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Spreadsheets didn’t replace accountants, however, it made them more efficient. I don’t personally believe AI will replace software engineers anytime soon, but i

Spreadsheets didn’t replace accountants, however, it made them more efficient. I don’t personally believe AI will replace software engineers anytime soon, but it’s already making us more efficient. Just as Excel experience is required to crunch numbers, I suspect AI experience will be required to write code. I use chat-gpt every day for programming and there are times where it’s spot on and more times where it’s blatantly wrong. I like to use it as a rubber duck to help me think and work through problems. But I’ve learned that whatever the output is requires as much scrutiny as a good code review. I fear there’s a lot of copy and pasting of wrong answers out there. The good news is that for now they will need real engineers to come in and clean up the mess.

aabhay 3y ago
Spreadsheets actually did put many accountants and “computers” (the term for people that tallied and computed numbers, ironically a fairly menial job) out of business. And it’s usually the case that disruptive technology’s benefits are not evenly distributed. In any case, the unfortunate truth is that AI as it exists today is EXPLICITLY designed to replace people. That’s a far cry from technologies such as the telephone (which by the way put thousands of Morse code telegraph operators out of business)
- bdw5204 3y ago
  It is especially sad that VC money is currently being spent on developing AI to eliminate good jobs rather than on developing robots to eliminate bad jobs.
  - pama 3y ago
    The plan has always been to build the robots together with the better AI. Robots ended up being much harder than early technologists imagined for a myriad different reasons. It turned out that AI is easier or at least that is the hope.
    - grogenaut 3y ago
      Actually I'd argue that we've had robots forever, just not what you'd consider robots because they're quite effective. Consider the humble washing machine or dishwasher. Very specialized, and hyper effective. What we don;'t have is Gneneralized Robotics, just like we don't have Generalized Intelligence. Just as "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", "Any sufficiently omnipresent advanced technology is indistinguishable from the mundane". Chat GPT will feel like your smart phone which now feels like your cordless phone which now feels like your corded phone which now feels like wireless telegram on your coal fired steam liner.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      No, AI is tremendously harder than early researchers expected. Here's a seminal project proposal from 1955: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer. “
      - Miraste 3y ago
        GP didn't say that AI was easier than expected, rather that AI is easier than robotics, which is true. Compared to mid-century expectations, robotics has been the most consistently disappointing field of research besides maybe space travel, and even that is well ahead of robots now.
        sgu999 3y ago
        > well ahead of robots now I am not working in that field, but as an outsider it feels like the industrial robots doing most of the work on TSMC's and Tesla's production lines are on the contrary extremely advanced. Aside from that what Boston Dynamics or startups making prosthetics came up is nothing short of amazing. If anything software seems to be the bottleneck for building useful humanoids...
  - specialist 3y ago
    Capitalism always seeks to commodify skills. We of the professional managerial class happily assist, certain they'll never come for our jobs.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      A serious, hopefully not flippant question; Who are "they" in this case? Particularly as the process you describe tends to the limit.
      - jampekka 3y ago
        I would guess that "they" are "the capitalists" as a class. It's very common to use personal pronouns for such abstract entities, and describe them in behaving in a goal-driven matter. It doesn't really matter who "they" are as individuals (or even if they are individuals). More accurate would be something like "reducing labor costs increases return on capital investment, so labor costs will be reduced in a system where economy organizes to maximize return on capital investment". But our language/vocabulary isn't great at describing processes.
      - specialist 3y ago
        Poor phrasing. Apologies. u/jampekka nails it. Better phrasing may have been "...happily assist, confident our own jobs will remain secure."
        nonrandomstring 3y ago
        Thanks. Not putting this onto you so I'll say "we/our" to follow your good faith; What is "coming for our jobs" is some feature of the system, but it being a system of which we presume to be, and hope to remain a part, even though ultimately our part in it must be to eliminate ourselves. Is that fair? Our hacker's wish to "replace myself with a very small shell-script and hit the beach" is coming true. The only problem I have with it, even though "we're all hackers now", is I don't see everybody making it to the beach. But maybe everybody doesn't want to. Will "employment" in the future be a mark of high or low status?
  - Dig1t 3y ago
    Many machinists, welders, etc would have asked the same question when we shipped most of American manufacturing overseas. There was a generation of experienced people with good jobs that lost their jobs and white collar workers celebrated it. Just Google “those jobs are never coming back”, you’ll find a lot of heartless comparisons to the horse and buggy. Why should we treat these office jobs any differently?
