You're not wrong that AI is hyped just like crypto and VR were. But it's also true that automation will increasingly impact your job, even for jobs that we have considered to be highly technical like software engineering.
I've noticed this over the last decade where tech people (of which I am one) have considered themselves above the problems of ordinary workers such as just affording to live. I really started to notice this in the lead up to the 2016 election where many privileged people did not recognize or just immediately dismissed the genuine anger and plight of working people.
This dovetails into the myth of meritocracy and the view that not having enough money or lacking basic necessities like food or shelter or a personal, moral failure and not a systemic problem.
Tech people in the 2010s were incredibly privileged. Earnings kept going up. There was seemingly infinite demand for our services. Life was in many ways great. The pandemic was the opportunity for employers to reign in runaway (from their perspective) labor costs.
Permanent layoff culture is nothing more than suppressesing wages. The facade of the warm, fuzzy Big Tech employer is long gone. They are defense contractors now. Google, Microsoft or Amazon are indistinguishable from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
So AI won't immediately replace you. It'll start by 4 engineers with AI being able to do the job that was previously done by 5. Laying off that one person saves that money directly but also suppresses the wages of the other 4 who won't be asking for raises. They're too afraid of losing their jobs. Then it'll be 3. Then 2.
A lot of people, particularly here on HN, are going to find out just how replaceable they are and how aligning with the interests of the very wealthiest was a huge mistake. You might get paid $500K+ a year but you are still a worker. Your interests align with nurses, teachers, baristas, fast food workers and truck drivers, not the Peter Thiels of the world.
I think engineers are more like doctors / lawyers, who are also both contracted labor, whose wages can be (and have been) suppressed as automations and tactics to suppress wages arrived.
But these groups also don't have strong unions and generally don't have the class consciousness you are talking about, especially as the pay increases.
You and I seem to be on the same page here but I want to take this opportunity to the role "middle class" plays in preventing class consciousness.
The "middle class" is propaganda we've been fed for decades by our governments, the media and the very wealthy. It's just another way to pit workers against one another, like how the flames of white supremacy were fanned after the slaves were freed so poor whites wouldn't socially align with freed slaves. It's why politics now tends to focus on socially divisive issues rather than economics, like abortion, LGBTQIA+ people, migrants, Islamophobia, etc.
Doctors are workers. Lawyers are workers. Professional athletes are workers.
There have always been segments of the working class, which have deluded themselves into believing that by co-operating with the capitalists, they could shield themselves from the adverse effects of what is happening to the rest of the working class.
And it's an understandable impulse, but at some point you'd think people would learn instead of being mesmerized by the promise of slightly better treatment by the higher classes in exchange for pushing down the rest of the working class.
Now it's our turn as software engineers to swallow that bitter pill.
>but at some point you'd think people would learn instead of being mesmerized by the promise of slightly better treatment
They have already learned, fortunately the entire 20th century was devoted to this. That is why any worker with even a little bit of brain and ability to learn perceives socialists as the main threat to his well-being.
Well given that you're the first in this subthread to even mention socialism, that lesson of the 20th century would probably ring true, yes. Although I must admit that talking about classes like that probably did help conjure that idea.
Of course, it's not like one needs to be a Marxist or even any other sort of a socialist to see the whole "employers are screwing their employees", since I do doubt that many employees working in Amazon's tech like AWS and whatnot would be in the ideology. In fact, that has become a fairly popular position even outside of traditionally leftist politics.
> fairly popular position even outside of traditionally leftist politics
Only leftist politics will actually be able to address the issues. Of course people will just mindlessly scream "sOcIaLiSm!" at anything and everyone, but it ultimately doesn't matter. We still have to be optimistic, once enough people have the vocabulary to think about their increasingly parlous circumstance, things will change in our direction inevitably.
I've noticed this over the last decade where tech people (of which I am one) have considered themselves above the problems of ordinary workers such as just affording to live. I really started to notice this in the lead up to the 2016 election where many privileged people did not recognize or just immediately dismissed the genuine anger and plight of working people.
This dovetails into the myth of meritocracy and the view that not having enough money or lacking basic necessities like food or shelter or a personal, moral failure and not a systemic problem.
Tech people in the 2010s were incredibly privileged. Earnings kept going up. There was seemingly infinite demand for our services. Life was in many ways great. The pandemic was the opportunity for employers to reign in runaway (from their perspective) labor costs.
Permanent layoff culture is nothing more than suppressesing wages. The facade of the warm, fuzzy Big Tech employer is long gone. They are defense contractors now. Google, Microsoft or Amazon are indistinguishable from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
So AI won't immediately replace you. It'll start by 4 engineers with AI being able to do the job that was previously done by 5. Laying off that one person saves that money directly but also suppresses the wages of the other 4 who won't be asking for raises. They're too afraid of losing their jobs. Then it'll be 3. Then 2.
A lot of people, particularly here on HN, are going to find out just how replaceable they are and how aligning with the interests of the very wealthiest was a huge mistake. You might get paid $500K+ a year but you are still a worker. Your interests align with nurses, teachers, baristas, fast food workers and truck drivers, not the Peter Thiels of the world.