5 ms·

I feel sad this evening... I was playing around with ChatGPT this afternoon and I've come to the conclusion that it's now almost inevitable that a large amount

by kypro 4y ago

I feel sad this evening... I was playing around with ChatGPT this afternoon and I've come to the conclusion that it's now almost inevitable that a large amount of middle-class jobs be automated away by end of decade. ChatGPT is far more competent than a lot of people here realise. While ChatGPT isn't perfect and it sometimes makes mistakes, so do we humans. The only real difference between us and ChatGPT is that we have a feedback process to correct mistakes. When I write bad code I know because I run it, test it, and if needed, fix it. But that validation and correction step is arguably the easy bit of writing code, and with a few modifications it seems likely ChatGPT could do this fairly well today. Things are going to change faster than I think people realise. Perhaps by mid-decade companies like Squarespace will have their own AI website builders, then by end of the decade perhaps software engineers will largely be a thing of the past along with thousands of other middle-class jobs. I think we spend far too much time worrying about the singularity and far to little time thinking about the consequences of AI rapidly destroying middle-class jobs. Software engineers, graphic designers, writers, customer sales reps - these are all going to be gone sooner than I think people realise. Jobs which require in-person human interaction such as waiters or jobs which require interaction with the physical environment (builders, cleaners, chefs) should be okay - at least until robotics catches up.

