Basically what I’ve been doing since the very beginning except instead of full prototypes I go feature by feature, and only if I’m struggling, otherwise I don’t even look at an LLM.
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@samir @RosaCtrl I can't think of many jobs we actually automated away entirely; we just automated away some of the tasks that made up that job. Sometimes enough tasks that people are no longer hired to do that job. But there's usually enough that remains that couldn't be automated that the detritus of what used to be someone's job then diffuses out to become part of the shared frustration of living and working in modern society.
@samir @RosaCtrl For teachers specifically:
I worked as one for just over 10 years. The decline of that job, I think, has little to do with automation - it's not unthinkable (in fact, I'd think it's *likely) that LLMs will finally allow automation of part of a teacher's core responsibilities ... but not all of it. There's a significant part of what a teacher does (even in adult education) that's much more about emotional labour and being a comforting and experienced human presence that I think most normal people aren't yet mangled enough to be ready to cede to machines.
What fucks over teachers (at least here in Denmark) is the same thing that fucks over nurses: It's a job where the social significance is *completely* evident, and where many of the practicioners experience it as a calling - and where they have a high feeling of duty towards the people they care for. This means they're uniquely exploitable: Management and political forces can make them put up with all sorts of terrible shit that nobody else would accept, because they don't want to let down the people they're responsible for.
Being a teacher (or nurse) is the polar opposite of a bullshit job: You *know* what you're doing has social value, but this only makes you *more* exploitable.
(I quit when ChatGPT was launched and the message from on high was that we'd have to put in extra hours to figure out how to deal with it. Right after "oh, there's a pandemic lockdown; you figure out how to rework everything on your own" had led to almost a full year of 60-70 hour workweeks.)
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@samir @RosaCtrl For teachers specifically:
I worked as one for just over 10 years. The decline of that job, I think, has little to do with automation - it's not unthinkable (in fact, I'd think it's *likely) that LLMs will finally allow automation of part of a teacher's core responsibilities ... but not all of it. There's a significant part of what a teacher does (even in adult education) that's much more about emotional labour and being a comforting and experienced human presence that I think most normal people aren't yet mangled enough to be ready to cede to machines.
What fucks over teachers (at least here in Denmark) is the same thing that fucks over nurses: It's a job where the social significance is *completely* evident, and where many of the practicioners experience it as a calling - and where they have a high feeling of duty towards the people they care for. This means they're uniquely exploitable: Management and political forces can make them put up with all sorts of terrible shit that nobody else would accept, because they don't want to let down the people they're responsible for.
Being a teacher (or nurse) is the polar opposite of a bullshit job: You *know* what you're doing has social value, but this only makes you *more* exploitable.
(I quit when ChatGPT was launched and the message from on high was that we'd have to put in extra hours to figure out how to deal with it. Right after "oh, there's a pandemic lockdown; you figure out how to rework everything on your own" had led to almost a full year of 60-70 hour workweeks.)
@datarama @samir it’s similar to what happened in Chile. Most of the people that studied to become teachers after the dictatorship didn’t want to be teachers in the first place, but couldn’t get into other disciplines. A lot of the people that wanted to become teachers studied something else to have better working conditions and higher salaries.
The similarity with automation is the goal of making workers as cheap as possible
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@datarama @samir it’s similar to what happened in Chile. Most of the people that studied to become teachers after the dictatorship didn’t want to be teachers in the first place, but couldn’t get into other disciplines. A lot of the people that wanted to become teachers studied something else to have better working conditions and higher salaries.
The similarity with automation is the goal of making workers as cheap as possible
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@sanityinc @RosaCtrl Goddamnit I think you’re spot on.
@samir @sanityinc @RosaCtrl Trouble is the system will always reward the person supporting it, and punish the one trying to do a good job despite it.
"Something something bad system something something good person etc….”
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@RosaCtrl @samir Anyway, by the time I left my teaching job, only the "hard core" was left. Everyone who *could* find a better gig in industry and didn't have a near-pathological sense of loyalty towards their students or a burning drive to teach had left long ago - and even that hard core was beginning to fray at that point - the triple punch of management abuses during lockdown, a mass layoff round due to political budget cuts, and then the GenAI crisis had the most demoralizing compound effect I've ever seen in a workplace.
I loved teaching, but I never want to work in that profession (or whatever's left of it in the near future) ever again.
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@samir yeah, it’s a trend that has been going on for too many decades to count already. And it has many different shapes. Chile is a cautionary tale of your example, so it’s hard for me not to look at these things from a sociological and economical perspective.
This is why the «people that embraced LLMs for programming don’t like it» narrative makes sense to me. Keeping around the people that’s actually interested in a discipline is expensive, as it should
@RosaCtrl @samir Anecdotally, the enthusiastic LLM users I know personally roughly fall into two groups:
- People who don't really care about software development, but got into it because of the high salaries.
- People who care a lot about software development, but are terribly burnt out and overworked, and never have the time to give anything the care it deserves anymore.(On the internet, there are also grifters and robot cultists. I don't know any of those personally.)
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@RosaCtrl @samir Anyway, by the time I left my teaching job, only the "hard core" was left. Everyone who *could* find a better gig in industry and didn't have a near-pathological sense of loyalty towards their students or a burning drive to teach had left long ago - and even that hard core was beginning to fray at that point - the triple punch of management abuses during lockdown, a mass layoff round due to political budget cuts, and then the GenAI crisis had the most demoralizing compound effect I've ever seen in a workplace.
I loved teaching, but I never want to work in that profession (or whatever's left of it in the near future) ever again.
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@samir @sanityinc @RosaCtrl Trouble is the system will always reward the person supporting it, and punish the one trying to do a good job despite it.
"Something something bad system something something good person etc….”
@thirstybear @sanityinc @RosaCtrl Yup, and it will keep going until the system fails. Which might take centuries.
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In my darkest moments, when I feel like AI is going to eat up everything, this is actually what claws into my forebrain: A deep-seated feeling of guilt that I unwittingly participated in scamming a bunch of young people into a doomed profession and that they might end up being unemployable and miserable.
Seriously. Beyond fear of losing my job and depression over my interests feeling increasingly pointless, the horror of all the students I spent 10 years helping to get to a better place (I taught in a community college; most of my students were from underprivileged backgrounds) having their future flushed down the toilet eats me up.
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In my darkest moments, when I feel like AI is going to eat up everything, this is actually what claws into my forebrain: A deep-seated feeling of guilt that I unwittingly participated in scamming a bunch of young people into a doomed profession and that they might end up being unemployable and miserable.
Seriously. Beyond fear of losing my job and depression over my interests feeling increasingly pointless, the horror of all the students I spent 10 years helping to get to a better place (I taught in a community college; most of my students were from underprivileged backgrounds) having their future flushed down the toilet eats me up.
@datarama @RosaCtrl Maybe those young people will help us get out of this fucking hole.
You’re not responsible for Altman, OK? And they’re not either. Sometimes bad things (or bad actions, from people with bad intentions) happen, and we always rely on collective action to get us out of the hole. It doesn’t mean those people got us into the hole. In fact, they almost never overlap.
And also, a good idea which didn’t work out was still a good idea. We never operate on perfect information.
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@datarama @RosaCtrl Maybe those young people will help us get out of this fucking hole.
You’re not responsible for Altman, OK? And they’re not either. Sometimes bad things (or bad actions, from people with bad intentions) happen, and we always rely on collective action to get us out of the hole. It doesn’t mean those people got us into the hole. In fact, they almost never overlap.
And also, a good idea which didn’t work out was still a good idea. We never operate on perfect information.
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