Asklemmy

I disagree with the other posts here that you're overreacting. I think that AI will replace most jobs (maybe as high as 85% at some point). Consider becoming a plumber or an electrician. Until the robots will become commonplace in 20 years from now, you will have a job that AI won't be able to touch much. And people won't run out of asses or gaming. So they'll be stable professions for quite a while. You can still code in your free time, as a hobby. And don't cry for the lost revenue of being a programmer, because that will happen to everyone who will be affected by AI. You'll just have another job while the others won't. That's the upside.

I understand that this comment is not what people want to hear with their wishful thinking, so they'll downvote it. But I gotta say it how I see it. AI is the biggest revolution since the industrial revolution.

I'm not really losing any sleep over this myself. Current approach to machine learning is really no different from a Markov chain. The model doesn't have any understanding in a meaningful sense. It just knows that certain tokens tend to follow certain other tokens, and when you have a really big token space, then it produces impressive looking results.

However, a big part of the job is understanding what the actual business requirements are, translating those to logical steps, and then code. This part of the job can't be replaced until we figure out AGI, and we're nowhere close to doing that right now.

I do think that the nature of work will change, I kind of look at it as sort of doing a pair programming session. You can focus on what the logic is doing, and the model can focus on writing the boilerplate for you.

As this tech matures, I do expect that it will result in less workers being needed to do the same amount of work, and the nature of the job will likely shift towards being closer to a business analyst where the human focuses more on the semantics rather than implementation details.

We might also see new types of languages emerge that leverage the models. For example, I can see a language that allows you to declaratively write a specification for the code, and to encode constraints such as memory usage and runtime complexity. Then the model can bang its head against the spec until it produces code that passes it. If it can run through thousands of solutions in a few minutes, it's still going to be faster than a human coming up with one.

🙄 no I'm sure you're the only one

I think your job in your current form is likely in danger.

SOTA Foundation Models like GPT4 and Gemini Ultra can write code, execute, and debug with special chain of thought prompting techniques, and large acale process verification on synthetic data and RL search for correct outputs will make this 10x better. The silver lining to this is that I expect this to require an absolute shit ton of compute to constantly generate LLM output hundreds of times for each internal prompt over multiple prompts, requiring immense compute and possibly taking longer than an ordinary software engineer to run. I suspect early full stack developer LLMs will mainly be used to do a few very tedious coding tasks and SWEs will be cheaper for a fair length of time.

I expect it will be 2-3 years before this happens, so for that short period I expect workers to be "super-productive" by using LLMs in the coding process, but I expect the crossover point when the LLM becomes better is quite soon, perhaps in the next 5 years as compute requirements go down.

To answer your question directly: The debate has been going on in the broader public since ChatGPT 3 dropped

To answer how you’re feeling: that’s valid, because a lot of big pockets seem to not care at all about the ethical considerations.

I love llms! I'm using them to answer all sorts of bullshit to become a manager....like here's a bunch of notes make me a managers review of Brian. LOL.

I think Google is struggling to control the bullshit flood from the Internet and so AI is about to eat their lunch. Like I already decided that all AIs are just bullshit and the only really useful AIs are the ones that can actually search the Internet live. Perplexity AI was doing this for a while but someone chopped off it's balls. I've been looking for a replacement ever since.

I also use it for help with python, with Linux, with docker, with solid works and stuff around the house like taxes, kombucha, identifying plants and stupid stuff like that.

But I can definitely see the future when the police are replaced with robo dogs with lases heads that can run at 120mph and shoot holes through cars. The only benefit being that the hole doesn't get infected and there's no pool of blood. That future is coming. I'm going to start wearing aluminum reflective shield armor.