▲I won't have to switch careers since I'm a software engineer instead of a developer that does nothing but implement specifications with no creativity or design work. I will have to keep up with the changing technology landscape though like I have been for my entire career.
reply▲Hardware that can assume the states you’d creatively conjure is on the way.
Your special literacy isn’t all that. It was a stop gap until hardware caught up. SWE gigs was something politics saw as a “create jobs” opportunity.
Chip makers see the opportunity is there to claim more of the tech valuations for themselves reducing the number of software “engineers” and are coming for ya with global politics on their side. Not just the normies sick of IT.
if robotics hasn't been solved yet, I'll become a robotics researcher. if robotics is solved, I'll research autonomous research. if automated research and robotics are solved, there are no more jobs. in any industry. at least not for long.
reply▲I figure the AI is a long way from understanding why the dev environment is pointed to the test database, while the test environment is pointed to the dev database. lol
reply▲Software, but not for someone else - it's time to be the primary beneficiary of our own work. The jobs are evaporating because AI can amplify our individual efforts into something much greater, and it can do it for us by ourselves too.
reply▲AI will create more jobs as it replaces tedious ones. There will always be more innovation and work, so don't worry! This is the same fear as the Internet age back in the days replacing stores, TV, media, etc. We will always continue to improve, and nothing stays stagnant -- there's always something new to discover.
reply▲Why can't AI do the new jobs it just created?
reply▲At present, AI is starkly limited and not able to replace any job. At best, it can automate certain menial tasks, such as low-level support. In programming, it only works for non-trivial programs when used under the direction of an experienced programmer that breaks down the work into small steps the AI can perform.
You may be imagining a future where AI can do all jobs, but please be clear that this is your imagination. That future does not exist today and is not guaranteed to exist tomorrow. Before it can exist, a much simpler future where AI can replace any job has to exist, and that future doesn’t exist yet either.
this thread's premise assumes AI will make "developers" obsolete. jotjotzzz's comment assumes that AI will create new jobs to replace the old ones.
assuming the premise of the thread, that some hypothetical AI replaces all the developers, I was questioning why such a hypothetical AI would be able to do the work of developers, but not do the supposed "new jobs" jotjotzzz believes would arise.
basically, if AI ever becomes autonomous and general enough to fully replace developers, it will be autonomous and general enough to handle any new jobs that pop up too.
AI needs to be trained, it cannot create knowledge in a vacuum.
I think that's why there will always be some augmentation by humans to provide the context and the knowledge
reply▲A good example is … Blockbuster is gone but we have Netflix. Sears is gone but we have Amazon. Those were internet age companies that we’ve seen come to having massive market shares now.
If AI follows suit, there will be a wasteland of nonsense “AI” companies followed by some industry shifting AI technology companies, in about 10-15 years we’ll see who’s left.
There will be an enormous market cleaning up the mess AI use will leave behind.
reply▲I think the best term I've seen for this is "digital asbestos"
reply▲PCMag Australia has this headline
Bill Gates Says Humans Won't Be Needed for 'Most Things' in the AI Age.
Also https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JCnAz_fYzW8
“Will we need humans”
“Not for most things. We’ll decide..” rambling on
I’m not going to be negative just leave that there.
He of all people should know better. Unless he's talking in hundreds or thousands of years timescales perhaps?
reply▲Gates-era Microsoft had a bit of a running problem with "[X] will change everything!" In particular see Windows for Pen Computing in the early 90s and their big voice interaction push in the late 90s/early noughties. I'd tend to discount Gates on this, because, like, it's not his first rodeo; he has predicted all ten of the last two tech revolutions.
reply▲And he famously nearly missed the internet. Microsoft famously came within inches of irrelevance when they ignored the internet for too long leading to his "tidal wave" memo. They got onboard but at the last minute.
reply▲> I'm thinking pastry chef or line cook.
Have you done these jobs before? Or is this more like a programmer’s dream of some fantasy camp version of manual labor?
OnionBlender6 months ago
[-] I see it as someone who likes baking pastries for their family not fully understanding to what it is like to bake pastries for hours everyday. Or someone who likes to tend their garden thinking they should become a farmer. Although I'm guilty of this with regard to turning programming as a hobby into a career. At least the pay is better than my alternatives.
reply▲I'll have to do something with my hands, kitchen skills are probably the only manual labor I can do better than average.
It's not a matter of fantasizing about an idealized version of a dirty, hard blue collar job, but an honest assessment of something that will last longer than coding and will pay me money to feed myself.
smuffinator6 months ago
[-] I was wondering the same thing. It's backbreaking work, man. I started in kitchens after I got jaded writing software, but in comparison, getting jaded from f&b took no time at all
reply▲I’ll be an expat taking advantage of lower income nations
reply▲A lot of the younger (recently ex colonial) nations actually had an agricultural/industrial revolution quite recently. Someone had a grandfather who lost the land of his ancestors to farming machines and vowed revenge. The attitude here is tech is a weapon and it's meant to take jobs and land. Who cares how much water or energy it uses; it's all ammunition. If I don't use it to take someone else's job, they'll use it to take mine.
