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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

#361

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

the_doctah wrote: post #253
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please give some examples then. I've found the GPT-4 version to be remarkably accurate, and when it makes mistakes it's not hard to spot them. For example, I commented last week that I've found ChatGPT to be a great tool for managing my task list, and for whatever reason the "verbal" back-and-forth works much better for my brain than a simple checklist-based todo app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35390644 . B…

For a time, I was attempting to use it for game advice during my recent playthrough of Demon's Souls remake (What's the best build for X? What's the best weapon for X?). I asked ChatGPT where to find the NPC The Filthy Woman in a certain level. ChatGPT answered that that NPC doesn't exist, and perhaps I had the wrong game? That NPC most certainly does exist. I was also using it to generate some Java code for a bit. T…

> I asked ChatGPT where to find the NPC The Filthy Woman in a certain level. ChatGPT answered that that NPC doesn't exist, and perhaps I had the wrong game? That NPC most certainly does exist.

OK, wow - that example kind of perfectly proves my point. If I were to ask ChatGPT an extremely specific, low-level question about an extremely niche topic, then I would absolutely be on "high alert" that it wouldn't know the answer. And while I agree the "confidence" with which ChatGPT asserts its answers (though I'd argue the GPT-4 version does a much better job at not being over-confident than 3.5) is off-putting, I think it's pretty easy to detect where it's wrong.

I'd also be curious about your Java example. There was a good YouTube video of a guy that got ChatGPT to write a "population" game for him. In some cases on first try it would output code that had compile errors, e.g. because it had wrong versions of Python dependencies. He would just paste the errors back in to ChatGPT and ChatGPT would correct itself. Again, though, this highlights my point that I use ChatGPT as the start of my processes, a 1st draft if you will. I don't just ask it to write some code, then when I get an error throw my hands up and say "see how dumb ChatGPT is." To each their own, though.

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

#364

Post by kingboss »

Herval_freire wrote: post #139
moonchrome wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As AI perfects mimicking human output, the line between human and AI-generated content becomes irrelevant. Once "organic" content is trendy, the market will flood with cheap fakes. Good luck with your "differentiator" in a sea of indistinguishable content.

It could one day be possible for AI content to be so superior to human content that it becomes distinguishable. We may actually be identifying human content by how inferior it is to AI generated content. It could be happening already.

Why would I choose the inferior product?

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

#365

Post by fnovd »

gavinhoward wrote: post #318
Closi wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed their point - calculators don't exist in accountancy firms to 'encourage accountants not to think', they exist because they dramatically speed up accountancy and make accountants more productive. Sure you can open an accountancy business and refuse to use calculators, but that's just working with a strange self-imposed limit rather than using technology to best support your business.

And you missed my point. Yes, calculators do that. I'm arguing that "AI" does not let programmers write better code faster. It lets them write worse code faster, or better code slower .

I'm sure people said the same thing about compilers. And then interpreters. Even today people complain about interpreted languages being too slow and not requiring people to understand "enough" of what's actually happening.

Turns out that really doesn't matter. I think your argument is incredibly weak; the fact that some people don't use these tools effectively doesn't mean that nobody can. Whoever figures this stuff out is going to win, that's just how it works.

That is to say, there will always be a niche for people who refuse to move up the chain of abstraction: they're actually incredibly necessary. However, as low-level foundations improve, the possibilities enabled higher up the chain grow at an exponentially-higher rate, and so that's where most of the work is needed. Career-wise it might be better to avoid AI if that's what you want to do, but as a business I can't see a dogmatic stance against these tools being anything but an own goal.

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

#366

Post by uconnectlol »

sharemywin wrote: post #345
uconnectlol wrote: post #342

What's this constant obsession with "stealing jobs"? The tech industry has been dead for something like 30 years. There is zero intellectual design being put into it. Music is just a bunch of sellouts. You know how "content creators" do that cringy shit where they try to base their life around monetizing their "content"? That's how "musicians" worked before the internet. I couldn't care less how their jobs are threat…

> As technological capability increases, there will just be a point where food and everything will be handed out for free. that's not the trend line I'm seeing.

Most jobs are worthless and shouldn't be artificially preserved. The end game of AI is just doing nothing and still having a roof and food. It's not like we're going to have human manual labor picking apples. At which point all of these people who sold out and made their what would otherwise be an intellectual job into something profitable, will have no value.

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

#367

Post by JohnFen »

Herval_freire wrote: post #360
JohnFen wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What should affect whether something is considered is it's likelihood of happening. Right, which is why I don't spend a lot of time considering a future where "AI content may even be preferable and better than human produces content." In part because I don't think this is likely at all. But also in part because if it does happen, then there's literally no way to compete with that. My career will be over, and it's u…

>I'm having a very hard time seeing what could be done (in the possible future we're talking about). Easy. While industrial automation has largely eliminated repetitive mechanical tasks robotics has not yet advanced to the point where it can replicate the versatility of the human form. The gap is partly closing with 3D printing but this is not moving nearly as fast as AI. Additionally there's just multitudes of const…

> Additionally there's just multitudes of construction jobs, maintenance jobs, physical jobs that can't be replaced.

