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I've all of the sudden seen AI blackpilling break out into the normie space around me. Not so much about FOOM, and paperclipping, or terminator scenarios, but around the sudden disruptive nature, and especially around economic upheaval. Not exactly sure why. Veo3 has been part of it.
For example, coworkers suddenly aware that AI is going to completely disrupt the job market and economy, and very soon. People are organically discovering the @2rafa wonderment at how precariously and even past-due a great deal of industry and surrounding B2B services industries stand to be domino'd over. If my observation generalizes, that middle class normies are waking up a doompill on AI economic disruption, what is going to happen?
Let's consider it from 2 points of view. 1 They're right. and 2. They're wrong. 1. is pretty predictable fodder here - massive, gamechanging social and economic disruption, with difficult to predict state on the other side.
But is 2 that much less worrisome? Even if everyone is 'wrong', and AI is somehow not going to take away 'careers', people in mass worrrying that it's so will still manifest serious disruption. People are already starting to hold thier breath. Stopping hiring, stopping spending, running hail mary's, checking out.
Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact. (They keep framing 'If we can cut costs, we'll come out on top, instead of following the logical conclusion, if everyone stops spending the B2B economy collapses.) - I have a nontechnical coworker, who has recently recreated some complex business intelligence tool we purchased not long ago using readily available AI and a little bit of coaching. He had an oh shit moment, when he realized how cannibalized the software industry is about to get. The film industry seems about to completely topple, not because Veo3 will replace it immediately, but because, who's going to make a giant investment in that space right now?
I suspect the macro economic shock is going to hit faster than most are expecting, and faster than actual GDP gains will be made, but maybe I'm just an idiot.
So many contract renewal conversations with SaaS providers lately are like "they want how much per year for this service? that's three months salary for a typical engineer and our engineers say one of us can build this in-house in 6 weeks with LLM tools"
People are saying a lot of things and doing little. I've heard similar claims, but haven't seen any meaningful increase in SWE productivity and I've talked with friends and managers at other companies and they say largely the same thing.
The one thing I've seen is a slight cut back in use of consultants, particularly third world ones, but that might as well be a result of cutbacks due to economic uncertainty.
There definitely is some increase, but not at the right level yet. You can't yet fire all your junior devs and let the LLM close JIRA tickets on its own. What you can do is retrain your senior devs much faster. An LLM is the best form of introductory documentation right now. The bottom falls out when you start asking it hardcore questions, but this can be solved by more extensive (and expensive) training.
In my experience the questions do not really need to be that hardcore, but perhaps we have different definitions of what hardcore is.
I do agree about LLMs being a very good way to get introductory information. How valuable this is for the median developer I don't know. A lot of people seem to be working with the same languages and APIs for a long time.
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