Reassuring read from someone unable to consistently write "ChatGPT" vs "ChatGTP".
AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
81–90 of 496 posts
Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
#82I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…
Possibly. This is certainly a pattern that works in other industries. I am aware of a local glass company with about 50 years of operation under its belt. They have tooling, but the process is heavily manual; no aspect of it is end-to-end automated. Their primary customers are those requiring high precision for industrial applications (electrical, aeronautics). They are forever capacity-capped because their model doe…
This might be a bad comparison. But I feel like Marvel movies (and TV shows) tried to scale, and lost it. And that there was a sweet-spot, where less was more. It's way to oversimplified, but I think they tried to churn out hits from a factory after a build-up in some home runs, but then took on too much and have diluted their films & shows, where it's all a bit flat and underdelivering what audiences expected.
I like this glass company, though. Seems like they know what's up.
Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
#83I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…
On the other hand, I think semi-business productivity will skyrocket. Just think what the landscape for open source will look like in even a year. There will be lots of cool motives that are not for profit greatly enhanced by AI, and I think it could point to brighter and more intellectual futures (of course, where intellect activities will be even more elitized than today, sort of a regress to the previous centuries, but with vast more output and better), albeit after a crunch period.
For instance, I review all that the AI writes for my newsletter[0], but the kind of content I put out now wasn't easily done (teaching Chinese through relatively obscure rock songs, and also programming in Chinese) without lots more work and knowledge, and that means I wouldn't have done it without the magic AI employee.
0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/i/103754530/chinesepython
Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
#84At some level it’s tautological. Initially I had a similar negative reaction other commenters had, but I think I’m deciding I like the people framing. Obviously this is not an either-or. It’s not a question of AI vs people, it’s both AI+people. But only people are making the choices. People are building AI, people who can use AI will choose to use it, and people who run businesses will choose to allow it and/or incorporate it. Just like jobs lost to immigration and/or outsourcing, the jobs aren’t being stolen, they’re being intentionally given to cheaper alternatives, by business people, without much worry about the consequences. It’s healthy for us to think about the AI revolution as a social & economic choice, because that’s what it really is.
Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far (super early days, I know) the main thing I've used AI for at work is to write tests for code I'm working on. I get to do the fun bit, solving the problem space, and the AI gets to do the tedious bit (and do it faster than I would). I'm liking at least that level of AI integration.
This is the one that is most scary to me as a user of software. Have the AI write some of the code, sure. But tests have to be correct. Autogenerating a mountain of mostly-correct tests strikes me as a great way of ending up with surprising behavior that is a nightmare to untangle.
I see the assumption that automation means it removes the human from the task. The article is precisely about a human is still intermediating. Writing tests doesn’t mean blindly accepting the test, it mean the boilerplate of the test is auto completed based on a human description, then a human verifies the correctness of the output. Will people take the shortcut? Of course. But AI didn’t create or magnify that problem. How many “return true” or incomplete tests or missing significant cases etc have you reviewed or stumbled across? Or worse; the test free code base?
Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
You cannot in good conscience be wishing to do menial tasks for a living, that AI can do for you and instead of you. That's how doing manual search and replace instead of search/replace in editor or computing stuff in spreadsheet by hand instead of using formulas. If you think AI's output is suboptimal, right. Maybe find a way to use/train AI better to produce good enough output. But simply wishing to out-robot a rob…
I think the parent's point is the exact opposite of what you have argued against. The author is saying they are afraid 'robots' will come for the fun stuff, rather than only being a tool for the menial labour. Think of the recent generative AI artwork...rather than drawing, and creating, (some/most?) artists fear just being prompt-carvers. The fun of the art has been replaced with menial labour of crafting prompts.
I wonder how "artsy" kids growing up today feel. Getting good at visual arts takes a lot of time and practice and it must be very discouraging when your best output is easily beaten by a guy typing "some flowers in a vase in the style of Van Gogh" into Dall-E.
Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
#87I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…
AI is not well-defined and what has that label will change quickly. So I suppose you just have to stay a bit behind the times.
Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
#88I'd love if AI automated the 'talking to people' part of my job for me
Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far (super early days, I know) the main thing I've used AI for at work is to write tests for code I'm working on. I get to do the fun bit, solving the problem space, and the AI gets to do the tedious bit (and do it faster than I would). I'm liking at least that level of AI integration.
This is the one that is most scary to me as a user of software. Have the AI write some of the code, sure. But tests have to be correct. Autogenerating a mountain of mostly-correct tests strikes me as a great way of ending up with surprising behavior that is a nightmare to untangle.
Tests are easy to verify - if they aren't they are probably bad tests. Using AI for stuff that's easy to verify has been good so far.
Knowing what tests to write is another story.
My problem with AI generated tests is that they lead to over testing and it bogs you down once you have to do refactoring. Ideally detailed tests should come once you're on like 3rd iteration and really sure you've nailed the design (oh I hate TDD if it isn't obvious). With AI I'm getting detailed tests and first try implementations, bad code locked in everywere :(
More tests != better code, tests are still code - the less code you have to satisfy some goal the better.
Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
#90The article can't even spell "ChatGPT" right! And randomly makes words plural like "white collars job" and "a sure things."
The author says they are a ghost writer and is confident they can do a better job than AI, and according to their bio they have written 100+ papers... I wouldn't be so confident that they are better than AI and writing stuff like this if this is their best work!