26 ms·

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladd

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete with the fewer and fewer social climbing opportunities. Also what happens to Europe? All these companies behind LLMs are from US, and Europe is nowhere to be found. This seems like it will dramatically accelerate the wealth different between the US and the EU.

tjr 4y ago
What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP? And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it would have done these things even better than humans did". But so far it seems to be amazingly good at doing things that we showed it how to do. If we stop creating actually new things, will it do that for us also? Why would it care to do so? What interest does it have in creating new things on its own?
- crop_rotation 4y ago
  The amount of people who create genuinely new things is so tiny that I am not sure it is even relevant to the discussion. And here I mean genuinely new things, not translating some C lib to java or similar stuff, or changing existing libraries to handle more stuff. If the amount of people that will have social mobility opportunities will be equivalent to the amount of people who could have invented the MPG format or something comparable, then my point is made.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    > people who create genuinely new things is so tiny This is my insurance against LLMs, only works if the market demands new things...
    - crop_rotation 4y ago
      I doubt anyone would want their livelihood to depend upon being able to create genuinely new things with extreme consistency.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > The amount of people who create genuinely new things The question isn't really about "genuinely new things". The number of permutations of existing things is such that at any given job you're likely to do old things in a new way. E.g. you'd think that all streaming services are the same. Superficially, yes. Internally, Netflix, Disney+ and Apple Tv+ are likely to be different as night and day.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  >Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Could you?
  - tjr 4y ago
    A good highlight to an ambiguous question! Which knowledge, exactly, is not being made available? But let's say that an MPG format specification is available. Even other code examples of interacting with an MPG file. But no examples, no library, no documentation on specifically how to extract a subset of one file into another file. I would think a competent programmer could figure that out. Perhaps an AI tool could also; I have not yet seen an example of it doing so, but perhaps it could. Of the handful of questions I asked, this might be the least interesting one. More generally, can AI tools advance the state of the art?
- meghan_rain 4y ago
  > What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP? Would you?
tablespoon 4y ago
> What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world[?] If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope it will, upward social mobility will be nearly eliminated... unless there's some kind of successful Luddite revolution against the technology and the people that own it. But that's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure against revolution, as well as strict gun control in most places. Anyone who tries to resist their obsolescence will soon find themselves either ridiculed and condemned or in jail. Of course, downward social mobility will accelerate, and be celebrated by idiot technologists who just want to build tech, and don't really care to think about the consequences of the technologies they build on real people.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased. This technology will allow entrepreneurs and solo content creators to accomplish a lot more, but it'll also eliminate a lot of safe career paths. As a result, if you don't want to be stuck in the underclass doing manual labor or customer service, you'll need to either be brilliant, well connected, start a business or create content of some sort that attracts an audience you can monetize. The people who do well will do very well, but a lot of people who would have done decently before are going to fail.
  - crop_rotation 4y ago
    Your points all resonate with me. But the end result is same, the opportunities available for social mobility to an average person would reduce. I am not even sure of the 2nd and 3rd order effects. How would an industry like hospitality survive if most of the knowledge work based jobs are gone.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased. Those round to the same number: 0.
  - 4y ago
CuriouslyC 4y ago
As AI progresses, job options will reduce to various flavors of people who tell AI what to do, or tell other people what to do, or do physical things that machines are bad at. Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. The entire "middle" portion of most organizations that exist to connect the people making the high level decisions wit h the boots on the ground is going to disappear.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. And at the very end, it will reduce to capital only, with no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They (you) will end up as little more as impotent ants to AI-fueled Elon Musks, neglected until the infestation needs to be cleared to make way for some project.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state. I don't think it's that unrealistic. The trick will be, not going too fast, managing a few separate transitions, and making sure capital maintains control of the institutions with the monopoly on the use of force. The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.
