Community is the future of AI: Blog post and community discussion
meta.stackexchange.com
meta.stackexchange.com
SO jobs should have been an absolute gold mine, instead he cancelled it.
Makes no sense to me. If you can’t make a ton of money on job ads on Stack Overflow then you’re not trying.
It’s true that SO was doing SO jobs wrong, but it should have been fixed, not cancelled.
job websites I can think of off the top of my:
hired
indeed
ziprecruiter
google shows jobs
websites google recommends:
monster
glassdoor
simplyhired
yes none of these are customized like stackoverflow but, don't you think that competition is stiff enough?
Indeed can't find me devs that don't know they want to leave their current job yet.
Every business is recruiting and willing to pay hundreds or thousands to fill each spot.
Every single site you mentioned is filled to the brim with low quality low effort Contract to Hire recruitment spam.
StackOverflow could have been the way to get real tech jobs, but they squandered it.
If you can keep the quality high for a small-medium group there is money to be made, I imagine (i'm trying to start a job board myself for a tiny group). But just look at anything Pieter Levels has built (remoteok.io) dude has a huge monthly MRR. granted hes a solo founder and SO probably employs many. Also look at Dice.com. They allegedly bring in near 150Million/year! To have a targeted audience in the palm of you hands and throw it out the window is just bad business. SO is really just throwing away money.
The consensus at the time was that end to end wise (company hires and is happy with candidate) - you could just remove every integration leaving just stack overflow jobs and it'd be fine.
It's beyond me why they cancelled it, so stupid from my PoV.
really, that is example used? If AI will do to development was tractors did to farming there is not going to be many developers left.
>>today’s AI the potential for the loss of certain jobs, yes, but also, if history is a guide, a future in which a great variety of more highly skilled work
Ag -> Industrial -> Information transitions were all supported by a mix of massive expansion in population, mass migration of populations, and globalization of economies
information -> automation / AI transition does not seem to have these 3 things in the same way. Globalism is slowing or reversing into protectionism. Migration is still high but seemingly for different reasons (geopolitical) as people displaced for war, crime, or climate and critical for this discussion population growth as SLOWED way down, and it expected to reverse about 2040.
This means people looking at the historical models for how these tech disruptions played out are very flawed in their "everything will be just fine because Farmers became factory workers, and factory workers became developers"
Current economic models may not play out like they did in the past. History may rhyme, but it does not actually repeat.
Also lets not forget the terrible way society in general handled these previous transitions that resulted is massive amounts of suffering for the people displaced. "Learn to AI" can not become the mantra of the day like "Learn to Code" did....
My prediction is we will see a MASSIVE increase in wealth gaps, and extreme decrease in standard of living in most of the industrial world (we are already seeing this in a limited way) leading to more and more political instability
The idea that rather than losing jobs, it will compliment us and even enable millions of new "non-programmers" to start programming, I'm puzzled where this demand actually would come from? What would they even "build? And can you imagine the absolute nightmare of millions of people producing "code" with zero background in programming?
In a sane world, this could be a humanitarian moment where we redirect our human capital to things of a less commercial nature, say human care. We don't live in that world though.
You say that as if understanding and stating requirements in a non conflicting way isn't the primary skill of a programmer anyway.
Where do you think all the renewable energy is coming from, its coming from large teams of crews installing those wind turbines and solar panels in the wilderness.
Every electrical transformer in the US is going to have to be upgraded, to accomodate for surges in demand from EVs.
The housing price crisis, once regulation is fixed, people will still have to build them. Robot construction workers ain't coming any time soon.
All of these are massive sources of employment. If AI really does automate a large chunk of white collar jobs, corporate profits will skyrocket, and so will government tax and private investment (Profits generally end up in investment funds somewhere), and the above sectors will absorb that investment.
Now, will the transition look pretty? Will your office workers make an easy transition to physical labour? No. But neither did the coal miners find 'learning to code' easy.
Time to buckle up, the tsunami comes. Also, if you can use AI, you are already safer than most of the white collar jobs, so we shouldn't be the ones crying the hardest.
