The workload of two people before now only requires one person. If this situation continues, will AI make more people unemployed? Is it possible to develop into AI to write all the code in the future?
We are in an hype fase. VC's pump money into it because it is the current hype, before this it was NFT's and crypto. The fase "AI" or a better name for it is LLM or GenAI will also pass. VC money will run out. There is no real business model yet that can support the enormous amounts of resources needed to train it and to run them.
Hardware is not fast enough yet.. it could be sustainable when it runs locally on my hardware. Till that time I see this as another hype we shouldn't pay a lot of attention to.
If you are a framework junkie that cannot write original logic or standup some small original application you are already largely irrelevant but your employer just hasn’t determined how to replace you. Everybody else pays the price for that inefficiency.
Software is littered with developers that cannot program. If there is some magic solution that makes these people suddenly irrelevant the world is in a better place. Consider the manual transcription jobs that instantly evaporated because of photocopying.
All software engineers are different.
AI reduces toil and only dumb work (and even struggle at this often in real world).
So if you’re doing dumb work (because of legacy, bureaucracy, poor management or any dumb reason) — yes, you’re going to be obsolete sooner or later.
“Good” news are
a) ai needs another major jump or two to be realistic and scalable tool for dumb work e2e. And those steps are not yet invented.
B) bureaucracy and poor management is stronger than the strongest ai, so there is always be some vacancies even for dumbest work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
available free online from the author: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
If you replace "AI" with "StackOverflow", would you still feel the same?
LLMs won't replace you in this round at statistically composing text/code. But may be in the next. The best thing about this, still a human is needed to do the reasoning instead of the LLM. But when this can be done (f.e. with a combination of different ML techniques and LLM) then we have to talk what can be done about it.
We can talk now, but each solution for the question "what will happen to working people, when AI rise" is just a game of thoughts and in the end lead to the only conclusion:
You get rid of it and work further OR you stop working and let AI do it for you. It will be in the time of the transition, surely a lot of people will become unemployed. But at some point, the whole economy and money does not make sense anymore. Just imagine AI produces you the parts you need with a 3D printer on your sign. So when we come to this point, we've transformed as society so much, that your question is not important anymore.
(I think in Europe it will be started early to find solutions to the threat, a AI tax or something like this. With this AI tax the people who lost their jobs will be supported..
Amerika, India, Afrika (as example) are the countries where a lot people living in that care by themselves for their lives. No helping state. There will be big problems, as no social/governed safety net existing.)
How did you measure it? Did you measure the efficiency that Intellisense, codegen, tools, etc.. provided to you before ChatGPT/copilot and what would be the delta?
There will be less jobs out there for software engineers since AI can pretty much do them for cheap and very fast, OpenAI talked about driving down the cost of intelligence, and now this is what is happening for all models that are being released.
Right now LLM’s like GPT-4o and Claude have gotten to the intelligence of a mid-level level engineer.
The company I was in was so fascinated by this that they closed job openings for junior employees, laid them off, and are thinking about laying off some senior engineers after carrying out a trial of AI tools like cursor, copilot and others.
I can only imagine the same thing is happening across other companies and especially startups that cannot afford many senior engineers, they will just use AI and only one senior engineer.
Expect more layoffs and less job openings unfortunately.
A lot of potential software currently can't be cost effectively developed - so it isn't.
More startups with a single senior engineer (augmented by AI) becomes possible at a lower price point.
We might actually end up with more work. And an altered kind of work
LLMs have no intelligence at all, they don't reason.
So the benchmarks (1) of LLM's like Claude 3.5 are categorically flawed at reasoning and they will never get better?
Yet their outputs are heuristically good enough to reduce jobs from engineers by driving the cost of code generation down to almost 0.
If we take the idea that you believe that it cannot reason at all in any capacity, as whole it would be regretful for you to bet against these systems not getting better or that another breakthrough would change the perspective of a new generation of LLMs.
Yeah, many. For tens of thousands of years you were either a hunter or a gatherer. Even after agriculture shows up something like 12000 years ago, the job of farmer, craftsman, soldier, etc. were pretty stable.
Job churn really only begins to happen with industrialization, and that process is only something like 200-400 years old depending on where in the world you are.
Yikes. Maybe you shouldn’t be in software engineering? Not a great look, professionally.
i fucking love claude 3.5 but i still catch it slippin.
as johnson wang of nvidia said, ai wont replace you, but you will be replaced by people who uses AI.
i think the former will eventually come, but the latter is already here.
