The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita. And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the money that programmer gets from programming - travels around the world, buying large houses, ... If you care about the environment, you should want AI's re…
So you mean that human programmers who were replaced by AI are dead by now? "You'll be fine digging trenches, programmer", they said. Seriously, though: ...so that they can no longer afford traveling around the world... This is either a sarcasm I failed to parse, or pure technofascism.
on top of that for sure all programmers AI is replacing are all extravagantly traveling around the world (especially ones in America that make the most dough and 90% do not have a passport)
They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the sam…
A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris paribus.
This is what I find interesting - the response from most companies is "we will need fewer engineers because of AI", not "we can build more things because of AI".
What is driving companies to want to get rid of people, rather than do more? Is it just short-term investor-driven thinking?
Maybe. The reality of software engineering is that there's a lot of mediocre developers on the market and a lot of mediocre code being written; that's part of the industry, and the jobs of engineers working with other engineers and/or LLMs is that of quality control, through e.g. static analysis, code reviews, teaching, studying, etc.
And those mediocre engineers put their work online, as do top-tier developers. In fact, I would say that the scale is likely tilted towards mediocre engineers putting more stuff online than really good ones. So statistically speaking, when the "AI" consumes all of that as its training data and returns the most likely answer when prompted, what percentage of developers will it be better than?
In other words, there's probably a market for a model trained on a curated collection of high-quality code.
A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris paribus.
This is what I find interesting - the response from most companies is "we will need fewer engineers because of AI", not "we can build more things because of AI". What is driving companies to want to get rid of people, rather than do more? Is it just short-term investor-driven thinking?
I think it's an excuse to do needed lay offs without saying as much. So yes, preserving signals, essentially. I've never met a tech company that didn't love expanding work to fill capacity, even if the work is of little value.
Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
One issue is that developers have been trained for the past few decades to look for solutions to problems online by just dumping a few relevant keywords into Google. But to get the most out of AI you should really be prompting as if you were writing a formal letter to the British throne explaining the background of your request. Basic English writing skills, and the ability to formulate your thoughts in a clear manner, have become essential skills for engineering (and something many developers simply lack).
what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.
The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita. And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the money that programmer gets from programming - travels around the world, buying large houses, ... If you care about the environment, you should want AI's re…
Yes the environmental impact of an AI agent performing a given task is lower. However we will not simply replace every programmer with an agent: in the process we will use more agents exceeding the previous environmental impact of humans. This is the rebound effect [0].
Your reasoning could be effective if we bounded the computing resources usable by all AI in order to meet carbon reduction goals.
what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.
All environmental impacts are equal, but some of them are more equal than the others!
This comes from a dystopian book (Animal Farm). What is your point?
Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…
You think you know what taste is. Have you been cranking on real systems all these years, or have you been on the sidelines armchairing the theoretics? I'm not trying to come across as rude, but it may be unavoidable to some degree when indirect criticism becomes involved. A laboring engineer has precious little choice in the type of systems available on which to work on. Fundamentally, it's all going to be some variant of system to make money for someone else somehow, or system that burns money, but ensures necessary work gets done somehow. That's it. That's the extent of the optimization function as defined by capitalism. Taste, falls by the wayside, compared to whether or not you are in the context of the optimizers who matter, because they're at the center of the capital centralization machine making the primary decisions as to where it gets allocated, is all that matters these days. So you make what they want or you don't get paid. As an Arts person, you should understand that no matter how sublime the piece to the artist, a rumbling belly is all that currently awaits you if your taste does not align with the holders of the fattest purses to lighten. I'm not speaking from a place of contempt here; I have a Philosophy background, and reaching out as one individual of the Humanities to another. We've lost sight of the "why we do things" and let ourselves become enslaved by the balance sheets. The economy was supposed to serve the people, it's now the other way around. All we do is feed more bodies to the wood chipper. Until we wake up from that, not even the desperate hope in the matter of taste will save us. We'll just keep following the capital gradient until we end up selling the world from under ourselves because it's the only thing we have left, and there is only the usual suspects as buyers.
All environmental impacts are equal, but some of them are more equal than the others!
This comes from a dystopian book (Animal Farm). What is your point?
If you read the book, my point should be crystal clear - that environmental impact which aligns with The Party goals (shareholder profits) the best, is painted the least concerning of all.
A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris paribus.
This is what I find interesting - the response from most companies is "we will need fewer engineers because of AI", not "we can build more things because of AI". What is driving companies to want to get rid of people, rather than do more? Is it just short-term investor-driven thinking?
The optimization function of capitalism and it's instrumental convergence. The AI Alignment problem is already here, and it is us.