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He just vibe-repaired cars!

Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.

And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.

Early automobiles were very simple machines. I you knew how to repair a carriage or a wagon, you were pretty close to being able to work on an early automobile. You should check them out.

Shoeing horses properly is actually no joke and cars back then were laughably simple. I don’t see how any of that could feel relatable to people in software development now, when almost all jobs that require real smarts and competency require years of study and experience.

Many people in life are underutilized and ready to step up to challenges if given the opportunity.

The amount of consumption is largely dependent on income level. There's a recent study from Moody's that says that in the US, the top 10% income bracket now accounts for roughly half of consumer spending. As wealth inequality continues to worsen, it makes more and more sense to solely target that market because you make the same as selling higher amounts of lower priced product but with less overhead.

This sounds like you are deriving an is from an ought.

Is it not conceivable that we won't find a way to do so, and that consumption and economic activity will ultimately decline?

Everyone wants seniors, nobody wants to train juniors.

I imagine this is gonna continue to be true, except that "everyone wants consumers, nobody wants to employ people".

Popular belief never took the regulatory obstacles to self-driving cars seriously. If LLMs required insurance to use, they also wouldn't be available in public yet.

Employees are just another way to get things done. Ripe for disruption!

I don't know where you are, but when I hire mechanical engineers, I hire them from universities with accredited engineering programs. It's actually a legal requirement for the job in my jurisdiction. And if those engineers decide they want to become daycare teachers or knee surgeons, they do have to go back to university and re-train, even though they already learned how to think the first time.

Did you graduate yesterday? Have you actually lived in the world?

My unmet needs are $2.5k rent and $2k childcare, per month. Then there's food, healthcare, car payments. There is pretty much zero wiggle room for us.

People don't get a degree in "generic doing things people want". They generally get one focused on a particular field.

If someone's degree is in computer science, they're not going to be a good fit to be, say, an accountant or a nuclear engineer.

This works if you're interested in running a business, but what well paying work doesn't require a degree or some kind of formal training certification?

Just curious, what kind of jobs did they transition to? Or were they forced to take a break, or left in job application hell, etc?

I know a language translator (Japanese/English) who is doing very well out of AI screwing up and causing damage.

>The vast majority of role or career changes do not involve going back to college.

That was possible pre-2022 during the famous developer labor shortage. In the current market, companies expect seniority/experience in that specific stack they use for that, no more career changers.

They either take you as a senior/expert to contribute from day one, or as a young and cheap newgrad/junior out of uni they expect to train on the job, but no more in-betweeners switching careers as they're not as experienced as the seniors on the market, nor are they as cheap and malleable as newgrads/juniors.

Sure, in theory every developer can learn at home to do anything new related, but in the current job market, companies expect X-years of proven on the job experience with their stack, no more bootcampers, and no more self-taught-at-home types. The entry bar has risen significantly. At least where I live.

Like I just saw on linkeidn a job posting from a large bank that was an hour old and it already had 100 applications, which probably means most applications are now AI botted, meaning yours will get lost in the noise and getting a call back for an actual interview is like rolling a dice.

Not saying it's impossible to change(I did a couple of times), just that's it's much more difficult than in the good times, and will most likely also come with a paycut.

I guess where I'm coming from is that I currently am trying to change careers. Everything I'm finding is either a 50% pay cut or is simply unwilling to consider anyone without 5-10 years of experience in that particular industry. Since I've already built a life here I can't really just move and a 50% pay cut isn't enough to live anywhere near a comfortable life; particularly since I have medical expenses that aren't covered by insurance.

A stay-at-home mom isn’t bringing any income in so has the luxury of being able to fail.

Whereas many of us can’t take a loss of income for months while we retrain.

Well, a lot of them retrained into call-centre type of jobs.

Then the call centre jobs offshored (and now are being replaced by AI).

I started from sweeping floors and making survey calls at minimum wage. I think you can teach Math to high school students.

We are mostly already doing that now as DE.

There’s so much more you can do to get back at megacorps that will hurt them more than that. 1 less person in the world to oppose them is a win for them.

I’ve never met you but based on your last 10 HN comments I think the world would be worse off without you in it.

I think of doing this except for suicide (which you shouldn't do) I fantasize about becoming a monk. That's a life role that can't be replaced with AI, provides meaning to yourself and to the community and guarantees you a certain amount of happiness – probably more than most jobs.

"as a big FU to the megacorps"

Where is the satisfaction in that?

If you jump from a bridge, all it does, is that relatives of yours will receive the bill for cleaning up the blood and remains (on top of funeral etc).

Just ALT+F4 on shitty tech, which is most of it. Ditching your smartphone is a small but good start.

> hitting ALT+F4 on life for good

That hardly seems like it would be satisfying.

There are many ways to do that more effectively TBH.

Because I've been looking for a new job for several months and all of them either require significant retraining or don't pay nearly enough to maintain even a similar quality of life. I don't just mean they don't pay enough for luxury. I mean they don't pay enough to live in my community without a roommate.

"unless you're targeting a career that requires, or expects, a degree."

