A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
aifuture.substack.com

I disagree with the response to objection 1. Look for more than a few moments at the right side picture and the shadows of the chess pieces are low quality, the shadows continue off the table, and the checkers on the board look more like backgammon than chess. The AI generated sites that clutter google are easily identified as low quality GPT 3 nonsense.

I’d also disagree that the AI “understands” the physics of the sun, or that Africa has a lot of desert. The prompt includes the desert, so it pulls from pictures of the desert. It doesn’t understand that people have a face when they concentrate either, it finds a picture of someone playing chess then maps an “African fortune teller” onto that person. Oh, it also has to grab photos of an African fortune teller. The AIs used as examples in this article (DALLE, Copilot) are regurgitated humans. What happens when we have new tasks that we can’t train on? They don’t “understand” things, they recreate them.

Maybe I’m just typically bad at estimating the exponential growth. I’m not optimistic I can replace humans with Copilot authored pull requests anytime soon. It might be good at “write a function to convert ISO date time to MM/DD/YYYY” but we’re decades off of “create an API for managing a warehouses inventory.” Either way, being replaced by copilot would require business partners to be able to explain what they want, so I’m not worried.

What about the argument that unless the collective gets better/smarter, that AI will indeed only be as smart as the current collective? Perhaps this is the "AI will hit a ceiling", but it needs to be trained on something. If more and more gets automated in these areas, how will they ever improve?

I don't buy that devs are going to run out of things to do. Instead I see this increasing the leverage of engineers (who are really just creative problem solvers) such that an exponentially increasing number of lower value problems will make financial sense to solve with engineers.

I think we'll see the same thing with designers and all different kinds of tech workers.

Pay will increase, not decrease (at least globally) because business people don't have the training to work these levers or judge the quality of the output.