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With all due respect, When AI becomes good enough to code web apps and other simple applications, the people who will be decrying AI will be all of the web dev

With all due respect, When AI becomes good enough to code web apps and other simple applications, the people who will be decrying AI will be all of the web devs out of work. Notto mention, all of the creative and entertainment industry jobs that will be destroyed permanently. It's coming whether people want to accept it or not and we're going to reach a point where new roles will not be ready to absorb the loss.

vundercind 2y ago
A widely observed problem with AI we’ve created so far is that it seems best at destroying jobs people tend to like (at least, better than other things they might be paid to do) and replacing them with a smaller set of less-pleasant jobs. At least, within the realm of basically-positive jobs. There’s separately the issue of its being by far the most productivity-enhancing for things that are harmful (scams, astroturfing, spamming)
- tombert 2y ago
  I mean, you're not entitled to a fun job, and moreover I think people will find other fun jobs. It sucks if you loved painting, and you're risking getting replaced by a robot, but a) I think Stable Diffusion will still need to be human assisted for quite awhile to get results that don't suck, and the pictures will almost certainly need to be touched up by people to be useful in a commercial context, and b) There's really no limit on "potentially fun work". I agree that making scams easier is a real threat though, and I have absolutely no idea how the hell we're going to properly address that. Even if the main service providers block scam-like language, there's nothing stopping anyone from using an open model and running Llamas or something.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    > I mean, you're not entitled to a fun job Who said anything about entitled? It’s about better and worse. “We automated all the things people wished they could do if they didn’t need money—but basically none of the stuff you all actually wished we’d automate” is pretty clearly bleak as fuck.
    - tombert 2y ago
      That's just not true, we've automated lots of stuff that people don't like and wish we'd automate, well before AI was in the picture. "Computer" used to be a job title, but that was automated by, you know, computers. We've automated digging ditches, planting crops, transportation, and many, many, many more things. I'd venture to say that most of the stuff we've automated has been stuff people don't really like doing. Even with AI, there's plenty of stuff it's automating that no one really likes doing. For me, it makes bizarre server logs substantially more digestible, so to a point where I've debated writing a systemd service that listens on journalctl and creates a separate stream of easier-to-understand server logs for me to look at. I don't really see it as "bleak", and I certainly don't view it as "worse", I think it's just different. Most art isn't people painting stuff for the Met, it's corporate stuff. I don't really think it's terribly fun for people who do that (though I'm not sure, I don't have much experience in that realm), so if we can automate that isn't that something "you all wished we'd automate"?
      - JohnFen 2y ago
        I really try to keep my comments on this topic as neutral and not emotionally based as I can. But here's my 100% emotional, non-neutral reaction: > I don't really see it as "bleak" I'm trying not to see it that way, but it's really hard. Almost everything that the advocates of these systems say about them strikes me as very dystopic. > I don't really think it's terribly fun for people who do that (though I'm not sure, I don't have much experience in that realm) I know a few people who make their living doing that, and they really do enjoy it.
        vundercind 2y ago
        It’s basically the Anakin/Padme meme. A: “Good news, we automated a ton of work. Millions of jobs no longer need to be done.” P: “Oh, great, now that you automated boring jobs that nobody wants to do, those workers can switch to working in the arts just like they always wanted!” A: “…” P: “… you automated the boring work we all hate, right?”
tombert 2y ago
I am confident that I will not be one of "web devs who decry AI because I'm out of work" [1], but even if I were, it doesn't actually change anything about what I said, even if you could prove some kind of hypocrisy. I was laid off from three jobs last year (not for AI replacement), so I can empathize how much it sucks to lose your job, but that doesn't mean we just halt progress, and even if I were pissed off that ChatGPT replaced me, it wouldn't really change anything I said. > Notto mention, all of the creative and entertainment industry jobs that will be destroyed permanently. Sorry, citation needed. Everyone just keeps asserting it like I can just take it as an axiom, and I don't buy it. AI is a tool, it will be treated as a tool, if a tool can do something better than a person then that tool should be used, and if it's worse than a person, then they probably won't be replaced. If ChatGPT were to start writing code that didn't suck and as a result started replacing lower-level developers and eventually higher-level developers, that would of course suck, but those developers would probably just learn how to use the AI tools and move on with the trend, at least eventually. People have been saying this crap my entire life (and probably way before it), and I just don't accept the axiom. [1] I don't do web dev, but you can replace it with "backend data processing crap dev".
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > those developers would probably just learn how to use the AI tools and move on with the trend, at least eventually. Many certainly will. But that sort of job would be very different from what being a dev has entailed when they chose the career. For many devs, the part of programming that they enjoy the most is precisely the part that people are talking about automating away. That means that there would be devs who find themselves trapped in a job that they now hate.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Sample size of one, but I've found AI to be quite good at automating away the parts of engineering that I really dislike. Stuff like basic scaffolding and long repetitive if/elseif/else chains are things that I have zero fun doing, or looking at long debug logs from build systems makes my life considerably less irritating. It's not perfect at it, but it's also generally useful to paste a chunk of code I wrote years ago and telling me more or less what it does (because I forgot). Obviously part of this is sort of predicated on the fact that it's still pretty bad at the fun stuff right now, and if it gets better at it then maybe I'll be right now, but in its current state I feel like it's made my life better.