Unfortunately most well paying jobs do.

In the past there was always demand for "unskilled" (manual) labor where displaced workers could land to without long (re)training, and possibly even gain skills on the job. But that job marked has dramatically diminished especially in the west; there are only so many burgers to be flipped. Somewhat famously during industrial revolution displaced agricultural workers (e.g. farmhands) ended up mass-migrating to cities doing factory work under extremely exploitative conditions. And that never truly got resolved, we just brushed the issue under the rug by pushing manual labor to third world countries where the problems could remain out of sight.

Generally speaking they didn't. They either got lucky or their quality of life plummeted.

How can you not see that this time its actually different? The very need for labor is being obviated. Every technological change we had before still required a need for labor often an massive need that justified an entire city population. That is the difference. For the first time in human history, economic output is being severed from requiring maintenance of a labor pool. Considering we are that labor pool, things do not bode so well for us. As you state, look at the relative lack of abundance of candlestick makers and horeshoe makers and basket weavers and other colonial jobs. We are essentially making ourselves extinct and we don't even realize this.

There's an off-color joke that could be made here but the real question is the speed of change - we gloss over it but there have been major changes that took centuries, and others that were quite fast, this one seems to be closer to the fast end.

Yes and? You'll be shocked to know that pretty much none of us were alive in colonial America.

Who's we? Personally, I've actively supported the traditional garment industry to the degree that it still exists.

> where you can just point it to your already existing codebase and tell it your problem and it can basically do it

Who is deciding the action/s to take in response to the problem? How do you know which is the right action to take?

"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

What you said is valid but I think you are still constrained in thinking that the code is the solution, though. I wish I could word it a better way. Maybe we need a word calculator /s

don't we already have lots of machines that do things like this though? Even if its human operated: excavators, combines, tractors, and other heavy machinery have reduced the physical burden involved in sustaining large societies tremendously.

If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.

We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.

I would agree with you, if we taxed the ever-living fuck out of AI companies to enable UBI, so that the people replaced with robots did not end up homeless.

Horses where the plaything of the rich. Farmers were using oxen not horses for the most part. However the modern plow (invented in the mid 1830s - John Deere being the best known inventor, but others were inventing them about the same time) needed the faster speed of a horse to work well, but if the previous farming technology worked for you then oxen (or donkeys ... - there are several other work animals used in different areas for farming) were better.

There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.

The number of horses in the US is down by about a factor of 3 from the peak in 1920. They're mostly recreational now though.

Presumably you are a human, not a horse, yes? Presumably there is more to your life than dragging around carts all day every day?

HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.

I can see that going away too. Eventually the average horse rider is going to be someone of stature of a saudi prince at the rate horse ownership coupled with inequality is going. They'd probably be all about buying the Gemini horse teacher over learning from some lesser birth stableboy. I bet eventually all tutoring from a human is seen as some lesser ick by the rich. People already think as much about you today when you talk about say not relying on claude code. It is all about optics and virtue signalling pedigrees at the end of the day.

It'd be uneconomical today but I don't see any reason to believe it will always be that way. Any time you want a high standard of living for people it creates an incentive to eventually make a cheaper way of doing what those people make their high standard of living with.

About the only things I can think to guarantee will have some constancy are "for the sake of being human" type things. Much like buying handmade bowls is something you can do out of pure preference/taste/ideology even though it's cheaper to buy massed produced ones.

You seem to be living under a rock. Yes driverless cars started in 2009, but in 2026 it is very much here. Waymo recently crossed a milestone of more 500k trips I think, we will have millions of driverless cars in the coming years (we’re at 10k right now)

The phrase "sent to the glue factory" comes from this era where many horses made redundant were sent to be slaughtered for meat or raw materials.

Or on the shelves of Tesco.

No. The horses were made redundant and no longer exist in such quantities

So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.

Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.

The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?

Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.

It is clear that at the limit, machines will be more capable in nearly every way. I suppose there might be some room for a few exceptions like working around big electromagnets that machines can't get close to... Does that sound great? Is there something else you had in mind which would be reserved for humans and fulfilling?

Give us a single example of a job that you believe can never be done by robots or AI.

Some skilled workers retrained. Many of them refused to learn.

Don't be the old dog who can't learn new tricks.

You mean my meat proxy skills while wearing a Ratatouille machine-vision head camera that tells me what wrench to pick up and how to crimp the Pex rings?

Actually had a plumber here earlier today which was an ordeal so have been asking that myself too...

Plumbing is kind of a hard job, definitely not fun for anyone above middle age. And given it will pay minimum wage, I think I'd just take a life of leisure instead.

Plenty if not all people put more value into handmade things, but they can't afford to have everything handmade. An IKEA coffee table is $15. Handmade one from a woodworker is $400 - $1000.

Can you describe the last time you asked your compiler how you should best approach an interpersonal problem, to research an investment thesis, or to figure out an org chart by analyzing communication patterns within teams?

People aren't just using AI for writing code, but for all of their decision making. AI is far from limited to writing code.

