6 ms·

ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Can we stop this nonsense, please?

clnq 4y ago
If anything, we'll need more engineers to help GPT-3.5/ChatGPT eat most receptionist, customer support, and similar customer-facing entry level jobs. That itself could become a very healthy and large industry.
- brookst 4y ago
  IMO AI code will eat entry level software eng jobs before AI eats in-person jobs like receptionist. I would not want to be a “take this UI and add a new field” coder right now.
  - clnq 4y ago
    I don't think so for several reasons. First, there's the uselessness of entry-level engineers. They are hired for their growth potential (that every human has, but language models don't) and are expected to grow into mid-levels and seniors. In most of the sw industry, entry-level roles are also not terminal, which means that such an engineer must get promoted at least +1L to keep working in the company. Someone (or something) perpetually stuck at the entry level is a bad value proposition for a sw company. Secondly, the code that language models produce is buggy. They can, on occasion, produce amazing code and even entire codebases. But this is an exception, not the rule. You can generally prototype something or get an idea for something from language models, but you can only push very little of that into production. What good is code you can't use? You still need an engineer to oversee the language model's outputs. Overall, if some company replaced their juniors with AI, that would be incompetent management.
- a_bonobo 4y ago
  This feels kind of arrogant? People working in many customer-facing entry level jobs do emotional labor within organisations that no AI-training has even taken aim at. If glorified chatbots could do their work receptionists would've disappeared a long time ago.
  - clnq 4y ago
    Emotional labor is a problem, not a feature. A receptionist only needs to be polite with the guests. But unfortunately, receptionists are often subject to emotional abuse. We've never had glorified chatbots like GPT-3 or GPT-3.5. I'm not just praising GPT; I've myself casually run through a few simulations with a hotel chain receptionist and an executive. The technology looks very competent, and aside from cost savings, there's also the customer service quality aspect (consistency particularly) and the element of removing staff from abuse. The biggest challenge is integrating language models with live data. Making customer data accessible to them is not a problem technically (prepending prompts), but it could be a GDPR problem if a third party like OpenAI is involved (having to hand over data to a third party might make the AI receptionists unappealing to some customers -- maybe, needs to be tried). The other aspect is letting the AI make changes in a data model. But there are ways to solve that as well. When these obstacles are resolved - and there is a lot of incentive to fix them now - a lot of customer-facing reception-type work can be outsourced to AI. By the way, some hotels are already very interested in chatbots for reception work. There has been a lot of talk about that in some chains since about 2020. Old-style NLP bots, too. But of course, GPT-3 capabilities are very appealing.
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    I just want to add, ordering through the McDonald's big touchscreen machine is much better than ordering through the human and that alone has elevated my affinity for McDonald's. Which other experiential leaps from replacing humans with machines remain unimplemented?
    - Rapzid 4y ago
      Eh on McDonalds but I do like the self-service ordering. Kinda amazing this has not caught on more and sooner in USA. Much more low tech versions of this have been used in Japan forever. The noodle bars and ramen shops are case studies in efficiency.
rvz 4y ago
> ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Of course. My comment was about 'less programmers' getting hired. Not the extreme of 'All programmers' getting replaced by ChatGPT as you read incorrectly. Believing that programmers don't need to adapt and that managers won't need to reduce or do layoffs especially with programmers, is quite frankly a denial and delusion of what is going on with cutting costs in hiring too many of them in the first place. Denial is the first step to acceptance and as I said before, less programmers will be hired with juniors and some seniors impacted.
- emptyfile 4y ago
  ChatGPT has quite literally nothing to do with tech lay-offs. Read a freaking newspaper once in a while.
  - rvz 4y ago
    Yet no-one here said that for this year's tech layoffs. But I wouldn't be surprised to see less engineers being hired compared to last year which is my entire point. Bringing in ChatGPT into the mix now won't make it any easier for entry level job seekers or for several seniors. This time, it is not the same as before. But of course. Denying it all, and not adapting sure is a great way of coping with rapid changes. /s
- gorbachev 4y ago
  No, that will also not happen. More developers will get hired, because ChatGPT will not perform the higher function tasks most developers actually spend most of their time working on. The reason this will happen, is because ChatGPT will be more efficient in performing the lower function tasks and there will be more of a need to put all that automatically created code into actual use, integrate it with Enterprise Package FooCPT, figure out what caused the product outage at 2am at night. And on and on and on. Not to mention that ChatGPT will not be able to talk to your users about what they want next, convince your manager that that's the right thing to do and everything else that you need to do on top of the coding part to be a good developer. What possibly will happen is that junior developers will have even harder time getting into the industry, because clueless PHBs will see ChatGPT doing all their work "for free". A few years later they're screwed, because nobody at the company knows how their applications work. Except ChatGPT...maybe.
nbaugh1 4y ago
I'll get scared when someone shows me an actual deployed, running, and maintained app by something like chatGPT. Solving problems with code snippets is a tiny part of the job
- f1shy 4y ago
  We will be all dead and gone long before any of those points are a reality...
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  I'll get scared when a chat bot can log into JIRA, take a ticket, read the requirements, say "Hmm, there's not enough details in here and a couple things seem ambiguous or contradictory..." Then it schedules a meeting with the biz dev and a QA resource and they all hash out and improve the ticket. Then it goes and implements the code and puts it out for review, addresses any comments, works with QA to clarify how to test it (maybe that's another chat bot) and deploys it.
  - htrp 4y ago
    I'll be ecstatic when that happens..... Jira is like the worst part of my day
- nanidin 4y ago
  Not to mention, until on-prem chatGPT is available, companies that care about source code secrecy aren’t going to expose their codebase to OpenAI. We’ll get another slew of decades long court cases once one line of Oracle or Microsoft code proprietary code comes out of chatGPT.

