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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

sheshbabu.com

321–330 of 434 posts

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also more of our time thinking about higher level, hard, technical problems (e.g., how do we use math to build a system that dynamically optimizes itself for whatever metric we care about?). It’s likely that a near-future AI system can suggest suitable math and implement it in an algorithm for the problem the user wants solved. An expert who understands it might be able to critique and ask for a better solution…

This kind of optimization is what I did for the last few years of my career, so I might be biased / limited in my thinking about what AI is capable of. But a lot of this area is still being figured out by humans, and there are a lot of tradeoffs between the math/software/business sides that limits what we can do. I'm not sure many business decision makers would give free rein to AI (they don't give it to engineers to…

> AI is trained on the past.

Yes, unless models are being live fine-tuned, but generally yes.

>What we call AI today does not use reason

I don’t think this is correct- I think it’s more accurate to say it reasons on its priors rather than from first principles.

For the most part, I agree with the rest of your post.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#322
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION" — IBM slide from 1979.

Some might consider that a plus in the same way that "you can't get fired for choosing IBM" -- it's a way to outsource blame.

ted nelson calls it "cybercrud", blaming the machine as if it has the final say on the matter, "the system won't let me..."

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#323
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not skilled in these areas so I am very scared. I am going to go back to school to get a nursing degree because it is guaranteed to not be disrupted by the disrupters like now where the disrupters are disrupting themselves. Despite the personal risks of a healthcare job, it will bring me so much more peace of mind.

I'm afraid it's naive to think that nursing is not going to get disrupted by AI. Seems like robotics is going to massively impact medical caregiving in the near future.

> robotics is going to massively impact medical caregiving in the near future

Not in the near near future. Do you know anything about nursing? The field will require some hard changes for robots to replace nurses, and the robots will need licenses

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#324
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember back in the 80s I had friends who enjoyed coding in assembly and felt that using higher-level languages was "cheating" - isn't this just a continuation of that?

I do think it’s basically the same. Its further on the same continuum of: Natural language/Machine code.

I don't really think it's a continuum. There is a continuum of abstraction among programming languages, from machine code to Java/Python/Haskell or whatever, but natural language is fundamentally different: it's ambiguous, ill-defined. Even if LLMs generate a lot of our code in the future, somebody is going to have to understand it, verify its correctness, and maintain it.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#325
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard one CEO been asked about gen-ai tools to be used in the company. The answer was vague, like they are evaluating the tooling. However one good example was made: chatgpt is really good in writing mails, and in summarizing text as well. He said they don't want to have situation when sender is using chatgpt to write a fancy mail and recipient is using chatgpt to read it. However I think that it is the directio…

Yeah it’s good for the kinds of emails that people don’t really read or, at best, just skim over

If people would just stop loading those emails up with bullshit then we wouldn't have any reason to put AI on either end of the transaction.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AGI and artificial sentience comes hand in hand, I fail to see how our plans to spin up AGI's as a black box to "do the work" is not essentially a new form of slavery. Speaking from an ethics point of view: at what point do we say that AGI has crossed a line and deserves self autonomy? And how would we ever know when the line is crossed?

Humans can't be copied. It seems like the inability to copy people is one of the pillars of our morality. If I could somehow make a perfect copy of myself, would I think about morality and ethics the same way? Probably not. AGI will theoretically be able to create perfect copies of itself. Will it be immoral for an AGI to clone itself to get some work done, then cause the clone to cease its existence? That's what com…

> Humans can't be copied.

There is no reason to believe this, and every reason to believe that humans can, in fact, be cloned/copied/whatever. It may not be an instant process like copying a file, but there is nothing innately special about the bio-computers we call brains.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#327
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not skilled in these areas so I am very scared. I am going to go back to school to get a nursing degree because it is guaranteed to not be disrupted by the disrupters like now where the disrupters are disrupting themselves. Despite the personal risks of a healthcare job, it will bring me so much more peace of mind.

I'm afraid it's naive to think that nursing is not going to get disrupted by AI. Seems like robotics is going to massively impact medical caregiving in the near future.

Even without robotics, many jobs like nursing (or construction) that require training will be able to be accomplished with much less training + a live computer coach that can give context-specific directions.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#328
post #327
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid it's naive to think that nursing is not going to get disrupted by AI. Seems like robotics is going to massively impact medical caregiving in the near future.

Even without robotics, many jobs like nursing (or construction) that require training will be able to be accomplished with much less training + a live computer coach that can give context-specific directions.

This is how we get to Idiocracy. Everyone is now relying on AI and become stupid because of it.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#329
post #26

As long as there is no AGI, no software engineer needs to be worried about their job. And when there is, obviously everything in every field will change and this discussion will soon be futile.

and does even AGI change the bigger picture? we have 26.3 million AGIs currently working in this space [1]. I've never seen a single one take all the work of the others away... [1] https://www.griddynamics.com/blog/number-software-developers... .

Presumably, the same ability we have to scale software which drives the marginal cost of creating it down will apply to creating this kind of software.

The difference here though is the high compute cost might upset this ability to scale cheaply enough to make it worthwhile economically. We won’t know for a while IMO; new techniques could make the algorithms more efficient, or new tech will make the compute hardware really cheap. Or maybe we run out of shit to train on and the AI growth curve flattens out. Or an Evil Karpathy’s Decepticons architecture comes out and we’re all doomed.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#330

This is the future of software development: > The Administration will work with Congress and the private sector to develop legislation establishing liability for software products and services. Any such legislation should prevent manufacturers and software publishers with market power from fully disclaiming liability by contract, and establish higher standards of care for software in specific high-risk scenarios. To…

I can’t believe I hadn’t seen this earlier. Am I wrong, or could this change the software profession - accountability trickling down to the engineer which inevitably leads to insurance and licensure?
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