If you read Robert Greene books, they have a twist ending like "the child who killed his uncle was Ivan the Terrible" or "the British underestimated Afghan pride". I feel like this idea might have a twist ending as well.
The 10 lines of code I write daily will be written by AI and I'll keep doing all the other work.
reply▲"All the other work" being "fixing the code written by AI".
reply▲sumeruchat6 months ago
[-] Shoe cleaning is like coding, you start by spotting surface dirt (easy bugs), then scrub out the tough stains (edge cases), and finish by polishing everything up (optimization). Both demand precision, patience, and a sharp eye for detail.
reply▲When AI replaces developers, it might affect around 5% to 10% of IT staff. Even if AI could develop robust code from scant and inconsistent requirements, it would likely only replace up to 50% of those developers. This would result in a 2.5% to 5% reduction in IT staff. That coincides with what CrowdStrike is laying off as discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43916858. I imagine we're going to see a lot of announcements like these over the next couple of years.
OccamsMirror6 months ago
[-] Are these companies actually laying people off to cut costs in anticipation of a possible recession or depression, but publicly framing it to the stock market as "strategic headcount reduction thanks to AI advancements" to boost their stock prices rather than devalue them?
reply▲Busker, cronic author, chef, racing car driver, language teacher, tourist guide, YouTube pseudo-celebrity, project manager, spiritual guide, advisor, dog walker, gigolo, clown.
So many options!
Parallel parking but clearly not even that is safe.
reply▲I'm going to buy a boat and become a pirate.
reply▲The last remaining job: captcha solver for AI.
reply▲I'll help AI to replace developers (or lawyers or doctors or managers...) in better ways
reply▲AI won't replace developers, it will make people think they can do things that seemed otherwise out of their reach (a.k.a. vibe coding) resulting in more work to people who actually know what they are doing.
reply▲Already veering back to EE, energy based models, mutations of electromagnetic geometry in the machine, that recreates software states through energy based regulation.
Gonna be a long time before infrastructure makes itself.
Bartender or waitstaff. Or wait, I guess they are supposed to be the ones coming to replace me with AI...?
reply▲Containment vessel welding.
reply▲I'll make the same career switch that I made when 'no-code', 5GLs, and, er, that Sun drag and drop flowchart thing, can't remember what it's called, made developers obsolete.
"This will make developers obsolete" is fairly standard marketing and crops up a couple times a decade (this has been going on for a while; COBOL was marketed this way!) At a certain point, it's an industry crying wolf, honestly.
Autocompleter can replace copyers.
reply▲FroshKiller6 months ago
[-] I'll probably get a job with the city cleaning up all the poop from the flying pigs.
reply▲I'm going to be a unicorn rancher.
reply▲Career? I would just own several AI products
reply▲Ugh. Please. Get
off the hypetrain already.
Developers aren't going to be replaced by AI. Have you seen how BAD this stuff is?
It might assist you in certain use cases, but it's not going to replace you.
"AI" is neither artificial, nor intelligent.
It's next token prediction, and it's still laughable what things it comes up with.
It will *NOT* replace a human developer who knows what they're doing and is actually capable of reason.
Anthropic released a study on it quite recently:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-anthropic-economic-indexIt splits tasks into augmentation (upgrading jobs) vs automation (taking jobs). But it's actually hard to separate the two - someone could ask for a full website then modify the code, which becomes augmentation.
Ironically software, especially web dev is at the top of the list. I just talked to someone yesterday who opted not to hire a designer who was being a little pushy in negotiations, and they opted to just hire v0 which would do the same thing faster. At the very least, it's replacing part-timers. We're also seeing teams shrink and churn and being replaced by less experienced (cheaper) members. That's not "taking jobs" either, but it's reducing the demand for seniors as more junior people are able to take on more senior responsibilities.
atleastoptimal6 months ago
[-] AI is capable of reason.
Most AI models today have the superhuman breadth of knowledge but the long-context intuition of a 4 year old. However only a year ago they were no better than a 2 year old. Every few months, many of the things people said AI could never do, the best models are able to do.
Is there a reason why this trend will just suddenly stop short of full human intellect? It's like assuming that humans could never invent a machine that can go faster than a human, or build anything taller than a human. Intelligence is a process of identifying patterns. Humans simply now just have a scale advantage over AI models (100T-1000T synapses in a human brain vs 2-10T parameters in the biggest models).
>It's next token prediction
Just because the architecture is simple doesn't mean intelligence can't emerge from it. It's like claiming the human brain can't be more complex than the human genome.