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Comment by Jevon23 | Hacker News Reader

I really don’t want my productivity to increase.

Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do.

Alternative scenario is that individual developers get somewhere around a 2x-5x productivity increase, but why would I want that? That doesn’t give me more free time - that just means I’ll be expected to do more work. Non-technical management already expects ridiculous delivery timelines; now I’ll have to deal with them asking “why can’t you have the whole project done by tomorrow? Why can’t you just have the robot do it?”

It’s a lose-lose situation and none of us asked for this.

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I think the rapid rate of change in modern software libraries has left me underwhelmed with ChatGPT when it comes to new libraries, C++, or niche APIs (financial, etc).

If you're writing react/python/angular or something popular it seems to do amazing things and spit out entire websites (per demos).

Unfortunately, when I try to put together C++, Rust, or even C# using recent libraries like Blazor it chokes up. I fully understand at least one reason why (libraries and language features not being in the training data from 2021) but that makes me feel that perhaps software engineering at the cutting edge or niche is safe and still requires human reasoning. Not to mention things like properly understanding when and why to use certain data structures, real-world impact of coding choices, pricing, esoteric speed/efficiency improvements, etc.

I think there's still a broad general area where good, great, and amazing+ developers can operate without much threat and in fact using their knowledge and experience to leverage GPT-4 (or others) as a force multiplier.

But with the plugins they announced yesterday this should no longer be an issue. You'll be able to easily connect other APIs or data sources to OpenAI so that your model will write the code exactly the way you want.

Are niche libs safe or software platform will concentrate on the most popular with the most examples and better LLM completion/generation leading to ossification ?

Your tool just needs examples of the more recent library calls.

With 32k tokens coming that's like 90kb total chars which 80kb could library or API docs.

Also it can easily be connected to things like pip or GitHub or Google to check documentation. And many tools are coming over the next few months that will put it in a debugging loop.

So maybe it's "safe" in the very near term but that issue of out of date training in no way prevents it from taking software engineering jobs.

I am working hard to build an AI system that can replace me before someone else does.

Alternatively, there's more developer output, the unit price of an application gets cheaper, and this stimulates demand for more developers. CPUs getting cheaper and faster didn't decrease demand for CPUs.

This is the assumption that there is end-user demand for the software developers would write. I think we can assume that end users will be using traditional software less as ChatGPT functionality increases.

I'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today. Life will become easier, products and services will become more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for those who refuse to adapt and resist change.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet. It's likely that when we reach that stage, the world will change dramatically and we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction :)

> we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction

Third option, the workers no longer control the means of production, and we see levels of inequality that make the railroad barons look like they were middle class.

I doubt this third option exists. If the AI(s) lack empathy for us and we are useless to them, they will either exterminate us directly, or indirectly by denying us resources. If they have empathy for us, they will probably let us live good lives. I doubt we will be useful to them, so I doubt there is a scenario where we live miserable lives working for the AI(s).

It’s happening now with closed AI models. The era of open computing may be ending. The models are essentially a new type of computer and they will remain fundamentally closed, accessible only through an API.

It’s not the AIs who are in charge, it’s rich humans.

By super intelligent, I meant AIs that have a will of their own. In the meantime, AIs are just a tool at our disposition. And I don't see why those tools would just be in the hands of the rich, anymore than electricity, the Internet, the personal computer or the smartphone is.

Yes, but there aren't many secretaries working these days, and certainly the skill set has changed (though I'll never forget the company owner who was surprised when he was called out on promises made to women running a local college and couldn't understand how they could repeat his statements back to him verbatim along w/ the time/date of the phone call in question --- had to explain that they'd all come up through the secretarial pool, and so knew shorthand).

The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be done, and render some folks unemployable --- how does society cope with that? Universal Basic Income is the only reasonable suggestion I've yet seen, but doesn't address the age-old problem of socialism --- it only works until one runs out of other people's money.

Back when computers were first announced, taxing CPUs so as to cover benefits for newly unemployed folks was suggested --- can we put that back on the table?

For a fictional take on this see:

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

> The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be done

Jevons paradox [0] proposes that as automation reduces the cost of labor then people will find new uses for automation, and this seems to be the historical trajectory. Hundreds of years since the industrial revolution and we still haven't run out of work to do (this could be better or worse given your philosophical premises).

> and render some folks unemployable

If automation truly causes more actually productive work to be done, then as a first-order effect there should be a surplus available to support these people without making anyone else (much) worse off. However as you observe the higher-order consequences of this are very much an open issue.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Yes, but how much more head room do we have for that sort of thing?

the current climate crisis suggests that we are running out:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

> It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet.

But we are there. This is a reality we live in for a lot of people. That's why the existential crisis in the OP.

Most of our ancestors actually had less stressful jobs and worked less than we do today. The average agricultural worker 100 years ago was not even doing a part-time in terms of time spent doing actual work. More like 2h/day on average.

You could still live like that today. But most people chose not to.

Or, with software so much easier to create, so much more software is created, and demand for SW engineers increases.

I can't see the first case ever happening. You'd need a whooooole lot of trust in AI systems to have it write all the code.

As for the latter...I'd say GPT has increased my productivity and therefore allowed me to focus on the more interesting aspects of my work, rather than writing annoying boilerplate code and doing boring tasks where I don't learn anything. I almost never write my own boilerplate anymore.

More productivity doesn't necesarily mean more work. It does mean more focus on interesting work.

pretty incoherent. A better tool is bad because someone else might demonstrate that you're lazy?

>I really don’t want my productivity to increase.

>...and I find myself out of a job.

Tell me you are the problem in the industry without telling me you are the problem in the industry.

Nope, just a human being who wants to be a human being.

And to you core part of being human is being inefficient?

Think about the hunter gatherer who was given a bow, but stuck with throwing rocks because he didn't want to get too efficient.

Fletching, creating an arrowhead (that needs to be small and perfect) goes through way more material than a hand held obsidian blade, you are not necessarily saving on labour switching to arrows, especially as you now have introduced multiple specialized skills that require hundreds of hours of practice across multiple tribal members (the opposite of this, where you go down to a few babysitters to finesse the final code).

But more relevantly the instant bows were invented you're quota of mammoths to kill a day didn't go up to that maximum possible number + 1 (because sales guys). It stayed at 1 per week or whatever. It's not efficiency, it's management's unrealistics expectations of productive output that I hear being complained about.

>you're quota of mammoths to kill a day didn't go up

Expect with more efficient hunting methods you could kill more than you did before per day, which meant less hunting days, which meant more time with the wife which in turn meant bigger tribe, which in turn meant you actually had to increase your quota.

Just because you are more efficient doesnt mean your manager becomes an idiot and starts to demand unreasonable output (and if you have an idiotic manager already then you already have the problem).

I have no fucking clue what you are even arguing for.

Sounds like it's an argument not to maximize output at every possible opportunity, just because it's possible?

More, more, more, always more, the ideology of infinite growth belongs to a cancer. Quite literally a self-defeating, pathological mindset. More brought us here, to the present day, and it will probably bring us over a Seneca cliff too.

That's the thing about ambition. It means you will never be content.

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