What is going to become of life for those of us who do not work at AI labs and are unlikely to be hired by AI labs, despite all the years we put into learning coding, math, etc, as we were told to do? Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living? (We don't live in a world that seems likely to distribute gains widely instead of largely to the handful of already mega-rich.)
You can calm down, even those with machine learning knowledge and most of those working for the AI labs won’t be needed anymore if models are capable to improve themselves.
In the end, having a machine replacing the work of a human is a good thing - in most of the cases we don’t work because of the work but to make a living. If too many people can’t make a living anymore the system is going to change. For the better or the worse.
I'd be happy to not work anymore with a strong welfare system redistributing society's gains to the leisured masses, but absolutely nothing I've seen of the direction of politics in any recent years gives me hope for this kind of situation coming about.
No it is good for humanity, but not necessarily good for individuals who built technical foundational skills on things that will be taken over by automation.
AI as it is now and as it will be projected into the future WILL automate many skills. But not all skills. MANY MANY people will retain skills that cannot be replaced by AI. One career track that will be replaced is definetely the SWE. Or at least massively reduced in capacity if not eliminated all together.
When AI can replace most SWEs, it can cost-effectively build systems that can replace most other white-collar workers as well. It's mainly skills involving physical work that cannot be replaced without major advances in robotics. Anything done with a computer in a office will be gone if SWE is gone.
Coding is the easiest thing for the ai to do, the rules are strict, there are plenty of working code to use as example and training data. The most important is that even an ai can decide immediately if the output is good or bad (working vs not working) and try again.
All other white collar jobs does not seem to have this immediate, automatic response loop, so the ai can only rely on a human's judgement on the quality of the work. Which is slow and unreliable. The human is not going to throw an exception while reading the ai generated scientific paper. It is inconsistent, two humans can make the opposite decisions about the same output. No way for the ai to measure auccess.
It is going to change a lot of things for everyone, no question about that, but nothing like this. Coding is obsolete. Actually writing the stuff into an editor does not make any sense.
We are now shepherds, we make sure the agents are well fed and not doing anything stupid.
For me it is amazing to watch it in action, I don't mind being a shepherd :) I'm not interested in the syntax of the languages or code formatting. Tabs or spaces? Who cares, neither. I also don't like shell scripts, batch files, yaml configs, json, xml. Watching the agent going through this shit like a tank is amazing.
I agree about the shepherding role. But, I'm not sure about how hands-off the shepherding will be at well-run companies. I work on pricing software for a regulated industry. If I were to start over again from scratch on some of the systems I work on, I could certainly get AI to create a black box that prices per a spec while showing its work. I would iterate on the system and validate the output with the help of an LLM. I would make sure all edge cases are covered and lock in the behavior with "unit" tests. I'd continue to monitor the system in production.
The problem that I see with a black box approach is a lot of uncertainty about how long it will take to get the initial system reliably producing the correct output with acceptable performance. I could deal with that, but the bigger problem I see is the unpredictability of future effort to make changes to the system as my company grows (more traffic to the system, more/changed territory specific laws, more features). This uncertainty could be mitigated by an experienced software engineer guiding what gets built inside of the box. This guiding would include a familiarity with how the code is structured.
Even if one assumes a black box approach, what the box should actually do still requires the mindset of a good software engineer. Many product managers or non-technical parties requesting software won't think through and find problematic inconsistencies or gaps in the business rules they asked for. They won't anticipate how to frame the problem in a way that makes expanding upon the capabilities later easier.
So, I think the role would look like a blend of software/system architect + product manager + dev/LLM ops + QA. At least this would be true at a company that I would want to work for. I've always preferred working in small, strong teams where everyone has a lot of ownership. There will always be the LLM day equivalent of software produced by offshore teams in the early 2000s. I'm sure their modern-day ilk will excrete something that's good enough. I don't want to work for this type of company.
Nah battery power and meat based hardware will stay intrinsically ahead indefinitely.
That being said metal based robots can replace many human jobs (like server) but something like a plumber or construction worker is extremely hard to do.
