But it's definitely not just programmers. And it will take time.
Society needs to adjust. Stopping progress would not be a solution and is not possible.
However, hopefully we can pause before we create digital animals with hyperspeed reasoning and typical animal instincts like self-preservation. Researchers like LeCun are already moving on from things like LLMs and working on approaches that really imitate animal cognition (like humans) and will eventually blow all existing techniques out of the water.
The path that we are on seems to make humans obsolete within three generations or so.
So the long term concern is not jobs, but for humans to lose control of the planet in less than a century.
On the way there we might be able to manage a new golden age -- a crescendo for human civilization.
Humans don’t become obsolete, we become bored. This tech will make us bored. When humans get too bored and need shit to stir up, we’ll start a war. Take US and China, global prosperity is not enough right? We need to stoke the flames of war over Taiwan.
In the next 300 years we’ll wipe out most of each other in some ridiculous war, and then rebuild.
"Global prosperity" might be true in a very long-term historical sense, but it's misleading to apply it to the immediate situation.
Taiwan is not just a talking point. Control over Taiwan is critical for maintaining hegemony. When that is no longer assured, there will likely be a bloody battle before China is given the free reign that it desires.
WWIII is likely to fully break out within the next 3-30 years. We don't really have the facilities to imagine what 300 years from now will look like, but it will likely be posthuman.
We’re going to move from debugging some crap the last developer wrote to debugging an order of magnitude more code the last developer generated.
It’s going to be wonderful for job prospects really.
