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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

#161

Post by thunderfork »

chii wrote: post #68
crote wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly why the term is being used. A company like Amazon doesn't treat its warehouse workers as human beings. Workers are seen as disposable: forced to piss in bottles, forced to work around the corpses of their collapsed coworkers, paid the absolute minimum possible, and replaced the second they don't operate like a perfect unfailing machine. You aren't viewed like a human, you are a tool. Cattle. A piece o…

> someone with a heartbeat they can blame when stuff inevitably goes wrong. if said person can be blamed (and take on the liability), but cannot stop the action or audit the action, take preventative measures (which costs money) etc, then they cannot take responsibility for real and thus whether the blame falls on them on paper is irrelevant - if there's real punishment (like jail time), but no real power to enforce…

There are several historical examples of this sort of job, and plenty of people who took them. For example, plenty of "editors in name only" of publications when the German government got really interested in censoring press in the 18th century.

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

righthand wrote: post #148
pardon_me wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human species. "We" doesn't include everyone and doesn't necessarily imply the process happens through collaboration and planning (conspiracy). The race to automation is happening as expected; outside any group control and bound by competition. Game theory suggests the end result is us being replaced, if we make it that far. "We" as a species are the ones making it happen.

There is a very very small percentage of humanity that’s pushing this stuff on everyone else. In fact most are saying “please stop”. “We” as a species certainly aren’t making it happen.

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by ChrisLTD »

the_af wrote: post #151
ChrisLTD wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

My impression from a couple years ago was that it was fairly decent at coding, it was just slow to go from question -> code, and the tooling around that has improved significantly so that it's all pretty quick. I think whether or not the models are fundamentally better at raw coding is a murkier question.

They still fall down at bigger architectural tasks, go off the rails, hallucinate, etc. So, it seems to me like a core problem with the current technology.

> it doesn't matter if the end result is flawed, it matters that "mission accomplished" and someone is out of a job

This is a short term problem. If the market has any sanity left, the shops that maintain the talent to execute well will out-perform the shops that were short-sighted.

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

#164

Post by ChrisLTD »

Aperocky wrote: post #147
ChrisLTD wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If they never learned to code, it wouldn't be very easy to build or catch the BS that AI generate.

Yes, this is the obvious problem.

We've been through cycles like this before. Back in the day, Dreamweaver was going to put every web developer out of a job. More recently, Squarespace was going to do something similar. However, as soon as you step out of the well-trodden path, you're encountering tougher to debug issue, or you want some customization that the tools aren't aware of or designed to handle, and now you're hiring or paying a specialist again.

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

#165

Post by icedchai »

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.

Many experienced software engineers will move into infrastructure or architect roles, if they haven't already. Experienced engineers are in the best position to use LLMs because they can validate the output as actually being correct, not just looking like it works. Newer folks are going to be in a bad spot.

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

#166

Post by icedchai »

pixl97 wrote: post #139
paulnpace wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Heh, how long before someones agent starts looking for these 3 so it can run the business in the background and feeding them all the reports they need to sign.

In most jurisdictions, all three can be the same person.

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

#167

Post by icedchai »

Aperocky wrote: post #147
ChrisLTD wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If they never learned to code, it wouldn't be very easy to build or catch the BS that AI generate.

Yes. This is why senior+ engineers will be fine for a while. It's the future of the industry I'm worried about. We are the last generation that will know the world before GenAI.

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

#168

Post by netcan »

bobthepanda wrote: post #34
netcan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense, technology is "not normal" regardless. If we think of the digitization tech revolution... the changes it made to the economy are hard to describe well, even now. In the early days, it was going to turn banks from billion dollar businesses to million dollar ones. Universities would be able to eliminate most of their admin. Accounting and finances would be trivialized. Etc. Earlier tech revolution s were…

Accountability is really a way to address liability. So long as people can sue and companies can pay out, or individuals can go to jail, there is always going to be a question of liability; and historically the courts have not looked kindly at those who throw their hands up in the air and say “I was just following orders from a human/entity”

Yes. I agree. There is a context and it makes sense within this context. But, the economy or industry is not there to produce accountability, liability, court-legibility. These are support structures, not end goals.

I said this in response to the example above, that humans are needed where accountability is a concern. This is pretty distant from the macro.

If we think of the 19th century economy... it was mostly about food, household products and suchlike. Now the economy is a lot harder to reason about and it's easy to miss the forrest for the trees... when talking about how technology will affect it.

Accountability is required to work with your payment processor, which works with visa and mastercard, that also have requirements, etc. Depending on where (of anywhere) paradigm shifts occur... we may or may not even need these functions.

That's why it's so hard to reason our way to predictions about upcoming Ai-mediated changes.

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

#169

Post by the_af »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #164
Aperocky wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they never learned to code, it wouldn't be very easy to build or catch the BS that AI generate.

Yes, this is the obvious problem. We've been through cycles like this before. Back in the day, Dreamweaver was going to put every web developer out of a job. More recently, Squarespace was going to do something similar. However, as soon as you step out of the well-trodden path, you're encountering tougher to debug issue, or you want some customization that the tools aren't aware of or designed to handle, and now you'…

> We've been through cycles like this before. Back in the day, Dreamweaver was going to put every web developer out of a job [...]

I get what you're saying. This is why I was also skeptical, initially. But consider this: this time, it's qualitatively different, and more importantly, companies seem to believe so, which has real impact on our jobs.

Dreamweaver never threatened my job. Not once. Neither did Squarespace. I'm sure they did threatened some jobs, but ultimately they simply didn't replace the mind and hands guiding them, and in fact, they never aimed at this. "No code" tools were similarly misguided for a lot of real use case. However, this time, AI seems to be making real progress towards this, and is becoming a real threat to jobs.

The argument of "but when calculators/writing/$SOME_OTHER_TECH was introduced..." don't fly with me. $OLD_TECH is not necessarily analogous to new tech, or AI in particular.

What if this time it's different?

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

#170

Post by the_af »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #163
the_af wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 My impression from a couple years ago was that it was fairly decent at coding, it was just slow to go from question -> code, and the tooling around that has improved significantly so that it's all pretty quick. I think whether or not the…

> My impression from a couple years ago was that it was fairly decent at coding, it was just slow to go from question -> code, and the tooling around that has improved significantly so that it's all pretty quick

Your experience is very different from mine. Early GPT/LLM tech was hilariously wrong. It famously hallucinated code out of nowhere, made breaking changes all the time, failed to follow very simple instructions. I remember when it couldn't play Tic Tac Toe! It hallucinated board positions and rules. I used to break it all the time, for fun (and it didn't take much, it mostly fell down the stairs on its own). Now it can play far more complex games.

Was I right to be skeptical? Well, based on what I saw, I was right. GPT was impressive and fun but also hilariously wrong most of the time. Until they weren't!

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