Please hire my officemate! He plays classical music without headphones all the time, so it would be ideal if he didn't take a year 7. (also, his job market paper is really cool!)
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One way to look at this is that there's a part of the labor market that competes purely on price-in this case, basically by being the poorest place rich enough to afford fast Internet-and this category is the most vulnerable to technological disruption.
Dopamine in the human brain isn't all about motivation to action. There's dopamine in other parts of the brain. We know from some really classical work by Patricia Goldman Rakit, for example, that dopamine is important for working memory, short-term memory.
Like that just does not seem like the ideal artifact. We should be able to store them somewhere. We should be able to have architecture diagrams that we can review and discuss that generate that code to spec.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson. SICP is my all-time favourite programming book. It's also where I learned about the power of wishful thinking when coding. SICP uses wishful thinking as a design tool: write code as if the abstraction already existed. Pretend. Then, once the ideal abstraction has taken shape, you go ahead and implement those functions. This meta-level is what made SICP so valuable. Ultimately, it's a book that teaches how to think about code and problem solving. I'm tempted to even say that SICP is more a work of art than a pure coding book, but I won't go there. A beautiful book.
I predict that in the next 10 years software development will survive, but it will become like any other white-collar professional work. No more $200,000 salaries, unlimited vacation, or incredible employee bargaining power.
However, in our non-ideal biophysical reality, present levels of urbanism are unlikely to be sustainable without cheap fossil fuels, and the human cost of that could be horrific unless we address it urgently.
elevators are the rare part of the economy where Europeans have embraced market dynamism while Americans choose overregulation and labor market rigidity.
The ideal of this period's justice which is much more shaped by Christianity is the purpose of the trial is the spiritual interior correction of the soul of the sinner.
when I think about why it might be good to have a lot of wealth in the future as a good classical utilitarian, to me, the value is or at least one way you could have a kind of almost unsatiating uh utility function in in having wealth in the future is to create new happy beings, right? They just add to the total welfare of the world.
Like right now we're endowed with labor that can turn into uh that can turn into income. When that is no longer the case and we are now at the mercy of the of the elected official for like basic needs, right? So that to me feels like a power sharing arrangement that's really dangerous.
They just recently released a report, and I think like you really have to squint to see anything happening. Like basically, if you want to take kind of like uh an an approach across the entire economy and looking at even looking at like software engineering, like the most exposed sort of sectors, there's just like not really anything going on. There might be a little bit of a signal about like junior developers getting jobs less than before, and that but that's like a less than before rather than a level shift.
rather than thinking about individual forecasts like what me and Phil are going to do, rather looking at kind of like basically generating prediction markets, where you get aggregate forecasts, where you get like kind of wisdom of the crowd effects. And kind of the reason that I think this is because we have been famously terrible at forecasting.
LLMs themselves are the perfect captive reader: they never get bored or confused, never miss a reference or have an emotional reaction, never ask themselves why am I reading this?, never close the tab.
In a sense, we're all turning into project managers, right? And and we can have an army of junior programmers called agents that will just spit out reams of code, but someone's got to have the big picture and review all of that. And so, increasingly our craft is going from one of writing the code to one of of reviewing the code and and building the architecture of the code and overseeing the work, if if you will.
Yeah, AI is an amplifier. And if uh if you're young and learning quickly, AI is going to amplify that or can amplify that. So, I I personally think this is this is the golden age of the junior programmer.
As we move from, you know, hey, [clears throat] these companies are selling tokens where they provide the entire uh reasoning chain and all that to uh selling automated, you know, white collar work, right? Automated software engineer, send them the request, they give you the result back and there's a bunch of thinking on the back end that they don't show you. The ability to distill out of American models into Chinese models will be harder.
Everybody thinks our schools are in crisis all the time because they’re being forced to do something they were never meant to do, which is to make everyone college-ready, and they’re being forced to do that because we have seen jobs that provide a living wage without a college diploma evaporate.
I- I can relate that if you very deeply identify that you are a programmer, that it's scary and that it's threatening because what you like and what you're really good at is now being done by a soulless or not entity. But I don't think you're just a programmer. That's a very limiting view of your craft. You are, you are still a builder.
Long lead times and soft costs, fueled by the world-leading US wages for "white collar" work, are the root cause of poor performance in low-volume production because there are few units to spread the soft costs over.
This is a topic that I warned about very publicly in 2025 , where I predicted that AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next 1–5 years, even as it accelerates economic growth and scientific progress.
A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.
Well, it's in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress. If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition?
I think we've proven, and the AI community in general that classical systems, Turing machines can go a lot further than we previously thought. They can do things like model the structures of proteins and play go to better than world champion level. And a lot of people would've thought maybe 10, 20 years ago that was decades away, or maybe you would need some sort of quantum machines to quantum systems to be able to do things like protein folding. And so I think we haven't really even sort of scratched the surface yet of what classical systems so-called could do.
And I think the reason that's possible is that in nature, natural systems have structure because they were subject to evolutionary processes that shape them. And if that's true, then you can maybe learn what that structure is.
So my betting is that it's mostly it is just classical computing that's going on in the brain, which suggests that all the phenomena are modelable or mimicable by a classical computer.
There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before.
Assuming you are still hiring junior engineers (you really should be even in this AI era), the good ones will learn quickly and want to see career progress in their first few years of working.
There's this very good quote from Sam Altman who... He can be a hyperbeast sometimes, but one of the things he said, and I think I agree, is that superhuman persuasion will happen before superhuman intelligence, right? And if that's the case, then these things before we get this AGI ASI stuff, we can embed superhuman persuasion towards our ideal or whatever the ideal of the model maker is, right?
a good overview of SRE at Google. For those who worked at places with oncall, much of the first part of the book will likely be very familiar. Keep in mind that your mileage might vary: what works at Google scale, might not be the ideal fit for your use case.
So my interpretation of reality is if you fold it up, all that bifurcation of many worlds, and you just fold it into the structure that is you, and you just said you are all of those many worlds and your history converged on you, but you’re actually an object exists that was selected to exist, and you’re self-consistent with the other structures. So the quantum mechanical reality is not the one that you live in. It’s this very deterministic, classical world, and you’re carving a path through that space. But I don’t think that you’re constantly branching into new spaces. I think you are that space.
But understand that it’s ultimately a moral and political argument, not an empirical question of the ideal population or the exact level of housing demand in Santa Monica.
3000 years of factual Arab history, and personal insights from this Oxford Brit who lived in Yemen for 37 years, translates classical Arabic, and clearly cares a lot. Huge and thorough but really wonderful for those with the interest. I loved his writing style and poetic asides. Read my notes here for a taste. What a great book.
Comic book mind candy fantasy. Superficially, this is a cynical, post-apocalyptic subversion of the Matter of Middle Earth. In fact, the hard-bitten surface merely conceals a core which actually believes in epic fantasy, both in the content and in the classical form (a trilogy ending in a eucatastrophe).
You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do, is make housing and food dirt cheap. Right? And that’s the good world. And actually, let’s go into what we should really be making dirt cheap, which is energy.
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