      - rootusrootus 4y ago
mrtksn 4y ago
The panic is needless. If one hour of design work generates $100 income, then one might assume that MidJourney/Dall-E/StableDiffusion will generate trillions of dollars, but the world doesn't work like this. What will happen is that the design jobs will transform. As you might have noticed, the AI boom will decimate the code writing jobs as well, something that the EU is behind on. Europe missed the "tech" age, but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA. Sure, some countries are poorer than others, but not everywhere in the US is Silicon Valley. Why? Because despite the EU missing out on "tech", actually the EU is very technologically advanced. Tech doesn't mean only low-touch high-scale computer-based businesses. There are chemists, biologists, anthropologists out there who don't know how to write a single line of JS and are paid like 1/5th of a junior JS developer, but the work they do is very valuable to society. Guess they don't need to learn JS anymore. Also, notice how despite the thousands of layoffs, the US job data keeps coming out very positive - there's no unemployment problem. This is because of the markets, but AI will have similar effects. The world no longer needs that many CSS experts and React gurus who pull in $200K; the world apparently needs more hard-tech engineers and retail workers. The AI thingy is devastating just for a subset of the "tech" workers and creative industries. It will enable other types of people and industries. Startups who are trying to solve food production issues, for example, might finally outshine the next grocery delivery startup.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  > but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA. EU is significantly poorer than the US. Lots of different ways to measure it, but it’s a factor of roughly 1.5-2x in purchasing power parity.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    It’s just accounting differences. The life in Europe is not any different. If the junior developers don’t make 100K and the visit to a doctor doesn’t cost 10K the overall economic activity appears to be lower but it’s not.
    - thequadehunter 4y ago
boh 4y ago
This is a question to ask when this actually becomes a reality. The AI taking jobs narrative is more of a marketing ploy to convince companies to buy AI services but the truth is, none of this stuff is anywhere near market ready. If a person is doing a job an AI bot can currently replace you've probably already replaced that person with cheap labor overseas. Regardless of whatever optimism is being channeled into the hype about AI's "potential", it hasn't convinced many businesses.
- daniel_reetz 4y ago
  Businesses take time to react and this is recent. I'm close to Hollywood and these technologies are seeing their first value-generating uses on every project I'm privy to. What you see in public is just that-public.
- random_cynic 4y ago
  > it hasn't convinced many businesses. Those businesses would not be around for very long, so who cares?
  - boh 4y ago
    Like what?
anonyfox 4y ago
Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people. Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy in the world by the way, and the US is actually falling behind into developing-country territory when you look at the population and their access to basic services. And just because right now it is convenient to rely on the US companies, and we're deep allies btw, doesn't mean europeans couldn't spin up the same tech if really needed.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  Luddites failed the first time around. What could they do this time to succeed?
  - anonyfox 4y ago
    french revolution and socialist revolutions went different. its not preventing the machines, its strictly solving the problem of who owns them - fairly easy thing. It "only" needs to build up a bit more suffering for the masses until this naturally happens again.
    - margorczynski 4y ago
      The thing is then the people in power were reliant on other people to provide force. What happens when the tech-overlords and government cliques put their hands on perfect robot AI slaves which are completely superior to humans when it comes to fighting?
      - namaria 4y ago
        Kill bot enforced gated communities and a free for all outside, naturally. Maybe in due time we have a second industrial revolution and rebuild modern society ourselves...
wefarrell 4y ago
Ironically administration overhead in many industries, particularly healthcare and education, has been growing over the past several decades despite increasing technology adoption. This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect given the increased efficiencies that come from adopting computer systems and automation. I see AI as a continuation of this trend and I don’t expect it to put people out of work, bureaucracy will always find new ways to justify itself.
- analyte123 4y ago
  I’ve heard this stated as “jobs that don’t exist for economic reasons aren’t going to get automated for economic reasons”.
  - wefarrell 4y ago
    I think we overestimate the extent to which organizations are aligned and making cohesive decisions based on economics.
- thequadehunter 4y ago
