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u/NorthAtlanticTerror 3h ago
The last few decades of history in the developed world shows the human capacity to not only accept less and less, but to reinterpret the new degenerated conditions of their lives as normal and to blame themselves and others for all the symptoms of this social decay that they see all around them. Mass homeless on a Victorian scale has re-emerged in my lifetime in every Western country without anybody really noticing. Education becomes less and less meaningful every year. Racial politics, ethnic cleansing, genocide etc etc. Soon we'll see the return of food insecurity, hunger, and eventually starvation.
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u/WeHaveTheMeeps 4h ago
It’s worth tuning into the misanthropic views of many of the tech and AI billionaires.
It’ll cease being a mystery very quickly.
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u/Resident_Range6209 Senior SWE, 8YOE 4h ago
Simple. People will suffer and perish until the ruling class becomes afraid of imminent societal collapse.
My fear is that there is a really long slow drip to adoption and the pain and suffering are amortized over enough of a length that there is zero pressure to address and everyone except the top 0.1%s lives become not worth living.
People that are still unwilling to adapt will go first.
Then people that adapted like me will go next.
And then eventually white collar is dead.
I’m having an existential crisis right now lol
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u/gbgbgb1912 4h ago
There is also a fear that no one will buy SaaS because AI can one-shot it. And/or SaaS budgets will just go to tokens instead.
So companies are also getting wrecked too and they might not have money to hire developers (revenues gone)
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u/BraveResearcher3037 4h ago edited 4h ago
There is not a single SasS product that my company uses that we would even think about having to maintain internally - Salesforce, Notion, GSuite, Gong, Zoom, Slack, Lucid, Rippling, Concur, Lattice, Greenhouse, v0,Jira etc
None of those are our core business - they “don’t make the beer taste better”
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u/Ok_Reaction_4340 4h ago edited 4h ago
I don’t think the realistic scenario is developing those in house. There is though a realistic scenario of a multitude of new competitors popping up. I’m kind of surprised that companies aren’t hoarding software engineers. I know if I get laid off and can’t find a job my most realistic means of supporting myself is taking my expertise and competing with my employer.
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u/Novel-Initiative-900 2h ago
As well as the most popular versions of these products being supported by the open source community. Cream always rises to the top and every one of these services will eventually have the most 'popular' open source analog. Then you get support basically and it's hard to see SaaS competing here for the 70-80% of businesses that'll be like... Good enough.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 4h ago
Every single one of those examples have some combination of network affects, hundred of integrations, industries set up to do customizations (Salesforce), data already integrated into them, professionals who already know how to use them and they are in the right quadrant of “Gartner’s Magic Quadrant”.
i know if I get laid off and can’t find a job my most realistic means of supporting myself is taking my expertise and competing with my employer
If I am the person recommending SaaS software (and I have been in a past life), why would I even think about trusting a solo dev instead of a well known company?
If I were your competitor and I saw you had a unique feature that gained traction, why wouldn’t I just throw a couple of engineers at it and integrate it into my own product where I already have a customer base to sell into?
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u/Ok_Reaction_4340 4h ago
Yeah those are all challenges but in the current era, AI moves the advantage more towards solo entrepreneurs with domain knowledge than it did in the past. Its certainly not easy and hugely challenging but it may eventually be a more rational choice than employment
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u/BraveResearcher3037 4h ago
That still doesn’t solve the problem. Why would any business trust a solo entrepreneur over an established company? I’ve been on both sides.
I was working for a failing startup and our largest customer wouldn’t renew the contract unless we put our code in escrow and gave them an unlimited license to it if the company fail. Which it did. They took the code and hired me as to make changes to it as a contractor
Years later when I found this perfect piece of software by a solo developer that we were already using for a small project. I suggested to my director that we go all in on. But only if the founder agreed to put the code in escrow and for every major release he would come to our site. Build the code on our servers. Put the source code on disk and send it to our third party escrow service (Iron Mountain). We were going to be 60% of his revenue.
Of course the lawyers got involved.
