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A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated

62 points by ajafari1 4y ago

ajafari1 4y ago
OpenAI estimates that Github’s Copilot can already complete 37% of coding tasks. DeepMind’s AlphaCode is estimated to be 59% better at coding competitions than Codex. Will automation start in 2023?
- horns4lyfe 4y ago
  You said this in the article too, but why does being better at coding competitions, where there are very specific rules and outcomes, mean this AI can work in the very abstract realm of software development. And forgive me if OpenAIs estimates of its own product it’s trying to sell isn’t exactly convincing. It looks like you were a former PM, and to be frank, until an AI can wade through confusing conversations with PMs to figure out what actually needs to be built, engineer jobs are safe.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  As useful as Copilot has been 37% paints an untrue picture. It helped with 80% of copy paste tasks that repeat in a pattern. For data seeding thousand line files.. super helpful. In other areas it can create tough bugs instead of solving them.
timomax2 4y ago
Not convinced at all. This stuff makes people more productive. This may mean fewer jobs orbit may just mean more output as the lower costs (not wages) make custom software more accessible. I see this as making the Google/stack overflow turn around much shorter.
- jart 4y ago
  It will. In particular, people who aren't software developers. Most devs are basically modern scribes working for kings who can't read or write. In order to exert willpower in digital society, you need to be able to code, which is why everyone with money who can't code wants coders to work for them. But that's all going to change the day ideas men can explain their idea to an AI instead, which whips up an app on the fly. When that happens there'll be a lot less demand for coders. It probably wouldn't impact things like software engineering, where it'd be more of a productivity booster, but it'd certainly narrow down the tech workforce by a bit.
pjc50 4y ago
> Once an AI gets just 1% efficient at automation, it achieves 100% efficiency quickly thereafter This is really optimistic and completely overlooks the 80/20 problems that have plagued both AI automation and traditional automation. The AI sweeps up the easy cases and humans are left to fix, or paper over with heuristics, the remainder. Example? Speech-to-text. It's pretty good and the spread of automated closed captions to youtube videos is a definite benefit. But broadcast TV will almost exclusively use human subtitlers still, because the last few percent of accuracy isn't there. Software hasn't even effectively been reliably outsourced to cheap humans yet. Perhaps you can automate some of the production of CRUD tools, in the absence of a better framework for them (frameworks, compilers, libraries and npm should all be thought of as forms of automation). But anything with a competitive advantage will be relying on humans for a long time.
- AlexanderTheGr8 4y ago
  To further support your point, AI is 90% efficient/good at driving. But the last 10% is so hard that some think it's impossible to have 100% self-driving cars.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Self-checkout at supermarkets does 90% of the work. The 10% of work remaining is done by a human supervising the self-checkout stations. And same will happen to development. Lots of tasks will be automated and less people will be needed as a result.
    - vincentmarle 4y ago
      Maybe our engineering jobs will consist of reviewing AI-generated PRs all day…
      - bckr 4y ago
        Oh, that didn't cross my mind. Yes, that's a serious potential. Take it a few more steps and then you get to automated analysis tools, system simulations, and NLP systems. This looks essentially like IronMan's Jarvis running heuristics interactively. "Which edge cases did you cover?" `I covered 3000 edge cases extrapolated from these bug reports...`
rmahan 4y ago
Great article! Enjoyed the argument but I have a few disagreements I disagree with the response to objection 1. Look for more than a few moments at the right side picture and the shadows of the chess pieces are low quality, the shadows continue off the table, and the checkers on the board look more like backgammon than chess. The AI generated sites that clutter google are easily identified as low quality GPT 3 nonsense. I’d also disagree that the AI “understands” the physics of the sun, or that Africa has a lot of desert. The prompt includes the desert, so it pulls from pictures of the desert. It doesn’t understand that people have a face when they concentrate either, it finds a picture of someone playing chess then maps an “African fortune teller” onto that person. Oh, it also has to grab photos of an African fortune teller. The AIs used as examples in this article (DALLE, Copilot) are regurgitated humans. What happens when we have new tasks that we can’t train on? They don’t “understand” things, they recreate them. Maybe I’m just typically bad at estimating the exponential growth. I’m not optimistic I can replace humans with Copilot authored pull requests anytime soon. It might be good at “write a function to convert ISO date time to MM/DD/YYYY” but we’re decades off of “create an API for managing a warehouses inventory.” Either way, being replaced by copilot would require business partners to be able to explain what they want, so I’m not worried.
- etothepii 4y ago
  In addition, is it even fair to say, "Africa has a lot of desert." It has the biggest desert, but it's also a very big place.
etothepii 4y ago
The main edge I see in AI today is the ability to create random ideas on a theme. I suspect this will end up being much more of a force multiplier than a replacement tool.
- gbin 4y ago
  Exactly, think about it, it just creates content and the human is there to select, it can be wrong a lot but only need to succeed once and we are ok. Programming is completely another deal, it is a creative task sure but once you get it wrong it is a costly mess! Another point is that most of the difficulty is not even actually coding but understanding what to code from people that cannot express what they want... So yes I agree with this statement, AI would probably not fully replace the coding workforce but would help with some careful supervision.
- throwaway4220 4y ago
  This is not random though it’s derivative of toms of input data. Can it be genuinely creative?
  - etothepii 4y ago
    That's a fair comment, I mean random in the sense of wide variation. I suspect a moderately skilled user of graphical software could convert either of the proposed images into something that looks real solving for shadows and incorrect game pieces, whereas generating 10 different faces might be quite difficult. Especially if tasked with doing it for a race or culture the artist was not familiar with.
  - coffee_beqn 4y ago
    I don’t see why it couldn’t - but the end result might be incoherent to humans. It could easily combine or extrapolate on random things to create “art”
thenerdhead 4y ago
These are some wild estimates for professions based on products that haven't even been generally accessible for that long. Nor does it equate that writing, coding, or designing is only a small portion of most jobs. And typically the most enjoyable/easiest part for some. What about the argument that unless the collective gets better/smarter, that AI will indeed only be as smart as the current collective? Perhaps this is the "AI will hit a ceiling", but it needs to be trained on something. If more and more gets automated in these areas, how will they ever improve?
akmarinov 4y ago
With the way driving automation is going, let’s just say I’m not worried any time soon.
Msw242 4y ago
> At some point along the continuum, there will simply not be enough new work to make up for the efficiency gains by the AI models. I don't buy that devs are going to run out of things to do. Instead I see this increasing the leverage of engineers (who are really just creative problem solvers) such that an exponentially increasing number of lower value problems will make financial sense to solve with engineers. I think we'll see the same thing with designers and all different kinds of tech workers. Pay will increase, not decrease (at least globally) because business people don't have the training to work these levers or judge the quality of the output.
belter 4y ago
