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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

#81

Post by lbrito »

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…

The black plague's capital-concentration aftermath supposedly fueled the renaissance and the city-state ascensions, and ultimately the great land discoveries of the 14th and 15th centuries.

Not sure if there's an analogy to make somewhere though

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#82

Post by Rodeoclash »

gordonhart wrote: post #69
malyk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

This right here is my view on the future as well. Will the AI write the entire feature in one go? No. Will the AI be involved in writing a large proportion of the code that will be carefully studied and adjusted by a human before being used? Absolutely yes.

This cyborg process is exactly how we're using AI in our organisation as well. The human in the loop understands the full context of what the feature is and what we're trying to achieve.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#83

Post by lbrito »

pfisch wrote: post #35
ianbutler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just skimmed this and the so called zeitgeist here is fear. People are scared, it's material concern and he effectively stoked it. I work on this technology for my job and while I'm very bullish pieces like that are as you said slopish and as I'll say breathless because there are so many practical challenges here to deal with standing between what is being said there and where we are now. Capability is not evenly d…

Are you ever concerned about the consequences of what you are making? No one really knows how this will play out and the odds of this leading to disaster are significant. I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

>I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

A cynical/accelerationist perspective would be: it enables you to rake in huge amounts of money, so no matter what comes next, you will be set up to endure it better than most.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#84

Post by fragmede »

gordonhart wrote: post #69
malyk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I mean, what is the validation system? Either it exists in code, and thus can be discovered if you point the AI at repo, or... what, it doesn't exist?

For the UX, have it explore your existing repos and copy prior art from there and industry standards to come up with something workable.

Web scale issues can be inferred by the rest of the codebase. If your terraform repo has one RDS server, vs a fleet of them, multi-region, then the AI, just as well as a human, can figure out if it needs Google Spanner level engineering or not. (probably not)

Bigger picture though, what's the process of a human logs an under specified ticket and someone else picks it up and has no clue what to do with it? They're gonna go ask the person who logged the bug for their thoughts and some details beyond "hurr Durr something something validation". If we're at the point where AI is able to make a public blog post shaming the open source developer for not accepting a patch, throwing questions back to you in JIRA about the details of the streaming validation system is well within its capabilities, given the right set of tools.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#85

Post by Gud »

lbrito wrote: post #47
malyk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why isn't it? Just offload it to the clankers and go enjoy a margarita at the beach or something.

There are plenty of people who are enjoying margarita by the beach while you, the laborer, are working for them.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#86

Post by delegate »

Bottlenecks. Yes. Company structures these days are not compatible with efficient use of these new AI models.

Software engineers work on Jira tickets, created by product managers and several layers of middle managers.

But the power of recent models is not in working on cogs, their true power is in working on the entire mechanism.

When talking about a piece of software that a company produces, I'll use the analogy of a puzzle.

A human hierarchy (read: company) works on designing the big puzzle at the top and delegating the individual pieces to human engineers. This process goes back and forth between levels in the hierarchy until the whole puzzle slowly emerges. Until recently, AI could only help on improving the pieces of the puzzle.

Latest models got really good at working on the entire puzzle - big picture and pieces.

This makes human hierarchy obsolete and a bottleneck.

The future seems to be one operator working on the entire puzzle, minus the hierarchy of people.

Of course, it's not just about the software, but streams of information - customer support, bug tickets, testing, changing customer requirements.. but all of these can be handled by AI even today. And it will only get better.

This means different things depending on which angle you look at it - yes, it will mean companies will become obsolete, but also that each employee can become a company.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#87

Post by aurareturn »

nphardon wrote: post #80

Unfortunately, one of the struggles in old high tech (thats the only thing i know, are you also experiencing this?) is that the C-level people don't look at Ai and say LLM's can make an individual 10x more productive therefore (and this is the part they miss) we can make our tool 10x better. They think: therefore we can lay off 9 people.

There aren't 10x revenue gains in most businesses if their workers become 10x more productive. Some markets grow very slow and/or have capped growth.

Therefore, the best way to increase profit is to lower cost.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#88

Post by pupppet »

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…

We're all slowly but surely lowering our standards as AI bombards us with low-quality slop. AI doesn't need to get better, we all just need to keep collectively lowering our expectations until they finally meet what AI can currently do, and then pink-slips away.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#89

Post by ej88 »

i am somewhat worried in the short term about ai job displacement for a subsection of the population

for me the 2 main factors are:

1. whether your company's priority is growing or saving

- growing companies especially in steep competition fight for talent and ai productivity results in more hiring to outcompete

- saving companies are happy to cut jobs to save on margin due to their monopoly or pressure from investors

2. how 'sequence of tasks-like' your job is

- SOTA models can easily automate long running sequences of tasks with minimal oversight

- the more your job resembles this the more in-danger you are (customer service diffusion is just starting, but i predict this will be one of the first to be heavily disrupted)

- i'm less worried about jobs where your job is a 'role' that comes with accountability and requires you to think big picture on what tasks to do in the first place

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#90

Post by lbrito »

Gud wrote: post #85
lbrito wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why isn't it? Just offload it to the clankers and go enjoy a margarita at the beach or something.

There are plenty of people who are enjoying margarita by the beach while you, the laborer, are working for them.

Preach. That's always been the case though, AI just makes it slightly worse.
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