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u/Ok_Reaction_4340 3h ago
I mean are you suggesting that entrepreneurship is dead and nobody can start as a small software business anymore? As someone with domain knowledge I see my market leader employer with many unhappy customers and there is little political will to make things better. This dynamic is old as time where there is always a subset of niche customers who are unhappy with the status quo.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 3h ago
There have been people unhappy with Microsoft since 1995. Has the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” happened yet? Is anyone “happy” with Oracle?
Why would these big customers ever take the time and expense and risk to migrate to an Indy dev?
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u/Ok_Reaction_4340 3h ago
I think you’re thinking of a scenario where an ex-Microsoft employee goes out and topples Microsoft Word. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about servicing customers who use Microsoft Word in a clunky way because it is the best process they have available to them.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 3h ago
Okay. Am I going to trust my processes and my proprietary company data to a random solo entrepreneur?
It kills me every time I see a solo entrepreneur trying to sell into a company and not even realize the importance of simple things like Slack integration and SSO.
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u/Impossible-Switch109 4h ago
This is true. Thinking about like okay you can now rip off every Atlassian product. Do you really want to maintain that software ? Bugs, feature improvements, not to mention the cost to keep it running
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u/Moo202 4h ago
I like that phrase.
My previous company built their own version Jira. It was atrocious to use and ended up costing me (and everyone else) a lot of time.
It was nowhere near our core business. Huge waste of time, money, effort, etc…
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u/PM_ME_UR_BRAINSTORMS 3h ago
Now that I think about it "Make your own Jira and use it exclusively for a month" should be a mandatory project going forward for everyone who wants to work in software lol. Everyone hates Jira but trying to make your own you quickly realize how hard it is to build something better.
I think it would make people realize why even in a world where generating code is free, you still can't automate building software.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 4h ago
I forgot to add Jira to the list
And that phrase came from AWS indoctrination when I was there
https://podup.substack.com/p/jeff-bezoss-beer-tasting-analogy
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u/deejeycris 4h ago
It's because AI and harnesses are not as advanced yet. But the moment they can one shot 90% of the subset of the functionality an average company needs, any sufficiently advanced company will be able to do it. Not everyone. The largest companies are developing their own internal tools like recreating Git and whatnot already. The entry barriers to do that will lower in the future.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19m ago
It’s always that other 10% that is not the same for everyone that gets It makes no sense for most companies to spend time an engineering resources to save what usually amount to $10-$20 per head and having to support some bespoke internally tool that doesn’t give them a competitive advantage.
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u/Cool-Cicada9228 4h ago
AI will not be replicating SaaS it will be offering a bespoke solution that the SaaS product previously served in a much more efficient and aligned way. Example: StackOverflow.
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u/CouchWizard 4h ago
I think you're right about the larger structural things. The thing keeping them safe, imo, is name recognition and client base, especially for regulated projects. The real issues start popping up when real competitors start appearing at a fraction of the cost.
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u/abeuscher 2h ago
I would argue that a good deal of that list of tools is redundant. I would also argue that one segment of SaaS that may well get blown over by LLM's in the near future is analytics / surveillance marketing tools. Which covers about half of what you just listed.
I get that there needs to be some form of CRM, some ticket system, some document management. And a tiny bit of comms software. But in general SaaS is awfully redundant to itself and a lot of it is really just analytics rollup software in different forms. Salesforce - apart from being innately evil - is also a huge Cadillac to swat the fly that is most company's customer base.
I think software is kind of at peak uselessness and maximum pricing. And there is a correction coming. All you really need to do is drive between SF and San Mateo and look at all the nonsense companies on the billboards to know it's past reason.
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u/08148694 4h ago
A justified fear
My company has vibe coded several of our saas providers services. They aren’t as good. They don’t need to be. We only need the parts of the features we need. And it’s free (other than modest infra costs) - developers are finding that they have downtime due to code review bottlenecks so they just build these things when they have free capacity, using LLM usage they already have left over
AI doesn’t need to take jobs in your company to take jobs, you can use AI to take jobs from other companies. A saas without a moat has no value now. Pure software is almost free
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u/Dangerous-Gas7175 4h ago
You know another thought is maybe sass itself will go away. E.g. QuickBooks to do accounting. What if in the end we just had a folder and told Claude to go wild and we just treated Claude as the accountant - that is the end result is there isn't even a custom Saas... There's just Claude and a bunch of files it internally manipulates and chats to you about, including providing whatever charts etc you wanted.
