4 ms·

My question is kind of in this brave new world, where do the domain experts come from? Whose going to know this stuff?

by donatj 1y ago

mock-possum 1y ago
Same place the previous generation came from - college courses, DIY hackers, and learn-on-the-job training and apprenticeships. Why would that change?
maegul 1y ago
This, for me, has been the question since the beginning. I’m yet to see anyone talk/think about the issue head on too. And whenever I’ve asked someone about it, they’ve not had any substantial thoughts.
- PUSH_AX 1y ago
  Engineers will still exist and people will vibe code all kinds of things into existence. Some will break in spectacular ways, some of those projects will die, some will hire a real engineer to fix things. I cannot see us living in a world of ignorance where there are literally zero engineers and no one on the planet understands what's been generated. Weirdly we could end up in a place where engineering skills are niche and extremely lucrative.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
shswkna 1y ago
Most important question on this entire topic. Fast forward 30 years and modern civilisation is entirely dependent on our AI’s. Will deep insight and innovation from a human perspective perhaps come to a stop?
- qzw 1y ago
  No, but it'll become a hobby or artistic pursuit, just like running, playing chess, or blacksmithing. But I personally think it's going to take longer than 30 years.
- Earw0rm 1y ago
  No. Even with power tools, construction and joinery are physical work and require strength and skill. What is new is that you'll need the wisdom to figure out when the tool can do the whole job, and where you need to intervene and supervise it closely. So humans won't be doing any less thinking, rather they'll be putting their thinking to work in better ways.
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    to use your own example though, many of these core skills are declining, mechanized or viewed through a historical lens vs. application. I don't know if this is net good or bad, but it is very different. Maybe humans will think as you say, but it feels like there will be significantly less diverse areas of thought. If you look at the front page of HN as a snapshot of "where's tech these days" it is very homgenous compared to the past. Same goes for the general internet and the AI-content continues to grow. IMO published works are a precursor to future human discovery, forming the basis of knowledge, community and growth.
- brookst 1y ago
  Did musical creativity end with synths and sequencers? Tools will only amplify human skills. Sure, not everyone will choose to use tools for anything meaningful, but those people are driving human insight and innovation today anyway.
svara 1y ago
LLMs make learning new material easier than ever. I use them a lot and I am learning new things at an insane pace in different domains. The maximalists and skeptics both are confusing the debate by setting up this straw man that people will be delegating to LLMs blindly. The idea that someone clueless about OAuth should develop an OAuth lib with LLM support without learning a lot about the topic is... Just wrong. Don't do that. But if you're willing to learn, this is rocket fuel.
- junon 1y ago
  On the flip side, I wanted to see what common 8 layer PCB stackups were yesterday. ChatGPT wasn't giving me an answer that really made sense. After googling a bit, I realized almost all of the top results were AI generated, and also had very little in the way of real experience or advice. It was extremely frustrating.
  - roxolotl 1y ago
    This is my big fear. We’re going to end up in a world where information that isn’t common is significantly more difficult to find than it is today.
    - andersa 1y ago
      It's going to be like the pre-internet dark ages, but worse. Back then you only didn't find the information. Now, you find unlimited information, but it is all wrong.
      - svara 1y ago
        I don't know, this sounds a lot like in the late 90s when we heard a lot about how anyone could put information on the internet and that you shouldn't trust what you read online. Well it turns out you can manage just fine. You shouldn't blindly trust anything. Not what you read, not what people say. Using LLMs effectively is a skill too, and that does involve deciding when and how to verify information.
kypro 1y ago
In a few years hopefully the AI reviewers will be far more reliable than even the best human experts. This is generally how competency progresses in AI... For example, at one point a human + computer would have been the strongest combo in chess, now you'd be insane to allow a human to critic a chess bot because they're so unlikely to add value, and statistically a human in the loop would be far more likely to introduce error. Similar things can be said in fields like machine vision, etc. Software is about to become much higher quality and be written at much, much lower cost.
- sarchertech 1y ago
  My prediction is that for that to happen we’ll need to figure out a way to measure software quality in the way we can measure a chess game, so that we can use synthetic data to continue improving the models. I don’t think we are anywhere close to doing that.
  - kypro 1y ago
    Not really... If you're an average company you're not concerned about producing perfect software, but optimising for some balance between cost and quality. At some point companies via capitalist forces will naturally realise that it's more productive to not have humans in the loop. A good analogy might be how machines gradually replaced textile workers in the 19th century. Were the machines better? Or was there a was to quantitatively measure the quality of their output? No. But at the end of the day companies which embraced the technology were more productive than those who didn't, and the quality didn't decrease enough (if it did at all) that customers would no longer do business with them – so these companies won out. The same will naturally happen in software over the next few years. You'd be an moron to hire a human expert for $200,000 to critic a cybersecurity optimised model which costs maybe a 100th of the cost of employing a human... And this would likely be true even if we assume the human will catch the odd thing the model wouldn't because there's no such thing as perfect security – it's always a trade off between cost and acceptable risk. Bookmark this and come back in a few years. I made similar predictions when ChatGPT first came out that within a few years agents would be picking up tickets and raising PRs. Everyone said LLMs were just stochastic parrots and this would not happen, well now it has and increasingly companies are writing more and more code with AI. At my company it's a little over 50% at the mo, but this is increasing every month.
risyachka 1y ago
Use it or lose it. Experts will become those who use llm to learn and not to write code for them or solve tasks for them so they can build that skill.
paradox242 1y ago
The implication is that they are hoping to bridge the gap between current AI capabilities and something more like AGI in the time it takes the senior engineers to leave the industry. At least, that's the best I can come up with, because they are kicking out all of the bottom rings of the ladder here in what otherwise seems like a very shortsighted move.

