Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code?
by malborodog on Friday March 17, 2023 @03:28AM
(#35194301)
But obviously increasing avg and sr programmer productivity by many x implies many fewer jobs for programmers. That’s the point we’re interested in.
Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code?
by mattnewport on Friday March 17, 2023 @07:32AM
(#35195605)
Is that obvious? The history of programming has been full of things that have at least claimed to increase programmer productivity, everything from high level languages to smart refactoring IDEs, debuggers, PaaS, etc and in all that time the trend has been towards more jobs for programmers not fewer.
Productivity with modern tools (SPAs, microservices) is often a lot lower than oldschool stuff (django/rails, maybe even Visual Basic, Delphi)
You seem to be saying that there is fixed demand for programmers and oversupply means less hiring.
But the history of technology says that demand is recursive; the more tech produced, the more demand there is for producers.
There may be a time when we hit the old “the whole world only needs 5 computers”[0] limit, but I don’t think we’re anywhere close. AI is providing leverage to create net more programming; it is not replacing programmers in a zero sum game.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/computing...
Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code?
by flippinburgers on Friday March 17, 2023 @08:34AM
(#35196254)
Sounds a bit too much like a perpetual motion machine to me.
Isn’t that true of any economy? Think of how many people are employed in general. How could this number of people have been employed 200 years ago?
I’ve got a computer in all of my light switches. There’s a limit to this, but I’m not quite sure where it is.
Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code?
by thingification on Friday March 17, 2023 @12:03PM
(#35198888)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
> In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a fixed amount of work—a lump of labour—to be done within an economy which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs.
The lump of labor fallacy says nothing about a particular type of job. A category of jobs can become non-productive versus a technology and the workers within those jobs should get reallocated to more productive jobs.
Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code?
by jacobedawson on Friday March 17, 2023 @03:01AM
(#35194119)
That's why I said it was unpredictable, in both directions.
Additionally, "the rate of increase in capabilities" is very much a false flag. Past performance (especially for second-order things like 'rate of improvement') is an absolute batshit insane metric for predicting future success.
https://russellinvestments.com/us/blog/past-performance-no-g...
The advancements have eaten low hanging fruit. Once all the low hanging fruit is gone, we'll all realize GPT will never be tall enough to reach the good stuff.