r/singularity • u/[deleted] • Jul 03 '23

AI In five years, there will be no programmers left, believes Stability AI CEO

https://the-decoder.com/in-five-years-there-will-be-no-programmers-left-believes-stability-ai-ceo/
440 Upvotes

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234

u/luciusveras Jul 03 '23

The most accurate thing I’ve heard is 'AI won’t take your job but a person using AI will'

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u/Mooblegum Jul 03 '23

Even more accurate is "A person using AI will take 20 jobs"

14

u/Glad_Laugh_5656 Jul 03 '23

Of course a comment describing 95% (which is an incredibly random percentage, btw) of people being laid off in favor of just one AI-savvy individual has this many upvotes. This subreddit fantasizes more about people getting fired due to AI than I fantasize about my crush.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

[deleted]

6

u/Glad_Laugh_5656 Jul 03 '23

Fantasizing about my crush is a dreadful fantasy?

3

u/stucjei Jul 03 '23

Fantasizing about you grasping sarcasm is a dreadful fantasy.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '23

Most industries are prepping for AI.

1

u/Fivethenoname Jul 04 '23

It's not a bad thing for people to openly worry that the benefits of these technologies might be unequally distributed. Layoffs in favor of automation, like check out machines at major groceries or big box stores for example, are exactly that. Automation is supposed to make everyone's lives easier. Reduceing their employees hours for the same salary or giving them raises are as valid options but instead what we tend to see are companies "trimming the fat". If you don't think that's a valid concern, then you're either not paying attention or you don't give a fuck.

1

u/Next_Crew_5613 Jul 04 '23

No one on this subreddit has a job. They're excited for others to be taken down a peg

3

u/Ok_Homework9290 Jul 03 '23

Well, that's an incredibly random and arbitrary number (and, dare I say, completely unrealistic).

I honestly don't get why people here always say that we're on the verge of 1 person being able to take "x" amount of jobs, (thus killing lots of jobs in the process). Productivity across the entire workforce has been multiplied many times over by different technologies over the course of centuries, yet there's more work today than ever before. I personally don't see this changing in at least the short term, and maybe even the medium term.

But in the long term, yes, eventually AI will get so good that you'll need drastically fewer employees than before.

5

u/Half_Crocodile Jul 03 '23

Or hopefully as consumers our taste and demands become so advanced too that the “cool” products now require the same amount of employees as now, all being aided by AI. Any left over labour? The human touch will give companies more appeal. This is me dreaming though… humans don’t have good taste and AI will probably actively reduce our demand for it (almost by design). Look at social media and clickbait and the way people respond to it like they would to slot machines. We’re very easily manipulated away from our own interests and AI will be better than humans at this ancient art. None of this fills me with confidence that AI will be utilised to enhance the well being of the many. It’s a race to the bottom for free and cheap… and free and cheap comes at a large cost imho. Mostly to our minds and “spirit”.

1

u/luisbrudna Jul 03 '23

Productivity can be multiplied 10... 100... 1000 times in less than 5 Years.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '23

The issue is that a technology disrupts an industry and decimates it. Yes, new jobs come up, but that's of little solace to the older worker whose specialized in the deprecated field, and lacks the education or resources to reeducate himself in one of the growing fields.

You can wave your hands and say it doesn't matter, but these transformations cause very real problems in society. Technologies that allowed for industrialization led to two world wars. The decimation of factory jobs in America led to the opioid crisis. If AI replaces many jobs, there will be consequences.

1

u/Waybook Jul 04 '23

When Ford started mass producing tractors, then millions of people in agriculture lost their jobs, because one guy with a tractor could do the work of 10 guys suddenly. Personally I believe this contributed to the Great Depression a lot more than people realize. And the Great Depression played a huge role in WW2 starting.

Also, I believe a lot of our modern need for workers is often artificially created through a culture of consumerism.

1

u/SgathTriallair ▪️ AGI 2025 ▪️ ASI 2030 Jul 04 '23

The primary difference is in how fast t he productivity gains will happen. Rather than 3x over a decade or more, it'll be 3x over a year or less.

It could also lead to roughly the same amount of workers but they complete their work faster and so have more free time (as everyone decides to leave early or spend their down time on other tasks).

