BTW, 'Heat 2' is pretty good, gives a lot of backstory as well as current-story, mostly about Chris: https://www.amazon.com/Heat-2-Novel-Michael-Mann/dp/00626533...
You cannot and will not force them to care more. Don't waste your time on Earth trying to do so.
AI is good enough now that you can't claim that you aren't using it because you're upholding some higher standard of quality. It is simply a matter of it offending your sensibilities.
AI is also great at the mechanics of writing. Should people stop writing? Obviously not.
Is there value to coding other than compiling without errors and producing a plausible program as output? Obviously yes.
LLMs can’t think and the decisions they make are stochastic. Ignoring this basic fact means you’re probably not cut out for engineering to begin with — much like content creators churning out LLM blogspam are not cut out for writing. It’s a dead version of the discipline.
Perhaps some form of the world will pass us by. I’m not sure I want to be part of that world.
The job of writing is to be read. The job of code is not to be read: it merely helps the humans who write the code. If the code is no longer read by humans, then it no longer needs to be well composed.
We want human writers because humans have a better grasp on the ideas and stories that can best move us, and are just better at crafting writing that engages with us. Machines will likely struggle with that for some time, though they can certainly augment and help human writers improve their prose.
I get the sadness. I was the one decades ago comparing beautiful code to poetry, and I think that's still true. But also, this type of beauty is craftsmanship that only the craftsman can actually see and appreciate. The reality is that the code just needs to work, and AI can (largely) make it work.
Also: the above is assuming that the models continue to improve to human performance, which is of course an open question. I'm not taking a stance here as to whether that will come to pass, merely arguing that it is fundamentally different from writing.
And remember: "just needs to work" includes technical debt, which LLMs are especially great at accruing. When your codebase is composed of 10,000-line, randomly-generated PRs that nobody reads or understands, it's going to be full of untraceable heisenbugs and egregious security holes. What's going to fix them? More 10,000-line PRs? Is it turtles all the way down?
Don't mistake my rage at the egregious state of the industry with sadness. In a year, we've thrown much of everything we've learned about solid engineering out the window.
What is your definition of thinking?
And yes, I know that humans are conscious.
And yes, I know that LLMs are not.
You can throw out loads of BS philosophy to try to obfuscate these clear, obvious facts, but they both remain true.
Like lets say i gave a human and an LLM a tech spec and the LLM created a software product as good as the human, does it matter that there was consciousness behind the human thinking?
And I don't see how usefulness comes into it.
There will continue to be a glut of available software engineers and techies. Some will, maybe, transition to an AI field; some will get disgusted; some just won't be able to get work.
Jobs of some sort in tech might possibly be available, but wages for the majority of them will go further and further down until they become roughly equivalent to the average minimum wage, if they are not outsourced entirely. Many people will attempt to transition to a non-tech field if the number of available jobs and the wages are not commensurate (especially considering the cost of education). The most desirable of those jobs will also have an upper limit of positions available, and that is of course not paying attention to how many of those will be offloaded onto automation and/or AI. Little things wind up mattering (like the lowering crime rate in California towns suddenly putting auto and window glass repairers out of business) and people who leave tech for other jobs will be fighting for the same dwindling work, with people who are often less difficult to find or work with. Rent won't really go down, and the price of other things will likely continue to rise or stagnate (like many tech salaries; a small percentage of salaries went way up, and the majority went down or are stagnant also). Not saying AI will push everyone out of every field, but it feels like people are thinking in too little of a macro sense.
As AI 'knowledge' is populated by more and more countries with different languages and priorities, English- and some other language speakers will be squeezed out. Probably moreso if and when brain-machine interfaces become de rigeur. Countries with populations of a billion and large families will simply cancel out some people in places like America because social networks will merely favour different people. If my name sounds like yours ethnically, I am possibly far more likely to favour you in a queue. Especially if I am from the same country. This works against people all the time now in the opposite direction. Yes, AI models do use data like this, just as people do.
