5 ms·

"I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. They've been promising those since the 1880s, but I've still got passenger

"I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. They've been promising those since the 1880s, but I've still got passengers in my carriage every day!" Obviously it's a cheeky example, but this would not be the first time in history a previously well-established career was upended in a (relatively) short amount of time. I'm a FAANG dev, I've got skin in the game too and I'm trying to be optimistic, but I can't help but be at least a little worried. From Wikipedia - "In 1890 there were 13,800 companies in the United States in the business of building carriages pulled by horses. By 1920, only 90 such companies remained." I don't think we'll be out of the job entirely, but I can definitely imagine the bar being raised and the compensation stagnating as we now have to justify the time and cost of our work compared to the near-free, near-instantaneous output of an LLM. All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried.

theshrike79 4y ago
> All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried. Yea, that's mostly why I get hired. Experience gives people a certain intuition on what kind of solutions work for which cases. And when you've been working long enough, you don't (hopefully) feel the need to do cool bleeding edge shit at work, you just want the work code to ... work. You pick the simplest and most boring solution possible so you can clock out at 1600 and not think about services crashing because the newfangled thingamageek coded with the latest language du jour failed because of an edge case nobody has seen before.
- joenot443 4y ago
  That's a comforting perspective, I hope that you're right.
illiarian 4y ago
> I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. Wow. The hype around "AI"s has entered the crypto stages. Just like crypto was the new car, the new internet etc., so is AI now. Well, at least AI is useful in certain applications.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  Again? Last time it ended in a long winter. And horse carriages have some serious advantages, maybe even will make a comeback. :)
- joenot443 4y ago
  I got into and out of Bitcoin back in 2010 when I was still in high school. Even then, I thought and still do that crypto as a whole is a complete ponzi scheme with little real world utility. I feel completely differently about LLMs; I'd say we're closer to 2007 when the first iPhone was released. I believe LLMs will become a part of our day to day lives at a level that crypto never came close to.
saurik 4y ago
But horse carriage drivers were never out of a job, because cars still needed people to drive them... (yes, people can drive their own car, but they can also drive their own carriage, so nothing is different there). In contrast, horses were out of a job; do you think we are more like horses than like the people who drive horses?

theshrike79 4y ago

> All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried. Yea, that's mostly why I get hired. Experience gives people a certain intuition on what kind of solutions work for which cases. And when you've been working long enough, you don't (hopefully) feel the need to do cool bleeding edge shit at work, you just want the work code to ... work. You pick the simplest and most boring solution possible so you can clock out at 1600 and not think about services crashing because the newfangled thingamageek coded with the latest language du jour failed because of an edge case nobody has seen before.

joenot443 4y ago
That's a comforting perspective, I hope that you're right.

illiarian 4y ago

> I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. Wow. The hype around "AI"s has entered the crypto stages. Just like crypto was the new car, the new internet etc., so is AI now. Well, at least AI is useful in certain applications.

AstralStorm 4y ago
Again? Last time it ended in a long winter. And horse carriages have some serious advantages, maybe even will make a comeback. :)
joenot443 4y ago
I got into and out of Bitcoin back in 2010 when I was still in high school. Even then, I thought and still do that crypto as a whole is a complete ponzi scheme with little real world utility. I feel completely differently about LLMs; I'd say we're closer to 2007 when the first iPhone was released. I believe LLMs will become a part of our day to day lives at a level that crypto never came close to.

saurik 4y ago

But horse carriage drivers were never out of a job, because cars still needed people to drive them... (yes, people can drive their own car, but they can also drive their own carriage, so nothing is different there). In contrast, horses were out of a job; do you think we are more like horses than like the people who drive horses?