Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me

Yep, at a much lower compensation for starters.

Glass can be half empty or half full:

1) You currently have top %5 salary, not tomorrow, but today - you probably doesn't have to worry that much for the next 5 years at least and probably will enjoy similar high salary

2) You have currently 20 years of experience - that's a lot. Compare to someone who is currently studying IT or just starting their education.

3) After 20 years of working in industry most likely you have some savings and warchest

4) You probably in better situation comparing to someone just starting carieer - most people work around 40 years in their field before retiring, you already half there.

5) Worst case maybe you won't enjoy top 5% salary but median Tech salary - which is still way above median salary in most countries. You managed to live with lower salary before so will do fine as well.

6) With your experience probably easier for you to find remote job if haven't done already. You seems like don't have mortage so probably easy to move to cheaper city or even country even if just for couple of years.

7) Many expats on retired visa in south east asia (thailand, malaysia, indonesia, vietnam) - life is so much cheaper there - that's assuming you are currently from more developed countries.

8) If you salaries will get lower you will have 3 choices:

a) live with lower salary like you used to before but at least you job will be easier to because more automated by LLM so probably less stressful

b) should be easier for you to learn and pick any new specializations with LLM as your copilot: rust, machine learning, vr/ar, robotics,

c) embrace it and use it to develop some you own product/SaaS/app as a side hassle/hobby - it's probably now the best window of opportunity for indie devs.

In 2019, I read "AI-Superpowers" by Kai-Fu Lee, where he went through most of the worries we have today. In the final chapters however, he started talking more about how we, as humans, need to adapt, and he also mentioned UBI as a (possible) way forward.

At some point, AI indeed will "replace" what people like you (and me, who has pretty much the same background as you) do. We are just tools that knows how to code.

Quite a big part of my time, as part of a large development team, consists of fixing bugs. I believe AI in the near future will be able to solve those, based on input and expectations. Someone still needs to verify the code, and take responsibility for the changes, before they're released to production. This is where I think developers will be needed. I don't think you'll ever find a PO so frisky as to just release it, unless for maybe very small domains.

But.. we'll all get hit. And the way I see it, developers are not in the direct line of fire.

I hope UBI will never actually happen, even though they're testing it out several places in the world recently. I also hope a One World Government will never happen, even though it looks like we're heading for it. I also hope WHO, UN and NATO will not gain the power they seem to strive for, but I don't see much resistance.

Instead.. what I do personally, which might be a solution for you also, is to try to embrace it. These years are quite unique in the history of the human kind. It's a mixture of 1984, Terminator 2, Ex Machina and more. I have a bad feeling about it all, but at the same time I'm curious, and still have hope. But also, I'll try to resist the sinister parts of it whenever I get the chance.

When google turned up (or before) we started to get more productive by being able to look up information and other people's code examples and so on. I couldn't have done my job properly in my whole career without search to help me.

Anyone could look up an internet reference and copy some lines of code without being special. Or could download a python library that does what was needed and write almost no code.

GPT is a kind of improvement of search which again makes the common knowledge base more usable. It obviously lets people do less work just as installing a module saves a mountain of work.

Yet jobs have not seemed to get more scarce since search engines appeared. We have built out a huge internet infrastructure and that might have skewed things because it needed such a lot of effort and people.

We've simply (IMO) done more and more amazing things because there has been an appetite for them. Perhaps there is a limit to software and there might be a time when there are enough people doing it that the salaries look less amazing but it need not fall off a cliff suddenly.

We tend to do the same things many times over anyhow,

I think the main reason people become less worried about chatGPT is because of its hallucinations and inability to have actual intelligence (there may be “sparks” of intelligence, but nothing crazy impressive). Also, AI systems replacing engineers is unlikely to happen for a while until we can reach AGI just because of all the nuances and the nature of the work we do requires a lot more than pulling data from a bunch of sources and outputting a response in a formatted way. I think people don’t really understand what is going on under the hood so it makes sense why people are so worried, it is seemingly very intelligent, but still doesn’t have the intelligence to know how to apply what it “knows”. We’ve made a lot of progress so far but I think we are going to hit a wall very soon if we haven’t already. I don’t think people should be worried about GPT8 even.