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What will be left for us to work on?

normaltech.ai

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Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#61

Post by jambalaya8 »

singingtoday wrote: post #30
neitherboosh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI This is true as a sentiment, but my understanding is that the majority of students are overwhelmingly using AI for ~everything. If a thing provides massive utility people will use it.

I recently sat in on a lecture at my old uni and noticed almost every student heavily using ai. So I agree it's a but heavy handed to day young people dislike ai as a monolith.

People dislike and are dependent on things all the time. What'll be interesting to see is how that classroom of students will feel towards AI when it leaves school. I am uncomfortable with AIs being used in schools this way, myself, like almost without exception. I mean, geez, how do you compete? Do you just sort of have to, once a certain number of your classmates uses it for stuff like essays? Do they curve essays anymore?

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#63

Post by ilaksh »

He's basically saying that even though AI capability is high and rapidly increasing, it is not reliable, creative or tasteful enough to replace humans. Further he implies that it will take decades before this is the case.

But we already do have have some kind of measurement of most of these types of side factors, and they actually aren't at zero and are increasing rapidly. So the implication that they will not be human level until decades from now is just (hopeful?) speculation or fuzzy thinking.

To me this looks like a really academic and official sounding version of the same quasi-religious hopium that usually defends the sanctity of the human. He is essentially saying that there is just something so special about humans that it will never be reproduced in a machine. It's very similar to dualism (and in many people actually is religious dualism). No AI is going to have human creativity or judgement. Not anytime soon. Why? Well, we all just _know_ that's not possible. Okay, maybe in a couple of decades (but they don't necessarily believe that anyway). Why would that take decades? Well we all can just _tell_ it's no where close, right? Because AI of today just isn't special like humans.

Aside from that worldview issue, I think that people still are not taking seriously or internalizing the concept of exponential improvement.

Computing efficiency gains can actually level off. In fact, they have many, many times before. But they always tilt back up again when we invent the next approach to get beyond the current level. This is how it has been for 90 years.

There are multiple ways that we continue to see huge gains in AI software, architecture, and hardware. There are huge efficiency gains available still as we move towards more radical fully compute in memory and/or analog approaches and other options like models implemented in hardware.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#64

Post by strange_quark »

Metricon wrote: post #8

I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it. So if things c…

Bad take. What you're describing already exists.

> Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.

Nursing and being a physician aren't really the same thing at all, and they require different skill sets, it's not just "having more knowledge". Just because someone is an amazing surgeon doesn't mean they would also make a good nurse.

> Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.

I think you just described a staff swe

> The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.

These people already exist. They are the business analysts who know SQL and maybe Python, R, or VBA. Marketing people who work on Wordpress landing pages. People doing systems integration, the IT department, sales engineers, and on, and on, and on.

> At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.

You said it, no code/low-code has existed forever.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#65

Post by AuthAuth »

zkmon wrote: post #59

You need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work? Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work". Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for th…

There exists to many complex things in the world and we cannot do it all ourselves. We work so that we have something of value to trade to the people who do the work on the things we want.

We will never automate all work so we with half of humanity doing nothing of value it will be a struggle for the people who do nothing of value to convince people to do work for them.

We can see it now where products dont target the people without money. There is no point because they cant give you any reward so instead you do your work for the people that can give you something in return. We can use the government to stimulate and balance this a bit but at a certain point the number gets to high and things collapse.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#66

Post by hattmall »

franze wrote: post #7

Question: Does anybody here yet personally has less (to) work 'cause of AI?

I have the opposite, because I'm now getting things clients generated that they want me to implement. It's definitely more work and money for me, but it's concerning somewhat because ultimately it's not good for their business. It takes me longer to implement this kind of stuff than it would for me to code it from scratch. That is in a working way, the AI generated code has far more bells and whistles, but also layers and layers of needless complexity that quite literally add no value as in they aren't even a factor of the finished output.

The problem is they are now paying me more, plus paying for the cost of using the AI, and the needless complexity also slows down the employees. So more costs there as well, any future debugging is going to cost far more and at the end of the day they are getting less quality on the core function but far more presentation data that is essentially meaningless.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#67

Post by kkhs »

I have been coding in one form or another since the 80s. Back then it was 68k assembly for me. People seem to forget that "software development" is really a big bloated abstraction between "I want or need" and the product that serves that want or need. It's hard to write and debug in ones and zeros so we invented languages. Software projects have been difficult to schedule so we invented all kinds of ceremony. What will be left for us to work on? The same stuff you already work on! People who write this drivel don't seem to actually be directly engaging with the tools to understand what is what. The reality at large companies right now, based on my experience at least, is that the product people who always cared about the product and the user want to move fast and skip the bloated inflamed stuff that stood in their way (i.e. "software development shrouded in magical mysticism reserved for the D&D introverted crowd"). And then, on the other side, the AI luddites try to hold onto SOPs from twenty years ago because they feel like that magical veil is being pulled up and they no longer have a smoke screen to hide behind. Back when we had boxed software that retailed for $1k a box, "professionals" used to freak out about some kid in Bangladesh pirating the software and thus immediately and directly stealing their jobs. I never lost a gig to a kid with pirated software. I won't lose a gig to AI either.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#68

Post by HDBaseT »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #61
singingtoday wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently sat in on a lecture at my old uni and noticed almost every student heavily using ai. So I agree it's a but heavy handed to day young people dislike ai as a monolith.

People dislike and are dependent on things all the time. What'll be interesting to see is how that classroom of students will feel towards AI when it leaves school. I am uncomfortable with AIs being used in schools this way, myself, like almost without exception. I mean, geez, how do you compete? Do you just sort of have to, once a certain number of your classmates uses it for stuff like essays? Do they curve essays…

When students are provided work sheets, assessments and powerpoint slides made by AI, its no surprise that students resort to AI to assist or complete these.

Garbage in, Garbage out.

The University market is brutal too. If you aren't using AI too, you are falling behind. Many see it as a means to an end.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#69

Post by [deleted] »

Metricon wrote: post #8

I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it. So if things c…

[deleted]

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#70

Post by jrowen »

zkmon wrote: post #59

You need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work? Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work". Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for th…

This. Before we worry about how much work there is left, we have to define what work is "to be done." We're already at a point where an incredible amount of work done isn't strictly "necessary." It's not growing food, it's not making clothing, it's not building houses, or providing other basic needs and comforts...

How many man-hours go into various parts of the advertising distribution chain? Though a certain fraction of that energy goes to connecting people with goods and services they might find valuable, most of it goes into shifting numbers around for people that already don't personally have to worry about money.

We don't need to find endless ways for people to spin wheels, but as long as we're worried about "jobs," we will. We just need to find the social structures to provide people with basic needs and reserve "work" for things that are vital to society or truly inspired.

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