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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

aphyr.com

71–80 of 190 posts

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accountability is really a way to address liability. So long as people can sue and companies can pay out, or individuals can go to jail, there is always going to be a question of liability; and historically the courts have not looked kindly at those who throw their hands up in the air and say “I was just following orders from a human/entity”

A huge component of compulsory (either by statute or de-facto as a result of adjacent statute, like mandatory insurance + requirements thereof) professional licensure is that if you follow the rules set by (some entity deputized by) government the government will in return never leave you holding the bag. The government gains partial control and the people under it's control get partial protection. "oh I'm sorry your…

Right, but usually that also involves verifying that the electrician actually followed the professional rules, and if not, they have liability

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#72
post #54

As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an implementation and it then exist - As long as I thought about the structure/input/output/testability and logic flow correctly and made sure I included all that information, it just works, nicely, with tests. Unix philosophy works well with LLM too - you can have…

> As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited? Everyone thinks it won't be them, it will be others that will be impacted. We all think what we do is somehow unique and cannot be automated away by AI, and that our jobs are safe for the time being.

> How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited?

Yeah, no one ever thinks beyond "whoa, how cool, I cloned Slack in 15 minutes!"

Personally, the thing I find more depressing is turning a career that was primarily about solving interesting puzzles in elegant ways into managing a swarm of idiot savant chatbots with "OK, that looks good" or "no, do it better" commands.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#73
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "playing it safe" in the same way that wearing full hockey gear to go to the store is "playing it safe". He is either making a political point or excessively paranoid.

It's probably a political point, but I think your comparison over sells how inconvenient it is for someone to geoblock one small country and the headache if anything did happen. It's not much more effort than doing nothing really? And clearly users in the UK can find their own way to read it if they like, so the cost is also small there.

>geoblock one small country

Considering that there is multiple "why is this blocked in the uk" comments on every single one of these posts maybe the UK isn't such a small country. Geoblocking a decent chunk of your readership would be a pretty big inconvenience for a writer I would imagine.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#74
post #68
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly why the term is being used. A company like Amazon doesn't treat its warehouse workers as human beings. Workers are seen as disposable: forced to piss in bottles, forced to work around the corpses of their collapsed coworkers, paid the absolute minimum possible, and replaced the second they don't operate like a perfect unfailing machine. You aren't viewed like a human, you are a tool. Cattle. A piece o…

> someone with a heartbeat they can blame when stuff inevitably goes wrong. if said person can be blamed (and take on the liability), but cannot stop the action or audit the action, take preventative measures (which costs money) etc, then they cannot take responsibility for real and thus whether the blame falls on them on paper is irrelevant - if there's real punishment (like jail time), but no real power to enforce…

Someone who needs to feed their family given that AI CEOs predicting that their technology will either destroy the world, take everyone's jobs or both.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#75
post #63
post #21

I am personally of the opinion that ML will end up being 'normal technology', albeit incredibly transformative. I think you can combine 'Incanters' and 'Process Engineers' into one - 'Users'. Jobs that encompass a role that requires accountability will be directing, providing context, and verifying the output of agents, almost like how millions of workers know basic computer skills and Microsoft Office. In my opinion…

> Hence why I've been quite bullish on software engineering (but not coding). You can easy set up 1) and 2) on contrived or sandboxed coding tasks but then 3) expands and dominates the rest of the role. Why can't LLMs and agents progress further to do this software engineering job better than an actual software engineer? I've never seen anyone give a satisfactory answer to this. Especially the part about making mista…

> Why can't LLMs and agents progress further to do this software engineering job better than an actual software engineer?

Because a machine can never take accountability. If a software engineer throughout the entire year has been directing AI with prompts that created weaker systems then that person is on the chopping block, not the AI. Compared to another software engineer who directed prompts to expand the system and generate extra revenue streams.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#76
post #69
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's why I just can't understand the mindset of software engineers who are giddy about this brave new world. There really is nothing special about your expertise that an LLM can't achieve, theoretically. They’re stupid or they’re already set up for success. The general ideas seems to be generalists are screwed, domain experts will be fine.

> domain experts will be fine But I don't see how this holds up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny. We're literally training LLMs to BE domain experts.

I think these arguments tend to reach impasse because one gravitates to one of two views:

1) My experiences with LLMs are so impressive that I consider their output to generally be better than what the typical developer would produce. People who can't see this have not gotten enough experience with the models I find so impressive, or are in denial about the devaluation of their skills.

2) My experiences with LLMs have been mundane. People who see them as transformative lack the expertise required to distinguish between mediocre and excellent code, leading them to deny there is a difference.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#77

The problem with AI is that it isn't like any previous technology. There may be temporary jobs to fill in the gaps but they won't be careers. The AI will do the process engineering and self optimization. The prompt witchcraft is a good example because today its totally unnecessary and doesn't actually increase performance, and they'll continue to make it easier to direct/steer the models. We're literally trying to bu…

We?

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#78
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense, technology is "not normal" regardless. If we think of the digitization tech revolution... the changes it made to the economy are hard to describe well, even now. In the early days, it was going to turn banks from billion dollar businesses to million dollar ones. Universities would be able to eliminate most of their admin. Accounting and finances would be trivialized. Etc. Earlier tech revolution s were…

Accountability is really a way to address liability. So long as people can sue and companies can pay out, or individuals can go to jail, there is always going to be a question of liability; and historically the courts have not looked kindly at those who throw their hands up in the air and say “I was just following orders from a human/entity”

Sort if like how one could be held liable for copyright infringement?

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#79
All plausible, but not very transformative. Like imagining that the new jobs enabled for the automobile include automobile maintenance, tire shops, and so on. Traveling nurses, motel operators, military tanks, doordash, suburban life, beer sales at NASCAR, those were all enabled by the car (and its larger sibling the truck). Still missing are the jobs snd industries enabled by "AI" that are not themselves "AI".

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#80
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO a small blog website is not going to get pulled-up for this Well, maybe not the typical engineering blog but I think if you're a puritan some posts/texts from Aphyr probably reaches borderline "adult content", so I'm not that surprised Aphyr rather play it safe and also make a point at the same time.

It's "playing it safe" in the same way that wearing full hockey gear to go to the store is "playing it safe". He is either making a political point or excessively paranoid.

>or excessively paranoid.

Have you even read the shit politicians are either pulling or trying to these days? There is no amount of paranoia that is too little when talking about things like cross national prosecution, laws regarding users not considered adults, and age verification.

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