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It's really sad how everyone here is fawning over tech that will destroy you own livelihoods. "AI won't take your job, those who use AI will" is purely short te

It's really sad how everyone here is fawning over tech that will destroy you own livelihoods. "AI won't take your job, those who use AI will" is purely short term, myopic thinking. These tools are not aimed to help workers, the end goal is to make it so you don't need to be an engineer to build software, just let the project manager or director describe the system they want and boom there it is. You can scream that this is progress all you want, and I'll grant you that these tools will greatly speed up the generation of code. But more code won't make any of these businesses provide better services to people, lower their prices, or pay workers more. They are just a means to keep money from flowing out of the hands of the C-Suite and investor classes. If software engineering becomes a solved problem then fine, we probably shouldn't continue to get paid huge salaries to write it anymore, but please stop acting like this is a better future for any of us normal folks.

tomr75 3y ago
Improve productivity, cheapen goods and services. Nature of technological advancement
bbor 3y ago
We have three options, IMO: 1. As a species decide to never build another LLM, ever. 2. Change the path of society from the unequal, capitalist one it’s taken the last 2-300 years. 3. Give up I know which I believe in :). Do you disagree?
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  The problem with 2 is that the people in power, and with immense wealth, remain there because of capitalism. They have the political power, and the resources, to enact the change ... but they also lose the most (unless you count altruism as gain, which of it were true the World would be so different). We could structure things so that LLM, and the generalised AIs to come, benefit the whole of society ... but we know that those with the power to make that happen want only to widen the poverty gap.
  - bbor 3y ago
    Yes but the common man has won before! There has never been a perfect revolution/paradigm shift (personally anti utopia-through-intense-bloodshed, so hesitant to use the former term alone), but there have been many, all of which were against the wishes of those in power. Plus, if these AIs are enough to change everything, that kinda implies that we've developed flexible, reliable AGI systems. In such a world, everything changes - maybe the calculus of The Powerful Few vs. The Oppressed Masses changes in too! It might even change in our favor, if we're terribly lucky...
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      I like your optimism, but AGI owned by the elite to my mind will just be another opportunity to collect rent from the masses, and reduce wages.
- sp332 3y ago
  Finish #2 first, or else people with access to more money and infrastructure will use LLMs to increase inequality even further.
Draiken 3y ago
I agree. This will ultimately become another way to extract more value straight into the pockets of the owners. Unfortunately, I don't believe there's a way to stop (or even slow down) this train. We can't defeat it, so the only logical answer is to join it. It's the classical issue with progress removing jobs. In today's world, since mostly everyone (aside from the capitalists themselves) relies on jobs to survive, barring a complete switch from capitalism (which will not happen in our lifetimes), we're fucked. Next best thing we can do is to try and democratize it enough so that not only the rich have access to it.
criley2 3y ago
You can say this about every major invention. The loom destroyed jobs! The engine destroyed jobs! So on and so forth. This view is critically flawed in two major ways: 1) AI is not anywhere near being able to replace the majority of what developers do on a product team. We are decades away from a PM at Facebook being able to type "make a twitter clone that uses instagram login and can scale to 1 billion" and have an AI just do it. 2) Programming and product work is not zero sum. The more we can do means the more product we can make. It means more products can be made overall. After the loom came out, we simply made more clothes than ever before and in the process created a ton of jobs. We are not at some peak software point where we've completely saturated all humanity's need for software or profitable software and thus tools that increase efficiency don't put us out of work. And frankly, if we develop the kind of general AI that accept a query like "make a facebook competitor capable of scaling to 10 billion" and simply do it, inventing whatever languages, frameworks, hardware, processors, patterns, methodologies, global datacenters handling global politics and law, etc, etc necessary to accomplish such a task, then so be it. I welcome the overlords!
manicennui 3y ago
I'm not worried because it solves a problem for the semi-competent.
lsmeducation 3y ago
It’s less of a concern if you are in mid career. But someone should warn all these college kids that are going into comp sci. I don’t think this will be the kind of lucrative field they think it’s going to be over the course of a 40 year career. The days of getting paid well for making crud are numbered (which most of us do, even in the most interesting problem spaces). # need a front end boilerplate that hits a backend with the following end points. REST api for movies catalogue, and a corresponding ui. Oh, unit tests please. Go with a responsive design and also make a React Native version (matter of fact provision it to my iPhone). Decide between Heroku or AWS, set up deploy with git hooks. # scrape IMDb for initial population of the db # I think a Reddit like comment system would be good to add, so add it. No upvote/downvote though # handle user login with google/fb/email # also make an admin page to manage all this I guess the technical product designer will be the new unicorn.
lamp987 3y ago
"If software engineering becomes a solved problem" It will simply move to a higher level of abstraction. Remind me, how many programmers today are writing in assembly?
- blibble 3y ago
  due to the way LLMs work: it will be able to handle that level of abstraction in exactly the same way
  - lamp987 3y ago
    LLM is not strong AI. It's not even AI. So no. You will always need that strong "I" at the top somewhere.
    - blibble 3y ago
      I think you're in for a nasty surprise
      - lamp987 3y ago
        Two more weeks!
int_19h 3y ago
Any improvement in tooling benefits capital owners the most, since the productivity gains mostly end up in their pockets. But the answer to that is to deal with concentration of capital, not to eschew better tools.