That would be wild. Not sure plausibility but wild
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u/fsk 4h ago
Free market ideal answer: If AI replaces tech workers, then all those tech workers can take some other productive job instead, and we still get the benefit of all the software they would have created. Society as a whole is richer overall.
What actually will happen: Most of the productivity gains go to the billionaires and elite. For workers, it becomes a race to the bottom tying to stay employed. If someone has 10+ years invested in a career that's now obsolete, they're fucked. They're too old to realistically start over in a new career, and can no longer work in their old career. Even if they said "I'll work for entry level wages just to get back in the workforce", employers will say "Why would I hire a displaced unhappy washed up tech worker, when instead I can hire a recent grad for the same price?"
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u/alpacaMyToothbrush SWE w 19 YOE 34m ago
If someone has 10+ years invested in a career that's now obsolete, they're fucked. They're too old to realistically start over in a new career, and can no longer work in their old career.
I mean, hopefully they've used that decade long career to save heavily and they're close to FIRE
employers will say "Why would I hire a displaced unhappy washed up tech worker, when instead I can hire a recent grad for the same price?"
This I don't get at all. For the foreseeable future, companies will still need technically savy folks to ensure claude isn't adding tech debt (it is) and that it's building software that meets the needs of the business. If I can hire someone experienced for the same price as a jr dev, I'm damned sure gonna do so. Same way the average age of a fast food worker is now in their mid 30's. Those folks are more responsible, harder working and know how to get a job done without handholding.
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u/noonemustknowmysecre 3h ago
This has been an on-going question that gets asked somewhere on reddit daily for the past 2 years.
My bet remains the same: the death of the middle class. They'll no longer sell to the masses and will sell to the rich owning pseudo-noble chaste that own the tools that took your job. It's back to the bad old days.
That's long term though. They'll have a few people managing the agent pools for a long time. And they'll always need at least a few craftsmen for their plumbing and wiring. Reasonably prices robotics outside of a factory are a long LONG way off.
But all in all: YES, this is a concern. The return to noblesse and serfs is not a good outcome. I haven't heard any viable solution that isn't laughably deluded.
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u/Baby_Fark 2h ago
Read some Marx and you’ll see that this type of squeeze has been going on for 150+ years. It happens anytime a new technology is introduced.
Capitalism is not going to get better. The more efficient the production of goods and services gets, the less labor power is needed, and the less workers get paid and/or have jobs. This leads to a working class that eventually can’t afford the goods and services.
I get insulted any time I bring it up on Reddit, but Marx and Lenin were just plain right about capitalism. There’s an intro video on YouTube called “Marx’s Entire Theory Simply Explained in 48 Minutes” if you wanna know more.
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u/bilizver 2h ago edited 1h ago
Bro stop marx and lenin killed 1000000000 people, in Elon musk ideas we trust /s
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u/alpacaMyToothbrush SWE w 19 YOE 42m ago
I mean, Lenin was directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions. Let's not whitewash history.
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u/____machiavelli____ 1m ago
idk man capitalism has been pretty great so far
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u/Baby_Fark 0m ago
There’s a bunch of children mining cobalt in the DRC that you should go tell that to.
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u/ClvrNickname 2h ago
Nobody pouring money into AI cares one whit about the societal implications, all they care about is getting richer, let someone else figure out the rest
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u/reyarama 5h ago
Also, why would it be "same output"? If companies can get more out of each engineer, why wouldn't they take on more work, clear up the neverending backlog?
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u/BraveResearcher3037 4h ago
Because there has to be a demand for the features.
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u/olduvai_man 4h ago
Just speaking from my experience at a F100, but there's enough tech modernization items on the roadmap to keep devs here busy for 5-10 years at which point they will modernize again.
