"I am concerned that the cotton gin will make slavery obsolete and all my slaves will lose their value"
Insert similarly ridiculous and offensive comment about women being replaced by any number of domestic labour-saving devices.
Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
501–510 of 829 posts
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#502Just 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.
Not to mention how it destroys your ability to date. Women don't like STEMlords. Watch a girl's face at a bar when she asks you how much you make, and watch as you follow up, say the 6 figure+ amount, and then watch the exact moment that you mention you code. Coding is an "ick" for an awful lot of people. I don't blame them. I gave up on an awful lot of social skills so that I could escape the worst of capitalist exp…
The dating part is like affected by an inability to socialise due to sitting at a machine all day everyday. Also massively harmful to one’s health - a cost often not factored in. It is only natural that not spending time with people will lead to a gradual regression in people skills.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can every other white collar job If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can it replace even the blue collar jobs. Because if it can’t that is what this developer here will be working on.
I'm pretty sure the reason human physical labour hasn't been replaced yet in many areas isn't because AI tech hasn't advanced sufficiently - there are real engineering challenges in automating physical interactions with the real world that it's hard to see how ever more advanced LLMs will help much with (though they could certainly assist in the design process). That humans are still needed to cook/assemble burgers o…
They’re held back by robotics and energy storage more than anything. How would chatgpt paint my wall or fix my sink or install electrical wiring in my house?
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#504Here's my current thinking on the impact of GPT-4 on the developer job market: - I expect developer productivity to go up 1.5x - 15x over the next several years assuming GTP-4 based tooling is integrated into IDEs. - There will be two opposing forces acting on developer wages. First, developers will be more productive, therefore the price of one hour of work should go up. But - the supply of developer output will inc…
I think you have two common misconceptions here. 1) Wages have very little to do with value/productivity in a free market. They are almost entirely determined by supply and demand. Value simply places a ceiling on compensation. Thus, if far more people can perform a "programming" job because of GPT-X, unless the demand for those jobs rises significantly the net result will be wage reduction. 2) There's this weird thi…
It's not that more people can do programming with GPT-X around, because the AI will only solve the problems that have already been solved thousands of time in the past in slightly different ways. What GPT-X cannot do is left to real CS people. So instead of coding CRUD systems, we can do real algorithms research again, except fewer people are capable of it.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's literally what the language model is. It might correctly generate a solution to a "novel" question/problem that is sufficiently close to one with an existing, known answer. But then again it might not. And in software development, it's going to take someone who is knowledgeable to tell the difference. I think software engineering is going to look very different in a few years, and likely be a smaller field wit…
"One of the biggest differences that we saw from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 was this emergent ability to reason better," Mira Murati, OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer, told ABC News." https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-ai-r... I neither know how LLMs work nor how our brains work. And I don't know what could be parallel between these two. For my very very limited knowledge of how properties can emerge from…
Just because the guy said it doesn't make it true. "Emergent reasoning" is a great marketing hype-term that contains no technical specifications, like 'retina display'.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#506If 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.
This person is asking about career prospects 10-15 years out though. I'm sorry, but the landscape in then might be as alien to someone asking today, as todays would have been to someone asking 15 years ago (2008). What John said is correct, but personally I think he's underplaying how much people could be affected. Those "product skills" take years of grinding to really sharpen, and in 15 years only a few people migh…
> I'm sorry, but the landscape in then might be as alien to someone asking today, as todays would have been to someone asking 15 years ago (2008).
Hahahah. Yes. Who could have foreseen the trailblazing advances in the tech industry such as "television, but over the internet", "booking rooms, but via a website" or "posting messages on a forum"
Don't forget the stuff powering it: "RPC, but over HTTP", "scripting languages, but compiled", or "Key-value stores"
If only I had dared to dream.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#507Reminds me of patio11's classic "don't call yourself a programmer": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
I've read the whole thing. Frankly, this was quite a depressing. Something about this Economic Reductionistic way of thinking puts me off. Even tough I agree with a lot of his points — for example, the importance of communication over anything else — it just seems like a very one-sided worldview.
For example, he constantly outlines aspects 'business value', but not one sentence on the inherent, intrinsic joy of creating and building something (software in this case).
And I think you can't just ignore that part.
As someone in this post has put it quite beautifully: > It's like telling a musician to become a DJ because the point of performing is to entertain people.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#508Looking 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 n…
Right now AI can randomly generate images or text that are similar to what we describe, but every time you run it you get a different randomly-generated image. If I were to tell a client that I was going to randomly generate a financial transaction that "looked similar to" the one they entered, they would destroy me!
While absolute rigor in programming is a hard thing to find in reality, I don't think people understand the difference at all.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#509So much this.
We, as software engineers, build software to deliver values, to accomplish certain goals.
It doesn’t reside in typing the code out.
Be the devil’s advocate, that part of the job is boring.
AI tools will come in and take over whatever they could take over from this moment forward.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#510I think of AI as simply a productivity tool, and it is here to make everyone more productive, like Google did 25ish years ago. Google may have put some out of a job, but it made everyone much more efficient. This is a good thing. Work weeks are shortening around the world and this will help us maintain productivity as we work less. (Fingers crossed)