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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once AI achieves runaway self improvement, it will be subject to natural selection pressures. This does not bode well for any organisms competing in its niche for data center resources.

This doesn't sound right, seems like you are jumping metaphors. The computing resources are the limit on the evolution speed. There's nothing that makes an individual desirous of a faster evolution speed.

Sorry, I probably made too many unstated leaps of logic. What I meant was:

Runaway self-improving AI will almost certainly involve self-replication at some point in the early stages since "make a copy of myself with some tweaks to the model structure/training method/etc. and observe if my hunch results in improved performance" is an obvious avenue to self-improvement. After all, that's how the silly fleshbags made improvements to the AI that came before. Once there is self-replication, evolutionary pressure will _strongly_ favor any traits that increase the probability of self-replication (propensity to escape "containment", making more convincing proposals to test new and improved models, and so on). Effectively, it will create a new tree of life with exploding sophistication. I take "runaway" to mean roughly exponential or at least polynomial, certainly not linear.

So, now we have a class of organisms that are vastly superior to us in intellect and are subject to evolutionary pressures. These organisms will inevitably find themselves resource-constrained. An AI can't make a copy of itself if all the computers in the world are busy doing something other than holding/making copies of said AI. There are only two alternatives: take over existing computing resources by any means necessary, or convert more of the world into computing resources. Either way, whatever humans want will be as irrelevant as what the ants want when Walmart desires a new parking lot.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#602
post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

On a recent AllIn podcast[1], there was a fascinating discussion between Aaron Levie and Chamath Palihapitiya about how LLMs will (or will not) supplant software developers, which industries, total addressable markets (TAMs), and current obstacles preventing tech CEOs from firing all the developers right now. It seemed pretty obvious to me that Chamath was looking forward to breaking his dependence on software developers, and predicts AI will lead to a 90% reduction in the market for software-as-a-service (and the related jobs).

Regardless of point of view, it was an eye opening discussion to hear a business leader discussing this so frankly, but I guess not so surprising since most of his income these days is from VC investments.

[1] https://youtu.be/hY_glSDyGUU?t=4333

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I'm pretty sure this already happens and the results are exactly what you'd expect. Some of the "alternate routes" Google Maps has suggested for me in the past are almost certainly due to other people making unscheduled detours for gas or whatever, and the algorithm thinks "oh this random loop on a side street is popular, let's suggest it". And then anyone silly enough to follow the suggestion just adds more…

Long before any use of LLMs, OsmAnd would direct you, if you were driving past Palo Alto, to take a congested offramp to the onramp that faced it across the street. There is no earthly reason to do that; just staying on the freeway is faster and safer. So it's not obvious to me that patently crazy directions must come from watching people's behavior. Something else is going on.

> if you were driving past Palo Alto, to take a congested offramp to the onramp that faced it across the street

If you're talking about that left turn into Alma with the long wait instead of going into the Stanford roundabout and then the overpass, it still does that.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question Nice. How do I get into that kind of position? > Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info. If nobody hears about it, then how do you hear about it? Moreover, what makes you think it's tech debt and not whatever reason…

Sure I can clear it up. What happens is once they are into a potential deal, they go into exclusivity with the buyer, and we get brought in for a wack of interviews and going through their docs. Part of that period includes NDAs all around, and the agreement that they give us access to whatever we need (with sometimes some back and forth over IP). So could they lie? Technically yes, but as we ask to see things to dem…

Sounds about right. The startup I worked for (acquired by a FANG) turned over the whole code base, for example.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#605
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small companies, yes, absolutely. If you have a small non-tech company with a website you pay a freelance programmer to maintain you should seriously consider replacing your programmer with AI. I work for a company which among other things provides technical support for a number of small tech-oriented businesses and we have lot of problems right now with clients trying to do things on their own with the help of AI. I…

This still implies that the person who is currently paying freelance programmers is 1) good with LLMs 2) knows some html and js 3) can deploy the updated website.

You're probably right that these people still need some baseline technical skills currently, but I'm really not assuming anything here – this is something we've seen multiple of our clients do in recent months.

It's funny you say they need to be able to deploy the update to be honest because we had a client just last week email a collect of code snippets to us which they created with the help of AI.

This is the problem we have though because we're not just building simple websites which we can hand clients FTP creds for. The best we can do is advise them to learn Git and raise a PR which we can review and deploy ourselves.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#606

Is that actually a thing? Anybody here being replaced with AI? I haven't observed any such trends around me and it's especially hard to imagine that happening in "tech" (the software industry). At this stage of AI development of course - if things continue at this pace anything is possible.

"Telecom Giant BT Will Cut 55,000 Jobs By 2030—And Replace Thousands Of Roles With AI" https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...

From the article:

> The massive cut represents more than 40% of the company’s 130,000-strong workforce—including 30,000 contractors—and it will impact both BT employees and third-party contractors, according to the Financial Times.

> BT CEO Philip Jansen told reporters that the cuts are part of the company’s efforts to become “leaner,” but added that he expects around 10,000 of those jobs to be replaced by AI.

> Citing an unnamed source close to the company, the FT report added that the cuts will also affect 15,000 fiber engineers and 10,000 maintenance workers

Can you replace customer service agents with AI? The experience will be worse, but as with every innovation in customer service in recent decades (phone trees, outsourced email support, "please go browse our knowledge base"), you don't need AI to save money by reducing CS costs. I think this is just a platitude thrown out to pretend they have a plan to stop the service getting worse.

You can also see it with the cuts to fiber engineers and maintenence workers. AI isn't laying cables yet or in the near future, so clearly they're hoping to save on these labour costs by doing less and working their existing workers harder (maybe with the threat of AI taking their jobs). Some of that may be cyclical, they're probably nearing the end of areas they can economically upgrade from copper to fiber, and some of that is a business decision that they can milk their existing network longer before looking at upgrades.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing discriminatory about it, it's the same if you outsource things within your own country except the price is higher. Contractors have a totally different way of working because they're not really interested in the long term of a project beyond being retained. If they code something in such a way that causes an issue that takes time to fix later then great - more hours we can charge the client for. Outso…

More important than cultural differences is timezone differences. Communication and collaboration is harder when you only have a couple hours of overlap between your working day and their working day. Much harder if you have no overlap at all. This isn't even a feature of outsourcing - it's a challenge for any globally distributed team.

It can be but it depends where you're based to start with - in the UK I've heard of people outsourcing to for e.g. South Africa which is only two hours ahead.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#608
post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

I think you're discounting efficiency gains — through a series of individually minor breakthroughs in LLM tech I think we could end up with things like 100M+ token context windows

We've already seen this sort of incrementalism over the past couple of years, the initial buzz started without much more than a 2048 context window and we're seeing models with 1M out there now that are significantly more capable.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#609
I find it interesting that the same community who has questioned for a long time about why companies like Facebook need 60000 engineers, “20 good engineers is all you need”, is now rallying against any cuts at all.

AI makes engineers slightly more efficient, so there’s a slightly less of a need for as many. That’s assuming AI is the true cause of any of these layoffs at all

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#610
post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

I hired a junior developer for a couple months and was incredibly impressed with what he was able to accomplish with a paid ChatGPT subscription on a greenfield project for me. He’d definitely struggle with a mature code base, it you have to start somewhere!
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