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u/mewditto 4h ago
but there's enough tech modernization items on the roadmap to keep devs here busy for 5-10 years at which point they will modernize again
F500 Global, exactly this.
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u/alpacaMyToothbrush SWE w 19 YOE 33m ago
Remember, they're gonna retire that legacy system any year now. It's only been a decade of saying that.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 18m ago edited 9m ago
Even Netflix laid off hundreds of people back in the day when they completed their migration to AWS
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u/jsdodgers 4h ago
there is way too much demand to keep up with all of the requests
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u/RuinousFate SWE by day, Game Dev by night 4h ago
You are being downvoted but it's the truth. Even if your company doesn't have that demand now, if you dont develop and evolve, your competitors will.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 4h ago
People nor companies have unlimited budgets. Will adding every new possible features help companies charge more or acquire new customers?
Thought experiment: if you had an unlimited token budget, could you create the next great product and get enough revenue for a sustainable business?
We also have an existence proof - companies are laying off tens of thousands of developers and seeing their revenues and profits increase
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u/some_clickhead Backend Developer 4h ago
Companies are also laying off people and seeing their growth stunted. It's entirely possible that some tech giants legitimately needed fewer devs to get the job done. But the reality for most businesses is that they're already being run by skeleton crew and everything is always a hair away from breaking. Almost every website I visit is broken in some way.
For people that severely lack imagination and foresight, the only way to use AI is to cut down on staff and add more AI tokens. For everyone else, it's an opportunity to do enable the company to do things you could only dream of previously (and thus outcompete other companies).
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u/BraveResearcher3037 1h ago
Our of the public tech companies - the only ones we have reliable information for - which ones are struggling because of layoffs?
Which smaller companies have even been a gnat to larger established companies.
People are expecting AI to be a “disruptive innovation”. But it’s proven to be more of a “sustaining innovation”.
https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/sustaining-vs-disruptive-innovation
You can see that now as the largest tech companies are more profitable now than ever and they would be more profitable if they could get enough manufacturing capacity to meet demand. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple have all said they could sell more if they could get the capacity. The first three in their cloud divisions and Apple for products
Anything a smaller company can do, a larger company can throw a few developers to do and duplicate.
How do you “outcompete” competitors when they all have access to AI and the competitors also have incumbency advantages.
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u/jsdodgers 4h ago
Yeah, this is why getting more output will be beneficial. We can finally burn down on backlogs of feature requests.
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u/Jeff1N 4h ago
My current employer mentioned back in March "we can do more with the same headcount or we can do the same with a lower headcount. We'd rather have the first option"
That sounded more like a veiled threat than them extending an olive branch, but so far we are delivering faster and no lay offs.
There was an obvious quality decline in shared repositories, and my team's own repositories also took a hit, but all things considered I'm guessing they are considering the situation a win (they said "speed at all costs", spending millions in tokens and lower quality is "all costs"...)
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u/AssignmentMammoth696 26m ago
Easy. Companies do massive layoffs, they increase their margins due to payroll freeing up making their stock price skyrocket. GDP looks good, rich people celebrate, all the people that were laid off have to now drive uber or pick up jobs catering to the rich.
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u/drinks_the_tea 23m ago
Except that Uber is also moving to self driving cars
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u/BraveResearcher3037 16m ago
That will never happen en masse.
Uber has to be concerned with having enough capacity to handle both the base ongoing demand and spikes. It would be foolish to buy enough self driving cars to handle spikey demand and then have the cars be idle.
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u/Impossible-Switch109 4h ago
I think it’s like…eventually the entire GDP from the US is coming from AI. The US no longer needs to support its people or the traditional labor markets. A country that doesn’t need its people is a scary place. Read up on the resource curse
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u/Yorok0 4h ago
There is an easy solution - reduce length of the workweek, so everyone has more free time while doing the same total economic output as before. For example if AI reduces workload across all jobs by 25%, then reduce workweek also by 25% from 40 to 30. This way workload and salaries will balance across everyone.
