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manOnPavementWaving t1_isp7v7u wrote

As a coder, I feel quite safe. Not because Im denying progress, but because if Im not safe from automation, nobody is. Making me quite safe.

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blueSGL t1_isptr8s wrote

> Not because Im denying progress, but because if Im not safe from automation, nobody is.

this is my thoughts. With the speed that things are improving it's not going to hit one sector, it going to hit most/all of the sectors at around the same time with increasing regularity.

That sort of seismic shift, for that many people has to mean UBI or another similar scheme in order to stabilize the economy.

There is no reason having automated goods and services if a huge chunk of your consumer base is now unable to buy them.

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TheSingulatarian t1_isswca3 wrote

It will take 10 to 20 years for capitalists to come to this realization. Right now they seem to think a rental model will compensate for reduced prosperity of the masses, "You will own nothing, and you will be happy." But, I not so sure that is going to work out.

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blueSGL t1_ist0kec wrote

with google now gamifying (and having an AI 'win') low level optimization and Microsoft improving natural language coding to include sanity checking and self correcting even if you assume cherrypicked results I don't think it's going to be 10-20 years.

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ginger_gcups t1_it0ew70 wrote

Especially how the entire model will eventually be upheaved by fabricating replicators as a community or personal service, and once one of them get out, well, given a supply of matter and energy, everyone gets one and is their own steady state producer. Genie would be out of the bottle then, and God knows what beyond that.

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visarga t1_it15bg3 wrote

> A supply of matter and energy

I think some raw materials are going to be inevitably contested unless we find abundant replacements or reach 100% recycling rate. A replicator won't save us if it needs rare material X.

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FiFoFree t1_it2w094 wrote

In theory all you need for an abundance of any element is other elements as stock, a particle accelerator, energy, and time.

In practice, we'd need the price and size of particle accelerators to go way down, the price of energy to go way down, and the time required to go way down before it would make a difference.

Then again... "Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties are, if it is desired greatly enough." -- Arthur C. Clarke.

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FaxDwellerCat t1_ispi1i5 wrote

Really depends on the level of your work.

Programmers are for instance more easily replacable by AI then healthcare givers, where good personal contacts is a vital factor for the well being of patients.

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Owner2229 t1_isprw8j wrote

>Programmers are for instance more easily replacable by AI then healthcare givers

Replacing programmers with AI would require users being able to specify exactly what they want. Programmers are safe. They might become something like "code translators" or "machine whisperers", but they'll still have a job for quite a while.

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FranciscoJ1618 t1_isr09lq wrote

Wrong. Programmers will be replaced by Business Analysts that DO know what they want.

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s1syphean t1_itow35y wrote

What is your advice for someone who knows they’d be valued highly in this new class of ‘Business Analysts’ who wants to position themselves as best they can in advance of this trend? Say, for somebody with a new law degree?

I also have foreseen this, but you have the industry expertise. Send me a dm if you’d like, would love to chat about this.

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manOnPavementWaving t1_isqdf9x wrote

Disagree, gave my dad my DALL-E access, and he learned to prompt engineer to reasonable success in an hour. Once you've got quick iteration, specifying what you want becomes trivial.

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Redifyle t1_isr0oac wrote

But specifying what you want in terms of coding is more complex and requires more background knowledge than just typing a prompt for DALL-E (in which case quick iteration is way less of a factor).

In time, the level will of course be so abstract that that that isn’t necessary anymore, but while the technology is still progressing there will definitely be a need for programmers (aka the guys who know what to put in the prompt).

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berdiekin t1_iss2afs wrote

I guess if we ever get to the point where you can describe an entire app/project with a simple (none-technical) description and get something out of it that does what's expected then programmers would become obsolete.

Honestly I'm more interested to see if an AI would be able to integrate into a legacy project and take over / improve that.

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freeman_joe t1_iswfjlx wrote

Why would it try to improve legacy project when it could do one better from scratch? I won’t ask AI to improve steam engine when it could make me electric motor from scratch.