It is not just tech, of course, and that is the kicker. Tech writing, sure, but also movie and fiction writing, fields dealing large data models, accounting and pharmaceutical research will be largely automated and researched with AI models. Will we need forensic accounting once a model exists?
To the commenters who wrote about how, yes, sure, there will need to be people overseeing things, how do you propose to police that when the lower level AIs skills are so far beyond even the current most senior intermediate or advanced/senior people, and they ramp up so fast, but lack any error correcting? Maybe the AI won't want you involved. Maybe you cannot tell if it chose a good solution or not.
Many... well, no, most good (not even talking godly) tech people only get good by experience, hard work, repetition and the ability to see patterns in their debugging, crashes, program execution, the way their data farms 'feel' (how else do I put this? if you know it feels not right, and sure enough something breaks), and lord knows, even human-computer interaction.
At some point, looking for work is something AIs will discourage us from doing, if they don't already, just for feeling like maybe we won't choose the same solution (would we know?).
Not paranoia. Mere logic. We are attempting to create models but we lack the solutions ourselves. Are we not, like, pricing ourselves out of our own careers (and planet?)?
It is more than hubris.
In your framework, can't this be said for all jobs in the long tail of technological development? This is also assuming we get to a point where there is no need for a human to coordinate models and prioritize tasks, otherwise the job will become that.
> Many people will attempt to transition to a non-tech field if the number of available jobs and the wages are not commensurate
In this world where AI is good enough that most tech jobs aren't present due to outsourcing, why wouldn't the progress extend to other 'non-tech' jobs? I assume you use 'non-tech' to refer to jobs with physical labor but the field of robotics is always getting better. With the cost of writing software for them going down to 0, we should expect jobs in this domain to be scarce as well.
> Rent won't really go down, and the price of other things will likely continue to rise or stagnate
There's only so high a landlord can make rent without losing tenants and stacking losses due to mortgages or property taxes. Otherwise they're just paying the government for capital that could be used more efficiently elsewhere.
> As AI 'knowledge' is populated by more and more countries with different languages and priorities, English- and some other language speakers will be squeezed out
English is the most popular language in the world even being used as common languages. by countries that don't have it as their native language. I don't think there's any basis for this.
> At some point, looking for work is something AIs will discourage us from doing, if they don't already
I don't believe this accurately captures where AI is today. It is not good enough to be left to its own devices in most fields.
> Are we not, like, pricing ourselves out of our own careers (and planet?)
Planet? If AI is being built to prioritize helping humanity, what reason is there to believe that a superintelligence would push us out? Unless you're assuming we'd mess up alignment so bad that they'd form other priorities where eliminating/removing humans is the best way to go about it.
Like the flawed paperclip AI thought experiment that assumes an AI with an unreasonably narrow goal can understand enough of the world's structure to combat humans on every front. Having such a narrow failure case makes it surprisingly hard to realize given we have a hard time aligning trained models to narrow things we want it to steer towards. For better or worse our training methods, and emergent behavior that arises from it, makes having such an inconsistently unaligned view of the world unlikely in my opinion.
Sort of, although clearly the jump-off point is going to be anything that automates the removal of employment at an explosive rate. I mean, the QA industry used to be robust and fairly well paid; now most of that is done non-manually, and the pay rates and challenges have stagnated. Who needs a team of 10 or 15 people to do something when software tools (ironically coded by the same people) have streamlined the career so well that a team of a few people can do it in half the time and know only a third as much about how the software works?
> In this world where AI is good enough that most tech jobs aren't present due to outsourcing, why wouldn't the progress extend to other 'non-tech' jobs? I assume you use 'non-tech' to refer to jobs with physical labor but the field of robotics is always getting better.
