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"People who don't use AI will be left behind"

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Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#201

Post by happytoexplain »

btschaegg wrote: post #180
jerhewet wrote: post #87

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and re…

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural o…

True. Even Adams himself would have been sickened by GenAI.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#202

Post by archagon »

sdevonoes wrote: post #62

Any engineer (any person actually) can “learn to use AI” in a couple of days. It’s not rocket science; there’s no chance of left behind. If you haven’t use LLMs at all, a weekend would be enough to be on par with everyone else in the industry

The unspoken (and utterly antisocial) subtext is "we are aiming for an exponential leveraging of our labor and complete domination of the market."

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#203

Post by archagon »

dudisubekti wrote: post #7

Black-and-white thinking like this is not healthy. You can still do creative thinking while using AI as a powerful tool at your disposal. Some mathematicians like Terence Tao are comfortable doing this, for example.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Richard Stallman was unreasonable. So was Linus Torvalds. I'm hoping that something wonderful and entirely human-centered will come out of the anti-AI movement, up to and including a bifurcation of the internet.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#204

Post by vehemenz »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #151
vehemenz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that's all they are: statistical text prediction engines. They do not think or reason; they generate next tokens based on prior context[1]. Unfortunately, because they predict really convincing text, a lot of people are willing to believe them to be more capable than they are. As a consequence, the companies developing these technologies have chosen to lean into rhetoric that exacerbates these beliefs because i…

> The reductionist, mechanical explanation of what AIs do is not the full picture It is the full picture, to a first approximation. The statistical models involved are incredibly complex, and the mechanisms used to tend towards better outputs have improved drastically, but it is still fundamentally just statistics . I don't understand why you would try to argue otherwise. "Just statistics" is not a pejorative; if any…

[dead]

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#205

Post by RajT88 »

happytoexplain wrote: post #201
btschaegg wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural o…

True. Even Adams himself would have been sickened by GenAI.

Happy Service!

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#206

Post by Olumde »

I don't (yet) use AI in the way I am expected to. I have not integrated it into my IDE -- can't be bothered, plus I code in notepad++. Rather I use in a browser and have raging arguments with it over the course of three days about a design. After we come to an agreement I write the code.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#207

Post by akomtu »

bluegatty wrote: post #175
akomtu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hand writing" your own thoughts is the only true way, though. If some entity does your thinking, then it's no longer you.

Yes, now that's a reasoned though on how AI will affect us, but fortunately - the AI is not 'doing our thinking for us' any more that 'calculators did', and, that's not going to stop us from using AI. People not using AI will be about as useful as those refusing to use e-mail or computers. It's absurd.

Doing our thinking for us is the purpose of AI, isn't it? It's called artificial intelligence for a reason.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#208

Post by DANmode »

archagon wrote: post #203
dudisubekti wrote: post #7

Black-and-white thinking like this is not healthy. You can still do creative thinking while using AI as a powerful tool at your disposal. Some mathematicians like Terence Tao are comfortable doing this, for example.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Richard Stallman was unreasonable. So was Linus Torvalds. I'm hoping that something wonderful and entirely human-centered will come out of the anti-AI movement, up to and including a bifurcation of the internet.

> up to and including a bifurcation of the internet.

Enforced how?

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#209

Post by DANmode »

jckahn wrote: post #133
Barrin92 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a good job is one that brings you joy and improves your creativitiy, they by definition can't be in hell. if you mean well paying, that's a different thing entirely, ditch the fancy car and adjust your lifestyle

I have a fancy car? News to me. I'm just trying to pay my bills and live a sensible and reasonably comfortable life. These days that requires a lot of money.

Leave the city.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#210

Post by simonw »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #190
simonw wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firmly disagree. Learning how to use these tools effectively is unintuitively difficult. They're great at some stuff and terrible at other stuff in ways that are very hard to predict. I'm figuring out new and better ways to use them in a daily basis, and I've been an almost daily user for nearly three years.

They're difficult and hard to predict because they're still primitive, despite what their companies say. When (or if) they get advanced enough to deliver consistently, there will be no chance of being left behind, because even a kid will be able to use them effectively. Right now they're still at the gimmick level, although a very impressive one.

If the models get to a point of total consistency there's still a LOT that we need to figure out and learn about how to use them.

Let's say models can exactly and correctly write any code you ask of them.

- How do you break down a project into a sequence of requests to models?

- How can you most effectively parallelize the work - models will never be instant, so there will always be benefits in working out how best to use several agents at once

- Now that the models can handle the details of Lean, and Swift-UI, and Oracle stored procedures, and thousands of other technologies that you never got around to learning in the past... what can you do with those and how do you pick which projects to go after?

- How do you collaborate with other engineers and designers and product people in a world where you can churn out the right code reliably in a few minutes?

The models we have today are already effective enough to change the shape of our work as software engineers. As the models continue to improve figuring out and adapting to whatever that new shape is becomes even more complicated.

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