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berdiekin t1_iswpk2e wrote

That's a fair question, but so much depends on the how/when/what. Like how fast will these tools appear, how good will they be, how powerful will they be, how easy to use will they be, ...

I personally don't see these tools going from pretty much not existing to writing entire projects from scratch based on a simple description. At least not without at least some human intervention.

Because code generation is 1 thing, now tell it to integrate that with other (human written) APIs and projects with often lackluster documentation (if there's any in the first place). Not gonna happen.

Unless we hit some kind of AGI breakthrough ofcourse, then all bets are off.

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freeman_joe t1_isyv8ff wrote

I think it will have better capabilities than humans. Every time AI is better in some domain we ignore it and point to what it can’t do at the moment and project to future and say it will probably do it good but not that good. Yet AI shows as every time it is better in domains it learned fully than humans.

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manOnPavementWaving t1_issmqzx wrote

I don't think this holds for higher layers of abstraction. If all I need to do is ask to make the porgram faster, and then a model does it for me, that's easy. If I ask it to optimize cache hits and data locality, that task would be more difficult for the prompter (more specific). Depending on the quality of the system, the level of abstraction will eventually reach a point where anyone can code, with very little background knowledge.

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Artanthos t1_isq6jc4 wrote

Having people who can specify exactly what they want takes 10% of the labor that coding to spec requires.

The software engineer designing the program will remain employed for a lot longer than the people doing the coding.

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freeman_joe t1_iswfu6y wrote

I view your comment as coping imho. If AI will have intellect as average human it will quickly learn how to automate everything and everyone with no exceptions.

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Artanthos t1_it0lc4g wrote

All things take time.

  1. Following a blue is much easier than creating from scratch.
  2. Creating blueprints endures you get exactly what you want, not something superficially similar to what you want.
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visarga t1_it15qub wrote

I bet we underestimate progress in some ways and overestimate it in other ways. The future is here but unequally distributed. There will still be a need for humans unless AI has cleared that last 1% of accuracy, which is damn hard as we can see from self driving.

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kmtrp OP t1_isv97q8 wrote

Most programmers are just coders, bug squashers. Those will be gone pretty soon.

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GenoHuman t1_isrpsfs wrote

No, at that point you have customer & NN's interacting, the developers don't have to be part of the picture, you cut out the middleman.

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overlordpotatoe t1_isqhdnp wrote

Yeah, that's true. If it starts hitting your industry, it'll be hitting a ton of other things at the same time. If it's just you who's out of a job, that's your problem. If it's half the country, it's an issue that will have to be addressed in some way through government policy. Who knows if they'll do a good job of that, but you worrying about it now won't help anything.

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freeman_joe t1_iswfxvi wrote

We have two ways UBI or war. It depends only on who will be at top if someone reasonable or dictator.

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GenoHuman t1_isrpqbm wrote

That's not even true though, a lot of physical jobs would be harder to replace than programmers.

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NoRip7374 t1_isqc7qj wrote

No, specifically graphical designs and coding are first thing to go obviously. Initially you will just see bunch of unemployed senior programmers, because it would be much cheaper and easier to hire intern + AI and she/he will be more effective and much, much cheaper than senior. I plan budgets for software projects, trust me i know how upper management thinks in regards of software projects and budgeting.

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manOnPavementWaving t1_isqd6kk wrote

Not my point, the point was if you've genuinely automated software creation, you've almost immediately automated everything else

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NoRip7374 t1_isrrbc6 wrote

Software is low hanging fruit because of excellent training data and recent language models progression (namely transformers). It have immens impact and good earning potential. Other areas don't have even close enough of freely available data (open versionig systems). And it looks like training ML models to code is not so hard. Coding will be solved maybe decade before anything else (doctors, laywers, accountants, more messy things without good training data). And there will be no UI in sight, what will we(coders) do then?

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visarga t1_it16573 wrote

Let your imagination run wild, what will we do when we become more productive - go home or build things we can't even imagine yet? If we still want more than what is possible today, then how can we afford to send people home? So many grand challenges are far from being solved - global warming, space colonisation, poverty, AI implementations, public education ... we still need people for a while.

