He seems to think the world can absorb higher programmer productivity without destroying jobs. It's still one person's opinion but it was nice to hear.
That seems pretty clear to me? The web made programmers drastically more productive, and it coincided with a huge increase in both total employment and salaries, not a decrease.
For example, I first used Google in summer 2000 at a college internship, one where I flailed and didn't really know how to program. In high school and even college I could write code, but not anything real. (The CS program I went to was good, but focused on CS).
I think my programming skill and productivity took off when I had access to the web, and more people posted content to the web.
It really is like an external brain. Tim Berners-Lee isn't wrong; we just take it for granted now (and large parts of it have been ruined by advertising.)
And this is from a person who read the MS-DOS manual from front to back when I was a teenager. I also installed a Borland C compiler from a bunch of floppy disks, yet never really managed to write much of a C program.
So Google (in addition to education) made me much more productive, and StackOverflow attests that it has made millions of programmers similarly more productive. But yet I lived through a huge programmer tech boom in San Francisco for over a decade -- increasing staff, increasing salaries, etc.
What would be different about 2023?
It seems clear that the demand to build things will just get larger, just as it got larger from 2000 to now. There seems to be a "fixed pie" fallacy in the opposite view.
Why would it be the same? Think about it from first principles instead of assuming that what happened in the past will keep happening in the future. If there's a ceiling to the demand for programming work and we're near that ceiling, and you then increase the productivity of all programmers, the number of jobs will have to go down.
Is there a ceiling for demand and are we near it? I don't know. But the argument that stackoverflow and search made things better and so it goes for GPT-4 isn't thought out very well.
That's not first principles, that's a bunch of assumptions:
> If there's a ceiling to the demand for programming work and we're near that ceiling, and you then increase the productivity of all programmers,
Look at the history of civilization. Throughout millenia, we've advanced tremendously but still the vast majority of people across all (current) industries have jobs.
Just to put something out there, I think LLMs will be something like Google.
I remember when Google started improving a lot in 2003-2004, a coworker wrote a blog post "Is Google God?" People thought it was conscious.
It was absolutely revolutionary. It created huge amounts of wealth for itself and others
But clearly it hit a limit. It wouldn't surprised me if LLMs were huge boon for 5 or 10 years, and they hit a fundamental wall, stagnate, and then we repeat the cycle.
I agree with this, and LLMs seem pretty clearly the next step after search engines, in terms of intelligence augmentation. The parallels are too obvious to ignore. Search engines didn't replace humans, but they made us better at what we do, and let us do it with less effort. Also, librarians still have jobs.
I haven't come across any experienced software engineer who actually sees AI as a threat to their job. Maybe there will be a point when ChatGPT (or whoever else) can actually write better code than me, but I'd actually welcome that. Writing code is the most insignificant part of my job, and automating it away would leave more time for everything else, the stuff I actually get paid for. And in the worse case everyone will just switch to coding AI bots (because someone still needs to do that).
I agree with him, but I do worry that cost-effective software development may become drastically more capital-intensive, which will reduce the bargaining power of software developers in the job market. Currently, we largely own the means of production, because the valuable work comes almost entirely from our heads, but that may not be the case for much longer.
