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AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

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Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#181

Post by onion2k »

tricksforfree wrote: post #22
lolsowrong wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.

How often are calculators confidently wrong?

AI is confidently wrong about a lot of things, but that doesn't mean it's useless. It means you need to verify what it generates. Doing that for code is much easier than prose. AI that produces wrong code is immediately and obviously wrong. It can't really fool you. It's easy to test. You can even ask AI to write tests for the code it produces to demonstrate it's correct.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#183

Post by JohnFen »

Herval_freire wrote: post #93
gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I 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…

Given the progress, current trendline point to a possible future where AI content is indistinguishable from the "human touch". AI content may even be preferable and better than human produces content. People are reacting to AI as it is right now without projecting where this technology is going in the future. Given the rate of progress in the past year, the scenario I describe is a possibility that is insane not to c…

> Given the rate of progress in the past year, the scenario I describe is a possibility that is insane not to consider.

Personally speaking, there's no point to me considering that. If what you are projecting turns out to be true, all it means is that there no place for me anymore.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#186

Post by cal85 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #101
cal85 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline is a pithy statement that those who ignore AI will be left behind, just as those who ignore automation were left behind. I don't think it means what you seem to think it means.

Ironically, the advice from some circles for those left behind by automation was "learn to code".

Which was good advice, and I would argue still is. But even if you think it is no longer good advice, would you at least accept it was good advice for a very long time, leading to a lot of lucrative careers?

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#187

Post by jandrese »

cal85 wrote: post #67
jandrese wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought was it read exactly like "Guns don't kill people, people who squeeze the trigger kill people." Technically right in a specific context but completely misses the point.

What point does it miss?

The degree to which it enables undesirable behavior. A disturbed guy may want to murder everybody in a nightclub, but his chances of success go way up when he has a gun vs. a knife. A company owner may want to automate your job away, but without AI the automation is too expensive and unreliable.

The big concern with AI isn't so much the Terminator future, but the Cyberpunk future, where all wealth is concentrated at the top and economic mobility is stopped. A dysfunctional feudal system that is impossible to reform because the small handful of people who own everything also control the politics and the police.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#188

Post by carlosjobim »

paxys wrote: post #176

If there are 100 manual jobs today and 80 AI-assisted jobs tomorrow then AI has "stolen" 20 jobs. There's really no other way to frame it. The added productivity gains are going into someone's pocket, and if you are in the labor class then that someone isn't you.

AI is yet another technology that can help you escape the labor class.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#189

Post by ajmurmann »

dahart wrote: post #84

At 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 incor…

Comparing to outsourcing or, even less fitting, immigration is a terrible analogy. Those jobs and their income go to other humans. Other humans who will consume goods and services, this is especially true for immigration. I'd also argue that offshoring is morally positive because it moves the work and associated income to where people need it more, that's why the labor is cheaper there

Both automation and global movement of goods and workers increase productivity which is highly desired. However, automation allows for the owner of the goods of production to retain much more of the value created. This leads to higher wealth concentration. I'm fine with some people being super rich, but I'm worried about there floor. IMO, we need something like UBI to raise the floor. Leaving AI assignment concerns aside, I'd be incredibly excited if the productivity gains from AI were to somehow be used to raise the floor for everyone on the planet. Instead I'm worried that we'll see more unemployment or more low-payed gig/service work on which, in the US, people might struggle to afford basic things like health care, housing and education for their children. Edit: This also carries a high risk of getting some form of violent revolution, or more push towards a too extreme solution like communism. After all communism was born as a response to the automation of the industrial revolution.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#190

Post by zamalek »

UncleMeat wrote: post #41
gaoshan wrote: post #23

Earlier 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.

> But tests have to be correct.

From my experience, ChatGPT-3 has been pretty good at exercising all meaningful branches (I look at code coverage results, I don't care for percentages at all), in the least amount of tests, on the first go. I definitely have to modify each test quite a bit, because it frequently hallucinates API calls that don't exist, but the code that it produces is an incredible blueprint. And I haven't even attempted to use RCI yet: "improve your answer" or "your answer is wrong because..."; ChatGPT-4 is supposedly extremely adept at reflecting on its responses. I can only imagine where this will be in a few years.

I was about 6 months late to Copilot because I was incredibly skeptic about it, without having used it in anger. My skepticism was mostly (but not entirely) wrong. Having actually used ChatGPT in anger, I find the degree of skepticism extremely skeptical.

It's like picking up C in the 1970s. We're at the very beginning when things are pretty rough, but the skills that I am building today are going to be foundational in the future. If you're dismissing AI without giving it a few weeks to earn its keep, it's going to be rough to catch up when things improve to the point where it is required.

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