  The other thing is that we'd need insane levels of trust in the AI to have it doing all these jobs 100%. Like, I could technically have a newbie running commands on a production router for a script that I wrote out...but even if I let them do that there's no way I wouldn't at least supervise. I don't think most companies are even remotely comfortable with the idea of having an AI system running code on their systems no matter how smart it is.
green_man_lives 4y ago
The Luddites were not protesting technology because technology is inherently evil. They were against the capitalistic ownership of the means of production. So far technology has enabled use to increase economic output which means rising standards of living. Even if 99% of people subsist from selling their labor, the tools they use are a force multiplier that (in theory) drives wages up. When you can spin up a bunch of Von Neumann level intelligence LLM-powered agents and have them run your company for you, there is no more labor to sell. You can either pay the former laborers to exist, or just let them starve. So our two options are social ownership of all AI capital, or letting everyone without AI capital die, and let a handful of people live in the resulting AI-powered society.
ticviking 4y ago
I’m not terribly worried. Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering. The fact is that anyone who understands even at a basic level what the computer is actually doing and isn’t afraid to look at it at a low level can’t be replaced by an AI trained on stack overflow. It may be that I will spend more of my time on code review of LLM generated code, or make my money in the new kinds of legacy code created by copy pasting ChatGPT snippets together instead of SEO optimized stack overflow scrapes. For me the outcome is the same. The skills I need to be more effective than the machine are the exact same as they were decade, century or even millennium ago. I still don’t see these LLMs do any synthesis of knowledge, and they don’t seem to have a grasp of logic or grammar at the level I expect a bright middle school student to have.
- yoyohello13 4y ago
  > Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering. Lol, I was thinking about this the other day. Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want. A small few high clerics will bother to learn how computers actually work. The rest will simply be cargo culting to the maximum extent possible.
  - golemotron 4y ago
    > Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want. Same as it ever was.
- visarga 4y ago
  You should read the "Sparks of AGI" paper, especially the math and code sections. It's a GPT-4 evaluation conducted from outside OpenAI (authored by a MS team). It's an easy to read paper, mostly a collection of examples. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
thisoneworks 4y ago
You hit the nail on the head. GPT/copilot in some sense is democratization of specialized knowledge. Now on one end you'll have product engineers/managers prompt gpt to write boilerplate code of all kind, on the other end you'll have senior engineers reviewing, optimizing writing specialized code. Where do junior engineers fit? Can you be a full stack engineer? I believe it'll squeeze out all the could-be devs out of the field forever. Gender diversity/DEI? Forget it. Upward mobility? Will become much harder, you'll basically need to have a specialization to even be considered
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  And then your senior engineer class ages out and you are left with who? You need a ladder to create that senior class in the first place.
  - thisoneworks 4y ago
    At that point I'm pretty sure they'll already have fine tuned a "senior software engineer agent". This may sound ridiculous and yeah we probably won't get rid of the entirety of SWE ladder, but my point is we are entering the realm of science fiction now, our assumptions about labor are about to fall off a cliff. Productivity will increase through the roof, corps will make more cash, workers will suffer
machiaweliczny 4y ago
Lol I am from Europe and I know how to repro this in a week so not a big deal.
nextlevelwizard 4y ago
Hot take: we will get better software. People who are in tech just to "climb social ladder" i.e. only for the pay check are going to be pushed out by LLMs and people who are actually passionate about tech will remain. This will cause less and less shitty code to be written (of course for next few years even more bloated shit code will be written with ChatGPT and Copilot by noobs who have no idea what they are doing)
th14row 4y ago
Nobody in their right mind would start a business like this in Europe, with the shadow of the EU threatening with regulating everything and pushing taxes/fines for everything. Just move to a tech hotspot in the US.
race2tb 4y ago
I mean when enough people are unemployed they will just vote to socialize the society. Also, massive deflation will reset the global economy. The social ladder as you call it will flatten pretty hard. At that point we nationalize and ubi with work being some kind of minimum amount a year to qualify for ubi. Work hours per year will drop alot. I think society will transform for the better where we start developing towards a post scarcity deflationary future rather than the inflationary rat race we have now.
root_axis 4y ago
Social mobility is already a joke. Knowledge workers have enjoyed prosperity for decades, software folks in particular, all AI does is even the playing field a bit more.
kulikalov 4y ago
What you're describing requires AI to make conjectures, hypothesize, design experiments, run them, and assess their results.

