4 ms·
He’s laid out five stages where he says specific changes will occur. He’s extrapolating this all based on evidence from just the past few months. This is nonsen
by dimal 4y ago
He’s laid out five stages where he says specific changes will occur. He’s extrapolating this all based on evidence from just the past few months. This is nonsense. I’m not saying I know we’re not going to be replaced, but neither does he.
For example, he links to an article that he says shows “OpenAI has openly stated its intent to replace developers”, but when you read that article, it’s actually about a report by another company (not OpenAI itself) saying that “OpenAI is pursuing an avenue to make basic coding practices essentially obsolete”. That’s _very_ different than making _programmers_ obsolete.
Listen, if all you do is plug shit together and don’t contribute at a higher level than that, yeah your job might be at risk. But if you use this as a tool to release you from the drudgery of “basic coding”, this could be an incredible tool to make you far more effective.
Almost every time there’s a new tool that gives us new capabilities, instead of firing programmers (except for this one period of COVID hangover layoffs), companies make the choice to do _more_ with the same number of people. (If we don’t, the the competition will!) And so the level of complexity ratchets up higher. And who are the people that can manage that complexity? The CEO? The product managers? No. Software engineers.
Unless they actually create AGI. It which case, everyone is fucked, regardless of the industry. At that point, we all have to become massage therapists or waiters.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoAGI is a zero-dimensional mythology like flying cars, more HAL 9000 or The Jetson's science fiction. Some forms of it will continue to arrive in stages, but it will be difficult to point to when exactly and what will be called "AGI". PS: Waiter robots that are self-propelled drink carts have been done before. It's busboys, maids, and physical lift assistance that will be especially difficult to automate. By that time, we better have such amazing BCI that we've shuffled off the mortal coil and melded with tech. The days of carbon-based life are numbered not just by existential threats like climate change, but because it will likely be inferior to computational life. I'm curious how inorganic life will own physical property including itself, expand, reproduce, etc. Will it jump on the zetacoin mining rage to make money or refactor code made by other programs? Will inorganic life need entertainment?
- ValentaTomas 4y agoCan you please elaborate on what you mean by the term zero-dimensional mythology?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Unitron 4y ago> Unless they actually create AGI. It which case, everyone is fucked, regardless of the industry. At that point, we all have to become massage therapists or waiters. GPT-4 has already shown sparks of AGI. It can solve complex problems with high accuracy. AGI is inevitable and will arrive soon, most likely within the next 3 years. And those jobs you've listed can be replaced by AI, the only limiting factor at this point is the lack of a physical body. Though, massages will still be performed by humans as some people would prefer that, but others don't care and would likely prefer AI over a human. So AI will still be deployed to act as a massage therapist.
- dimal 4y agoWe don’t know what’s inevitable in foresight, only in hindsight. Sparks of AGI are sparks, and do not imply an inevitable progression to a particular end state. I don’t see GPT-* replacing us unless they endow it volition. If it requires prompts to get things done, some human has to understand the system enough in order to provide the correct prompt. Writing code is only a small part of the job. Knowing what code to write, what code to refactor, what abstraction to use that fits with your other abstractions — these things are the real job. Giving GPT volition would make it “self-prompting” and maybe allow it to make these leaps. But volition seems qualitatively different to me than what it’s doing now, and that just improving its current capabilities won’t necessarily lead to volition.
- Unitron 4y ago> Knowing what code to write, what code to refactor, what abstraction to use that fits with your other abstractions — these things are the real job. I don't see why you can't train AI to do these tasks. If you can train a human to do something you can train an AI to do it as well. Volition is not necessarily required and pseudo-volition can be trained.