Maybe its all unavoidable, but I don't want it.
With all of the money and effort put into GPT-4, and now all of the attention from 3rd party devs, we have very little to show for it? At best we have something that improves productivity by a few percent. It’s..ok. The more you use it the more you realize it’s very flawed.
I will never completely discount that future models will be fundamentally different, but I’d put the chances of that happening in the next 5 years very low, despite what we’re hearing from certain industry folks.
As for me, I'd put that at more likely than not.
If we are talking about specific workflows, I would agree with you that this is quite likely to occur.
Given all the people worried about AI safety issues[1], I agree it's likely we might not see any substantial quality[2] improvements for five years.
Even without that, there's no way to tell how close we are to a "solution" to the question of intelligence; it may well be that LLMs are to AGI what all the self-driving car startups you've never heard of are to SAE's Level 5.
[1] alignment: this entire area is described as "pre-paradigmatic" by the actual researchers 6 months ago
privacy preservation: anything that might come under GDPR
audience suitability: e.g. no adult content for minors
[2] speed/efficiency yes, but scoring similarly on the tests.
If you think your job is just writing code, then yeah, you're about to get replaced. But if that was the case, then you would already have been replaced by an outsourced team of developers that can get things done cheaper than you.
We as developers are the conduit between what the business needs and what computers can do. We're translators, and not in the "we write code" sense. A non-developer won't be able to use GPT to write any non-trivial system because they won't have a clue what to ask for.
And if someone thinks "oh but they will one day be able to list their requirements exactly and GPT will just do it", I will ask: Well, why hasn't that taken off with offshore teams, then? The answer to that is exactly the answer to why GPT poses no risk to anyone's career: Stakeholders don't know what they need, and it's up to developers to figure it out.
Honestly, even that would require major advancements, which is speculative at best. The last time I used Copilot to generate a few lines of code, there were three different mistakes. I spent much more time debugging than it would have taken me to just write the code myself.
It can do some things very well, but it fails all the time.
For the foreseeable future, I think we're firmly in the "this is just a tool" territory.
The BLS data has some insights into how the government regarded different job titles over the years.
The current one:
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm#15-0000
has "Computer Programmers" https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151251.htm
> Create, modify, and test the code and scripts that allow computer applications to run. Work from specifications drawn up by software and web developers or other individuals. May develop and write computer programs to store, locate, and retrieve specific documents, data, and information.
and "Software Developers" https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
> Research, design, and develop computer and network software or specialized utility programs. Analyze user needs and develop software solutions, applying principles and techniques of computer science, engineering, and mathematical analysis. Update software or enhance existing software capabilities. May work with computer hardware engineers to integrate hardware and software systems, and develop specifications and performance requirements. May maintain databases within an application area, working individually or coordinating database development as part of a team.
---
This seems to match your views too.
2021:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210318001704/https://www.bls.g...
15-1251 Computer Programmers
15-1256 Software Developers and Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers
15-1257 Web Developers and Digital Interface Designers
Had
15-1131 Computer Programmers
15-1132 Software Developers, Applications
15-1133 Software Developers, Systems Software
15-1134 Web Developers
15-1021 Computer Programmers
15-1031 Computer Software Engineers, Applications
15-1032 Computer Software Engineers, Systems Software
Yes, generating new code is a fairly small part of my job too. But this is also a pretty common take re ai.
Maybe I'm wrong, but generative ai seems to be eating human capabilities for breakfast right now, and we're only ~8 months in. Today it can do a small part of a small part of my job, and rather more of a junior dev's job, but where are we going to be in five years time? I'd quite like to still have a paying job over that timescale.
People used to think that creating art or music or playing go or whatever, were activities that required a human meatbrain. Turns out its all just (effectively) a bunch of parametric equations. What if the non-coding skills you list will be similarly amenable/vulnerable to automation by ai?
One of these things is not like the others
(I'm not actually sure which of those three you were singling out and why; they're all different in their own ways).
I don't foresee an AI being able to replace an engineer for real production-grade custom software for a long time
At the beginning of the devlopment of computer chess, people said it would NEVER beat a reasonable player. Then it did. Then they said it would NEVER beat a seasoned tournament player, and it did. They said it would NEVER beat an international master or grandmaster...but it did.
