6 ms·

I'm a firmware engineer that's been working in consumer electronics and I feel very bleak about my future I feel so left behind. I have extremely limited roboti

by fusslo 2y ago

I'm a firmware engineer that's been working in consumer electronics and I feel very bleak about my future I feel so left behind. I have extremely limited robotics and computer vision experience. I have no ML experience. The only math I know has to do with basic signal processing. When I see open roles at these companies I think the projects I'm going to work on in the future will be more and more irrelevant to society as a whole. Anyway, this is amazing. Please delete/remove my post if it seems like this adds nothing to the conversation

mrkurt 2y ago
For what it's worth, I really appreciate your post.
joelthelion 2y ago
Even for AI engineers, the future is not necessarily bright. These approaches are so powerful and so general that the world is probably not going to need that many of them. I think where the real work will be is taking these models and creating real products out of them.
- visarga 2y ago
  I think you are right, the value is in application. If you have a problem to solve with AI, you benefit from AI. If you don't, you don't.. like any software. The AI providers get $20/month, you can get anything out of AI. Users have a much higher upside than AI developers and providers.
ethan_smith 2y ago
It definitely adds value to the conversation - we're all human, we're all unsure about the future and our place in it. I'm just scared about a future where humans (say the next generation, kids 1-5 years of age right now) lack in-depth knowledge of almost everything and it's mostly AI writing low-level code, so there are no more "human experts." We've already seen this happening where Gen Z mostly interacts with the world using phones and struggle with older operating systems/desktops, just like older generations. AI is going to make that 10x worse going forward.
- n_ary 2y ago
  > I'm just scared about a future where humans (say the next generation, kids 1-5 years of age right now) lack in-depth knowledge of almost everything and it's mostly AI writing low-level code, so there are no more "human experts." Isn’t that the ultimate goal?
  - outworlder 2y ago
    It isn't. I mean, that depends on what "low level code" means. We have compilers so, to an extent, it's something desirable. But if "low level code" means everything we understand as code today, it may not be great. Human languages aren't precise enough for the kind of work that needs to be done. But let's say it's accomplished. What will end up happening is that AI (should it work to the extent it's been hyper) will replace all the 'fun' jobs and we'll be left with either no jobs (and no income), or the most menial physical labor imaginable.
    - djeastm 2y ago
      The physical labor will be for the robots in the video. We'll probably spend all day consuming media and socializing. Thats the optimistic view of course.
      - JFingleton 2y ago
        I have a million and one things I want to accomplish but can't due to lack of time and energy as I work full time. This includes reading, gardening, playing sports, learning to play the piano, etc. Of course some of that is consuming media, but I don't think people will just become couch potatoes. Think of all the things "high society" accomplished in Victorian england because they had the time, energy and resources.
  - achierius 2y ago
    Why would it be? I can understand wanting us to be free of having to do the work, but having essentially no-one understand the systems they're using is something we haven't encountered once in the modern period. It feels more akin to the post-Roman Britons, who inherited the Empire's hydraulic infrastructure but not the know-how to fix it when things went wrong.
GardenLetter27 2y ago
At least robotics (and by extension, embedded development) is a growing field. I'd be more worried being a junior front-end mobile or web dev.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- schlauerfox 2y ago
  I was at the SCaLE22x linux expo in Pasadena last week and there was a company Replit that has a tool where you type the website you like and it was pretty decent. They said someone came by and in a prompt alone created a GPDR compliant cookie popup. It's another tool, it wasn't perfect, but okay for some one-off sites. It will require skills to direct and know what you want, just like always. Embrace the power, know the limits. Let the new skills enabled by the new tools empower you, reject vendor lock-in to keep yourself free to ply your trade. Just like last time around.
  - GardenLetter27 2y ago
    It's sad that the cookie popups are even necessary tbh. It's like we automate their creation, and the users automate hiding / clicking them.
nick3443 2y ago
Still have to architect, review, and debug AI code.
ost-ing 2y ago
I disagree, you are in a prime position to learn those technologies and have a greater breadth of opportunity. There is so much noise online, it’s all bullshit. Keep going!
ninetyninenine 2y ago
At least you're honest. I feel a lot of people (on HN esp) take pride in their programming ability and intelligence to the extent that they think there's no chance AI will take over their job. LLMs were a breakthough out of like a multitude of breakthroughs in AI in the past decade. I think there only needs to be a couple more breakthroughs in the next decade for it to come full circle. Whenever I here a naysayer open his mouth it's like he's insulting a baby. Look it can't talk! no way it can ever program! Either way it's not just you. The people creating AI are also as a side effect creating the training data for AI to replace them. So no one is safe.
- n_ary 2y ago
  When I see pro-AI promoters giving weird analogies that do not fit, I get a feeling that they are either management class(aka MBA types) or are not serious professionals. One key point we must first understand, coding is NOT software engineering or even programming! Writing code is the last bit, a minimal fraction of the job description(unless you are actually indie dev or working for consulting firms). The core tasks include actually untangling the numerous vague requirements, understanding the domain, figuring out best approaches, performing various tests and checks, validating ideas, figuring out a cost effective solution, preparing rough architecture, deciding on an actual set of tech, align a hoard of people that everyone is on the same page, then start coding. My IDE can already read my mind by auto-suggestion since many years and patterns/frameworks exist to reduce the amount of code I need to write. The issue is that, with these AI model, I just need to abuse my fingers slightly less. The other core duties are not yet solved and remains same archaic procedural everywhere in any/all serious roles. And speaking of consulting firms, they are also clever and often has several implementations of same stuff, which they can modify a bit and sell for big money. So in the end, people who jump into the pit because they are afraid of the juju mask are the prime target of the juju mask, for the rest of us, life goes on with minor bumps when the MBA comes to the desk and asks if it is possible to layoff few people to jack up the stock price this quarter yet… while subscribing to that new agenting engineer product suite for double the fees of what the laid off people actually costed, because their best friend in the golf club said the price will eventually become reasonable but the benefits are immediate.
