They were highly skilled laborers who knew how to operate complex looms. When auto looms came along, factory owners decided they didn't want highly trained, knowledgeable workers they wanted highly disposable workers. The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just wanted to realize some of the profit from the savings in labor along with the factory owners. When the factory owners said no, the Luddites smashed the new looms.
Genuinely, and I'm not trying to ask this with any snark, do you view the work you do as similar to the manufacturers of the auto looms? The opportunity to reduce labor but also further the strength of the owner vs the worker? I could see arguments being made both ways and I'm curious about how your thoughts fall.
Things turned out pretty great economy-wise for people in the UK. So that's a poor example even if Luddites didn't hate technology. Not working on the technology wouldn't have done the world any favours (nor the millions of people who wore the more affordable clothes it produced).
I personally think it'd be rewarding to make developers lives easier, essentially just saving the countless hours we spend googling + copy/pasting Stackoverflow answers.
Co-pilot is merely just one project in this technological development, even if a mega-corp like Microsoft doesn't do it ML is here to stay.
If you're concerned that software developers job security is at all at risk from co-pilot than you greatly misunderstand how software engineering works.
Auto-completing a few functions you'd copy/paste otherwise (or rewrite for the hundredth time) is a small part of building a piece of software. If they struggle with self-driving cars, I think you'll be alright.
At the end-of-the-day there's a big incentive for Github et al to solve this problem, a class action lawsuit is always an overhanging threat. Even if co-pilot doesn't make sense as a business and these pushback shut it down I doubt it will go away.
I'm personally confident the industry will eventually figure out the licensing issues. The industry will develop better automated detection systems and if it requires more explicit flagging, no-one is better positioned to apply that technologically than Github.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre for example
Sure glad thse Luddites didn't get their way
I think you are vastly underestimating how many professionally employed software developers are replaceable by copilot at this very moment. The managers are not caught up yet and you seem to be lucky not having to work with this type of dev, but I have had 1000s of people I interacted with in a professional capacity over the decades who can be replaced today. Some of those realised this and moved to different positions (for instance, advising how to use ML to replace them: if you cannot beat them…).
I mean of course you are right in general but there are millions of ‘developers’ who just look everything up with Google/SO, copy paste and change until it works. You are saying this will make their lives better, I say it will terminate their employment.
Anecdote: I know a guy who makes a boatload of money in London programming but has no understanding of things like classes, functional constructs, functions, iterators (he kind of, sometimes, understands loops) etc. He simply copies things and changes them until it works: he moved to frontend (react) as there he is almost not distinguishable from his more capable colleagues because they are all in a ‘put code and see the result’ type of mode anyway and all structures look the same in that framework, so the skeleton function, useXXX etc is all copy paste mostly anyway.
I will admit I’m kind of a “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” kind of coder but nobody is paying me boatloads of money to poke at some program until it stops segfaulting, would be nice though.
But also this point is silly. Plenty of money and effort is risked and lost with no bailout. Bailouts are extremely unusual in the grand scheme of things.
Similarly, the reason Europe put 30% of its populace "out of work" by industrialising agriculture is why we don't have to all go work in fields all day. It is a massive net positive for us all.
Moving ice from the arctic into America quickly enough before it melted was a big industry. The refrigerator put paid to that, and improved lives the world over.
Monks retained knowledge through careful copying and retransmission of knowledge during the medieval times in the UK. That knowledge was foundational in the incredible acceleration of development in the UK and neighbouring countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the printing press, that rendered those monks much less relevant to culture and academia, was still a very good idea that we all still benefit from today.
Soon, millions of car mechanics who specialise in ICE engines will have to retrain or, possibly, just be made redundant. That may be required for us to reduce our pollution output by a few percent globally, and we may well need to do that.
The exact moment in history when workers who've learned how to do one job are rendered obsolete is painful, yes, and they are well within their rights to what they can to retain a living. But that doesn't mean those workers are somehow right; nor that all subsequent generations should have to delay or forego the life improvement that a useful advance brings, nor all of the advances that would be built on that advance.