My question is kind of in this brave new world, where do the domain experts come from? Whose going to know this stuff?

by donatj 1y ago

My question is kind of in this brave new world, where do the domain experts come from? Whose going to know this stuff?

Same place the previous generation came from - college courses, DIY hackers, and learn-on-the-job training and apprenticeships. Why would that change?

maegul 1y ago

This, for me, has been the question since the beginning. I’m yet to see anyone talk/think about the issue head on too. And whenever I’ve asked someone about it, they’ve not had any substantial thoughts.

PUSH_AX 1y ago
Engineers will still exist and people will vibe code all kinds of things into existence. Some will break in spectacular ways, some of those projects will die, some will hire a real engineer to fix things. I cannot see us living in a world of ignorance where there are literally zero engineers and no one on the planet understands what's been generated. Weirdly we could end up in a place where engineering skills are niche and extremely lucrative.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

shswkna 1y ago

Most important question on this entire topic. Fast forward 30 years and modern civilisation is entirely dependent on our AI’s. Will deep insight and innovation from a human perspective perhaps come to a stop?

qzw 1y ago
No, but it'll become a hobby or artistic pursuit, just like running, playing chess, or blacksmithing. But I personally think it's going to take longer than 30 years.
Earw0rm 1y ago
No. Even with power tools, construction and joinery are physical work and require strength and skill. What is new is that you'll need the wisdom to figure out when the tool can do the whole job, and where you need to intervene and supervise it closely. So humans won't be doing any less thinking, rather they'll be putting their thinking to work in better ways.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  to use your own example though, many of these core skills are declining, mechanized or viewed through a historical lens vs. application. I don't know if this is net good or bad, but it is very different. Maybe humans will think as you say, but it feels like there will be significantly less diverse areas of thought. If you look at the front page of HN as a snapshot of "where's tech these days" it is very homgenous compared to the past. Same goes for the general internet and the AI-content continues to grow. IMO published works are a precursor to future human discovery, forming the basis of knowledge, community and growth.
brookst 1y ago
Did musical creativity end with synths and sequencers? Tools will only amplify human skills. Sure, not everyone will choose to use tools for anything meaningful, but those people are driving human insight and innovation today anyway.

svara 1y ago

LLMs make learning new material easier than ever. I use them a lot and I am learning new things at an insane pace in different domains. The maximalists and skeptics both are confusing the debate by setting up this straw man that people will be delegating to LLMs blindly. The idea that someone clueless about OAuth should develop an OAuth lib with LLM support without learning a lot about the topic is... Just wrong. Don't do that. But if you're willing to learn, this is rocket fuel.

junon 1y ago
On the flip side, I wanted to see what common 8 layer PCB stackups were yesterday. ChatGPT wasn't giving me an answer that really made sense. After googling a bit, I realized almost all of the top results were AI generated, and also had very little in the way of real experience or advice. It was extremely frustrating.
- roxolotl 1y ago
  This is my big fear. We’re going to end up in a world where information that isn’t common is significantly more difficult to find than it is today.
  - andersa 1y ago
    It's going to be like the pre-internet dark ages, but worse. Back then you only didn't find the information. Now, you find unlimited information, but it is all wrong.
    - svara 1y ago
      I don't know, this sounds a lot like in the late 90s when we heard a lot about how anyone could put information on the internet and that you shouldn't trust what you read online. Well it turns out you can manage just fine. You shouldn't blindly trust anything. Not what you read, not what people say. Using LLMs effectively is a skill too, and that does involve deciding when and how to verify information.

kypro 1y ago

In a few years hopefully the AI reviewers will be far more reliable than even the best human experts. This is generally how competency progresses in AI... For example, at one point a human + computer would have been the strongest combo in chess, now you'd be insane to allow a human to critic a chess bot because they're so unlikely to add value, and statistically a human in the loop would be far more likely to introduce error. Similar things can be said in fields like machine vision, etc. Software is about to become much higher quality and be written at much, much lower cost.

sarchertech 1y ago
My prediction is that for that to happen we’ll need to figure out a way to measure software quality in the way we can measure a chess game, so that we can use synthetic data to continue improving the models. I don’t think we are anywhere close to doing that.
- kypro 1y ago
  Not really... If you're an average company you're not concerned about producing perfect software, but optimising for some balance between cost and quality. At some point companies via capitalist forces will naturally realise that it's more productive to not have humans in the loop. A good analogy might be how machines gradually replaced textile workers in the 19th century. Were the machines better? Or was there a was to quantitatively measure the quality of their output? No. But at the end of the day companies which embraced the technology were more productive than those who didn't, and the quality didn't decrease enough (if it did at all) that customers would no longer do business with them – so these companies won out. The same will naturally happen in software over the next few years. You'd be an moron to hire a human expert for $200,000 to critic a cybersecurity optimised model which costs maybe a 100th of the cost of employing a human... And this would likely be true even if we assume the human will catch the odd thing the model wouldn't because there's no such thing as perfect security – it's always a trade off between cost and acceptable risk. Bookmark this and come back in a few years. I made similar predictions when ChatGPT first came out that within a few years agents would be picking up tickets and raising PRs. Everyone said LLMs were just stochastic parrots and this would not happen, well now it has and increasingly companies are writing more and more code with AI. At my company it's a little over 50% at the mo, but this is increasing every month.

risyachka 1y ago

Use it or lose it. Experts will become those who use llm to learn and not to write code for them or solve tasks for them so they can build that skill.

paradox242 1y ago

The implication is that they are hoping to bridge the gap between current AI capabilities and something more like AGI in the time it takes the senior engineers to leave the industry. At least, that's the best I can come up with, because they are kicking out all of the bottom rings of the ladder here in what otherwise seems like a very shortsighted move.