n_ary 2y ago
Hey, this is not new. For me these are akin to a web dev building an ERP system vs another creative coder building beautiful motion graphics using same tech. While the ERP is boring as hell compared the the creative coding results, the latter is novelty and often has no intrinsic value. Also, I see these videos and get deja vu of boston dynamics demos from years back. Not seeing anything new here except this is just early beta version of boston dynamic robots backed by different models. Also amount of people around the demo set tells me, a lot of supervision and retakes happened. I often do not trust such demos(experience from seeing what goes behind the scene with cherry picked takes being published). Anyways, my point is, just chill out. I remember how AWS/GCP/Heroku etc were eradicating IT admin but instead now we have dedicated DevOps and IAM specialist roles… and every day I see 7:1 ratio of job vacancy for DevOps:SWE.
- cglace 2y ago
  This is the most level take I’ve seen.
rglover 2y ago
"Being left behind" is a floating point. If you think there's something you'd like to learn (or would be valuable to learn), just start digging in. Picking new things up usually takes far less time than you'd think, especially if you have existing experience in an even semi-related field.
renecito 2y ago
Get concerned when you see a real product in the market that has a sustainable business model. The man behind the curtain here has an army of engineers, unlimited cloud nodes and basically has harvested all the data currently available in the world. It doesn't get any better than this right now. What's next? They'll ping you later on Linked-in with this awesome idea that you need to make sure runs in a $1 USD microcontroller with a rechargeable battery that is supposed to last at least all day. The actual scary stuff is the dilution of expertise, we contributed for a long time to share our knowledge for internet points (stack overflow, open source projects, etc), and it has been harvested by the AIs already, anyone that pays access to these services for tens of dollars a month can bootstrap really quickly and do what it might had needed years of expertise before. It will dilute little by little our current service value, but you know what, it has always been like this forever, it is just faster. In the meantime, learn to automate the automator, that's the way to get ahead.
- aperrien 2y ago
  Man, we shared our knowledge via books long before the internet. And a lot of those AI models train off of thousands of books as a base before they try to incorporate less accurate knowledge from the wild internet. The cat was out of the bag on that long ago.
- DebtDeflation 2y ago
  I saw Musk saying a couple of days ago that we've "hit the limit of peak data" for training AI. My immediate reaction was no, surely you have not trained on every copyrighted textbook on every subject ever written. You hit the peak of easily accessible internet data that you could quickly steal to train your models.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - potatoman22 2y ago
    The 82TB Meta trained on is still a lot of textbooks.
  - 2y ago
LZ_Khan 2y ago
I think we all share that feeling, even as a software engineer and I see AI writing 90% of my code for me.
piokoch 2y ago
No worries. You know the hard part: dealing with hardware. ML/AI/Comp Vis can be learned fairly quickly if you don't need to dig very deep into algorithms by yourself, but use some higher level libs like scikit-learn, pytorch, etc. The math, well, basic signal processing means you know some algebra and differential calculus. Which is enough, unless, again, you don't want to prove theorems or invent new algos.
whiplash451 2y ago
Let me bring some perspective. In 1998, CMU was showing a self-driving car "driving on its own" [1] 27 years later, 99.99% of trips are driven by humans. Real-world robotics takes multiple decades to pan out. These demos are just that: demos. What you are seeing will not remotely impact your life before the 2050's, if ever. What you should be worried about, however, is you (not your job) becoming irrelevant if you don't learn to write firmware using state-of-the-art AI tooling. At the minimum: learn to work with Cursor (or equivalent). Make sure you work at a company that uses state-of-the-art AI tooling. If you want to go further: learn to code (e.g. in python). Take undergrad/grad level courses in math, statistics and fundamentals of deep learning. And FFS, chill. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KMAAmkz9go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KMAAmkz9go
- varjag 2y ago
  The fellow develops firmware and does signal processing and you come back with "learn to code", really?
blibble 2y ago
if it's anything like their past "demos" it's all staged anyway
lallysingh 2y ago
It might be time to pick up some books and reading up on this stuff. What's nice is that you can directly ask ChatGPT/etc questions about all this tech, and the math behind it! It's never been an easier time to learn new things.
imtringued 2y ago
You might feel like this, but end to end learning in robotics has basically killed almost all of the high level trajectory planning, leaving just the real time control up to you. The hardest part is data collection.
- robotresearcher 2y ago
  That’s true for these research demos. How about for deployed robots that make money?
redfern314 2y ago
Also a firmware engineer. I see 4 career paths under the advent of AI: 1. If you can't beat em, join em - get a masters in ML or something and work at a higher level of the stack. I know several folks who have pivoted this way and are happy. 2. Double down - there will always be layers below the AI (drivers, silicon, etc). Sure, ChatGPT will continue chipping away at how much coding we do day to day, but at the end of the day, good luck to an AI trying to debug I2C bus clock stretching issues IRL. And you can bet that these robotic actuators have plenty of hardware issues to debug. 3. Pick an area of tech which is relatively immune (medical/automotive/aerospace) due to regulatory and other barriers to AI entry. You don't necessarily need robotics/CV experience to do this. 4. GTFO (I say this with no judgment) - and work in a different industry which is less likely to be automated. It would not be the most lucrative option but is certainly an option.