We need another "No Silver Bullet" [1] for these modern times of ridiculous hype. Contain your ego and all these Matrices Statistical manipulations you decide to call AI...Somebody please volunteer. "OpenAI estimates that OpenAI Codex (what powers Github’s Copilot) can already complete 37% of coding tasks." And who decides the task is done, complete and works? The Meat does [2]...The Meat and nobody else. [1] "No Silver Bullet": http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf [2] "They're Made Out of Meat": https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ
pluijzer 4y ago
What I see whit AI is that it is very good at closed ended questions. Take, like the article, AlphaGo as an example. The rules and goal of the game are fixed and verifiable by the computer itself. With writing and graphic design less so. The best AI can do is to generate a text or image that it judges itself as passing as realistic according to its own model. For jobs where passing a being realistic is good enough I certainly see those as being replaceable. This might include mundane coding tasks like writing an API to an existing server. Tasks where the goal is not closed ended, where the computer cannot judge itself if it got the correct result and passing as realistic is not enough, might never get replaced by machines.
yrgulation 4y ago
Any decent developer will use existing libraries and tools for common tasks, so 90% of the code is already written. The remaining 10% of the code is business and use case specifics that change frequently and is made by pulling the pieces provided by libraries together. The ai assisted auto complete will likely never be able to understand use cases, for that it would need sentience - and even humans fail at understanding what non techies want in their apps. As others pointed out such ai tools reduce the time taken to google something, so its more like a built in code search engine and very good at it. Other than that all the “software jobs automation” stories such as this article are written to impress either non techies or gullible newbies. A waste of content, scifi at best.
- coffeefirst 4y ago
  Right. The efficiencies are already here in the form of CI/CD, workflow tools like IntelliSense, and boring old stuff like ORMs and libraries. It's probably about 50% faster to make a common CRUD app than it was 20 years ago. Luckily the industry has found a way to compensate for this by building the common CRUD app in React and Microservices, so now it takes 3x longer again and requires twice the staff to maintain it.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    > so now it takes 3x longer again and requires twice the staff to maintain it precisely. or like with aws, what used to be a sysadmin is now two to three devops engineers doing the same stuff. if anything ai will enable even more people to get into software dev and thus allow even more businesses to thrive and thus create more jobs. ais and tools like you mentioned are like fertilisers. the more crap the more jobs for us.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      I happily wait for the few rounds when non-technical people attempt to use them to make system that works and is secure... As someone working in security I'm not very worried about career prospects. There is plenty of time to point out crap yet...
dboreham 4y ago
I'll begin worrying after we get self driving lawyers.
- wombatpm 4y ago
  A self driving car that becomes a lawyer that enters into contracts with body shops where it randomly causes accident in return for a % of the business, free charging and maintenance. I don’t know which is worse, an amoral corporation using AI to crush its workers or an independent AI working for its own interests
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I think that might even be a improvement. Just imagine if there was enough of them and they entered actual price competition. Dropping cost to 10th or 100th...
horns4lyfe 4y ago
As I read this I thought all read as very philosophical and hand-wavy, as well as showing a misunderstanding of how software engineers actually work. I then looked at the authors profile and saw that they’re a young PM and “entrepreneur”. So interesting, but not an expert analysis at all, which explains the gaps.
angarg12 4y ago
If you work doing ML in production, you know how incredibly difficult it is to get an extra % improvement. The idea of exponential growth that accelerates into the singularity is a sci-fi concept that I have never experienced. From the outside we've experienced exponential improvements in ML models, sure. But those didn't come out of nowhere. They are powered by massive efforts involving humans. Personally I'm not worried about losing my dev job to machines in my lifetime.
- turns0ut 4y ago
  Because you’re using the library’s we have today; they don’t make the unknown you encountered easy. What about the ripples from “enough people” losing their jobs? Covid and the logistics whiplash have done nothing to embed in people they’re just one of seven billion. Each still acts like the king of their own mountain. It’s pretty sad. You have no say over your place in a future society that appears keen to rug pull the masses lives from under them.
civilized 4y ago
More exponential growth voodoo.
IAmGraydon 4y ago
This author is running on heroic amounts of hopium. That said, the first thing I see this replacing is not graphic designers, but stock photography sites.
- komadori 4y ago
  I saw some DALL-E output recently where it had reproduced the watermark from a stock photography site! https://twitter.com/dalle2pics/status/1531721904121315328?s=21&t=52L6TU3ootFLN9isyTDBKQ https://twitter.com/dalle2pics/status/1531721904121315328?s=...
the_cat_kittles 4y ago
why do people write articles like this? is it just to hear themselves talk?
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
A powerful AI capable of programming would be amazing. It could reverse engineer binaries into human-readable source code. It could transpile tools and libraries to different platforms and languages. Personally I can't wait to be made obsolete by the god AI. The limit to human creativity would move from a technical one to your imagination.
jacknews 4y ago
This article seems very simplistic to me. I'm grasping for a word to describe an argument that leads you, via brightly-colored baby steps, to a desired conclusion, but this article seems to be that. What is intelligence? Can classical machines become intelligent, or is there some mystical quantum quality involved? Is there a limit to intelligence? What is the best form of intelligence (single entity vs society), Is intelligence even understandable, and therefore engineerable? Are current neural networks in any way intelligent (they seem extremely good at pattern matching, and/or regurgitating those patterns, but beyond that I'm not sure). Etc, etc, etc, etc.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Think of all the money that could be saved if interlocking boards of directors and corporate executives could be replaced by AI? No more need to pay bloated salaries and ludicrous bonuses and provid ridiculous 'golden parachute' contracts to top executives. The discussion about AI always focuses on replacing the leaves of the trees in corporate heirarchies, but the value obtained by replacing the root seems to be much higher. One could also plausible replace shareholders with AI, although then one might start to question the whole structure of investment capitalism... maybe AI would be better at making long-term decisions about the distribution of capital to prospective business operations than some group of Wall Street funds are? Perhaps we'll see AI-managed pension funds in the near future with significantly better results (and more interest in the long-term health of the outfits they invest in) soon?
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indigoabstract 4y ago
* Boss type speaking disapprovingly to some programmers and designers: * Come on guys, back to the fields, play time's over. Those strawberries need to be picked before they spoil. Tell the AI what you've done so far, he'll take care of it from now on.
- indigoabstract 4y ago
  The upside is, if the AI ever really gets that scary good(aka singularity), we can always ask it to find a solution for our current troubles. Btw, can entropy ever be reversed?
gz5 4y ago
