29 ms·

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the pri

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jostmey 5y ago
I am blown away but not scared for my job... yet. I suspect the AI is only as good as the training examples from Github. If so, then this AI will never generate novel algorithms. The AI is simply performing some really amazing pattern matching to suggest code based on other pieces of code. But over the coming decades AI could dominate coding. I now believe in my lifetime it will be possible for an AI to win almost all coding competitions!
- asdfman123 5y ago
  I guess it's worth pointing out that the human brain is just an amazing pattern matcher. They feed you all these algorithms in college and your brain suggests new algorithms based on those patterns.
  - jostmey 5y ago
    Humans are more than pattern matchers because we do not passively receive and imitate information. We learn cause and effect by perturbing our environment, which is not possible by passively examining data. An AI agent can interact with an environment and learn from its environment by reinforcement learning. It is important to remember that pattern matching is different from higher forms of learning, like reinforcement learning. To summarize, I think there are real limitations with this AI, but these limitations are solvable problems, and I anticipate significant future progress
    - visarga 5y ago
      Fortunately the environment for coding AI is a compiler and a CPU which is much faster and cheaper than physical robots, and doesn't require humans for evaluation like dialogue agents and GANs.
      - qorrect 5y ago
        Well you still have to assess validity and code quality which is a difficult task , but not unsolvable. Also Generative Adversarial Networks original implementation was to pit neural networks against each other to train them , they don't need human intervention.
  - ElFitz 5y ago
    > They feed you all these algorithms in college and your brain suggests new algorithms based on those patterns. Some come from the other end of the process. I want to solve that problem -> Functionally, it’d mean this and that -> How would it work? -> What algorithms / patterns are there out there that could help. Usually people with less formal education and more hands on experience, I’d wager. More prone to end up reinventing the wheel and spend more time searching for solutions too.
    - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
      What?
      - ElFitz 5y ago
        Most people I know who’ve been to college, or otherwise educated in the area they work in, tend to solve problems using what they know (not implying it’s a hard limit. Just an apparently well spread first instinct). Which fits the pattern matching described by the grandparent. A few people I know, most of which haven’t been to college, or done much learning at all, but are used to work outside of what they know (that’s an important part), tend to solve problems with things they didn’t know at the time they set out to solve said problems. Which doesn’t really fit the pattern matching mentioned by the grandparent. At least not in the way it was meant.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    To reduce intelligence to pattern matching begs the question: How do you know which patterns to match against which? By some magic we can answer questions of why, of what something means. Purpose and meaning might be slippery things to pin down, but they are real, we navigate them (usually) effortlessly, and we still have no idea how to even begin to get AI to do those things.
    - ganzuul 5y ago
      I think those are the distance metrics, which is what produces inductive bias, which is the core essence of what we consider 'intelligence'. - Consider a more complicated metric like a graph distance with a bit of interesting topology. That metric is the unit by which the feature space is uniformly reduced. Things which are not linearized by the metric are considered noise, so this forms a heuristic which overlooks features which may have been in reality salient. - This makes it an inductive bias. (Some call me heterodox, I prefer 'original thinker'.)
- timkam 5y ago
  To generate new, generally useful algorithms, we need a different type of "AI", i.e. one that combines learning and formal verification. Because algorithm design is a cycle: come up with an algorithm, prove what it can or can't do, and repeat until you are happy with the formal properties. Software can help, but we can't automate the math, yet.
  - dharmaturtle 5y ago
    > we can't automate the math, yet This exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_proving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_proving
    - bccdee 5y ago
      This is moreso automation-assisted theorem proving. It takes a lot of human work to get a problem to the point where automation can be useful. It's like saying that calculators can solve complex math problems; it's true in a sense, but it's not not strictly true. We solve the complex math problems using calculators.
    - sterlind 5y ago
      and there's already GPT-f [0], which is a GPT-based automated theorem prover for the Metamath language, which apparently submitted novel short proofs which were accepted into Metamath's archive. I would very much like GPT-f for something like SMT, then it could actually make Dafny efficient to check (and probably avoid needing to help it out when it gets stuck!) 0. https://analyticsindiamag.com/what-is-gpt-f/ https://analyticsindiamag.com/what-is-gpt-f/
    - IAmLiterallyAB 5y ago
      Someone tell Gödel
  - jostmey 5y ago
    I see a different path forward based on the success of AlphaGo. This looks like a clever example of supervised learning. But supervised learning doesn't get you cause and effect, it is just pattern matching. To get at cause and effect, you need reinforcement learning, like AlphaGo. You can imagine an AI writing code that is then scored for performing correctly. Overtime the AI will learn to write code that performs as intended. I think coding can be used as a "playground" for AI to rapidly improve itself, like how AlphaGo could play Go over and over again
- GrinningFool 5y ago
  > If so, then this AI will never generate novel algorithms. This is true, but the most programmers don't need to generate novel algorithms themselves anyway.
- habibur 5y ago
  > I now believe in my lifetime it will be possible for an AI to win almost all coding competitions! Then we shall be reaching singularity.
  - jostmey 5y ago
