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Imagine two software engineers. One believes the following: > AI can't do my job and I doubt it will any time soon The other believes the opposite; that AI i

Imagine two software engineers. One believes the following: > AI can't do my job and I doubt it will any time soon The other believes the opposite; that AI is improving rapidly enough that their job is in danger "soon". From a game theory stance, is there any advantage to holding the first belief over the second?

sfn42 2y ago
Yeah. The engineer who thinks their job is in danger might be less inclined to improve their skills because they don't think their skills will be useful in the future, which is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe they will pursue some other career or start preparing for it, which might be a complete waste of time. Similarly, non-engineers might choose a different profession entirely. Meanwhile the engineer who isn't bothered by this bullshit prophecy goes about their day, making lots of money and becoming less replaceable every day. Maybe they learn to use these AI tools to be more efficient, which is really the only realistic endgame of AI tools anyway. You don't just fire all the devs and have some manager do the prompting. Maybe you fire some devs and keep the best ones as prompt engineers. Maybe this isn't even a management-driven process at all, maybe the developers just start using these tools of their own volition, become more productive and everyone's happy. It's not like we're running out of development work any time soon, whenever we meet a goal they set a new one. Being able to move faster doesn't necessarily mean we need fewer developers. Setting aside hypotheticals and game theory, it's completely unrealistic to expect that software developer suddenly won't be a job any more. If it even happens it will be a slow, gradual process. The people working as software developers today will be prime candidates for using AI tools to create software. You still need to understand what you're doing, what's possible and what isn't etc. There is absolutely no reality where some business person just tells an AI to make a banking system and it does that perfectly without any human intervention.

sfn42 2y ago

Yeah. The engineer who thinks their job is in danger might be less inclined to improve their skills because they don't think their skills will be useful in the future, which is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe they will pursue some other career or start preparing for it, which might be a complete waste of time. Similarly, non-engineers might choose a different profession entirely. Meanwhile the engineer who isn't bothered by this bullshit prophecy goes about their day, making lots of money and becoming less replaceable every day. Maybe they learn to use these AI tools to be more efficient, which is really the only realistic endgame of AI tools anyway. You don't just fire all the devs and have some manager do the prompting. Maybe you fire some devs and keep the best ones as prompt engineers. Maybe this isn't even a management-driven process at all, maybe the developers just start using these tools of their own volition, become more productive and everyone's happy. It's not like we're running out of development work any time soon, whenever we meet a goal they set a new one. Being able to move faster doesn't necessarily mean we need fewer developers. Setting aside hypotheticals and game theory, it's completely unrealistic to expect that software developer suddenly won't be a job any more. If it even happens it will be a slow, gradual process. The people working as software developers today will be prime candidates for using AI tools to create software. You still need to understand what you're doing, what's possible and what isn't etc. There is absolutely no reality where some business person just tells an AI to make a banking system and it does that perfectly without any human intervention.