wintorez 4y ago
'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.'
Waterluvian 4y ago
Frankly I’m delighted by this potential future. We spend so much time seeing “the economy” as some immutable fact of life that we miss the point of life. For most of us it isn’t to work. Most jobs aren’t jobs people would do if they were paid regardless. Yes, this is totally predicated on the concept of some sort of guaranteed income. Without that, I’m 100% in agreement that automating jobs is bad.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Chances are that it will end with lots of people either dead or with substantial psychological issues for at least a generation. Keep in mind that a lot of our self-value is tied to being 'productive members of society', if you remove that bit then a large chunk of the people alive will lose their main reason for feeling good about themselves.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    I’m not sure I fully agree. I think there’s no reason it has to be tied to feeding our kids and putting a roof over their heads. But I partly agree with the idea that it might take generations to adapt fully. I know people who retired early and ended up just kind of rotting away. I guess we don’t all have the self-drive.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      I know quite a few cases of people that were happy and felt useful right up to the day of their retirement.
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  I'm with you, at least provided it happens in a way that doesn't just build a Verhoeven-esque dystopia for all us serfs. Bring on The Culture!
PaulWaldman 4y ago
I share your concern. I develop industrial control systems. It's been a hot topic for decades that automation will replace factory workers. From my vantage point there is still the same number of workers in factories. The difference is that they are now doing more meaningful and less labor intensive work. This level of automation is what has made manufacturing sustainable in the US. While this anecdote is not completely analogous with your example, I'm optimistic that we don't quite know yet how humans will be able to leverage these kinds of tools to increase their own productivity.
dantetheinferno 4y ago
I find that this will wipe out a lot of Software Developers who are doing something that isn't really unique - and people will move on to more interesting work. The internet wiped out travel agencies - but opened a new, more interesting world of better products (Expedia, Google flights, etc.) that made travel more accessible to everyone. Instead of travel agents - we hire software developers to benefit everyone
agentwiggles 4y ago
I'm not fully convinced, and I say this as someone who is wildly impressed by ChatGPT and reeling a bit at what it's capable of. Over the past few days, I've tried a number of experiments with it. I had it generate song lyrics. They were funny but not anything that I'd actually use . I had it write a few stories featuring my son. We were both impressed by the stories and entertained. But none of them were very special or particularly good. I had it write me a few regexes. It did the job essentially perfectly, I made some mild tweaks for things like capture group names, but the regexes it generated were perfectly functional. I had it try to parse some Advent of Code inputs. It failed miserably on today's, but did pretty well on day 3. I had it generate an AWS lambda function which uses the Spotify API to get a users recently played tracks and put them in a DynamoDB table. I had it write a short incremental style game, which I deployed to GitHub pages with minimal modification. So these are all impressive as hell in their own ways. But the thing is, I had to know what to ask it, and it also gave some incorrect results very confidently. If I had to make a prediction, it's that this will make experienced developers more productive, but it won't turn juniors into seniors. It's not going to make someone who has no idea about coding into a developer. And it doesn't feel to me like it's going to obviate creativity in writing or lyricism or poetry. It feels like an augmentation of productivity more than a replacement. Now, who knows where we'll be in a decade, maybe I'm wildly wrong and unemployed in 2032. But if I think about the closest analogue I can - self driving cars - I'm reminded that the technology amazed me 6 years ago and still isn't to the point where I would trust it with my life. I suspect this is a case where the first 90% is incredibly impressive, maybe even game-changing - but that the last 10% is going to take a long time to attain, and may not be reachable with the current approach. Feel free to argue the other direction, I'm not convinced either way yet, but as amazing as this thing is, I'm still confident I'll be working valuably for at least the next few years.
- chinabot 4y ago
  As with self-driving cars it only needs to work better or safer than a standard human, its almost there already, hell I am now getting petrified of the hackers getting this and targeting phishing emails.
  - 4y ago
danenania 4y ago
Some jobs may well disappear, but I think rather than AI replacing all these jobs, it will just shift what they entail. Take software engineering. Rather than doing the dirty work ourselves, we'll become AI supervisors and verifiers. Instead of implementation, the hard parts will become: - Telling the AI what you want precisely enough that you get the right output. - Verifying that the resulting code really works. - Figuring out what went wrong when it doesn't work (which will still require a deep understanding of the code, even if the engineer doesn't write it). Come to think of it, is that really all that different than what we do today? It sounds like the same job, just higher up on the ladder of abstraction.
- double_nan 4y ago
  I have a name for this: ai whispers. In order to be efficient there will be a special dialect to talk to different implementations of AIs and ppl will specialize in different dialects.
  - tinkertamper 4y ago
    This is just what was just called “speaking tech” back in the early 2000. I see a lot of discussion online about “prompt engineers” or “ai whispers” as you put, but I think the reality is that these tools are just another UI paradigm that our current generation will (on the whole) struggle with and the next generation will find intuitive.
    - double_nan 4y ago
