I'm not saying I know that's going to continue forever, but it might. If the cost to produce software goes down, the demand for software will increase. That's what has always happened, but maybe this time is different.
Everyone always thinks this time is different though, it's good to be skeptical of thoughts like that.
My take is that if you stay on the cutting edge and get good at using all kinds of tools with max productivity, you'll probably end up as the tractor driver rather than as an unemployed ox.
When that's possible, the world will be very different. Right at this moment, AI is still useless for unskilled workers trying to write software, it's just a productivity multiplier for skilled engineers.
Depends on the software, and how much mediocrity the end user is willing to put up with.
A trivial prompt can spit out a web page with functioning JavaScript for a mediocre-but-playable version of Pong.
This may not be of interest to us, but our standards are not necessarily shared by normal people: in the wild, I've seen websites where the thumbnails were all loaded as full-sized images and merely displayed smaller, bottles on supermarket shelves whose labels had easily visible pixelation and JPEG artefacts.
Infamously, there's a lot of stuff done in Excel that really shouldn't be. Some genes had to be renamed because scientists kept using Excel, and Excel kept interpreting the gene's names as dates.
I get SMSes whose sender ID has obviously involved someone somewhere trying to record phone numbers as floats.
Even in places with high standards, the UI of the Calculator app on iOS still gets confused if I tap buttons too fast (before animations finish playing?).
Do you want to listen to a 10 brand new songs by 10 brand new artists using generative AI, or do you want to listen to 10 brand new Taylor Swift songs (that were created with the help of generative AI)?
While some people will be able to leverage this to good effect, I fear the established have much more to gain in this new world…
Here’s a recent article from the seattle times: https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/as-tech-job...
For people with eternal youthful energy, good health, no family, and a single-mindedness toward work in life.
On the second point, I actually think my salary is inflated and we'd be in the dark ages if I took that for a reason to hamper technology. Not only am I not just a developer of software but also a consumer, so I benefit directly, but more importantly so does everyone else. If everyone operated on that logic I'd still pay 20 bucks for a potato and a hundred for a hammer.
Let's be real the entire point of software is to replace labor. The software industry has done it to many sectors of the economy and called it progress. Which it is. We have no right to start complaining now.
It's not a code writer though, that's not its sole trained task. Why do you think it's going to have a drastically harder time doing the fuzzier higher level work? Human preference and subjective work has a wider acceptance of solutions.
I can have it write abstracts and works of fiction and songs. It wrote a great kids song about bumlollies and their terrible flavour, explained syncitial nuclear aggregates to a lay audience as a jaunty pirate and created ember templates in our custom framework. Have you tried it with any architecture questions?
> Let's be real the entire point of software is to replace labor. The software industry has done it to many sectors of the economy and called it progress. Which it is. We have no right to start complaining now.
It's totally fine IMO to have the views that it's big and scary for me and also good for humanity.
Eventually we need to stop and think about how capitalism is winner take all, or we're all in for a very bad time.
Huge numbers were left unemployed with industrial automation in the US and left unemployable. The technical term is structural unemployment. All it means is you cant retrain 10,000 factory workers to be front end developers, and that even If they find a job its often not as well paid.
The two greatest myths of modern capitalism are that free markets are good for everyone (they're not) and that automation doesnt lead to unemployment. Any reasonable assessment of the data will show both of these to be clearly false.
An important effect is the speed of change - it _might_ be possible to train the next generation such as those who would have been factory workers become front end developers, but it's an entirely different challenge to take actual factory workers and train them for another job. That is to say, even if in the long run automation doesn't lead to unemployment, the short term effect may be quite different.
Writing generic code that are more or less stackoverflow copy/paste ?
The interesting parts are coming up with the logic &c. not typing the code imho
As an example, I wont code at work anymore, I chatgpt all day. Just like that, overnight. And my productivity went 10x - though i was already 10x more productive than you.> What should have taken 1 week takes 1 day, sometimes less (it's new software im working on).
I would only code if I was doing great software, that is, for myself, we dont do that at work.
It's gonna build tension silently and then release: capital will be massively reallocated - that moment will be tsunami. Talk to your representative.