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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

#151

Post by the_af »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #141
the_af wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate here, I'm not antagonizing you but thinking out loud. > if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure. That's a current technical limitation. Are you so sure it won't be overcome in the near/mid future? > LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build But work is being done…

Does it seem to you like those issues will be solved soon? Does your boss have the time to do this AI wrangling work on top of their other tasks even if they don't have to learn to code?

> Does it seem to you like those issues will be solved soon?

No.

But I was also very skeptical about AI being able to code semi-reliably during the early stages of GPT hype, and look where I'm now: most of the code I produce is written by an AI. So I was wrong before, which makes me doubt my own ability to predict the near future.

> Does your boss have the time to do this AI wrangling work on top of their other tasks even if they don't have to learn to code?

My boss' boss would probably love to get rid of both me and my direct boss. And a whole class of problems will disappear, freeing time of people higher up the chain to focus on this... either them or a tiny group of engineers, which leaves me out of a job either way. I've already seen people in small shops get fired because their immediate semi-technical boss can now do their job with AI (cannot go details because of privacy reasons. Also, it doesn't matter if the end result is flawed, it matters that "mission accomplished" and someone is out of a job).

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

#152

Post by the_af »

icedchai wrote: post #137
the_af wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems. Yup. I've spotted former coworkers who I know for a fact can barely write in their native language, let alone in English, working for AWS and writing English-language technical blog posts in full AI-ese. Full of…

The "dead Internet" theory has become more real. It's especially bad on LinkedIn. Everyone is now an "AI expert", posting generated slop and updating their profiles with AI enhanced head shots.

> It's especially bad on LinkedIn

Agreed, but to be fair, LinkedIn was especially bad to begin with.

Even before AI-slop, LinkedIn posts were rightfully mocked. Self-congratulatory or self-pitying, full of empty platitudes and "lessons learned" and "journeys" (ended or started). There was never anything worth reading to begin with.

Now it's of course worse. I don't think I can stand reading about another self-appointed expert on LinkedIn writing about their completely unwarranted strategy and/or lessons and/or skepticism about AI.

I only go to LinkedIn for the daily puzzles!

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

#153

Post by 9rx »

the_af wrote: post #54
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…

> As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited? Everyone thinks it won't be them, it will be others that will be impacted. We all think what we do is somehow unique and cannot be automated away by AI, and that our jobs are safe for the time being.

> How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited?

The exciting part of the job is, and always has been, listening to idle chitchat where you pick up on the subtle cues of where one is finding difficulty in their life and then solving those problems. I think AI could already largely handle that today just fine, except:

You have to convince, especially non-technical, people to have idle chitchat with machines instead of humans

-or-

Convince them of and into having a machine always listening in to their idle conversations with humans

Neither of those are all that palatable in the current social landscape. If anything, people seem to be growing more weary of letting technology into their thoughts. Maybe there is never a future where humans become accepting of machines being always there trying to figure out what is wrong with them.

The trouble with AI replacing jobs is that a lot of jobs exist only because people want to have other people to talk to and are willing to pay for the company.

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

#154

Post by johngunderman »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #91
bobthepanda wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but usually that also involves verifying that the electrician actually followed the professional rules, and if not, they have liability

So the court checks if they were "just following orders"? Sounds to me like following orders is in fact this magical thing that causes courts to direct liability away from the defendant.

I think the point is supposed to be that "following the practices and procedures that limit their liability" = "doing their due diligence to reduce risk in accordance with their credentialing body".

We generally don't hold people liable for acts of God or random chance failures. For example, malpractice suits generally need to prove that a doctor was intentionally negligent on their responsibility.

Everything in real life has quantifiable risk, and part of why we have governing bodies for many things is because we can improve our processes to reduce the risk.

It's not just following orders :) it's recognizing that the solution to risks isn't to punish the actor but to improve the system.

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

#156

Post by monknomo »

guzfip wrote: post #65
xienze wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's why I just can't understand the mindset of software engineers who are giddy about this brave new world. There really is nothing special about your expertise that an LLM can't achieve, theoretically. They’re stupid or they’re already set up for success. The general ideas seems to be generalists are screwed, domain experts will be fine.

The optimistic spin is, I think, software developer as a career dies, just like sysadmin. But just like dev-ops, a new to-be-named role (or set of roles) will arise

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

#157

Post by seniorThrowaway »

doubled112 wrote: post #126
nradov wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

low code / no code, and it's been around in one form or fashion since the 1990's, at least.

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

#158

Post by cucumber3732842 »

johngunderman wrote: post #154
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the court checks if they were "just following orders"? Sounds to me like following orders is in fact this magical thing that causes courts to direct liability away from the defendant.

I think the point is supposed to be that "following the practices and procedures that limit their liability" = "doing their due diligence to reduce risk in accordance with their credentialing body". We generally don't hold people liable for acts of God or random chance failures. For example, malpractice suits generally need to prove that a doctor was intentionally negligent on their responsibility. Everything in real…

I'm not thinking act of god type unforseable event I'm thinking "everyone knows this is stupid and wrong and will cause a problem eventually but it's easier to just follow the rule than challenge it" situations because "if I follow the rules my ass is covered".

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

#159

Post by g9yuayon »

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…

> How much of the job is a structured set of tasks vs. taking accountability?

More accurately, how many jobs are probabilistically mechanical. That is, how many jobs are really the execution of a serious Bayesian decisions with a strong prior. LLMs are really great at displacing such jobs.

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

#160

Post by icedchai »

the_af wrote: post #152
icedchai wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "dead Internet" theory has become more real. It's especially bad on LinkedIn. Everyone is now an "AI expert", posting generated slop and updating their profiles with AI enhanced head shots.

> It's especially bad on LinkedIn Agreed, but to be fair, LinkedIn was especially bad to begin with. Even before AI-slop, LinkedIn posts were rightfully mocked. Self-congratulatory or self-pitying, full of empty platitudes and "lessons learned" and "journeys" (ended or started). There was never anything worth reading to begin with. Now it's of course worse. I don't think I can stand reading about another self-appoint…

Yes, we have more "thought leaders" than ever, all acting like copy-and-pasting from a textbox is some sort of unique skill.
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