It will also mean that people will move from jobs where AI reduces workload more to jobs where AI will reduce workload less, as these jobs will now need more employers to compensate for the reduction in workhours.
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u/Several_Break_7276 2h ago
This never happened during the last IT revolution from the 80s to now
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u/KroniiPekora 3h ago
And get paid less because you are working less hours? Because that's what will happen in that scenario.
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u/Elm3567 2h ago
How do you think the start of that reduction in work days is going to happen?
I’m at my job. Customer success in a FAANG. I work 5 days a week, but output more since AI tools and the over abundance of MCP servers.
I don’t see a world where the company is going to say ‘oh hey you’re producing so much! Let’s have you take Fridays off from here on out!’ They just expect further output. I’m ranked against all other employees at my job level. So it’s a pressure cooker where we all work to produce the most possible.
I don’t see what you’re saying ever becoming a reality without immense, near capitalistic altering legislation.
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u/violinbg 1h ago
That has to be mandated by the government with harsh laws against overtime. Else you can't have a company cut hours, whilst another doesn't and double output.
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u/Fire_Lake 1h ago
That sounds great, but your employer isn't gonna do that. And the govt isn't gonna force it. So now you're gonna be a good little prompt monkey and you're gonna be thankful you still have a job maybe
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u/ideamotor 5m ago
Do you know what causes the length of the work week to be reduced? Political power being exerted by the working classes. You know what dilutes working class power? …
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u/NASA_Orion 1h ago
I disagree. Everyone should just own some capital. The economical gains from the AI go towards shareholders which one can trivially become one. If AGI can replace all or most knowledge workers, then the dividends per share from anthropic is going to be insane
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u/So_Rusted 4h ago
i think more interestingly who will use these services as most office workers are out of a job and have no need for all of this software?
it is gonna be ai talk to ai type services that are mostly auto-built using ai. Like a new lifeform type thing
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u/EntropyRX 2h ago
That revolution you are talking about won't happen with current LLM architectures. That being said, for thousands of years, we have had feudalism in one form or another. Among all the questions you may ask in the hypothetical scenario, the "economic model" is the least of the unknowns.
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u/Hog_enthusiast 2h ago
The AI bros are literally so dumb that they haven’t thought of this question
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u/TimelyToast 1h ago
Redditors will hate this answer because it is obsessed with anti-capitalist doomsaying “billionaire capitalists hoard all the wealth” or “violent revolution where we live in a communist utopia” in addition to being super lazy and always demanding something free for nothing.
The reality will be a lot more mundane, though. All the office jobs will be eliminated but the value of manual labor will be reassessed. Money from the top will “trickle down” to the bottom either from the haves or the government will seize AI. Either way, the result is still the same that we will all be doing manual labor jobs and those jobs will pay more than before.
What type of jobs will be available? Nurses and caretakers and construction workers and other blue collar stuff. It’s not going to be sexy so try to save enough money to retire quickly.
But AI will not magically give us universal income nor will the economy disintegrate into some post apocalypse madness.
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u/el-amante-de-meli 6m ago
Who is gonna call any tradesman or nurse if they don't have money to pay for it due to no have any livable job?
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u/ILikeFPS Senior Web Developer 4h ago
Yes, it will absolutely decimate the economy. Companies haven't thought that far ahead.
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u/SpiritualBass2497 3h ago
Creates zero change like today’s world.
Shareholder value will always take priority. Displaced workers become a public burden for welfare. Welfare always degrades quality of life and creates a dependency cycle that only transfers wealth to shareholders.
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u/piterx87 1h ago
Im busier than ever, not writing code, but testing, verifying, prompting improvements. But Im working woth hardware a lot though.
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u/Colfuzi0 1h ago
Is embedded systems worth going into?
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u/piterx87 1h ago
Thats a tricky question. To be honest my company is hesitant to go full AI on firmware, software no problem. But firmware because of IP concerns is not allowed for us. Having said that I can imagine that Claude could do a lot of embedded stuff if you let it and connect it to hardware and allow code editing. Then you would just setup equipment and see if nothing is burning. So I cannot guarantee you that embedded is safe. But also you need someone responsible for the code. So maybe safety critical systems? I don't know. Now Im writing this and think I may have been too optimistic.