tomr75 3y ago

Improve productivity, cheapen goods and services. Nature of technological advancement

bbor 3y ago

We have three options, IMO: 1. As a species decide to never build another LLM, ever. 2. Change the path of society from the unequal, capitalist one it’s taken the last 2-300 years. 3. Give up I know which I believe in :). Do you disagree?

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
The problem with 2 is that the people in power, and with immense wealth, remain there because of capitalism. They have the political power, and the resources, to enact the change ... but they also lose the most (unless you count altruism as gain, which of it were true the World would be so different). We could structure things so that LLM, and the generalised AIs to come, benefit the whole of society ... but we know that those with the power to make that happen want only to widen the poverty gap.
- bbor 3y ago
  Yes but the common man has won before! There has never been a perfect revolution/paradigm shift (personally anti utopia-through-intense-bloodshed, so hesitant to use the former term alone), but there have been many, all of which were against the wishes of those in power. Plus, if these AIs are enough to change everything, that kinda implies that we've developed flexible, reliable AGI systems. In such a world, everything changes - maybe the calculus of The Powerful Few vs. The Oppressed Masses changes in too! It might even change in our favor, if we're terribly lucky...
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    I like your optimism, but AGI owned by the elite to my mind will just be another opportunity to collect rent from the masses, and reduce wages.
sp332 3y ago
Finish #2 first, or else people with access to more money and infrastructure will use LLMs to increase inequality even further.

Draiken 3y ago

I agree. This will ultimately become another way to extract more value straight into the pockets of the owners. Unfortunately, I don't believe there's a way to stop (or even slow down) this train. We can't defeat it, so the only logical answer is to join it. It's the classical issue with progress removing jobs. In today's world, since mostly everyone (aside from the capitalists themselves) relies on jobs to survive, barring a complete switch from capitalism (which will not happen in our lifetimes), we're fucked. Next best thing we can do is to try and democratize it enough so that not only the rich have access to it.

criley2 3y ago

You can say this about every major invention. The loom destroyed jobs! The engine destroyed jobs! So on and so forth. This view is critically flawed in two major ways: 1) AI is not anywhere near being able to replace the majority of what developers do on a product team. We are decades away from a PM at Facebook being able to type "make a twitter clone that uses instagram login and can scale to 1 billion" and have an AI just do it. 2) Programming and product work is not zero sum. The more we can do means the more product we can make. It means more products can be made overall. After the loom came out, we simply made more clothes than ever before and in the process created a ton of jobs. We are not at some peak software point where we've completely saturated all humanity's need for software or profitable software and thus tools that increase efficiency don't put us out of work. And frankly, if we develop the kind of general AI that accept a query like "make a facebook competitor capable of scaling to 10 billion" and simply do it, inventing whatever languages, frameworks, hardware, processors, patterns, methodologies, global datacenters handling global politics and law, etc, etc necessary to accomplish such a task, then so be it. I welcome the overlords!

manicennui 3y ago

I'm not worried because it solves a problem for the semi-competent.

lsmeducation 3y ago

It’s less of a concern if you are in mid career. But someone should warn all these college kids that are going into comp sci. I don’t think this will be the kind of lucrative field they think it’s going to be over the course of a 40 year career. The days of getting paid well for making crud are numbered (which most of us do, even in the most interesting problem spaces). # need a front end boilerplate that hits a backend with the following end points. REST api for movies catalogue, and a corresponding ui. Oh, unit tests please. Go with a responsive design and also make a React Native version (matter of fact provision it to my iPhone). Decide between Heroku or AWS, set up deploy with git hooks. # scrape IMDb for initial population of the db # I think a Reddit like comment system would be good to add, so add it. No upvote/downvote though # handle user login with google/fb/email # also make an admin page to manage all this I guess the technical product designer will be the new unicorn.

lamp987 3y ago

"If software engineering becomes a solved problem" It will simply move to a higher level of abstraction. Remind me, how many programmers today are writing in assembly?

blibble 3y ago
due to the way LLMs work: it will be able to handle that level of abstraction in exactly the same way
- lamp987 3y ago
  LLM is not strong AI. It's not even AI. So no. You will always need that strong "I" at the top somewhere.
  - blibble 3y ago
    I think you're in for a nasty surprise
    - lamp987 3y ago
      Two more weeks!

int_19h 3y ago

Any improvement in tooling benefits capital owners the most, since the productivity gains mostly end up in their pockets. But the answer to that is to deal with concentration of capital, not to eschew better tools.