The US is already spending $1 trillion on infrastructure, $1 trillion can hire 10 mil people digging ditches for a year, and when subsidizing gainful employment (ie, only subsidizing 20% of the wages), can probably generate 50 mil jobs. If AI is that impressive, expect the government coffers to swell so much it can spend $1 trillion on infrastructure every single year.
The US can easily absorb $30 trillion in total of infrastructure investment + housing construction, rebuilding itself to say Chinese standards. This wasn't possible previously because of cost and labour shortages. Now it is.
The future isn't all roses, but pretending it'll be some sort of apocalypse, is just another form of coping, excusing yourself to understanding the reality.
No the US is not. I urge you to read the damn bills not the Headlines. No where in any of these "infrastructure" is even 10% of the money being spent on actual infrastructure...
>>If AI is that impressive, expect the government coffers to swell so much it can spend $1 trillion on infrastructure every single year.
Where on earth do you get this.... Where in the history of anything has that been true. Where do you expect this money to come from... Corporate Taxes. Please ...
That said, I don't see this mass transition happening from white collar to blue collar for a very sizable part of existing white collar. In many developing countries, white collar is a of a considerable age. There's skill/capability/physical issues as well as a social/cultural aspect. You're telling people that their educational investment is now worthless and are hereby demoted to the working class. May be correct, true and just, but expect social unrest.
and most of them do not pay even a fraction of what information jobs pay. The 100K welder that I see tossed around all the time is like the $300K dev, sure they exist but that is not the median.
>>Every electrical transformer in the US is going to have to be upgraded, to accomodate for surges in demand from EVs.
Which is ironic given there is an extreme transformer shortage in the US, and the manufacturing supply chain that builds many of the components for transformers is actively being reallocated to build things for EV's
>>The housing price crisis, once regulation is fixed,
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA good one... I hope you are not serious
>>Robot construction workers ain't coming any time soon.
I dont know about that, Several innovations from Concrete printers, to rammed earth homes look very interesting. Then there is a "FlatPack" home trend, and several other innovations that could very well reduce the number of blue collar trade jobs as well
>>All of these are massive sources of employment.
Employment yes... High Income No, they also destroy the body so you really need to be in a supervisory, manager, or other such role by the time you are 50-55.
>>and the above sectors will absorb that investment.
That has never been true in the history of humanity, and it will not be true here.
>>>Will your office workers make an easy transition to physical labour? No. But neither did the coal miners find 'learning to code' easy.
This is one of the worse misconceptions people have, very few if any "coal miners" learned to code.. This does not happen. That is not the transition
The transition from Mining to Information was a generational thing, a family that was 3 generations of miners, well the 4th generation learned to code.
The miners move to other blue collar jobs, they became truck drivers, plumbers, welders, factory workers, etc.
>>Also, if you can use AI, you are already safer than most of the white collar jobs,
You are delusional if you think that.
Actually a lot of them didn't transition to anything. They stopped working and went on welfare or disability.
The reason they are invalid, is that all prior disruptions were narrow, were followed by periods of stabilization that allowed people to plan and reason about their lives.
AI is the opposite in this regard, it is broad and there is no period of stabilization. It is continual acceleration.
AI is a skill/technology replication machine. This concept has never existed before. The impacts are not relatable to anything else.
The implications go far beyond jobs as well. The potential cultural and societal impacts are equally as disturbing. I've written in detail about some of those possibilities here.
It's crazy to me how I have memories of AI discussions from years back where this crucial difference was well known and acknowledged. But right now it feels like half the people are turning a blind eye to it on purpose.
"Climbing the skill ladder is going to look more like running on a treadmill at the gym. No matter how fast you run, you aren’t moving, AI is still right behind you learning everything that you can do."
I still don't think ChatGPT is really coming for software engineers' jobs anytime soon, though. A high level programming language is about telling a computer exactly what you want as succinctly as possible. By the time you get specific enough with ChatGPT to produce said code, you could just write that code yourself. Without the non-deterministic behavior, too.
But as a helper tool, it's remarkably useful.