vundercind 2y ago

A widely observed problem with AI we’ve created so far is that it seems best at destroying jobs people tend to like (at least, better than other things they might be paid to do) and replacing them with a smaller set of less-pleasant jobs. At least, within the realm of basically-positive jobs. There’s separately the issue of its being by far the most productivity-enhancing for things that are harmful (scams, astroturfing, spamming)

tombert 2y ago
I mean, you're not entitled to a fun job, and moreover I think people will find other fun jobs. It sucks if you loved painting, and you're risking getting replaced by a robot, but a) I think Stable Diffusion will still need to be human assisted for quite awhile to get results that don't suck, and the pictures will almost certainly need to be touched up by people to be useful in a commercial context, and b) There's really no limit on "potentially fun work". I agree that making scams easier is a real threat though, and I have absolutely no idea how the hell we're going to properly address that. Even if the main service providers block scam-like language, there's nothing stopping anyone from using an open model and running Llamas or something.
- vundercind 2y ago
  > I mean, you're not entitled to a fun job Who said anything about entitled? It’s about better and worse. “We automated all the things people wished they could do if they didn’t need money—but basically none of the stuff you all actually wished we’d automate” is pretty clearly bleak as fuck.
  - tombert 2y ago
    That's just not true, we've automated lots of stuff that people don't like and wish we'd automate, well before AI was in the picture. "Computer" used to be a job title, but that was automated by, you know, computers. We've automated digging ditches, planting crops, transportation, and many, many, many more things. I'd venture to say that most of the stuff we've automated has been stuff people don't really like doing. Even with AI, there's plenty of stuff it's automating that no one really likes doing. For me, it makes bizarre server logs substantially more digestible, so to a point where I've debated writing a systemd service that listens on journalctl and creates a separate stream of easier-to-understand server logs for me to look at. I don't really see it as "bleak", and I certainly don't view it as "worse", I think it's just different. Most art isn't people painting stuff for the Met, it's corporate stuff. I don't really think it's terribly fun for people who do that (though I'm not sure, I don't have much experience in that realm), so if we can automate that isn't that something "you all wished we'd automate"?
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      I really try to keep my comments on this topic as neutral and not emotionally based as I can. But here's my 100% emotional, non-neutral reaction: > I don't really see it as "bleak" I'm trying not to see it that way, but it's really hard. Almost everything that the advocates of these systems say about them strikes me as very dystopic. > I don't really think it's terribly fun for people who do that (though I'm not sure, I don't have much experience in that realm) I know a few people who make their living doing that, and they really do enjoy it.
      - vundercind 2y ago
        It’s basically the Anakin/Padme meme. A: “Good news, we automated a ton of work. Millions of jobs no longer need to be done.” P: “Oh, great, now that you automated boring jobs that nobody wants to do, those workers can switch to working in the arts just like they always wanted!” A: “…” P: “… you automated the boring work we all hate, right?”

tombert 2y ago

I am confident that I will not be one of "web devs who decry AI because I'm out of work" [1], but even if I were, it doesn't actually change anything about what I said, even if you could prove some kind of hypocrisy. I was laid off from three jobs last year (not for AI replacement), so I can empathize how much it sucks to lose your job, but that doesn't mean we just halt progress, and even if I were pissed off that ChatGPT replaced me, it wouldn't really change anything I said. > Notto mention, all of the creative and entertainment industry jobs that will be destroyed permanently. Sorry, citation needed. Everyone just keeps asserting it like I can just take it as an axiom, and I don't buy it. AI is a tool, it will be treated as a tool, if a tool can do something better than a person then that tool should be used, and if it's worse than a person, then they probably won't be replaced. If ChatGPT were to start writing code that didn't suck and as a result started replacing lower-level developers and eventually higher-level developers, that would of course suck, but those developers would probably just learn how to use the AI tools and move on with the trend, at least eventually. People have been saying this crap my entire life (and probably way before it), and I just don't accept the axiom. [1] I don't do web dev, but you can replace it with "backend data processing crap dev".

JohnFen 2y ago
> those developers would probably just learn how to use the AI tools and move on with the trend, at least eventually. Many certainly will. But that sort of job would be very different from what being a dev has entailed when they chose the career. For many devs, the part of programming that they enjoy the most is precisely the part that people are talking about automating away. That means that there would be devs who find themselves trapped in a job that they now hate.
- tombert 2y ago
  Sample size of one, but I've found AI to be quite good at automating away the parts of engineering that I really dislike. Stuff like basic scaffolding and long repetitive if/elseif/else chains are things that I have zero fun doing, or looking at long debug logs from build systems makes my life considerably less irritating. It's not perfect at it, but it's also generally useful to paste a chunk of code I wrote years ago and telling me more or less what it does (because I forgot). Obviously part of this is sort of predicated on the fact that it's still pretty bad at the fun stuff right now, and if it gets better at it then maybe I'll be right now, but in its current state I feel like it's made my life better.