Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts Billy - I hope you enjoyed your day off 
I echoed similar in our recent How useful do you think AI tools are/will be? (Poll) but I am beginning to feel it might happen quicker than expected. In fact some people in our poll (12%) felt AI is so useful that they consider it a necessity. 22% think it will be a necessity within 5 years, and over 50% saying within 10 years.
If what has been said by Hinton and others, that a dev with AI will probably replace lots of devs within the same company to do the same work, then that will more than likely have an impact on the economy and society - because we’ve seen similar in other sectors. Here in Wales mine closures had a lasting negative impact, including high unemployment, lower earnings, poorer health outcomes, and significant general social disruption in former mining communities that haven’t fully recovered. That was down to just 25,000 job losses.
I was actually talking to someone earlier and they mentioned that in the US there have been more job losses in the past month than there has for any month in the last two decades. I think this was the article they were referring to:
Nov 6 (Reuters) - U.S.-based employers cut more than 150,000 jobs in October, marking the biggest reduction for the month in more than 20 years, a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas said on Thursday as industries adopt AI-driven changes and intensify cost cuts.
The same person also said he knows people who have lost (dev) jobs recently. He said the latest he heard was a Go developer. I’d like to think more popular languages might be hit first, but we’ve already seen it fairly close to home:
I’d go as far as to say that even economists don’t have any real idea how things are going to pan out tbh, not just because it’s uncharted territory but because the implications of AI need a certain level of understanding of what these tools are actually capable of. Perhaps if they got together with Hinton that could make for an interesting report, but as of now, I’m personally just as interested in hearing the thoughts of people like you and the friend I was speaking to earlier - those who are working in the space itself and who may notice the impact before anyone else 
