Programmer headcount by age before and after ChatGPT

[ergophobe]

https://www.understandingai.org/p/new-evidence-strongly-suggest-ai

TL;DR

[ergophobe]

Noah Smith has a nice critique of the paper that generated the above chart.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/ai-and-jobs-again

With respect to this chart, he points out that if AI were making it so that you didn't need any junior programmers, why would you still be hiring senior programmers at such a high rate? Or is it just that younger programmers are getting older and not being replaced? He doesn't seem to consider that possibility.

Josh Gans (also mentioned in the Noahpinion article) has a thesis about what you would see if AI augments human programmers:

"Basically, the idea is that experience is a complement to what AI can do, while formal education (which is all young workers have) is a substitute."

But I think the money is at the beginning...

If AI takes a lot of people's jobs, the debate will end because one side will have clearly won. But if AI doesn't take a lot of people's jobs, then the debate will never be resolved, because there will be a bunch of people who will still go around saying that it's about to take everyone's job...

In other words, the good scenario for the labor market is that we continue to exist in a perpetual state of anxiety about whether or not we're all about to be made obsolete by the next generation of robots and chatbots.