A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
Marx talks about this a bit in <i>Das Capital</i>... You would think that the automation of an industry improves working conditions inside of it, in practice the opposite has usually been true: fewer people work longer hours in ever-more-tedious ways. So you used to go to work to design something, but in this vision of the future, you now go to work to craft prompts to DALL-E-2 so that it can design something for you, but because design is now so much cheaper you have to do three or four times as much design in the day, and this mechanism only doubles your rate of production... Gets to be a real mess.<p>However, I would notice that we have been blessed with a different exponential, which we have been riding into the future. That is the exponential of processor speed and storage and all of the other computing resources. It&#x27;s a perennial observation that our actual programs have not gotten much faster. The extra resources are immediately wasted. The reputation of hiring developers from developing countries, the cheap foreign labor force, for us has always been that you get a big ball of mud which you cannot maintain very easily. I do not see AI helping with this, but rather exacerbating it. Beforehand, there was a reasonable limit to how many lines of code you might expect from a developer per day, maybe a couple hundred if they test their code well and do other things to refactor and simplify. But with AI you could imagine it multiplying 10-fold, just throw more mud at the problem, the mud ball is already huge: what could it hurt.<p>In fact, we may see the Smalltalk revolution! Of course this has been prophecied before, but never really come to pass. In this more-dystopian form, the idea is that everyone leans heavily into AI and something like kubernetes for modularization. Every single cell, every pod, in these gigantic supercomputer clusters which shall exists to serve up a smallish blog, needs to do something small enough that with its abundant AI generated code, it can nevertheless live and die successfully, spawning new processes as needed. The blog is thousands of small mud balls, and they work together in signaling pathways that are  no longer understood by any human who works on the blog, and the dominant metaphor ceases to be one of mechanism and design and inputs and outputs... Rather it is biological, or even ecological. To start such systems up requires a story of “childhood” where a harness coordinates the first thousand nanoservicesv and grows the cluster into a template for the living application, then it needs AI-style “training” to reconfigure itself to handle actual business purposes, finally it will be released on the world, only to make mistakes which we will have to educate it to discern as mistakes... We certainly can&#x27;t fix the system, we don&#x27;t know how it works. Not what Alan Kay envisioned! But who knows. Maybe our kubernetes clusters will go to school one day.