I believe what happens in the aftermath of a capitalist-driven revolution is most people who were climbing the class hierarchy fall back down again and wealth inequality increases. Maybe things will improve in the future, but GP is rationally contending with the fact that most of us will lose out because of this and if we’re lucky our grandchildren will have easier lives in certain ways, but different lives than we would live.
Very true, unfortunately it is just about repeating something for long enough so you micro agree on certain things and adopt a new "normal" and that volume of info is getting out of hand
I have exactly the same thoughts - or perhaps slightly bleaker ones - evry time I read this relentless stream of news about new model releases. I’m tired of all the enthusiastic comments about how excited everyone is about the latest benchmark results and so on.
I have a strong suspicion that many of those comments are written by people who are already financially independent, have millions in stocks, and can just sit back, coast around and watch this whole spectacle unfold while using LLMs to vibe-code their next fun side projects without a shadow of anxiety about their own future.
I’ll most likely be labelled a helpless doomer and downvoted into oblivion for saying this, but I genuinely struggle to see any silver lining here.
Are you doing less work now because of AI? Not sure about you, but I'm doing a lot more work. Not saying I like doing more, or how it's getting done, but nonetheless I don't feel like AI is doing what the CEOs of AI labs want to convince everyone of.
100% in real life where everyone has an AI there are new problems to deal with. There's a lot of correcting AI slop code. There's a lot of having to read AI generated slop docs and posts and PR comments. There's a lot of evals for large AI agent chains and prompts, etc.
It's natural to worry about one's own future but I think it's a bit wild to worry just _your_ job that would be replaced. Not just for those with phone center jobs or art jobs or programming jobs - remember, the whole premise was AI overtakes humans, why would that slow down after _your_ job?
Because of this, I don't think many are thinking "90% of the world won't have a source of livelihood but that just means I chill at my lake house for the next 20 years like a normal retirement". Instead, it's usually either "I think AI is overhyped", "I think humanity will figure something out", or "I think this is the end of humanity".
Public opinion and politicians will only notice when the job losses are massive, unfortunately. Right now, unemployment rates are still stable. We can only hope they will notice before things fall off a cliff (if they do).
I feel the same sometimes. I don’t see how this doesn’t lead to massive job losses. The thing we spent our lives/careers learning is now worth basically nothing in comparison.
AI is only going to get better and do more with less humans in the loop over time.
That said, I do also relate to the "coding was never the hard part"-type arguments, and much of my day is spent on the stuff in between writing code.. but still.
I see how it won't lead to massive job loss every day, idk. Now every idiot has a massive slop code cannon they can point at any working system and bombard it and we all have to sift through and find the nuggets and gems in the rough
Yes same thoughts. I dont know anyone who are both enthusiastic about those and work for salary. If you dont have any financial concern, this is really great.
Are you sure that will be enjoyable? Lots of articles out there about people opening coffee shops with idyllic dreams of what it will be like, only to find the reality is a daily grind (hehe) of dealing with delayed suppliers, broken machines, absent staff. All that not-fun stuff falls on you while the customers sip their cappucinos.
The answer to this is: countries with the most natural resources will build robots to farm all their food, mine all their minerals, and build all their products. It will be up to governments to enforce that outputs are equitably distributed to the populace. Countries without natural resources, or ones with corrupt governments, will continue to have serious, and likely worsening, problems.
Thought experiment: If no thought workers are needed to design or engineer a Ferrari, what is needed? My answer is time and natural resources (include energy).
People need purpose. Workplaces provide a very structured, highly managed, perpetual treadmill of purpose. Not purpose in the "self growth" sense, but just something to keep people occupied. "The devil looks for idle hands", and with a large swath of the population* on welfare, there's a good chance he'll find plenty.
[0] that said, population in developed countries is naturally declining so maybe it won't be a problem in the long term either; or maybe, with less need to work, people will be more inclined to raise other people, leading us to both more machines and more humans.
Don't be selfish. Think first of all the jobs that are already dead. A friend of mine she's a translator: like translating financial documents between french/english/spanish. It's over for her: she doesn't get 10% of the gigs she used to get and the 10% she gets is... Verifying AI output.