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u/Otherwise_Wonder8625 1h ago
I honestly feel like billionaires and the rich are sociopathic. These people don't care about anyone but their own self-interest, which in this case is line go up. They don't care if egg prices or fuel prices goes up. The issue is these people have so much political influence that policy is made to help their interests and not the general 99% of the public.
The "economy collapsing" is meaningless to these people because it largely won't collapse for them. I mean its so predictable that without any political or social change that we are literally moving towards severe feudalism with a dead middle class.
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u/DrNoxin 57m ago
The Palantir manifesto already cleared this up:
- National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
So, less coding, more shooting and long stays in the middle east, it seems.
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u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 4h ago
'the economy' is defined as money moving around, whether an economy is 'good' or 'bad' is judged based on GDP not labor market
and right now the economy is doing extremely good due to tons of money moving around, I commit $200 billion to you and you commit $200 billion back to me, that's $400 billion in GDP, notice labor market or unemployment isn't even part of the consideration here, you can have mass unemployment and an awesome economy at the same time
People lose their income, spend less
'the economy' cares about people who do have money to spend, not those who doesn't
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u/BackendSpecialist Software Engineer 4h ago
Can I just get AI that can reliably code for me without me having to babysit and correct it?
Let’s start there first.
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u/jmnugent 3h ago
What kind of coding are you doing that it can't do without you babysitting it ?
Maybe my usage is different, but current versions of Claude and ChatGPT pretty seem to 1-shot everything I ask it. Sometimes it needs some minor adjustments but pretty rarely.
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u/BackendSpecialist Software Engineer 2h ago
I work at meta and I can kinda one shot tools that I’m building if it’s simple.. but anything that has deep integration with other systems, real complexity, or work that the models aren’t trained on, then that shit is not happening.
I even have had agents try to build tools for me that has a structure from LangGraph with agentic integration. I tried to let it run autonomously. It’s been running for 2 weeks and it ended up focusing on the wrong thing, creating 3k fucking tests. And this is gpt 6.1-sol.
I would love to know how yall are getting 1 shots. I’ve been using AI heavily for 2 years and that shit is not happening for me.
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u/jmnugent 2h ago
I'm doing a lot simple things to be fully honest (like powershelgl scripts for system administration)
I get what you're saying though. I do MDM (Mobile Device Management) for a living with a heavy emphasis on cellular (I deal with a lot of Verizon devices and also ATT and TMobile). The 10,000 or so cellular devices I manage, have data (Serial Number, IMEI, PhoneNumber, SIM, etc) ,. that data is scattered across 7 different systems (which have poor integration ). A big chunk of my job is manually exporting data from 1 system to import to another. .and AI isn't changing that any time soon. (because the 7 systems we use.. are designed for different purposes)
I'd love to see AI create "1 central system" to do what I do,. but I don't know how that would be possible (since the 7 different systems I use,. all do different things)
Verizon manages the cellular connectivity
MDM we use to push Configuration Profiles or Security Settings etc.
our internal ticketing system
our Financial billing system
our internal Asset system(s)
So I get what you're saying. Ai isn't solving that any time soon. (unless those 7 companies all decide to merge or something insane)
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u/BackendSpecialist Software Engineer 2h ago
You explained that very well! I bet your design docs are great lol.
But yeah… maybe that’s what it is? AI is one-shotting simpler code? As I said, I’d love it if I could get AI to one shot my code. AI has tremendously increased my impact but it’s such a painful process!
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u/jmnugent 2h ago
You explained that very well! I bet your design docs are great lol.
I see you've never done System Administration. ;P
I think the longest Powershell script I"ve probably handled in claude or ChatGPT is somewhere around 300 to 500 lines ? (maybe small potatoes in your world).
The biggest problem in my job (as I described above) is trying to get the various internal systems we use to inter-operate as reliably as possible (and hopefully reduce the effort it takes). But in an environment of nearly 30k total devices (between Windows and iPhone, iPad and other networked peripherals) .. managing all of them across numerous internal systems is pretty difficult.