    - vidarh 3y ago
      US manufacturing has not been shipped out. US manufacturing output keeps increasing, though it's overall share of GDP is dropping. US manufacturing jobs went overseas. What went overseas were those areas of manufacturing that was more expensive to automate than it was to hire low paid workers elsewhere. With respect to your final question, I don't think we should treat them differently, but I do think few societies have handled this well. Most societies are set up in a way that creates a strong disincentive for workers to want production to become more efficient other than at the margins (it helps you if your employer is marginally more efficient than average to keep your job safer). Couple that with a tacit assumption that there will always be more jobs, and you have the makings of a problem if AI starts to eat away at broader segments. If/when AI accelerates this process you either need to find a solution to that (in other words, ensure people do not lose out) or it creates a strong risk of social unrest down the line.
    - allturtles 3y ago
      If I didn't celebrate that job loss am I allowed to not celebrate this one?
    - sgt101 3y ago
      Agree - also note that many office jobs have been shipped overseas, and also automated out of existence. When I started work there were slews of support staff booking trips, managing appointments, typing correspondence & copying and typesetting docuements. For years we laughed at the paperless office - well it's been here for a decade and there's no discussion about it anymore. Interestingly at the same time as all those jobs disappeared and got automated there were surges of people into the workforce. Women started to be routinely employed for all but a few years of child birth and care, and many workers came from overseas. Yet, white collar unemployment didn't spike. The driver for this was that the effective size of the economy boomed with the inclusion of Russia, China, Indonesia, India and many other smaller countries in the western sphere/economy post cold war... and growth from innovation.
  - polpenn 3y ago
    I think the impact of AI is not between good jobs va bad jobs but between good workers and bad workers. For a given field, AI is making good workers more efficient and eliminating those who are bad at their jobs (e.g. the underperforming accountant who is able to make a living doing the more mundane tasks whose job is threatened by spreadsheets and automation)
    - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
      I worry the effects this has on juniors…
  - roguas 3y ago
    I think AI, particularly text based, seems like a cleaner problem. Robots are derivative of AI, robotics, batteries, hardware, compute, societal shifts. It appears our tech tree needs stable AI first, then can tackle the rest of problems which are either physical or infrastructure.
- hindsightbias 3y ago
  > Spreadsheets actually did put many accountants https://cpatrendlines.com/2017/09/28/coming-pike-accountants/ https://cpatrendlines.com/2017/09/28/coming-pike-accountants... Not really seeing any correlation in graduation rates. Excel was introduced in 1985. Every accountant had a computer in the 80s.
nextos 3y ago
AI might help programmers become more rigorous by lowering the cost of formal methods. Imagine an advanced language where simply writing a function contract, in some kind of Hoare logic or using a dependently-typed signature, yields provably correct code. These kinds of ideas are already worked on, and I believe are the future.
- moring 3y ago
  I'm not convinced about that. Writing a formal contract for a function is incredibly hard, much harder than writing the function itself. I could open any random function in my codebase and with high probability get a piece of code that is < 50 lines, yet would need pages of formal contract to be "as correct" as it is now. By "as correct", I mean that such a function may have bugs, but the same is true for an AI-generated function derived from a formal contract, if the contract has a loophole. And in that case, a simple microscopic loophole may lead to very very weird bugs. If you want a taste of that, have a look at how some C++ compilers remove half the code because of an "undefined behaviour" loophole. Proofreading what Copilot wrote seems like the saner option.
  - nextos 3y ago
    That is because you have not used contracts when you started developing your code. Likewise, it would be hard to enforce structured programming on assembly code that was written without this concept in mind. Contracts can be quite easy to use, see e.g. Dafny by MS Research.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  They won't need human help when the time comes.
- oivey 3y ago
  I think this is longer off than you might expect. LLMs work because the “answer” (and the prompt) is fuzzy and inexact. Proving an exact answer is a whole different and significantly more difficult problem, and it’s not clear the LLM approach will scale up to that problem.
- 3y ago
panta 3y ago
> But I’ve learned that whatever the output is requires as much scrutiny as a good code review. I fear there’s a lot of copy and pasting of wrong answers out there. The good news is that for now they will need real engineers to come in and clean up the mess. isn't it sad that real engineers are going to work as cleaners for AI output? And doing this they are in fact training the next generation to be more able to replace real engineers... We are trading our future income for some minor (and questionable) development speed today.