by fusslo 2y ago

mrkurt 2y ago

For what it's worth, I really appreciate your post.

joelthelion 2y ago

Even for AI engineers, the future is not necessarily bright. These approaches are so powerful and so general that the world is probably not going to need that many of them. I think where the real work will be is taking these models and creating real products out of them.

visarga 2y ago
I think you are right, the value is in application. If you have a problem to solve with AI, you benefit from AI. If you don't, you don't.. like any software. The AI providers get $20/month, you can get anything out of AI. Users have a much higher upside than AI developers and providers.

ethan_smith 2y ago

It definitely adds value to the conversation - we're all human, we're all unsure about the future and our place in it. I'm just scared about a future where humans (say the next generation, kids 1-5 years of age right now) lack in-depth knowledge of almost everything and it's mostly AI writing low-level code, so there are no more "human experts." We've already seen this happening where Gen Z mostly interacts with the world using phones and struggle with older operating systems/desktops, just like older generations. AI is going to make that 10x worse going forward.

n_ary 2y ago
> I'm just scared about a future where humans (say the next generation, kids 1-5 years of age right now) lack in-depth knowledge of almost everything and it's mostly AI writing low-level code, so there are no more "human experts." Isn’t that the ultimate goal?
- outworlder 2y ago
  It isn't. I mean, that depends on what "low level code" means. We have compilers so, to an extent, it's something desirable. But if "low level code" means everything we understand as code today, it may not be great. Human languages aren't precise enough for the kind of work that needs to be done. But let's say it's accomplished. What will end up happening is that AI (should it work to the extent it's been hyper) will replace all the 'fun' jobs and we'll be left with either no jobs (and no income), or the most menial physical labor imaginable.
  - djeastm 2y ago
    The physical labor will be for the robots in the video. We'll probably spend all day consuming media and socializing. Thats the optimistic view of course.
    - JFingleton 2y ago
      I have a million and one things I want to accomplish but can't due to lack of time and energy as I work full time. This includes reading, gardening, playing sports, learning to play the piano, etc. Of course some of that is consuming media, but I don't think people will just become couch potatoes. Think of all the things "high society" accomplished in Victorian england because they had the time, energy and resources.
- achierius 2y ago
  Why would it be? I can understand wanting us to be free of having to do the work, but having essentially no-one understand the systems they're using is something we haven't encountered once in the modern period. It feels more akin to the post-Roman Britons, who inherited the Empire's hydraulic infrastructure but not the know-how to fix it when things went wrong.

