5 ms·

Your perspective is very strange, as I want to be replaced by cheaper devs - or ideally, even machines, which would free us humans to work on other problems tha

by csdvrx 2y ago

Your perspective is very strange, as I want to be replaced by cheaper devs - or ideally, even machines, which would free us humans to work on other problems that machine can't work on yet. > In fact, I do not care to be convinced otherwise, I am ideologically speaking completely opposed to any form of LLM or "AI". Then could you try to convince me of your argument? I don't see tech problems as worse or better than other problems like growing food, which we were fortunate to solve with industrialized farming and other technological breakthroughs like the Haber–Bosch process Explain me why I should join your daydream!

sph 2y ago
> which would free us humans to work on other problems We have heard this refrain since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  And it’s been true. I don’t have to break my back toiling the earth to grow crop. Nor risk other kinds of life changing injuries working in factories, down the mines, etc. Instead, I’ve got a comfortable job which requires using my brain. Which is an opportunity that someone from my social class wouldn’t have been granted even just 100 years ago.
  - sph 2y ago
    We were talking about machines freeing time so we can do other things, do not move the goalposts to fit your argument. Yes, I do not have to break my back 5 hours a day in the field, I only have to sit in an office 8 hours, and 2 hours commute a day. Also make sure you check your Slack notifications at home. [1] I hope you enjoy your couple hours in the weekend to read philosophy and paint landscapes. 1: in fact I don't waste all my time working like most, but that makes me unhireable to 99% of companies that just want to squeeze every productive minute out of me.
    - ncruces 2y ago
      Let's all go back to doing the laundry by hand. Because life was better back then.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      > We were talking about machines freeing time so we can do other things, do not move the goalposts to fit your argument. That’s a very uncharitable comment given “time” wasn’t mentioned once in either your comment nor the GPs. You might have read their comment as meaning “less work” (time) but for me it reads that they’re talking about “different and more interesting work”. Both interpretations are valid. I get a sense from your rant that you’re massively overworked. I do sympathise with you there, I honestly do. But that’s got nothing to do with AI.
  - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
    The biggest use of professional AIs will offset the majority of big brain jobs, possibly leaving the majority of jobs left for humans to do being physical back-breaking labor at some point before long.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      We’ve long since proven that machines are better for back-breaking labor. I also disagree that AI will offset the majority of big brain jobs. What’s actually happening is AI is offsetting the majority of narrowly defined queries. The more open ended problems require an actual understanding of problem solving rather than a really clever text prediction engine. Some examples to illustrate my point: If you wanted to build a mobile app, you’d need to first: - understand the problem you’re trying to solve (is it a game? A medical app? A productivity app? Etc) - choose a frontend stack - create a design language - create wireframes - decide where to host the backend stack (eg self hosted? Or public cloud? If so, which?) - decide which cloud services to use (if public cloud) - decide on how to approach IaC - decide on the backend stack - decide on how to implement your CI/CD pipelines (or even if you want continuous delivery) - understand what privacy and security concerns you have and identify what risks you’re willing to accept - define testing strategy’s - define release cadences And so on and so forth. Writing the code is often actually the easiest part of software development because we already understand the problem by that point. The rest of the work is figuring out all questions that need to be answered — and I don’t even mean answering the questions, I mean understanding what questions to ask. AI can’t do that. GenAI requires human input and much of software development is actually figuring out what those inputs should be rather than generating that output. So that’s what I mean by “big brain jobs”. It’s not writing code, because that’s easy. It’s understanding and defining those requirements to begin with.
      - tuckerman 2y ago
        > We’ve long since proven that machines are better for back-breaking labor. This is contrary to my perception of current trends (and to a perhaps generous reading of Moravec's Paradox). Dexterous manipulation is still quite hard which is why a task like laundry folding is so impressive despite being relatively simple for many humans: https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 Perhaps we disagree on what "back breaking" entails but I'd much rather spend all day coding than folding laundry!

by csdvrx 2y ago

sph 2y ago

> which would free us humans to work on other problems We have heard this refrain since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

hnlmorg 2y ago
And it’s been true. I don’t have to break my back toiling the earth to grow crop. Nor risk other kinds of life changing injuries working in factories, down the mines, etc. Instead, I’ve got a comfortable job which requires using my brain. Which is an opportunity that someone from my social class wouldn’t have been granted even just 100 years ago.
- sph 2y ago
  We were talking about machines freeing time so we can do other things, do not move the goalposts to fit your argument. Yes, I do not have to break my back 5 hours a day in the field, I only have to sit in an office 8 hours, and 2 hours commute a day. Also make sure you check your Slack notifications at home. [1] I hope you enjoy your couple hours in the weekend to read philosophy and paint landscapes. 1: in fact I don't waste all my time working like most, but that makes me unhireable to 99% of companies that just want to squeeze every productive minute out of me.
  - ncruces 2y ago
    Let's all go back to doing the laundry by hand. Because life was better back then.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    > We were talking about machines freeing time so we can do other things, do not move the goalposts to fit your argument. That’s a very uncharitable comment given “time” wasn’t mentioned once in either your comment nor the GPs. You might have read their comment as meaning “less work” (time) but for me it reads that they’re talking about “different and more interesting work”. Both interpretations are valid. I get a sense from your rant that you’re massively overworked. I do sympathise with you there, I honestly do. But that’s got nothing to do with AI.
- MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
  The biggest use of professional AIs will offset the majority of big brain jobs, possibly leaving the majority of jobs left for humans to do being physical back-breaking labor at some point before long.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    We’ve long since proven that machines are better for back-breaking labor. I also disagree that AI will offset the majority of big brain jobs. What’s actually happening is AI is offsetting the majority of narrowly defined queries. The more open ended problems require an actual understanding of problem solving rather than a really clever text prediction engine. Some examples to illustrate my point: If you wanted to build a mobile app, you’d need to first: - understand the problem you’re trying to solve (is it a game? A medical app? A productivity app? Etc) - choose a frontend stack - create a design language - create wireframes - decide where to host the backend stack (eg self hosted? Or public cloud? If so, which?) - decide which cloud services to use (if public cloud) - decide on how to approach IaC - decide on the backend stack - decide on how to implement your CI/CD pipelines (or even if you want continuous delivery) - understand what privacy and security concerns you have and identify what risks you’re willing to accept - define testing strategy’s - define release cadences And so on and so forth. Writing the code is often actually the easiest part of software development because we already understand the problem by that point. The rest of the work is figuring out all questions that need to be answered — and I don’t even mean answering the questions, I mean understanding what questions to ask. AI can’t do that. GenAI requires human input and much of software development is actually figuring out what those inputs should be rather than generating that output. So that’s what I mean by “big brain jobs”. It’s not writing code, because that’s easy. It’s understanding and defining those requirements to begin with.
    - tuckerman 2y ago
      > We’ve long since proven that machines are better for back-breaking labor. This is contrary to my perception of current trends (and to a perhaps generous reading of Moravec's Paradox). Dexterous manipulation is still quite hard which is why a task like laundry folding is so impressive despite being relatively simple for many humans: https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 Perhaps we disagree on what "back breaking" entails but I'd much rather spend all day coding than folding laundry!