Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

This seems to just ignore what's going on in the world. Some parts of the software development domain are definitely being affected by AI. I see a particular shift in web development and possibly embedded systems firmware development (or any other field where there is an exact specification of what you're supposed to deliver).

LLMs don't need to be AGI. There's a race to adjust testing, architecture and infrastructure to fit AI agents who could possibly change them as needed. Some tools are already pretty good and they will only get better.

Long story short, we are definitely going to see massive shift in jobs in the coming years.

This is a shallow and dated article, even when it came out in 2023. LLMs are dumb because they can't multiply, and generalize? They can easily write programs and calculate anything you want, and machine learning is all about generalizing.

   Hot take: if your job can be partially or wholly eliminated by AI, that’s a GOOD THING. If your job has patterns that predictable or labor that routine, AI automation is a GOOD THING. 

What if it lead to widespread under- or unemployment? This social upheaval would lead to people setting aside the niceties of civilization as they fight to meet their basic needs. And such people elect bad governments, which exacerbates the problem.

One might also be scared in a physical sense. The race is afoot to develop physical robots on par with humans. Imagine that as your policeman, or soldier, bringing democracy to a country near you.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/china-tech-contest-features-robot...

You make an interesting point about embedded specifications. But doesn’t that assume two things: 1) the specs are clear and complete, 2) we’re ok trusting AI to develop safety critical software in those subsets of embedded applications?

Dumb stuff is what I want. Classifiers and denoise are really useful.

What I don’t want is a shitty chat bot that barely understands what you ask it and generates shitty code by sticking a corpus of shitty code together then leaving me with the unconstrained job of working out if it has any land mines in it. Then multiply that by 50 engineers. Then tell me that’s the future. Because if it is we are totally fucked. Our decline will be noted by the general decline in capacity to do anything.

Because it isn't AI.