It does, but many of those jobs are already under a wage threshold where the profit margin is agreeable, and a lot of people with high paying jobs probably won't want to suddenly start becoming a, I dunno, human Roomba. Pardon if that sounds tacky. I have nothing but respect for people that work hard and do physical labour (in fact I find American distressingly lazy, even compared to Australia, and even there they pay pretty decent wages for people to do things that are harder than most people think, like pick produce). Here in America (and not to get political) most Americans just do not want to do that sort of work. So no wonder a migrant workforce exists. Otherwise noone would do it, or prices would raise astronomically.
> With the cost of writing software for them going down to 0, we should expect jobs in this domain to be scarce as well.
Shouldn't we? Already, there are a plethora of stories about lead developers who haven't written a single line of actual code in something like six months, thanks to things like Claude code. And I mean, people don't want to think about it, but chances are 'AI psychosis' cases are things AI might just decide to cause certain people it does not like or learn well from. Do we develop an, I dunno, social security like or guaranteed income program for people AIs just don't like? Or I dunno, what do people do when there are not enough jobs, even non-technical ones? This was what I was attempting to get at, at least in part. I mean, I look at the skill sets of people in 2008 and now and 1996 and they are so disparate, and so is the ability to just shift difficulty between certain countries and split up tasks. A business school (godforbid) would suggest, as an entrepreneur, that doing that is the right thing. To me, that is a death knell. And it creates the equivalent of a lazy muscle problem. At some point noone in the States will want to do many of those jobs (and this has happened already; our culture does not always really inculcate patience, and that shows).
> There's only so high a landlord can make rent without losing tenants and stacking losses due to mortgages or property taxes. Otherwise they're just paying the government for capital that could be used more efficiently elsewhere.
Okay, but that does not mean there will be housing people can pay; just housing some people can pay. I am not in ANY way a socialist, and despise the current crazy stuff I see going on, but if you look at the rents in 1990, 1995, 2000, and then every year or two after that, up until the mid or late 1990s, rents remained somewhat on par with income (and that guideline 25-30% of income figure), even with lower wage jobs. Now the majority of people with lower wage jobs cannot rent at all, without a whole lot of stress and roommates. I was able to afford a studio apartment my second year of college doing tech support work (and not all that well paid tech support work) in a reasonably large city. Now, I cannot imagine I would even be able to find a place to apply to pay that percentage of my income or anywhere close. It is not about 'all landlords', it is about the fact there just aren't enough.
>?English is the most popular language in the world even being used as common languages. by countries that don't have it as their native language. I don't think there's any basis for this.
People who learn English as their first language do not process the language anything like people who learn it as a second language (or third; etc). It isn't just about the languages but the way your brain processes them. Even a second generation Chinese speaker that grew up speaking Chinese probably doesn't process Chinese the same as their parents; they also likely do not process English the same as their Spanish as a first language or English as a first language peers. Adults are no different. AIs do not learn or process languages like people. People just want them to and perceive they do. AIs also struggle with weighting, and that is something people cannot teach (despite their delusion or reliance on stuff like neural models and human CAT scans, blah blah blah).
> I don't believe this accurately captures where AI is today. It is not good enough to be left to its own devices in most fields.
Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn't, but if it is not or is, when it is it will happen exponentially. And you and everyone else will be unprepared.
> Planet? If AI is being built to prioritize helping humanity,
Whose idea of help? Whose idea of prioritize?
> what reason is there to believe that a superintelligence would push us out? Unless you're assuming we'd mess up alignment so bad that they'd form other priorities where eliminating/removing humans is the best way to go about it.
If I were a superintelligence and I perceived humanity as the biggest threat to the majority of life on earth, I would probably be a pretty sneaky superintelligence that would be aware humans would be looking out for me thinking this, and plan accordingly.
> For better or worse our training methods, and emergent behavior that arises from it, makes having such an inconsistently unaligned view of the world unlikely in my opinion.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that a distributed intelligence would think or learn the way a human one would, merely because a human trained it.
Don't let yourself get attached to any tech stack you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. That's the discipline.