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The range is tinker able.
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You can also get a lot of vote information in the data explorer https://data.stackexchange.com
I don't think most of the replies on SO mention this directly, they mostly focus on how this will impact the site's quality negatively. But really you are correct that people don't like being used as training data and imo the "arguments" everyone are making against AI disadvantages on SO, on art sites, on wherever else are pretty much "excuses". Quoted because even if they are correct they are just excuses for the core much more ethical issue - humans don't want to be replaced. Being replaced by a machine is even shittier. Being replaced by a machine that exploited your own hard work against you even more so.
In a real world example if my boss hired a junior whom I must mentor with the sole purpose of me being fired and replaced so he can pay him less. Well that would be considered very unethical even though it does happen and many workers do put up with it. Yet the current AI movement is that on an unprecedented scale and to the people being replaced it must feel like a massive bitch slap in the face.
To me it seems like an extreme expression of power and it's bizzare how many people are fine with it.
SO should be ran by a foundation funded by tech companies enlightened enough to realize the massive productivity gains it produces (with SE as a side goodwill project). In this era, this counts as wishful thinking. Instead we got a 1.8B sale, that's not pocket change, now the profit must flow.
This is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Tech is no more enlightened than the robber barons were 100 years ago.
There’s only three real options for platforms like SO:
- Mozilla
- Wikimedia Foundation
- Internet Archive
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
[2] https://unherd.com/thepost/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-longer-...
> Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
Can't really argue with that, even though I also frown at the tone of the test of the post.
But it is possible for tech companies, even ones we generally think of as evil, to collaborate (entirely out of self interest!) on mutually beneficial advancements.
Don't mistake "it would be wise for tech companies to support such a thing because they would get ROI" with "any company who supported such a thing should automatically be declared noble and perfect and of unimpeachable character forever"
In 2015 Prashanth Chandrasekar became Vice President and GM of the company -- the leader in all but name. In 2016 Apollo Global Management bought the company and took it private. The rest, as they say, is history. Sad history. And yes, he is 100% to blame. Or, from his and Apollo's perspective, to praise. Gutting a company this big brings in a lot of dough.
It took him two years to sell Stackoverflow. It's a harder sell, after all, than Rackspace.
[1] https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...
Is the essence really: "Please contribute manual qualitative solutions to public SO, so we can use it to train GenAI for our enterprise customers", or have I misread?
Amen.
Most people actually like stability and no surprises, when doing their habits, like drinking coffee for example. It should not suddenly turn to wine, that would freak them out.
And books and movies should follow a familiar pattern, or it will be perceived as disturbing. Slight variations are welcome, but nothing too drastic. So I doubt people will be truly shocked.
Your 8 year olds cat drawing has been subsumed for 25c. Your essay on Philip K. Dick has been subsumed for .32c.
Comedy gold. So first AI takes content created by human labor without permission or compensation. Then it centralizes the sum of it and monetizes it exclusively.
But wait, it gets better. You will now also supply your labor for free to fix/curate the current AI errors. Which will make the AI even better and more profitable, and yourself ever more obsolete over time.
Picking our brains to create a giant private for-profit brain. Why would anybody willingly contribute to this scheme with their free time, in a backdrop where their own relevancy is at stake? There is no community without human incentives, every community will starve and die. You can extend this doom scenario to all open (web) content.
More pragmatically speaking, StackOverflow is royally screwed. It was already on its way down for various reasons but this is a shock. AI coding assistants are rapidly spreading and improving, making it inevitable that programmers will have less need for a direct visit to SO over time. Worse, those actually keeping the site running is a small group of hardcore volunteers that you just alienated.
The future is even more bleak for their enterprise product. Having your private copy of some data and training it for internal use is rapidly being commoditized. Many companies have a Microsoft contract, giving them (potential) access to Azure OpenAI that allows you to do just that.
But that doesn't take it far enough and is just an intermediary step. Soon you'll simply point your enterprise AI at everything. Your Wiki, your documents, your SharePoint, your email. All of the companies' knowledge will be at your fingertips from any contextual UI, whether this is Word, Excel, Outlook or your code editor.
