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I went from being worried to thinking it won't replace me anytime soon after using GPT4 for a while and now I'm back to being worried. Because the pace of deve

• tetris11 3y ago
  You summed up my financial and career worries very nicely
• lcfcjs 3y ago
  [dead]
• WendyTheWillow 3y ago
  I don’t think any of this materially changes job outlook for software development over the next decade. I use ChatGPT daily for school, and used Copilot daily for software development; it gets a lot wrong a lot of the time, and can’t retain necessary context that is critical for being useful long term. I can’t even get it to consume an entire chapter at once to generate notes or flashcards yet. It may slightly change some aspects of a software job, but nobody’s at risk.
  • callwhendone 3y ago
    > I can't copy paste an entire book chapter and have flashcards in 30 seconds. If that's your bar for whether or not it changes the job outlook for software development over the next DECADE, I think you need to recalibrate.
    • smk_ 3y ago
      If I took 2 weeks off from work I could build this prototype quite easily. We're in an interesting period where the space of possibilities is so large it just takes a while for the "market" to exhaust it.
      • callwhendone 3y ago
        Quizlet has a feature to build flashcards using AI. I'm sure they could write a backend service that just chunked the entire chapter.
        • WendyTheWillow 3y ago
          It doesn't work well enough yet. The flashcards it generates don't actually fit well into its own ecosystem. When you try to build the "quizzes", the wrong answers are trivially spottable. Further, even the generated questions are stilted don't hit parity with manually generated flashcards. My use of ChatGPT for this purpose is so far mostly limited to a sanity check, e.g. "Do these notes cover the major points of this topic?" Usually it'll spit back out "Yep looks good" or some major missed point, like The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 for a topic on the Civil War's economic complexity. I'll also use it to reformat content, "Convert these questions and answers into Anki format."
    • WendyTheWillow 3y ago
      Er, why did you rewrite what I wrote but then pretend like it was a quote? That's a really weird way to reply! But to address your point, my "bar" is that OpenAI's ChatGPT fails to solve problems for me on a many-times-a-day basis. It's an immensely helpful tool, but I still need to drive it, so it's not replacing me, it's augmenting me.
  • jader201 3y ago
    This feels fairly naive, ignoring how much progress has happened over the (short) span of one year. This doesn't sound like that tough of a gap to close in another year (again, projecting based off recent progress).
    • lukev 3y ago
      The bitter truth though is that the last 20% always takes 99% of the time and effort. LLMs are a huge breakthrough and we are absolutely speedrunning the 80%, but I see no reason to believe the usual pattern won’t hold when the easy wins are exploited.
      • realce 3y ago
        Some insurance against this dam breaking wouldn't be so bad however
    • TheRoque 3y ago
      The opposite is fairly naive. Software development is not only dumping tokens into a text file. To have a significant impact on the market, it should do much, much, much more: compile and test code, automatically assess the quality of what its done, be aware of the current design trends (if in UI/UX), ideally innovate, it should also be able to run a debugger, inspect all the variables, and deduce from there how it got something wrong, sometimes with tiny clues that I don't even know how it would get its information (e.g. in graphics programming where you have to actually see at a high frame rate). Oh snap a library is broken ? The AI needs to search online why it's broken, then find a fix (log onto a website to communicate with support, install a missing dep...). It can't be fixed ? Then the AI needs to explain this to the manager, good luck for that. It would need to think and feel like a human, otherwise producing uncanny content that will be either boring, either creepy. You can think about your daily job and break down all the tasks, and you'll quickly realize that replacing all this is just a monstrous task.
      • jader201 3y ago
        Yeah, I definitely am not on team “We’re Doomed”, but I also can’t say definitively that I’m on team “We’re Fine” either. I think there are merits to both arguments, and I think it’s possible that we’ll see things move towards either direction in the next 1/5/10 years. My point is, I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of some jobs being at risk within the next 1/5/10 years.
  • fzzzy 3y ago
    You could easily write a 20 line script to generate notes and flashcards. I know because I have.
    • misiti3780 3y ago
      you mean like anki flash cards?
    • WendyTheWillow 3y ago
      Yep, and I could have done that 5 years ago. My point is that I run into problems on a daily basis that the current ChatGPT is not capable of handling on its own, without meaningful interaction with me, a software engineer.
  • pmarreck 3y ago
    > I can’t even get it to consume an entire chapter at once to generate notes or flashcards yet. Anthropic’s Claude 100k is your jam, then. And Amazon just invested $1 billion in them.
• make3 3y ago
  The real problem is distribution of the output of production. We will need something like UBI eventually.
  • LambdaComplex 3y ago
    UBI is a bandaid on top of capitalism. It is saying "we have a system where people die if they don't have money, so we'll give people money." It's not a real fix. A real fix would be replacing the system with one where people don't need money in order to not die. We're going to keep automating more and more things. I think that much is inevitable. Eventually, we may get to a point where very few jobs are necessary for society to function. This should be a good thing, because it would mean fewer people would have to work and could therefore pursue things that actually interest them, but it would be a catastrophe under the current system.
