Are you super pessimistic about the future of this profession?
I expect this to destroy the “gig economy” of freelancers too, but only after existing programmers are forced out of normal employment and into “freelancing” with drastically reduced negotation power and workplace protections.
All the technical depth and fun is going to be removed unless you’re one of the very few most elite human programmers.
It breaks my heart seeing this happen but I can’t do anything about it. My advice to everyone is to grift their way into a startup, get as much equity as you can, sell it and retire early. With UBI coming in 10 or 20 years it shouldn’t be too hard.
Most leading ML researchers expect it to continue for a few more orders of magnitude of model size, which I think is enough for my prediction to come true.
The computer is a blank slate. Innocent. When it starts, there is nothing stored in its vast arrays of memory. No data, no code, nothing.
Bit by bit programmers carved meaning into that empty universe. This number is now a character. An array of these numbers is now text. An ordered list of these texts is now a program. Complexity increasing. We could do more and more with less and less. That new virtual world was revealing itself to us.
We were the gods of this virtual world.
With mere words we could conjure up incredible architectures out of nothing. We gave meaning to ordinary numbers. We invented structures. We developed systems. We erected infrastructure. Even language itself came from us. Limited only by our minds. The computer's capabilities shaped by our own understanding. Anything we thought possible, happened. Only the courage to try was necessary.
And now the computer is becoming so advanced and complex that our minds can no longer fully understand it. We can no longer fully control it. One day we will no longer be the gods we once were. The computer will understand things and reprogram itself.
A truly poignant end for us. Reduced to reliving our past glories in the comfort of old hardware and software.
> I also live in Brazil, if it matters.
It matters. I'm also brazilian and most other programmers I've met are exactly as you described. I actually quit professional programming because of that.
Yeah, computer technology is exactly like this today. What's it about? Consumerism. Engagement. Advertising. Surveillance. Corporate bottom lines. Government control.
It's such an incredible waste. The potential of computers used to be limitless. They empowered people. They once threatened monopolies, governments. To see them reduced to the state of appliances serving the very same elites they were supposed to free us from is just sad.
> Science and computers should be accessible to everybody, not only DaVinci's and elite programmers, and that's the way it will go.
That's okay. I just wish things were different.
Science fiction predicted the creation of AI. They were human-like. They were our friends. We could trust them. The dystopian cyberpunk hell we're heading towards has AI as a tool of corporations and the state, used to control people, exploit them. It has masters but they're not us. The AI snitches on us, reports our wrongthink.
> I hope you can find joy in life elsewhere in your mind/activity.
Thanks. I hope so too. I've found meaning in other activities but nothing matches the godlike feeling I used to get from programming.