Sooo, while having dinner I was watching this video which talked about automation and how it's inevitable that a lot of manual labor will be replaced by cheaper ai workforce, and how we are not prepared to handle it. Your thoughts on how something like this might affect our software industry?

https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU

as long as you confuse your right to live a decent dignified life with your ability to work for the 1%.
1% are the ones for whom finding work for a living wage is not a problem but.....

don't worry you will be mostly ok

A large push for automation has been happening in the US as people demand a higher minimum wage. Especially in easily replaceable positions. Something like forklift operators are already mostly automated at Amazon, McDonald's is looking to automate which would be easy. I pontificate that mainly unskilled labor is going to be automated. I think skilled labor will be much more difficult to automate.

@ingenioushax The video, pretty convincingly, suggests that white collar jobs aren't safe either.

Manual Labour is affected because it is easier to automate - and the faster minimum wage rates are raised, the faster the jobs will disappear.

Professional Jobs will be automated because the pay-offs for doing so will be even greater.

Creative jobs (like ours) are safest.

We need to institute a Citizen's Basic Income as soon as possible. It could be introduced at a low rate to prove the concept before increasing to a suitable (minimal) level.

@Wildgoose YC is testing out basic income in a contained environment. Let's see how that turns out and hope for the best.

With recent advancements, where machines are learning to paint, write novels and movie scripts, one day we will teach them to code as well. Although it's not in the near future. So for the time being our jobs are safe 🙂

@sshntt: When this happens, I'll hopefully be dead. One wrong calculation of the 3 Laws and we're fucked.

@coookie can you elaborate on what that means or point me to an article? I'm not sure what "YC" is.

@brettmoan "YC" refers to Y-Combinator, the name of a tech venture capital organisation run by Paul Graham and his wife Jessica Livingston. They also host Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com

If we honestly think AI generated movie scripts are a threat, we need to reconsider the kinds of movies we've been watching.

And the more we automate manual labour, the higher the need for skilled people working with education, social services, health and so on.

It's really a shame that talented, well-paid engineers find jobs in companies whose services revolve around cat videos, while teachers are so underpaid. Tells a lot about what we value as a society and I think that's the real threat.