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A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

aifuture.substack.com

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Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

#21

Post by 29athrowaway »

AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #11
pjc50 wrote: post #4

> Once an AI gets just 1% efficient at automation, it achieves 100% efficiency quickly thereafter This is really optimistic and completely overlooks the 80/20 problems that have plagued both AI automation and traditional automation. The AI sweeps up the easy cases and humans are left to fix, or paper over with heuristics, the remainder. Example? Speech-to-text. It's pretty good and the spread of automated closed capt…

To further support your point, AI is 90% efficient/good at driving. But the last 10% is so hard that some think it's impossible to have 100% self-driving cars.

Self-checkout at supermarkets does 90% of the work. The 10% of work remaining is done by a human supervising the self-checkout stations.

And same will happen to development. Lots of tasks will be automated and less people will be needed as a result.

Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

#24

Post by horns4lyfe »

ajafari1 wrote: post #2

OpenAI estimates that Github’s Copilot can already complete 37% of coding tasks. DeepMind’s AlphaCode is estimated to be 59% better at coding competitions than Codex. Will automation start in 2023?

You said this in the article too, but why does being better at coding competitions, where there are very specific rules and outcomes, mean this AI can work in the very abstract realm of software development. And forgive me if OpenAIs estimates of its own product it’s trying to sell isn’t exactly convincing. It looks like you were a former PM, and to be frank, until an AI can wade through confusing conversations with PMs to figure out what actually needs to be built, engineer jobs are safe.

Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

#25

Post by vincentmarle »

29athrowaway wrote: post #21
AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To further support your point, AI is 90% efficient/good at driving. But the last 10% is so hard that some think it's impossible to have 100% self-driving cars.

Self-checkout at supermarkets does 90% of the work. The 10% of work remaining is done by a human supervising the self-checkout stations. And same will happen to development. Lots of tasks will be automated and less people will be needed as a result.

Maybe our engineering jobs will consist of reviewing AI-generated PRs all day…

Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

#27

Post by pjc50 »

29athrowaway wrote: post #21
AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To further support your point, AI is 90% efficient/good at driving. But the last 10% is so hard that some think it's impossible to have 100% self-driving cars.

Self-checkout at supermarkets does 90% of the work. The 10% of work remaining is done by a human supervising the self-checkout stations. And same will happen to development. Lots of tasks will be automated and less people will be needed as a result.

If you look back at far enough, quite a lot of development tasks have already been automated. There aren't all that many people manually "coding", or turning high level languages into machine code. That got automated early on.

Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

#28

Post by pjc50 »

ab791055 wrote: post #15
pjc50 wrote: post #4

> Once an AI gets just 1% efficient at automation, it achieves 100% efficiency quickly thereafter This is really optimistic and completely overlooks the 80/20 problems that have plagued both AI automation and traditional automation. The AI sweeps up the easy cases and humans are left to fix, or paper over with heuristics, the remainder. Example? Speech-to-text. It's pretty good and the spread of automated closed capt…

Hmm, that said, the purpose of using AI is because it can replace human labour and save labour cost. Otherwise, we won't see half the money flowing into AI research. So AI certainly might prove to become a crisis for human on economic and military fronts. Since the end goal of AI will result in a crisis for human, isn't it time for governments to step in and regulate?

> Since the end goal of AI will result in a crisis for human, isn't it time for governments to step in and regulate?

Your crisis has been added to the queue and will be dealt with in due course. Your crisis is .. 1,734 in the crisis queue.

(seriously I think this is best left alone until it clarifies or subsumed into the general "regulation of harmful doing things with computers", like privacy laws. Self-driving cars are their own game and deserve immediate scrutiny.)

Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

#29

Post by sweezyjeezy »

pjc50 wrote: post #4

> Once an AI gets just 1% efficient at automation, it achieves 100% efficiency quickly thereafter This is really optimistic and completely overlooks the 80/20 problems that have plagued both AI automation and traditional automation. The AI sweeps up the easy cases and humans are left to fix, or paper over with heuristics, the remainder. Example? Speech-to-text. It's pretty good and the spread of automated closed capt…

Exactly - AI is amazing at taking millions of datapoints and interpolating between them to be extremely accurate - as long as it's well within the manifold of examples it's seen. But edge cases where it has either not seen it before, or has seen few examples? Who knows, usually a lot worse.

Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

#30

Post by jtwebman »

pjc50 wrote: post #4

> Once an AI gets just 1% efficient at automation, it achieves 100% efficiency quickly thereafter This is really optimistic and completely overlooks the 80/20 problems that have plagued both AI automation and traditional automation. The AI sweeps up the easy cases and humans are left to fix, or paper over with heuristics, the remainder. Example? Speech-to-text. It's pretty good and the spread of automated closed capt…

I think this is thinking small. An AI doesn't need to use human readable programming languages or frameworks to solve problems. Also software engineers are expensive. Corporate greed will drive this faster.
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