Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.
1. People *across generations* had to skill up.
2. software being very opaque (very differently from agriculture/mechanized labour) imo is linked to having a plethora of support roles that cannot write software but "handle the human part" and help make it readable, while spreading accountability. Hopefully with a "more readable/more standardized" software development, those [product|project|people] management roles can stop being a drag/bottleneck. (code was never the bottleneck we repeat ourselves since age immemorial)
They'll all turn in to "the managerial class". That's the higher order function that requires high judgement, low frequency work (unlike developers, data entry, designers, BDRs, compliance, etc.)
The globalized economy has demonstrated that a single country and supply the majority of the world's manufacturing needs, at least for a while.
Taiwan creates most of the worlds semiconductors. China makes the majority of everything else. Silicon Valley created a majority of the tech market's value.
But there's a cap where the world has enough stuff at least in the short term, and growth slows.
Humans only need a certain amount to survive. With populations leveling out, industry will shift from servicing human needs, to the needs of corporations and other industries. Consumers will become a minority in the future economy.
What will corporations value in the future, that they're willing to spend on recurring human capital expenses? I think the answer will always be: the tasks that will help companies grow.
Why would companies want to grow if there is no more demand by consumers? I understand that "b2b" exists, but surely all production and commerce is ultimately about satisfying (or creating) demand for consumption? Why would companies want to keep growing if there is no demand for their products?
There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work.
Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work.
For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!
There will always be more work that could be done, certainly.
What’s uncertain, however, is whether the work that remains to be done is valuable enough that it makes sense to pay someone an engineer’s salary to do it.
In your analogy, your competitors who keep their people could just as easily end up bankrupt.
Great way of putting this. I certainly feel like this in smaller companies where each action (or inaction) has a direct consequence on the profitability.
Software developers get paid to crunch out as much code as possible. If you work twice as fast, do you think your employer will let you slack off a bit because they ran out of work?
What really happens is that your bucket gets filled with more work, and now you are as busy as before. Or did someone else got fired because now you were working twice as fast as them?
With farming, you couldn't just start your own farm, because it requires farmland, and there's only so much of that. But those 6 software engineers can start their own companies, fire up their own team of agents. There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.
No I watch/listen to a lot of entrepreneurial stuff since 2016 and I still haven't launched my own product. There's a YT channel "Starter Story" it's like "this person make $100K/mo, here is the template".
It really is simple though, put a paypal button on a squarespace page and ask someone to pay it.
Yeah pretty much. Have you seen Polsia and its ilk? Maybe "trivial" would be too strong a word but... in 2026 it's not hard.
That's my point. You couldn't tell an unemployed farm worker to go start their own farm. They probably don't have the land or substantial capital it takes. But an unemployed software engineer just doesn't need anything like that to go into a business built on AI.
This may seem like an important change that's making things different today, but it's not. Farms back in the day were constrained by supply, software today is constrained by demand.
A farmer couldn't create a farm from nothing, but if you had one, you very likely were able to sell its products - everyone always wants to eat. That is in addition to the natural benefit of being able to use the food grown there to survive all on their own, being your own guaranteed consumer.
A software developer can create software from nothing, but who is going to buy it? There's not enough consumers and problems in the world for everyone to have their own specialized business that is able to thrive. Someone is always going to be left out. It's not like food.
It's like as if a farmer was able to conjure up a farm for free, but there is such an abundance of farms that to sell the crops to anyone, you'd need the help of a bigger business, or try to cultivate very specialized and niche crops that are not being made by one of the mega-farms, yet.
software today is heavily, heavily constrained by supply. demand is basically infinite for actually good software that solves problems people have (and people always have problems).
If the claim isn't falsifiable, than you can't do science. If you can't disprove a 2X multiplier how are you going to prove a 6X? 1000X? What's stopping the next hype man from claiming a billion X multiplier?
>what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers?
They need to go into business for themselves, and become capital owners, who benefit from AI, not workers who are replaced by it. AI won't be able to compete at entrepreneurship unless robots are given autonomy and property rights like humans, which is quite unlikely to happen any time soon.
I highly doubt that a significant portion of farm labor became salesman or researchers. Builders? I could see that but robots already replaced a portion of those too.
That's how it always happens. Technology advances, and there are more jobs than we're displaced. That's why technology keeps getting better AND the number of jobs keeps increasing with population.
less jobs creation is a almost certain for tech, but some people with high IQ get wayy more things done, they already do. This will spread to robots and other areas because robots are not automous yet, maybe will take decade(s). but meanwhile few operators will lead them in a more productive way? That's my bet. It's a clear, logical process with iterations. A lot of things are getting faster with AI, except energy production in some places in the world!
if AI get advanced, it only makes certain % of the engineers and related jobs wayy more productive, not everyone. This is already happening, it will grow from
here or AI and LLMs stop advancing
Everyone always assumes this, and it's always wrong. There is an infinite amount of work to do, and the more complex that work gets, the MORE people get employed.
In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?