aabhay 3y ago

Spreadsheets actually did put many accountants and “computers” (the term for people that tallied and computed numbers, ironically a fairly menial job) out of business. And it’s usually the case that disruptive technology’s benefits are not evenly distributed. In any case, the unfortunate truth is that AI as it exists today is EXPLICITLY designed to replace people. That’s a far cry from technologies such as the telephone (which by the way put thousands of Morse code telegraph operators out of business)

bdw5204 3y ago
It is especially sad that VC money is currently being spent on developing AI to eliminate good jobs rather than on developing robots to eliminate bad jobs.
- pama 3y ago
  The plan has always been to build the robots together with the better AI. Robots ended up being much harder than early technologists imagined for a myriad different reasons. It turned out that AI is easier or at least that is the hope.
  - grogenaut 3y ago
    Actually I'd argue that we've had robots forever, just not what you'd consider robots because they're quite effective. Consider the humble washing machine or dishwasher. Very specialized, and hyper effective. What we don;'t have is Gneneralized Robotics, just like we don't have Generalized Intelligence. Just as "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", "Any sufficiently omnipresent advanced technology is indistinguishable from the mundane". Chat GPT will feel like your smart phone which now feels like your cordless phone which now feels like your corded phone which now feels like wireless telegram on your coal fired steam liner.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    No, AI is tremendously harder than early researchers expected. Here's a seminal project proposal from 1955: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer. “
    - Miraste 3y ago
      GP didn't say that AI was easier than expected, rather that AI is easier than robotics, which is true. Compared to mid-century expectations, robotics has been the most consistently disappointing field of research besides maybe space travel, and even that is well ahead of robots now.
      - sgu999 3y ago
        > well ahead of robots now I am not working in that field, but as an outsider it feels like the industrial robots doing most of the work on TSMC's and Tesla's production lines are on the contrary extremely advanced. Aside from that what Boston Dynamics or startups making prosthetics came up is nothing short of amazing. If anything software seems to be the bottleneck for building useful humanoids...
- specialist 3y ago
  Capitalism always seeks to commodify skills. We of the professional managerial class happily assist, certain they'll never come for our jobs.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    A serious, hopefully not flippant question; Who are "they" in this case? Particularly as the process you describe tends to the limit.
    - jampekka 3y ago
      I would guess that "they" are "the capitalists" as a class. It's very common to use personal pronouns for such abstract entities, and describe them in behaving in a goal-driven matter. It doesn't really matter who "they" are as individuals (or even if they are individuals). More accurate would be something like "reducing labor costs increases return on capital investment, so labor costs will be reduced in a system where economy organizes to maximize return on capital investment". But our language/vocabulary isn't great at describing processes.
    - specialist 3y ago
      Poor phrasing. Apologies. u/jampekka nails it. Better phrasing may have been "...happily assist, confident our own jobs will remain secure."
      - nonrandomstring 3y ago
        Thanks. Not putting this onto you so I'll say "we/our" to follow your good faith; What is "coming for our jobs" is some feature of the system, but it being a system of which we presume to be, and hope to remain a part, even though ultimately our part in it must be to eliminate ourselves. Is that fair? Our hacker's wish to "replace myself with a very small shell-script and hit the beach" is coming true. The only problem I have with it, even though "we're all hackers now", is I don't see everybody making it to the beach. But maybe everybody doesn't want to. Will "employment" in the future be a mark of high or low status?
- Dig1t 3y ago
  Many machinists, welders, etc would have asked the same question when we shipped most of American manufacturing overseas. There was a generation of experienced people with good jobs that lost their jobs and white collar workers celebrated it. Just Google “those jobs are never coming back”, you’ll find a lot of heartless comparisons to the horse and buggy. Why should we treat these office jobs any differently?
  - vidarh 3y ago
    US manufacturing has not been shipped out. US manufacturing output keeps increasing, though it's overall share of GDP is dropping. US manufacturing jobs went overseas. What went overseas were those areas of manufacturing that was more expensive to automate than it was to hire low paid workers elsewhere. With respect to your final question, I don't think we should treat them differently, but I do think few societies have handled this well. Most societies are set up in a way that creates a strong disincentive for workers to want production to become more efficient other than at the margins (it helps you if your employer is marginally more efficient than average to keep your job safer). Couple that with a tacit assumption that there will always be more jobs, and you have the makings of a problem if AI starts to eat away at broader segments. If/when AI accelerates this process you either need to find a solution to that (in other words, ensure people do not lose out) or it creates a strong risk of social unrest down the line.
  - allturtles 3y ago
    If I didn't celebrate that job loss am I allowed to not celebrate this one?
  - sgt101 3y ago
    Agree - also note that many office jobs have been shipped overseas, and also automated out of existence. When I started work there were slews of support staff booking trips, managing appointments, typing correspondence & copying and typesetting docuements. For years we laughed at the paperless office - well it's been here for a decade and there's no discussion about it anymore. Interestingly at the same time as all those jobs disappeared and got automated there were surges of people into the workforce. Women started to be routinely employed for all but a few years of child birth and care, and many workers came from overseas. Yet, white collar unemployment didn't spike. The driver for this was that the effective size of the economy boomed with the inclusion of Russia, China, Indonesia, India and many other smaller countries in the western sphere/economy post cold war... and growth from innovation.
- polpenn 3y ago
  I think the impact of AI is not between good jobs va bad jobs but between good workers and bad workers. For a given field, AI is making good workers more efficient and eliminating those who are bad at their jobs (e.g. the underperforming accountant who is able to make a living doing the more mundane tasks whose job is threatened by spreadsheets and automation)
  - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    I worry the effects this has on juniors…
- roguas 3y ago
  I think AI, particularly text based, seems like a cleaner problem. Robots are derivative of AI, robotics, batteries, hardware, compute, societal shifts. It appears our tech tree needs stable AI first, then can tackle the rest of problems which are either physical or infrastructure.
hindsightbias 3y ago
> Spreadsheets actually did put many accountants https://cpatrendlines.com/2017/09/28/coming-pike-accountants/ https://cpatrendlines.com/2017/09/28/coming-pike-accountants... Not really seeing any correlation in graduation rates. Excel was introduced in 1985. Every accountant had a computer in the 80s.