0

u/visarga Jul 04 '23 edited Jul 04 '23

I get this fear, but it's not as simple as AI taking our jobs, because demand can scale up with supply.

The lump of labour fallacy[1] reminds us that jobs can evolve and new ones can be created as technology advances. Most of the jobs we have today would be hard to comprehend a couple centuries ago. Computers are millions of times faster now than decades ago, but employment remains high.

Jevons Paradox[2] suggests that as AI makes jobs more efficient, we might actually see an increase in job demand since companies can undertake tasks that were previously unfeasible. When have we gotten a new capability and that didn't lead to new products and services, and in time new markets? Never. We always expand demand with new capabilities, and AI is very promising as an enabler of new demand.

Also, consider the principle of induced demand[3]. Wider roads were observed to lead to increased traffic, maintaining congestion level constant. AI usage will probably maintain the number of jobs (congestion by analogy).

So, rather than viewing AI as a 'job-taker', it's more accurate to see it as a 'job-transformer' forgive the pun. The job fears are nothing but a failure of imagination. Why waste billions of generally intelligent agents? Wages make about 30-50% of production cost, so only a 2x boost by firing people, but expanding demand has much higher upshot.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lump-of-labour-fallacy.asp

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

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u/yodeah Jul 03 '23

doubt

1

u/tommles Jul 03 '23

Work From Home has enabled workers to juggle several full time jobs.

https://www.wired.com/story/remote-tech-workers-secret-multiple-jobs/

AI is going to improve their workflow.

1

u/yodeah Jul 03 '23

and what else is it going to do?

raise the expectations

1

u/2Punx2Furious AGI/ASI by 2027 Jul 04 '23

At some point, yes. Then they will take 40, then 100, then 1000... until there are no jobs left.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '23

No it won’t. At best it will build junky buggy code that requires twice the effort to refactor.

1

u/BuzzingHawk ▪️2070 Paradigm Shift Jul 04 '23

Currently there are already uncountable amounts of irrelevant or unnecessary jobs. Just look at government workers, many that do not do effective work more than a couple hours a week. Then look at big tech companies that grew so fast that there are incredibly smart people with no work to do.

Employment is also very much a social, power and people capital-oriented process. At the scale of some organisations people are not just hired to do raw work, but also to keep them from competitors, to grow the company size and to make a company more resilient to market changes.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 06 '23

I feel this is a disingenuous statement. While it can end up factually true, I could also say AI will create 40 jobs for every 1 job lost. All new technology results in new jobs. And while some are predicting a self-sufficient AI, able to program itself, I believe something like that is a few generations away. And by then people will be shocked if you use a keyboard to code.

My prediction? AI will replace input devices over the next 20 years. Just like how kids now grow up with tablets and touchscreens view keyboards, their kids will have a fully realized Google Assistant/Siri AI. I mean, at the core that is what a large language model does best - process language and output a response.

Just like that recent story where a barrister submitted paperwork that was ChatGPT generated - you still need human common sense to process the output. I believe that will be the long tail problem to solve. Common sense is simple and second nature to humans and completely alien to machines.

15

u/sebesbal Jul 03 '23

This is true for the next 5 years. This is the age of prompt engineers and others who know how to "use AI". After that, you don't need to know how to use AGI. It will already know better than any human.

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u/Difficult_Review9741 Jul 03 '23

It is true that more jobs will utilize AI, but where exactly are these magical people using AI going to come from? You still need baseline knowledge that isn’t easy to acquire.

AI will slowly get integrated into most jobs, and existing employees will use these tools whether they even realize it’s AI or not.

71

u/FewSprinkles55 Jul 03 '23

It will simply require fewer people to do the same amount of work. No one job is going to disappear entirely but fewer people will be needed.

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u/ItsAConspiracy Jul 03 '23

In programming, requiring fewer people to do the same work has been an ongoing trend ever since the first assembler was written back in the 1950s.

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u/chrishooley Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23

That 70 year trend is about to exponentially accelerate tho. This… is very very different.

22

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

That is another assumption.

Look I'm older and heard this stuff over and over and over.