In games like Go, the problem is very well defined and bounded. Most high value software dev work is working with humans to define the problem itself, and the problem usually exists in a multi-actor, non-deterministic, dynamic, somewhat irrational environment. Meanwhile, the resultant code or 'solution' is also not a solution in a vacuum - it needs to work within certain workflows, tooling, skills, cultures, processes, orgs etc...which are also often undefined, dynamic and irrational. Not saying AI can't help in many areas, but do the areas which are growing exponentially as described by OP help AI function effectively in enviros such as the above?
victor106 4y ago
> The 60% decrease in AI computing hardware every year which translates to the ability to train exponentially larger AI models (ARK Invest 2022 Big Ideas Report). From what I understand most intensive AI tasks require using a GPU and the leader in the GPU business is NVIDIA. Looking at their profit margins I don’t see any drop in fact a growth of over 30% yoy [1] Also as an aside, I am a big skeptic of ARK. During the short time she had a diva status Woods seems to have been more lucky than good. That said, investing is a long game. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/profit...
EGreg 4y ago
Let me summarize the state of AI as a layman who has been following the main trends: 1) Cyc and reasoning - stuck for decades but making slow progress 2) GANNs - can detect a whole lot of things by being trained on data 3) MTCS - this is AlphaGo and AlphaZero. Adversarial networks that play each other. Have nearly solved any turn based game that can be expressed this way, and can be used for StarCraft etc. 4) Data fitting - can get scientific data and find new scientific theories and formulas to explain them, etc. by essentially building analytic functions from building blocks and optimizing for simplicity. 5) GPT3 and DALL-E - have very little understanding of anything, they just throw a lot of bullshit at a wall and see if it sticks. But since the bullshit is actually stitched from all serious human output that could be digitized, they sound quite serious at times (even though they show total lack of understanding when basic math is involved for instance, as numbers get higher). Now I will be willing to admit (and have written about this) that logic and science may be a “poor man’s” million-dimensional vector data fitting. Maybe our binary logic and simple models are the thing that models the world worse than the million-vector models that capture the actual dynamics better. But humans won’t be able to understand these dynamics any more than a cat can understand most of your activities based on abstract systems. All that other stuff — superhuman sensors, motors etc. gives them unfair advantages, like the finger on Geopardy. Auto-aim and self-driving cars are more about HUMANS improving, training, and then downloading the new software to every device. What scares me most, though, is deepfakes and swarming. You don’t need GREAT AI to take over political discussions, or direct swarms of self driving cars or drones to wreak havoc. Online, swarms of sleeper bots can inftrate many communities and execute sybil attacks at scale. They can amass karma right here on HN with comments stitched through bullshit that sounds just like HN. It’s a positive EV strategy for the swarm. Eventually they can edge out all human participants where everything you see all day long is bots. The kicker is THEY DONT NEED TO PASS THE TURING TEST in order to take over our systems because most people consume content non-interactively (read comments, watch videos) . “Truth” online is just a correlation of A vs B and every repository of “truth” can be flooded with a different correlation. Stephen Colbert fans even did it manually with elephants tripling in Africa! Imagine what botswarms can do to out sense of truth or political will or anything!
- elforce002 4y ago
  Preach.
mihaigalos 4y ago
AI automation pushing people out of jobs is a strong incentive for universal basic income, or a similar scheme. If there is enough work doable by AI, why would humans still be needed? Some humans would cover the missing 10% of what AI can't do, as pointed out in other threads. But that leaves a lot of humans idle. The entities operating this AI would still need to operate i.e. in a country. So the country's government will have to enact some sort of legislation to regulate the AI's impact. It doesn't necessarily mean everybody will be out of a job and miserable. Probably work would be optional and shelter, food and the likes would be provided by the government.
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semiquaver 4y ago
When google search was introduced it was a revelation. Search results were eerily accurate compared with the then-state-of-the-art. The key was using computers to interpret and leverage human-made webs of knowledge. 20+ years later, search sucks because it’s mostly robots (or humans acting like robots) writing SEO centric copy to capture valuable queries. Most of these strikingly capable “AI” tools today like DALL-E and Codex are fundamentally built by applying more leverage in new ways to a corpus of human work: art/code/etc. What happens if these systems take over and 99% of the humans stop writing code or making art and successive systems are trained on mostly regurgitated AI output? The same effect is apparent in equities: index funds now make up the bulk of investment, but they merely follow other money flows in lock step, many of them driven by computers. As a result the decisions of a relatively small number of actual humans have incredibly outsized impact on markets. We will have a system of infinitely recursive navel-gazing that is devoid of utility once the actual intelligence that was the key driver of the system has dried up because it’s economic value was captured by greedy hill-climbing algorithms. Pieces like this are naive because they extrapolate what they see as trends without recognizing that the world is a dynamic system. Predictions are never this simple when the subject is so dependent on the state of the world which it will dramatically change.
- throwaway_7874 4y ago
  Well you gave me a new perspective. But what happens when AI needs less and less "real" data for training then it, will not degrade like google's search, which by the way is still the best from all the search engines I have known and tried.
benreesman 4y ago
OpenAI thinks their code transformer can already do 37% of all coding “tasks”? Buzz off.
- p1esk 4y ago
  On a dataset of 164 programming problems: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf (Section 2.2). The dataset is here: https://github.com/openai/human-eval https://github.com/openai/human-eval
  - kubanczyk 4y ago
    Ah, they seem to think that 100% of programming problems literally amount to Easy leetcodes. I see no glue-code questions there, nor anything brownfield.
    - p1esk 4y ago
      Yeah I don't know where benreesman pulled that statement from, neither the blog post nor the original OpenAI paper claims anything of the sort. That aside, I'm not sure how impressive is an AI that could do 37% of "all coding tasks". It's like a self-driving car that only works 37% of the time.
      - benreesman 4y ago
        From TFA: “OpenAI estimates that OpenAI Codex (what powers Github’s Copilot) can already complete 37% of coding tasks.”
        p1esk 4y ago
        Are you intentionally trying to hide that “coding tasks” in the blog article is a link to the paper, clearly explaining what these coding task are? And you, for some reason, decided to add “all” before “coding tasks”. What are you trying to pull?
Hizonner 4y ago
It's pretty much never right to extrapolate something that looks exponential as an actual exponential. It's much more likely to be something with roughly the shape of a logistic curve. ... and the fun part with a logistic curve is guessing how far up you actually are...
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
All my hope rests on the assumption that creating bigger models with current AI technology will only lead to marginally better results. The old law of diminishing returns. In other words, current model approaches hopefully have a limit (that's not too far away) that will keep them from getting better.
mlcrypto 4y ago
Sounds like the AI will need a decentralized money to value compute costs and trade freely with other AI. One advantage we have is that AI is not smart enough to buy Bitcoin yet. That is my hedge against Exponential AI. Another megabull scenario
crdrost 4y ago