People keep saying never. Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time. You might be safe in your job, but what about your children or grandchildren?
Yeah, it's gonna suck for us, but it's gonna suck more for a lot of other jobs a lot sooner.
I guess the modern answer from a globalist is that back in the day, societies weren't as entangled as they are today, so they could go into freefall relatively easily with little impact by other societies, so they let them fall, especially if it was beneficial for them.
But today everything is so interconnected that if one fall, it would heavily impact a large part of the rest of the societies, that we cannot let it happen. Just look at how unimportant most people would consider Ukraine to be, before the invasion. But it has a huge impact on large sectors, and most countries would have this impact. Some areas of the world, like the Eurozone, even purposefully lock themselves in with their partners so if Greece gets impacted by something, member states have to help them as it'll impact them greatly if they don't.
So I guess my end argument is that there isn't really "societies" anymore, we're just part of a global one where the decentralized nature is so strong that we cannot really fail (globally) anymore unless there is something really big impacting all of us (like COVID).
Worse: thanks to psychology, even if a time traveller came back to now with such a list (and proof of being a time traveler), their examples would not feel real to most until they could be experienced directly — I knew that GPT-3 could code simple web pages just over two years[0] before ChatGPT came out, but it still didn't hit me emotionally until we were all able to play with it ourselves.
[0] August 8, 2020: https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE
Yes, and?
I mean, you clearly get what you put in the next sentence:
> "AI" is just a broad, abstract category that they both happen to share.
But, there's also no requirement for future chat bots to be Transformer models like GPT.
All we know for sure is that this blob of weights seems to be pretty good at a lot of different things that used to be things that only humans could do.
Thus, I think as another demonstration of "we used to use this as a proxy for intelligence and now we can't" it's fine to use chess as an analogy because it demonstrates exactly that thing.
No idea what comes next, nor when — it's still possible that "solving" general intelligence is beyond human capacity.
There's another effect, especially with regard to information synthesis via AI: previously the vast majority of information was obtained with people's names attached to them. All Stackoverflow answers have names attached to them, and articles on the internet too.
Now, AI bypasses that, making information gathering more anonymous and less human. I already remarked in comments that information sharing has always had two functions in human history: bonding humans together and trading useful information. AI removes the bonding aspect and creates a pathological environment where information sharing is too anonymous.
Your comment is one of the first I've seen that actually talks about a longer-term effect of AI, but AI programmers and companies are too bedazzled by the promise of short-term financial gain to give one care about ethics, except for mouth-service.
Though we do need to prepare for AI replacement, I think we'll be much more successful pushing for things like UBI than pushing against things like AI assistants.
> Previously the vast majority of information was obtained with people's names attached to them. All Stackoverflow answers have names attached to them, and articles on the internet too.
> Information sharing has always had two functions in human history: bonding humans together and trading useful information
I'm sorry but I disagree. When I see StackOverflow answers or random articles I rarely remember the associated name, unless they're especially notable (e.g. Eric Lippert). And I'm not sure about the vast majority, lots of Stack Overflow and Reddit answers are under pseudonyms.
I'm in academia. I believe that when people contribute to the pool of knowledge, the knowledge comes first and their credit comes second; not to be forgotten, but not something most people need to know. When applying for jobs and bragging to people I can show off that I discovered or invented X, but people learning or using X don't need to know my name.
I don't think most people asking technical questions are looking for "bonding", they're just looking for an answer to the question. I talk with colleagues about things like opinions and the latest hot topic, but AI isn't going to replace these discussions.
That is already an unfortunate side effect of our current advanced state of technology.
> I don't think most people asking technical questions are looking for "bonding", they're just looking for an answer to the question. I talk with colleagues about things like opinions and the latest hot topic, but AI isn't going to replace these discussions.
I never said they are looking for it. I just said that it is a function of information exchange. In other words, it is an evolutionary instinct that just occurs, and has occurred whether we want it to or not. AI for the first time will be poised to remove it.
AI might indeed replace your colleagues one day, since an entire academic department may not even need that many professors or researchers to run it, once it's augmented with AI.
I don't know where you've been this past year, but hand-wringing about AI replacing humans in the long term has been everywhere. It's gotten less common in recent months as the limitations of the models become apparent, but it's still prevalent.