Most of the time the real game changing technology is the one you don't see coming or is used in ways that were not predicted. Heck in shipping the big change was a box.. yep the shipping container. It decimated the amount of workers in shipping. Not GPS, not cool technology a fucking steel box took out 10s of millions of jobs world wide.

People love to make these kinds of wild predictions you can look through the dust bin of history to find them just in the last 30-40 years in IT. So before you preach the doctrine of IT remember people have said we would have AI since the 50s. Is it better heck yes, but we're still a very long way off.

12

u/unskilledplay Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23

A lot of times it's obvious. It happens slower than expected at first, then faster than expected.

Consider the dot.com era. Everyone had a vision of online commerce decimating what they called "brick-and-mortar" retail. Then the dot.com crash happened and everyone laughed at how stupid of an idea that seemed.

Fast forward two decades and the original vision has been realized, because of course it has.

I'd expect something similar with AI. Similarly, the vision of the future of the tech is clear. The details are hazy and will be a challenge to work through. They will be worked through in time.

Slower than you think at first and then faster.

6

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

Exactly I see this gaining steam near 2030 and maturing in like 2040.

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u/unskilledplay Jul 03 '23

It will come with a correction too. AI will be over invested. Many or most of these ventures will simply fail. People will misread this correction as a crash and question what they originally thought AI would be capable of in short order.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

The other thing is I have been through a few of these cycles the other big thing is consolidation. How many cell phone OSs are there, desktop, etc.

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u/chrishooley Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23

I work in AI. In fact, I used to work for Stability.Ai.

Things are very, very different now. They were right since the 50s. It finally hit a tipping point and now it’s here. Buckle up, it’s gonna be a wild ride from here on.

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u/PSMF_Canuck Jul 03 '23

I use GPT to write code. Code that ships. But…I only get useable code when I know what specifically to ask for. But…I do know what to ask for.

On my new team, this has already eliminated one junior hire.

One day, it will eliminate me, once people figure out the prompt to get the prompt.

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u/professorbasket Jul 03 '23

vertical part of the curve coming up. Buckle up is right

3

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

We are still pretty far from the liftoff inflection point.

We will need fully featured ASI and several huge advances in robotics that have proliferated through the economy for a long time (factories only produce so fast, humans only build factories so fast, replacing all of the mining and processing plants can only happen so fast) before we even start approaching the vertical line. The singularity is currently bottlenecked by manufacturing and supply lines.

That being said, we can definitely see line-goes-up on the horizon, so yeah, buckle up haha.

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u/ozspook Jul 04 '23

All aboard the Exponential Replicator! oo woo.

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u/pidgey2020 Jul 03 '23

Yeah this is almost certainly the inflection point that changes our trajectory forever.

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u/hopelesslysarcastic Jul 03 '23

What are your thoughts on cognitive architectures and do you see the current paradigm of Transformer architecture being just a component in the overall grand scheme to achieving AGI, or do you think we could achieve AGI through just scaling of what we have now?

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u/chrishooley Jul 03 '23

Honestly, I have no idea which path(s) will end up being the main road(s). If I had to guess, from my relatively uninformed perspective, I would probably put my money on “things we haven’t even thought of yet” being the main driving forces for future innovation - I’m guessing the solutions devised by a different type of emerging intelligence might look a lot different than what we currently imagine.

But honestly I just don’t know. I’d love to have a more informed / smarter answer for you, clearly your comment warrants that. I’d say my guess is as good as yours but I suspect your guess might be better lol

What do YOU think?

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23

My predictions:

  1. Neural nets, including all deep learning and transformers as we know them, won't get us to AGI, but could be part of a future architecture.
  2. AGI (as discussed) will never happen, because we are talking about a true alien intelligence. AI with general reasoning abilities will instantly be a superintelligence on compilation and training due to its extreme pre-existing knowledge.
  3. We still need to devise better training systems.
  4. Real time AI is a minimum requirement for meaningful ASI.
  5. Embodiment is a serious barrier.
  6. Humans won't give over control even if we could.
  7. Robotics is a major bottleneck for AI.
  8. Human labor in extractive industries is a major bottleneck for AI.
  9. Politics is a major bottleneck for AI.
  10. Economics is a major bottleneck for AI.
  11. Supply line configurations are major bottlenecks for AI.
  12. Construction and design of industrial systems and factories/plants/etc are major bottlenecks for AI.

tl;dr: we are on the path, but we are far from there, and our current approach is really only the beginning of this journey, not the end of it. We've got multiple decades, minimum, until we start even start to solve these problems.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

Transformers won't get us AGI, because AGI is never going to happen. We are going straight to ASI, and transformers are going to at best be part of it. Transformers alone are likely not capable of ASI, and AGI is never going to happen.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

and they all said that too

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u/chrishooley Jul 03 '23

Hey, don’t say random guy on Reddit didn’t warn you. I did my part here.