tjr 4y ago

What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP? And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it would have done these things even better than humans did". But so far it seems to be amazingly good at doing things that we showed it how to do. If we stop creating actually new things, will it do that for us also? Why would it care to do so? What interest does it have in creating new things on its own?

crop_rotation 4y ago
The amount of people who create genuinely new things is so tiny that I am not sure it is even relevant to the discussion. And here I mean genuinely new things, not translating some C lib to java or similar stuff, or changing existing libraries to handle more stuff. If the amount of people that will have social mobility opportunities will be equivalent to the amount of people who could have invented the MPG format or something comparable, then my point is made.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  > people who create genuinely new things is so tiny This is my insurance against LLMs, only works if the market demands new things...
  - crop_rotation 4y ago
    I doubt anyone would want their livelihood to depend upon being able to create genuinely new things with extreme consistency.
- illiarian 4y ago
  > The amount of people who create genuinely new things The question isn't really about "genuinely new things". The number of permutations of existing things is such that at any given job you're likely to do old things in a new way. E.g. you'd think that all streaming services are the same. Superficially, yes. Internally, Netflix, Disney+ and Apple Tv+ are likely to be different as night and day.
antibasilisk 4y ago
>Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Could you?
- tjr 4y ago
  A good highlight to an ambiguous question! Which knowledge, exactly, is not being made available? But let's say that an MPG format specification is available. Even other code examples of interacting with an MPG file. But no examples, no library, no documentation on specifically how to extract a subset of one file into another file. I would think a competent programmer could figure that out. Perhaps an AI tool could also; I have not yet seen an example of it doing so, but perhaps it could. Of the handful of questions I asked, this might be the least interesting one. More generally, can AI tools advance the state of the art?
meghan_rain 4y ago
> What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP? Would you?

tablespoon 4y ago

> What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world[?] If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope it will, upward social mobility will be nearly eliminated... unless there's some kind of successful Luddite revolution against the technology and the people that own it. But that's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure against revolution, as well as strict gun control in most places. Anyone who tries to resist their obsolescence will soon find themselves either ridiculed and condemned or in jail. Of course, downward social mobility will accelerate, and be celebrated by idiot technologists who just want to build tech, and don't really care to think about the consequences of the technologies they build on real people.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased. This technology will allow entrepreneurs and solo content creators to accomplish a lot more, but it'll also eliminate a lot of safe career paths. As a result, if you don't want to be stuck in the underclass doing manual labor or customer service, you'll need to either be brilliant, well connected, start a business or create content of some sort that attracts an audience you can monetize. The people who do well will do very well, but a lot of people who would have done decently before are going to fail.
- crop_rotation 4y ago
  Your points all resonate with me. But the end result is same, the opportunities available for social mobility to an average person would reduce. I am not even sure of the 2nd and 3rd order effects. How would an industry like hospitality survive if most of the knowledge work based jobs are gone.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased. Those round to the same number: 0.
- 4y ago

CuriouslyC 4y ago

As AI progresses, job options will reduce to various flavors of people who tell AI what to do, or tell other people what to do, or do physical things that machines are bad at. Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. The entire "middle" portion of most organizations that exist to connect the people making the high level decisions wit h the boots on the ground is going to disappear.

tablespoon 4y ago
> Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. And at the very end, it will reduce to capital only, with no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They (you) will end up as little more as impotent ants to AI-fueled Elon Musks, neglected until the infestation needs to be cleared to make way for some project.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state. I don't think it's that unrealistic. The trick will be, not going too fast, managing a few separate transitions, and making sure capital maintains control of the institutions with the monopoly on the use of force. The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago

