John Carmack left Oculus to work on an AGI startup. Of course he's not going to fearmonger AI's disastrous effects on the job market, he has a business to market.
Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#22That sounds like a good thing. There are many people paid to write software who absolutely cannot write original code and have no idea how things actually work. A lot of that can be, and probably should be, eliminated by AI.
Those people still need to eat and pay rent so maybe we should solve that before making who knows how many millions of people jobless.
Useless jobs shouldn't exist, people should be able to live without wasting resources and their life in doing false work.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#23I wouldn't be surprised if John Carmack combines activities of product owner, game designer, and programmer. In most industry cases, programming jobs are not like this. There are dedicated positions for people who focus on delivered value and it's not programmers. So in scrum terms, he might actually be saying that programmers will be indeed obsolete, but product owners, game designers and other kinds of business ana…
Nope, the programmers simply are the suppliers of the product owner. Everything John said still holds true of their position.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#24Just avoid careers in software development. These are not high paying, if you factor in total time invested and spent working; and you have to waste your life away sitting in an office chasing tickets. Nothing engineery about it. It’s modern day assembly line work.
What do you recommend for someone with a CS degree?
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#25If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can every other white collar job and humanity will look very different than what it is now. And I’ve been using ChatGPT and copilot and it’s a nice tool but nowhere near a replacement for knowing how to program.
Right now it is a kindergarten child at cognitive level, and like humans it will grow up and evolve, unless we nuke ourselves before it happens.
right now it will only solve problem someone else already knows the solution to, so not even at that.
that said, I expect an ai assisted clerk to be order magnitude faster than not. it will be though for people at the bottom of the learning curve for a bit, but in half generation the educational offering will include how to work toghether with ai, massively improving worker productivity
that is not to say it won't have negative impact. there's so much job that we need, currently programmer are in high demand, and it's the one of the highest paying jobs, but that will change, possibly dramatically. I expect people at the top of the chain to be in trouble first (architects and whatnot) because they are the least creative and the one that possibly require the most knowledge, things ai do exceptionally well as of today.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#26If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can every other white collar job and humanity will look very different than what it is now. And I’ve been using ChatGPT and copilot and it’s a nice tool but nowhere near a replacement for knowing how to program.
Right now it is a kindergarten child at cognitive level, and like humans it will grow up and evolve, unless we nuke ourselves before it happens.
It's not kindergarten child at congitive level. It's a different kind of cognition than humans, if you can call it "cognition" at all.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#27Just avoid careers in software development. These are not high paying, if you factor in total time invested and spent working; and you have to waste your life away sitting in an office chasing tickets. Nothing engineery about it. It’s modern day assembly line work.
What do you recommend for someone with a CS degree?
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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#28Yeah, unfortunately I’m in love with the tooling and the engineering. Often the “product” is so mundane, I find it offensive
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#29Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017.
His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers.
I said it then and I will say it now. If your managers could specify what they need in a manner that no-code tools, or now AI, can generate the code they want, they will have to be extremely exact in their language. So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language.
Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away?
In essence what has happened in software development is that the level of abstraction has gone up while the machine has taken over more and more of the nitty gritty details. From punchcards, to assembly, to COBOL, C, Perl, Java, Python, Erlang, Rust.
Of course I'm leaving out some languages here, but the level of abstraction has been rising.
But the rigidity of what is needed to specify a program that really does what you want hasn't. Especially evidenced by the fact that recent programming language developments often have a specific area where they shine, but not raising the abstraction level that much.
I'd be surprised if the next step is "Hi, I'm an ideas guy, please give me an app that does Uber, for bicycles, but better."
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#30Just avoid careers in software development. These are not high paying, if you factor in total time invested and spent working; and you have to waste your life away sitting in an office chasing tickets. Nothing engineery about it. It’s modern day assembly line work.
What do you recommend for someone with a CS degree?
Don’t listen to the guy above. Terrible advice likely colored by an unhappy career just like don’t listen to me because it works be followed by barring generally happy with mine.
> and you have to waste your life away sitting in an office chasing tickets. Nothing engineery about it. It’s modern day assembly line work.
Every job I’ve literally done I’ve set my own direction. Sure, there’s some negotiation because ultimately you have to get the work done of the business. But you make recommendations and figure out what’s compelling to the business and how that intersects with something you might find interesting and want to work on.