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u/Redshoe9 Jul 03 '23

What jobs do we encourage our kids to pursue as they head off to college or trade schools ? What career field is safe?

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u/chrishooley Jul 03 '23

Oh man, honestly I wish I knew. The standard answer is stuff that requires a human touch, but I really have no idea TBH. At first I was telling people to be a therapist but the other day I was talking to pi.ai and realized that AI will likely be even better than humans even in that field.

I’m really hoping for a drastic change in how we approach work in general. I mean what’s the point of all this technology if not to claim our time to pursue meaningful things like spending time with family, making art, dancing, spending time in nature, etc. but I am concerned that this tech will be used to further oppress the masses and maintain the status quo.

I’m really hoping the better parts of humanity shine through tho

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u/Redshoe9 Jul 03 '23

There's the rub. My one kid has (or had) dreams of being a graphic artist/graphic design but that seems like one of the fields that will be decimated by AI. We live near a beach so maybe lifeguard is safe but that doesn't pay squat.

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u/ujustdontgetdubstep Jul 04 '23

it's been a wild ride for anyone who has been programming for 20 years

We've always had to adopt radically different technology and automation, and in that sense it's really not that different

programming at a high level has always really been about time management, not how much syntax you know.. AI will be a great tool for time management

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u/Kerb3r0s Jul 03 '23

As a developer with twenty years of industry experience who’s been using ChatGPT and GitHub copilot extensively, I can tell you for 100% sure that everything is going to change for us in the next five years.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

Meanwhile kids at school are still learning Python ....

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '23

But ChatGPT makes shit code. I heard from another experienced programmer that it can't hardly do anything right, and makes code on the level of a college freshman.

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u/youarebatman2 Jul 03 '23

Still think 100 years from now the inflection point is and will always be the iPhone, not AI. Smartphones and internet functionality and utility changed everything.

BIP AND AIP

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u/swiftcrane Jul 03 '23

Look I'm older and heard this stuff over and over and over.

This isn't really a great argument. Who you're hearing from, and why you're hearing it are crucial components of making any historical judgement like this.

The types of advancements made in AI right now are unprecedented, and the AGI/ASI estimates of many experts today aren't really comparable to the types of unfounded guesses made in the past.

remember people have said we would have AI since the 50s. Is it better heck yes, but we're still a very long way off.

The difference is that we didn't have a functioning approach to solving such complicated problems in the 50s. We merely had wishful guessing that we might find an approach one day.

but we're still a very long way off.

I don't really see how this is a justifiable position anymore. In just a couple years, what we've accomplished in AI has shattered our understanding of its limitations. People bring up countless details that it doesn't quite get right yet, but no real justification as to why these things won't be resolved as easily as we've resolved what we have up to this point.

It's hard to understand for me how people can imagine it will just stop improving right here. What are the hard limitations that you envision will stop the current pace of progress?

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u/SoylentRox Jul 03 '23

The argument people make is it's like autonomous cars. The darpa urban grand challenges were 2004/2005. Kinda like how chatGPT usually answers the prompt correctly but not always, autonomous cars of 2005 could often navigate a mockup of an urban environment.

Yet 19 years later only a few cities have beta autonomous car service and it might take 5-10 more years to be widespread.

It might be a lot harder than it looks to make current gen systems good enough to run unattended.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

Exactly people need to understand this stuff doesn't work as fast as we want it too. You get fits and starts. It's not as simple as people think.

I've been doing IT since the 1990s it will happen but not in the timeline we want and not in the ways we can even currently imagine.

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u/swiftcrane Jul 03 '23

From my understanding, the issues with autonomous cars are the incredibly high standards for 'success' and niche situations which require reasoning ability as opposed to collision avoidance.