Think of the artists: I'm sorry for those too, for for many it's already game over today.
> How will we make a living?
A friend of mine who's got his own software-consultancy SME is now advertising on LinkedIn that he'll also help your company fix the mess LLMs created.
That's how you'll make a living: by learning, in addition to all you've already learned, how you work with harnesses and LLMs to be more productive, by learning what they're good at and what they suck big fat balls at.
> Think of the artists: I'm sorry for those too, for for many it's already game over today.
No it's not??? People want human made art. Abstract artists didn't paint anything technically challenging and they sold art for millions because art is about human connection and human inventiveness, not whatever prompt you could feed into an AI.
> he'll also help your company fix the mess LLMs created.
Hugely valuable. I keep a list of every PR I halted which was AI generated with AI commit summaries and AI tests and no human reviewer till me. It's very easy to convince people to keep me around. AIs are smarter than ever but the people using them and putting the prompts in and not reading the output are still as dumb as before
This is such a childish take I hear getting thrown around all the time on the internet. If you really have just been listening to whoever is telling you how to be successful, then you were always doomed to fail at some point. Like, have some self-respect and own your own life, for better or worse.
>Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living?
Take it from someone who studied machine learning specifically: nobody is safe if you assume these companies are going to produce a product that will put everybody else out of business. If AI is going to take your job, then it's gonna take enough jobs that your problems will not be personal but systematic.
Perhaps it was childish to listen to advice, sure. I was a child when I made my formative choices; I was a teenager in college and so on. I can't go back in time now.
Yes, these problems are systematic. That is what I am saying. That doesn't make it any nicer.
10-20 years? I doubt it. There are a bunch of companies actively working in bringing AI into robots, so they can make your dishes. And so far progress looks quite good.
Also, if enough people are going for the same backup plan it might not work out. Why should anyone book you as a personal trainer instead of the other 500 guys in town. And who is going to be able to afford paying you anyway?
> There are a bunch of companies actively working in bringing AI into robots, so they can make your dishes.
I know, I'm excited to buy the first relatively affordable ones.
> Also, if enough people are going for the same backup plan it might not work out.
Sure, could happen. You can't really plan for the future -- we like to think we can, but the best you can do is set your goals and deal with the hand life gives you along the way.
> Why should anyone book you as a personal trainer instead of the other 500 guys in town.
I'm not particularly worried about this, but that's an individual thing based on network/connections and life history that doesn't apply to everyone.
I doubt it. It’s not just America working on these breakthroughs anymore. Now we have two powers working at break neck speed to get to that point and the Chinese are making a lot of progress.
Those robots are a gimmick and they can only do prescribed tasks in a super constrained environment. They are cashing in on LLM hype right now, vision has had some advances thanks to transformers but we are so far away in terms of the hard stuff (dexterity and physical sensing) still.
Is that 10-20 years number based on anything? I genuinely have no idea, but when I saw a video showing what's happening at the World Humanoid Robot Games[1], I realized I didn't have a good idea of where we really are with robotics.
We are talking that hundred millions of people will switch their jobs, how you will keep your value or earning as personal trainer. It's not easy to say switch the job. This question must be answered by politicians not us.
You'll be fine. All these AIs still need direction, drive, and prompts. And it'll still be important to evaluate their output and correct it. And you'll be more productive and able to do more tasks quicker than usual with you helpful human expertise guiding the AI which is far more general.
You're the taste and decision maker. The AI is like a really precise, fast Google, Wikipedia, codegen tool
It’s an interesting moment in history, people 35+ yrs old seem to be less afraid if tech because we learned that things change in the way we work.
People below this age got used to fact that the work and tech doesn’t change - just because for the last 10-15 years it didn’t.
The problem is it’s turtles all the way down. The AI will be able to use AIs better than a good engineer can. And it will also be able to use AIs to use AIs to use AIs better than the engineer can.
The threat is that the very kernel of value you had is gone forever. There is no more differential leverage.