GardenLetter27 2y ago

At least robotics (and by extension, embedded development) is a growing field. I'd be more worried being a junior front-end mobile or web dev.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
schlauerfox 2y ago
I was at the SCaLE22x linux expo in Pasadena last week and there was a company Replit that has a tool where you type the website you like and it was pretty decent. They said someone came by and in a prompt alone created a GPDR compliant cookie popup. It's another tool, it wasn't perfect, but okay for some one-off sites. It will require skills to direct and know what you want, just like always. Embrace the power, know the limits. Let the new skills enabled by the new tools empower you, reject vendor lock-in to keep yourself free to ply your trade. Just like last time around.
- GardenLetter27 2y ago
  It's sad that the cookie popups are even necessary tbh. It's like we automate their creation, and the users automate hiding / clicking them.

nick3443 2y ago

Still have to architect, review, and debug AI code.

ost-ing 2y ago

I disagree, you are in a prime position to learn those technologies and have a greater breadth of opportunity. There is so much noise online, it’s all bullshit. Keep going!

ninetyninenine 2y ago

At least you're honest. I feel a lot of people (on HN esp) take pride in their programming ability and intelligence to the extent that they think there's no chance AI will take over their job. LLMs were a breakthough out of like a multitude of breakthroughs in AI in the past decade. I think there only needs to be a couple more breakthroughs in the next decade for it to come full circle. Whenever I here a naysayer open his mouth it's like he's insulting a baby. Look it can't talk! no way it can ever program! Either way it's not just you. The people creating AI are also as a side effect creating the training data for AI to replace them. So no one is safe.

n_ary 2y ago
When I see pro-AI promoters giving weird analogies that do not fit, I get a feeling that they are either management class(aka MBA types) or are not serious professionals. One key point we must first understand, coding is NOT software engineering or even programming! Writing code is the last bit, a minimal fraction of the job description(unless you are actually indie dev or working for consulting firms). The core tasks include actually untangling the numerous vague requirements, understanding the domain, figuring out best approaches, performing various tests and checks, validating ideas, figuring out a cost effective solution, preparing rough architecture, deciding on an actual set of tech, align a hoard of people that everyone is on the same page, then start coding. My IDE can already read my mind by auto-suggestion since many years and patterns/frameworks exist to reduce the amount of code I need to write. The issue is that, with these AI model, I just need to abuse my fingers slightly less. The other core duties are not yet solved and remains same archaic procedural everywhere in any/all serious roles. And speaking of consulting firms, they are also clever and often has several implementations of same stuff, which they can modify a bit and sell for big money. So in the end, people who jump into the pit because they are afraid of the juju mask are the prime target of the juju mask, for the rest of us, life goes on with minor bumps when the MBA comes to the desk and asks if it is possible to layoff few people to jack up the stock price this quarter yet… while subscribing to that new agenting engineer product suite for double the fees of what the laid off people actually costed, because their best friend in the golf club said the price will eventually become reasonable but the benefits are immediate.

n_ary 2y ago

Hey, this is not new. For me these are akin to a web dev building an ERP system vs another creative coder building beautiful motion graphics using same tech. While the ERP is boring as hell compared the the creative coding results, the latter is novelty and often has no intrinsic value. Also, I see these videos and get deja vu of boston dynamics demos from years back. Not seeing anything new here except this is just early beta version of boston dynamic robots backed by different models. Also amount of people around the demo set tells me, a lot of supervision and retakes happened. I often do not trust such demos(experience from seeing what goes behind the scene with cherry picked takes being published). Anyways, my point is, just chill out. I remember how AWS/GCP/Heroku etc were eradicating IT admin but instead now we have dedicated DevOps and IAM specialist roles… and every day I see 7:1 ratio of job vacancy for DevOps:SWE.

cglace 2y ago
This is the most level take I’ve seen.

