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It’s also not hard to find people (see: me) in industries where AI has been prophesied to be exceptionally disruptive, saying that actually, meh, it’s not going

It’s also not hard to find people (see: me) in industries where AI has been prophesied to be exceptionally disruptive, saying that actually, meh, it’s not going to mean much ultimately. I’m a programmer, and sure, I’ve asked ChatGPT to write some unit tests, and I’ve encouraged CodePilot to suggest some function signatures, but - it’s still ‘just’ a novelty, and it is wildly out of reach of ‘disruptive.’ It’s not doing anything I couldn’t do, and it’s not doing anyone not at my level would know what to do with. You’ve still got to be a programmer to see whether the code it generates is good. People kind of forget that about art - everyone has an opinion about how art looks. But there’s really one main way everyone knows to test code: does it work? And if you don’t know how to stitch it together so it works, it doesn’t look like anything to the initiated. You can write 10000 thousand lines of code, and even if it’s brilliant technically, unless you can demonstrate it to the client, it’s practically worthless. You still need a programmer to figure out what to do with chatGPT’s output, clients don’t know what to do with it. Everyone has an opinion on almost-perfect AI art - almost-perfect code doesn’t compile.

fortysixdegrees 3y ago
...yet
pydry 3y ago
>It’s also not hard to find people (see: me) in industries where AI has been prophesied to be exceptionally disruptive, saying that actually, meh, it’s not going to mean much ultimately. Indeed that's quite a bit easier than finding people who are 5x more efficient thanks to AI. Never mind, I'm sure that we will see the results soon in the form of lower inflation and a lowered retirement age though /s After all, we're so much more efficient now. It's not just a smokescreen for the disemployment effects of industrially hollowing out the country for profit? Is it?
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
That's not how it works. With autogen code a small office of devs can build a test rig and run autogen code through it until it passes. That's no different to what happens - or should happen - now. But with a much, much faster iteration cycle and higher throughput. At this point GPT doesn't really understand semantics. But it does a fair imitation, and that imitation will improve over time. There will certainly be a point where it will be writing code that has fewer bugs than human code. There will be a point after that where it will build the test rig internally. But I suspect we'll be in a very different place by then, and most of what we consider dev work today will be redundant for structural reasons rather than technical ones. Generally I think the AI not-so-bad comments are coming from people who haven't really understood what's coming at everyone. AI won't automate coding, it will automate culture - artistic culture, media culture, business culture, political culture, perhaps also many kinds of personal interactions. It'll be like the web, which automated paperwork, dats gathering, and certain kinds of social interaction, but many orders of magnitude broader and more disruptive.
moneywoes 3y ago
Have you tried gpt4? IBM already cutting staffing
JohnFen 3y ago
Even if what you say is true (and I am very doubtful), that only covers rather specific sorts of jobs. It says nothing about the wider impact across all industries. Even if dev's jobs are "safe", if even 20% of everyone else can't earn a living, devs will suffer the consequences just the same as the rest of the world.

fortysixdegrees 3y ago

...yet

pydry 3y ago

>It’s also not hard to find people (see: me) in industries where AI has been prophesied to be exceptionally disruptive, saying that actually, meh, it’s not going to mean much ultimately. Indeed that's quite a bit easier than finding people who are 5x more efficient thanks to AI. Never mind, I'm sure that we will see the results soon in the form of lower inflation and a lowered retirement age though /s After all, we're so much more efficient now. It's not just a smokescreen for the disemployment effects of industrially hollowing out the country for profit? Is it?

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

That's not how it works. With autogen code a small office of devs can build a test rig and run autogen code through it until it passes. That's no different to what happens - or should happen - now. But with a much, much faster iteration cycle and higher throughput. At this point GPT doesn't really understand semantics. But it does a fair imitation, and that imitation will improve over time. There will certainly be a point where it will be writing code that has fewer bugs than human code. There will be a point after that where it will build the test rig internally. But I suspect we'll be in a very different place by then, and most of what we consider dev work today will be redundant for structural reasons rather than technical ones. Generally I think the AI not-so-bad comments are coming from people who haven't really understood what's coming at everyone. AI won't automate coding, it will automate culture - artistic culture, media culture, business culture, political culture, perhaps also many kinds of personal interactions. It'll be like the web, which automated paperwork, dats gathering, and certain kinds of social interaction, but many orders of magnitude broader and more disruptive.

moneywoes 3y ago

Have you tried gpt4? IBM already cutting staffing

JohnFen 3y ago

Even if what you say is true (and I am very doubtful), that only covers rather specific sorts of jobs. It says nothing about the wider impact across all industries. Even if dev's jobs are "safe", if even 20% of everyone else can't earn a living, devs will suffer the consequences just the same as the rest of the world.