I don't know, maybe I am one of those "superstitious peasants from the dark ages who fear new tools", but I'm increasingly terrified of GPT-4 and future iterations of it as applied to the industry I work with (i.e. software). It does seem to threaten to suddenly eliminate all the interesting parts of the job, a good chunk of openings, and to significantly reduce salaries for the openings that remain - all at the same time, and rather suddenly.
In the past, when tools that significantly increased developer productivity emerged, like higher level languages (C, Java, Python), better IDEs, or better access to help (e.g. StackOverflow), the demand for more software has outpaced any decrease in demand for developers due to productivity improvements.
I'm not saying I know that's going to continue forever, but it might. If the cost to produce software goes down, the demand for software will increase. That's what has always happened, but maybe this time is different.
Everyone always thinks this time is different though, it's good to be skeptical of thoughts like that.
My take is that if you stay on the cutting edge and get good at using all kinds of tools with max productivity, you'll probably end up as the tractor driver rather than as an unemployed ox.
People in the textile industry were well paid and given a place to live at one point in history. Then the auto loom showed up and they were kicked to the street to starve. I wouldn't want to try to live in any major US city on a blue collar salary.
Maybe one day AI will allow completely unskilled laypeople, ignorant of software, to build and deploy software end to end with no involvement from any software engineers, testers, SREs, anything. That would be the power loom of our time - the power loom allowed unskilled workers to completely replace skilled hand loom weavers with no drop in quality of output.
When that's possible, the world will be very different. Right at this moment, AI is still useless for unskilled workers trying to write software, it's just a productivity multiplier for skilled engineers.
This isn't an all-or-none scenario. It's not like all textile factories got auto-looms and the labor market collapsed overnight. Tools will improve, productivity will improve, and the demand for software development as a specialty will wane dramatically. Making simple tools using prompts will no longer require knowledge of data structures and algorithms, efficiency, networking, or anything else we get paid to know, and over time will shift to something white collar workers put on their resume next to MS Office. A tiny handful of specialist engineers will control development, and software creation as a commodity will essentially be automated. We will feel the impact of these changes LONG before that process is complete.
> When that's possible, the world will be very different. Right at this moment, AI is still useless for unskilled workers trying to write software, it's just a productivity multiplier for skilled engineers.
Depends on the software, and how much mediocrity the end user is willing to put up with.
A trivial prompt can spit out a web page with functioning JavaScript for a mediocre-but-playable version of Pong.
This may not be of interest to us, but our standards are not necessarily shared by normal people: in the wild, I've seen websites where the thumbnails were all loaded as full-sized images and merely displayed smaller, bottles on supermarket shelves whose labels had easily visible pixelation and JPEG artefacts.
Infamously, there's a lot of stuff done in Excel that really shouldn't be. Some genes had to be renamed because scientists kept using Excel, and Excel kept interpreting the gene's names as dates.
I get SMSes whose sender ID has obviously involved someone somewhere trying to record phone numbers as floats.
Even in places with high standards, the UI of the Calculator app on iOS still gets confused if I tap buttons too fast (before animations finish playing?).
Do you want to listen to a 10 brand new songs by 10 brand new artists using generative AI, or do you want to listen to 10 brand new Taylor Swift songs (that were created with the help of generative AI)?
While some people will be able to leverage this to good effect, I fear the established have much more to gain in this new world…
This, and also every textile worker didn't have an auto loom in their pockets, or a lawyer, or an accountant, or a copywriter....I mean who will be left besides leadership teams??
It’s funny you’re using “blue collar” to mean low skilled probably things like retail cashiers, but folks in trades actually make very livable wages in the US.
For me the interesting job in software is designing architecture and implementing complex things. Automation with tools like this is not remotely there and to some extent probably won't be because we're often talking about human preferences and subjective design choices. Gpt4 in software is Intellisense++ right now, it provides code snippets for things you want to do, it's just raising the bar of abstraction, not replacing the designer.
On the second point, I actually think my salary is inflated and we'd be in the dark ages if I took that for a reason to hamper technology. Not only am I not just a developer of software but also a consumer, so I benefit directly, but more importantly so does everyone else. If everyone operated on that logic I'd still pay 20 bucks for a potato and a hundred for a hammer.
Let's be real the entire point of software is to replace labor. The software industry has done it to many sectors of the economy and called it progress. Which it is. We have no right to start complaining now.
> For me the interesting job in software is designing architecture and implementing complex things. Automation with tools like this is not remotely there and to some extent probably won't be because we're often talking about human preferences and subjective design choices. Gpt4 in software is Intellisense++ right now, it provides code snippets for things you want to do, it's just raising the bar of abstraction, not replacing the designer.
It's not a code writer though, that's not its sole trained task. Why do you think it's going to have a drastically harder time doing the fuzzier higher level work? Human preference and subjective work has a wider acceptance of solutions.
I can have it write abstracts and works of fiction and songs. It wrote a great kids song about bumlollies and their terrible flavour, explained syncitial nuclear aggregates to a lay audience as a jaunty pirate and created ember templates in our custom framework. Have you tried it with any architecture questions?
> Let's be real the entire point of software is to replace labor. The software industry has done it to many sectors of the economy and called it progress. Which it is. We have no right to start complaining now.
It's totally fine IMO to have the views that it's big and scary for me and also good for humanity.
We already know capitalism is rotten… but we don’t care because it gives us the opportunity (real or not) to be the one on top standing on a mountain of bodies, basking in the glow of our delusional, narcissistic sense of entitlement.
You are absolutely right. The myth that automation does not replace Jobs is just that, a myth.
Huge numbers were left unemployed with industrial automation in the US and left unemployable. The technical term is structural unemployment. All it means is you cant retrain 10,000 factory workers to be front end developers, and that even If they find a job its often not as well paid.
The two greatest myths of modern capitalism are that free markets are good for everyone (they're not) and that automation doesnt lead to unemployment. Any reasonable assessment of the data will show both of these to be clearly false.
> All it means is you cant retrain 10,000 factory workers to be front end developers, and that even If they find a job its often not as well paid.
An important effect is the speed of change - it _might_ be possible to train the next generation such as those who would have been factory workers become front end developers, but it's an entirely different challenge to take actual factory workers and train them for another job. That is to say, even if in the long run automation doesn't lead to unemployment, the short term effect may be quite different.
Well I put my foot in my mouth here and apologize for insulting any uncertainty; these are new technologies so uncertainty is normal of course. In retrospect I tend to communicate things online in a much more careless way
I'm in a similar boat. I'm currently building setups to have GPT-n write code, and it's surprising how good it really is, and in such a short space of time.
Like Covid, it will change the world very fast. Talk to your representative about it.
As an example, I wont code at work anymore, I chatgpt all day. Just like that, overnight. And my productivity went 10x - though i was already 10x more productive than you.> What should have taken 1 week takes 1 day, sometimes less (it's new software im working on).
I would only code if I was doing great software, that is, for myself, we dont do that at work.
It's gonna build tension silently and then release: capital will be massively reallocated - that moment will be tsunami. Talk to your representative.
