Comment by eldritch_4ier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eldritch_4ier | Hacker News Reader

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All points the horses made before cars all but replaced them. “The humans need to get from A to B and it’s not like they’ve gotten any faster with their own 2 legs”.

How does this manager-engineer look like now? Managers specify what they need in plain language, and both parties go back and forth with increasing complexity to create based on the shared vision. Managers can already pull off a similar dance with ChatGPT: give it a plain English prompt, it’s responds with what it thinks you want, and you refine until it’s got it. GPT4 can do this with website sketches, and who knows how much finer you could get from there by specifying your prompts and feedback more tightly over less than an hour. Remember: copywriters and brand marketers and marketing creative makers have a similar role of turning complex requirements into designs that sell (and their roles are dying fast).

A software engineers job is to realize products into software. ChatGPT is pretty much as capable as a high school programmer that moves really quickly and takes feedback to heart - and that can handle a good chunk of the software engineering job for a huge fraction of the price. Your job isn’t as bulletproof as you think, and especially not your amazing salary. I’m speaking as a software engineer turned vc backed founder, so I’ve seen both sides of this relationship.

The horse population has decreased by half or so since the early 1900s. And horses have stayed pretty valuable, too. Most of them just don't have to work as hard anymore. The horses used for sport never went away, only the horses used for labor or transport. So if your horse analogy is accurate, then maybe half of software engineers lose their jobs and the industry stops growing. Those that keep their jobs keep their salary and have to either be very fast or very good at jumping over artificial obstacles. Seems accurate. I should probably stop beating a dead horse.

Even the work horse breeds still exist and do work at some small farms but it’s probably 1% of the peak demand for them. Not a good outlook necessarily if we are the workhorses

Wouldn’t a better statistic be the ratio of horses to people? I’m sure that has gone done much more since the early 1900’s.

A software engineer's job isn't to write code, it's to make decisions. Going from "give me Uber for bicycles" to a working app that runs on a device takes a million decisions, which a bunch of people (designers, copywriters, engineers, etc) make.

Yes, the AI is good at taking low-level requests and turning them into reasonable code, and then refining them, but unless the CEO is going to sit down and spend days telling the AI "OK now make this button disabled when it's clicked until the table loads", you need someone to be doing that.

Manager would be easier to replace with ChatGPT than a software developer

And a founder likely easier again ;)

Maybe? A founders job is basically “execute the path to capitalize on the opportunity”. So you have to figure out the opportunity, and execute towards it by whatever means necessary - that’s a lot of jobs and hats. As long as there’s a human required to make a business possible, founders will exist. Get rid of software engineering, marketing, fundraising, identifying the opportunity, sales, customer support, etc then maybe all the founder does is make sure the machine keeps running. But at that point every other human job is automated too.

Founders are weird because their job is just to “do everything that needs to be done” so the role flows like water into any spot that isn’t already filled in a company. Replacing that seems like by definition you have to replace almost everyone else first.

> But at that point every other human job is automated too.

I’ve heard that exact same argument for software engineers.

As an outside observer it sounds like you’ve switched from SE to founder, so you’re failing to apply the same standards because you (consciously or not) want to defend your current position.

> I’ve heard that exact same argument for software engineers.

Do you think it failed to hold?

How do they apply to software engineers exactly? The founder “job” is literally “do anything that needs doing in the business”. Now the job of a CEO or CTO is much more narrowly defined and I can see that seeing automation sooner, but the founder role is kinda unique in that it’s just “do everything and if you’re successful you should be constantly replacing your job with an employee”.

Founders are the jobs trying their hardest to replace themselves (with hires and go can do the work better) and yet still always find more to do. That’s very unique

>That’s very unique

That's not even close to unique. Software engineers have been doing that since they existed.

>but the founder role is kinda unique in that it’s just “do everything and if you’re successful you should be constantly replacing your job with an employee”.

That's maybe the ideal of a founder, it's definitely part of the mythology, but it wasn't true for the majority of the many founders I worked with back when I was consulting for early stage startups. Based on my experience with a large sample size, the job of a founder is to convince VCs to give them money.

>How do they apply to software engineers exactly?

It's one of the definitions of the singularity. When AI can write itself, it will improve so rapidly that humans won't be able to keep up.

> Founders are the jobs trying their hardest to replace themselves (with hires and go can do the work better) and yet still always find more to do. That’s very unique

Not really. They are not "replacing self", the coordination is always needed, just hire the people to the point coordinating the company is their only job. I.e. finding peasants to do their dirty work and they can just rule over them.

Probably the whole company.

Uber was founded in 2009. Before that you could maybe hail a cab if you were in NYC, otherwise you had to call ahead. Someone would drive the cab to you, you'd get in it, and they'd drive you to where you wanted to go.

Now we have AI. Now instead of driving to a financial advisor's office or a bank loan officer's desk or my kid's school:

- I have an AI app that automatically invests my money and runs on my phone's neural processor

- I have an AI app that automatically tells me if I qualify for a mortgage based on a truckload data about me and runs on my phone's neural processor

- There's a booth in my kid's classroom that her teacher puts her into; he says, "hey Siri, teach this kid to stop throwing carrots", the AI teaches my kid in a kind, convincing way that carrots are food, not sports. This runs on the iPad inside the booth that is also the screen

- I have an AI app that tracks how long I'll live, and it ticks down 1.38 minutes whenever I set foot in an automobile, so I try and avoid it now. I can't believe people were ever so reckless.

The race now is who controls this. Probably what will happen is governments will deem it dangerous (disinformation, national security, export controls), and allow only megacorps like Google/Facebook/Microsoft to run them under strict regulations. As a result, these models won't run on our phones but on server farms, and we'll become (even more) dependent on these corporations. This will feel good to the US because it shores up our tech sector--a big economic advantage compared to every other country--while also looking sensible.

Some good points but maybe be more careful with your use of verb tense. I was thinking you were either overly-trusting or in possession of an ungodly-exotic prototype phone until you got to the part about the conditioning booth in the classroom. :-P

I'm bullish on recent ML advancements but it will be a long time before I give one my Schwab login.

Hah fair, could have used more editing :))

I'm skeptical too, but I assume this will just be Darwinian: curmudgeons like us will shamble along with our 5% gains and ill-behaved children, and the bulk of society will reap greater rewards. The worst part is our judiciousness won't even save us if we turn out to be right: society will still collapse whether or not you turned your life over to AI.

On that day, "I told you so" wont bring us back from the brink.

High-level decision makers like founders and C-suite execs will be the last roles automated away. ChatGPT is effectively a personal assistant that works fast and works cheap. That's a game changer because suddenly peons like you and me get our own personal assistants, but for high-level decision makers it's just an incremental improvement over what they already have.

Maybe. I’m not on anyone’s side here, just what makes sense.

This is good thing. Managers can clarify their ideas using AI tools.

But still, the real product needs to be fleshed out, back and forth, interactively.

Regardless of whether it is the manager or engineer who commands the tool, you can't entrust the AI to get everything 100% right. Some one has to proofread it, and that is the bottleneck, or where the value of human kicks in.

A human brain can only hold that many details by itself. It can't maintain all the details live all at once, and some business do have overwhelming number of details. A one man team with help of infinite AIs to replace an actual team isn't useful.

At some point, that human will start to fail to verify the system generated by AI is actually what he/she wants.

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