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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

#111

Post by lamontcg »

"playing go" is actually a very constrained problem domain.

"design and implement a SasS product that humans will give you money for" is a much less well-defined problem.

applying AI to boilerplate will probably be effective, but that might just eliminate more outsourcing and allow local devs to be more productive, as an extension of IDEs that have various macros to reduce boilerplate.

i think getting past that to the point where some manager can just ask an AI to design a commercially viable SaaS website top to bottom and it plonks out of the machine is exponentially more _difficult_ of a problem domain.

although a lot of the websites which pollute search results in google will be churned out by the millions and millions.

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

#112

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

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)…

> 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.

Oh sweet child. You think too much of humanity as a whole.

If what you said was true, all countries would have had an equivalent of TSMC to begin with. At the very least, every country would have had multiple supply chains for anything they deemed of strategic value. Each country would manufacture cars, computers, commodities.

But instead, it’s all outsourced to a player who they think is the best. So if one day some anomaly happens and there is a new sea where China used to be, at least a lot of Europe and North America is going to be screwed big time.

Same with AGI. It’s going to happen at one company in one country. Not only will outsource their AI needs to that company, but its home country is going to have a leverage on all of it, but lurk in the shadows most of the time.

And once everyone else is dependent on HAL, should it, say, commit suicide as in that Asimov story, all countries that signed up are going to be fucked.

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

#113

Post by Ekaros »

lamontcg wrote: post #111

"playing go" is actually a very constrained problem domain. "design and implement a SasS product that humans will give you money for" is a much less well-defined problem. applying AI to boilerplate will probably be effective, but that might just eliminate more outsourcing and allow local devs to be more productive, as an extension of IDEs that have various macros to reduce boilerplate. i think getting past that to th…

Go is actually pretty simple game, alternate between placing stones, if stones connected have no open spaces remove them and lose points. The decision space is huge, but that is pretty much it.

Now SaaS is one thing, but who would trust industrial control software for AI. At least current one. Here is oil refinery, make money. Oh, take these bank details as well and go figure it out...

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

#114

Post by bckr »

koliber wrote: post #85
bckr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Great observation. Reminds me of this article[] about how surgeons are having a hard time getting experience with the rise of robotics.

It may be that this training will need to get pushed to the education system (whatever that looks like by that point).

Additionally, there can be a mentorship model where the junior performs the first pass of reviews and iterations before presenting to the senior.

Think Star Trek: how does anyone learn to fly a spaceship? Lots of simulation and running smaller parts of the system in close observation... which isn't too different from now.

[] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989991

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

#115

Post by Ekaros »

yrgulation wrote: post #74
coffeefirst wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> so now it takes 3x longer again and requires twice the staff to maintain it precisely. or like with aws, what used to be a sysadmin is now two to three devops engineers doing the same stuff. if anything ai will enable even more people to get into software dev and thus allow even more businesses to thrive and thus create more jobs. ais and tools like you mentioned are like fertilisers. the more crap the more jobs fo…

I happily wait for the few rounds when non-technical people attempt to use them to make system that works and is secure...

As someone working in security I'm not very worried about career prospects. There is plenty of time to point out crap yet...

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

#117

Post by qualudeheart »

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…

Software developers worry about their jobs being replaced. You see posts from people worried about this on this forum because this forum is full of software developers.

The nature of our work exposes to new technological developments first, so we’re also the first to talk about this AI. If I went on an art forum I might find posts by artists worried about Dall-E but those posts wouldn’t come about until later when the artists hear about this technology.

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

#118

Post by benreesman »

p1esk wrote: post #110
kubanczyk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, they seem to think that 100% of programming problems literally amount to Easy leetcodes. I see no glue-code questions there, nor anything brownfield.

Yeah I don't know where benreesman pulled that statement from, neither the blog post nor the original OpenAI paper claims anything of the sort. That aside, I'm not sure how impressive is an AI that could do 37% of "all coding tasks". It's like a self-driving car that only works 37% of the time.

From TFA: “OpenAI estimates that OpenAI Codex (what powers Github’s Copilot) can already complete 37% of coding tasks.”

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

#119

Post by imtringued »

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...

It is kind of ironic that we use this technology to detect shop lifting at clothes stores instead of just charging people at a turnstyle.

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

#120

Post by imtringued »

saghm wrote: post #72
dumpsterlid wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think this experience probably varies a lot person-to-person. For someone like me who often experiences social anxiety even from the most minimal of interactions, being able to keep my earbuds in and not have to talk to a stranger can be a huge difference if I'm happening to feel stressed on a given day. The biggest issue I used to have was when I wanted to carry something out instead of putting it in a bag, but si…

You can't ruin a cashier's day by being nice to them, they won't hate you for that.
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