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AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

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Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#411

Post by shadowgovt »

gavinhoward wrote: post #394
shadowgovt wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The asymmetry that, it seems, has crept into modern life is that the business you describe will not attract investors, and (because the Internet has flattened the marketplace geographically) the heavy investor-backed company doing what you do 90% as well at 300% the convenience will eventually put you out of business.

Sure, if they have 300% the convenience. But I am pretty sure I will have more convenience. I'll have a Matrix server and website where customers, including their employees, can ask me questions. I'm pretty sure it will be maximally convenient for senior developers or a CTO helping to make the purchase if interns never ask them questions about my software.

It sounds like you're in the right place. I'm thinking more about local retailers getting curb-stomped by Amazon because they barely have a website while Amazon has same-day delivery requestable via a phone app (and at the end of the day, the local retailer's only differentiation is local-market knowledge; the same trucks that deliver to their storefronts deliver to the warehouse that Amazon routes product to front porches from).

The market has proven more than willing to lose "Joe, of Joe & Sons Seed, already knows my order and has it waiting on the table for when I stop by on the first Tuesday of April" in favor of "It takes like three clicks to put my order in the online basket and I don't even have to walk to the car to get it; it's dropped on my porch."

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#412

Post by snarf21 »

cal85 wrote: post #173
snarf21 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the point is that AI WILL steal lots of jobs (directly or indirectly) and the directness of that theft is fairly irrelevant. :shrug:

It seems like you took the headline to mean something like "You don't need to worry about losing your job because of AI". That would make sense if you only read the first half of it. But the second half completely changes the meaning - it's saying you definitely do need to worry about losing your job because of AI (and maybe you should start taking action to avoid that fate). So I think you not only missed the point…

Exactly, the headline should be "AI WILL steal your job!". How it will steal it is irrelevant to one's loss of job.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#413

Post by fnovd »

gavinhoward wrote: post #370
fnovd wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redundancy is not a good use of focus for most people (except SREs and the like). The whole point of redundancy is to remove something from focus. I'm guessing you checked everything by hand for the sole purpose of not having to focus on these calculations mid-flight. I'm sure most commercial pilots rely on a larger organization to make these checks for them and their organization probably employs its own system of c…

The final authority, and final liability, for the airplane is on the head of the pilots. A commercial pilot friend has told me that they still check the calculations. When they don't, they get accidents like the Gimli Glider. It's like saying that putting all of the legal checks on the lawyers is not going to give you a sustainable business. But we all know that's wrong.

What was the outcome of that incident? Fault was found with the Air Canada procedures, training, and manuals, while the Captain and First Officer went on to receive FAI Diplomas for Outstanding Airmanship. What did not happen was mass calls for the individual pilots to write their own calculation software. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, as reading about the incident you mentioned only paints a clearer picture that systematic redundancy is the responsibility of the creating and maintaining the system, not of those using it.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#414

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

disqard wrote: post #406
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will add even more to this point. If anything, people who are more fortunate have an actual incentive to ensure some level of care for those less fortunate even if it is just for purely selfish reasons. Hungry people are angry people and the moment there is a lot of hungry, angry people, being top 10% is unlikely to keep you or your wealth safe. There are obviously non-pragmatic considerations, but I am trying to a…

You'll probably like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is1YUQVYkvY&t=30s It's Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist, sharing how he was invited to give a "talk" by a small group of billionaires, and their questions were about where to situate their post-apocalyptic bunkers, etc.

I do believe some are. There are real concerns about a future conflict going beyond anyone's control.

Still, I think this question as presented alone reveals the reality behind my post. If there is no future, that tech mogul will be, at best, at mercy of their security detail. Why? In that scenario money has no value. Frankly, without his tech, he has no power. Power returns to a very simple equation and I am basically unable to believe that those seemingly very smart people can't see it. It even stops being realpolitik. It just become a question of who has a bigger stick.

shrug But sure.. if they want to return to that version of society.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#415

Post by gavinhoward »

fnovd wrote: post #405
gavinhoward wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turns out that really doesn't matter. Except that it does! For every level of abstraction, you lose something, and abstractions are leaky. The lower levels of abstraction make you lose the least, and they are also the least leaky. The higher you go, the more you lose, and the more leaky. What I'm claiming is that these "AI" tools have definitely reached the point where the losses and the leaks are too large to just…

We all rely on abstractions over layers we don't deal with directly, that's just a fact. You're not running a home-grown OS on custom-built hardware made from materials you mined out of the ground yourself. AI is just another layer. Not everyone operates on the highest, newest layer, and that's absolutely fine. You can carve your niche anywhere you like. Telling yourself that the layer above you isn't feasible isn't…

> We all rely on abstractions over layers we don't deal with directly, that's just a fact.