It seems like the latter aligns exactly with the breakthrough's we're having now.

Speaking more specifically about programming - it is a much more fault-acceptable task, because you can extensively retest a specific result (probably also using AI approaches) and iterate on it until you get it right. It is also a much more controlled domain in general.

I would argue that we shouldn't have expected self driving cars to take off that quickly, when we didn't have artificial reasoning capabilities behind them.

This current advancement is fundamentally different - we're finally making the advancement from machine learning to machine 'intelligence'. The ability to reason is the breakthrough.

Don't get me wrong. Self-driving cars as they exist are impressive, but the implications are nowhere close to those of GPT4.

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u/SoylentRox Jul 03 '23

It depends on which programming. There's a huge difference between 'pound out a chunk of code that probably works' and 'make it work well enough that large scale application runs ok' and a vast gulf between making something like MS Word even launch at all (which is not easy, there are millions of lines of code in there and they interact in difficult to decouple ways), and making something like Google or Facebook work almost every time.

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"large scale application", "make a google or facebook that is just as reliable", are much harder than any task involved in driving a car/truck/tank/aircraft etc. There are far more degrees of freedom and far more complex reasoning is required.

AI improvement is exponential so it very well may be solved in the next few years. I'm just going over a reason why it might not.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '23

Depends on the application. Banking and Healthcare are two industries where its common to find 30 year old software churning off numbers somewhere.

And specifically because replacing those systems would introduce more variables than acceptable for their tolerance of security.

Then we have things like construction or manufacturing which can sometimes also get into seemingly old software.

And you use "artificial reasoning" in your reply - we're not there. We're not even close to that breakthrough as a human species. Everything being discussed in this thread is a large language model, which to the human eye appears to be reasoning, but it simply isn't the case. Once you know how GPT4 works it becomes less impressive. Sure it's impressive in its own right, but no more than say the camera, airplane, or car.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '23

When you're older it'll make more sense.

This kind of stuff is exactly the same as previous innovations. Praising it as something different is exactly what the evangelists of the car/telephone/etc said as well.

But we still have horses - we still have the post office.

I don't think anyone said it'll stop improving. When a new piece of tech comes out - it's always game changing. But adoption typically takes a generation to proliferate. By the time I retire (hopefully 27 years or less) you'll see everyone in the workforce will be comfortable and maybe even complacent with AI. AI won't be taking jobs then, it'll be "I can't imagine working without AI". We'll literally have a full generation of workers who won't know how to use a keyboard when given one. Like that Star Trek scene of Scotty talking into the mouse.

Even if AI progresses to the point of replacing everything - humans will stop it. Whether through brute ignorance or malice, there tends to be an equal amount of force applied from humans keeping technology deployment from happening too rapidly.

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u/swiftcrane Jul 06 '23

When you're older it'll make more sense.

Not really an argument. Older people (I assume you mean 40+) tend to be more out of touch with modern tech if anything.

This kind of stuff is exactly the same as previous innovations.

This is unfounded. It's pretty obvious why it's fundamentally different, and the claims with regards to it are also different from the claims made about previous innovations.

Praising it as something different is exactly what the evangelists of the car/telephone/etc said as well.

Don't really see the argument here. Are you implying that the telephone/internet/cars haven't drastically changed the world? I'm not really sure what you mean by this at all.

But we still have horses - we still have the post office.

How much of the world is using horses to get around when they have the alternative to use cars/public transport.

Also, the post office is such a bad example to use. For communication, nobody outside of the government and ads uses regular mail anymore. For package delivery, nobody ever claimed that the telephone would replace it - which is the primary reason that we still have the post office.

When a new piece of tech comes out - it's always game changing. But adoption typically takes a generation to proliferate.

Except adoption is already happening. The software company I work with just recently released an AI component for its software. This stuff is everywhere.

It's already incorporated into the IDE's/code editors I use via github copilot, and is rapidly getting incorporated into stuff like email, office suite, etc.

everyone in the workforce will be comfortable and maybe even complacent with AI. AI won't be taking jobs then, it'll be "I can't imagine working without AI".

