For things like aircraft pilots, it's both realtime-- which means 'reviewer' per output-- you haven't taken a highly trained pilot out of the loop, even if you relegated them to supervising the computer-- and life critical so merely "so/so" isn't good enough.
Pilots are not there to fly the aircraft, the autopilot already does that. They are there to command the aircraft, in a pair in case one is incapacitated, making the best decisions for the people on board, and to troubleshoot issues when the worst happens.
No AI or remote pilot is going to help when say... the aircraft loses all power. Or the airport has been taken over in a coup attempt and the pilot has to decide whether to escape or stay https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NcztK6VWadQ
You can bet on major flights having two commercial pilots right up until the day we all get turned into paperclips.
Yes, this is the sane approach, since a jet represents an enormous amount of energy that can be directed anywhere in the world (just about). But that said, there seems to be enormous pressure to allow driverless vehicles, which also direct large amounts of energy directed anywhere in your city. IOW it seems like a matter of time before we say, collectively, screw it, let the computers fly the plane and if loss of power is a catastrophe, so be it.
As far as the extremely unlikely hostage situation goes, if it were AI controlled that would be even less likely attempts from people to hijack an airplane in the first place since there wouldn't be a human element a.k.a. a pilot that they could appeal to their emotion.
I can easily imagine that at some point, pilots are replaced with technicians who are just there to fix redundant AI systems in case of failure.
In practice in illustration (as in all arts) there are a variety of markets where different levels of talent, originality, reputation and creative engagement with the brief are more relevant. For editorial illustration, it's certainly not a case of 'find me someone who can draw X', and probably hasn't been since printing presses got good enough to print photographs.
Personally, I would never buy a painting generated by an ML model, or even a commercial illustration, if i can help it. The artist and their life experience is half the point of art, IMO.
Unlike artwork, precision and correctness is absolutely critical in coding.
Accomplishing that is achieving general AI.
In the meantime, there are plenty of boilerplate ORMs and simplistic API template tools that make production of bog standard CRUD apps dead simple. Of course, they all have their drawbacks and trade-offs, and aren't always suitable. But I don't see the amount of software engineering work reducing as a result of these no-code, low-code tools, do you?
As I see, the real challenge to solve is for it to be able to hold context and be able to communicate iteratively. Also, as you say find missing gaps. That's important. Other than that, you tell it what you want, it creates something and then you tell it to change things around. Which is, BTW, pretty similar to how it works with biological life based developers. Though as we're lazy, we like to clarify a lot of things up front (and either drive customers crazy or teach them that this is the way it works). If you have an AI that spits out code in a few minutes, it may not matter a lot.
Most of the programming jobs are indeed about making relatively simple stuff from standard components.
Let me know when you find a single programmer who can do that reliably.
Bytecode -> Assembly -> C -> higher level languages -> AI-assisted higher-level languages
Above a certain threshold of ability, yes.
The same will hold true for designers. DALL-E-alikes will be integrated with the Adobe suite.
The most cutting edge designers will speak 50 variations of their ideas into images, then use their hard-earned granular skills to fine-tune the results.
They'll (with no code) train models in completely new, unique-to-them styles--in 2D, 3D, and motion.
Organizations will pay top dollar for designers who can rapidly infuse their brands with eye-catching material in unprecedented volume. Imitators will create and follow YouTube tutorials.
Mom & pop shops will have higher fidelity marketing materials in half the time and half the cost.
All will be ever as it was.
At some point AI will become as powerful as companies.
And then AI will be able to sustain positive feedback loop of creating more powerful company like ecosystems that will create even more powerful ecosystems. This process will be fundamentally limited by available power and the sun can provide a lot of power. Eventually AI will be able to support space economy and then the only limit will be the universe.
We will be united with the AI, we're already relying on it so much that it has become a part of our extended minds.
What's this in reference to?
The space for "AI-assisted higher-level languages" sufficiently distinct from natural language is vanishingly small. Eventually you're just speaking natural language to the computer, which just about anyone can do (perhaps with some training).
AI that can write code from a natural language description doesn't help as much as you seem to think if natural language description is too hard to actually bother with when humans (who obviously benefit from having a natural language description) are writing the code.
