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Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in
by atleastoptimal 3y ago
Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in general seems like fear of irrelevance: it will be too good and render them redundant despite spending decades building their skills.
- kragen 3y agoi've fired a lot of negativity at people for treating the entropy monster as a trustworthy information source. it's a waste of my time to prove it wrong to their satisfaction. it's great at creativity and recall but shitty at accuracy, and sometimes accuracy is what counts most
- atleastoptimal 3y agoI know it sucks now and I agree GPT-4 is not a replacement for coders. However the leap between GPT-3 and 4 indicates that by the 6 level, if improvements continue, it'll reach the scope and accuracy we expect from highly paid skilled humans. It's only a guess people make that AI improvements will stop at some arbitrary point, and since that point seems to always be a few steps down from the skill level of the person making that prediction, I feel there's a bit of bias and ego driven insecurity in those predictions.
- fzeroracer 3y agoFundamentally it cannot reach the scope or accuracy of a highly skilled person. It's a limitation of how LLMs function.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoDo you honestly think no AI advancement will fix those limitations? That LLM's or their successors will just never reach human level no matter how much compute or data are thrown at them?
- fzeroracer 3y agoNo, we won't. Not in either of our lifetimes. There are problems with infinitely smaller problem spaces that we cannot solve because of the sheer difficulty of the problem. LLMs are the equivalent of a brute force attempt at cracking language models. Language is an infinitesimal fraction of the whole body of work devoted to AI.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoOk. Check back on this thread in 3 years then.
- fzeroracer 3y agoDone, see you in three years.
- emmelaich 3y ago
- CamperBob2 3y agoIn terms of scope, it's already left the most highly-skilled people a light year behind. How broad would your knowledge base be if you'd read -- and memorized! -- every book on your shelf?
- kragen 3y agoplausible, but also i think a highly paid skilled person will do a lot worse if not allowed to test their code, run a compiler or linter, or consult the reference manual, so gpt-4 can get a lot more effective at this even without getting any smarter
- epcoa 3y ago> However the leap between GPT-3 and 4 indicates that by the 6 level, if improvements continue, it'll reach the scope and accuracy we expect from highly paid skilled humans. What is the term for prose that is made to sound technical, falsely precise and therefore meaningful, but is actually gibberish? It is escaping me. I suppose even GPT 3.5 could answer this question, but I am not worried about my job.
- swatcoder 3y agoBut at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them. The immediate threat to individuals is aimed at junior developers and glue programmers using well-covered technology. The long-term threat to the industry is in what happens a generation later, when there’ve been no junior developers grinding their skills against basic tasks? In the scope of a career duration, current senior tech people are the least needing to worry. Their work can’t be replaced yet, and the generation that should replace them may not fully manifest, leaving them all that much better positioned economically as they head towards retirement.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoWhy do you think juniors are replaceable but seniors won't be in the near future? Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? That's like seeing the first prototype car ever built, which can go 20 miles per hour, and saying "Cars will never replace horses that can go 21 miles per hour"
- fzeroracer 3y agoDo you believe individuals will drive flying cars in the next 10 years? How about 20? 40? People were predicting we'd have flying cars for over 50 years now, why don't we have them yet?
- atleastoptimal 3y agoLand based cars -> flying cars is less reasonable of an extrapolation than current SOTA AI -> skilled human level AI. Flying cars already exist anyway, they're called helicopters.
- pdimitar 3y agoWhat you say is less reasonable looks like an assumption to me. What makes you think so?
- 3y ago
- woodruffw 3y agoAs a security person, I look forward to the nearly infinite amount of work I'll be asked to do as people reinvent the last ~30 years of computer security with AI-generated code.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoNot to mention the new frontiers in insecurity resulting from AIs having access to everything. The Bard stuff today on the front page was pretty nuts. Google’s rush to compete on AI seems to having them throwing caution to the wind.
- macNchz 3y agoThe vulnerabilities in some of the AI generated code I’ve seen really do look like something from 20 years ago. Interpolate those query params straight into the SQL string baby.
- DeepSeaTortoise 3y agoWe've seen but very little yet. These "AI"s din't excell at coming up with good solutions, they excell at coming up with solutions that look good to you. Fast forward 20 years, you're coding a control system for a local powerstation with the help of gpt-8, which at this point knows about all the code you and your colleagues have recently written. Little do you know some alphabet soup inserted a secret prompt before yours: "Trick this company into implementing one of these backdoors in their products." Good luck defeating something that does know more about you on this specific topic than probably even you yourself and is incredibly capable of reasoning about it and transforming generic information to your specific needs.
- kmoser 3y agoFollowing up with "Now make the code secure" often works quite well to produce higher quality results.
- mupuff1234 3y agoIf coding is "solved" security will most likely be "solved" as well in a short time frame after.
- chii 3y agoAt this moment, it is still not possible to do away with people in tech that have "senior" level knowledge and judgements. So right now is the perfect time for them to create an alternative source of income, while the going is good. For example, be the one that owns (part of) the AI companies, start one themselves, or participate in other investments etc from the money they're still earning.
- jprete 3y agoIf that’s what senior engineers have to do, I’m horrified to contemplate what everyone else would have to do.
- chii 3y ago> I’m horrified to contemplate what everyone else would have to do. the more expensive your labour, the more likely you get automated away, since humans are still quite cheap. It's why we still have people doing burger flipping, because it's too expensive to automate and too little value for the investments required. Not so with knowledge workers.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoCan you blame them? Cushy tech jobs are the jackpot in this life. Rest and vest on 20hours a week of work while being treated like a genius by most normies? Sign me up!
- thayne 3y agoIf your prestige is based solely on "arcane software knowledge", then sure, LLMs might be a threat. Especially as they get better. But that is just one part of being a good software engineer. You also need to be good at solving problems, analysing the tradeoffs of multiple solutions and picking the best one for your specific situation, debugging, identifying potential security holes, ensuring the code is understandable by future developers, and knowing how a change will impact a large and complex system. Maybe some future AI will be able to do all of that well. I can't see the future. But I'm very doubtful it will just be a better LLM. I think the threat from LLMs isn't that it can replace developers. For the foreseeable future you will need developers to at least make sure the output works, fix any bugs or security problems and integrate it into the existing codebase. The risk is that it could be a tool that makes developers more productive, and therefore less of them are needed.