    We will only reach a singularity with respect to coding. There are many important problems beyond computer coding like engineering and biology and so on
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Coding isn't chess playing it's likely about as general as math or thinking. If you can write novel code you can ultimately do biology or engineering or ultimately anything else.
itsoktocry 5y ago
>Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. I'm skeptical. The envelope of "programming" will continue to shift as things get more and more complex. Your mother-in-law is not going to install Copilot and start knocking out web apps. Tools like this allow programmers to become more productive, which increases demand for the skills.
- waprin 5y ago
  I strongly agree with you. Reminds me of something I read that claimed when drum machines came out, the music industry thought it was the end of drummers. Until people realized that drummers tended to be the best people at programming cool beats on the drum machine. Every single technological advancement meant to make technology more accessible and eliminate expertise has instead only redefined what expertise means. And the overall trend has been a lot more work opportunities created, not less.
  - atentaten 5y ago
    Yeah, but less drummers are being hired than before drum machines came out. What you describe sounds like work has become more concentrated into fewer hands. Perhaps this will happen with software as well.
    - morei 5y ago
      What happened is what typically happens: Concentration of expertise. The lower expertise jobs (just mechanically play what someone else wrote/arranged) went away and there was increased demand for higher expertise (be an actual expert in beats _and_ drum machines). So the winners were those that adapted earlier and the losers were those that didn't/couldn't adapt. This translates to: If you're mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again, then it's a low value prop and is at risk. But if you're solving actual problems that require thought/expertise then the value prop is high and probably going to get higher.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bconnorwhite 5y ago
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1404100794245214215 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1404100794245214215
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I think this will result in classic Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . As the price of writing any individual function/feature goes down, the demand for software will go up exponentially. Think of how many smallish projects are just never started these days because "software engineers are too expensive". I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper, they'll just do a lot more.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  > Think of how many smallish projects are just never started these days because "software engineers are too expensive". Maybe many. If the cost/benefit equation doesn't work, it makes no sense to do the project. > I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper, they'll just do a lot more. If they do more for the same cost, they are cheaper. You as a developer will be earning less in relation to the value you create.
  - habibur 5y ago
    > You as a developer will be earning less in relation to the value you create. Doesn't matter as long as I create 5x value and earn 2x for it. I still am earning double within the same time and effort.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    > If they do more for the same cost, they are cheaper. You as a developer will be earning less in relation to the value you create. Welcome to the definition of productivity increases, which is the only way an economy can increase standard of living without inflation.
    - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
      Inflation and productivity might be correlated but neither is a function of the other. Given any hypothetical world where increased productivity leads to inflation, there's a corresponding world equal in all respects except that the money supply shrinks enough to offset that inflation.
qqqwerty 5y ago
We went through the same hype cycle with self driving cars. We are now ~15 years out from the DARPA challenges and to date exactly 0 drivers have been replaced by AI. It is certainly impressive to see how much the GPT models have improved. But the devil is in the last 10%. If you can create an AI that writes perfectly functional python code, but that same AI does not know how to upgrade an EC2 instance when the application starts hitting memory limits, then you haven't really replaced engineers, you have just given them more time to browse hacker news.
- ulber 5y ago
  Driving is qualitatively different from coding: an AI that's pretty good but messes up sometimes is vastly more useful for coding than for driving. In neither case can you let the AI "drive", but that's ok in coding as software engineering is already set up for that. Testing, pair programming and code reviews are popular ways to productively collaborate with junior developers. You're not replacing the engineer, but you're giving every engineer a tireless companion typing suggestions faster than you ever could, to be filled in when you feel it's going to add value. My experience with the alpha was eye opening: this was the first time I've interacted with an AI and felt like its not just a toy, but actually contributing.
  - qqqwerty 5y ago
    Writing code is by far the easiest part of my job. I certainly welcome any tools that will increase my productivity in that domain, but until an AI can figure out how to fix obscure, intermittent, and/or silent bugs that occur somewhere in a series of daisy-chained pipelines running on a stack of a half-dozen services/applications, I am not going to get too worked up about it.
    - worldsayshi 5y ago
      I agree. It kind of amazes me though there is so much room for obscurity. I would expect standardisation to have dealt with this a long time ago. Why are problems not more isolated and manageable in general?
blackearl 5y ago
I just don't believe it. Having experienced terrible cheap outsourced support and things like Microsoft's troubleshooting assistant (also terrible), I'm willing to pay for quality human professionals. They have a long way to go before I change my mind.
jahewson 5y ago
I’m not sure why it’s unexpected when it’s essentially a reframing of Baumol's cost disease. Any work that does not see a productivity increase becomes comparatively more expensive over time.
