4 ms·

Media synthesis means artists of all sorts will take a hit. Gpt means writers, programmers, journalists, and others will take a hit. Prompt engineering and larg

Media synthesis means artists of all sorts will take a hit. Gpt means writers, programmers, journalists, and others will take a hit. Prompt engineering and larger models could mean any procedural use of knowledge in any context could be subject to automation. Consumer level robotics, drones, and battery tech is close to a level that manual labor, delivery, and such tasks can be automated. Maybe we should be preparing for post-scarcity. At the very least, the idea of "jobs" is going to have to transform. The 40 hour work week isn't going to make much sense in the near future.

onion2k 5y ago
Copilot (and all other AI tools, and non-AI tools) will lead to more developer jobs, not less. The thing holding most industries back at the moment is the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. Literally every business has an opportunity to automate some process better than it does now, or to make an app to assist a business function, or to drive sales and growth through an application of new tech. The reason why they don't do that is cost and availability of skilled people to do the work. If a new AI tool removes the need to write code entirely and a developer just needs to work out the specifications and requirements then whole industries will start employing more developers. The part of dev that you get paid to do is not writing the code. It's the part where you define what the code should do. That's where all the value in development resides. Getting AI to write the syntax is 100% upside for the tech industry.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > The part of dev that you get paid to do is not writing the code. It's the part where you define what the code should do. That's where all the value in development resides. Getting AI to write the syntax is 100% upside for the tech industry. I guess they felt the same ways when the first compilers were introduced. Or interpreters. > the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. There's already developers on the market at an incredibly low price. Good luck getting code that compiles out of them, much less that is correct. I'm afraid we'll see more and more of these, since now they'll be able to cycle through completions and try until it seems to pass all tests.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    There's already developers on the market at an incredibly low price. Good luck getting code that compiles out of them, much less that is correct. I've been a dev for almost 25 years, and in my experience how much someone is paid has very little correlation to how good their code is. I've worked with outsourced developers in India, Poland, and Vietnam who are brilliant at writing clean, robust, well-designed code and earn the equivalent of low-two-digits thousands of dollars per year, as well as former FAANG engineers who earn three-digit thousands of dollars and write untested, untestable spaghetti code. I'm afraid we'll see more and more of these, since now they'll be able to cycle through completions and try until it seems to pass all tests. In which case the value will lie in defining the tests, and the people who do that will earn the most. That's fine.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > I've been a dev for almost 25 years, and in my experience how much someone is paid has very little correlation to how good their code is. I've worked with outsourced developers in India, Poland, and Vietnam who are brilliant at writing clean, robust, well-designed code and earn the equivalent of low-two-digits thousands of dollars per year, as well as former FAANG engineers who earn three-digit thousands of dollars and write untested, untestable spaghetti code. That has not been my experience at all. There's this myth of the genius dropout in our industry, or that FAANG is basically luck, and yet it always fails to materialize.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    It's not like gpt models are some sort of random walk or Markov bot. They produce nuanced text with deep semantic relationships between large segments of text. There's a direct relationship between the algorithms human brains used to produce the training data and the algorithms being approximated by these models. No, gpt-3 isn't human level generally, but it is human level competent in some domains. These tools are effectively less then a year old in production, but we're already seeing the potential for huge disruption in lots of markets based on relatively straightforward uses of the tech. I can't wait to see what a skillful and artfully sophisticated use will be. I don't think we've even scratched the surface.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

onion2k 5y ago

Copilot (and all other AI tools, and non-AI tools) will lead to more developer jobs, not less. The thing holding most industries back at the moment is the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. Literally every business has an opportunity to automate some process better than it does now, or to make an app to assist a business function, or to drive sales and growth through an application of new tech. The reason why they don't do that is cost and availability of skilled people to do the work. If a new AI tool removes the need to write code entirely and a developer just needs to work out the specifications and requirements then whole industries will start employing more developers. The part of dev that you get paid to do is not writing the code. It's the part where you define what the code should do. That's where all the value in development resides. Getting AI to write the syntax is 100% upside for the tech industry.

908B64B197 5y ago
> The part of dev that you get paid to do is not writing the code. It's the part where you define what the code should do. That's where all the value in development resides. Getting AI to write the syntax is 100% upside for the tech industry. I guess they felt the same ways when the first compilers were introduced. Or interpreters. > the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. There's already developers on the market at an incredibly low price. Good luck getting code that compiles out of them, much less that is correct. I'm afraid we'll see more and more of these, since now they'll be able to cycle through completions and try until it seems to pass all tests.
- onion2k 5y ago
  There's already developers on the market at an incredibly low price. Good luck getting code that compiles out of them, much less that is correct. I've been a dev for almost 25 years, and in my experience how much someone is paid has very little correlation to how good their code is. I've worked with outsourced developers in India, Poland, and Vietnam who are brilliant at writing clean, robust, well-designed code and earn the equivalent of low-two-digits thousands of dollars per year, as well as former FAANG engineers who earn three-digit thousands of dollars and write untested, untestable spaghetti code. I'm afraid we'll see more and more of these, since now they'll be able to cycle through completions and try until it seems to pass all tests. In which case the value will lie in defining the tests, and the people who do that will earn the most. That's fine.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > I've been a dev for almost 25 years, and in my experience how much someone is paid has very little correlation to how good their code is. I've worked with outsourced developers in India, Poland, and Vietnam who are brilliant at writing clean, robust, well-designed code and earn the equivalent of low-two-digits thousands of dollars per year, as well as former FAANG engineers who earn three-digit thousands of dollars and write untested, untestable spaghetti code. That has not been my experience at all. There's this myth of the genius dropout in our industry, or that FAANG is basically luck, and yet it always fails to materialize.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  It's not like gpt models are some sort of random walk or Markov bot. They produce nuanced text with deep semantic relationships between large segments of text. There's a direct relationship between the algorithms human brains used to produce the training data and the algorithms being approximated by these models. No, gpt-3 isn't human level generally, but it is human level competent in some domains. These tools are effectively less then a year old in production, but we're already seeing the potential for huge disruption in lots of markets based on relatively straightforward uses of the tech. I can't wait to see what a skillful and artfully sophisticated use will be. I don't think we've even scratched the surface.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]