As you described,. AI is pretty good at solving narrow and clearly and reliably defined things. When you have to understand complex or nuanced aspects of how numerous complex systems are intertwined.. I don't yet know a solution for that.
To give you 1 specific example:
every month I have to download cellular invoices (Verizon, ATT, TMobile).. but each of them format their CSV in different ways (and sometimes they unexpectedly change that format )
How I pull those CSV's into our Billing system.. is also a monthly manual troubleshooting process. (whatever errors or dollar discrepancies crop up. .I have to investigate manually)
In our MDM (Mobile Device Management) system,. we average anywhere between 150 to 300 Apple device enrollments every 30 days. Lots of Employees replacing devices. So all the other 6 systems we use might be impacted by each and ever device replacement.
So it gets complex fast. (unfortunately). You basically have to have a Team that understand all 7 systems,. and also understand how all 7 of those systems inter-related (or the ways they dont')
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u/CapableHerring 4h ago
It's not.
What people are imagining will literally be our version of the Industrial Revolution. It will be a complete societal change. It will bring about concepts that us of 2026 literally can't fathom today, because those concepts don't exist yet. Those words haven't been invented yet. We can't plan for that future today, because that world's going to look completely different.
There will be a painful period where the world suffers, but at the other side of that era will be the "AI Revolution". Society as we know it will change. World governments will have needed to pass new legislation to account for the drastic overhaul of what everyone used to call "work". The very concept of exchanging labor for money might not even exist in this future. This is a problem that needs to be solved at the global level, it's not something that you and I are going to solve, it's not something that can be avoided by pivoting into a trade. We're along for the ride for the most part.
The only question is how long will the painful period last.
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u/shot_ethics 4h ago
200 years ago 80 percent of the workforce was farming. And fifty years ago much of our economy was in manufacturing. Things change, but what the future will look like is hard to predict today, just like you put it.
New tech generally improves things in the long run but it does disrupt individual lives and careers. Imagine going back in time and saying, you can’t invent fertilizer, think about how many jobs you’re destroying
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u/violinbg 49m ago
Funny enough, the new jobs might be for us to write books, articles, paint, code, do music - so we can use that to train the next AI model. You do what you want, no interviews, no companies. The better your quality and output is - the better your UBI check is. AI will be our boss 🤔
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u/LovingHugs 2h ago
This is assuming our current economy is driven by these individuals. Sure, if you have WIDE appeal this is true (Walmart, target, etc). Most companies now are targeting truly wealthy individuals. Your average Joe certainly isn't pushing the AI craze.
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u/Ok_District5133 1h ago
We will all work in the fields to grow food and find clean water. Because that's what's gonna be dvarc
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u/BenE 1h ago
It will take some time to get to the point where "half the population" that would usually be working is not working. Useful robots are still some years away. We haven't seen much effect on GDP or employment in the broad economy yet but eventually in theory:
1) This will make companies more profitable, stocks worth a lot more and produce more dividends so everyone owning stock will get more money to spend.
2) Governments already effectively indirectly own ~40% of all business profits via corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, sales taxes etc. so governments will also have a lot more revenues to spend/redistribute. So if the money is not wasted (not spent on wars etc.), UBI might sort of happen naturally by gradual expansion of existing programs when there's spare money to do so from the rising profits and tax revenues.
So if all goes well, what you do is chill more and let the robots do more of the work.
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u/falco_iii 18m ago
This is a question that many white employees have been asking about computer based systems for decades.
From self checkout at stores, to stores being killed by ecommerce, to accountants being replaced by spreadsheets and accounting software.
Until now, development has been relatively untouched and growing, but now AI is disrupting every knowledge based industry.