    • mhss 3y ago
      You make it sound simple. What's the replacement? UBI is at least somewhat within grasp. Completely replacing capitalism is going to take a long time and it's more likely to happen as incremental improvements.
    • pmarreck 3y ago
      That’s not going to come to fruition, and no amount of dreamy socialist fanfiction’ing is going to make it so. People pay for value. Produce value for others, get paid. LLM’s are tools to make humans able to produce more value, and will not replace humans, although the job market will change, and hopefully utilize humans better. People, NOT machines, are the ultimate judgers of what is valuable and the ultimate producers of value. “no one should have to work to eat” is the most ridiculous gen Z meme going around lately. Like, technically yes, not eating would make you unhealthy and thus unable to contribute yourself, but we also don’t want the opposite of people just sitting home all depressed about being oppressed and not utilizing their gifts while living off mysteriously-produced (paid for or labored over by whom?) gourmet sushi. How about another common meme in response? “We live in a society.”
• callwhendone 3y ago
  I'm very worried constantly. This is the story of the bear, where you just have to be faster than the other guy. For now. The bear is getting faster and faster and it won't be long before it eats all of us. It feels like we're at the end of history. I don't know where we go from here but what are we useful for once this thing is stuck inside a robot like what Tesla is building? What is the point of humanity? Even taking a step back, I don't know how I'm going to feed my family in ten years, because my skillset is being rapidly replaced. And to anyone mentioning UBI, I'm pretty sure they'll just let us starve first.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    >where you just have to be faster than the other guy. For now. The bear is getting faster and faster and it won't be long before it eats all of us. Here's the thing about that. At first it's about you running faster and the bear getting the slow ones, but this is actually a very short term situation. When things start getting bad, it's not the bear you need to worry about, it's your neighbor stabbing you in the leg so you're the slow one.
  • mhss 3y ago
    re: UBI. I don't think they'll let us starve, but that's a very low bar. If we all become fungible and invaluable they can just feed us Soylent green.
    • whimsicalism 3y ago
      Who is they?
      • mhss 3y ago
        People that has enough money & wealth to employ others, control corporations who employ thousands and influence the government meaningfully (lobbying). Today, they basically control who is employed and who isn't by deciding how much to invest and in what. No, you cannot just choose to employ yourself in all circumstances. I'm all for being self-sufficient but not everyone can start a company (time and capital intensive, and very risky without a safety net).
• tombert 3y ago
  I'm not convinced that this pace will continue. We're seeing a lot of really cool, rapid evolution of this tech in a short amount of time, but I do think we'll hit a soft ceiling in the not too distant future as well. If you look at something like smartphones, for example. Smartphones, from my perspective, got drastically better and better from about ~2006-2015 or so. They were rapidly improving cameras and battery life and it felt like a new super cool app that would change our lives was being released every day, but it feels like by ~2016 or so, phones more or less hit a ceiling on how cool they were going to get. Obviously things still improve, but I feel like the pace slowed down eventually. I think AI is going to have the same path. GANNs and transformers and LLMs and the like have opened the floodgates and for the next few years clever people are going to figure out a ton of really clever uses for them, but eventually it's going to plateau and progress will become substantially more gradual. I don't think progress is linear, I think it's more like a staircase.
  • satellite2 3y ago
    There is clearly a plateau in how good a ux can be. It might be a local optimum but still you solve the task the user wants. I don't see a clear ceiling in intelligence. And if the ceiling is how much of the human tasks can be replaced then I think when we reach it the world is going to look very different from now. (Let's also not discount how much the world changed since the introduction of the smartphone.)
    • chimprich 3y ago
      > I don't see a clear ceiling in intelligence The plateau in this case is presumably how far you can advance intelligence from the current model architectures. There seems to be diminishing returns from throwing more layers, parameters or training data at these things. We will see improvements but for dramatic increases I think we'll need new breakthroughs. New inventions are hard to predict, pretty much by definition.
      • tombert 3y ago
        That's more or less what I was getting at; the cool new GANN and LLM models have a certain set of problems that they will solve exceptionally well, and then another set of problems that they will solve "pretty well", but I don't think they'll solve every problem.
• lossolo 3y ago
  Don't worry, you are not alone, there are hundreds of millions of us around the world, maybe even billions (all the jobs that could be replaced by AI in the next 10-20 years). We will just need to do what we always do, so vote for a systemic change or eat the rich.
• GCA10 3y ago
  Ah, your closing question could be a thread in itself. This is tricky territory! Be wary of the treadmill where as your income rises, your sense of what's an acceptable restaurant, vacation, car, home, etc. escalates just as fast. Then you'll always be n+1 windfalls away from your goal. If you're really wanting "financial independence," which is a weirdly opaque phrase, focus at least 49% of your energy on keeping your spending rate low.
• jstx1 3y ago
  > I would love to be financially independent and watch this with excitement Even if you were, your money would be invested in something which is tied to the overall economy and if a huge proportion of knowledge jobs are at risk, you would still be exposed to it through whatever assets you own. Don't expect stocks (or currency, or property) to do great when unemployment is 30%+.
• deleted 3y ago
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