This is a tired, idiotic analogy. For one, if LLMs are compilers, they're terrible compilers because they can't be reasoned about the way one wants to reason about a compiler (but I assume you have a weird take here since you claim compilers are non-deterministic).

But more importantly, if you insist on treating LLMs like compilers, then the source language – natural prose – is the worst programming language ever invented. Coding the world in brainfuck is a better idea than where you lot is suggesting we go.

Correct.

I'm just not sure exactly where we are on the "Jevons Paradox Adoption Curve"

That was my interpretation but nobody ever explained it.

I think the punchline is that workplace romance usually gets both parties fired, regardless of who initiated. Hence, doing "things" with the pickle slicer means the pickle slicer gets fired for participating...

My grandpa was a shoemaker. The real change in technology left his family in poverty in Chicago during the depression. I didn't hear anyone joke about that, directly.

Jewish humor is frequently about laughing at your own pain. There's a genre of Jewish jokes created in concentration camps.

It feels to me like the advancements are not accelerating, though, like we're nearer the top of the S-curve than enthusiasts think we are. A lot of the recent advances seem as much a harness improvement as an actual model improvement. We've made exceptional progress in the last couple years, but spent an exceptional amount of money to do it. A moon shot, basically.

Honestly, my gut feeling (worth every bit of what you are paying for it...) is that until we get actual intelligence instead of a good facsimile, we're not looking at an existential problem or a UBI-level problem, even, just a big change in tooling.

I used to find joy in knowing how things worked inside-out. Whether it was Postgres, or browser engines, or some detail about compilers... I used to find joy in developing the little techniques that made programming NOT building on quicksand. There was satisfation in what you had done being robust.

Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like. When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)

Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers? It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face). I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.

It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.

> It does feel a bit like building on quicksand

that's a good analogy and puts into words the way i've always felt about software development. Every so often the entire industry rolls over into something new. I've been here 30 years now and, in my experience, the skill that counts is being able learn new skills. To go back to the analogy, to build something new on top of what you've built in the past before everything is swallowed by the quicksand.

Did a tailor gain mastery of the sweatshop machine? Did mastery of the automated sewing machines give the same joy to the tailor or was it mind numbing meaningless activity that he would be happier to be free of.

> "Make this. LGTM. Now make this".

I think well north of 90% of people in software engineering have job expectations that, when assisted/automated with AI, boil down to exactly that.

It's a pain in the ass to work at such a job and find challenges or things to master--your superiors don't want you to do that, there's not enough time in the day, and you're tired from LGTM-now-make-this work.

That's most software jobs, because that's what most software companies want.

It can replace all work, IMO. I'm doing intellectual work that replaces manual labor with machinery and computer vision systems. It's massively sped up by AI.

A less misanthropic alternative: The technology required to replace the person is much smarter and more adaptable than that which was needed to replace the horse. Because of this, you can end up in the horse's role in the story without having to be as dumb as a literal one so long as it's this other lever which moves instead.

That is an unnecessarily rude and mean comment.

> Wait 10 years when the humanoid robots become reasonably capable and affordable

We've had humanoid robots that could walk for what, 30 years? While technology marches ever forward, and sometimes makes pretty good leaps, 10 years for both capable and affordable seems pretty optimistic.

No it isn’t, fear mongering is way more common for propaganda. What makes you think it’s the case here?

> They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.

The tech crowd used to say that only the "dumb" ones did that. They said those who were "smart like us" were much more adaptable, learning to code and whatnot to find new, often even better careers. It will be interesting to see if the emperor has clothes.

You're mixing a bunch of different "people" in the same bag. I'm not the one saying "there's never been anything like this before".

The investment is massive, but not bigger than other projects by an order of magnitude. Major wars were bigger than AI. The dot com bubble was 2-3T dollars.

> The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation.

Yes, the absolute numbers might now read TRILLION instead of BILLION or MILLION, but the concept of "Technology so impactful governments shift their economies" is in no way new, and has already happened a bunch of times before in humanity's timeline.

I guess that's why you're seeing some of us less stressed out about it, as again, scale is different, because scale today is different in everything, but relatively, we're just repeating another of those "Technology changes everything" milestones that we've done before.

Because they're liars. Plain and simple. Lying is a virtue as long as the lie is powerful enough to sustain attention.

We should start with the assumption that humans are valuable and deserve to live with dignity. Any philosophy that doesn’t have that at its center is broken.

Very often the justification for why these things aren't terribly disruptive is that the very best of a certain trade or field will still have a useful skillset. Like the best graphic designers in the world are still more creative and skilled than AI, and the best writers are still better, the best programmers are still better, just that they're all more expensive and slower.

But we're not taking into account how it affects the mediocre or average people in these fields. Roughly half of all of these people are below average. Maybe if you're the best you'll always have a job, but what about the guy who legitimately struggled to finish high school? The person who genuinely doesn't have the capacity to earn much more than minimum wage?

I weep for people whose scientistic reductionism has led to such devaluation of humanity. Robots don’t do anything and don’t think anything. Humans do things with and through them. What makes us special is that we exist and love one another.