      Well, to be fair there is a quantum leap: an ability to materialize abstract thought presented as a text. This will end a lot of jobs where anyone can judge the result or certain error rate is tolerable. But while we have a lot of jobs like that, way to many are not like that and they will not be replaced. But i like the idea of a new type of UI (UX?) being born in front of us.
- alecco 4y ago
  I foresee a sort of hyper-CAPTCHA for AI tuning. Perhaps this will be more valuable than the underlying model itself. The process could be: a flawed AI answer is reported, someone writes a distilled generalization of the misunderstanding, this is made into a hyper-CAPTCHA and a bunch of solvers (people) compete with another AI to iron out the flaw in the model. These people would probably have AI assistants of their own and would have to understand the internals, so they would have to be highly educated in maths, logic, stats, and probability. Heck, it could be like a spectator sport.
chinabot 4y ago
I just want to feed it my whole organization's emails, databases and spreadsheets so it has the context of the work I am doing, based on the questions I have given it, it could certainly replace a first level support person in a lot of cases and in some cases much higher levels, I would pay money for this if I could guarantee the privacy of the company.
double_nan 4y ago
I would not feel bad. The jobs which will be diminished (but not totally gone) will be the jobs which require technical skills to execute. Illustrations for books would be a good example - technically hard job which doesn’t require any special imagination nor mental skills. Ppl will create illustrations by describing the desired outcome. But even in this example there will be outstanding illustrators who are famous for their work.
yrgulation 4y ago
One thing is clear. If you have kids and advice them to go into software engineering then you are a bad parent.
- kaba0 4y ago
  No, you aren’t. Wake me up when AI writes any novel code.
emrah 4y ago
Here is another use case for ChatGPT, with the caveat that it is decently good at coding. Make it go through your coding interviews (somehow not revealing that it's not a human) and see if it makes it through. If not, you have biased judging :-)
- kaba0 4y ago
  It is not decently good at coding anything that has not yet been implemented and shared online.
- japanman425 4y ago
dogweather 4y ago
> When I write bad code I know because I run it, test it, and if needed, fix it. This puts you ahead of 80% of coders in 2022. That's who's going to have trouble: the people churning out software that sucks and the companies that enable them. These companies have gotten by until now because most other companies' software sucks too.
vitorgrs 4y ago
Same here. I used it to just generate contracts. Though we already knew a lot of lawyers would be replaced by AI, I never saw it in practice. And it worked amazing. You can also just generate laws too, etc etc
kaba0 4y ago
> The only real difference between us and ChatGPT is that we have a feedback process to correct mistakes No, it can actually be taught that something was incorrectly and will learn it (temporarily?). But it is still just way off base on plenty of things to the point where a small children can easily surpass it. It is marvelously good at digging up information written/created by humans, it is not good at all at creating novel thought. Probably the best comparison is someone very very booksmart, but very very dumb otherwise. So not many/any jobs will be replaced by it, maybe these “how can I help you” bots become somewhat useful at last.
captainmuon 4y ago
Isn't it totally weird that we long for jobs, instead of the fruits of the jobs? This backwards incentive structure is one of the reasons capitalism works so well - and so badly at the same time. If I cannot work a job anymore, great! But I demand to be able to take part in society, and I demand my share of societal production. This is one of many many cases where new technology clashes with the boundaries of our societal system. There are only three solutions: - Ban the new technology to prop up these jobs - Let the people become "unnecessary" and try to fix it with wellfare, which will cause all kinds of unrest - Embrace the new technology. Find a way to feed all the people who lost their jobs (the food is still being produced, it is just a question of how to distribute it). And find new meaningful activities for them (Remember: wage labor is not neccessarily == meaningful activity.)
- kypro 4y ago
  You're touching on my primary long-term concern with AI and automation here. One of the issues with the argument that we'll all be able to live great work-free lives on welfare is that AI fundamentally changes the dynamic between labourer and government. Historically the power nations, governments, business and individuals have is really just product of the labourers below them. Or put another way, the US is only as powerful as the total output of its labourers. This means historically the greatest threat to the US government (and governments generally) is unhappy labours - US revolution being the obvious example here. The same is true for companies though, just on a smaller scale. If you're in a position of power, historically your power has depended on ensuring those below you don't revolt. So for that reason historically we have always been able to protest for workers rights, higher wages, welfare, etc. But as soon as our labour is worthless we have very little bargaining power. In fact in the extreme it's possible we might all just become waste of resources and space to those at the top. And this gets even more concerning when you consider how AI could be used to prevent protests or to financially punish those involved in them. It seems to me wherever we like it or not civilization will depend entirely on those with power being charitable because as workers we will eventually have no power to influence anything. I'm not saying anything is certain, but these are outcomes I think we at least need to be thinking about today because the cost of getting this wrong is so high.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Won’t happen. If we get massive productivity boosts from software AI like this, it will generate a lot of wealth and help society overall. We have never been more productive and had lower unemployment.
japanman425 4y ago

