Well, all the promoters promote these because most of them don’t understand it or has money incentives. These models consume HUGE energy to run and a lot of knowledge to coerce an useful result. You as a developer has the knowledge to ask these questions, but if you look at the people who are looking to cut costs(management), most of these people are not adequately knowledgeable at all. Look at any decent sized corp or even startups, most management have difficulty correctly fleshing out a proper and clear requirement. A product that is successful is like a garden, it needs tending and I don’t see these manager types having the knowledge to tend, else we would be all out of work several decades back. The thing is, everyone can use a hammer, but only the experienced ones can produce a crafted creative good. Everyone can probably pain a banana but only the real artists well practiced can produce an aesthetic portrait of a banana.
Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
#22Can''t you just replace every mention of AI with outsourcing in your post? Literally everyone was freaking out in the 2000's about their job because of India.
Yeah and that was a far more realistic fear, because talented Indian developers actually exist and aren't just a hypothetical future that requires a series of incredible technological breakthroughs.
But in reality, many of the outsourcing firms relied on volume and conformity.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
#23Can''t you just replace every mention of AI with outsourcing in your post? Literally everyone was freaking out in the 2000's about their job because of India.
Yeah and that was a far more realistic fear, because talented Indian developers actually exist and aren't just a hypothetical future that requires a series of incredible technological breakthroughs.
Except (and really not wanting to offend Indians), what we did is import a large number (by percentage of tech jobs) of skilled Indians which drove down the market rate for those jobs, either way it had the 'benefit' of driving down costs.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
#24People will still be needed to translate the instructions from upper management, i.e. "make it better, now" or "make the red thing do what the blue thing does" most of which are never going to be parsable with any kind of AI, so humans will form the abstraction layer even if they're writing less of the code.
What struck me yesterday was a post about a "$10,000 ChatGPT error" at a startup, where clearly the young devs had "got ChatGPT to do it" and refactor a load of stuff because the code was then in Python of some flavour, which I read between the lines and figured was likely the only coding they knew about from a bootcamp. But then there was a terrible error in the GPT-generated code which caused loads of hassle because nobody caught it, because nobody was really even reading the code upon which the company depended, because who cares, ChatGPT is doing everything now. So it did make me concerned that tech startups are going to shift from being funded with lazy ideas or marketese to being funded with the lazy ideas and marketese of people who cannot even code at all.
Hence it's a step closer towards idiocracy as much as it is our glowing AI future, when Silicon Valley produces neither silicon nor even software, because once the young generation can go "just get the AI to do it" nobody is going to spend time keeping their mental tools sharp by actually coding all day long. Understanding coding could become a rarer and rarer skill in some ways, so today's coders will be the dark wizards of a decade's time.
Also I don't think LLM's will ever reach the point where they can code deeply enough because a large amount of majorly complex material and massive projects are not in publicly accessible repositories. And what I mean too is that I think for all the hype, continuing quantum leaps in AI, and human-coded-at-great-pain quantum leaps in AI are still needed. I don't think that simply throwing more GPUs at the problem is going to keep delivering spectacular returns, rather, diminishing returns, and things might flatten out for a while. I don't think there's going to be some "cascade of free lunch" and AIs will improve themselves on their own, at least not in the immediate future. And that is also a recipe for a mess and chaos.
A good thing to do is to focus on doing what you really love, try reducing your social following closer to zero, and not buy into the hype so much. The AI-pocalypse could still be a long way off and there's no need to worry yourself all the way there. Humans want humans. If an AI could generate me perfect "new" Bob Dylan or Beatles songs, then they'd be interesting for 30 seconds and I'd go back to the real thing. An undead, disembodied AI therapist is also not going to replace an actual flesh-and-blood empathetic therapist any time soon. Much of what we find most profound and valuable does not reduce down to language, which is where AI first took a mis-step, right at the very idea of the Turing test. It's been stuck with that confusion ever since, by people who believe it without thinking philosophically – it reduces us to the only board that AI can ever win on, whereas we have so many more games. Including the "ignoring it because it's an AI" game.
