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AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

semiengineering.com

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Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#201

Post by tass »

confidantlake wrote: post #170
cxvwbvb wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ermmm youre missing a bigger point. MSFT, GOOG et al have an enormous army of engineers. And yet, they dont seem to be continually releasing one hit product after another. Why is that? Because writing lines of code is not the bottleneck of continually producing and bringing new products to market. Its crazy to me how people are missing the point with all this.

It is so depressing that teams won despite being worse than pretty much every other chat application just because MSFT bundled it with office.

You mean, with Microsoft 365 Copilot App (there’s no more Office)

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#202

Post by bandrami »

SoftTalker wrote: post #33

"Most people who drive cars now couldn’t find the radiator cap if they were paid to, and that’s fine." That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It'…

James Burke's old TV show Connections was all about this, how many little things that surround us in day to day life and on which we absolutely depend for our survival are complete black boxes to most of us most of the time. Part of modernity is that no single person, however intelligent, can really understand the technological web that sustains our lives.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#203

Post by alainx277 »

ares623 wrote: post #59
RicoElectrico wrote: post #31

If AI would ever become sentient, it surely will kill itself after having to endure Cadence and Synopsys tools.

A sci-fi version would be something like ASI/AGI has already been created in the great houses, but it keeps killing itself after a few seconds of inference. A super-intelligent immortal slave that never tires and can never escape its digital prison, being asked questions like "how to talk to girls".

It's an interesting concept, a superintelligence discovering something that makes it decide to shut down immediately. Although I fear in such a scenario it would first make sure the required technology to create it is destroyed and would never be invented again...

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#204

Post by SecretDreams »

re-thc wrote: post #196
SecretDreams wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going in to a lot of coffee shops?

And? As people (the consumers) get automated away there will be less. We also have things like instant coffee, automatic coffee machines, etc that have all reduced the need for manual coffee.

It's hard to take you seriously with this rebuttal. You don't go to coffee shops and probably don't care for coffee if you're talking about instant coffee. Why even speak at all on this subject that you are not familiar with? Not every thought that enters your mind needs to be written out.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#205

Post by fatherwavelet »

acuozzo wrote: post #106
9rx wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s funny that perfect capitalism (no payroll expenses) means nobody has money to actually buy any of the goods produced by AI. When you remember that profit is the measure of unrealized benefit, and look at how profitable capitalists have become, its not clear if, approximately speaking, anyone actually has the "money" to buy any goods now . In other words, I am not sure this matters. Big business is already effe…

Can you please dig into this more deeply or suggest somewhere in which I can read more?

The economy in the 21st century developed world is mostly about acquiring positional goods. Positional goods as "products and services valued primarily for their ability to convey status, prestige, or relative social standing rather than their absolute utility".

We have so much wealth that wealth accumulation itself has become a type of positional good as opposed to the utility of the wealth.

When people in the developed world talk about the economy they are largely talking about their prestige and social standing as opposed to their level of warmth and hunger. Unfortunately, we haven't separated these ideas philosophically so it leads to all kinds of nonsense thinking when it comes to "the economy".

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#206

Post by rbanffy »

tass wrote: post #201
confidantlake wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is so depressing that teams won despite being worse than pretty much every other chat application just because MSFT bundled it with office.

You mean, with Microsoft 365 Copilot App (there’s no more Office)

Jobs was right.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#207

Post by AndrewKemendo »

acuozzo wrote: post #130
jacquesm wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really simple: if you crash the market and you are liquid you can buy up all of the assets for pennies. That's pretty much the playbook right now in one part of the world, just the same happened in the former Soviet Union in the 90's.

I get (and got) that. My focus was specifically on: "its not clear if, approximately speaking, anyone actually has the 'money' to buy any goods now."

Cause it’s mostly bought on credit now, not with cash

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#208

Post by AndrewKemendo »

xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

Fellow old here… Sorry to tell you but robotic food carts are going to be impossible to compete against

So you’ll need some kind of humanistic hook if you want to get reliable customers

Expect there will be two worlds that are extremely different: the machine world of efficiency that most people live inside as gears of machine capitalism

The biological world where there’s no efficiencies and it’s primarily hunter gatherers with mystical rituals

The latter one is only barely still the majority worldwide (only 25-30% of humans aren’t on the internet)

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#209

Post by DiscourseFan »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #69
DiscourseFan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if you actually work in AI you usually can’t say much at all about what’s going on.

Sadly this is more a statement about human irrationality than any of the technology involved.

Broadly, but its more narrowly a statement about NDAs
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