Now, if the AI can actually interview stakeholders and come up with what the code needs to do...
But I am not convinced that is doable short of AGI (AI assistants that improve productivity of humans in that task, sure, but that expands the scope for economically viable automation projects rather than eliminating automators.)
Evolution doesn't stop for anyone, don't think like a dinosaur.
You thought climate change is hard to hold up? Try holding up the invention of AI. The whole world is going to have to change and some form of socialism/UBI will have to be accepted, however unpalatable.
Claiming AIs are going to take over or destroy the world has been a basis of "AI safety" research since the 90s, but that isn't real research, it's a new religion run by Berkeley rationalists who read too many SF novels.
Also, one thing that everyone seems to ignore is that even if the number of jobs are not reduced, the skill/talent level for doing those jobs may (actually DO) increase and also, switching careers does not work for everyone. So you'll inevitably have people without a job even if it's just that the job market is shifting.
But I argue that as automation reaches jobs with higher levels of sophistication, i.e. the jobs of more skilled workers, some people will simply be left out because of their talent won't be enough to do any job that has not been automated.
So, today some good AI applications are face detection, fingerprint detection, or generating art. Where you need to catch or generate the general gist of it without pixel precision.
Of course, programming might be under greater threat than we imagine. I can also not claim that anyone holding that position is just plain _wrong_. But I do believe that would take an AI breakthrough that is yet to happen. That breakthrough would also have absolutely crazy consequences beyond programming, because now we would have "exact AI" and the thought of that boggles my mind for sure.
Algorithm space is large and guess-checking through it takes a lot of effort even when it’s automated like now. It requires huge amounts of compute. And meaningful progress requires the combined effort of the entire worlds intellectual and compute resources. It sounds implausible at first but this machine learning ecosystem is in fact subject to sanctions. There are extreme but plausible ways of reducing the stream of progress to a trickle. It just requires people to actually wake up to what’s happening.
But the reverse is not true, they won't be able to properly vet a piece of code generated by an AI since that will require technical expertise. (You could argue if the piece of code produced the requisite set of output that they would have some marginal level of confidence but they would never really know for sure without being able to understand the actual code)
For the first category, Dall-E 2 and Codex are promising but not there yet. It's not clear how long it'll take them to reach the point where you no longer need people. I'm guessing 2-4 years but the last bits can be the hardest.
As for the second category, we are not there yet. Self-driving cars/planes, and lots of other automation will be here and mature way before an AI can read and communicate through emails, understand project scope and then execute. Also lots of harmonization will have to take place in the information we exchange: emails, docs, chats, code, etc... That is, unless the browser is able to open a navigator and type an address.
It's important to note that we still need professionals to guarantee the quality of the output from AIs, including this one. As noted in their issue tracker, DALL-E has very specific limitations, but these can be easily solved by employing dedicated professionals, who are trained to tame the AI and properly finish the raw output.
So, if I were running OpenAI, I'll clearly be experimenting with how their AIs and human interact, and build a training program around it for producing practical outputs. (Actually, I work in consumer robotics, and human adoption has been the biggest hurdle here. Thus, my claim here.)
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In case of fine art, thou, I don't think they'll not get hit by this AI advancement. The biggest problem is that you simply can't get the exact image you want wit this AI. Even humans cannot transfer visual information in verbal form without a significant loss of details, thus a loss of quality. It's the same with AI, but, worse, because AI rely on the bias in a specific set of training data, and it never truly understands the human context in it (in the current level of technology).
Additionally, the rise of no-code development is just extending the functionality of designers. I didn't take design seriously (as a career choice) growing up because I didn't see a future in it, now it pays my bills and the demand for my services just grows by the day.
Similar argument to make with chess AI: it didn't make chess players obsolete, it made them stronger than ever.
Are all designers becoming more valuable or is a subset of really good ones going to reap the value increase and capture more of the previously available value?
Bad designers are even being given better and better paying jobs as the top talent gets poached up quicker and quicker.
In other words, if someone else is a better designer than you, that actually has nothing to do with if they're going to take your job. They may have something better to do. An ML model isn't a worker no matter how good it is at painting, so rather than having a job it has input resources (RTX 3090s, electricity, maintenance engineers) but the concept is still important.