> Am I supposed to want to code all the time? When can I pursue hobbies, a social life, etc.
I feel you. It's a societal question you're posing. Your employer (most employers) deal in dollars. A business is evaluated by its ability to generate revenue. That is the purpose of a business and the fiduciary duty of the CEO's in charge.
I tend to agree with your assessment. The increase in demand cannot possibly equal the loss from AI.
Given projections of AI abilities over time AI necessarily creates downward pressure on new job creation. AI is for reducing and/or eliminating jobs (by way of increasing efficiency).
AI isn't creating 'new' things, it's reducing the time needed to do what was already being done. Unlike the automobile revolution new job categories aren't being created with AI.
Lots of users seem to think LLM's think and reason so this sounds wonderful. A mechanical process isn't thinking, certainly it does NOT mirror human thinking. The processes being altogether different.
Humans are probabilistic systems?! You might want to inform the world's top neuroscientists and philosophers to down tools. They were STILL trying to figure this out but you've already solved it! Well done.
I don't think it's a naive response. Perhaps it's obvious to you that human doctors can't produce an "exact correct solution", but quite a lot of people do expect this, and get frustrated when a doctor can't tell them exactly what's wrong with them or recommends a treatment that doesn't end up working.
There's nothing naive about it. Most doctors work off of statistics and probabilities stemming from population based studies. Literally the entire field of medicine is probabilistic and that's what angers people. Yes, 95% chance you're not suffering from something horrible but a lot of people would want to continue diagnostics to rule out that 5% that you now have cancer and the doctor sent you home with antibiotics thinking it's just some infection, or whatever.
Please do read up on how farmers are doing with this race to the bottom (it hasn't been pretty). Mega farms are a thing because small farms simply can't compete. Small farmers have gone broke. The parent comment is trying to highlight this.
If LLM's turn out the way C-Suite hopes. Let me tell you, you will be in a world of pain. Most of you won't be using LLM's to create your own businesses.
Exactly! If people have 'never felt this far behind' and the LLM's are that good. Ask the LLM to teach you.
Like so many articles on 'prompt engineers' this (never felt this behind) take too is laughable. Programmers having learnt how to program (writing algorithms, understanding data structures, reading source code and API docs) are now completely incapable of using a text box to input prompts? Nor can they learn how to quickly enough! And it's somehow more difficult than what they have routinely been doing? LOL
Many HN users may point to Jevons paradox, I would like to point out that it may very well work up until the point that it doesn't. After all a chicken has always seen the farmer as benevolent provider of food, shelter and safety, that is until of course THAT day when he decides he doesn't.
It is certainly possible that AI is the one great disruptor that we can’t adapt to. History over millenia has me taking the other side of that bet, seeing the disruptions and adaptations from factory farming, internal combustion engines, moving assembly lines, electrification, the transistor, ICs, wired then wireless telecommunications, the internet, personal computing, and countless other major disruptions.
1. Fundamentals do change, Yuval Noah Harari made this point in the book Sapiens, but basically there are core beliefs (in fact the idea that things do change for the better is relatively new, “the only constant is change”. Wasn’t really true before the 19th century.
What does “the great disrupter we can’t adapt to” mean exactly? If humans annihilate themselves from climate change, the earth will adapt, the solar system will shrug it off and the universe won’t even realize it happened.
But like, I am 100% sure humans will adapt to the AI revolution. Maybe we let 7 billion people die off, and the 1% of the rest enslave the rest of us to be masseuses and prostitutes and live like kings with robot servants, but I’m not super comfortable with that definition if “adaptation”.
For most of human history and most of the world “the rest of us” don’t live all that well, is that adaptation? I think most people include a healthy large, and growing middle class in their definition of success metrics.
Isn’t this “healthy, large middle class” a reality that is less than 100 years old in the best of cases? (After a smaller initial emergence perhaps 100 years prior to that.) In 250K years since modern humans emerged, that’s a comparative blink of an eye.
There might be slight local dips along the timeline, but I think most Westerners (and maybe most people, but my lived experience is Western) would not willingly trade places with their same-percentile positioned selves from 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 10K, 50K, or 250K years ago. The fact that few would choose to switch has to be viewed with some positive coefficient in a reasonable success metric.
Yes, my point was, if AI and automation in general are the start to the end of all that (and I do think there are some signs that these technologies could be leading us towards a fundamentally less egalitarian society) I think many would consider that a devastating impact that we did not adapt to, the way we did the Industrial Revolution, which ultimately led towards more middle class opportunities.
Am puzzled why so many on HN cannot see this. I guess most users on HN are employed? Your employers - let me tell you - are positively salivating at the prospect of firing you. The better LLM's get the fewer of you will be needed.
Denial, like those factory workers at the first visit from the automation company, each one hoping they are the ones elected to stay and overwatch the robots.
I have seen projects where translator teams got reduced, asset creation teams, devops head count, support teams on phone lines,...
It is all about how to do more with less, now with AI help as well.
I feel you. It's a societal question you're posing. Your employer (most employers) deal in dollars. A business is evaluated by its ability to generate revenue. That is the purpose of a business and the fiduciary duty of the CEO's in charge.
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