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Comment by kossTKR | Hacker News Reader

Yeah personally i don't get the optimism until something as good as ChatGPT is not just in the hands of OpenAI / Google etc.

And when that happens a version 5 or 6 will probably pretty much wipe 80%+ of the white collar workforce including your job. If V4 is just a medium leap, a V5 or 6 will easily take your job.

It's time to be a cook, a carpenter or a nurse.

Personally i have multiple startup projects i'm worried about AI will be able to do easily in 2-5 years, and i can't really think of any projects anymore where that isn't the case?

There's almost something bizarre about the bell curve where IT has been so highly paid and progressed so much that developments are now making the sector potentially eat itself in the long run.

Is this crazy thinking? I hope it is!

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> Personally i have multiple startup projects i'm worried about AI will be able to do easily in 2-5 years

Do what? Setup a corporations, handle logistics, pay the accountant, open a bank account? I mean, there's more to running a company than writing the code and fixing bugs (assuming AI will get better and not worst at it as time goes by).

Outside the HN bubble, from an entrepreneurial perspective a programmer is an expensive machine that implements ideas into code. No one cares if it's in rust or cobol, if it runs in O(1) or O(log n), etc.

So in that sense, make some jobs are under threat but most likely something else will come along.

<HERE BE DRAGONS>That's human history and tbh... can't wait for an UBI-based + social welfare future.</HERE BE DRAGONS>

>can't wait for an UBI-based + social welfare future

if you're a programmer working now in most places, and in the future you are going on UBI, you will probably be going bankrupt because UBI will not be paying anywhere near what you are earning now.

That why it's Basic. No one will stop you from working to get income beyond basic.

Not working because anything you can do automation can do better for cheaper, will get you basic income and basic decent living conditions.

>will get you basic income and basic decent living conditions.

yes which for most of the people on this site would probably be a big decrease in living standards and also have possible debts etc. that cannot be paid off by UBI because people thought I am programmer, programmers get paid good. So in short if you lose your job because automation does it better, even if you get UBI you are probably screwed.

Why would your living standards decrease? You are still valuable to companies, get a decent salary?

And if the living standards of a minor fraction of very well off people decrease and the living standard of many people increase, is that so bad?

Hypothetically, when someone is going from from say 100k to 90k salary per year and another from 0 to 10k of UBI, what has a bigger impact on someone's well-being do you estimate?

Of course it'll never be this clear cut, but for the sake of argument.

People in third world countries have much worse living standards than you or I. I myself have had ancestors that could only afford meat every fourteen days. The only vehicle was a borrowed bicycle. People in Africa can survive off of one dollar per day, only fifty percent more than the forthcoming paid ChatGPT prescription.

If the State provides financial assistance (Housing! Medical Care!) I think most people could survive.

> Do what? Setup a corporations, handle logistics, pay the accountant, open a bank account?

There are high chances that such services become "AI friendly" overtime, as in are easily understood and automable by AI. Kind of like roads, parking, and fuel stations for cars.

> can't wait for an UBI-based + social welfare future

I have some spicy spicy takes about that future. If you peruse my other comments on my profile you’ll see them.

I’d expect the most likely outcome to be competiting welfare systems. The largest will be public and be extensions of the existing welfare systems. Private entities— corporations, nonprofits and billionaires- will run combined housing and UBI projects. You get to live with other people who have declared loyalty to the same entity. It will be like serfdom in the middle ages, but without the work.

Depending on who you live under, it could either be really good or really bad. In the suckier places it can be like a prison or a cult.

Here’s some food for thought. The State already runs living spaces for people who usually aren’t economically productive. Those spaces are called prisons and housing projects.

If communist societies could give everyone an apartment we can do the same with all the productivity unleashed by AGI. The tougher question is how we do that without abusing the tenants.

Maybe we can tame the dragons.

It is because I used chatgpt yesterday for programming and other than for providing me with a grails style scaffold to out my customizations into I don't see any value.

Writing prompts and reading the wrong or incomplete code is harder than typing code. The only thing it saves you is this initial moment where you literally have no idea how to get started.

Also, cooking and carpentry have been automated already.

I don't know why this pattern keeps repeating. ChatGPT is a language model which means it is good at manipulating language. It generates text and since programs are text, therefore it makes "programmers" redundant because programmers just generate text. That is the kind of logic that you are using.

As I said above, if you just treat AI as a human language to code compiler then your source code is the words you put into the AI and now you need to pay the cost of getting the prompt that solves your particular problem.

So now you have cost of prompt writing + X% failure chance multiplied by the cost of writing code yourself Vs cost of writing code yourself and again I am just talking about writing text. I do more things than just write text, like almost any software developer out there

There are plenty of other arguments to make:

While it's already surprisingly good and useful, it still is often not good enough. And we could hit a celling faster than we hope.

And more interesting: just because a lot of people know about it and are able to use it, there are so so much more people who actually don't.

Look on how a lot of companies still struggle with it or digitalization.

I don't think we're anywhere close to actual AI that could do those things.

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