the investor bull case in AI is to cannabalize the labor markets at 15% margin, so 1:1 labor:AI budget is where we are headed next - e.g. $100k/100k for a senior dev. The AI share will come out of dev budgets, so expect senior salaries to fall and team sizes to shrink by a lot if this stuff works. Remember we’re in the land grab phase, all subsidized by VCs, but we’re speed running through the stages as and this phase appears to be ending based on twitter VC sentiment. There’s only so many times you can raise another $500M for 9 months of operating cost at -100% gross margin.
What if once the 100k dev jobs are gone the equivalent value in terms of AI is nowhere near that. Say it is 5k instead?
Due to oversupply. First you needed humans who can code. But now you need scalable compute.
Equivalent would be hiring those people to wave a flag infront of a car. They are replaced bt modern cars, but you dont get to receive the flag wavers wage as captured value for long if at all.
lets call that stage 2 when the labor/ai spend drops below 1.0, to understand what that might look like i would compare to surgeon model. so like $500k for a Surgeon to manage outcomes with 10x AI leverage. Arguments for: managers are compensated proportional to the capital risk they are responsible for so it makes sense that as the leverage increases the comp increases, even if the ratio drops before it u-turns and climbs. Four arguments against: 1) the economy is going to look very different with different dynamic equilibrium in surprising places; 2) this assumes software best practices remain as they are today with no disruptive breakthroughs which is unlikely, 3) systems that promote inequality are vulnerable to constant attack so it may not be a stable equilibrium 4) it may not even work - code complexity scales faster than linearly with lines of code, where is the break even point and is it higher or lower on the complexity curve than the breakeven point today?
i kinda think we should blame the youtube alg for this, the algs set incentives which shape behavior at scale, and it’s not like one can make a living doing actual physics these days
Actually, taking someone’s livelihood hostage is a great and time-proven way to rob initially decent people of their moral agency. The case studies are everywhere.
Do they lose moral agency? Having practical reasons to take an action is not the same as ceding moral agency.
We are not perfect creatures and sometimes do immoral things, for various reasons. But we did those things, nobody else did them.
That also suggests a practical guideline: whatever your rationale for taking action, anticipate living with that rationale for years and years. If you can’t see it looking the same 10 years from now, perhaps that is a strong clue.
When it comes to physics it is even weirder than this. I’d argue there really isn’t anything at stake anymore. Einstein was able to make predictions and get them verified.
But the Higgs Boson might be the last prediction in fundamental physics to be verified in the lifetime of the predictor. Neutrino oscillations sure weren’t.
Society needs people to teach introductory physics classes to a wide range of undergrad students and upper level classes to a few specialists and that is what determines the size of the job market. You don’t really need physics PhDs to do that (I did a lot of that work in the first two years of my PhD program)
The physics community manages to organize things such that a few people can work on fundamental physics on the side but their numbers are basically determined by demand for teaching with is unrelated to the situation in research.
One strange thing though is that there is some market for books for laymen like
and it’s been clear for a while those people aren’t really satisfied. They think Bell’s inequality and ‘interpretations of quantum mechanics’ are more interesting than physicists do, there is no more Babe Ruth style showmanship [1] and from an outsider’s point of view there’s a feeling that since GUTs and inflation and String theory there are just a lot of bad smells —- insiders are right to discount some of these complaints but in a lot of ways inflation and string theory have neither had a story that completely made sense nor anything that rules them out so they lumber on in an unsatisfying way so in the 2000s we started to see insider-outsider figures like Peter Woit (who I strongly endorse) and Hossenfelder (who’s been too corrupted by being a YouTube star)
I have two friends who are in trade school after studying physics. They're applying physics everyday. They'll make a perfectly adequate living in a few months and meanwhile they're both getting paid to go to school.
I'd add PBS Space Time (Matt O'Dowd), Becky Smethurst and, to a lesser extent (more because she has a much broader remit that doesn't always focus on science -- that said, it's always insightful) Angela Collier.
tech layoffs have nothing to do with AI; the business has realized that they are not getting the expected marginal increase in returns for marginal headcount expansion, and while historically layoffs can cause brand damage and need to be avoided, the mainstream media is giving companies a pass because everybody is doing it
Hi Alex, if you have data that supports a positive Clojure growth narrative please publish it so that I and other consultants/influencers can share the good news in support of our shared mission. The perception of the decline of Clojure is becoming a board-level conversation at unicorn/ish size companies that are or were all-on on Clojure.
It's not similar to this at all. There is still a safe direction which exists - if you could reverse your fall, it would take you back to the plane. There is no reversing your "fall" into a singularity. "Out" no longer exists. Even if you reverse your direction, you'll still be falling towards the event horizon.
above 50k and the UI needs to change because 1) you can’t count the collection, and 2) the scrollheight becomes too unwieldy to use the mouse, slight adjustments to the handle will skip forward many pages. And if you try at some point you exceed the pixel height browser scroll bars can support, needing a custom non-native scroll bar. anyway well before that point, roughly at 50k records you need to switch to “search” UX (much smaller result sets) because there is no way to actually access page 99910 of your million record collection.
reply