by kypro 4y ago

wintorez 4y ago

'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.'

Waterluvian 4y ago

Frankly I’m delighted by this potential future. We spend so much time seeing “the economy” as some immutable fact of life that we miss the point of life. For most of us it isn’t to work. Most jobs aren’t jobs people would do if they were paid regardless. Yes, this is totally predicated on the concept of some sort of guaranteed income. Without that, I’m 100% in agreement that automating jobs is bad.

jacquesm 4y ago
Chances are that it will end with lots of people either dead or with substantial psychological issues for at least a generation. Keep in mind that a lot of our self-value is tied to being 'productive members of society', if you remove that bit then a large chunk of the people alive will lose their main reason for feeling good about themselves.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I’m not sure I fully agree. I think there’s no reason it has to be tied to feeding our kids and putting a roof over their heads. But I partly agree with the idea that it might take generations to adapt fully. I know people who retired early and ended up just kind of rotting away. I guess we don’t all have the self-drive.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I know quite a few cases of people that were happy and felt useful right up to the day of their retirement.
agentwiggles 4y ago
I'm with you, at least provided it happens in a way that doesn't just build a Verhoeven-esque dystopia for all us serfs. Bring on The Culture!

PaulWaldman 4y ago

I share your concern. I develop industrial control systems. It's been a hot topic for decades that automation will replace factory workers. From my vantage point there is still the same number of workers in factories. The difference is that they are now doing more meaningful and less labor intensive work. This level of automation is what has made manufacturing sustainable in the US. While this anecdote is not completely analogous with your example, I'm optimistic that we don't quite know yet how humans will be able to leverage these kinds of tools to increase their own productivity.

dantetheinferno 4y ago

I find that this will wipe out a lot of Software Developers who are doing something that isn't really unique - and people will move on to more interesting work. The internet wiped out travel agencies - but opened a new, more interesting world of better products (Expedia, Google flights, etc.) that made travel more accessible to everyone. Instead of travel agents - we hire software developers to benefit everyone

agentwiggles 4y ago

I'm not fully convinced, and I say this as someone who is wildly impressed by ChatGPT and reeling a bit at what it's capable of. Over the past few days, I've tried a number of experiments with it. I had it generate song lyrics. They were funny but not anything that I'd actually use . I had it write a few stories featuring my son. We were both impressed by the stories and entertained. But none of them were very special or particularly good. I had it write me a few regexes. It did the job essentially perfectly, I made some mild tweaks for things like capture group names, but the regexes it generated were perfectly functional. I had it try to parse some Advent of Code inputs. It failed miserably on today's, but did pretty well on day 3. I had it generate an AWS lambda function which uses the Spotify API to get a users recently played tracks and put them in a DynamoDB table. I had it write a short incremental style game, which I deployed to GitHub pages with minimal modification. So these are all impressive as hell in their own ways. But the thing is, I had to know what to ask it, and it also gave some incorrect results very confidently. If I had to make a prediction, it's that this will make experienced developers more productive, but it won't turn juniors into seniors. It's not going to make someone who has no idea about coding into a developer. And it doesn't feel to me like it's going to obviate creativity in writing or lyricism or poetry. It feels like an augmentation of productivity more than a replacement. Now, who knows where we'll be in a decade, maybe I'm wildly wrong and unemployed in 2032. But if I think about the closest analogue I can - self driving cars - I'm reminded that the technology amazed me 6 years ago and still isn't to the point where I would trust it with my life. I suspect this is a case where the first 90% is incredibly impressive, maybe even game-changing - but that the last 10% is going to take a long time to attain, and may not be reachable with the current approach. Feel free to argue the other direction, I'm not convinced either way yet, but as amazing as this thing is, I'm still confident I'll be working valuably for at least the next few years.

chinabot 4y ago
As with self-driving cars it only needs to work better or safer than a standard human, its almost there already, hell I am now getting petrified of the hackers getting this and targeting phishing emails.
- 4y ago

danenania 4y ago

Some jobs may well disappear, but I think rather than AI replacing all these jobs, it will just shift what they entail. Take software engineering. Rather than doing the dirty work ourselves, we'll become AI supervisors and verifiers. Instead of implementation, the hard parts will become: - Telling the AI what you want precisely enough that you get the right output. - Verifying that the resulting code really works. - Figuring out what went wrong when it doesn't work (which will still require a deep understanding of the code, even if the engineer doesn't write it). Come to think of it, is that really all that different than what we do today? It sounds like the same job, just higher up on the ladder of abstraction.

double_nan 4y ago
I have a name for this: ai whispers. In order to be efficient there will be a special dialect to talk to different implementations of AIs and ppl will specialize in different dialects.
- tinkertamper 4y ago
  This is just what was just called “speaking tech” back in the early 2000. I see a lot of discussion online about “prompt engineers” or “ai whispers” as you put, but I think the reality is that these tools are just another UI paradigm that our current generation will (on the whole) struggle with and the next generation will find intuitive.
  - double_nan 4y ago
    Well, to be fair there is a quantum leap: an ability to materialize abstract thought presented as a text. This will end a lot of jobs where anyone can judge the result or certain error rate is tolerable. But while we have a lot of jobs like that, way to many are not like that and they will not be replaced. But i like the idea of a new type of UI (UX?) being born in front of us.
alecco 4y ago
I foresee a sort of hyper-CAPTCHA for AI tuning. Perhaps this will be more valuable than the underlying model itself. The process could be: a flawed AI answer is reported, someone writes a distilled generalization of the misunderstanding, this is made into a hyper-CAPTCHA and a bunch of solvers (people) compete with another AI to iron out the flaw in the model. These people would probably have AI assistants of their own and would have to understand the internals, so they would have to be highly educated in maths, logic, stats, and probability. Heck, it could be like a spectator sport.

