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

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

#91

Post by cucumber3732842 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #71
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So the court checks if they were "just following orders"?

Sounds to me like following orders is in fact this magical thing that causes courts to direct liability away from the defendant.

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

#92

Post by EGreg »

mrdependable wrote: post #90

I think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.

They're just a thin layer to be replaced last. They're just arrogant enough to think they're the company, but ultimately the endgame is -- all humans become economically insignificant compared to the automated economy.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/13/meta-ai-m...

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

#93

Post by giaour »

simonw wrote: post #43

Loved that section about "meat shields". LLMs cannot be held accountable. Someone needs to be involved in decision making, with real stakes if those decisions are bad.

Data & Society put out a paper on this role back in 2019 but used the term "moral crumple zones" since they were focusing on how to assign blame in autonomous vehicle crashes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Cru...

"Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though

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

#94

Post by georgemcbay »

bwestergard wrote: post #76
xienze wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hav…

I was at 2) until the end of last year, then LLM/agent/harnesses had a capability jump that didn't quite bring me to be a 1) but was a big enough jump in that direction that I don't see why I shouldn't believe we get there soonish.

So now I tend to think a lot of people are in heavy denial in thinking that LLMs are going to stop getting better before they personally end up under the steamroller, but I'm not sure what this faith is based on.

I also think people tend to treat the "will LLMs replace " question in too much of a binary manner. LLMs don't have to replace every last person that does a specific job to be wildly disruptive, if they replace 90% of the people that do a particular job by making the last 10% much more productive that's still a cataclysmic amount of job displacement in economic terms.

Even if they replace just 10-30% that's still a huge amount of displacement, for reference the unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 25%.

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

#95

Post by cucumber3732842 »

nemomarx wrote: post #89
xienze wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because a machine can never take accountability. A business leader can though. > Compared to another software engineer who directed prompts to expand the system and generate extra revenue streams. I think you're missing the point. Why can't an LLM advance sufficiently to be a REAL senior software engineer that a business person/product manager is prompting instead of YOU, a software engineer? Why are YOU specifical…

why would it be a manager? hire a cheap intern to be the scapegoat, if the job market is bad enough. no reason for liability to fall on the suits

That's how things work already in every workplace where there's any real danger. The companies construes its policies and paper trail in bad faith so that the employees are always operating contradictory to policy/training and then when something happens blame can be shifted on them.

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

#96

Post by Aperocky »

the_af wrote: post #54
Aperocky wrote: post #26

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.

As someone in 99th percentile in terms of token usage, it's super clear to me where the agent will not be able to replace my judgement, two areas:

1. if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure.

2. LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build.

As such, I'm the limit of the numbers of concurrent agents working fo rme, because there is still a limit to my output of engineering judgement. I do get better, both at generating and delivering this judgement. Exceeding this limit, the output becomes garbage.

At this current year and date, the AI does not automate me in anyway, I have something that they just flat out don't have.

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

#97

Post by Aperocky »

xienze wrote: post #72
the_af wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem that I'm trying to solve with agent is similar here, for instance, my comment likely made zero impression on you because I'm against both of the things that you are also against here.

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

#98

Post by aphyr »

giaour wrote: post #93
simonw wrote: post #43

Loved that section about "meat shields". LLMs cannot be held accountable. Someone needs to be involved in decision making, with real stakes if those decisions are bad.

Data & Society put out a paper on this role back in 2019 but used the term "moral crumple zones" since they were focusing on how to assign blame in autonomous vehicle crashes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Cru... "Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though

Thank you for this--I remember reading this paper when it came out, but forgot it by the time I wrote this section. Will add a citation.

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

#99

Post by arbitrary_name »

Jtarii wrote: post #61
embedding-shape wrote: post #48

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.

the culture section of this writeup links to explicitly adult/erotic content in the footnotes and discusses 'adult themes' directly. his caution seems reasonable.

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

#100

Post by paleotrope »

xienze wrote: post #82
bwestergard wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Not sure that's what I was getting at. People in camp 2 don't think an LLM can take over the job of a real software engineer. It's people in camp 1 that I wonder about. They're convinced that LLMs can accomplish anything and understand a codebase better than anyone (and that may be the case!). However, they're simultaneously convinced that they'll still be needed to do the prompting because ???reasons???.

I was thinking today that I need to pivot to making and selling shovels, but then other issue is is anyone going to need shovels in the future.
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