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NoRip7374 t1_it1x5at wrote

Hmm, you are making good points i would say. On the other hand when you have radical shift in short amount of time, like we can expect with language models that can code, will industries accommodate in same short amount of time? I don't know the answer.

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cwallen t1_isr60tj wrote

While I don't doubt that some will try that, generally it'll be the other way around.

At least at first the AI will be only capable of the grunt work that jr level coders do now, not the sr level decision making. Once the AI is capable of doing Sr level work, it'll be PMs driving AI "no code" systems.

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SnowyNW t1_ispl8go wrote

Well, the planet is dying and the general public has been lied to about it too long for us to have any time to overhaul current infrastructure enough. Also, billions of poor and suffering will be the first to go, and are about to all be sacrificed to drought, flood, and starvation over the next five years, so are you really sure that jobs in their current conception will continue to exist much longer? Especially considering most coding is simply for the optimization of selling things to consumers that are directly responsible for the ecological disaster we are currently facing?.

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Artanthos t1_isq91qb wrote

The timeframe is a bit longer than 5 years and will render equatorial regions inhospitable first.

If this happens, yes, billions will die. And billions more will survive, mostly in wealthy countries that are better able to adapt.

It would also mean that the surviving countries, facing an existential threat, will become a more brutal than they are today.

Drought is already a solvable issue. Israel has already demonstrated this. Nearly their entire water supply, including agricultural, comes from desalination.

Vertical farming allows for food growth independent of climate. It’s just not cost efficient. That can change real quick if crops start failing.

If automation does leave most people unemployed, those unemployed will be in a very bad position when food prices skyrocket and those at the top are forced to make existential choices.

But humanity will survive and the survivors will write history to reflect that they made the necessary choices while vilifying the people today for putting the world into a state of crisis.

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Key_Abbreviations658 t1_isqsmrs wrote

It’s people saying things like billion of people will die tomorrow if we don’t destroy the economy that get environmentalism laughed at.

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SnowyNW t1_isqvknh wrote

Tomorrow, huh? Looks like it’s already too late then. Why would you want anyone to believe that though

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Key_Abbreviations658 t1_isqvrc2 wrote

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SnowyNW t1_isqvuog wrote

??

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Key_Abbreviations658 t1_isqvy37 wrote

???

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SnowyNW t1_isr8p9j wrote

Which part of the economy do you think needs to be destroyed? I don’t think our utilities, which are mostly tax funded, need consumerism to survive.

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Key_Abbreviations658 t1_isrdv25 wrote

those are taxes on value created by consumerism anyways obligatory ????

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SnowyNW t1_isre013 wrote

Really? Amazon’s tax rate was far lower than those working essential jobs such as teachers and nurses. Almost all corporate tax rates are far lower after incentives and write offs. What are you talking about lol

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Key_Abbreviations658 t1_isshg6m wrote

True Amazon does weird things to pay less taxes but they create a huge amount of value and their workers and shareholders of which there are quite a few are taxed.

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M3KVII t1_istdaog wrote

Right programmers will be the last people with jobs. Because of the level of specialization still being quite high for network/ IT work if any kind. If anyone should be scared about their job in the near future it would be manufacturing, medical, and clerical/office work. I watched phone qa essentially dissapear as an industry replaced by interactive intelligence AI that grades the calls. I used to set up call centers, and I watched qa basically dissapear as a job.

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kmtrp OP t1_isv9zq5 wrote

I've worked as a programmer and also been involved in software startups, and I can confidently say the main work of most programmers will be completely automated in a few short years. Maybe 1 out of 10 of those can keep a job as an AI whisperer or adviser to clients et. but even that more "creative" job is based on information easily integrated in a model. It's going to be rough.

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M3KVII t1_isvjop1 wrote

Gpt3 and things like commit assistant do look promising. But that’s stil 30 years out considering how slowly the actual industry adopts Ai. Maybe game developers and FAANG companies will adopt these tools. But fintech, medical, and government are very slow to catch on imo.

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