Marx talks about this a bit in Das Capital... You would think that the automation of an industry improves working conditions inside of it, in practice the opposite has usually been true: fewer people work longer hours in ever-more-tedious ways. So you used to go to work to design something, but in this vision of the future, you now go to work to craft prompts to DALL-E-2 so that it can design something for you, but because design is now so much cheaper you have to do three or four times as much design in the day, and this mechanism only doubles your rate of production... Gets to be a real mess. However, I would notice that we have been blessed with a different exponential, which we have been riding into the future. That is the exponential of processor speed and storage and all of the other computing resources. It's a perennial observation that our actual programs have not gotten much faster. The extra resources are immediately wasted. The reputation of hiring developers from developing countries, the cheap foreign labor force, for us has always been that you get a big ball of mud which you cannot maintain very easily. I do not see AI helping with this, but rather exacerbating it. Beforehand, there was a reasonable limit to how many lines of code you might expect from a developer per day, maybe a couple hundred if they test their code well and do other things to refactor and simplify. But with AI you could imagine it multiplying 10-fold, just throw more mud at the problem, the mud ball is already huge: what could it hurt. In fact, we may see the Smalltalk revolution! Of course this has been prophecied before, but never really come to pass. In this more-dystopian form, the idea is that everyone leans heavily into AI and something like kubernetes for modularization. Every single cell, every pod, in these gigantic supercomputer clusters which shall exists to serve up a smallish blog, needs to do something small enough that with its abundant AI generated code, it can nevertheless live and die successfully, spawning new processes as needed. The blog is thousands of small mud balls, and they work together in signaling pathways that are no longer understood by any human who works on the blog, and the dominant metaphor ceases to be one of mechanism and design and inputs and outputs... Rather it is biological, or even ecological. To start such systems up requires a story of “childhood” where a harness coordinates the first thousand nanoservicesv and grows the cluster into a template for the living application, then it needs AI-style “training” to reconfigure itself to handle actual business purposes, finally it will be released on the world, only to make mistakes which we will have to educate it to discern as mistakes... We certainly can't fix the system, we don't know how it works. Not what Alan Kay envisioned! But who knows. Maybe our kubernetes clusters will go to school one day.
crikeyjoe 4y ago
paulhodge 4y ago
When it comes to AI replacing jobs the biggest wonder I have is.. why is there so much talk and attention on replacing software jobs first? Software work is fairly high skill and hard to replace. Every hour that a software dev spends doing a task, they are doing some kind of work that the industry has probably tried and failed to automate, and we're talking about an industry filled with the most clever and most qualified automation-writers there are. There's many jobs that AI will probably replace. Software will be among the last.
- ta988 4y ago
  That's because people saying that are fooled and believe that SE is just about writing code and that it is similar to making a picture like Dall-E or writing a pseudo-profound text like GPT-3 does. This is really far from reality. You have to design, redesign, correct bugs, think about the whole system from backend to frontend, envision user interaction take into account evil actors or rogue employees... And to that you add a layer of politics that forbid some options and favor others because of company culture. Good luck designing an AI that does that. It is not impossible, but it is much harder than a robot that mixes liquids or a program that make drawings that look cool.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  Software developers worry about their jobs being replaced. You see posts from people worried about this on this forum because this forum is full of software developers. The nature of our work exposes to new technological developments first, so we’re also the first to talk about this AI. If I went on an art forum I might find posts by artists worried about Dall-E but those posts wouldn’t come about until later when the artists hear about this technology.
nbzso 4y ago
Yep. I have seen this "enthusiastic futurism" before. Dot-com bubble.
thesz 4y ago
[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... One of my tasks as a software engineer is to reduce code as much as possible. Because code is a liability, it needs to be supported, maintained, adapted, ported, etc, etc. If you can do same or more with less code, please do. If you can reduce other's code, which is often legacy code, please, do. Right now all demoes I see are generating code, they do not changing code, not deleting something. This means the only way for text-to-code system to get a new program for a changing requirement is to regenerate new code from scratch. I am not in the mood of deducing what that means for AI, it is enough for me to know what that means for typical software development process.
lamontcg 4y ago
"playing go" is actually a very constrained problem domain. "design and implement a SasS product that humans will give you money for" is a much less well-defined problem. applying AI to boilerplate will probably be effective, but that might just eliminate more outsourcing and allow local devs to be more productive, as an extension of IDEs that have various macros to reduce boilerplate. i think getting past that to the point where some manager can just ask an AI to design a commercially viable SaaS website top to bottom and it plonks out of the machine is exponentially more _difficult_ of a problem domain. although a lot of the websites which pollute search results in google will be churned out by the millions and millions.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Go is actually pretty simple game, alternate between placing stones, if stones connected have no open spaces remove them and lose points. The decision space is huge, but that is pretty much it. Now SaaS is one thing, but who would trust industrial control software for AI. At least current one. Here is oil refinery, make money. Oh, take these bank details as well and go figure it out...
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    "Okay GitHub Copilot go design the flight computer for the next generation of SpaceX rockets" (proceeds to regurgitate MechJeb code from KSP).
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
People seem to think that automation needs to be 100% or nothing. Automation at 80%(or whatever percent) of ideal will affect a large number of programming jobs. If you as a programmer start to compete without the use of AI vs someone that has embraced it then you are going to lose. If you can get an AI to do 80% of your work and you as a sentient being can finish the project then your output will explode vs someone that does not. This says to me that the future programmer will be closer to a software architect. Someone that can interpret what someone wants and decide what the solution is using all the resources available including AI tools. Not all programmers can do that. I've known plenty of programmers that are great at their job but lack social skills. Those are the type that will definitely be affected by AI. Given that you don't need 100% perfection in AI to make an impact in the industry and programming jobs then I see big changes happening with-in the next 10 years at most. Don't believe it? Look at Dall-e 2. It won't get rid of designers or such but many people will start to use it in some cases and by-pass the designer all together. Also a new crop of designers will use Dall-e 2 to create some of their work. Those that won't will be left behind. Designers today, programmers next... Yes!
vba616 4y ago
What's all this, then? Programming was automated 65 years ago. The "Formula Translating System" introduced in 1957 eliminated the drudgery of programming by allowing users to simply enter equations into a computer directly. Specifying machine instructions and memory addresses by hand rapidly became a thing of the past. Today, having a programming assistant is as quaint as a secretary.

