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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

#81

Post by throwaway_7874 »

semiquaver wrote: post #60

When google search was introduced it was a revelation. Search results were eerily accurate compared with the then-state-of-the-art. The key was using computers to interpret and leverage human-made webs of knowledge. 20+ years later, search sucks because it’s mostly robots (or humans acting like robots) writing SEO centric copy to capture valuable queries. Most of these strikingly capable “AI” tools today like DALL-E…

Well you gave me a new perspective.

But what happens when AI needs less and less "real" data for training then it, will not degrade like google's search, which by the way is still the best from all the search engines I have known and tried.

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

#82

Post by paulhodge »

When it comes to AI replacing jobs the biggest wonder I have is.. why is there so much talk and attention on replacing software jobs first? Software work is fairly high skill and hard to replace. Every hour that a software dev spends doing a task, they are doing some kind of work that the industry has probably tried and failed to automate, and we're talking about an industry filled with the most clever and most qualified automation-writers there are.

There's many jobs that AI will probably replace. Software will be among the last.

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

#83

Post by ta988 »

mjr00 wrote: post #43
jtwebman wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

> An AI doesn't need to use human readable programming languages or frameworks to solve problems. Why would an AI writing assembly give it an advantage? > Also software engineers are expensive. Corporate greed will drive this faster. Are they? You can get a software engineer for less than $10,000/year. When I was going to university in the mid-00s I had quite a few "advisors" recommend against going into computer sci…

And yet 17y later salaries are still sky high. Someone that believed that advisor could have had a job paying a lot and time on the side or enough of a safety net to learn new skills if salaries ever tank (which we still don't really see a sign of)...

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

#84

Post by koliber »

dumpsterlid wrote: post #32
29athrowaway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Self checkout at supermarkets absolutely sucks. For the customer it is a huge downgrade in experience.

I’ve seen different self checkout systems that provide a vastly different experience. Some are painful, like the ones where you scan a bar code and place the items in a scale. It’s effectively a checkout where I am now the clerk, but am less well trained, less experienced, and can not solve my own issues when they happen.

I’ve also seen a superb one at Decathlon stores in Poland. You dump your items in a box. It automagically scans everything using something that I’m guessing is RFID based. Bag, swipe a card to pay, and goIt is much simpler to use and is actually pleasant. It’s one step short of just walking out of the store without actually checking out.

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

#85

Post by koliber »

bckr wrote: post #77
vincentmarle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh, that didn't cross my mind. Yes, that's a serious potential. Take it a few more steps and then you get to automated analysis tools, system simulations, and NLP systems. This looks essentially like IronMan's Jarvis running heuristics interactively. "Which edge cases did you cover?" `I covered 3000 edge cases extrapolated from these bug reports...`

This is a possibility, but it presents a problem. In order to be a senior enough engineer to review PRs really well, you need years of practical experience. Those years start out in entry level jobs where you make lots of mistakes and learn by doing. But these are the very jobs that AI is most likely to eliminate first. So the first AIs will have good PR reviewers that were “classically trained”. Who will review the PRs of AI 50 years from now?

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

#86

Post by ta988 »

paulhodge wrote: post #82

When it comes to AI replacing jobs the biggest wonder I have is.. why is there so much talk and attention on replacing software jobs first? Software work is fairly high skill and hard to replace. Every hour that a software dev spends doing a task, they are doing some kind of work that the industry has probably tried and failed to automate, and we're talking about an industry filled with the most clever and most quali…

That's because people saying that are fooled and believe that SE is just about writing code and that it is similar to making a picture like Dall-E or writing a pseudo-profound text like GPT-3 does. This is really far from reality. You have to design, redesign, correct bugs, think about the whole system from backend to frontend, envision user interaction take into account evil actors or rogue employees... And to that you add a layer of politics that forbid some options and favor others because of company culture. Good luck designing an AI that does that. It is not impossible, but it is much harder than a robot that mixes liquids or a program that make drawings that look cool.

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

#88

Post by thesz »

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

One of my tasks as a software engineer is to reduce code as much as possible. Because code is a liability, it needs to be supported, maintained, adapted, ported, etc, etc. If you can do same or more with less code, please do. If you can reduce other's code, which is often legacy code, please, do.

Right now all demoes I see are generating code, they do not changing code, not deleting something. This means the only way for text-to-code system to get a new program for a changing requirement is to regenerate new code from scratch.

I am not in the mood of deducing what that means for AI, it is enough for me to know what that means for typical software development process.

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

#89

Post by vitus »

mjr00 wrote: post #43
jtwebman wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

> An AI doesn't need to use human readable programming languages or frameworks to solve problems. Why would an AI writing assembly give it an advantage? > Also software engineers are expensive. Corporate greed will drive this faster. Are they? You can get a software engineer for less than $10,000/year. When I was going to university in the mid-00s I had quite a few "advisors" recommend against going into computer sci…

> Why would an AI writing assembly give it an advantage?

There are lots of non-human-optimized options that aren't raw assembly. Any intermediate representation, for one (e.g. LLVM IR, C-- used by ghc, Python/JVM bytecode, abstract syntax trees to simplify parsing).

And even raw assembly is often not what the CPU operates directly on (see: microcode).

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

#90

Post by coffee_beqn »

Ekaros wrote: post #47
scaredginger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-checkout isn't a great example since it's mainly just shifting the work from one human (the employee) to another (the customer), rather than true automation. As a side note, we were told decades ago that visual programming would similarly displace developers; however, I'm doing perfectly fine

True automation would be system that would at 100% accuracy note and bill all of the bagged items you carry out of the shop. Without ever scanning them. Which turns the whole thing to much harder case to solve. 90% is simple, but it really doesn't change the last 10% still needing to do essentially the 90% again...

There’s already Amazon Go which is fully automated
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