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Comment by qorrect | Hacker News Reader

I'm extremely worried. This tech is going to replace a lot of jobs in the next 10-20, including ours ( software ). And if not replace, it's going to cut the available positions drastically. We already have a great divide between those with money and those without and this is a nuclear bomb about to go off. Without any sort of UBI or social safety nets, this is going to be a true disaster.

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> including software

highly unlikely. You should be concerned if you are just plumbing between different software stacks, but even that is likely hard to fully automate.

You underestimate how powerful it already is. Have you tried Copilot or coding with ChatGPT? If this is the very first iteration it won't be long before many developers are fully replaced.

Aren't they just as likely to go sideways and build exactly the wrong thing? If all else fails a lot of a software dev's day to day will be a Chat wrangler where we still need the skills to determine why it's going wrong, which is a big part of the dev skill stack. Maybe it'll make us more productive, but in my experience, the software building doesn't stop until budget runs out. They'll still need devs.

They will go the wrong directions, too, but in 2 seconds instead of 2 week sprints. And the feedback loop to keep them on track can be automated, too … making current devs the next generation of PMs (prompt managers)

Generative code models trained on buggy, unmaintainable code snippets resulting in a buggy, unmaintainable codebase that only the model can manage. Genius.

Exec: Fix the login bug in production.

ChatGPT: There is no login bug in production.

Exec: Yes there is, run the login integration test.

ChatGPT: The test passes.

Exec: But I can't log in!

ChatGPT: Works for me.

So life like.

I had a partner that was being charged about 8k$ to solve a ruby problem that copilot answered with a couple of prompts (took a couple of hours but still..) I'm pretty certain that unless you are in machine learning, your job will be replaced soon enough

It seems likely that the nature of a programmer will change. You will just be wiring things together and fixing bugs.

Eventually ai will do that too but it'll be a few years. Still, the writing is on the wall

The hard part of programming was always gathering requirements accurately and architecting a solution to meet those requirements. All this does is automate out the easier parts.

(Almost) nobody is hand-crafting screws and nails anymore. It doesn't mean that those people don't have something to do, we just produce many more screws and nails at a much higher quality than before. The people do other things at a higher level of abstraction.

Now, eventually, general purpose strong AI will emerge that is capable of filling those roles that occupy the higher level abstraction niches. Once that happens we're entering a phase change in how cognition works in our little corner of the universe, and all bets are off.

Exactly, nail making used to be a profession in itself so much that there is a German surname Nagelmacher which is literally Nail Maker. Don't see many of them around nowadays unless they own a factory that produces nails.

People still pay biglaw lawyers hundreds if not thousands an hr to check for correct comma placement in documents. Can easily be replaced by why hasn't it been?

There’s always politics. Many people have jobs out of nepotism. Or they are clients of political elites. We may see a return to medieval conditions in which the neofeudal lords grant welfare to those who swear loyalty to them. I would like to be a serf under Jeff Bezos, the most ethical billionaire.

This is not the very first iteration. Watson, an LLM, won jeopardy years ago. This stuff has been in progress for a very long time

This is a great benchmark, in that it's widely available, user friendly, and competent enough that people are finding new use cases for it. I don't want to take away from how great it is- it is phenomenal, but it's one of many big benchmarks in AI

The Jeopardy winning Watson wasn't a large language model (LLM) as it is understood today. That technology didn't exist at the time. It was more of an expert system.

People are seriously in denial about how powerful this is. As you said this is just the beginning

It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends upon not understanding it.

HN loves to quote this, but when the dung hits the propeller, many can't see that they are just as expendable as anyone else.

I kinda like it honestly. Programmers have been so high on the hog, earning doctors salaries and thinking they are this special class of people where their jobs are totally unassailable. I know many who were earning 200k and have nearly no savings.

I don't think this will eliminate all jobs in the short term but it's going to have an impact very quickly. Hope these people are saving up

>Programmers have been so high on the hog, earning doctors salaries and thinking they are this special class of people where their jobs are totally unassailable

What makes you think doctors can't be replaced too? Just have a PA measure vitals, take down symptoms, etc and run it all through ChatGPT and let ChatGPT make the recommendation/diagnosis.. Studies will show ChatGPT produces better outcomes and it will be considered inhumane to see a real doctor, not to mention your insurance will start covering only ChatGPT visits!

