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Comment by qqqwerty | Hacker News Reader

We went through the same hype cycle with self driving cars. We are now ~15 years out from the DARPA challenges and to date exactly 0 drivers have been replaced by AI.

It is certainly impressive to see how much the GPT models have improved. But the devil is in the last 10%. If you can create an AI that writes perfectly functional python code, but that same AI does not know how to upgrade an EC2 instance when the application starts hitting memory limits, then you haven't really replaced engineers, you have just given them more time to browse hacker news.

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Driving is qualitatively different from coding: an AI that's pretty good but messes up sometimes is vastly more useful for coding than for driving. In neither case can you let the AI "drive", but that's ok in coding as software engineering is already set up for that. Testing, pair programming and code reviews are popular ways to productively collaborate with junior developers.

You're not replacing the engineer, but you're giving every engineer a tireless companion typing suggestions faster than you ever could, to be filled in when you feel it's going to add value. My experience with the alpha was eye opening: this was the first time I've interacted with an AI and felt like its not just a toy, but actually contributing.

Writing code is by far the easiest part of my job. I certainly welcome any tools that will increase my productivity in that domain, but until an AI can figure out how to fix obscure, intermittent, and/or silent bugs that occur somewhere in a series of daisy-chained pipelines running on a stack of a half-dozen services/applications, I am not going to get too worked up about it.

I agree. It kind of amazes me though there is so much room for obscurity. I would expect standardisation to have dealt with this a long time ago. Why are problems not more isolated and manageable in general?

It's extremely hard to reason about the global emergent behavior of a complex system than the isolated behavior of a small component.

I don't think it's a function of complexity per se, but determinism. This is why Haskellers love the IO monad. Used well, it lets you quarantine IO to a thin top-level layer, below which all functions are pure and easy to unit test.

Distributed systems are anything but deterministic.

What is your definition of "replace"? Waymo operates a driverless taxi service in Phoenix. Sign ups are open to the general public. IMO this counts as replacing some drivers as there is less demand for taxi service in the operating area.

https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr...

According to this article[1], the number of ride hailing drivers has tripled in the last decade.

I think full self driving is possible in the future, but it will likely require investments in infrastructure (smarter and safer roads), regulatory changes, and more technological progress. But for the last decade or so, we had "thought leaders" and VCs going on and on about how AI was going to put millions of drivers out of work in the next decade. I think it is safe to say that we are at least another decade away from that outcome, probably longer.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/number-american-taxi-drivers-...

Self driving is used in the mining industry, and lots of high paid drivers have been replaced.

But you are clearly more knowledgeable with your 0 drivers replaced comment.

Mining as in those big trucks or mining as in trains on tracks?

The trucks: https://im-mining.com/2020/06/02/suncor-speeds-komatsu-980e-...

excellent if dsytopian article. thank you for sharing!

> AI does not know how to upgrade an EC2 instance when the application starts hitting memory limits

That's exactly the kind of thing "serverless" hosting has done for a while now.

Yeah really bad example there.

Ahh yes, the serverless revolution! I was told that serverless was going to make my job obsolete as well. Still waiting for that one to pan out. Not going to hold my breath.

This isn't self driving for programming, its more like GPS and lane assist.

15 years is no time at all.

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