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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

#261

Post by fnimick »

baremetal wrote: post #248
fnimick wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't be serious. The vast majority of the "means of production" are owned by the top 1-5% of the country. Sure, I have a 401k, I have 0.000001% of Amazon, that doesn't make me an owner.

You are very likely in the top 5% of earners. Top 5% of Earners $342,987[1] [1] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...

No, I'm not. I'm not even in the top 10%.

Also, we can be concerned for people less fortunate than us. "You're probably wealthy so why do you care" is such a stupid argument.

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

#262

Post by gavinhoward »

jmfldn wrote: post #44
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…

I think the zero sum, "use AI everywhere" vs "don't use it at all" are both to be avoided. The wise path is somewhere in the middle. On avoiding it, if your competitors are getting massive productivity gains from AI tools, your hand-crafted, artisanal code is going to be expensive and your customers will vote with their wallets.

Maybe, but that's a bet I'm willing to take.

Here's the rub: if my competitors are going to realize "massive productivity gains," where are those gains actually coming from?

Are they coming from the time it takes to type? No, because typing is a small portion of the time we spend as programmers.

Are the gains coming from the time spent on design and architecture? Maybe, but that means my software will have better architecture, and I will have better velocity in the long run. (I have real-world experience with this, by the way; it takes me, on average, less than an hour to fix bugs in my bc nowadays. Architecture matters for long-term velocity.)

Are the gains coming from the time squashing bugs? No, this is where AI would decrease productivity because you have to carefully review outputs to ensure there are not any bugs.

In essence, the productivity gains will only happen the less that my competitors actually review and clean up the code from these tools. The less they do that, the lower the quality. The lower the quality, the slower their long-term velocity will be.

"A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." [1]

[1]: https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185

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

#263

Post by [deleted] »

dahart wrote: post #207
ajmurmann wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 move…

Okay, it’s not a perfect analogy, but from the perspective of a business owner, the choice is to put money into something expensive like local human labor, or something cheaper whether it’s remote labor or automation of some kind. Lots of tools have been accused of stealing jobs over the years, from factory machines to vehicles to computers. In that sense, I’m only borrowing an analogy with a long rich tradition. The…

[deleted]

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

#264

Post by ajmurmann »

timr wrote: post #217
ajmurmann wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at any metric like life expectancy, literacy rates, child mortality, things have gotten so much better. (One exception is the US where life expectancy dropped. As was heavily discussed online the last days, this is mostly due to gun violence, traffic accidents and drug abuse which IMO are largely cultural and not due to automation)

> this is mostly due to gun violence, traffic accidents and drug abuse which IMO are largely cultural and not due to automation) Not really. It's mostly due to food and metabolic disorders (i.e. diabetes, heart disease; iirc heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, and depending on how you group, diabetes is in the top five), which actually underscores the point. People are dying at higher rates because they…

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799722418556931?...

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

#265

Post by rf15 »

goldfeld wrote: post #113
rf15 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I am absolutely no fan of the new AI products, and the only question you have to answer for yourself is: can you leverage this technology for what you are trying to do? For me the answer was "yes", and I now enjoy having copilot around to dynamically type boilerplate I'd need much longer to type and fill out myself.

Why would you be absolutely no fan of a sure technological improvement? Is it because of the personal threat to professionals? Not commenting personally on you here, but I am very surprised at programmers' lack of nose for opportunities and how, after realizing GPT could do coding even before replacing retail and industry jobs, coders are completely on the defense. Is it a threat to job availability and security? Yes…

The technology's hype precedes it whenever you try to engage with it. On the surface, it looks a lot like the bitcoin hype, and if you remember IBM Watson you might get the idea that nothing much will come of it. So for me, I will keep using it, but I have nothing but disdain for the people worrying about AI overtaking the world, claiming this will revolutionise everything/etc.. Especially since this technology is almost good enough to tempt lay people to believe the statistically related words to your query would mean anything. In fact, iirc this has already happened and e.g. caused a suicide.

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

#266

Post by globalise83 »

lnsru wrote: post #223
globalise83 wrote: post #219

I think this is right. There is no AI in the foreseeable future that would be able to understand a complex business, prioritise and roadmap some future strategy, and convert that into business requirements detailed enough to implement as working software, architect a proper solution, and then work with an AI to develop and verify the software through an incremental development process. But I do believe that there are…

You can outsource everything right now to some dirt cheap offshore team. I doubt, that outsourcing alone will make you very rich.

Outsourcing to a team of cheap offshore developers has immense coordination costs for whoever is doing the outsourcing: communication, clarification verification, etc. Outsourcing to an AI has virtually none: feedback is instant, you can check understanding easily, you can specify exactly what you want to get back. And the costs are dramatically lower than even the cheapest of outsourcers. Whoever can orchestrate the activity of an AI will capture nearly all of the value.

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

#267

Post by gavinhoward »

simonw wrote: post #24
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…

Will you use a spellchecker when you send out emails about your company? How about doing research with a regular search engine? "Refusing to use AI" doesn't make sense to me as a blanket policy. If you're going to make that commitment - to yourself or to anyone else - you'll need to be a lot more precise in what you actually mean by that.

It's a difference of degree.

I still check the output of the spell checker. I still check the output of the search engine.

The problem with these "AI" tools is that they are magnitudes more likely to encourage you to not check the output because checking the output takes orders of magnitude longer than it does to check the output of a spell checker or search engine.

Do people refer to spell checkers as AI? No, so I don't include that. But I also don't use spell checkers, actually, including on my blog. [1]

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/

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

#270

Post by Kiro »

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.

For me, the alternative is no tests at all.
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