One of the main things capitalism does for us is keep us busy all day. AI automation isn't going to remove this key feature of capitalism.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
#25The simple development tasks, like building a basic CRUD website will get easier. Companies will want something more sophisticated. Development of anything sophisticated by AI will take much longer. And, by then, everyone will want something new and more complex once again. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
#26I work in an industry already being shaped by LLMs. Today, it's eating away at the bottom of the market, but I assume it will eventually eat away at the top where I am positioned too. I was talking to a friend about the book "psychology of money" and the part he shared was related to paying down your mortgage, even if it makes more financial sense to keep your money invested in the market with a higher expected retur…
That's like buying Bitcoin because you're worried about inflation.
The analogy is that 1) there's a high possibility that you may be buying at the local maximum 2) you may not be buying the best stock, only the most visible 3) it might be mostly unrelated and flop even if AI took off.
But don't take it as a discouragement. I've been proven wrong about tech too many times. Back in uni, we talked about PE ratio, but these days it doesn't really matter for tech - if you had bought Meta/FB at peak P/E you'd be rich. It's to make sure all assumptions are sound, rather than which ones are correct.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
#27I want to second two other responses: first, the one about outsourcing to India. This was a very real threat, and practically no one wanted to get a CS degree for a while. But we learned that the hard part about writing software is not hacking out code, it's communicating with the people that are driving requirements. Being in the same culture and time zone turned out to be more important than being cheap. This part of the job is still hugely important and will continue to be until AI is good enough to read the minds of business people that can't properly communicate what they need.
The other is connection. I think long term this is all we have -- people will prefer people because they are people, even if that is not as good as AI. Artists won't get paid for putting paint on paper anymore, for the most part, they will make money because they are human and can build a human connection with their clients. Not everyone will like this -- artists who may be brilliant with a paintbrush but totally lack people skills will probably wash out. I think for the rest of us, things will go similarly but later. Build and reinforce your human relationships.
Finally, breathe a little. We have some time, probably. The world won't change overnight. Stay on your toes, keep your eyes open. There will be opportunities as well as risks.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
#28From the title, I honestly thought you were asking, “As a regular, sensible person, how do I put up with all these AI doomsayers?”
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
#29> advances of AI in the past years can imagine a not-too-distant future (likely less than 10 years) where literally everything we are doing currently will be obsolete
Based on that you really understand what is current AI is all about no more than a bbc journalist.
So don’t worry about your worries, there are far more elephants in the room than this one.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
#30First, I’m kind of surprised that low/no-code tools, as well as outsourcing, weren’t an existential threat well before AI. Like, anyone can create a website nowadays, and yet it’s never been a better time to be a web developer.
I think we underestimate the difficulty of our jobs, or perhaps we underestimate the chance that something better will take its place. Perhaps a bit of both.
The other thing that helps me sleep at night is that I really don’t believe that AGI is as near or inevitable as people make it out to be. I don’t necessarily think models will simply get better with more data and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll just somehow figure out intelligence. When I think about AI’s bitter lesson, that nothing has really worked better than scale and data, I take that as a sign that we really don’t understand intelligence. I don’t take it as a sign that “scale is all you need”. Maybe to a certain point, but for AGI? I don’t know man.
Of course, suppose I’m wrong and we create AI that’s smarter than your typical software developer and costs the equivalent of pennies an hour. In which case, well, game over, but I don’t think I’ll feel like much of a loser. Sure, there goes my job, but the economy also probably gets wrecked in the process for a variety of factors. Massive unemployment aside, there’s also the fact that paying for software is kind of stupid when you can just pay a competent AI to make it for you or use some open source alternative made by people pooling AI resources together. This is kind of a big deal considering that tech companies basically carry the stock market. I haven’t even touched on the damage done to the rest of the economy by the existence of intelligence-on-demand for cheap. Either the government considers drastic measures and a radical rethinking of economics, or they ride out the worst economic crisis in history and try to figure out which holy cow gets cut from the government budget now that tax revenue is in free fall. Despite how little faith I have in the government, I trust their self-preservation instincts will kick in and they’ll resort to taking certain socialist economic policies more seriously.