rglover 2y ago

"Being left behind" is a floating point. If you think there's something you'd like to learn (or would be valuable to learn), just start digging in. Picking new things up usually takes far less time than you'd think, especially if you have existing experience in an even semi-related field.

renecito 2y ago

Get concerned when you see a real product in the market that has a sustainable business model. The man behind the curtain here has an army of engineers, unlimited cloud nodes and basically has harvested all the data currently available in the world. It doesn't get any better than this right now. What's next? They'll ping you later on Linked-in with this awesome idea that you need to make sure runs in a $1 USD microcontroller with a rechargeable battery that is supposed to last at least all day. The actual scary stuff is the dilution of expertise, we contributed for a long time to share our knowledge for internet points (stack overflow, open source projects, etc), and it has been harvested by the AIs already, anyone that pays access to these services for tens of dollars a month can bootstrap really quickly and do what it might had needed years of expertise before. It will dilute little by little our current service value, but you know what, it has always been like this forever, it is just faster. In the meantime, learn to automate the automator, that's the way to get ahead.

aperrien 2y ago
Man, we shared our knowledge via books long before the internet. And a lot of those AI models train off of thousands of books as a base before they try to incorporate less accurate knowledge from the wild internet. The cat was out of the bag on that long ago.
DebtDeflation 2y ago
I saw Musk saying a couple of days ago that we've "hit the limit of peak data" for training AI. My immediate reaction was no, surely you have not trained on every copyrighted textbook on every subject ever written. You hit the peak of easily accessible internet data that you could quickly steal to train your models.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- potatoman22 2y ago
  The 82TB Meta trained on is still a lot of textbooks.
- 2y ago

LZ_Khan 2y ago

I think we all share that feeling, even as a software engineer and I see AI writing 90% of my code for me.

piokoch 2y ago

No worries. You know the hard part: dealing with hardware. ML/AI/Comp Vis can be learned fairly quickly if you don't need to dig very deep into algorithms by yourself, but use some higher level libs like scikit-learn, pytorch, etc. The math, well, basic signal processing means you know some algebra and differential calculus. Which is enough, unless, again, you don't want to prove theorems or invent new algos.

whiplash451 2y ago

Let me bring some perspective. In 1998, CMU was showing a self-driving car "driving on its own" [1] 27 years later, 99.99% of trips are driven by humans. Real-world robotics takes multiple decades to pan out. These demos are just that: demos. What you are seeing will not remotely impact your life before the 2050's, if ever. What you should be worried about, however, is you (not your job) becoming irrelevant if you don't learn to write firmware using state-of-the-art AI tooling. At the minimum: learn to work with Cursor (or equivalent). Make sure you work at a company that uses state-of-the-art AI tooling. If you want to go further: learn to code (e.g. in python). Take undergrad/grad level courses in math, statistics and fundamentals of deep learning. And FFS, chill. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KMAAmkz9go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KMAAmkz9go

varjag 2y ago
The fellow develops firmware and does signal processing and you come back with "learn to code", really?

blibble 2y ago

if it's anything like their past "demos" it's all staged anyway

lallysingh 2y ago

It might be time to pick up some books and reading up on this stuff. What's nice is that you can directly ask ChatGPT/etc questions about all this tech, and the math behind it! It's never been an easier time to learn new things.

imtringued 2y ago

You might feel like this, but end to end learning in robotics has basically killed almost all of the high level trajectory planning, leaving just the real time control up to you. The hardest part is data collection.

robotresearcher 2y ago
That’s true for these research demos. How about for deployed robots that make money?

redfern314 2y ago

Also a firmware engineer. I see 4 career paths under the advent of AI: 1. If you can't beat em, join em - get a masters in ML or something and work at a higher level of the stack. I know several folks who have pivoted this way and are happy. 2. Double down - there will always be layers below the AI (drivers, silicon, etc). Sure, ChatGPT will continue chipping away at how much coding we do day to day, but at the end of the day, good luck to an AI trying to debug I2C bus clock stretching issues IRL. And you can bet that these robotic actuators have plenty of hardware issues to debug. 3. Pick an area of tech which is relatively immune (medical/automotive/aerospace) due to regulatory and other barriers to AI entry. You don't necessarily need robotics/CV experience to do this. 4. GTFO (I say this with no judgment) - and work in a different industry which is less likely to be automated. It would not be the most lucrative option but is certainly an option.