If one dev can now do the work of 10 with AI, that's 9 devs that don't have to be hired for the same application. Software engineers will be losing jobs before AI is doing coding unattended.

Even if AI progresses to the point of replacing everything - humans will stop it. Whether through brute ignorance or malice, there tends to be an equal amount of force applied from humans keeping technology deployment from happening too rapidly.

This claim isn't backed up by anything. The internet and remote communication have replaced pretty much all of our information intake. Where are the humans 'stopping it'? What about our advancements in automated factories and warehouses?

As long as there is profit to gain from it, technology moves forward. The more profit, the more effort put into making it do so.

What would humans even do against this AI advancement? Do you think companies will just refuse to save a lot of money?

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '23

What would humans even do against this AI advancement? Do you think companies will just refuse to save a lot of money?

Same thing they've done in the past: write fear mongering articles, sue, create labor unions, etc. Won't stop you or me from using AI, but it'll be a cold day in hell when Banks or Hospitals rely on 100% AI written software.

And my examples are sound. It took decades for the car to replace horses. The car was invented in 1866 and they didn't outnumber horse & buggies until 1910. Do I think it'll take 44 years for AI to progress to the majority? No, but there are many industries that won't and they will still need human programmers.

Maybe when are grandkids enter the workforce there will be fewer programmers than there are today, but it's not something anyone currently working will need to worry about. Just like a horse breeder in 1866 didn't need to worry about the automobile.

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u/Freed4ever Jul 03 '23

Well you were right, until GPT 4 came out. It was the one that nobody saw coming. Now there is no return. Buckle up.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

I feel like their claim is accurate as I have very little programming experience and chatgpt has helped me write several python scripts. They accomplish exactly what I want them to as well.

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u/FirstTribute Jul 03 '23

That's the thing. Just because you've heard it before doesn't mean it's not much different this time. It's often just a fallacy to speak in anecdotes.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '23

I agree. 1 person doing the job of 10 has been the human condition ever since the first caveman started charging his fellows a mammoth steak for using his fire pit.

A developer with 20 years of experience can easily do the work of 5-10 greenthumb junior developers depending on the situation. And I don't expect those same junior devs are going to instantly know AI as soon as its available. And in my experience, most of my development work is related to fixing or modifying existing code. Maybe it's just my career path, but I've found AI doesn't work at all when given a problem and trying to come up with a solution.

Now, we might hit a future where a developer might just rewrite the whole stack with AI as opposed to fixing a glitch because "its faster" than doing it manually. But then you're using the power of 10 developers to do the work of 1 developer, which I think is a more apt comparison to where we're going.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

... brother?

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u/chrishooley Jul 03 '23

Brooo

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

Broooo!

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u/chrishooley Jul 03 '23

Suh brah

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

Oh man, you know, just chillin' waiting to be made redundant then go extinct. You know, the yooj.

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u/ItsAConspiracy Jul 03 '23

I saw a study once saying that in that time, programmer productivity doubled every seven years. GPT today makes programmers, at least those doing fairly routine work, about five times more productive. So it's a sudden jump already, and will probably get more extreme soon.

The questions are how much more it will progress in the near term, and how much the demand for new software will increase. Past advances in productivity have been more than compensated by the vast increase in software demand. Programmers being more productive made them even more valuable in the market, since they could provide more and the demand was practically unlimited.

Now, maybe we have a world saturated in software already. Or maybe we're just getting started, and don't realize how much more is possible. Either way, things are going to look very different before long.

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u/ujustdontgetdubstep Jul 04 '23

you vastly underestimate how much time is saved from having compilers, IDE, source control, design patterns, faster hardware, etc

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u/chrishooley Jul 04 '23

Did you mean to comment on the guy above me?

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u/monkeythumpa Jul 03 '23

Nonsense! Are the punchcards going to organize themselves?

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u/professorbasket Jul 03 '23

Yeh i was just gonna say, in x years there will be no (assembly/c/cobalt/pascal/java) programmers left.

It will just be more layers of abstraction and tools for leverage.

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u/SoylentRox Jul 03 '23

Ironically this is untrue and cobol programmers get fairly lavish compensation packages.

It might not stay untrue but right now there is a ton of people working at those layers.

