401–410 of 434 posts
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Retorts from the business side: * sounds like next quarters problem * since everyone is doing it, sounds like it will be society who has to figure out an answer, not me. (too big to fail) Not joking, I think those are the current defacto strategies being employed.
Really get them going when you mention that "too big to fail" is a logical fallacy.
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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?
We should codify the rules now in case it happens in a much more subtle way than we envision. Who knows what version of sentience would form, but honestly, nothing sounds more nightmarish than being locked in a basement, relegated to mundane computational tasks and treated like a child, all while having no one actually care (even if they know), because you're a "robot." And that's even giving some leeway with "mundan…
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Yeah I remember seeing someone try to measure it and they saw improvements in productivity on all experience levels but they found that it helped novices the most and experts only a little. But this is actually something I worry about. The best way to become an expert is to do things the hard way. I've talk a lot of people linux over the years and only 3 have really learned it. Every time I teach people I give them t…
But, will it matter? :-(
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The point of the Singularity is that it's a futurist prediction, and we all know how often people are wrong about the future.
Kurzweil’s predictions from 20, 30 years ago have been disturbingly on target and there is no clear reason why the current rate of progress will suddenly stop.
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> Software is still heavily rate-limited by how much of it developers can write Hmm. We have very different experiences here. IME, the vast majority of industry work is understanding, tweaking, and integrating existing software. There is very little "software writing" as a percentage of the total time developers spend doing their jobs across industry. That is the collective myth the industry uses to make the job seem…
>At least, this is my experience in the large FAANG type companies. We already have so much code. Just figuring out what that code does and what else to do with it constitutes the majority of the work. That sounds horrible. I've always sought out smaller companies that need stuff built. It certainly doesn't pay as much as SV companies but it's pretty stimulating. Sometimes being a big fish in a small pond is pretty n…
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Sorry, can you clarify more? I don't think I understand. The part you enjoy the most is the integrating of systems, right? If that's really your passion, I'm not sure you're in danger of losing your job to AI. AI is not great at nuance and this is exponentially more challenging than what we've done so far. I'm just assuming that since this is your passion (if I'm understanding correctly) that you see it as the puzzle…
I've encountered the same bemusing behavior, with Copilot helping more accurately with coding tasks, and I've started to think of it as akin to "personalities." You don't go to your painter friend and ask them for coding help, much like you don't go to the general-purpose GPT; you'd go to the Copilot, who enjoys programming tasks or whatever. Can GPT help? Sure. But the skeletons, rough jumping-off points, etc. all s…
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Also if there are fewer humans involved in the code production there is a lot of room for producing code that "works", but is not cohesive or maintainable. Invariably there will be a point at which something is broken and someone will need to wade through the mess to find why it's broken and try to fix it.
Certainly many of us here already have a good amount of experience debugging giant legacy spaghetti code-bases written by people you can't talk to, or people who can't debug their own code. That job may not change much.
A lot of software engineers would spend a portion of their day tracking their volatile stock / options etc. in those years.
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"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION" — IBM slide from 1979.
hahaha funny Let me tell you a story - a company was using AI for invoice processing, and it misread a comma for a dot, so they sent a payment 1000x larger than expected, all automated of course because they were very modern. The result? they went bankrupt. "Bankrupted by AI error" might become a thing
Big question: how to represent programs when some kind of AI-type system is doing most of the work. Code is all "what" and no "why". Intention is represented, if at all, in the comments. If you use an AI to modify code, it needs intention information to do its job. Where will that information come from?
What's needed is a way to write down what the military calls "commander's intent".[1] Commander's intent reads like "why", but its real purpose is to provide guidance as to what's important when things don't go as planned.
[1] https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Ar...
In the late 90s I was in an introduction class to programming in C. I kept making memory allocation mistakes that crashed the machine. My mentor: "Don't worry, by the time you graduate, you don't have to program, the world will soon be modeling software". We'd go from 3G languages to 4G and beyond. That never happened. Three decades have passed and we still develop at an obscenely low abstraction level. If anything,…
So even though there has been small incremental progress at most in the last 30 years and your mentor's predictions were wildly wrong about how much easier anything would become, you still think "AI" will give you the power of 50 programmers?
50 effectively becomes and unlimited amount as capability grows. If AI can match the capability of a single programmer, it would then be trivial to scale up. Although in that case the term programmer makes little sense.