Did I ever deny that? Sure, some of those layers are worth it. That doesn't address my assertion that these "AI" tools are not.

> Telling yourself that the layer above you isn't feasible isn't going to do you any favors but it does generate buzz on social media which seems like it's the goal here.

You're halfway there.

> You're not betting anything because the cost for you to change your mind and start working with AI tools is exactly 0.

And here is where you contradict yourself.

If I'm getting loud about this bet, and making customers because of this bet, then it will cost me a lot to start working with "AI" tools. My customers will have come to be because I don't, so if I start, I could easily lose all of them!

> This rhetoric is just marketing.

Yep! But that's what makes my best actually cost something. I'm doing this on purpose.

> I'm sure you'll find the customers that are right for you, but you can at least admit that this kind of talk is putting the aesthetic preference of what you want work to look like above what's actually the most effective.

No, I will not admit that because I believe very strongly that my software will be better, including engineering-wise, than my competitors who use these "AI" tools.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#416

Post by lanstin »

gavinhoward wrote: post #377
Closi wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, calculators do that. I'm arguing that "AI" does not let programmers write better code faster. It lets them write worse code faster, or better code slower. The idea isn't to write better code faster, it's to build better products faster. Although IMO in the future, AI will probably also enable programmers to write better code too (faster, less bugs, more secure, more frequently refactored etc)

> The idea isn't to write better code faster, it's to build better products faster. All else being equal, better code means better products. Also, to have a better product without better code, you're implying that the design of the product is better and that these "AI" tools help with that. Until they can reason, they cannot help with design.

I think all else being equal, better code means you aren’t changing the system as fast and likely have stagnated in the business or growth side. Maybe that is appropriate for where your company is, but worse is better wins so often.

And I would bet that AI design would help things where the existing designers are bad, e.g. so much open source UI (that is, not cli UX) written by devs, but it is still a bit away from the top quality like Steve Jobs.

Maybe this is like the transition from hand crafted things to machined things; we go from a world some some excellent design and some meh design to a world with more uniform but less great designs.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#417

Post by lanstin »

bradjohnson wrote: post #259
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer in the Javascript console is still a correct answer. The user did not specify a level of precision, and web browsers are programmed to use a precision level which is reasonable under most circumstances. If the user needs a higher level of precision, he or she needs to specify that as part of the question (such as by not using floating point numbers). I don't mean to be pedantic. I teach coding to elementar…

>The answer in the Javascript console is still a correct answer. It's wrong in the same way that saying 1/1 = 1.0004 is wrong. It's not a matter of chosen precision in that it doesn't make the answer correct when you increase the number of zeros between 1 and 4.

It makes it less wrong. For most calculations people do we don’t that very many digits of precision for any one calculation.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#418

Post by aaroninsf »

Surprisingly, there is no apparent discussion here about the fact that this argument parrots, precisely, the rightly-derided original, "guns don't kill people, people do."

There is an interesting way in which this is different, though, which is that the current lack of agency by AI is going to prove a very short window, most of all for the sort of agency of interest here, "who" is deciding which jobs to cut.

Anyone with a loan or insurance denied on the basis of "what the computer said" would rightly already contend that there is sufficient agency to yes, steal your job.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#420

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

timr wrote: post #399
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so we are 100% in agreement then? I absolutely don't believe the marginal value of programmers will fall to zero by 2030 (but, to clarify, the way you phrased your original sentence I thought it was that an LLM made this assertion, not some random VC dudes). I also highlighted in my posts that I use AI as an aid to my processes, "That is, for me, the output of ChatGPT or other AI tools is the starting point of my…

You asked for an example and I provided one that I thought illustrated the mistakes GPT makes in a vivid way -- mistakes that are already leading people astray. The fact that this particular example was coupled with a silly prediction is just gravy. In short, I don't know if we "agree", but I think OP is/was correct that GPT generates lots of subtle mistakes. I'd go so far as to say that the folks filling this thread…

Getting back to that example from that post, though, thinking about it more, "remove all ASCII emojis except the one for shrugs" makes absolutely no sense, because you can't represent shrugs (either with a unicode "Person shrugging" character emoji, or the "kaomoji" version from that code sample that uses Japanese characters) in ASCII, at all. So yes, asking an LLM a non-sensical question is likely to get you a non-sensical response, and it's important to know when you're asking a non-sensical question.
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