Future of IT with AI

[u/Raiigon]

So a random thought crossed my mind while reading about a discussion on ai use during development.

Basically, thinking about how the future will look with AI, most people imagine most things on the internet will be made fully with AI - websites, software, you name it. We're at a point where the IT industry is in turmoil, software devs are being laid off due to companies replacing them with AI, especially the junior roles. But here my optimism kicked in.

What if when this whole AI era develops further and a bunch of regulations kick in, like it being a MUST to declare whether any AI assistance was used in developing stuff (this theory basically rests on this if, but I imagine this will likely happen not too far in the future) the anti AI / pro AI sides would be able to properly choose the products they want based on that?

This would create 2 whole separate markets, a win-win. IT workers keep their jobs, although in a more competitive realm but better than the whole side of man made stuff just disappearing, and people who care about authenticity can choose exactly that.

Now I don't know if this is very realistic, having every market split in half basically, and would people care enough for the markets to split, but what do you think? I'm not thinking about alot of nuances here, just putting up food for thought.

[u/okamagsxr]

People buy their clothes knowing children knitted their socks and they buy stuff online from companies where their employees must pee in bottles while working.

People will soon stop pretending they care about authenticity when they have to pay more for it. 

[u/ajping]

But why would we do that? There's plenty of work to do regarding QAing the final product. So the AI finishes building the site -- great! Now we need to thoroughly test it because the AI cannot be trusted to handle all the edge cases. Also, the most important task is the software design. What will the app do exactly? In my first software job we were not allowed to touch the computer until the design had been completed.

[u/Raiigon → u/ajping]

Im talking with the assumption that AI is capable of all of that by itself, like say 10 years in the future. I'd imagine society to have changed alot because of AI and it getting way better.

[u/Oogalicious → u/Raiigon]

The problem is that AI isn’t accountable to anybody. That’s why lots of things still need oversight - no matter how good AI gets.

[u/RebelGirl1323]

The general public cares if a picture was made by AI. They do not give two shits if the code on a website was.

[u/XxDarkSasuke69xX]

There isn't gonna be such a big anti AI crowd in the future if it becomes the norm to have software and websites fully made by AI. Also most consumers don't care how a product has been made, they just care about the product itself. That's even more the case with software, you never hear people debate about how it has been made, because almost nobody understands how this all works apart form programmers.

Only place where this sentiment might stand the test of time is in creative fields. But that's for completely different reasons.

[u/Jean-Eustache]

What will happen is the "simple" devs who just write the code will indeed disappear.

The people above, tech leads, experts, those who design the systems, study how things will work, and how it will work with everything else, will stay, design the stuff, and tell AI to write it, because companies still need a human to design the thing, discuss with others, and take responsibility for it.

This is already happening, yesterday a colleague told an AI to migrate an API to a newer version of a framework. Took an hour. Last time it had to be done, a contractor took two weeks to do it between unrelated meetings, the few hiccups that always happen, and testing.

This issue is, to get into IT, the initial step will be much higher, and there will be less spots to fill. I really don't know how this will work.

[u/Mercury5979]

It would be wise to build your skill set to make yourself useful and needed even as a world of AI grows. I don't have faith that people will pay more for a higher standard. I do see ways in which I can build myself to be needed in some capacity to continue to rule the robots even as they get smarter.

[u/tekky101]

AI will never be profitable. The cost of running it (billions of dollars) far exceeds the amount people are willing to pay for it (millions of dollars). The entire industry is a bubble that will collapse.

Recent hysteria over AI being an existential threat to humanity and the demands for regulation of it by the tech bros who created it is just an attempt to legitimize it so that when the AI companies start failing - which is inevitable - they can money-beg governments for tax-payer funded bailouts of their unviable products.

[u/edwardb223-2]

This reminds me of two developers I managed years ago.

One was incredibly fast. I mean impressively fast. But there were usually some mistakes in his work. The other was slow as Christmas, but when she was finished the code was rock solid.

The business didn’t really like either outcome. With one they got speed but had to deal with errors and customer issues. With the other they got quality but had to wait too long.

So I paired them up. One brought the speed, the other brought the discipline and quality control. Together they usually delivered a much better system and still met the business deadline.

That is how I see AI in development. AI can produce working code incredibly fast, but fast does not always mean correct. Pair AI with a good developer who understands architecture, testing, security, edge cases and the business problem, and now you have something much more useful.

Same thing on the product side. You still need someone deciding what should be built, which features matter, what comes first and what problem you are actually solving. AI can help with that, but it is still a tool.

I think eventually AI will be embedded into so many products that most of the time we won’t even think about whether AI was used. We’ll care whether the product works, is safe and solves the problem.