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Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

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Re: Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

#11

Post by philipswood »

colesantiago wrote: post #2

Bluntly, Yes. There will be less jobs out there for software engineers since AI can pretty much do them for cheap and very fast, OpenAI talked about driving down the cost of intelligence, and now this is what is happening for all models that are being released. Right now LLM’s like GPT-4o and Claude have gotten to the intelligence of a mid-level level engineer. The company I was in was so fascinated by this that they…

Counterintuitively decreasing the cost of development might actually drive up the demand.

A lot of potential software currently can't be cost effectively developed - so it isn't.

More startups with a single senior engineer (augmented by AI) becomes possible at a lower price point.

We might actually end up with more work. And an altered kind of work

Re: Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

#12

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

rkwz wrote: post #6

> I can’t do without the help of AI in my daily development work. I use ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and various AI-driven design platforms. AI can help me improve my efficiency by at least 30%. For some HTML pages or pure algorithm modules, AI code accounts for 80%, and only a small amount of modification is required. If you replace "AI" with "StackOverflow", would you still feel the same?

AI, unlike StackOverflow, won't call you names and XY you.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

#13

Post by thorin »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #12
rkwz wrote: post #6

> I can’t do without the help of AI in my daily development work. I use ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and various AI-driven design platforms. AI can help me improve my efficiency by at least 30%. For some HTML pages or pure algorithm modules, AI code accounts for 80%, and only a small amount of modification is required. If you replace "AI" with "StackOverflow", would you still feel the same?

AI, unlike StackOverflow, won't call you names and XY you.

Yes, this is a major plus point about LLMs which you can ask really stupid questions about things you know nothing about and get a starting point. I'm doing this with Bard all the time.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

#14

Post by schappim »

petabyt wrote: post #3

I do embedded development, I've tried a ton of models and all of them end up hallucinating and wasting my time with the very obscure and undocumented things I work with every day. Maybe if you're in webdev land, AI will replace you, I don't know I have as much hope in AI as I had in website builders and no-code platforms

Both Claude and GPT-4x excel in embedded development. While they aren’t perfect, it’s evident that if the current trend continues, they could potentially do my job within five years.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

#15

Post by austin-cheney »

I sure as hell hope so.

If you are a framework junkie that cannot write original logic or standup some small original application you are already largely irrelevant but your employer just hasn’t determined how to replace you. Everybody else pays the price for that inefficiency.

Software is littered with developers that cannot program. If there is some magic solution that makes these people suddenly irrelevant the world is in a better place. Consider the manual transcription jobs that instantly evaporated because of photocopying.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

#16

Post by seventh12 »

petabyt wrote: post #3

I do embedded development, I've tried a ton of models and all of them end up hallucinating and wasting my time with the very obscure and undocumented things I work with every day. Maybe if you're in webdev land, AI will replace you, I don't know I have as much hope in AI as I had in website builders and no-code platforms

AI is useful even in embedded development, but it certainly won't replace you

Re: Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

#17

Post by paxys »

AI or not, has there ever been a 50 year span in human history where the majority of jobs didn't get redundant? Technology evolves. Newer jobs spring up to replace the ones that were lost. People adjust to the new reality, and our lives are better because of it.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI make us unemployed?

#19

Post by jondwillis »

petabyt wrote: post #3

I do embedded development, I've tried a ton of models and all of them end up hallucinating and wasting my time with the very obscure and undocumented things I work with every day. Maybe if you're in webdev land, AI will replace you, I don't know I have as much hope in AI as I had in website builders and no-code platforms

Do you include good examples and documentation for context, since they do not seem to include much training data directly related to what you’re working on? I have mixed to positive-ish results with that approach.
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