chinabot 4y ago

I just want to feed it my whole organization's emails, databases and spreadsheets so it has the context of the work I am doing, based on the questions I have given it, it could certainly replace a first level support person in a lot of cases and in some cases much higher levels, I would pay money for this if I could guarantee the privacy of the company.

double_nan 4y ago

I would not feel bad. The jobs which will be diminished (but not totally gone) will be the jobs which require technical skills to execute. Illustrations for books would be a good example - technically hard job which doesn’t require any special imagination nor mental skills. Ppl will create illustrations by describing the desired outcome. But even in this example there will be outstanding illustrators who are famous for their work.

yrgulation 4y ago

One thing is clear. If you have kids and advice them to go into software engineering then you are a bad parent.

kaba0 4y ago
No, you aren’t. Wake me up when AI writes any novel code.

emrah 4y ago

Here is another use case for ChatGPT, with the caveat that it is decently good at coding. Make it go through your coding interviews (somehow not revealing that it's not a human) and see if it makes it through. If not, you have biased judging :-)

kaba0 4y ago
It is not decently good at coding anything that has not yet been implemented and shared online.
japanman425 4y ago

dogweather 4y ago

> When I write bad code I know because I run it, test it, and if needed, fix it. This puts you ahead of 80% of coders in 2022. That's who's going to have trouble: the people churning out software that sucks and the companies that enable them. These companies have gotten by until now because most other companies' software sucks too.

vitorgrs 4y ago

Same here. I used it to just generate contracts. Though we already knew a lot of lawyers would be replaced by AI, I never saw it in practice. And it worked amazing. You can also just generate laws too, etc etc

kaba0 4y ago

> The only real difference between us and ChatGPT is that we have a feedback process to correct mistakes No, it can actually be taught that something was incorrectly and will learn it (temporarily?). But it is still just way off base on plenty of things to the point where a small children can easily surpass it. It is marvelously good at digging up information written/created by humans, it is not good at all at creating novel thought. Probably the best comparison is someone very very booksmart, but very very dumb otherwise. So not many/any jobs will be replaced by it, maybe these “how can I help you” bots become somewhat useful at last.

captainmuon 4y ago

Isn't it totally weird that we long for jobs, instead of the fruits of the jobs? This backwards incentive structure is one of the reasons capitalism works so well - and so badly at the same time. If I cannot work a job anymore, great! But I demand to be able to take part in society, and I demand my share of societal production. This is one of many many cases where new technology clashes with the boundaries of our societal system. There are only three solutions: - Ban the new technology to prop up these jobs - Let the people become "unnecessary" and try to fix it with wellfare, which will cause all kinds of unrest - Embrace the new technology. Find a way to feed all the people who lost their jobs (the food is still being produced, it is just a question of how to distribute it). And find new meaningful activities for them (Remember: wage labor is not neccessarily == meaningful activity.)

kypro 4y ago
You're touching on my primary long-term concern with AI and automation here. One of the issues with the argument that we'll all be able to live great work-free lives on welfare is that AI fundamentally changes the dynamic between labourer and government. Historically the power nations, governments, business and individuals have is really just product of the labourers below them. Or put another way, the US is only as powerful as the total output of its labourers. This means historically the greatest threat to the US government (and governments generally) is unhappy labours - US revolution being the obvious example here. The same is true for companies though, just on a smaller scale. If you're in a position of power, historically your power has depended on ensuring those below you don't revolt. So for that reason historically we have always been able to protest for workers rights, higher wages, welfare, etc. But as soon as our labour is worthless we have very little bargaining power. In fact in the extreme it's possible we might all just become waste of resources and space to those at the top. And this gets even more concerning when you consider how AI could be used to prevent protests or to financially punish those involved in them. It seems to me wherever we like it or not civilization will depend entirely on those with power being charitable because as workers we will eventually have no power to influence anything. I'm not saying anything is certain, but these are outcomes I think we at least need to be thinking about today because the cost of getting this wrong is so high.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Won’t happen. If we get massive productivity boosts from software AI like this, it will generate a lot of wealth and help society overall. We have never been more productive and had lower unemployment.

japanman425 4y ago