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Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

>Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall.

I'm extremely skeptical about this happening. I haven't seen any evidence that GPT is capable of creating something new or even thinking logically. What's going to happen if you ask it to create something that isn't like anything in its training set?

My experience is that GPT just makes shit up that looks plausible at a glance when it doesn't have an answer instead of just admitting that it doesn't know; this is obviously very dangerous when it's supposed to be writing computer programs. That OpenAI hasn't made any progress towards fixing this makes me wonder if it's even possible for the GPT to understand that sometimes it doesn't understand. At the very least it must be a non-trivial problem.

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Counterpoint: how often do you as a developer create something totally novel that has never been built before?

I have to make new things pretty often. If you step outside of the high-level cloud/webdev stuff that most people seem to be obsessed with these days, there are a lot of non-trivial problems being solved in lower-level software such as device drivers, kernels, and compilers.

EDIT: i misinterpreted what you were saying, initially i thought you were asking how i make new things, not how often i make new things. my original reply is below.

weelll, i think about it real hard and do research? Not sure what your point is, but I definitely don't solve these problems by trying to find somebody else's solution to copy, or just dumping a bunch of C code that doesn't do anything and calling it a day like GPT would.

I'm not sure what you mean by novel, but every development project will always have requirements that are unique to solve their own respective business/domain problems. These unique, specialized requirements are further compounded by cultural and personal quirks that human stakeholders demand, making developments project essentially "novel". Current language models fail even with simple minor variations on existing problems that it hasn't seen before, so until then, current AI's won't be replacing any humans when it comes to actual problem solving.

Also, it was recently proven by experts that aliens are living on the earth's core, they breed spherical cows and flying pigs.

I can guarantee for most people 95% of what anyone is doing has been done before. AI can do all that in no time at all. Give it a few years.

Sure, most of what we're doing have been doing has already been done before, but that doesn't mean general intelligence is deprecated. It's not like we just keep repeating actions over and over without thought. For each problem we have, we adapt them and make changes to fit our specific context and needs. As long as humans and nature are involved, there's no such thing as a generalized solution that can be mechanistically applied to a general problem. I speak in the context software development and other activities that are creative or requires human judgment.

But yeah, I somewhat agree with you that a lot of the grunt work are going to be affected, jobs that are by nature purely mechanical, algorithmic or just plain parroting facts. But even then, I still highly doubt language models (today or with the following years) would deprecate those jobs. In the end, it's still a language model that is incapable of thought or reasoning.

If there one's thing I'm optimistic about the recent advances in AI, it's that more jobs will now be creative in nature. Hopefully gone are the days where schools are just mere factories for producing factoid parrots, where intelligence is measured by the size of one's esophagus to regurgitate.

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