simias 5y ago
Reading this thread it seems to me that AI is a threat for "boilerplate-heavy" programming like website frontends, I can't really imagine pre-singularity AI being able to replace a programmer in the general case. Helping devs go through "boring", repetitive code faster seems like a good way to increase our productivity and make us more valuable, not less. Sure, if AI evolves to the point where it reaches human-level coding abilities we're in trouble, but that's the case this is going to revolutionize humanity as a whole (for better or worse), not merely our little niche.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  C’mon guys, your standard backend schema with endpoints is like way easier to automate away.
  - Daishiman 5y ago
    I mean, we already have? Use Django Rest Framework and simple business models and you're pretty much declaratively writing API endpoints by composing behavior. Almost nothing in a DRF endpoint definition is boilerplate. The hard part has always been writing an API that models external behavior correctly.
fungiblecog 5y ago
I wonder does Sam Altman also believe that you can measure programmer productivity by lines-of-code?
Animats 5y ago
"Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" I've been saying something like that for a while, but my form was "If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, you can be replaced." By a computer, a computer with AI, or some kind of outsourcing. A question I've been asking for a few years, pre-pandemic, is, when do we reach "peak office"? Post-pandemic, we probably already have. This has huge implications for commercial real estate, and, indeed, cities.
mullingitover 5y ago
Generating the code with help from AI: 25 cents Knowing what code to generate with the AI: 200k/yr
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  Will this tend to blur the distinction between coder and manager? In the end a manager is just a coder who commands more resources, and relies more on natural language to do it. Or maybe I'm thinking of tech leads. I don't know, my org is flat.
  - kamaal 5y ago
    Issue is not writing code. Its changing, evolving or maintaining it. This is the problem with things like Spreadsheets, dag-drop programming, code generators. Its not easy to tell a program what to change and where to change.
    - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
      I feel like you might be moving the goalposts. Maybe they're different problems, but it's not at all clear to me that mutation is harder than creation.
sennight 5y ago
huh... I've found that people who tend to describe their occupation as "knowledge work" are the most blind to the fact that white collar jobs are the first to get optimized away. Lawyers are going to have a really bad time after somebody manages to bridge NLP and formal logic. No, it won't result in a Lawyerbot-2000 - it will result in software that enables lawyers to do orders of magnitude more work of a higher quality. What do you think that does to a labor market? It shrinks it. That or people fill the labor glut with new, cheaper, lawsuits...
- MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  i don't think that people will ever fully trust an AI lawyer, given all the possible legal consquences of a misunderstanding between the AI and the client. You could literally go to jail because of a bug/misunderstanding due to an ambiguous term (this might make a good sci-fi story ...) But yes, getting some kind of legal opinion will probably be cheaper with an AI.
  - sennight 5y ago
    Nor I, which is why I said so. A SaaS will pop up called "Co-chair" and that'll be that. It would definitely be a lot easier to trust than any of the black box neural networks we are all familiar with - as the field of formal logic is thousands of years old and pretty thoroughly explored. I used a SAT solver just last night to generate an exhaustive list of input values that result in a specific failure mode for some code I'm reverse engineering - I have no doubts about the answer the SAT solver provided. That definitely isn't the case with NN based solutions - which I trust to classify cat photos, but not much else.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  Legal discovery and other "menial" law tasks are already quite automated.
  - sennight 5y ago
    I wouldn't describe keyword search engines or cross reference managers as "quite automated" - so I would expect little market change from whatever LexisNexis is currently selling.
solitus 5y ago
Honestly, the only reason I'm still doing work in front of a computer is that it pays well. I'm really starting to think I should have followed my gut instincts when I was 17 and go to trade school to become an electrician or a carpenter...
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
True self-improving general AI would put all labor out of business. Incomes would then be determined by only the ownership of capital and government redistribution. Could be heaven, could be hell.
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
Don't hold your breath. (Coming soon right after the flying self-driving car.)
jfoster 5y ago
As it stands, this looks like it will actually increase the productivity of existing programmers more than it will result in "now everyone is a programmer". Over time it will certainly do more, but it's probably quite a long time before it can be completely unsupervised, and in the meantime it's increasing the output of programmers.
black3r 5y ago
I kinda believe this but I still think it hugely depends on what you're doing in front of a computer. If you're just a generic developer that gets a task and codes it by the spec, then you can probably be replaced by AI in a few years. But I don't think AI will become capable of complex thought in the next one/two decades, so if you're training to be a software architect, project manager, data analyst I think you should be safe for some time.
eCa 5y ago
So either his prediction or expectation will be correct. I think I’ll side with his expectation, but then again, my salary depends on it.
krageon 5y ago
People have been saying AI would end everything and anything since I was a wee baby. It still hasn't happened. How about instead of making the same old tired boring predictions about the impending apocalypse of things we love we start making and listening to predictions that actually talk about how life has been observed to progress. It's not impossible, science-fiction authors get it right occasionally.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jostmey 5y ago