mrtksn 4y ago

The panic is needless. If one hour of design work generates $100 income, then one might assume that MidJourney/Dall-E/StableDiffusion will generate trillions of dollars, but the world doesn't work like this. What will happen is that the design jobs will transform. As you might have noticed, the AI boom will decimate the code writing jobs as well, something that the EU is behind on. Europe missed the "tech" age, but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA. Sure, some countries are poorer than others, but not everywhere in the US is Silicon Valley. Why? Because despite the EU missing out on "tech", actually the EU is very technologically advanced. Tech doesn't mean only low-touch high-scale computer-based businesses. There are chemists, biologists, anthropologists out there who don't know how to write a single line of JS and are paid like 1/5th of a junior JS developer, but the work they do is very valuable to society. Guess they don't need to learn JS anymore. Also, notice how despite the thousands of layoffs, the US job data keeps coming out very positive - there's no unemployment problem. This is because of the markets, but AI will have similar effects. The world no longer needs that many CSS experts and React gurus who pull in $200K; the world apparently needs more hard-tech engineers and retail workers. The AI thingy is devastating just for a subset of the "tech" workers and creative industries. It will enable other types of people and industries. Startups who are trying to solve food production issues, for example, might finally outshine the next grocery delivery startup.

travisjungroth 4y ago
> but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA. EU is significantly poorer than the US. Lots of different ways to measure it, but it’s a factor of roughly 1.5-2x in purchasing power parity.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  It’s just accounting differences. The life in Europe is not any different. If the junior developers don’t make 100K and the visit to a doctor doesn’t cost 10K the overall economic activity appears to be lower but it’s not.
  - thequadehunter 4y ago

boh 4y ago

This is a question to ask when this actually becomes a reality. The AI taking jobs narrative is more of a marketing ploy to convince companies to buy AI services but the truth is, none of this stuff is anywhere near market ready. If a person is doing a job an AI bot can currently replace you've probably already replaced that person with cheap labor overseas. Regardless of whatever optimism is being channeled into the hype about AI's "potential", it hasn't convinced many businesses.

daniel_reetz 4y ago
Businesses take time to react and this is recent. I'm close to Hollywood and these technologies are seeing their first value-generating uses on every project I'm privy to. What you see in public is just that-public.
random_cynic 4y ago
> it hasn't convinced many businesses. Those businesses would not be around for very long, so who cares?
- boh 4y ago
  Like what?

anonyfox 4y ago

Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people. Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy in the world by the way, and the US is actually falling behind into developing-country territory when you look at the population and their access to basic services. And just because right now it is convenient to rely on the US companies, and we're deep allies btw, doesn't mean europeans couldn't spin up the same tech if really needed.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
Luddites failed the first time around. What could they do this time to succeed?
- anonyfox 4y ago
  french revolution and socialist revolutions went different. its not preventing the machines, its strictly solving the problem of who owns them - fairly easy thing. It "only" needs to build up a bit more suffering for the masses until this naturally happens again.
  - margorczynski 4y ago
    The thing is then the people in power were reliant on other people to provide force. What happens when the tech-overlords and government cliques put their hands on perfect robot AI slaves which are completely superior to humans when it comes to fighting?
    - namaria 4y ago
      Kill bot enforced gated communities and a free for all outside, naturally. Maybe in due time we have a second industrial revolution and rebuild modern society ourselves...

wefarrell 4y ago

Ironically administration overhead in many industries, particularly healthcare and education, has been growing over the past several decades despite increasing technology adoption. This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect given the increased efficiencies that come from adopting computer systems and automation. I see AI as a continuation of this trend and I don’t expect it to put people out of work, bureaucracy will always find new ways to justify itself.

analyte123 4y ago
I’ve heard this stated as “jobs that don’t exist for economic reasons aren’t going to get automated for economic reasons”.
- wefarrell 4y ago
  I think we overestimate the extent to which organizations are aligned and making cohesive decisions based on economics.
thequadehunter 4y ago
The other thing is that we'd need insane levels of trust in the AI to have it doing all these jobs 100%. Like, I could technically have a newbie running commands on a production router for a script that I wrote out...but even if I let them do that there's no way I wouldn't at least supervise. I don't think most companies are even remotely comfortable with the idea of having an AI system running code on their systems no matter how smart it is.

