From now on I’m referring to it as the blue shell letter.

Here are my two cents. In a sense it has already begun. We have seen massive tech layoffs recently. There are other factors to account for that, but the idea that fewer coders with AI tools can be more effective then more coders without them probably is a factor that companies are taking into account.

From my own experience, institutions have a good deal of inertia. It takes time and resources to change the way that a company does things. People stick with what they are used to as long as it works, even in the presence of newer more efficient options. If a new option is a big enough improvement people will switch, but it won’t be an instant process.

Add to this all the technologies that have been hyped up as the next great thing, and have turned out to either go nowhere or have proved to have been much less revolutionary than promised. Hype cycle is something that experienced decision makers have learned to largely ignore.

Basically I think that what is going to happen is that the AI tech will continue to advance at a rapid pace. Then a few nimble and forward thinking companies will start using it in a major way. It will then take a few quarters of financial reports for most other companies to realize that this is the real deal. Only then will we start seeing really dramatic changes to the job market.

The other way that can go is just a straight up increase in output without a significant decrease in positions. That was the way that the Industrial Revolution ended going down. If we develop AGI then all bets are off, but we may not need close to that.

Software engineering is only partially about writing code. Computer science isn’t really about writing code at all. We need breakthroughs on both to get closer to AGI. AFAIK GPT and it’s ilk haven’t been able to do anything original in either of those areas.

Is the power out for anybody else?

Civilization is about ten thousand years old and the species has been around for probably at least a quarter million years. 5000 years isn’t all that long from that point of view.