Clothing demand has increased greatly in the past decade due to fast fashion. Much of this clothing is designed to cost a few bucks, last a few wears, then get thrown out. It's an ecological disaster.
Maybe we'll see something similar happen with software — as production costs fall, trends will shift toward few-use throwaway software. I highly suspect this is already happening.
software has worked this way since the rise of the internet and SaaS. consumers rarely need to install anything locally other than a browser.
I was just laid off from my job of 8 years in which I was the UX Researcher, Designer, Front-End Dev and Customer UX Support. In a week I have sold my house and am downsizing significantly and in two years or less will be working as an RN(nurse). I will try to get back into my field but the current administration and the many tech layoffs has flooded the market with people like me looking for job. All the while AI is eating my career & field. It just doesnt seem wise that my career of 20 years is going to be around in the next ten years.
Also, will there be interfaces we have today in five to ten years or so? My guess is AI is the interface that does everything for us through voice (Open AI's upcoming device) or text .. now we still could have handheld AI phones or devices but where AI does everything including presents articles, games we play, etc and all from these AI devices' lock screen (websites are not visited much)
That said, I don't have much faith in the future of my programming career either. Unless robotics gets exponentially better, registered nurses are going to be way safer from automation (at least the ones doing physical treatment).
Tech is a tool. It will take away some jobs, and then create new ones. Think of a combine tractor -- it took away crop picking jobs, but created a new job of combine tractor driver. It bumps productivity.
The correct frame is "how can software engineers (or anyone, for that matter) use AI to increase my productivity?" With that frame, AI does not replace engineers; rather, engineers are in the best position to understand how it deliver products faster and implement that understanding.
The only reason society didn't collapse: there were enough other jobs to absorb those displaced workers. Will there always be?
LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon. They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cognitively demanding engineering tasks like design, planning, or creative problem solving. We will need a different architecture for that, transformers don't look like they get smarter in that way even with scale.
Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?"
>unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.There's no reason to believe that's the case.
How about the fact that we don't actually know enough about the human mind to arrive at this conclusion? (yet)
And also at what cost and at what scale?
Will we be able to construct a supercomputer/datacenter that can match or exceed human intelligence? Possibly, even probaby.
But that would only be one instance of such an AGI then and it would be very expensive. IMHO it will take a long time to produce something like that as a commodity.
Tractors didn't just change farming. They emptied entire regions.
What saved the people (not the communities) was that other industries absorbed them. Factory work, services, construction. The question for software isn't whether AI creates efficiency. It's whether there's somewhere else for displaced engineers to go.
I've been writing code professionally for 16 years. The honest answer is I don't know. The optimistic scenario is that AI makes software so cheap that we build things we never would have attempted. The pessimistic one is that most of what needed building gets built, and the remaining work fits in fewer hands.
Both seem plausible. I'd bet on somewhere in between, but I'm not confident enough to tell anyone starting out that they should ignore the risk entirely.
The dream of a Jira integration directly wired to an autonomous system to quickly close stories with no human intervention will remain a dream for a long time for anything except the lowest-level 10% of stories. Its not interactive enough; the feedback loop needs to be tighter, the vibes need to be conversational, and businesses will get the most value out of the pilot in the chair being someone who in years past called themselves a software engineer. I think we still will; the tools just change.
nomilk•1h ago
tl;dr it argues when there's a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of production of a good or service, its per-unit cost goes down so much that demand skyrockets, leading to greater demand for employees in that sector. The examples it gives are radiologists (after neural nets were predicted to be able to perform their jobs essentially for free), and dock workers
If this happens in the case of SWEs, it would mean a 'unit' of software will be able to be produced much more cheaply, but the demand for and price (i.e. salaries) of SWEs might stay the same or increase.
baxtr•45m ago
hshdhdhj4444•43m ago
The problem with this argument is that AI, or at least the vision of AI companies and governments are spending trillions of dollars on, purports to replace the human itself. Put another way it intends to automate all the 3 steps (as well as any ancillary services in marketing the widget, legal services in protecting the company, etc). So any increase in demand does not lead to any additional labor since the labor per unit is 0.
This video’s argument simply collapses the debate back to whether AI can largely replace human intelligence or not.