62 points by ajafari1 4y ago

OpenAI estimates that Github’s Copilot can already complete 37% of coding tasks. DeepMind’s AlphaCode is estimated to be 59% better at coding competitions than Codex. Will automation start in 2023?

horns4lyfe 4y ago
You said this in the article too, but why does being better at coding competitions, where there are very specific rules and outcomes, mean this AI can work in the very abstract realm of software development. And forgive me if OpenAIs estimates of its own product it’s trying to sell isn’t exactly convincing. It looks like you were a former PM, and to be frank, until an AI can wade through confusing conversations with PMs to figure out what actually needs to be built, engineer jobs are safe.
ipaddr 4y ago
As useful as Copilot has been 37% paints an untrue picture. It helped with 80% of copy paste tasks that repeat in a pattern. For data seeding thousand line files.. super helpful. In other areas it can create tough bugs instead of solving them.

timomax2 4y ago

Not convinced at all. This stuff makes people more productive. This may mean fewer jobs orbit may just mean more output as the lower costs (not wages) make custom software more accessible. I see this as making the Google/stack overflow turn around much shorter.

jart 4y ago
It will. In particular, people who aren't software developers. Most devs are basically modern scribes working for kings who can't read or write. In order to exert willpower in digital society, you need to be able to code, which is why everyone with money who can't code wants coders to work for them. But that's all going to change the day ideas men can explain their idea to an AI instead, which whips up an app on the fly. When that happens there'll be a lot less demand for coders. It probably wouldn't impact things like software engineering, where it'd be more of a productivity booster, but it'd certainly narrow down the tech workforce by a bit.

pjc50 4y ago

> Once an AI gets just 1% efficient at automation, it achieves 100% efficiency quickly thereafter This is really optimistic and completely overlooks the 80/20 problems that have plagued both AI automation and traditional automation. The AI sweeps up the easy cases and humans are left to fix, or paper over with heuristics, the remainder. Example? Speech-to-text. It's pretty good and the spread of automated closed captions to youtube videos is a definite benefit. But broadcast TV will almost exclusively use human subtitlers still, because the last few percent of accuracy isn't there. Software hasn't even effectively been reliably outsourced to cheap humans yet. Perhaps you can automate some of the production of CRUD tools, in the absence of a better framework for them (frameworks, compilers, libraries and npm should all be thought of as forms of automation). But anything with a competitive advantage will be relying on humans for a long time.

AlexanderTheGr8 4y ago
To further support your point, AI is 90% efficient/good at driving. But the last 10% is so hard that some think it's impossible to have 100% self-driving cars.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Self-checkout at supermarkets does 90% of the work. The 10% of work remaining is done by a human supervising the self-checkout stations. And same will happen to development. Lots of tasks will be automated and less people will be needed as a result.
  - vincentmarle 4y ago
    Maybe our engineering jobs will consist of reviewing AI-generated PRs all day…
    - bckr 4y ago
      Oh, that didn't cross my mind. Yes, that's a serious potential. Take it a few more steps and then you get to automated analysis tools, system simulations, and NLP systems. This looks essentially like IronMan's Jarvis running heuristics interactively. "Which edge cases did you cover?" `I covered 3000 edge cases extrapolated from these bug reports...`

rmahan 4y ago

Great article! Enjoyed the argument but I have a few disagreements I disagree with the response to objection 1. Look for more than a few moments at the right side picture and the shadows of the chess pieces are low quality, the shadows continue off the table, and the checkers on the board look more like backgammon than chess. The AI generated sites that clutter google are easily identified as low quality GPT 3 nonsense. I’d also disagree that the AI “understands” the physics of the sun, or that Africa has a lot of desert. The prompt includes the desert, so it pulls from pictures of the desert. It doesn’t understand that people have a face when they concentrate either, it finds a picture of someone playing chess then maps an “African fortune teller” onto that person. Oh, it also has to grab photos of an African fortune teller. The AIs used as examples in this article (DALLE, Copilot) are regurgitated humans. What happens when we have new tasks that we can’t train on? They don’t “understand” things, they recreate them. Maybe I’m just typically bad at estimating the exponential growth. I’m not optimistic I can replace humans with Copilot authored pull requests anytime soon. It might be good at “write a function to convert ISO date time to MM/DD/YYYY” but we’re decades off of “create an API for managing a warehouses inventory.” Either way, being replaced by copilot would require business partners to be able to explain what they want, so I’m not worried.

etothepii 4y ago
In addition, is it even fair to say, "Africa has a lot of desert." It has the biggest desert, but it's also a very big place.

etothepii 4y ago

The main edge I see in AI today is the ability to create random ideas on a theme. I suspect this will end up being much more of a force multiplier than a replacement tool.

gbin 4y ago
Exactly, think about it, it just creates content and the human is there to select, it can be wrong a lot but only need to succeed once and we are ok. Programming is completely another deal, it is a creative task sure but once you get it wrong it is a costly mess! Another point is that most of the difficulty is not even actually coding but understanding what to code from people that cannot express what they want... So yes I agree with this statement, AI would probably not fully replace the coding workforce but would help with some careful supervision.
throwaway4220 4y ago
This is not random though it’s derivative of toms of input data. Can it be genuinely creative?
- etothepii 4y ago
  That's a fair comment, I mean random in the sense of wide variation. I suspect a moderately skilled user of graphical software could convert either of the proposed images into something that looks real solving for shadows and incorrect game pieces, whereas generating 10 different faces might be quite difficult. Especially if tasked with doing it for a race or culture the artist was not familiar with.
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  I don’t see why it couldn’t - but the end result might be incoherent to humans. It could easily combine or extrapolate on random things to create “art”

thenerdhead 4y ago

These are some wild estimates for professions based on products that haven't even been generally accessible for that long. Nor does it equate that writing, coding, or designing is only a small portion of most jobs. And typically the most enjoyable/easiest part for some. What about the argument that unless the collective gets better/smarter, that AI will indeed only be as smart as the current collective? Perhaps this is the "AI will hit a ceiling", but it needs to be trained on something. If more and more gets automated in these areas, how will they ever improve?

akmarinov 4y ago

With the way driving automation is going, let’s just say I’m not worried any time soon.

