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Comment by Satam | Hacker News Reader

What I think it really comes down to, is whether copilot-like tech becomes a 2x (or even 10x) productivity multiplier.

If it becomes that powerful, we'll ignore these and other concerns. Just imagine Chinese or Russian devs moving 2x or 10x faster because they have no regard for our privileged concerns. Don't even have to go that far, a competitor is using GPT-17 and you're not - good luck!

And if it stagnates and never goes far beyond the current capabilities, then sure, it might become fashionable to try and hunt for copyright infringements caused by Copilot.

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Unfortunately this argument also makes a case for slavery. I’d rather not push ethics aside in favour of productivity

Absolutely not. Slavery is an inefficient system, otherwise it would still be the actual system.

This is a practical (at most you could call it purely utilitarian) argument and not a deontological one.

I don't think they are making an argument about ethics necessarily.

I don't think mentioning slavery is helpful or relevant to this discussion.

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Let's take Google as a better example of an overpowering technology. Its world-domination has been built on scraping everyone else's data, and regurgitating it to users in a very useful manner. Had it been less useful, I'm sure you'd have everyone constantly complaining about them "stealing" public information.

Either way, I wasn't making a judgment of how the world should be, merely how it's probably going to work out. Copilot in its ideal final form would be: 1) great at writing good code 2) if needed, very good at obfuscating any stolen code into something that looks brand new.

Good luck fighting this mostly-undectable, productivity-boosting technology that has no obvious victims.

> Good luck fighting this mostly undectable, productivity boosting technology that has no obvious victims.

This is practically freeing the code. Paradoxically, open source people oppose it, but it's going to empower open source as well.

"that has no obvious victims"

Come back with that line when the absolute number (not to mention the pay) of developer jobs worldwide starts decreasing because of this. It will probably happen by the end of the next decade.

Technology has been displacing people from established jobs for as long as civilizations have existed. The world isn't going to stop moving forward just so, us, developers can keep collecting good paychecks.

So it's indeed not "without victims", is it? Bonus points for reading comprehension and "coherent" comparison between automating physical and cognitive labor.

Devaluing all human intelligence (which is what the endgoal of all those advanced models is) is not "moving forward" in my book.

Are PHP programmers the victims of Python, JS and other languages that are taking over and reducing PHP's employability?

As for the physical vs cognitive labor: we automate the bottlenecks. Back in the day that was physical and now it's cognitive labor.

Also, let's not forget that right now programmers are one of the best compensated professions. For the non-tech businesses, we are the expensive gatekeepers for the world of software. Need to build a non-trivial tech solution? You could easily end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for devs to write it and maintain it.

If that instead can be done by the end-user themselves or with less employees, I'm sure they will be super happy to save resources. Or maybe you don't care about these people?

And I will be very happy if I had the famous ability of Midas whenever I willed so but that's not the question. Those "super happy" people will themselves be automated away from their jobs by AIs at roughly the same point as programmers, give or take several years.

Turning people into economically useless appendages (at best being consumers at the mercy of state-dispensed UBI) is not something to celebrate but a dystopia. So is destroying the ability of humans to achieve station in life because of their cognitive ability. I however don't think we will find common ground regarding that question.

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