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I'm not worried about AI job loss

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Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#61

Post by danesparza »

gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

Apparently you haven't seen ChatGPT enterprise and codex. I have bad news for you ...

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#62

Post by ninetyninenine »

qgin wrote: post #40

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

[dead]

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#63

Post by dysoco »

RS-232 wrote: post #36

The advent of AI may shape up to be just like the automobile. At first, it's a pretty big energy hog and if you don't know how to work it, it might crash and burn. After some time, the novelty wears off. More and more people begin using it because it is a massive convenience that does real work. Luddites who still walk or ride their bike out of principle will be mocked and scoffed. Then the mandatory compliance will…

> This license will be tied to your identity and it will become a hard requirement for employment, citizenship, housing, loans, medical treatment, and more. Not having it will be a liability. You will be excluded from society at large if you do not comply.

That's just an American thing, I've never owned a car and most people of my age I know haven't either.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#64

Post by tech_ken »

qgin wrote: post #40

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

That's exactly the point of the essay though. The way that you're implicitly modeling labor and collaboration is linear and parallelizable, but reality is messier than that:

> The most important thing to know about labor substitution...is this: labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. The question isn’t whether AI can do specific tasks that humans do. It’s whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone: in other words, whether there is any way that the addition of a human to the production process can increase or improve the output of that process... AI can have an absolute advantage in every single task, but it would still make economic sense to combine AI with humans if the aggregate output is greater: that is to say, if humans have a comparative advantage in any step of the production process.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#65

Post by gmadsen »

Jianghong94 wrote: post #24
nphardon wrote: post #12

(In the semiconductor industry) We experienced brutal layoffs arguably due to over-investment into Ai products that produce no revenue. So we've had brutal job loss due to Ai, just not in the way people expected. Having said that, it's hard to imagine jobs like mine (working on np-complete problems) existing if the LLMs continue advancing at the current rate, and its hard to imagine they wont continue to accelerate s…

Maybe I'm being naive here, but for AI (heck, for any good algorithm) to work well, you need some at least loosely-clearly defined objectives. I assume it's much more straightforward in semi, but there're many industries, once you get into the details, all kinds of incentives start to disalign and I doubt AI could understand all kinds of nuances. E.g. once I was tasked to build a new matching algorithm for a trading…

I think those conversations occur due to changes in timeline of deliverables or certainty of result, would that not be an implementation detail?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#66

Post by bsza »

qgin wrote: post #40

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

The problem is, you won’t necessarily know which 20% it did wrong until it’s too late. They will happily solve advanced math problems and tell you to put glue on your pizza with the same level of confidence.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#67

Post by Morromist »

Nevermark wrote: post #29

> Bottlenecks rule everything around me The self-setup here is too obvious. This is exactly why man + machine can be much worse than just machine. A strong argument needs to address what we can do as an extremely slow operating, slow learning, and slow adapting species, that machines that improve in ability and efficiency monthly and annually will find they cannot do well or without. It is clear that we are going thr…

I belive the black plague actually caused a massive labor shortage and wages increased. When a huge amount of people die and you still need to have people build bridges and be soldiers and finish building the damn cathedral that's been under construction for the last 400 years then that is what will happen.

Here's an article:

https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#68

Post by sunaurus »

I’m not worried about job loss as a result of being replaced by AI, because if we get AI that is actually better than humans - which I imagine must be AGI - then I don’t see why that AI would be interested in working for humans.

I’m definitely worried about job loss as a result of the AI bubble bursting, though.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#69

Post by gordonhart »

malyk wrote: post #33
gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

Can you give an example to help us understand? I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.

Here's an example ticket that I'll probably work on next week:

    Live stream validation results as they come in
The body doesn't give much other than the high-level motivation from the person who filed the ticket. In order to implement this, you need to have a lot of context, some of which can be discovered by grepping through the code base and some of which can't:

- What is the validation system and how does it work today?

- What sort of UX do we want? What are the specific deficiencies in the current UX that we're trying to fix?

- What prior art exists on the backend and frontend, and how much of that can/should be reused?

- Are there any scaling or load considerations that need to be accounted for?

I'll probably implement this as 2-3 PRs in a chain touching different parts of the codebase. GPT via Codex will write 80% of the code, and I'll cover the last 20% of polish. Throughout the process I'll prompt it in the right direction when it runs up against questions it can't answer, and check its assumptions about the right way to push this out. I'll make sure that the tests cover what we need them to and that the resultant UX feels good. I'll own the responsibility for covering load considerations and be on the line if anything falls over.

Does it look like software engineering from 3 years ago? Absolutely not. But it's software engineering all the same even if I'm not writing most of the code anymore.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#70

Post by tharkun__ »

e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #56
gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

A lot of this can be provided or built up by better documentation in the codebase, or functional requirements that can also be created, reviewed, and then used for additional context. In our current codebase it's definitely an issue to get an AI "onboarded", but I've seen a lot less hand-holding needed in projects where you have the AI building from the beginning and leaving notes for itself to read later

We have this in some of our projects too but I always wonder how long it's going to take until it just fails. Nobody reads all those memory files for accuracy. And knowing what kind of BS the AI spews regularly in day to day use I bet this simply doesn't scale.
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