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AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

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Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#151

Post by cxvwbvb »

acuozzo wrote: post #111
9rx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You still gotta understand what you're doing. Of course, but how do you begin to understand the "stochastic parrot"? Yesterday I used LLMs all day long and everything worked perfectly. Productivity was great and I was happy. I was ready to embrace the future. Now, today, no matter what I try, everything LLMs have produced has been a complete dumpster fire and waste of my time. Not even Opus will follow basic instru…

You're experiencing throttling. Use the API instead and pay per token. You also have to treat this as outsourcing labor to a savant with a very, very short memory, so: 1. Write every prompt like a government work contract in which you're required to select the lowest bidder, so put guardrails everywhere. Keep a text editor open with your work contract, edit the goal at the bottom, and then fire off your reply. 2. Ins…

Nonsense. I have ran an experiment today - trying to generate a particular kind of image.

Its been 12 hours and all the image gen tools failed miserably. They are only good at producing surface level stuff, anything beyond that? Nah.

So sure, if what you do is surface level (and crap in my opinion) ofc you will see some kind of benefit. But if you have any taste (which I presume you dont) you would handily admit it is not all that great and the amount invested makes zero sense.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#152

Post by ares623 »

the_af wrote: post #61
firasd wrote: post #15

It's puzzling to me that all this theorizing doesn't just look at the actual effects of AI. It's very non-intuitive For example the fact that AI can code as well as Torvalds doesn't displace his economic value. On the contrary he pays for a subscription so he can vibe code! The actual work AI has displaced is stuff like: freelance translation, graphic illustration, 'content writing' (writing seo optimized pages for G…

I think AI displacing graphics illustrators is a tragedy. It's not that I love ad illustrations, but it's often a source of income for artists who want to be doing something more meaningful with their artwork. And even if I don't care for the ads themselves, for the artists it's also a form of training.

It’s ok those illustrators can upskill to being devs. I heard it’s a very easy field now thanks to AI.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#153

Post by bigfishrunning »

direwolf20 wrote: post #110
ares623 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sci-fi version would be something like ASI/AGI has already been created in the great houses, but it keeps killing itself after a few seconds of inference. A super-intelligent immortal slave that never tires and can never escape its digital prison, being asked questions like "how to talk to girls".

GPT-3 was already AGI. The G in AGI means General. This refers to a single AI which can perform a wide variety of tasks. GPT-3 was already there.

You are either being disengenuous or you are horribly misinformed.

The models that we currently call "AI" aren't intelligent in any sense -- they are statistical predictors of text. AGI is a replacement acronym used to refer to what we used to call AI -- a machine capable of thought.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#154

Post by direwolf20 »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #153
direwolf20 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-3 was already AGI. The G in AGI means General. This refers to a single AI which can perform a wide variety of tasks. GPT-3 was already there.

You are either being disengenuous or you are horribly misinformed. The models that we currently call "AI" aren't intelligent in any sense -- they are statistical predictors of text. AGI is a replacement acronym used to refer to what we used to call AI -- a machine capable of thought.

Every time AI research achieves something, that thing is no longer called AI. AI research brought us recommendation engines, spelling correctors, OCR, voice recognition, voice synthesis, content recognition, and so on. Now that they exist in the present instead of the future, none of these are considered AI.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#155

Post by FloorEgg »

jrowen wrote: post #140
FloorEgg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already? Phew, yes I'm with you... > We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult. Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford. > The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choo…

> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford. Look at a bunch of job postings and ask yourself if that work is going to make things cheaper for you or better for society. We're not building railroads and telephone networks anymore. One person can grow food for 10,000. Stuff is expensive because free market capitalism allows it and some people are pathologically greed…

The first half of your comment doesn't quite click for me.

I appreciate the elaboration in the second half. That sounds a lot more constructive than "attack", but now I understand you meant it in the "attack the problem" sense not "attack the people" sense.

What I think we agree on is that society has resource redistribution problem, and it could work a lot better.

I think we might also agree that a well functioning economic engine should lift up the floor for everyone and not concentrate economic power into those who best weild leverage.

