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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

#91

Post by cyphar »

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…

> Speech-to-text. It's pretty good and the spread of automated closed captions to youtube videos is a definite benefit. But broadcast TV will almost exclusively use human subtitlers still, because the last few percent of accuracy isn't there.

This also widely varies by language. Automated Japanese subtitles on YouTube are completely useless. Even with someone speaking clearly you'll find at least 2-3 mistakes every line of dialogue and if they speak slightly quickly then all bets are off (it also makes mistakes that seem strange -- Japanese has a very limited set of phonemes so consistently guessing the wrong ones seems very strange).

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

#92

Post by coffee_beqn »

ta988 wrote: post #83
mjr00 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)...

Not “still”, wages have risen like crazy in the last decades

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

#93

Post by coffee_beqn »

j1anc wrote: post #62
pjc50 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

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

#94

Post by mjr00 »

vitus wrote: post #89
mjr00 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Yes, but that's not really relevant to what I was asking -- why would using any of those give an AI an advantage over, say, generating Python or C code?

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

#95

Post by mjr00 »

ta988 wrote: post #83
mjr00 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)...

Yeah exactly. The impending apocalypse that will make software developers redundant has been just around the corner for 20 years, during which time the number of people employed in software has increased exponentially and software developer salaries are some of the highest you can get for non-managerial work.

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

#96

Post by vishnugupta »

29athrowaway wrote: post #46
vishnugupta wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And same will happen to development. It is already happening. For example; setting up a production DB in primary-secondary mode; with daily back up and what not used to be quite a bit of manual grunt work. AWS Aurora and similar services handle 70-80% of the pain leaving you with setting up right table, index etc., Same in setting up a backend stack with DNS, load balancer etc., My guess is cloud services will auto…

That's why most dev teams now do dev ops, where before you had an ops team and on premise infrastructure, which is still necessary in some sectors with strict data regulations but not for everyone.

Indeed. We now have dev teams trying to tinker around with infra layer and more often shooting themselves in the foot because the UI makes it easy to play around. We often read horror stories of a one person startup accidentally running up $1MM AWS bills.

That said, we will continue to have a need for dedicated dev-ops team. Just that instead of say 10 people team it'd require 2 person team. But you still need a person dedicated (maybe part time) baby-sitting infrastructure. Don't let every dev get their hands on infra.

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

#97

Post by wombatpm »

dboreham wrote: post #14

I'll begin worrying after we get self driving lawyers.

A self driving car that becomes a lawyer that enters into contracts with body shops where it randomly causes accident in return for a % of the business, free charging and maintenance.

I don’t know which is worse, an amoral corporation using AI to crush its workers or an independent AI working for its own interests

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

#98

Post by coffee_beqn »

throwaway4220 wrote: post #42
etothepii wrote: post #6

The main edge I see in AI today is the ability to create random ideas on a theme. I suspect this will end up being much more of a force multiplier than a replacement tool.

This is not random though it’s derivative of toms of input data. Can it be genuinely creative?

I don’t see why it couldn’t - but the end result might be incoherent to humans. It could easily combine or extrapolate on random things to create “art”

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

#99

Post by elforce002 »

EGreg wrote: post #55

Let me summarize the state of AI as a layman who has been following the main trends: 1) Cyc and reasoning - stuck for decades but making slow progress 2) GANNs - can detect a whole lot of things by being trained on data 3) MTCS - this is AlphaGo and AlphaZero. Adversarial networks that play each other. Have nearly solved any turn based game that can be expressed this way, and can be used for StarCraft etc. 4) Data fi…

Preach.

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

#100

Post by unknownsky »

qualudeheart wrote: post #68
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.

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 they bother to oppress the poor, or will they start killing them off completely? Historically, peasants have been oppressed but still kept alive because the rich and powerful relied on them to farm the food, build the houses and empty the chamberpots. In a world with 80% unemployment, will the rich and powerful be merciful enough to only oppress that 80% of the population, or will they kill them instead?
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