I find it very hard to believe you didn't understand the suggestion.
A real good example is mapping objects: let’s say you have a deep nested object from an ERP and you need to map that to another system(s). This is horrible work and copilot just generates almost everything for it if it knows the input and output objects; it ‘knows’ that address = street and if it is not it will deduct it from the models or comments or both; if there is a separate house number and stuff, it’ll generate code to translate that. I used to hire people for that; no longer; it just pops, I run the tests and fix some thing here and there.
Stealing, scamming, gambling, inheriting, collecting interest, price gouging, slavery, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors… Plenty of ways to make money without being useful—or by being actively harmful—to someone else.
> Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us.
We don’t need all that clothing, made by monetarily exploiting people in poor countries and sold by emotionally exploiting people in rich countries under the guise of “fashion”. The usefulness line has long been crossed, it’s about profit profit profit.
So you write tests and copilot generates code you shove into production with little overhead ?
Do you read the code thoroughly (kind of negating having it generated for you?), or just have blind faith in it because tests are green and just YOLO it into production ?
I'd feel pretty uneasy deploying code that:
* I, or a trusted peer has not written.
* Hasn't been reviewed by my peers.
* Code I, or my peers don't understand fairly well.
In other words, I have no problem using code generated by co-pilot, but I'd feel the need to read and review it quite thoroughly and then I sort of feel that negates the purpose, and it also means it pulls my back into the role of doing work I'd hire someone else to do.
Most highly qualified workers loves what they do and would stand for keeping they’re output quality up. On the contrary interchangeable cheap workers have no real incentive to that. The factory’s manager is left alone in charge to balance quality versus cheapness, and the last comes with obsolescence (planned or not), which is good for business.
Sadly that's probably a modern thing and not something that people wanted / cared about immediately once everyone lost their jobs.
Sure the legal framework can change, but such profound change will have surely many consequences we won't foresee, for good or bad.
Isn't this basically all UI programming? :D
Joking aside, I see this 'person X doesn't know anything, but they are still delivering' attitude quite a bit on HN now. They clearly know something, and projects like co-pilot will make them even more effective.
I think the opposite of you - that projects like co-pilot will further lower the barriers of entry to programming and expand those who program. I also think that like all ease of programming advances in the past, business requirements will continue to grow at the edges where those who care about the craft will still be required.
Most of the time when it’s made it’s just papering over yer another situation where a surplus is being squeezed out of a transaction by a parasitic manager class using principal-agent problem dynamics.
The people who invented this stuff are always trying to tell you they’ve invented the cotton gin or something when in fact they’ve just come up with a clever way to take someone else’s work and exploit it.
only emotionally crippled people like fashion, if they were healthy they would all dress in gray unitards and march in formation towards the glorious future!
hey I too have often been carried away by my own rhetoric but come on!
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/817918/number-of-busines...
I don't equate, say, "making money" with "stealing money". I mean the way people do things within the law. Inheriting is different; the money is already made. Interest is being useful to someone else, via the loan of capital.
No, that's not true. Capitalists make money from simply owning things, not because they're necessarily doing anything useful.
Maybe not right this moment but our actions have consequences in the future.
For those who only see the next quarter, they're stoked.
For those who understand infinite growth is impossible and would simply like a livable world, they're horrified.
Currently, everything is extraction and the US is rotting from the inside out because of it.
Laws shouldn't be equated to ethics. There have been and will be countless ways to make money legally and unethically in any society.
Did you read the comment you're replying to at all? It says
>The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just wanted to realize some of the profit from the savings in labor along with the factory owners.
Now maybe you agree maybe you disagree. But if you're just talking past the person you're replying to... what's the point?
In other words: things improved because of technology and despite the societal/economic framework, not because of it.
