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The thing is that we don't know. What I also have been seeing for a while (like for at least for a decade) that whatever profession seemed to be in danger, whic
by atleta 5y ago
The thing is that we don't know. What I also have been seeing for a while (like for at least for a decade) that whatever profession seemed to be in danger, whichever profession came out on top on (guess) lists like "these will be replaced by AI soon", each and every one of them thought that it can't happen to them and they all had (and continue to have) explanations, usually involving how that jobs needs human ingenuity. (Unlike all the others, of course :) )
Now completely I agree with you that a significant part of our job is understanding and structuring the problem, but I'm not sure it can't be done in another way. We usually get taking in when we think about what machines will be able to do by thinking that just because we use intelligence (general/human intelligence) to solve the task it means that it's a requirement. Think chess. Or even calculating (as in, with numbers). Or go. Etc.
The funny thing is that we don't know, until someone does it. I've been thinking for a while that a lot of what I do could be done by a chat bot. Asking clarification questions. Of course, I do have a lot of background knowledge and that's how I can come up with those questions, but that knowledge is probably easy to acquire from the internet and then use it as training data. (Just like we have an awful lot of code available, we have a lot of problem descriptions, questions, comments and some requirement specifications/user guides.)
The hard part would probably be not what we have learned as a software developer, but the things we have learned while we were small kids and also the things that we have learned since, on the side. I.e. being a reasonable person. Understanding what people usually do and want. So the shared context. But I'm not sure it's needed that much.
So yeah, I can imagine a service that will talk to a user about what kind of app they want (first just simpler web sites, web shops, later more and more complicated ones) and then just show them "here is what it does and how it works". And then you can say what you'd like to be changed. The color or placement of a button (earlier versions) or even the association type between entities (oh, but a user can have multiple shipping addresses).
- GuB-42 5y agoI think programmers are relatively "safe" from AI for the simple reason they are the ones who talk to AI. The job of programmers is to have machines do stuff so that humans don't have to, and of course, they do it for themselves too. Scripts, libraries, compilers, they are just tools to avoid flipping bits by hand. If something like copilot is not embraced by all programmers, it is that it is often less than helpful, and even then, some have adopted it. If we have super-advanced AI that can have a high level understanding of a problem and writes the app for you, then it is not much more than a super-compiler, and there will be programmers who will tell the super-compiler what to do, think of it as a new, super high level programming language. The job will evolve, but there will always be someone who tells the computer what to do. And if there is no one needed to tell the computer what to do, that's what some people call "the singularity". Programming, or its evolution will probably be the last technical job. Social jobs may continue further, simply because humans like humans because they are human. Maybe the oldest profession will also be the last profession.
- elisbce 5y agoYour logic is completely flawed. If there is a super AI with real intelligence that understands problems and codes it up for you, why wouldn't it be possible to go one step further and solve problems on its own? Why do you think that a human programmer has to feed a problem statement to the AI for it to work?
- GuB-42 5y agoIt is what I meant by "the singularity". AIs that are so intelligent that they don't need humans, including when it comes to building better AIs. The idea is that they get in a runaway self-improving cycle and what they do after that and the place of humanity is left to the imagination. I don't believe in the singularity, but if we get to the point where AIs don't need human programmers anymore, things are going to get... interesting.
- p1esk 5y agothere will always be someone who tells the computer what to do Until the computer starts telling people what to do
- daniel-cussen 5y ago"Maybe the oldest profession will also be the last profession." -- GuB-42, Wednesday February 2, 2022
- zzt123 5y agoI sometimes get the feeling that all my coding is actually a class of mathematical transforms that I have no idea how to define but feel very strongly that it is definable and AI-able. Well it’d a curious day when an AlphaGo moment hits coding. Would be funny if it happened at the same time as Fed rate increases and destabilizing world events this year (the path from median human to top human is shallow). Mass firing of a few million highly paid redundancies out of the blue? Would be quite a sight. Or maybe it wouldn’t happen that way, but rather it would pave the way for a leaner set of startups that were built with the power to do the same thing at the same or better velocity with an order of magnitude or fewer people.
- nonameiguess 5y agoWhat professions are these? Chat bots didn't eliminate human CSRs. OCR didn't eliminate human data entry. Object detection hasn't eliminated human intelligence analysts. Machine translation hasn't eliminated human translators. Humans still make a living as professional Chess and Go players. Truck drivers were supposed to be on the chopping block a decade ago, yet they're more in demand now than ever. Human radiologists haven't gone anywhere. Even GPT-N hasn't eliminated human writers. Human transcriptionists haven't even been eliminated. We just have a lot more videos that automatically get shitty transcriptions instead of none at all now.