nextos 3y ago

AI might help programmers become more rigorous by lowering the cost of formal methods. Imagine an advanced language where simply writing a function contract, in some kind of Hoare logic or using a dependently-typed signature, yields provably correct code. These kinds of ideas are already worked on, and I believe are the future.

moring 3y ago
I'm not convinced about that. Writing a formal contract for a function is incredibly hard, much harder than writing the function itself. I could open any random function in my codebase and with high probability get a piece of code that is < 50 lines, yet would need pages of formal contract to be "as correct" as it is now. By "as correct", I mean that such a function may have bugs, but the same is true for an AI-generated function derived from a formal contract, if the contract has a loophole. And in that case, a simple microscopic loophole may lead to very very weird bugs. If you want a taste of that, have a look at how some C++ compilers remove half the code because of an "undefined behaviour" loophole. Proofreading what Copilot wrote seems like the saner option.
- nextos 3y ago
  That is because you have not used contracts when you started developing your code. Likewise, it would be hard to enforce structured programming on assembly code that was written without this concept in mind. Contracts can be quite easy to use, see e.g. Dafny by MS Research.
pjmlp 3y ago
They won't need human help when the time comes.
oivey 3y ago
I think this is longer off than you might expect. LLMs work because the “answer” (and the prompt) is fuzzy and inexact. Proving an exact answer is a whole different and significantly more difficult problem, and it’s not clear the LLM approach will scale up to that problem.
3y ago

panta 3y ago

> But I’ve learned that whatever the output is requires as much scrutiny as a good code review. I fear there’s a lot of copy and pasting of wrong answers out there. The good news is that for now they will need real engineers to come in and clean up the mess. isn't it sad that real engineers are going to work as cleaners for AI output? And doing this they are in fact training the next generation to be more able to replace real engineers... We are trading our future income for some minor (and questionable) development speed today.