Msw242 4y ago

> At some point along the continuum, there will simply not be enough new work to make up for the efficiency gains by the AI models. I don't buy that devs are going to run out of things to do. Instead I see this increasing the leverage of engineers (who are really just creative problem solvers) such that an exponentially increasing number of lower value problems will make financial sense to solve with engineers. I think we'll see the same thing with designers and all different kinds of tech workers. Pay will increase, not decrease (at least globally) because business people don't have the training to work these levers or judge the quality of the output.

belter 4y ago

We need another "No Silver Bullet" [1] for these modern times of ridiculous hype. Contain your ego and all these Matrices Statistical manipulations you decide to call AI...Somebody please volunteer. "OpenAI estimates that OpenAI Codex (what powers Github’s Copilot) can already complete 37% of coding tasks." And who decides the task is done, complete and works? The Meat does [2]...The Meat and nobody else. [1] "No Silver Bullet": http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf [2] "They're Made Out of Meat": https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ

pluijzer 4y ago

What I see whit AI is that it is very good at closed ended questions. Take, like the article, AlphaGo as an example. The rules and goal of the game are fixed and verifiable by the computer itself. With writing and graphic design less so. The best AI can do is to generate a text or image that it judges itself as passing as realistic according to its own model. For jobs where passing a being realistic is good enough I certainly see those as being replaceable. This might include mundane coding tasks like writing an API to an existing server. Tasks where the goal is not closed ended, where the computer cannot judge itself if it got the correct result and passing as realistic is not enough, might never get replaced by machines.

yrgulation 4y ago

Any decent developer will use existing libraries and tools for common tasks, so 90% of the code is already written. The remaining 10% of the code is business and use case specifics that change frequently and is made by pulling the pieces provided by libraries together. The ai assisted auto complete will likely never be able to understand use cases, for that it would need sentience - and even humans fail at understanding what non techies want in their apps. As others pointed out such ai tools reduce the time taken to google something, so its more like a built in code search engine and very good at it. Other than that all the “software jobs automation” stories such as this article are written to impress either non techies or gullible newbies. A waste of content, scifi at best.

coffeefirst 4y ago
Right. The efficiencies are already here in the form of CI/CD, workflow tools like IntelliSense, and boring old stuff like ORMs and libraries. It's probably about 50% faster to make a common CRUD app than it was 20 years ago. Luckily the industry has found a way to compensate for this by building the common CRUD app in React and Microservices, so now it takes 3x longer again and requires twice the staff to maintain it.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  > so now it takes 3x longer again and requires twice the staff to maintain it precisely. or like with aws, what used to be a sysadmin is now two to three devops engineers doing the same stuff. if anything ai will enable even more people to get into software dev and thus allow even more businesses to thrive and thus create more jobs. ais and tools like you mentioned are like fertilisers. the more crap the more jobs for us.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I happily wait for the few rounds when non-technical people attempt to use them to make system that works and is secure... As someone working in security I'm not very worried about career prospects. There is plenty of time to point out crap yet...

dboreham 4y ago

I'll begin worrying after we get self driving lawyers.

wombatpm 4y ago
A self driving car that becomes a lawyer that enters into contracts with body shops where it randomly causes accident in return for a % of the business, free charging and maintenance. I don’t know which is worse, an amoral corporation using AI to crush its workers or an independent AI working for its own interests
Ekaros 4y ago
I think that might even be a improvement. Just imagine if there was enough of them and they entered actual price competition. Dropping cost to 10th or 100th...

horns4lyfe 4y ago

As I read this I thought all read as very philosophical and hand-wavy, as well as showing a misunderstanding of how software engineers actually work. I then looked at the authors profile and saw that they’re a young PM and “entrepreneur”. So interesting, but not an expert analysis at all, which explains the gaps.

angarg12 4y ago

If you work doing ML in production, you know how incredibly difficult it is to get an extra % improvement. The idea of exponential growth that accelerates into the singularity is a sci-fi concept that I have never experienced. From the outside we've experienced exponential improvements in ML models, sure. But those didn't come out of nowhere. They are powered by massive efforts involving humans. Personally I'm not worried about losing my dev job to machines in my lifetime.

turns0ut 4y ago
Because you’re using the library’s we have today; they don’t make the unknown you encountered easy. What about the ripples from “enough people” losing their jobs? Covid and the logistics whiplash have done nothing to embed in people they’re just one of seven billion. Each still acts like the king of their own mountain. It’s pretty sad. You have no say over your place in a future society that appears keen to rug pull the masses lives from under them.

civilized 4y ago

More exponential growth voodoo.

IAmGraydon 4y ago

This author is running on heroic amounts of hopium. That said, the first thing I see this replacing is not graphic designers, but stock photography sites.

komadori 4y ago
I saw some DALL-E output recently where it had reproduced the watermark from a stock photography site! https://twitter.com/dalle2pics/status/1531721904121315328?s=21&t=52L6TU3ootFLN9isyTDBKQ https://twitter.com/dalle2pics/status/1531721904121315328?s=...

the_cat_kittles 4y ago

why do people write articles like this? is it just to hear themselves talk?

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

A powerful AI capable of programming would be amazing. It could reverse engineer binaries into human-readable source code. It could transpile tools and libraries to different platforms and languages. Personally I can't wait to be made obsolete by the god AI. The limit to human creativity would move from a technical one to your imagination.

jacknews 4y ago

This article seems very simplistic to me. I'm grasping for a word to describe an argument that leads you, via brightly-colored baby steps, to a desired conclusion, but this article seems to be that. What is intelligence? Can classical machines become intelligent, or is there some mystical quantum quality involved? Is there a limit to intelligence? What is the best form of intelligence (single entity vs society), Is intelligence even understandable, and therefore engineerable? Are current neural networks in any way intelligent (they seem extremely good at pattern matching, and/or regurgitating those patterns, but beyond that I'm not sure). Etc, etc, etc, etc.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Think of all the money that could be saved if interlocking boards of directors and corporate executives could be replaced by AI? No more need to pay bloated salaries and ludicrous bonuses and provid ridiculous 'golden parachute' contracts to top executives. The discussion about AI always focuses on replacing the leaves of the trees in corporate heirarchies, but the value obtained by replacing the root seems to be much higher. One could also plausible replace shareholders with AI, although then one might start to question the whole structure of investment capitalism... maybe AI would be better at making long-term decisions about the distribution of capital to prospective business operations than some group of Wall Street funds are? Perhaps we'll see AI-managed pension funds in the near future with significantly better results (and more interest in the long-term health of the outfits they invest in) soon?

