It's not the next few years, but half-century out that I'm worried about. I'll personally be retired by that point, sure, but that doesn't stop me from being deeply worried by society at large. Even good programmers are going to have a hard time finding jobs.
You're also missing that programming isn't the only sector that's going to be upended by automation. Basically every job market is going to be affected by the end of the century.
>If we reach some zen state where truly all has been automated then we’ll have UBI (or some dystopian hellscape)
In the States at least, the resistance to any form of socialism is so strong that I have no faith UBI has a snowball's chance in hell.
>there’s tons of one person businesses you can run if you automate workflows.
and when literally everyone can do it, competition will be brutal. When the stakes are "make it or end up homeless", and everyone is desperately trying to run their own business because corporations don't need to hire anymore, we're in deep trouble
We have about a century of empirical data that says that automation does not cause widespread unemployment. Automating horses took away all the horse-care jobs and business, but they found other things to do. Computers automated computers (armies of mostly women who chugged out calculations), and they all found new jobs. Nobody has a secretary any more. All those people responsible for inter-departmental mail are gone, because nobody sends memos any more. Nobody has live-in servants any more, partly thanks to washing machines, dishwashers, and microwaves.
Actually, in some sense, more people have servants, just that they are part-time: cleaning services, people who keep track of your schedule (executive assistants, but for normal people, can't remember the word).
When Microsoft Word automated away secretaries, it also raised the level of quality to be what was formerly available only at professional printers, so people spend the same amount of time, but now the expectation of quality of output is higher.
There can't really be widespread unemployment due to automation, because then labor costs would decrease and handmade goods would become more affordable, so people would start doing that.
Actually studies are that people who specialized in Eg. Looming fabrics never found equivalent jobs. They literally lost their livelihoods and never regained that quality of life. I would be supremely worried if a permanent underclass of people whose specialties are automated away and there are no equivalent quality jobs for them.
Good point, but as a counterbalancing force, those people still benefit from the economy-wide productivity increase in the long run. An entry-level unskilled worker has a much higher standard of living today than a skilled tradesman of the 19th century.
When it comes to approaching the asymptote of the singularity (or just general exponential increase in tech advancements across the board, if you don't buy the general singularity theory), the societal impact of the car replacing horses means little to me in terms of predicting the future.
UBI is orthogonal to socialism. It could exist under socialism, but you could also just take the existing state of the USA, widely considered capitalist, and modify it by setting the Social Security benefits age to 0. I've actually seen socialists against the UBI often enough; it implies the existence of money and markets
You're also missing that programming isn't the only sector that's going to be upended by automation. Basically every job market is going to be affected by the end of the century.
>If we reach some zen state where truly all has been automated then we’ll have UBI (or some dystopian hellscape)
In the States at least, the resistance to any form of socialism is so strong that I have no faith UBI has a snowball's chance in hell.
>there’s tons of one person businesses you can run if you automate workflows.
and when literally everyone can do it, competition will be brutal. When the stakes are "make it or end up homeless", and everyone is desperately trying to run their own business because corporations don't need to hire anymore, we're in deep trouble