Yes, it's funny to see programmers of all people, uber-technologists, shoot "i'm walking around in the woods videos" decrying the end of human civilisation merely because one specific craft practice is being automated.
AI isnt taking 'human creativity' away, this is an incredibly parochial and self-interested take. Its taking human creativity, as expressed in certain 20th C. crafts, away. Just as textile art has gone, and we don't have lace everywhere any more -- so it goes, that handcrafted programming goes to.
Engineers are those people who do that to human civilisation. That's always been the job. Replace people with machines. So it goes.
[–] glimshe 1 day ago
[–] mjburgess 1 day ago
Its not yet clear to me that blacksmith software engineers that quickly learn DIY tools, arent going to be in greater demand. Nor even, capable of commanding higher salaries. Perhaps fewer will exist, but they will transact with more end customers because their rate of production will increase -- and so, be richer still.
Its my view, incidentlly, that far fewer programmers ought exist. If you think about the last decade or two of the industry, and the rise of massive low-quality bootcamps -- imv we had an seng bubble. It isnt clear to me that we arent lower than a pre-bubble baseline.
[–] ryandvm 1 day ago
And it has rolled out to the rest of the software engineering industry rapidly because a) it was adjacent to AI development, and b) software engineers are very expensive workers. Graphical design is also being hit due to its proximity to software engineering.
Other information workers are going to start feeling the hurt soon enough, but their respective industry timeline will be correlated with how much money it's going to save to replace them.
Paralegals, customer support, copywriters, data analysts, and any other fields that are purely informational are all going to feel the squeeze.
[–] mjburgess 1 day ago
Its unclear what other jobs have a billion experts to-hand to grade LLM outputs. Its also unclear what other jobs would even benefit from such a thing.
For most others, it seems LLMs are basically tutors and mentors which existed anyway.
They were always a bit resentful about how I made money "so easily". And they were right in a sense. Before retiring I'd make more money browsing reddit in a boring meeting than they would make in a day.
We made incredible improvements to society but we also destroyed the livelihoods of millions. I believe our profession was/is a massive net positive to the world, but many got hurt while we steamrolled others without hesitation.
I'm actually very positive about AI in general and I don't think it will end our field. But if that's what happens, we can lament the bad luck but not really complain that we've been wronged.