The funny thing is, last year when ChatGPT was released, people freaked out about the same thing.
Some of it was downright gleeful. Buncha people told me my job (I’m a software developer) was on the chopping block, because ChatGPT could do it all.
Turns out, not so much.
I swear, I think some people really want to see software developers lose their jobs, because they hate what they don’t understand, and they don’t understand what we do.
As a software developer, I do want to see software developers lose their jobs to AI. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the purpose of a lot of software development is to put other people out of a job via automation, and that’s fundamentally a good thing. The alternative is like wanting a return to preindustrial society. Automation generally raises quality of life.
The real problem is that we still haven’t figured out how to distribute the benefits of society’s automation efforts equitably so that they raise quality of life for everyone.
Yeah that would be all fine and well if it meant we’re on track for some post-work egalitarian utopia but you and I know that’s not at all where this is heading.
Unfortunately based on what I know of history it seems likely that humanity won’t ever be on track to build a post-work egalitarian utopia until we’ve got no other option left. So I support going ahead with this tech because that seems like a good way to force the issue. The transition period will be rough, but better than stagnation IMO.
Oh, for sure, it’ll definitely further wealth disparity, as automation always seems to in a capitalist system. But that’s a societal problem that we continually have to address, and it spans nearly all fields of human work to varying degrees.
Fortunately, for the most part tech advancements are very hard to control. Progress can be impeded from spreading, but not stopped, and it means the average individual has access to more and more powerful tools.
We’ve figured it out. They already had a start on it in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, those with the means have spent the last 100 years screaming bloody murder. Dismantling government and any progress that had been made to address it. As well as invading and overthrowing any foreign group that though about opposing them.
Glad it’s all figured out. Does that include some sort of viable implementation plan?
Even if ChatGPT gets far in advance of the way it is now in terms of writing code, at the very least you’re still going to need people to go over the code as a redundancy. Who is going to trust an AI so much that they will be willing to risk it making coding errors? I think that the job of at the very least understanding how code works will be safe for a very long time, and I don’t think ChatGPT will get that advanced for a very long time either, if ever.
There’s more to it than that, even. It takes a developer’s level of knowledge to even begin to tell ChatGPT to make something sensible.
Sit an MBA down in front of a ChatGPT window and tell them to make an application. The application has to save state, it has to use the company’s OAuth login system, it has to store data in a PostgreSQL database, and it has to have granular, roles-based access control.
Then watch the MBA struggle because they don’t understand that…
- Saving state is going to vary depending on the front-end. Are we writing a browser application, a desktop application, or a mobile application? The MBA doesn’t know and doesn’t understand what to ask ChatGPT to do.
- OAuth is a service running separately to the application, and requires integration steps that the MBA doesn’t know how to do, or ask ChatGPT to do. Even if they figure out what OAuth is, ChatGPT isn’t trained on their particular corporate flavor for integration.
- They’re actually writing two different applications, a front-end and a back-end. The back-end is going to handle communication with PostgreSQL services. The MBA has no idea what any of that means, let alone know how to ask ChatGPT to produce the right code for separate front-end and back-end features.
- RBAC is also probably a separate service, requiring separate integration steps. Neither the MBA nor ChatGPT will have any idea what those integration steps are.
The level of knowledge and detail required to make ChatGPT produce something useful on a large scale is beyond an MBA’s skillset. They literally don’t know what they don’t know.
I use an LLM in my job now, and it’s helpful. I can tell it to produce snippets of code for a specific purpose that I know how to describe accurately, and it’ll do it. Saves me time having to do it manually.
But if my company ever decided it didn’t need developers anymore because ChatGPT can do it all, it would collapse inside six months, and everything would be broken due to bad pull requests from non-developers who don’t know how badly they’re fucking up. They’d have to rehire me… And I’d be asking for a lot more money to clean up after the poor MBA who’d been stuck trying to do my job.
Who is going to trust an AI so much that they won’t risk it making coding errors?
Sadly, too many
That’s a fuckin bleak outcome for a lot of people if the job transition goes from \ to \
That’s like being an artist and being told your job now is simply to fix the shitty hands Midjourney draws. And your job will only last as long as that remains a problem.
It isn’t surprising that this is the way we conceptualize the potential impact of AI, but it’s frustrating to see it tossed around as if AI disruption is a forgone conclusion.
AI will start re-defining the problems that code is written to solve long before we get anywhere close to GPT models replacing human workers, and that’s a big enough problem by itself.
It used to be that before code could even be employed to solve a problem, it had to be understood procedurally. That’s increasingly not the case, given that ML is routinely employed to decode things that were previously thought to be too chaotic to be understood, like brain waves and image pixel data. I don’t know why we’re so sure of ourselves that machine learning is just a gimmick and poses no real threat, just because anthropomorphizing it seems silly.
Your comment reminds me the cesspit of Xitter with the generative AI bros trying to conflate AI with assistive tech. They seriously argued that “artistically impaired” was a genuine disability and that they were entitled to generative AI training sets because it allowed them to draw. It was the most disingenuous argument, that they had a right to steal artists work, and leave them without income, to train their AI because they couldn’t be bothered to rub a pen against some paper.
Hey! Artist here. I love drawing. My hands go numb within minutes and they shake more every year. I appreciate having a tool and medium that allows great artistic control despite these facts.
Now, if you’re really butthurt about the training data you can use adobe’s proprietary model. I for one think it’s good that peasants have an open available tool that isn’t owned by adobe, even if it was trained less proprietarily.
This anger about it reminds me of deviant art artists getting mad at each other for “copying my style”
And the fact that copywrite used to be about the general good, and promotion of creative works.
This world needs new artistic priorities. Pen and paper aren’t losing their place, but new tech will lead to independent artists creating entire movies, games, and holodeck style experiences without looming overhead of whatever art oligarch holds the funding.
Au contraire. Art oligarchs will own every single thing you make with AI. You’re not being liberated, you’re being further imprisoned, and they got you to cheer for the jailers.
ADD: remember, the final goal of the technocrats is not to make more artists. But to remove the artist from the art altogether.
I mean, I was literally diagnosed with “clumsy child syndrome” (we call it dyspraxia now) as a kid, in part because I’m artistically impaired.
Lotta people have already lost jobs because of it. I know a few personally. People with college educations. We’re just getting started with this, it will get worse.
In software development? Not many - and certainly not at smart companies.
ChatGPT is a tool. It goes in the developer toolbox because it’s useful. But it doesn’t replace the developer, any more than a really good screwdriver replaces the construction worker.
More and more, understanding how to use LLMs for software development will be a job requirement, and developers who can’t adapt to that may find themselves unemployed. But most of us will adapt to it fine.
I have. I’m using Copilot these days. It’s great. And the chances of it replacing me are roughly 0%, because it doesn’t actually know anything about our applications, and if told to make code by someone else who doesn’t know anything about them either, it’ll make useless garbage.
Yeah so your job is a harder to fully replace with AI at this moment than jobs like copywriting, narration, or illustration. Enjoy it while it lasts, because the days are numbered.
And before all those jobs are gone, people using AI tools like your Copilot will be more productive requiring less headcount. At the same time there will still be a lot of people seeking work, but now with fewer jobs there will be downward pressure on wages.
Those people were always misinformed.
At some point in the future AI will replace most programmers, because AI will allow senior devs to automate large portions of their codebase. Human devs will act more like QA, fixing the small errors during the automation process.
Either way it’s a tool to by used by you to multiply your efforts, not one to replace you.