I am blown away but not scared for my job... yet. I suspect the AI is only as good as the training examples from Github. If so, then this AI will never generate novel algorithms. The AI is simply performing some really amazing pattern matching to suggest code based on other pieces of code. But over the coming decades AI could dominate coding. I now believe in my lifetime it will be possible for an AI to win almost all coding competitions!

asdfman123 5y ago
I guess it's worth pointing out that the human brain is just an amazing pattern matcher. They feed you all these algorithms in college and your brain suggests new algorithms based on those patterns.
- jostmey 5y ago
  Humans are more than pattern matchers because we do not passively receive and imitate information. We learn cause and effect by perturbing our environment, which is not possible by passively examining data. An AI agent can interact with an environment and learn from its environment by reinforcement learning. It is important to remember that pattern matching is different from higher forms of learning, like reinforcement learning. To summarize, I think there are real limitations with this AI, but these limitations are solvable problems, and I anticipate significant future progress
  - visarga 5y ago
    Fortunately the environment for coding AI is a compiler and a CPU which is much faster and cheaper than physical robots, and doesn't require humans for evaluation like dialogue agents and GANs.
    - qorrect 5y ago
      Well you still have to assess validity and code quality which is a difficult task , but not unsolvable. Also Generative Adversarial Networks original implementation was to pit neural networks against each other to train them , they don't need human intervention.
- ElFitz 5y ago
  > They feed you all these algorithms in college and your brain suggests new algorithms based on those patterns. Some come from the other end of the process. I want to solve that problem -> Functionally, it’d mean this and that -> How would it work? -> What algorithms / patterns are there out there that could help. Usually people with less formal education and more hands on experience, I’d wager. More prone to end up reinventing the wheel and spend more time searching for solutions too.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    What?
    - ElFitz 5y ago
      Most people I know who’ve been to college, or otherwise educated in the area they work in, tend to solve problems using what they know (not implying it’s a hard limit. Just an apparently well spread first instinct). Which fits the pattern matching described by the grandparent. A few people I know, most of which haven’t been to college, or done much learning at all, but are used to work outside of what they know (that’s an important part), tend to solve problems with things they didn’t know at the time they set out to solve said problems. Which doesn’t really fit the pattern matching mentioned by the grandparent. At least not in the way it was meant.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  To reduce intelligence to pattern matching begs the question: How do you know which patterns to match against which? By some magic we can answer questions of why, of what something means. Purpose and meaning might be slippery things to pin down, but they are real, we navigate them (usually) effortlessly, and we still have no idea how to even begin to get AI to do those things.
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    I think those are the distance metrics, which is what produces inductive bias, which is the core essence of what we consider 'intelligence'. - Consider a more complicated metric like a graph distance with a bit of interesting topology. That metric is the unit by which the feature space is uniformly reduced. Things which are not linearized by the metric are considered noise, so this forms a heuristic which overlooks features which may have been in reality salient. - This makes it an inductive bias. (Some call me heterodox, I prefer 'original thinker'.)
timkam 5y ago
To generate new, generally useful algorithms, we need a different type of "AI", i.e. one that combines learning and formal verification. Because algorithm design is a cycle: come up with an algorithm, prove what it can or can't do, and repeat until you are happy with the formal properties. Software can help, but we can't automate the math, yet.
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  > we can't automate the math, yet This exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_proving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_proving
  - bccdee 5y ago
    This is moreso automation-assisted theorem proving. It takes a lot of human work to get a problem to the point where automation can be useful. It's like saying that calculators can solve complex math problems; it's true in a sense, but it's not not strictly true. We solve the complex math problems using calculators.
  - sterlind 5y ago
    and there's already GPT-f [0], which is a GPT-based automated theorem prover for the Metamath language, which apparently submitted novel short proofs which were accepted into Metamath's archive. I would very much like GPT-f for something like SMT, then it could actually make Dafny efficient to check (and probably avoid needing to help it out when it gets stuck!) 0. https://analyticsindiamag.com/what-is-gpt-f/ https://analyticsindiamag.com/what-is-gpt-f/
  - IAmLiterallyAB 5y ago
    Someone tell Gödel
- jostmey 5y ago
  I see a different path forward based on the success of AlphaGo. This looks like a clever example of supervised learning. But supervised learning doesn't get you cause and effect, it is just pattern matching. To get at cause and effect, you need reinforcement learning, like AlphaGo. You can imagine an AI writing code that is then scored for performing correctly. Overtime the AI will learn to write code that performs as intended. I think coding can be used as a "playground" for AI to rapidly improve itself, like how AlphaGo could play Go over and over again
GrinningFool 5y ago
> If so, then this AI will never generate novel algorithms. This is true, but the most programmers don't need to generate novel algorithms themselves anyway.
habibur 5y ago
> I now believe in my lifetime it will be possible for an AI to win almost all coding competitions! Then we shall be reaching singularity.
- jostmey 5y ago
  We will only reach a singularity with respect to coding. There are many important problems beyond computer coding like engineering and biology and so on
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Coding isn't chess playing it's likely about as general as math or thinking. If you can write novel code you can ultimately do biology or engineering or ultimately anything else.