Never did I say that Doctors won't be replaced. Doctors go to college for 8 years though. I know many developers who had no college and were making 100K plus within a year but treated that like it was a right.

Programming made me wealthy and I appreciate that, the ones who DIDN'T appreciate that it was a gold rush and they should have treated it as such are the ones who will suffer the most.

This seems like a weirdly envious take, people are paid what the market will bear it's simple economics. If an engineer produces $2 million worth of net extra value for a company than a 200 K salary is a pittance.

Also having studied medicine, a lot of what doctors do is rote memorization , heuristic and pattern matching to produce a statistically likely diagnosis. You'd be a fool to think that that job is somehow going to be exempt from the AI singularity at some point.

There are already AI assistants for doctors. But the demand for healthcare is unlimited, so salaries will probably remain high and job markets tight.

The few times I have been to the doctor it has seemed like relatively standard knowledge work, gathering information and reasoning based on known and unknown factors.

The differentiating factors that make it high status and difficult are seemingly the same as for most knowledge work jobs: high stakes, high stress, high knowledge and skill requirements, limited pool of qualified people.

So unless I am mistaken, it seems like the kind of work that is very suited for automation. At the start it could be as simple as an AI automatically summarizing patient meetings.

My original post wasn't that Doctors won't face ChatGPT like challenges as well, it was just that doctors go to school for 8+years and developers don't even have to go to school.

To be honest I'd much prefer a initial consult with a ChatGPT like doctor rather than a real one. I was misdiagnosed for years and had to figure out, on my own, that Lyme disease was causing my problems.

Even once that was what I suspected my doctors wouldn't test me. Finally I got one to do so and that confirmed it. Meanwhile I've talked to multiple people already that have put their symptoms into chat GPT and it's figured out what they have.

For me I haven't been able to because every prompt I've tried it just said "Speak to a medical professional" but this stuff is coming for sure.

Not envious at all. I was making nearly 500k as a developer not in SV, and I banked nearly all my income, knowing I was riding a gravy train. My commentary is not that doctors jobs can't be removed but that you are in an industry where with 1 year's experience you can earn 100k, which is an unfathomable amount to many americans (especially when 50% of them can't afford a $400 unexpected expense).

My disdain is not that the market shouldn't bear it, it's many developers were arrogant and didn't appreciate it for what it was.

I'm fortunate enough I was able to "retire" at 38, but I couldn't have done that if I was blowing all my money, of which I know people who do.

What would you suggest people do, thinking about the 99% of devs who don't make FAANG salaries so that FIRE isn't an option?

I don't have answers about what to do but being in denial isn't going to help you. Most developers I know make 6 figures plus, even some JR developers, none of them for FAANG companies. If you make 6 figures you can generally save a lot. Most I know do not. They spend their money in nice things.

Either way, better to view this as a threat so you can jump on whatever comes next

You can switch to a field that won’t be automated for political reasons. Political actors often hire people not for their productivity but for political reasons. You should find yourself a political job.

Move to a country with very low cost of living or strong welfare system. Consider involvement in politics to push for UBI. C

Denial isn’t the same thing as disagreement.

I predict that there will be more people employed as software engineers in ten years than there are today.

I said they are in denial over how POWERFUL this is. Many think it's little more than a toy, when in reality I think it's a tsunami coming. That doesn't mean there won't be more programmers, I don't have any idea, but the nature of the job is going to be fundamentally impacted, in fact it already is.

Well, it may also go the way of self-driving cars, where it can almost replace most drivers, but not really as a few fatal accidents here and there are not acceptable. Maybe the AI could write 95% of our companies code, but would you risk it if there is a high chance that it makes the production server crash once a month or codes up a security hole that leaks your customers data once a year?

Programmer productivity has been going up for as long as programming has existed.

> You should be concerned if you are just plumbing between different software stacks, but even that is likely hard to fully automate.

Ah ok so just most software developers.

Imagine your average client/C suite manager. Now imagine them copy pasting code returned from their half-baked description of the problem domain onto a production server.

That sounds awesome. I'm not worried things will sort itself out, just like happened with the industrial revolution. There will be some initial friction but in the long run it will be a massive net positive for humanity. Why should we waste manpower on something a machine can do?

Lots of people went hungry during the industrial revolution, couldn't get a job people starved. It's going to be awesome for those looking back on it, for us living through it ... it's going to suck.

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