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"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
151–160 of 285 posts
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#152My personal thoughts on this are - A good lawyer + AI will likely win in court against a non lawyer with AI who would likely win in court against just an AI - A good software engineer + AI will ship features faster / safer vs a non engineer with AI, who will beat just AI - A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI As long as a human has a marginal boost to AI…
I think you're missing the spectrum between no jobs being lost and all jobs being lost. I think your first points are correct, but to me that points to some job losses as the good lawyers/doctors/SWEs get more efficient and better, and the lower tier aren't needed anymore and/or aren't worth the salary to employers.
Frankly "some jobs lost" is the worst possible outcome. This is the nightmare scenario for me
If all jobs are lost then our society becomes fundamentally broken and we need to figure out how to elevate the lives of everyone very quickly before it turns into riots and chaos. The thing is that it will be a very clear signal that something has to change, so change is more likely
If no jobs are lost we continue the status quo which is not perfect but is at least relatively sane and tolerable for now and hopefully we can keep working on fixing some of our underlying problems
If some jobs are lost but not all, then we see a further widening of the wealth gap but it is just another muddy signal of a problem that will not be dealt with. This is the "boiling the frog" outcome and I don't want to see what happens when we reach the end of that track.
Unfortunately that seems like the most likely outcome because boiling the frog is the path we've been on for a long time now.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#153Not an expert here, just speaking from experience as a working dev. I don’t think AI is going to replace my job as a software developers anytime soon, but it’s definitely changing how we work (and in many cases, already has). Personally, I use AI a lot. It’s great for boilerplate, getting unstuck, or even offering alternative solutions I wouldn’t have thought of. But where it still struggles sometimes is with the why…
The AI I use at work can’t set up IAM correctly, didn’t even know it needed to, let alone associate said IAM principal with the correct k8s RBAC groups. I do appreciate that it ground through a lot of boilerplate, but I’m concerned that it’s like buying a new Sony or Leica camera as a beginner photographer. As with your non-coder VBA friend, it might make them think they’re a lot more skilled than they really are. An…
Well put. And funny enough, I’m actually a complete newbie in photography and just got one of those expensive Sony cameras, so I know exactly what you mean. It’s overkill for my current skill set.
But the key difference? I’m not planning to use it as the primary photographer at my cousin’s wedding next week.
As you said, the real danger isn’t just the tool, it’s the false confidence it gives. AI can make us feel a bit too capable and too fast, and that’s when things can go sideways.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would agree with you, but the people making the decision to fire or keep you don’t care about quality, nor do they care about understanding AI or its limitations. If AI mostly does kinda the right thing 70% of the time but saves the company $80k a year, that’s a no-brainer. We’re being Pollyanna-ish to think that anyone cares about the things we care about, that you mention in your post. If firing you saves $1.50 a…
Fair enough, but what happens when those same companies start realizing it’s not just about reduced quality, but also security risks and costly errors? At some point, the savings get wiped out by the consequences. Do they go back to hiring human expertise then? I totally agree though, the business mindset of saving a buck often outweighs everything else. I’m actually going through something similar right now with a c…
They go bankrupt, get acquired, or just hope that no one notices their security mistakes.