itsoktocry 5y ago

>Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. I'm skeptical. The envelope of "programming" will continue to shift as things get more and more complex. Your mother-in-law is not going to install Copilot and start knocking out web apps. Tools like this allow programmers to become more productive, which increases demand for the skills.

waprin 5y ago
I strongly agree with you. Reminds me of something I read that claimed when drum machines came out, the music industry thought it was the end of drummers. Until people realized that drummers tended to be the best people at programming cool beats on the drum machine. Every single technological advancement meant to make technology more accessible and eliminate expertise has instead only redefined what expertise means. And the overall trend has been a lot more work opportunities created, not less.
- atentaten 5y ago
  Yeah, but less drummers are being hired than before drum machines came out. What you describe sounds like work has become more concentrated into fewer hands. Perhaps this will happen with software as well.
  - morei 5y ago
    What happened is what typically happens: Concentration of expertise. The lower expertise jobs (just mechanically play what someone else wrote/arranged) went away and there was increased demand for higher expertise (be an actual expert in beats _and_ drum machines). So the winners were those that adapted earlier and the losers were those that didn't/couldn't adapt. This translates to: If you're mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again, then it's a low value prop and is at risk. But if you're solving actual problems that require thought/expertise then the value prop is high and probably going to get higher.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bconnorwhite 5y ago

