With this pace, only manual physical jobs will remain. Most of the office jobs will be replaced with virtual workers. AGI will have shock-collared humans building new data centers full of TPU/GPUs. Maybe some farmers to feed those as well. Everyone else is on their own. Ah, and humans should be locked away from nuclear weapons for their own safety.
Sorry. I’m not yet seeing on the horizon AI that can even begin to approach the my skill level organizing reliable codebase, inventing new architecture to solve business and technical scaling problems, and the implementing that architectural design. AI is at best tackling uninteresting bust work right now with no sight that this is changing
Which just means, AI needs more data points for architects. What pages did you open in the code-base, what did you read, what changes did you suggest, what different approach did you choose.
But there are not many of you. Sure a few architects will be needed maybe. That still means ‘all’ with a little error margin.
Also, code in a new AI reality, will probably be mostly throw away code; you don’t need to repair a function; you just give the ai the input and output where it fails + the code of the function and it’ll give you a new one which might or might not be completely different from the previous one.
If your only value add is pumping out code that a generative model can generate with a few tweaks, please reconsider. This career is maybe not going to be extremely rewarding for you and your salary will go to 0 in the long run (it probably will for all of us at some point but the question is how much further out in the future).
If this is just fancy auto complete to you then neat.
> you just give the ai the input and output where it fails + the code of the function and it’ll give you a new one which might or might not be completely different from the previous one.
I spent three days chasing down a bug in our codebase with a repro. I’ll run the problem through ChatGPT but I feel like even if I give it the two functions involved and surrounding boilerplate pointing at those two functions, with tests the answer will be gibberish. My basic understanding is that chatgpt’s and copilot’s capability here is doing this for the kinds of things that are toy examples only where the scenario is both carefully constructed and the problem quite obvious. Is that not the case? Don’t get me wrong. I’m 100% on board that this is a fascinating direction and we will get there and it’s going to be great. I’m just saying the base level of competence hasn’t been met yet and so I’d use it as a teaching tool but I’d ban it in a professional environment for most code (not all) until it’s way more mature. It’s just going to do more damage than it’s worth. I look forward to a future where I can give AI higher level instructions of what to change in the codebase and I just need to peripherally review what it did. That and product leadership and upper management is a secure job path. Everything else. Well… good luck? And I am clear. I will go before product leadership and executives. But that means we have AI that’s experienced at building software with minimal input. You can just start your own business and that’s so fantastic. It lowers the barriers to software development so that more people can compete in business. That will be an interesting society to observe.
I think we vastly underestimate how much bespoke, physical labor and bespoke, tedious engineering goes into the high tech equipment that drives forward innovation.
What I am trying to say is, work for a defense contractor.
If human workers become obsolete, do we want to continue with capitalism, now with no more labor checks on those that already own everything, with the Bezoses and Musks controlling everything while the rest of us live in squalor?
Or do we want to usher in a Star Trek - Style technoutopian socialism, where humankind is provided for by technology, freed from the shackles of work and able to explore its interests for their own sake?
Even if you think that AI breakthroughs won't cause a collapse of the labor market, why not create a backstop so that those who do can put their full support behind creating new and useful AI technology instead of fearing for their jobs?
Not quite yet, friend. Wait till the lawyer market collapses, once they all turn coat the capitalists will have no more intellectual linemen. The quarterback will be sacked.
I will not be surprised if we end up with an organization composed of people like us, that looks a lot like the medieval Masons, keeping the internet going while everyone else just talks to it at ubiquitous terminals.