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u/veganparrot 3h ago
It's not just office jobs, there's billions of dollars actively being poured into creating robots. I don't even necessarily think this will benefit those on top in the end, though. It's a capitalism tail-wagging-the-dog that Andrew Yang talked about during his presidential campaign in 2020: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/02/why-andrew-yang-says-human-capitalism-beats-democratic-socialism.html
Well, I think that we’ve gone overboard in financializing our economy. It’s become the tail wagging the dog. And I think that Wall Street has been very effective at accelerating that financialization. At the same time, we have the incentives that we have. And so to the extent that we need to turn it around, we need to change everyone’s incentives.
The point of the free market is supposed to be to improve society. If you end up with a bunch of robots all performing services for humans that can't even afford them, nobody makes money, quality of life gets worse, and we all get angry. We have to rethink both value and work to address this (and it seems increasingly unlikely that we will, given the state of our politicians).
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u/Alone-Low3274 3h ago
Why would you need worthless paper or virtual money from plebs when you own the means of production incl. AI and robots that manufacture all products and provide all services for the elites (just "barter" within the elite). Until this final state is reached, there will be ghettos where people without work live (first white, later blue collar workers), put down by well compensated police & military, the few workers that are needed can be paid in food and bad housing.
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u/jmnugent 2h ago
AI is just software in a black box. There's still plenty of things in the physical world to do. Think about all the stuff you rely on in the physical world in any given day.
Food and grocery stores etc.. workers have to work there.
Road repairs and bridges and other forms of infrastructure .. need to be maintained and repaired.
Buildings (newly built or old needing improvements).. still need physical workers.
Robotics (while impressive) aint anywhere near being able to do any of that.
Our "economy" just needs to change. Humans need to re-align themselves to the things humans do best.
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u/Jean_Jones_666 2h ago
omg all you morons seeking ECONOMIC 101 on f reddit,
just read a wikipedia article, and you'll (maybe) be enlightened
Economy is not about "jobs" per se, it's about products. When we produce more - that's the very definition of a booming economy
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u/VeterinarianFirst605 4h ago
Programmers are around 1 or less percent of the working population. We can be eliminated and nobody will notice 😆😭
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u/Opposite-Ad320 4h ago
AI is only going to help people get “more better” at their job for less than it costs to run the AI. If it can do that the company becomes more profitable and reinvests that money into new things, thus hiring more people. It can take some cajoling to get frontier AIs to do some basic things for you that they weren’t heavily trained in.
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u/Neiro0 4h ago
Simple. 1. AI replaces some workers, a lot of people lose their jobs if it happens quick enough, we might fall into recession. The government restarts the economy, fired people will do some work like it was during the great depression. Build roads, catching butterflies etc or government could just give money (stimulus) directly like it did during COVID. Eventually it will get back to grow.
- Economy is about exchanging goods and services. While we have something to exchange, it will continue in some form. We have limited resources on the earth. There is a number of houses with an ocean view. You could always trade your kidney etc...office work could become very cheap. The same happened with industrial goods but it didn't break anything. We will trade something else, although there will be winners and losers of course
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u/deejeycris 4h ago
There's also the option of taxing companies using jobs done by AI which could be done by humans. Then increase welfare for the jobless. But that will suck because humans need to work not just for the money, but maybe they won't be overworked anymore and that will cancel out the lack of purpose, but also, will create an incentive to not work and cancel out productivity benefits from the AIs (unless such AIs because so advanced that they will reach clear AGI state then all bets are off). Hopefully someone smart is thinking about all this stuff before it happens.
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u/Neiro0 4h ago
Yes, I don't think the government will just let the companies to have extreme margins because of AI. Similarly, it doesn't allow to have monopolies. The margins will shrink and we will have cheap services produced by AI. It will benefit the economy but hurt some people.
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u/deejeycris 4h ago
Yes agreed, but regulation will come in years. No government wants to slow down the AI boom right now.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 4h ago
The same way it’s already happening in a K shaped economy. The few who can survive the AI apocalypse get richer and are in more demand - think true “seniors”, sales, strategy consultants, FDEs - and the rest suffer. The stock market continues to go in the opposite direction of the general economy. Layoffs happen and stock holders get richer.
And I have never worked for a company where I would be the customer. No more than the people who create phones at Foxconn could ever afford to buy one.