There are also good reasons for a lot of countries banning mines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty

Notably USA is not one of those signatories.

Has it affected how you calculate/charge your rates in any way?

I don’t have a good comparison of what rates are like for independent consultants. I have only worked full time salaried for consulting departments - at AWS directly (Professional Services - full time blue badge RSU earning employee) and now for a third party AWS partner.

But let’s say I make more as a staff consultant considering my actual billed hours, benefits (401K, health insurance, paid time off etc) than I would make working independently and I always know how much I’m going to get paid.

But I will say in today’s cloud consulting environment, it is a race to the bottom unless you can lead projects and even then there are relatively few high paying (over $200K with benefits and 80% utilization not including PTO) outside of being a full time employee working in the consulting divisions of AWS, Google (they had an RTO mandate so I ignored recruiters) or maybe Oracle.

The only reason they can justify American rates for someone like me who knows cloud but who is mostly a developer is because I can lead projects and churn out code quickly - thanks to AI.

At the expense of other people. Slot machines is a negative sum game.

Not for the house

I've been feeling it pretty strongly too. The way I see it there are very strong incentives to make this work out. Whether they actually manage to automate a big enough portion of knowledge work is still an open question. A few years ago I would easily say it's 0%. Now, I'm not so sure it feels like a non-zero probability to me.

Either way, planning for it to happen would be better than be taken by surprise if it does.

And to finish the end of the week on a good note.

AI Fails at 96% of Jobs (New Study)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3kaLM8Oj4o

Check out kagi; adfree search

Classical prisoner's dilemma.

I'm with you. Though what good choices do I have as an individual? It seems like all the choices are crap.

It's not only that. If 1 person is able to d the job of 10 people. What do you think will happen to the other 9 people.

> it should only become easier to become a founder,

You'll also have more competition. And perhaps fewer customers because people are out of a job.

How do you pay your bills? That's the dark question that's looming in the background.