clnq 4y ago

If anything, we'll need more engineers to help GPT-3.5/ChatGPT eat most receptionist, customer support, and similar customer-facing entry level jobs. That itself could become a very healthy and large industry.

brookst 4y ago
IMO AI code will eat entry level software eng jobs before AI eats in-person jobs like receptionist. I would not want to be a “take this UI and add a new field” coder right now.
- clnq 4y ago
  I don't think so for several reasons. First, there's the uselessness of entry-level engineers. They are hired for their growth potential (that every human has, but language models don't) and are expected to grow into mid-levels and seniors. In most of the sw industry, entry-level roles are also not terminal, which means that such an engineer must get promoted at least +1L to keep working in the company. Someone (or something) perpetually stuck at the entry level is a bad value proposition for a sw company. Secondly, the code that language models produce is buggy. They can, on occasion, produce amazing code and even entire codebases. But this is an exception, not the rule. You can generally prototype something or get an idea for something from language models, but you can only push very little of that into production. What good is code you can't use? You still need an engineer to oversee the language model's outputs. Overall, if some company replaced their juniors with AI, that would be incompetent management.
a_bonobo 4y ago
This feels kind of arrogant? People working in many customer-facing entry level jobs do emotional labor within organisations that no AI-training has even taken aim at. If glorified chatbots could do their work receptionists would've disappeared a long time ago.
- clnq 4y ago
  Emotional labor is a problem, not a feature. A receptionist only needs to be polite with the guests. But unfortunately, receptionists are often subject to emotional abuse. We've never had glorified chatbots like GPT-3 or GPT-3.5. I'm not just praising GPT; I've myself casually run through a few simulations with a hotel chain receptionist and an executive. The technology looks very competent, and aside from cost savings, there's also the customer service quality aspect (consistency particularly) and the element of removing staff from abuse. The biggest challenge is integrating language models with live data. Making customer data accessible to them is not a problem technically (prepending prompts), but it could be a GDPR problem if a third party like OpenAI is involved (having to hand over data to a third party might make the AI receptionists unappealing to some customers -- maybe, needs to be tried). The other aspect is letting the AI make changes in a data model. But there are ways to solve that as well. When these obstacles are resolved - and there is a lot of incentive to fix them now - a lot of customer-facing reception-type work can be outsourced to AI. By the way, some hotels are already very interested in chatbots for reception work. There has been a lot of talk about that in some chains since about 2020. Old-style NLP bots, too. But of course, GPT-3 capabilities are very appealing.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  I just want to add, ordering through the McDonald's big touchscreen machine is much better than ordering through the human and that alone has elevated my affinity for McDonald's. Which other experiential leaps from replacing humans with machines remain unimplemented?
  - Rapzid 4y ago
    Eh on McDonalds but I do like the self-service ordering. Kinda amazing this has not caught on more and sooner in USA. Much more low tech versions of this have been used in Japan forever. The noodle bars and ramen shops are case studies in efficiency.

rvz 4y ago

> ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Of course. My comment was about 'less programmers' getting hired. Not the extreme of 'All programmers' getting replaced by ChatGPT as you read incorrectly. Believing that programmers don't need to adapt and that managers won't need to reduce or do layoffs especially with programmers, is quite frankly a denial and delusion of what is going on with cutting costs in hiring too many of them in the first place. Denial is the first step to acceptance and as I said before, less programmers will be hired with juniors and some seniors impacted.

emptyfile 4y ago
ChatGPT has quite literally nothing to do with tech lay-offs. Read a freaking newspaper once in a while.
- rvz 4y ago
  Yet no-one here said that for this year's tech layoffs. But I wouldn't be surprised to see less engineers being hired compared to last year which is my entire point. Bringing in ChatGPT into the mix now won't make it any easier for entry level job seekers or for several seniors. This time, it is not the same as before. But of course. Denying it all, and not adapting sure is a great way of coping with rapid changes. /s
gorbachev 4y ago
No, that will also not happen. More developers will get hired, because ChatGPT will not perform the higher function tasks most developers actually spend most of their time working on. The reason this will happen, is because ChatGPT will be more efficient in performing the lower function tasks and there will be more of a need to put all that automatically created code into actual use, integrate it with Enterprise Package FooCPT, figure out what caused the product outage at 2am at night. And on and on and on. Not to mention that ChatGPT will not be able to talk to your users about what they want next, convince your manager that that's the right thing to do and everything else that you need to do on top of the coding part to be a good developer. What possibly will happen is that junior developers will have even harder time getting into the industry, because clueless PHBs will see ChatGPT doing all their work "for free". A few years later they're screwed, because nobody at the company knows how their applications work. Except ChatGPT...maybe.

nbaugh1 4y ago

I'll get scared when someone shows me an actual deployed, running, and maintained app by something like chatGPT. Solving problems with code snippets is a tiny part of the job

f1shy 4y ago
We will be all dead and gone long before any of those points are a reality...
nsxwolf 4y ago
I'll get scared when a chat bot can log into JIRA, take a ticket, read the requirements, say "Hmm, there's not enough details in here and a couple things seem ambiguous or contradictory..." Then it schedules a meeting with the biz dev and a QA resource and they all hash out and improve the ticket. Then it goes and implements the code and puts it out for review, addresses any comments, works with QA to clarify how to test it (maybe that's another chat bot) and deploys it.
- htrp 4y ago
  I'll be ecstatic when that happens..... Jira is like the worst part of my day
nanidin 4y ago
Not to mention, until on-prem chatGPT is available, companies that care about source code secrecy aren’t going to expose their codebase to OpenAI. We’ll get another slew of decades long court cases once one line of Oracle or Microsoft code proprietary code comes out of chatGPT.