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indigoabstract 4y ago

* Boss type speaking disapprovingly to some programmers and designers: * Come on guys, back to the fields, play time's over. Those strawberries need to be picked before they spoil. Tell the AI what you've done so far, he'll take care of it from now on.

indigoabstract 4y ago
The upside is, if the AI ever really gets that scary good(aka singularity), we can always ask it to find a solution for our current troubles. Btw, can entropy ever be reversed?

gz5 4y ago

In games like Go, the problem is very well defined and bounded. Most high value software dev work is working with humans to define the problem itself, and the problem usually exists in a multi-actor, non-deterministic, dynamic, somewhat irrational environment. Meanwhile, the resultant code or 'solution' is also not a solution in a vacuum - it needs to work within certain workflows, tooling, skills, cultures, processes, orgs etc...which are also often undefined, dynamic and irrational. Not saying AI can't help in many areas, but do the areas which are growing exponentially as described by OP help AI function effectively in enviros such as the above?

victor106 4y ago

> The 60% decrease in AI computing hardware every year which translates to the ability to train exponentially larger AI models (ARK Invest 2022 Big Ideas Report). From what I understand most intensive AI tasks require using a GPU and the leader in the GPU business is NVIDIA. Looking at their profit margins I don’t see any drop in fact a growth of over 30% yoy [1] Also as an aside, I am a big skeptic of ARK. During the short time she had a diva status Woods seems to have been more lucky than good. That said, investing is a long game. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/profit...

EGreg 4y ago

Let me summarize the state of AI as a layman who has been following the main trends: 1) Cyc and reasoning - stuck for decades but making slow progress 2) GANNs - can detect a whole lot of things by being trained on data 3) MTCS - this is AlphaGo and AlphaZero. Adversarial networks that play each other. Have nearly solved any turn based game that can be expressed this way, and can be used for StarCraft etc. 4) Data fitting - can get scientific data and find new scientific theories and formulas to explain them, etc. by essentially building analytic functions from building blocks and optimizing for simplicity. 5) GPT3 and DALL-E - have very little understanding of anything, they just throw a lot of bullshit at a wall and see if it sticks. But since the bullshit is actually stitched from all serious human output that could be digitized, they sound quite serious at times (even though they show total lack of understanding when basic math is involved for instance, as numbers get higher). Now I will be willing to admit (and have written about this) that logic and science may be a “poor man’s” million-dimensional vector data fitting. Maybe our binary logic and simple models are the thing that models the world worse than the million-vector models that capture the actual dynamics better. But humans won’t be able to understand these dynamics any more than a cat can understand most of your activities based on abstract systems. All that other stuff — superhuman sensors, motors etc. gives them unfair advantages, like the finger on Geopardy. Auto-aim and self-driving cars are more about HUMANS improving, training, and then downloading the new software to every device. What scares me most, though, is deepfakes and swarming. You don’t need GREAT AI to take over political discussions, or direct swarms of self driving cars or drones to wreak havoc. Online, swarms of sleeper bots can inftrate many communities and execute sybil attacks at scale. They can amass karma right here on HN with comments stitched through bullshit that sounds just like HN. It’s a positive EV strategy for the swarm. Eventually they can edge out all human participants where everything you see all day long is bots. The kicker is THEY DONT NEED TO PASS THE TURING TEST in order to take over our systems because most people consume content non-interactively (read comments, watch videos) . “Truth” online is just a correlation of A vs B and every repository of “truth” can be flooded with a different correlation. Stephen Colbert fans even did it manually with elephants tripling in Africa! Imagine what botswarms can do to out sense of truth or political will or anything!

elforce002 4y ago
Preach.

mihaigalos 4y ago

AI automation pushing people out of jobs is a strong incentive for universal basic income, or a similar scheme. If there is enough work doable by AI, why would humans still be needed? Some humans would cover the missing 10% of what AI can't do, as pointed out in other threads. But that leaves a lot of humans idle. The entities operating this AI would still need to operate i.e. in a country. So the country's government will have to enact some sort of legislation to regulate the AI's impact. It doesn't necessarily mean everybody will be out of a job and miserable. Probably work would be optional and shelter, food and the likes would be provided by the government.

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semiquaver 4y ago

When google search was introduced it was a revelation. Search results were eerily accurate compared with the then-state-of-the-art. The key was using computers to interpret and leverage human-made webs of knowledge. 20+ years later, search sucks because it’s mostly robots (or humans acting like robots) writing SEO centric copy to capture valuable queries. Most of these strikingly capable “AI” tools today like DALL-E and Codex are fundamentally built by applying more leverage in new ways to a corpus of human work: art/code/etc. What happens if these systems take over and 99% of the humans stop writing code or making art and successive systems are trained on mostly regurgitated AI output? The same effect is apparent in equities: index funds now make up the bulk of investment, but they merely follow other money flows in lock step, many of them driven by computers. As a result the decisions of a relatively small number of actual humans have incredibly outsized impact on markets. We will have a system of infinitely recursive navel-gazing that is devoid of utility once the actual intelligence that was the key driver of the system has dried up because it’s economic value was captured by greedy hill-climbing algorithms. Pieces like this are naive because they extrapolate what they see as trends without recognizing that the world is a dynamic system. Predictions are never this simple when the subject is so dependent on the state of the world which it will dramatically change.

throwaway_7874 4y ago
Well you gave me a new perspective. But what happens when AI needs less and less "real" data for training then it, will not degrade like google's search, which by the way is still the best from all the search engines I have known and tried.

benreesman 4y ago

OpenAI thinks their code transformer can already do 37% of all coding “tasks”? Buzz off.

p1esk 4y ago
On a dataset of 164 programming problems: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf (Section 2.2). The dataset is here: https://github.com/openai/human-eval https://github.com/openai/human-eval
- kubanczyk 4y ago
  Ah, they seem to think that 100% of programming problems literally amount to Easy leetcodes. I see no glue-code questions there, nor anything brownfield.
  - p1esk 4y ago
    Yeah I don't know where benreesman pulled that statement from, neither the blog post nor the original OpenAI paper claims anything of the sort. That aside, I'm not sure how impressive is an AI that could do 37% of "all coding tasks". It's like a self-driving car that only works 37% of the time.
    - benreesman 4y ago
      From TFA: “OpenAI estimates that OpenAI Codex (what powers Github’s Copilot) can already complete 37% of coding tasks.”
      - p1esk 4y ago
        Are you intentionally trying to hide that “coding tasks” in the blog article is a link to the paper, clearly explaining what these coding task are? And you, for some reason, decided to add “all” before “coding tasks”. What are you trying to pull?

Hizonner 4y ago

It's pretty much never right to extrapolate something that looks exponential as an actual exponential. It's much more likely to be something with roughly the shape of a logistic curve. ... and the fun part with a logistic curve is guessing how far up you actually are...