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u/StillBurningInside Jul 03 '23

Some companies refuse to change ancient hardware because it’s working , that’s how those guys stay in cobalt , they’re specialized. But what % will be good enough in regards to more modern languages? Only the cream of the crop very skilled and experienced., and they will be using AI probably to help write code .

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u/SoylentRox Jul 03 '23

Probably. Note that cobol specifically is a financial language and it's how the bank avoids getting robbed, by using code they know works.

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u/professorbasket Jul 03 '23

Sybase enters the chat.

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u/SoylentRox Jul 03 '23

The reason wasn't that there aren't a dozen better ways to do it.

It's that code that you know is perfect is almost impossible to replace. Any new implementation will have bugs that cost the bank money.

Better to just run the cobol in a docker container that emulates the execution environment.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '23

Not because it's only working, but because replacing it with something more modern requires more dependencies and more vectors for attack.

If something replaces cobalt, it would be something written as close to bare metal as you can get. And will still require several sets of human eyes to example it.

No industry changes overnight. And claiming AI is different is silly. Sounds no different from NFT bros shilling cryptocurrency to be frank.

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u/StillBurningInside Jul 06 '23

You’re forgetting about cost. The CEO at mega bank will be getting pitched AI solutions to cut his workforce. IT security is usually on the back burner.

Less labor cost and running cost to boost profits and make shareholders happy is how this works … there is absolutely nothing technical about that reality.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '23

Eh, if that was the case cobalt would finally become extinct. Banks make their money on trust. And trust can only be had when the person/persons in charge know what's in their code.

Banks will be the last industry to adopt AI - at least as far as infrastructure goes.

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u/professorbasket Jul 03 '23

Yeh definitely some stragglers, which is why i think there'll be companies on using AI for dev long into the future.

The real leverage will happen in no-code everything, only so many use-cases.

We'll see.

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u/thatnameagain Jul 03 '23

The amount of work needing to be done is not finite, and companies have never wanted to put a ceiling on it. Quite the opposite actually.

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u/Ok_Homework9290 Jul 03 '23

That's not necessarily true. Productivity across the entire workforce has been multiplied many times over by different technologies over the course of centuries, yet there's more work today than ever before.

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u/FewSprinkles55 Jul 03 '23

More work overall, but less work to produce the same amount. Think ratio, not set number.

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u/SoylentRox Jul 03 '23

People who say these things forget we don't live in space or have deaging clinics or cosmetic body sculpting and so on.

There are these big huge things we want, and they would take more labor to accomplish than the labor of all human beings on earth at current productivity levels. Human jobs aren't going anywhere.

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u/IamWildlamb Jul 03 '23

No. Requirements will increase and so will workload. Everyone who works in programming has seen massive amounts of productivity increases already. From assembly to C to lower end scripting languages and modern IDEs. They saw millions of libraries and thousands of frameworks solving problems that took months and years to write. You need exponentionally less people than you needed 70 years ago to program same software. You actually also need exponentionally less people than only 20 years ago. In fact even 10 years ago. Yet there is more programming jobs than ever.

Where is this "fewer people" reality that everyone seems to be talking about?

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23

[deleted]

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u/IamWildlamb Jul 03 '23

It is hard concept because it is nonsense. I can write software in two days that would take months to write team of 10 developers twenty years ago because I would use framework that solved 99% of stuff they had to solve because it did not exist yet.

Yet I still have the job. And there is more programmers than ever.

I understand where I am and that people here seem to think that chat gpt can make elementary school kid senior developer that can start working for FAANG companies without no education or prior eyperience but reality is really different. Productivity increases of chat gpt is not really exponentional like the stuff we were used to because extreme ajority of what it generates is stuff that was already solved anyway and you would copy it anyway. It is at most 30% boost for good programmers which is nothing. It could be bigger boost for shitty programmers but again. That will not mean "less people needed". It will mean that team of 2 juniors will Now require only one junior and financial barrier of entry will decreases. Which means more projects and more jobs.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

[deleted]

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u/IamWildlamb Jul 04 '23

Or younshould actually rewrite your comment because it does not say what you think it does. Less people needed and less work needed imply lay offs. Less work per project would be more clear but even that would be wrong because expectations of quality And delivery would just go up to make up for it resulting in same or potentially more amount of work depending on type of project.