Admitting mistakes and correcting them directly is not a common thing for CEOs to do.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#155The analogies to previous technologies always seem misguided to me. Maybe it allows us to make some predictions about the next few years, but not more than that. We do not know when/where we will hit the limits on AI capabilities. I think this is completely unlike any previous technology. AI is intentionally being developed to be able to make decisions in any domain humans work in. This is unlike any previous technol…
Let me give my two cents. I remember when people used to think ai models are all the rage and one day we are gonna get super intelligence. I am not sure If we can call the current sota models that. Maybe, maybe not. But a little disappointing. Now everyones saying that ai agents are the hype and the productivity gains are in that, the Darwin Gödel paper which was recently released for example. On the same day (yester…
I've got no dog on this hunt at all, the idea that any give AI company could be a house of cards is not only plausible but is the bet I would place every time, but the whole "builder.com is all Indians" thing is something 'dang spent a half an hour ruefully looking into yesterday and it turned out not to be substantiated.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#156Not an expert here, just speaking from experience as a working dev. I don’t think AI is going to replace my job as a software developers anytime soon, but it’s definitely changing how we work (and in many cases, already has). Personally, I use AI a lot. It’s great for boilerplate, getting unstuck, or even offering alternative solutions I wouldn’t have thought of. But where it still struggles sometimes is with the why…
I suspect that we will be seeing some very creative supply chain compromises. If you can train AI to insert calls to your malware server, in whatever solutions it provides, that's a huge win.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What if it just makes most jobs worse, or replaces good jobs with more, worse jobs? Right. Consider: 1) Senior engineer writing code vs. 2) Senior engineer prompting and code reviewing LLM agent The senior engineer is essential to the process in each case, because the LLM agent left to its own devices will produce nonfunctional crap. But think about the pleasantness of the job and the job satisfaction of the senior…
I don't think it's an exclusive choice between the two, though. I think senior engineers will end up doing both. Looking at GitHub Copilot's agent, it can work asynchronously from the user, so a senior engineer can send it off to work on multiple issues at once while still working on tasks that aren't well suited for the agent. And really, I think many senior engineers are already doing both in a lot of cases where t…
> And really, I think many senior engineers are already doing both in a lot of cases where they're helping guide and teach junior and early mid-level developers.
Babysitting and correcting automated tools is radically different from mentoring less experienced engineers. First, and most important IMO, there's no relationship. It's entirely impersonal. You become alienated from your fellow humans. I'm reminded of Mark Zuckerberg recently claiming that in the future, most of your "friends" will be A.I. That's not an ideal, it's a damn dystopia.
Moreover, you're not teaching the LLM anything. If the LLMs happen to become better in the future, that's not due to your mentoring. The time you spend reviewing the automatically generated code does not have any productive side effects, doesn't help to "level up" your coworkers/copilots.
Also, since LLMs aren't human, they don't make human mistakes. In some sense, reviewing a human engineer's code is an exercise in mind reading: you can guess what they were thinking, and where they might have overlooked something. But LLMs don't "think" in the same way, and they tend to produce bizarre results and mistakes that a human would never make. Reviewing their code can be a very different, and indeed unpleasant WTF experience.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#158It's also a great example of why tech executives shouldn't be trusted, at all. "My thing will break our entire economy. I'm still gonna build it, though." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
You could say that about a number of things we've benefited from. The cotton gin, the plow, industrialization, the car, electricity, alarm clocks, etc.
Uh, not everyone benefited from the cotton gin, to put it mildly. Though I suppose it depends how tightly or loosely you define "we."
It probably wasn't even a net good for the South, being blamed for locking it into an agrarian plantation economy and stunting manufacturing in the states that depended on cotton.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#159Maybe. But I think this is a useful time to engage in the conversation about what we do as a semi-post-scarcity society and how we should treat people under that framework. If we _do_ replace all the jobs, how should we, as a society, treat each other?
Fundamentally, you either continue down the path of pure capitalism and let people starve in the streets or you adapt socially.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#160Not an expert here, just speaking from experience as a working dev. I don’t think AI is going to replace my job as a software developers anytime soon, but it’s definitely changing how we work (and in many cases, already has). Personally, I use AI a lot. It’s great for boilerplate, getting unstuck, or even offering alternative solutions I wouldn’t have thought of. But where it still struggles sometimes is with the why…
> Even if I prompt with security as the top priority LLMs do really poorly with general statements like that, so not sure it's unexpected. If you put "Make sure to make it production worthy", you'll get as many different answers as there are programmers, because not even us human programmers agree what that really means. Same for "Make sure security is the top priority", most programmers would understand that differe…
Totally agree. I was simplifying for discussion’s sake, but yeah, I learned the hard way that vague prompts will lead you that rabbit hole. If you’re not crystal clear, you get everything but what you actually wanted.
These days, I make sure every “t” is crossed and every “i” dotted when giving instructions. Good point, definitely a lesson worth repeating.