Yes, I should have been more specific: I can't think of a way I could adapt to such a world in a way that wouldn't be utterly soul-crushing. If those sorts of jobs were appealing to me, I would still be doing them.

In any case, this is why I don't spend a lot of time thinking about this eventuality. I think it's an unlikely one, and it's a possible future that looks incredibly dystopian to me.

Since it's an unlikely future that I consider incredibly dystopian and have no idea how I could possible adapt to it, the most logical thing to do is to not waste a lot of time thinking about it. If/when the future comes, perhaps there will be options that are unclear to me now, or perhaps I'm just doomed. Either way, that's a bridge better crossed when I get to it. There's far too much uncertainty right now to engage in anything like planning.

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

#368

Post by jmfldn »

gavinhoward wrote: post #262
jmfldn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arc…

Honestly I wish you well in this approach, I just worry that ignoring this completely may be too costly.

I'm just advocating a very cautious middle path. For now, these tools are just code helpers to me (and right now I barely use them for that), but the moment I sense a genuine advantage to using them in my job, and I don't think it undermines my engineering, I think I'll have to engage further. Undermining for me means, reducing software quality, reliability, my own understanding. To the extent that I can work faster though, and even improve on those metrics, so much the better.

The semi-near future to me (5-10 years?) , breathless hype-aside, looks like one where quite a lot of coding is automated with machines able to range over whole codebases and build higher level models of the software, and then getting into architectural system-design suggestions. I also see them linking up with company docs to build up a model of the whole domain. This doesn't need AGI, it's just an extension of what we have now, and I can't see it being anything other than a game changer.

Forget ChatGPT, imagine your own private LLM, trained on your code and business, with all the weird glitches these prototypes have currently largely gone. You, the expert architect, are still needed, but you've now added a superpower to your tool chain.

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

#369

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

timr wrote: post #230
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please give some examples then. I've found the GPT-4 version to be remarkably accurate, and when it makes mistakes it's not hard to spot them. For example, I commented last week that I've found ChatGPT to be a great tool for managing my task list, and for whatever reason the "verbal" back-and-forth works much better for my brain than a simple checklist-based todo app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35390644 . B…

OK, here's one: this substack [1] was flying around a week or two ago, asserting that the marginal value of programmers will fall to zero by 2030. What a dream! No more annoying nerds! The code in the post is wrong. For this "trivial" example, if you just blindly copied it into your code, it would not do what you want it to do. I love this example not just because it's ironic, but because it's a perfect illustration…

OK, so we are 100% in agreement then? I absolutely don't believe the marginal value of programmers will fall to zero by 2030 (but, to clarify, the way you phrased your original sentence I thought it was that an LLM made this assertion, not some random VC dudes). I also highlighted in my posts that I use AI as an aid to my processes, "That is, for me, the output of ChatGPT or other AI tools is the starting point of my investigation, not the end output. Yes, if you just blindly paste the output from an AI tool you're going to have a bad time, but we also standardize code reviews into the human code-writing process - this isn't that different."

Also, I think the coding example in that substack highlights that one of the most important characteristics of good programmers has always been clarifying requirements. I had to read the phrase "remove all ASCII emojis except the one for shrugs" a couple times because it wasn't immediately clear to me what was meant by "ASCII emojis". I think this example also highlights what happens when you have 2 "VC bros" who don't know what they're talking about highlighting the "clever" nature of what ChatGPT did, because it is totally wrong. Still, I'd easily bet that I could create a much clearer prompt and give it to ChatGPT and get better results, and still have it save me time in writing the boiler plate structure for my code.

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

#370

Post by gavinhoward »

fnovd wrote: post #359
gavinhoward wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know much about aviation, do you? Aviation is about redundancy . Redundancy is a good use of a pilot's focus. That's why I did both. I didn't blindly trust my calculator to not have bugs (even though I wrote it!), and I didn't blindly trust my hand calculations to be correct. If they agree, though, it's a good sign that everything is in good order. That's what redundancy is for, to ensure that a problem in…

Redundancy is not a good use of focus for most people (except SREs and the like). The whole point of redundancy is to remove something from focus. I'm guessing you checked everything by hand for the sole purpose of not having to focus on these calculations mid-flight. I'm sure most commercial pilots rely on a larger organization to make these checks for them and their organization probably employs its own system of c…

The final authority, and final liability, for the airplane is on the head of the pilots.

A commercial pilot friend has told me that they still check the calculations. When they don't, they get accidents like the Gimli Glider.

It's like saying that putting all of the legal checks on the lawyers is not going to give you a sustainable business. But we all know that's wrong.

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