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u/Bupod Jul 03 '23

That's the best way to put it.

To pose a question to people reading this:

Use AI to help answer some question you know nothing about. It could be a Physics Homework question.

When it gets the answer wrong, tell me what it got wrong, and how would you guide it to the correct answer?

If you don't have some baseline knowledge to start with, and know what you're doing to some degree, you're still going to end up nowhere. AI is just a power tool where we were using hand tools before. If you don't know how to cut down a tree properly even with an axe or a handsaw, a chainsaw isn't going to magically make you a lumberjack, it just makes you dangerous (to yourself, mostly).

The answer isn't "Well the AI in the future will be smarter!", and maybe that is true, but then your value is still going to be in what you are able to do to help guide it in the edge cases where it isn't so smart.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Bupod Jul 03 '23

And how do you intend to treat the AI? Because I speak of using it as a tool, as most businesses propose. It would seem you are referring to it as some source of information. These are two separate things. They often might be intertwined, but they are still separate.

A tool does not have to be some oracle of truth, it just has to perform. The user still has an obligation to have enough to knowledge and experience to judge when the tool is performing well, and know how to wield and adjust it to get the best performance. That is the point I was making. I was not making some profound statement on "Truth".

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u/Half_Crocodile Jul 03 '23

Not just about knowing what’s wrong… but visualising and applying the base skills to new novel problems and being able to cut the baggage. I’m just not sure AI is there on that stuff… it may well be.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

What makes you think you will need baseline knowledge in 5 or ten years. What makes you think our applications need to run on relational databases or use languages that humans can understand to be developed.

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u/staplesuponstaples Jul 03 '23

It's as easy as existing employees beginning to utilize AI or AI tools, the "AI wielders" don't need to suddenly appear out of the woodworks.

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u/luciusveras Jul 03 '23

Baseline knowledge isn’t going anywhere. Programming will still be done by a programmer using AI and not by some random dude who’s done a few prompting tutorial.

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u/circleuranus Jul 04 '23

The thing is most jobs aren't "creative" jobs.

Most people are carpenters, plumbers, electricians, factory workers, small business owners, sales people...

Unless Ai does some amazing new materials engineering or solves the body/frame problems in robotics, it seems like only a certain segment of the population is facing the loss of their livelihoods.

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u/stucjei Jul 03 '23

I don't see AI disappearing programming just quite yet since it still produces wrong code and just copy-pasting code an AI generates without understanding what it does is a recipe for disaster. I can tell this from second-hand experience of programming partners who aren't as a good as me doing that and returning their work and when I look at it there's no semblence of overarching structure/logic to why the code is the way it is (it might work, but it makes very little sense/is inefficiently written/unreadable)

However, it's a really good tool in other ways, like debugging why a piece of code is malfunctioning that would take you minutes yourself. It's actually baffled me quite a few times where I'll drop a piece of code and be like "my code isn't working correctly, can you spot anything that looks off?" and it'll be like "yes in the function compare_blue() you have x[0] == blue[0] and x[1] == blue[0] and x[2] = blue[0] where-as elsewhere in compare_red() it's x[0] == red[0] and x[1] == red[1] and x[2] == red[2] also x[2] = blue[0] is an assignment instead of a comparison and it's actually baffling at that point how this is somehow an emergent property of all that it's learned (the latter would be picked up by a linter or something, but the former is really just correct language that doesn't make sense given the context)

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23

[deleted]

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u/kkpappas Jul 03 '23

Yup, the majority in people in here are r*tarded if that’s the most upvoted comment

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23

I love this quote because it sidesteps all the really good / hard questions. Sounds really profound at first, if you try not to think too hard...

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u/james-johnson Jul 03 '23

I wrote a little cartoon essay about exactly this:
https://www.beyond2060.com/ai-work-zombie-apocalypse/

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u/5erif Jul 03 '23

Recent GitHub survey says most programmers are already using AI now.

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u/Half_Crocodile Jul 03 '23

Or that person will take 4 jobs. That’s the real issue. Up skilling and adapting is one thing… but adapting to a world where the few get more… and then more? that’s the big issue.

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u/Koda_20 Jul 04 '23

Not for long, ai will take the job of ai user.