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1404100794245214215 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1404100794245214215

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

I think this will result in classic Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . As the price of writing any individual function/feature goes down, the demand for software will go up exponentially. Think of how many smallish projects are just never started these days because "software engineers are too expensive". I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper, they'll just do a lot more.

throwawayboise 5y ago
> Think of how many smallish projects are just never started these days because "software engineers are too expensive". Maybe many. If the cost/benefit equation doesn't work, it makes no sense to do the project. > I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper, they'll just do a lot more. If they do more for the same cost, they are cheaper. You as a developer will be earning less in relation to the value you create.
- habibur 5y ago
  > You as a developer will be earning less in relation to the value you create. Doesn't matter as long as I create 5x value and earn 2x for it. I still am earning double within the same time and effort.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  > If they do more for the same cost, they are cheaper. You as a developer will be earning less in relation to the value you create. Welcome to the definition of productivity increases, which is the only way an economy can increase standard of living without inflation.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    Inflation and productivity might be correlated but neither is a function of the other. Given any hypothetical world where increased productivity leads to inflation, there's a corresponding world equal in all respects except that the money supply shrinks enough to offset that inflation.

qqqwerty 5y ago

We went through the same hype cycle with self driving cars. We are now ~15 years out from the DARPA challenges and to date exactly 0 drivers have been replaced by AI. It is certainly impressive to see how much the GPT models have improved. But the devil is in the last 10%. If you can create an AI that writes perfectly functional python code, but that same AI does not know how to upgrade an EC2 instance when the application starts hitting memory limits, then you haven't really replaced engineers, you have just given them more time to browse hacker news.

ulber 5y ago
Driving is qualitatively different from coding: an AI that's pretty good but messes up sometimes is vastly more useful for coding than for driving. In neither case can you let the AI "drive", but that's ok in coding as software engineering is already set up for that. Testing, pair programming and code reviews are popular ways to productively collaborate with junior developers. You're not replacing the engineer, but you're giving every engineer a tireless companion typing suggestions faster than you ever could, to be filled in when you feel it's going to add value. My experience with the alpha was eye opening: this was the first time I've interacted with an AI and felt like its not just a toy, but actually contributing.
- qqqwerty 5y ago
  Writing code is by far the easiest part of my job. I certainly welcome any tools that will increase my productivity in that domain, but until an AI can figure out how to fix obscure, intermittent, and/or silent bugs that occur somewhere in a series of daisy-chained pipelines running on a stack of a half-dozen services/applications, I am not going to get too worked up about it.
  - worldsayshi 5y ago
    I agree. It kind of amazes me though there is so much room for obscurity. I would expect standardisation to have dealt with this a long time ago. Why are problems not more isolated and manageable in general?

blackearl 5y ago

I just don't believe it. Having experienced terrible cheap outsourced support and things like Microsoft's troubleshooting assistant (also terrible), I'm willing to pay for quality human professionals. They have a long way to go before I change my mind.

jahewson 5y ago

I’m not sure why it’s unexpected when it’s essentially a reframing of Baumol's cost disease. Any work that does not see a productivity increase becomes comparatively more expensive over time.

simias 5y ago

Reading this thread it seems to me that AI is a threat for "boilerplate-heavy" programming like website frontends, I can't really imagine pre-singularity AI being able to replace a programmer in the general case. Helping devs go through "boring", repetitive code faster seems like a good way to increase our productivity and make us more valuable, not less. Sure, if AI evolves to the point where it reaches human-level coding abilities we're in trouble, but that's the case this is going to revolutionize humanity as a whole (for better or worse), not merely our little niche.

runawaybottle 5y ago
C’mon guys, your standard backend schema with endpoints is like way easier to automate away.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  I mean, we already have? Use Django Rest Framework and simple business models and you're pretty much declaratively writing API endpoints by composing behavior. Almost nothing in a DRF endpoint definition is boilerplate. The hard part has always been writing an API that models external behavior correctly.

fungiblecog 5y ago

I wonder does Sam Altman also believe that you can measure programmer productivity by lines-of-code?

