OpenAI thinks their code transformer can already do 37% of all coding “tasks”?
Buzz off.
A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
61–70 of 129 posts
Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think that we are neglecting the possiblity that AI advancement and growth may proceed at an exponential pace as the author mentioned. The more people join AI industry, the faster AI advances, the more money invested in AI and causing more people to join the AI industry. Many people may join AI industry out of fear of losing their current jobs to AI. This may lead to a sudden avalanche of AI advances(domino effect) and also overnight collapse of economy.
Once we reached AGI, there is no way to back out of it and say we don't want it, because now other countries will also have AGI. And there won't be overnight solution to deal with the overnight crisis AGI created.
Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
#63If you work doing ML in production, you know how incredibly difficult it is to get an extra % improvement. The idea of exponential growth that accelerates into the singularity is a sci-fi concept that I have never experienced. From the outside we've experienced exponential improvements in ML models, sure. But those didn't come out of nowhere. They are powered by massive efforts involving humans. Personally I'm not wo…
Because you’re using the library’s we have today; they don’t make the unknown you encountered easy.
What about the ripples from “enough people” losing their jobs?
Covid and the logistics whiplash have done nothing to embed in people they’re just one of seven billion. Each still acts like the king of their own mountain. It’s pretty sad.
You have no say over your place in a future society that appears keen to rug pull the masses lives from under them.
Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
#64> 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…
The thing people forget about whether it's 80/20 (and the last 20 takes infinite time) or whether it's 80/20 (and it happens super-linearly) is the nature of the 20. One of two things tends to happen. 1) The 20 is a fundamentally different problem, but is itself solved by applying different new developments (e.g. most breakthrough devices: semiconductor manufacture and design, cellular phones, iPhone) 2) The 80 is so…
AI doesn't have to fully replace humans (or even be that good) to have detrimental effects on wages and working conditions. Jobs are like oil; if the people who control the supply can reduce quantity by 10 percent, prices spike (this, for workers, would mean that wages decline, work conditions worsen, and hours grow longer).
We're not going to see AIs replacing humans in all jobs any time soon. We are going to see, barring regulation or (better yet) a total overthrow of the corporate system, increasing power accruing to capital--due to AIs' ability to perform the "80" in the aforementioned 80/20 analysis--with devastating human consequences. And this is true even though DALL-E, in the given example, doesn't actually understand (even in a figurative sense) that a third of Africa is desert or that certain facial expressions indicate concentration.
If an AI can do even half of your job--and anything you do as a subordinate probably can, in principle, be done by machines--you should be terrified. You're not going to be working 20 hours per week; you're going to be working for pennies due to wage inelasticity--there's now twice as much competition for jobs. Automation is of course both desirable and inevitable, but we've got to transition to an economic system in which it doesn't result in widespread poverty and homelessness... which is not the one we've got right now.
Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
#65It's pretty much never right to extrapolate something that looks exponential as an actual exponential. It's much more likely to be something with roughly the shape of a logistic curve.
... and the fun part with a logistic curve is guessing how far up you actually are...
Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
#66Any decent developer will use existing libraries and tools for common tasks, so 90% of the code is already written. The remaining 10% of the code is business and use case specifics that change frequently and is made by pulling the pieces provided by libraries together. The ai assisted auto complete will likely never be able to understand use cases, for that it would need sentience - and even humans fail at understand…
Right. The efficiencies are already here in the form of CI/CD, workflow tools like IntelliSense, and boring old stuff like ORMs and libraries. It's probably about 50% faster to make a common CRUD app than it was 20 years ago.
Luckily the industry has found a way to compensate for this by building the common CRUD app in React and Microservices, so now it takes 3x longer again and requires twice the staff to maintain it.
Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
#67All my hope rests on the assumption that creating bigger models with current AI technology will only lead to marginally better results. The old law of diminishing returns. In other words, current model approaches hopefully have a limit (that's not too far away) that will keep them from getting better.
Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
#68Earlier 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.
That’s a scenario people don’t seem to explore.
The scenario in which demand for labor drops massively but human labor is still needed. Many industries would lose 80% of workers, but 20% would remain. Those 20% would be very high status and well paid, at least compared to the UBI neo-serf class that yheir former colleagues of the 80% have fallen off into. It is yhese 20% that woll form a new upper middle class. They will be isolated from the UBI serfs and live in gated communities.
These communities won’t be like the extremely luxurious communities of the one percent, but still isolated from the poor.
In another thread on this topic I’ve predicted a rise of technologically driven authoritarianism where the human elite uses AI to oppress the poor. The 20% that maintain such a system’s infrastructure (technical and otherwise) would probably support it politically. In most right wing authoritarian states the government has drawn support from its upper middle class. In left wing authoritarian states like the Soviet Onion there was a vast beurocrat class that was structurally isomorphic to the upper middle class.
I’m predicting that the humans that hold onto their jobs the longest, and work in high paying stem jobs, will form the core of such a regime. This is good news for many HN users, because you’ll be part of those 20%. I’m just worried what happens to the people that aren’t so lucky.
Of course there are caveats here that the automation may not happen soon, happen quickly or lead to societal upheaval or fascism, but all of those are still possible.
Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
#69Sounds like the AI will need a decentralized money to value compute costs and trade freely with other AI. One advantage we have is that AI is not smart enough to buy Bitcoin yet. That is my hedge against Exponential AI. Another megabull scenario
Re: A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So the ai will make solutions that are mostly correct but then can't be modified by humans to make them work? That is the problem with GAN generated art. It is pretty good but then you don't have a psd to modify it so it is useless for most purposes.
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