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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#141

Post by tablespoon »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #137
crop_rotation wrote: post #103

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…

As AI progresses, job options will reduce to various flavors of people who tell AI what to do, or tell other people what to do, or do physical things that machines are bad at. Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. The entire "middle" portion of most organizations that exist to connect the people making the high l…

> Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service.

And at the very end, it will reduce to capital only, with no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They (you) will end up as little more as impotent ants to AI-fueled Elon Musks, neglected until the infestation needs to be cleared to make way for some project.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#142

Post by btbuildem »

DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

From your comment:

> I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field.

From the second line of your comment:

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs

Do you need GPT to put the two together? I think it's pretty obvious why folks are freaking out.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#143

Post by dudeinhawaii »

Jevon23 wrote: post #46
DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

I really don’t want my productivity to increase. Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do. Alternative scenario is that individual developer…

I think the rapid rate of change in modern software libraries has left me underwhelmed with ChatGPT when it comes to new libraries, C++, or niche APIs (financial, etc).

If you're writing react/python/angular or something popular it seems to do amazing things and spit out entire websites (per demos).

Unfortunately, when I try to put together C++, Rust, or even C# using recent libraries like Blazor it chokes up. I fully understand at least one reason why (libraries and language features not being in the training data from 2021) but that makes me feel that perhaps software engineering at the cutting edge or niche is safe and still requires human reasoning. Not to mention things like properly understanding when and why to use certain data structures, real-world impact of coding choices, pricing, esoteric speed/efficiency improvements, etc.

I think there's still a broad general area where good, great, and amazing+ developers can operate without much threat and in fact using their knowledge and experience to leverage GPT-4 (or others) as a force multiplier.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#144

Post by CuriouslyC »

tablespoon wrote: post #133
crop_rotation wrote: post #103

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…

> What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world[?] If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope it will, upward social mobility will be nearly eliminated... unless there's some kind of successful Luddite revolution against the technology and the people that own it . But that's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure against revolution, as well as strict gun control in mos…

I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased. This technology will allow entrepreneurs and solo content creators to accomplish a lot more, but it'll also eliminate a lot of safe career paths. As a result, if you don't want to be stuck in the underclass doing manual labor or customer service, you'll need to either be brilliant, well connected, start a business or create content of some sort that attracts an audience you can monetize. The people who do well will do very well, but a lot of people who would have done decently before are going to fail.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#145

Post by tablespoon »

DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

> I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field.

> If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

And if you're a junior software engineer? Fuck you and be unemployed.*

Do you get it now?

* Until you can climb up the ladder where each rung is now 20 feet apart.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#146

Post by intelVISA »

crop_rotation wrote: post #121
tjr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP? And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it w…

The amount of people who create genuinely new things is so tiny that I am not sure it is even relevant to the discussion. And here I mean genuinely new things, not translating some C lib to java or similar stuff, or changing existing libraries to handle more stuff. If the amount of people that will have social mobility opportunities will be equivalent to the amount of people who could have invented the MPG format or…

> people who create genuinely new things is so tiny

This is my insurance against LLMs, only works if the market demands new things...

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#147

Post by sirsinsalot »

KrugerDunnings wrote: post #77

Working as a software engineer I often feels like I am living in the world of the Handmaidens Tale as a women with a functioning womb where the hole of society is organised around controlling everything I do. Hopefully LLM will change this but I do not underestimate the intellectual laziness of most "knowledge workers"

Highly paid middle class white male (statistically) compares his existence to the brutal oppression of women in a fictional book.

What insight!

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#148

Post by TchoBeer »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #68
PaulWaldman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was never a need for humans to understand code, are higher level languages really the most efficient?

Probably not but I doubt ASM is either. It's too low level, and it doesn't make sense for a LLM to have to do things like instruction selection which would can be done far better by existing tools (LLVM etc.). Maybe it could just be an alternative syntax for an existing language which is more optimized for input/output to an LLM.

I am thinking that the latter might eventually emerge, probably as part of a bigger tool chain e.g. langchain. Something like java bytecode which is low level and portable, but optimized for the ways that LLMs (perhaps interfacing with other tools) work.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#149

Post by CuriouslyC »

tablespoon wrote: post #141
CuriouslyC wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As AI progresses, job options will reduce to various flavors of people who tell AI what to do, or tell other people what to do, or do physical things that machines are bad at. Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. The entire "middle" portion of most organizations that exist to connect the people making the high l…

> Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. And at the very end, it will reduce to capital only , with no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They (you) will end up as little mo…

While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#150

Post by raldi »

btbuildem wrote: post #142
DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

From your comment: > I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. From the second line of your comment: > Now you don’t need to hire junior devs Do you need GPT to put the two together? I think it's pretty obvious why folks are freaking out.

Now junior devs don't have to build the product of someone else's dreams; they can build the product of their own dreams.
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