green_man_lives 4y ago

The Luddites were not protesting technology because technology is inherently evil. They were against the capitalistic ownership of the means of production. So far technology has enabled use to increase economic output which means rising standards of living. Even if 99% of people subsist from selling their labor, the tools they use are a force multiplier that (in theory) drives wages up. When you can spin up a bunch of Von Neumann level intelligence LLM-powered agents and have them run your company for you, there is no more labor to sell. You can either pay the former laborers to exist, or just let them starve. So our two options are social ownership of all AI capital, or letting everyone without AI capital die, and let a handful of people live in the resulting AI-powered society.

ticviking 4y ago

I’m not terribly worried. Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering. The fact is that anyone who understands even at a basic level what the computer is actually doing and isn’t afraid to look at it at a low level can’t be replaced by an AI trained on stack overflow. It may be that I will spend more of my time on code review of LLM generated code, or make my money in the new kinds of legacy code created by copy pasting ChatGPT snippets together instead of SEO optimized stack overflow scrapes. For me the outcome is the same. The skills I need to be more effective than the machine are the exact same as they were decade, century or even millennium ago. I still don’t see these LLMs do any synthesis of knowledge, and they don’t seem to have a grasp of logic or grammar at the level I expect a bright middle school student to have.

yoyohello13 4y ago
> Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering. Lol, I was thinking about this the other day. Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want. A small few high clerics will bother to learn how computers actually work. The rest will simply be cargo culting to the maximum extent possible.
- golemotron 4y ago
  > Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want. Same as it ever was.
visarga 4y ago
You should read the "Sparks of AGI" paper, especially the math and code sections. It's a GPT-4 evaluation conducted from outside OpenAI (authored by a MS team). It's an easy to read paper, mostly a collection of examples. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

thisoneworks 4y ago

You hit the nail on the head. GPT/copilot in some sense is democratization of specialized knowledge. Now on one end you'll have product engineers/managers prompt gpt to write boilerplate code of all kind, on the other end you'll have senior engineers reviewing, optimizing writing specialized code. Where do junior engineers fit? Can you be a full stack engineer? I believe it'll squeeze out all the could-be devs out of the field forever. Gender diversity/DEI? Forget it. Upward mobility? Will become much harder, you'll basically need to have a specialization to even be considered

ROTMetro 4y ago
And then your senior engineer class ages out and you are left with who? You need a ladder to create that senior class in the first place.
- thisoneworks 4y ago
  At that point I'm pretty sure they'll already have fine tuned a "senior software engineer agent". This may sound ridiculous and yeah we probably won't get rid of the entirety of SWE ladder, but my point is we are entering the realm of science fiction now, our assumptions about labor are about to fall off a cliff. Productivity will increase through the roof, corps will make more cash, workers will suffer

machiaweliczny 4y ago

Lol I am from Europe and I know how to repro this in a week so not a big deal.

nextlevelwizard 4y ago

Hot take: we will get better software. People who are in tech just to "climb social ladder" i.e. only for the pay check are going to be pushed out by LLMs and people who are actually passionate about tech will remain. This will cause less and less shitty code to be written (of course for next few years even more bloated shit code will be written with ChatGPT and Copilot by noobs who have no idea what they are doing)

th14row 4y ago

Nobody in their right mind would start a business like this in Europe, with the shadow of the EU threatening with regulating everything and pushing taxes/fines for everything. Just move to a tech hotspot in the US.

race2tb 4y ago

I mean when enough people are unemployed they will just vote to socialize the society. Also, massive deflation will reset the global economy. The social ladder as you call it will flatten pretty hard. At that point we nationalize and ubi with work being some kind of minimum amount a year to qualify for ubi. Work hours per year will drop alot. I think society will transform for the better where we start developing towards a post scarcity deflationary future rather than the inflationary rat race we have now.

root_axis 4y ago

Social mobility is already a joke. Knowledge workers have enjoyed prosperity for decades, software folks in particular, all AI does is even the playing field a bit more.

kulikalov 4y ago

What you're describing requires AI to make conjectures, hypothesize, design experiments, run them, and assess their results.