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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

#161

Post by enraged_camel »

gordonhart wrote: post #74
e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Curious to hear if you've seen this work with 100k+ LoC codebases (i.e. what you could expect at a job). I've had some good experiences with high autonomy agents in smaller codebases and simpler systems but the coherency starts to fizzle out when the system gets complicated enough that thinking it through is the hard part as opposed to hammering out the code.

Around 250k here. The AI does an excellent job finding its way around, fixing complex bugs (and doing it correctly), doing intensive refactors and implementing new features using existing patterns.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#162

Post by Gigachad »

zozbot234 wrote: post #127
RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

> I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#163

Post by fourside »

RevEng wrote: post #101

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the parad…

You also need a system that is ok with giving you some of said abundance without you working.

Last year the US voted to hand over the reigns, in all branches of government, to a party whose philosophy is to slash government spending and reduce people’s dependence on the government.

To all the US futurists who are fantasizing about a post-scarcity world where we no longer work, I’d like to understand how that fits in with the current political climate.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#164

Post by cortesoft »

9dev wrote: post #144
jjmarr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to live with no electricity, no running water, and a lack of refrigerated food, you could do so purely on welfare. In that sense, we already have the UBI that Marx predicted. However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.

Most non-banana republics across the world define the Minimum standard of living as having all of the things you listed, meaning welfare/social safety nets provide for that. As they should. We’re not animals.

I think that is part of the point, though. As our productivity increases, we don’t see an increase in leisure, instead we see an increase in what we consider the minimum standard of living.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#165

Post by dakolli »

When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs.

LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a limited number of jobs. LLMs are not creating new jobs, they only create "AI automate {insert business process} SaaS" that are themselves heavily automated.. I suppose there are more datacenter jobs (for now), and maybe some new ML researcher positions.. but I don't really see job growth.. Are we supposed to just all go work at a datacenter or in the semiconductor industry (until they automate that too)?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#166

Post by Gigachad »

nemo1618 wrote: post #154
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…

"The steamroller is still many inches away. I'll make a plan once it actually starts crushing my toes." You are in danger . Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%, or you already have enough money to retire, or you expect that AI will usher in enough prosperity that your job will be irrelevant, it is straight-up irresponsible to forgo making a contingency plan.

My contingency plan is that if AI leaves me unable to get a job, we are all fucked and society as a whole will have to fix the situation and if it doesn’t, there is nothing I could have done about it anyway.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#167

Post by alchemism »

Gigachad wrote: post #162
zozbot234 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.

As predicted in The Diamond Age.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#168

Post by slopinthebag »

jatari wrote: post #159
slopinthebag wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it's not a physical sciences problem? It could be the case that current technologies simply cannot scale due to fundamental physical issues. It could even be a fundamental rule of intelligent life, that one cannot create intelligence that surpasses its own. Plenty of things get substantial resources and investment and go nowhere. Of course I could be totally wrong and it's solved in the next couple y…

>It could even be a fundamental rule of intelligent life, that one cannot create intelligence that surpasses its own. Well that is easily disproved by the fact that people have children with higher IQ's than their own.

That's not what I mean, rather than humans cannot create a type of intelligence that supersedes what is roughly capable from human intelligence, because doing so would require us to be smarter basically.

Not to say we can't create machines that far surpass our abilities on a single or small set of axis.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#169

Post by shigawire »

gruez wrote: post #141
suzzer99 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.

Seems pretty easy to work around with "UBI for citizens" only. There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.

>There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.

The racist moral panic over "welfare queens" seems to be a counter example.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#170

Post by whattheheckheck »

gruez wrote: post #141
suzzer99 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.

Seems pretty easy to work around with "UBI for citizens" only. There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.

And why do citizens get it? USA killed a lot of the world for their wealth and kneecapped anyone who didn't play along
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