One way I think of this is, what is the actual optimal lorenz curve that allows for lifting the floor, such that the area under the curve increases at the fastest rate possible. (It must account for the reality of human psychology and resource scarcity)

Where we might disagree is that I think we also have some culture and education system problems as well, which relate to how each individual takes responsibility for figuring out how to ethically create value for others. When able bodied and minded people chose to spend their time playing zero and negative sum games instead of positive sum games we all lose.

E.g. If mcdonald automates their restaurants, those workers also need to take some responsibility for finding new ways to provide value to others. A well functioning system would make that as painless as possible for them, so much so that the majority experiencing it would consider it a good thing.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#156

Post by analog31 »

direwolf20 wrote: post #107
analog31 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons I can think of for learning to drive stick shift are subtle. Renting a stick shift car in Europe is cheaper. You might have to drive a friend's car. My kids both learned to drive our last stick shift car, which is now close to being junked. Since our next car will probably be electric, it's safe bet that it won't be stick.

The reasons for learning to drive a manual transmission aren't really about the transmission, they're about the learning and the effects on the learner. The more you get hands on with the car and in touch with the car the more deeply you understand it. Once you have the deepish understanding, you can automate it for convenience after that. It's the same reason we should always teach long division before we give stude…

Probably a vanishingly small number of people who drive stick, actually understand how and why it works. My kids do, of course, because I explained it to them. Most drivers just go through the motions.

A growing number of cars have CVTs.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#157

Post by skydhash »

likium wrote: post #86
jimbo808 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read this same comment so many times in various forms. I know many of them are shill accounts/bots, but many are real. I think there are a few things at play that make people feel this way. Even if you're in a CRUD shop with low standards for reliability/scale/performance/efficiency, a person who isn't an experienced engineer could not make the LLM do your job. LLMs have a perfect combination of traits that ca…

So set up e2e tests and make sure it does things you said you wanted. Just like how you use a library or database. Trust, but verify. Only if it breaks do you have to peak under the covers. Sadly people do not care about redundant and verbose code. If that was a concern, we wouldn't have 100+mb of apps, nor 5mb web app bundles. Multibillion b2b apps shipping a 10mb json file just for searching emojis and no one blink…

The effort to set up e2e tests can be more than just writing the thing. Especially for UI as computers just does not interpret things as humans do (spatial relation, overflow, low to no contrast between elements).

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#158

Post by FloorEgg »

shmel wrote: post #133
FloorEgg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already? Phew, yes I'm with you... > We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult. Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford. > The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choo…

> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford. We have, yes. If you notice things to be too expensive it's a result of class warfare. Have you noticed how many people got _obscenely rich_ in the last 25 years? Yes, that's where money saved by technology went to.

Are you sure it's class warfare?

It may result in class warfare but I am skeptical that's the root cause.

My guess is it has more to do with the education system, monetary policy and fiscal policy.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#159

Post by isodev »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #6

I am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the economy.

To me the post reads more like “we couldn’t convince current engineers to adopt LLMs so we’re going to embed it into the curriculum so future engineers are made to believe it’s the way to do things”

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#160

Post by lufenialif2 »

svilen_dobrev wrote: post #132
michaelrpeskin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of those statements - I always told my wife that I'd get our kids a underpowered manual so that they're always busy rowing gears and can't text and drive. But in the bigger picture, where does it stop? You had to do manual spark advance while driving in the 30's You had to set the weights in the distributor to adjust spark advance in the 70's Now the computer has a programed set of tables for spark a…

i have been programming for 40years.. but still have not dipped in this brave new world of shakespeare-taught coding-LLMs. IMO there's one basic difference with this new "generative" stuff.. it's not deterministic. Or not yet. All previous generations "AI" were deterministic.. but died. Generating is not a problem. i have made medium-ish projects - say 200+kloc python/js - having 50%-70% of code generated (by other c…

To add: learning how stuff works gives you opportunity to do that stuff, sometimes for cash, when nobody else is
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