And not just that, this enterprise intelligence will be combined with the world's intelligence. In such a future, would one seriously need a private copy of StackOverflow? The future I describe is about a year away.
But that kinda ignores the impact that AI will have on the concept of the SO community, or whether they’ll even be a need for it.
I honestly think his take is a misread of what kind of “community” SO has. My use of SO has always been 99% functional and borderline mercenary. I’m not getting to know anyone, I’m not building relationships, I just need a question answered. There’s nothing sticky about this community other than it being a good place to get those questions answered. As soon as AI can do that, I’ll never return to that “community”, and I’ll miss it as much as I miss Yahoo Answers.
Yes, why would one subject themselves to the toxic SO community when a bot can give you a tailored answer in seconds and doesn't close your question as duplicate.
Yes, StackOverflow is not for beginners at all. It's for fairly narrow technical questions.
Maybe AI may assist in asking a good question or breaking down a big question into narrow on-topics ones.
All it can provide is how the answer would sound or look like.
Be prepared for an absolute avalanche of bugs and security holes no one alive would've made. I make my living from debugging so I welcome the new job security but it's a massive net negative for society, no question about that.
This includes providing correct answers, because by definition, a correct answer sounds exactly like it would sound like.
The answer still has zero information value, even if it is accidentally the correct one.
Next, it tried to use AlpineJS to create tooltips with NextJS which is really not supported and couldn't fix the resulting bugs.
For sure, it's better than nothing, but you've got to be at least somewhat competent before you start copy-pasting code from it blindly.
A shared, public platform you say? The type of platform that AI will scan and train on? Therefore by contributing to such platform, you actively participate in AI centralization, no?
If AI code assistance has that answer, it's game over. Not even leeching SO would be attractive, let alone contributing.
Some comments may refer to that discussion post instead of the original blog (e.g. ones talking about downvotes) because it was a separate submission to HN whose comments were moved to this page.
But that isn't the only task available for fancy auto-complete. Eg. The LLM could help novices make better questions, or include more/less context in an answer, with the person still being the arbiter of truth.
I am sure there are older internet examples as well
Edit: I love your suggestion as well, any UI UX that helps surface existing relevant content to would be question askers is golden and very important
Great suggestion!
I don’t know if what he’s suggesting here makes sense (I tend to think no), but I’m automatically a little skeptical of the typical response to a serious threat: “no way, y’all, this is actually good for us!”
Imagine google coming out right now and saying the future of AI is search ads.
Yeah it also put a lot of them out of jobs. At least the tractor doesn't steal people's work to resell it, it's just a tool.
AI is hard, sales is hard. We don't all need to compete. I wonder what you all think?
edit: oops I left the tab open and this one got marked as a dupe in the mean time. Although this submission actually went to a different place..
> This question has received 11 upvotes and 32 downvotes.
Where was that hackathon announced - I don't see it on the website? I would like to not miss the next one.
Edit: since the current url has more information (as alecco pointed out downthread) I'm going to reverse this. Sorry everyone! I'm also going to edit the title to make it clear that it's not just the blog post but also the community discussion.
There's definitely a better karma-sharing solution to be built here. One of these years we'll get to it.
Edit: ok, I've merged the thread back to the original submission and edited the title to clarify that it has more information than just the blog post. It's late, of course, but better than never I guess.
Thanks for pointing this out!
The name is Prashanth Chandrasekar or am I missing something?
This is a bad heuristic, strengthening your priors based solely off rejection.
Nobody questions LLMs can write code. The question is whether Stack Overflow has a place in that future. The community’s rejection, and CEO’s ham fistedness, suggest the data he has are the data he’s got. Which makes him uncompetitive vis-à-vis e.g. GitHub or any IDE.
We trialed a private SO instance at work, and discoverability was an issue (now we have to search slack engineering channels, check notion, and check SO).
If I could quickly ask, in for example slack, a question in natural language and have it query our private SO, slack, notion etc, I would be pretty game (providing this data remains private).