And how many workers even have the possibility of an arrangement like this, i.e. a worker-owned cooperative?
Yes, that is exactly the point. When a labour-saving technological development comes along, it's payday to the capital-having class and dreary times for the labour-doing class.
>hey I too have often been carried away by my own rhetoric but come on!
Because that's what people want. You can get high quality clothes for much cheaper than you could in 1816, but people prefer disposable clothes so they can change their look more often. This is just producers responding to demand.
Please don’t straw man¹. That’s neither what I said, nor what intended to convey, nor what I believe.
The examples considered that: gambling, collecting interest, price gouging, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors.
I'm from the UK, and we used to make motorbikes. They got - correctly - outcompeted by Japanese bikes in the 1950s that were built with more modern investment and tooling. If Japan hadn't done that, we'd have more motorcycle jobs in the UK, and terrible motorcycles that still leaked oil because the seam of the crankcase would still be vertical and not horizontal.
I'm not saying anything about this process is perfect and pain-free, but it seems that a lot of the things we have now are because of processes like this. Should Tesla sell through dealerships instead of direct to consumers? I think the answer is, "Tesla should do what's best for its customers", and not "Tesla should act to keep dealership jobs and not worry about what's best for its customers."
Businesses exist for their customers and not their employees, and having just been part of a business that, shall we say, radically downsized, I've seen a little of the pain of that. Thankfully it was a high tech business, and as the best employment protection is other employers, and there are loads of employers wanting tech skills I've seen my great colleagues all get new jobs. But I think it's ultimately disempowering to think of your employer like a superior when it should feel like an equal whose goals happen to coincide with yours for a while.
Can you elaborate on this? How can I become a capitalist so all my possessions start earning me money?
Like I said; it is a great thing for me but I don’t believe developers without talent and/or rigorous foundations will make it. Go on Upwork and try to find someone who can do more than the same work (mostly copy paste) that they always did. In an interview when you ask someone to use map/reduce to create a map/dict, they will glaze over. This is the norm, not the exception, no matter the pay. Some of them have 10 years experience but cannot do anything else than make crud pages. This will end as copilot makes lovely .reduce and linq art from a human language prompt.
Capitalists make money from simply owning things, but that doesn't imply in the slightest that everything that can be owned produces income.
The classic example is a landlord: he collects income because he simply owns the land others need or want to use. He doesn't necessarily have do any work that's useful to anyone else, not even maintenance or "capital allocation."
Genuine question, not being snarky.
Gambling - I don't do it, but I'd need more specifics to see why gambling is bad in this sense. It's a voluntary pursuit that I think is a bad idea, but that doesn't make it illegal.
Price gouging is still being useful, just at a higher price. Someone could charge me £10 for bread and if that was the cheapest bread available, I'd buy it. If it is excessive and for essential goods, it is increasingly illegal, however. 42 out of 50 states in the US have anti-gouging laws [0], which, as I say, isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about legal things.
Underpaying workers - this certainly isn't illegal, unless it's below minimum wage, but also "underpaying" is an arbitrary term. If there's a regulatory/legal/corrupt state environment in which it's hard to create competitors to established businesses, then that's bad because it drives wages down. Otherwise, wages are set by what both the worker and employer sides will bear. And, lest we forget, there is still money coming into the business by it being useful. Customers are paying it for something. The fact that it might make less profit by paying more doesn't undermine that fundamental fact.
As for supporting laws to undermine competitors, that is something people can do, yes. Microsoft, after their app store went nowhere, came out against Apple and Google charging 30% for apps. Probably more of a PR move than a legal one, but businesses trying to influence laws isn't bad, because they have a valid perspective on the world just as we all do, unless it's corruption. Which is (once more, with feeling) illegal, and so out of scope of my comment. And again, unless the laws are there to establish a monopoly incumbent, which is pretty rare, and definitely the fault of the government that passes the laws, the company is still only really in existence because it does something useful enough to its customers that they pay it money.