We found an average time savings of 5.4% of work hours in the November 2024 survey. For an individual working 40 hours per week, saving 5.4% of work hours implies a time savings of 2.2 hours per week. When we factor in all workers, including nonusers, workers saved 1.4% of total hours because of generative AI.
Note this is across all disciplines. Some tasks are more easily assisted by AI than others.
Some economists say these trends may be short term in nature and little cause for concern on their own. Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, noted that the uptick in unemployment for college-educated workers was only modestly larger than the increase in unemployment overall, and that unemployment for both groups remained low by historical measures.
I think this is like the quote I know that goes ‘when your neighbor gets laid off, its a recession.
The benefits of AI-driven automation often favour capital over labour, which could widen inequality and reduce the competitive advantage of low-cost labour in developing economies.
However, the UNCTAD report also highlights inequalities between nations, with U.N. data showing that 40% of global corporate research and development spending in AI is concentrated among just 100 firms, mainly those in the U.S. and China.
First, original story is pay-walled for journalist only, so I was unable to review that.
I am increasingly distressed by the race to replace human developers, particularly the more junior ones, with AI assistants. … Companies are jumping on AI as a way of removing those messy (and expensive) humans from the process of developing software.
I think the best observation is that “people don’t know what they want”. If AI Coding is the proverbial horse, then everyone wants a faster horse; no one will ask for the car.
When I got stuck with a problem, I had two options: PRINT commands and a lot of dedication, or back to the library. Debugging at that time meant: running, hitting an error, searching, adjusting, and running again with fingers crossed. But in my view, this is just the next step in a long evolution of developer tools.
Eclipse, Firebase, and Stack Overflow haven’t replaced developers, and AI won’t make us obsolete either.
SA: I mean, my basic assumption is that each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers.
Lots of ink spilled on the nature of software engineering. I find it hard to believe that we’ll need fewer engineers… but flaged this as a ‘prediction’ so I can check back later.
Quote Citation: Ben Thompson, “An Interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman About Building a Consumer Tech Company”, March 20, 2025, https://stratechery.
