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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

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Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#121

Post by nradov »

ej88 wrote: post #107
xienze wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because a machine can never take accountability. A business leader can though. > Compared to another software engineer who directed prompts to expand the system and generate extra revenue streams. I think you're missing the point. Why can't an LLM advance sufficiently to be a REAL senior software engineer that a business person/product manager is prompting instead of YOU, a software engineer? Why are YOU specifical…

> A business leader can though. If a 'business leader' is prompting out software through their agents, ensuring it works, maintaining it, and taking accountability... they're also a software engineer These titles are mostly semantics

It's funny, that's why COBOL was originally developed in 1960: so that business people could write software themselves without needing software engineers. And it sort of worked, to an extent. History repeats itself.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#122

Post by paulnpace »

mrdependable wrote: post #90

I think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.

In the U.S., most or all states require all corporations to have a president, secretary, and treasurer.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#123

Post by vharuck »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #105
xienze wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> domain experts will be fine But I don't see how this holds up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny. We're literally training LLMs to BE domain experts.

An enormous amount of domain expertise is not legible to LLMs. Their dependence on obtaining knowledge through someone else's writing is a real limitation. A lot of human domain expertise is not acquired that way. They still have a long way to go before they can master a domain from first principles, which constrains the mastery possible.

People need to be careful about buying into the shorthand lingo with LLMs. They do not learn like we do. At the lowest level, they predict which tokens follow a body of tokens. This lets them emulate knowledge in a very useful way. This is similar to a time series model of user activity: the time series model does not keep tabs on users to see when they are active, it has not read studies about user behavior, it just reflects a mathematical relationship between points of data.

For an LLM and this "vague" domain expertise, even if none of the LLM's training material includes certain nuggets of wisdom, if the material includes enough cases of problems and the solutions offered by domain experts, we should expect the model to find a decent relationship between them. That the LLM has never ingested an explicit documentation of the reasoning is irrelevant, because it does not perform reasoning.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#124

Post by nradov »

mattmanser wrote: post #103
xienze wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because a machine can never take accountability. A business leader can though. > Compared to another software engineer who directed prompts to expand the system and generate extra revenue streams. I think you're missing the point. Why can't an LLM advance sufficiently to be a REAL senior software engineer that a business person/product manager is prompting instead of YOU, a software engineer? Why are YOU specifical…

You can say this about every single role. Why can't VCs feed your pitch deck into an AI and get a business they own 100%? If the only thing you're paying for is compute time... Some.people are claiming it's about taste. Why can't an AI learn taste?

It's funny how we see some people who claim to have "taste" walking around in public wearing horrible Balenciaga shoes. Are they really just tasteless, or are they doing it ironically to troll the rest of us? I guess we'll never know. Maybe someday AI robots will achieve the same level.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#125

Post by simplyluke »

xienze wrote: post #63
ej88 wrote: post #21

I am personally of the opinion that ML will end up being 'normal technology', albeit incredibly transformative. I think you can combine 'Incanters' and 'Process Engineers' into one - 'Users'. Jobs that encompass a role that requires accountability will be directing, providing context, and verifying the output of agents, almost like how millions of workers know basic computer skills and Microsoft Office. In my opinion…

> Hence why I've been quite bullish on software engineering (but not coding). You can easy set up 1) and 2) on contrived or sandboxed coding tasks but then 3) expands and dominates the rest of the role. Why can't LLMs and agents progress further to do this software engineering job better than an actual software engineer? I've never seen anyone give a satisfactory answer to this. Especially the part about making mista…

Who is better positioned to pilot the LLM than a domain expert?

"Software engineer" as a job title has included a lot of people who write near-zero-code, at least at the higher levels of the career ladder, for years prior to LLMs. People assuming the only, or even primary, function of the job is outputting code reveal a profound lack of understanding of the industry in my opinion. Beyond the first year or two it has been commonly accepted that the code is the easy part of the job.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#126

Post by doubled112 »

nradov wrote: post #121
ej88 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A business leader can though. If a 'business leader' is prompting out software through their agents, ensuring it works, maintaining it, and taking accountability... they're also a software engineer These titles are mostly semantics

It's funny, that's why COBOL was originally developed in 1960: so that business people could write software themselves without needing software engineers. And it sort of worked, to an extent. History repeats itself.

Between then and now, what ever happened to "no code development" or whatever they called it, where all of the world's APIs could be connected with lines in a diagram?

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#127

Post by at-fates-hands »

eloisant wrote: post #118
Aperocky wrote: post #26

As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an implementation and it then exist - As long as I thought about the structure/input/output/testability and logic flow correctly and made sure I included all that information, it just works, nicely, with tests. Unix philosophy works well with LLM too - you can have…

I'm excited and scared at the same time. Yes I'm much more productive than before, and I'm convinced we can't get rid of engineers altogether... But how long until my team of 5 gets replaced by a single engineer? Am I going to be the one to keep my job or one of the 4 to be let go?

When I was in automation a decade ago, they keep telling us to never tell people this is going to replace them. What you tell them is it will allow their teams to finally focus on what really matters. Instead of working on all these repetitive tasks, now they can focus on the much larger issues. Everybody bought in, teams felt like the automation we were doing was really going to make their jobs easier.

It never did.

Managers realized they could trim their teams down after we were done and did in fact, layoff people by the hundreds. Doing the same work with less people was beneficial to them because now they got bigger bonuses and salary increases for adding to the bottom line of the company. Many managers who did nothing more than layoff half their team were promoted faster up the ranks.

So yes, be scared, be VERY scared and have a Plan B and a Plan C going forward. The people who created this have rose colored glasses on how its going to revolutionize business. The actual businesses owners and CEO's just a see another new way to reduce human capital in order to increase profits.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#128

Post by [deleted] »

paulnpace wrote: post #122
mrdependable wrote: post #90

I think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.

In the U.S., most or all states require all corporations to have a president, secretary, and treasurer.

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#129

Post by paulnpace »

giaour wrote: post #93
simonw wrote: post #43

Loved that section about "meat shields". LLMs cannot be held accountable. Someone needs to be involved in decision making, with real stakes if those decisions are bad.

Data & Society put out a paper on this role back in 2019 but used the term "moral crumple zones" since they were focusing on how to assign blame in autonomous vehicle crashes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Cru... "Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though

Thank you, I had not found this one.

What I had considered is that in the case of self-driving cars, nobody is criminally accountable, even though the rest of us may be criminally negligent should we make some horrific error. Philosophically, there is some kind of reason that criminal acts require punishment beyond mere financial liability (e.g., prison time) and self-driving cars are exempted from this. Currently, self-driving cars are also exempt from the actual laws of the road because the police are dis-empowered to enforce anything on the self-driving car.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#130

Post by ej88 »

rdevilla wrote: post #113
ej88 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A business leader can though. If a 'business leader' is prompting out software through their agents, ensuring it works, maintaining it, and taking accountability... they're also a software engineer These titles are mostly semantics

By this definition, pre-LLM "business leaders" circa 2008 with not even an understanding of Excel were already "software engineers" this whole time - just prompting out software through their meatspace agents, instead of their silicon ones. Dismissal of arguments as "just semantics" is high school level argumentation.

clearly not the same when they were abstracted from the realities of building software and.. directly taking accountability for it!

by semantics, i mean the definition and pool of tasks, responsibilities, and outcomes a job is comprised of is shifting so fast that the borders of what is a 'software engineer' and 'business person' are melding together. software engineers are business people in their own way

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