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AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

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Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#41

Post by red75prime »

steve1977 wrote: post #15
throwfaraway4 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI will replace every humans in performing every cognitive task Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?" >unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.There's no reason to believe that's the case. How about the fact that we don't actually know enough about the human mind to arrive at this conclusion? (yet)

> Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?" And also at what cost and at what scale? Will we be able to construct a supercomputer/datacenter that can match or exceed human intelligence? Possibly, even probaby. But that would only be one instance of such an AGI then and it would be very expensive. IMHO it will take a long time to produce something like that as a commodity.

So far it looks like AI will go the same road as other technological analogues of biological systems: not a self-contained unit (powered by currently technologically unreachable nano-mechanisms), but infrastructure that produces and maintains specialized units.

A tractor can't reproduce or repair itself, but it is better than a horse for farming. A self-driving car can't learn by itself, but a datacenter can use its data to train a new version of the car software. A humanoid robot by itself might not be flexible enough to count as AGI, but it can defer some problems to an exascale datacenter.

Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#42

Post by pixl97 »

gdotdesign wrote: post #28
augusteo wrote: post #19

The tractor analogy keeps coming up in these threads, and I think it's actually more pessimistic than people realize. Tractors didn't just change farming. They emptied entire regions. What saved the people (not the communities) was that other industries absorbed them. Factory work, services, construction. The question for software isn't whether AI creates efficiency. It's whether there's somewhere else for displaced…

> The pessimistic one is that most of what needed building gets built, and the remaining work fits in fewer hands. I don't think that's true, mainly because if it were true it would have happened a long time ago. We will never settle on one version of a thing (let it be messaging, recipes, notes, image galleries, etc...). New variants emerge over time, the only thing AI does is accelerate this.

There are countless games and applications in the app stores these days. Almost all of them are money losing ventures. The vast majority of these variants are going to go extinct and earn negative revenue for its creator. The big problem comes in when creators stop running into any variants that can earn them a living at all.

>We will never settle on one version of a thing

This depends on how well a monopoly can fit into the equation.

>We will never settle on one version of a thing (recipes)

Here is an example of missing the whole elephant because you're looking to close. While the number of recipes are booming, the number of food distribution companies has collapsed into just a few mega corporations. And those corps are massively controlling the prices all of us must pay.

Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#43

Post by _pdp_ »

AI may replace the need for coding but not the need for understanding how it works. It is as simple as that.

We still need / want to study physics to understand the universe despite the fact that it is a process that we have no control over.

AI is the same. Even when code is written by AGI you still need to be able to understand what it is and how it works.

The alternative is complete abdication and resembles a lot more like religion or even a cult.

Trust but verify.

Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#44

Post by eloisant »

bluGill wrote: post #30
robofanatic wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s preventing AI from taking on the role of an architect?

Good taste. I just vibe coded some garbage in an hour. But it is so bad I can't see how to get to good code from here and so I'll spend the rest of the week doing it by hand. now to be fair this is my first attepmt at vibe coding and so I might not know how to prompt the ai

Depends on the tool, but the first thing to do is to use a plan mode where the AI will ask you follow up question to precise the project. This gives a much, much better result than just have the AI start to work with a few lines of prompt.

That basically turns your bad prompt into a good prompt, then execute on it.

Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#45

Post by pixl97 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #32
elevatortrim wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I do not understand is why is it that software engineers are so afraid? I have heard from so many other white collar people that AI already changed their job entirely (technical salesmen, translators, designers, government researchers, the list goes on), yet it is the software engineers that I hear the most noise from. Software engineering is one of the most intellectually demanding categories of white collar wo…

Tractors replaced farm hands, not farmers. Software developers are farm hands.

Why not both.

An absolutely massive numbers of farmers were replaced too. Farm management was rather grueling in the early 1900s. Farmers that embraced mechanization were able to buy up surrounding farms that didn't and grew in size. As the equipment got better the amount of work per acre farmed dropped so farms expanded with more acreage. Farmers and hands dropped in number.

Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#46

Post by CuriouslyC »

nomilk wrote: post #2

Interesting yc vid on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqwSb2hO1jE tl;dr it argues when there's a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of production of a good or service, its per-unit cost goes down so much that demand skyrockets, leading to greater demand for employees in that sector. The examples it gives are radiologists (after neural nets were predicted to be able to perform their jobs essentially for…

The Jevon's Paradox argument is not wrong but they're blanket applying it. Geoff Hinton has talked a lot about this, and he notes that while some things do benefit from Jevon's Paradox, there are a lot of things that AI is automating that won't. In terms of thoughtfulness and credibility I'll trust Geoff over YC.

Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#47

Post by aspenmartin »

spicyusername wrote: post #26
alphazard wrote: post #12

AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation. There's no reason to believe that's the case. LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon. They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cogn…

AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task This is probably true, but on a time horizon that is almost certainly much much longer than we think. Centuries. Perhaps millennia, even. It's fun to go back to the newspapers of the 1920, 30s, and 40s, and see how absolutely CERTAIN they were this was going to happen to them. I'm sure there are examples from the 19th and 18th centuries as well. Advancement ha…

I think I completely agree with you but I think HN folks seriously underestimate the rate of progress. Believe what you will about the magnitude of capex but it’s coming and it’s coming fast. And we are extremely extremely close now. I agree we constantly have gotten timelines wrong, and I think it’s easily possible SOME capabilities may take longer but I think it’s hard to overstate just how much we are accelerating progress like in the next year or two.

But yea: self driving cars are still not here, see e.g. all the other AI booms

Difference here is we’re seeing it with our own eyes and using it right now. So much absolutely existential competition between companies (even within them!) and geopolitically.

Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#48

Post by CuriouslyC »

robofanatic wrote: post #11
empressplay wrote: post #7

End of the engineer. Rise of the architect.

What’s preventing AI from taking on the role of an architect?

The challenge with AI doing architecture is assembling all the relevant stakeholder context, then having the wisdom to weigh it to produce an optimal solution. The context issue is solvable, but the wisdom part is complex and nuanced, it requires a deep understanding of power structures and organizational dynamics, as well as some understanding of where the problem domain is evolving over time.

Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#49

Post by fragmede »

pixl97 wrote: post #42
gdotdesign wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pessimistic one is that most of what needed building gets built, and the remaining work fits in fewer hands. I don't think that's true, mainly because if it were true it would have happened a long time ago. We will never settle on one version of a thing (let it be messaging, recipes, notes, image galleries, etc...). New variants emerge over time, the only thing AI does is accelerate this.

There are countless games and applications in the app stores these days. Almost all of them are money losing ventures. The vast majority of these variants are going to go extinct and earn negative revenue for its creator. The big problem comes in when creators stop running into any variants that can earn them a living at all. >We will never settle on one version of a thing This depends on how well a monopoly can fit…

You can't make money playing a guitar and warbling into a microphone anymore either. Hasn't stopped my local bar from hosting local musicians who are in it for the craft.

Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

#50

Post by pixl97 »

spicyusername wrote: post #26
alphazard wrote: post #12

AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation. There's no reason to believe that's the case. LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon. They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cogn…

AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task This is probably true, but on a time horizon that is almost certainly much much longer than we think. Centuries. Perhaps millennia, even. It's fun to go back to the newspapers of the 1920, 30s, and 40s, and see how absolutely CERTAIN they were this was going to happen to them. I'm sure there are examples from the 19th and 18th centuries as well. Advancement ha…

The particular problem here is the past has very little predictive power on when something is going to happen in the future.

There were plenty of people in 1890 saying heavier than air powered flight was never going to happen.

>humans love to do things, just for the sake of them.

This said, it doesn't prove a negative. How many things would people be doing if they could get paid for it. It's easy to say these things in generalities, but you do any specific things, especially for a living, those could dry up and disappear.

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