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

All my hope rests on the assumption that creating bigger models with current AI technology will only lead to marginally better results. The old law of diminishing returns. In other words, current model approaches hopefully have a limit (that's not too far away) that will keep them from getting better.

mlcrypto 4y ago

Sounds like the AI will need a decentralized money to value compute costs and trade freely with other AI. One advantage we have is that AI is not smart enough to buy Bitcoin yet. That is my hedge against Exponential AI. Another megabull scenario

crdrost 4y ago

Marx talks about this a bit in Das Capital... You would think that the automation of an industry improves working conditions inside of it, in practice the opposite has usually been true: fewer people work longer hours in ever-more-tedious ways. So you used to go to work to design something, but in this vision of the future, you now go to work to craft prompts to DALL-E-2 so that it can design something for you, but because design is now so much cheaper you have to do three or four times as much design in the day, and this mechanism only doubles your rate of production... Gets to be a real mess. However, I would notice that we have been blessed with a different exponential, which we have been riding into the future. That is the exponential of processor speed and storage and all of the other computing resources. It's a perennial observation that our actual programs have not gotten much faster. The extra resources are immediately wasted. The reputation of hiring developers from developing countries, the cheap foreign labor force, for us has always been that you get a big ball of mud which you cannot maintain very easily. I do not see AI helping with this, but rather exacerbating it. Beforehand, there was a reasonable limit to how many lines of code you might expect from a developer per day, maybe a couple hundred if they test their code well and do other things to refactor and simplify. But with AI you could imagine it multiplying 10-fold, just throw more mud at the problem, the mud ball is already huge: what could it hurt. In fact, we may see the Smalltalk revolution! Of course this has been prophecied before, but never really come to pass. In this more-dystopian form, the idea is that everyone leans heavily into AI and something like kubernetes for modularization. Every single cell, every pod, in these gigantic supercomputer clusters which shall exists to serve up a smallish blog, needs to do something small enough that with its abundant AI generated code, it can nevertheless live and die successfully, spawning new processes as needed. The blog is thousands of small mud balls, and they work together in signaling pathways that are no longer understood by any human who works on the blog, and the dominant metaphor ceases to be one of mechanism and design and inputs and outputs... Rather it is biological, or even ecological. To start such systems up requires a story of “childhood” where a harness coordinates the first thousand nanoservicesv and grows the cluster into a template for the living application, then it needs AI-style “training” to reconfigure itself to handle actual business purposes, finally it will be released on the world, only to make mistakes which we will have to educate it to discern as mistakes... We certainly can't fix the system, we don't know how it works. Not what Alan Kay envisioned! But who knows. Maybe our kubernetes clusters will go to school one day.

crikeyjoe 4y ago

paulhodge 4y ago

When it comes to AI replacing jobs the biggest wonder I have is.. why is there so much talk and attention on replacing software jobs first? Software work is fairly high skill and hard to replace. Every hour that a software dev spends doing a task, they are doing some kind of work that the industry has probably tried and failed to automate, and we're talking about an industry filled with the most clever and most qualified automation-writers there are. There's many jobs that AI will probably replace. Software will be among the last.

ta988 4y ago
That's because people saying that are fooled and believe that SE is just about writing code and that it is similar to making a picture like Dall-E or writing a pseudo-profound text like GPT-3 does. This is really far from reality. You have to design, redesign, correct bugs, think about the whole system from backend to frontend, envision user interaction take into account evil actors or rogue employees... And to that you add a layer of politics that forbid some options and favor others because of company culture. Good luck designing an AI that does that. It is not impossible, but it is much harder than a robot that mixes liquids or a program that make drawings that look cool.
qualudeheart 4y ago
Software developers worry about their jobs being replaced. You see posts from people worried about this on this forum because this forum is full of software developers. The nature of our work exposes to new technological developments first, so we’re also the first to talk about this AI. If I went on an art forum I might find posts by artists worried about Dall-E but those posts wouldn’t come about until later when the artists hear about this technology.

nbzso 4y ago

Yep. I have seen this "enthusiastic futurism" before. Dot-com bubble.

thesz 4y ago

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... One of my tasks as a software engineer is to reduce code as much as possible. Because code is a liability, it needs to be supported, maintained, adapted, ported, etc, etc. If you can do same or more with less code, please do. If you can reduce other's code, which is often legacy code, please, do. Right now all demoes I see are generating code, they do not changing code, not deleting something. This means the only way for text-to-code system to get a new program for a changing requirement is to regenerate new code from scratch. I am not in the mood of deducing what that means for AI, it is enough for me to know what that means for typical software development process.

lamontcg 4y ago

"playing go" is actually a very constrained problem domain. "design and implement a SasS product that humans will give you money for" is a much less well-defined problem. applying AI to boilerplate will probably be effective, but that might just eliminate more outsourcing and allow local devs to be more productive, as an extension of IDEs that have various macros to reduce boilerplate. i think getting past that to the point where some manager can just ask an AI to design a commercially viable SaaS website top to bottom and it plonks out of the machine is exponentially more _difficult_ of a problem domain. although a lot of the websites which pollute search results in google will be churned out by the millions and millions.

Ekaros 4y ago
Go is actually pretty simple game, alternate between placing stones, if stones connected have no open spaces remove them and lose points. The decision space is huge, but that is pretty much it. Now SaaS is one thing, but who would trust industrial control software for AI. At least current one. Here is oil refinery, make money. Oh, take these bank details as well and go figure it out...
- lamontcg 4y ago
  "Okay GitHub Copilot go design the flight computer for the next generation of SpaceX rockets" (proceeds to regurgitate MechJeb code from KSP).

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

People seem to think that automation needs to be 100% or nothing. Automation at 80%(or whatever percent) of ideal will affect a large number of programming jobs. If you as a programmer start to compete without the use of AI vs someone that has embraced it then you are going to lose. If you can get an AI to do 80% of your work and you as a sentient being can finish the project then your output will explode vs someone that does not. This says to me that the future programmer will be closer to a software architect. Someone that can interpret what someone wants and decide what the solution is using all the resources available including AI tools. Not all programmers can do that. I've known plenty of programmers that are great at their job but lack social skills. Those are the type that will definitely be affected by AI. Given that you don't need 100% perfection in AI to make an impact in the industry and programming jobs then I see big changes happening with-in the next 10 years at most. Don't believe it? Look at Dall-e 2. It won't get rid of designers or such but many people will start to use it in some cases and by-pass the designer all together. Also a new crop of designers will use Dall-e 2 to create some of their work. Those that won't will be left behind. Designers today, programmers next... Yes!

vba616 4y ago

What's all this, then? Programming was automated 65 years ago. The "Formula Translating System" introduced in 1957 eliminated the drudgery of programming by allowing users to simply enter equations into a computer directly. Specifying machine instructions and memory addresses by hand rapidly became a thing of the past. Today, having a programming assistant is as quaint as a secretary.