Animats 5y ago

"Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" I've been saying something like that for a while, but my form was "If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, you can be replaced." By a computer, a computer with AI, or some kind of outsourcing. A question I've been asking for a few years, pre-pandemic, is, when do we reach "peak office"? Post-pandemic, we probably already have. This has huge implications for commercial real estate, and, indeed, cities.

mullingitover 5y ago

Generating the code with help from AI: 25 cents Knowing what code to generate with the AI: 200k/yr

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
Will this tend to blur the distinction between coder and manager? In the end a manager is just a coder who commands more resources, and relies more on natural language to do it. Or maybe I'm thinking of tech leads. I don't know, my org is flat.
- kamaal 5y ago
  Issue is not writing code. Its changing, evolving or maintaining it. This is the problem with things like Spreadsheets, dag-drop programming, code generators. Its not easy to tell a program what to change and where to change.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    I feel like you might be moving the goalposts. Maybe they're different problems, but it's not at all clear to me that mutation is harder than creation.

sennight 5y ago

huh... I've found that people who tend to describe their occupation as "knowledge work" are the most blind to the fact that white collar jobs are the first to get optimized away. Lawyers are going to have a really bad time after somebody manages to bridge NLP and formal logic. No, it won't result in a Lawyerbot-2000 - it will result in software that enables lawyers to do orders of magnitude more work of a higher quality. What do you think that does to a labor market? It shrinks it. That or people fill the labor glut with new, cheaper, lawsuits...

MichaelMoser123 5y ago
i don't think that people will ever fully trust an AI lawyer, given all the possible legal consquences of a misunderstanding between the AI and the client. You could literally go to jail because of a bug/misunderstanding due to an ambiguous term (this might make a good sci-fi story ...) But yes, getting some kind of legal opinion will probably be cheaper with an AI.
- sennight 5y ago
  Nor I, which is why I said so. A SaaS will pop up called "Co-chair" and that'll be that. It would definitely be a lot easier to trust than any of the black box neural networks we are all familiar with - as the field of formal logic is thousands of years old and pretty thoroughly explored. I used a SAT solver just last night to generate an exhaustive list of input values that result in a specific failure mode for some code I'm reverse engineering - I have no doubts about the answer the SAT solver provided. That definitely isn't the case with NN based solutions - which I trust to classify cat photos, but not much else.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
Legal discovery and other "menial" law tasks are already quite automated.
- sennight 5y ago
  I wouldn't describe keyword search engines or cross reference managers as "quite automated" - so I would expect little market change from whatever LexisNexis is currently selling.

solitus 5y ago

Honestly, the only reason I'm still doing work in front of a computer is that it pays well. I'm really starting to think I should have followed my gut instincts when I was 17 and go to trade school to become an electrician or a carpenter...

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

True self-improving general AI would put all labor out of business. Incomes would then be determined by only the ownership of capital and government redistribution. Could be heaven, could be hell.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

Don't hold your breath. (Coming soon right after the flying self-driving car.)

jfoster 5y ago

As it stands, this looks like it will actually increase the productivity of existing programmers more than it will result in "now everyone is a programmer". Over time it will certainly do more, but it's probably quite a long time before it can be completely unsupervised, and in the meantime it's increasing the output of programmers.

black3r 5y ago

I kinda believe this but I still think it hugely depends on what you're doing in front of a computer. If you're just a generic developer that gets a task and codes it by the spec, then you can probably be replaced by AI in a few years. But I don't think AI will become capable of complex thought in the next one/two decades, so if you're training to be a software architect, project manager, data analyst I think you should be safe for some time.

eCa 5y ago

So either his prediction or expectation will be correct. I think I’ll side with his expectation, but then again, my salary depends on it.

krageon 5y ago

People have been saying AI would end everything and anything since I was a wee baby. It still hasn't happened. How about instead of making the same old tired boring predictions about the impending apocalypse of things we love we start making and listening to predictions that actually talk about how life has been observed to progress. It's not impossible, science-fiction authors get it right occasionally.