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Comment by mymac | Hacker News Reader

Never before in the history of mankind was a group so absolutely besotted with the idea of putting themselves out of a job.

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That’s just one perspective… Another perspective is that LLMs enable programmers to skip a lot of the routine and boring aspects of coding - looking up stuff, essentially - so they can focus on the fun parts that engage creativity.

But it won't stop there. Why would it stop at some arbitrarily defined boundary? The savings associated with no longer having to pay programmers the amounts of money that they believe they are worth (high enough to result in collusion between employers) are just too tempting.

Okay, think about it this way. This thing helps generate tons and tons of code. The more code people (or this thing) writes, the more shit there is to debug. More and more code, each calling each other means more and more insane bugs.

We’re going to move from debugging some crap the last developer wrote to debugging an order of magnitude more code the last developer generated.

It’s going to be wonderful for job prospects really.

Until AI figures out debugging

Some form of AI will eventually take over almost all existing jobs. Whether those jobs evolve or not somehow and new jobs replace them, we will see.

But it's definitely not just programmers. And it will take time.

Society needs to adjust. Stopping progress would not be a solution and is not possible.

However, hopefully we can pause before we create digital animals with hyperspeed reasoning and typical animal instincts like self-preservation. Researchers like LeCun are already moving on from things like LLMs and working on approaches that really imitate animal cognition (like humans) and will eventually blow all existing techniques out of the water.

The path that we are on seems to make humans obsolete within three generations or so.

So the long term concern is not jobs, but for humans to lose control of the planet in less than a century.

On the way there we might be able to manage a new golden age -- a crescendo for human civilization.

Continuing your aside…

Humans don’t become obsolete, we become bored. This tech will make us bored. When humans get too bored and need shit to stir up, we’ll start a war. Take US and China, global prosperity is not enough right? We need to stoke the flames of war over Taiwan.

In the next 300 years we’ll wipe out most of each other in some ridiculous war, and then rebuild.

I agree that WWIII is a concern but I don't think it will be brought about by boredom.

"Global prosperity" might be true in a very long-term historical sense, but it's misleading to apply it to the immediate situation.

Taiwan is not just a talking point. Control over Taiwan is critical for maintaining hegemony. When that is no longer assured, there will likely be a bloody battle before China is given the free reign that it desires.

WWIII is likely to fully break out within the next 3-30 years. We don't really have the facilities to imagine what 300 years from now will look like, but it will likely be posthuman.

I’ll go with the 30 year mark. Countries like Russia or China don’t get humbled in a loss (like Germany didn’t in WW1). Russia will negotiate some terms for Ukraine (or maintain perpetual war), but I believe it will become a military state that will funnel all money into the defense sector. The same with Iran, and the same with China.

Iran supplies Russia with drones. I can promise you Russia will help Iran enrich their uranium. They are both pariah states, what do they have to lose? Nuclear Iran, here enters Israel.

Everyone’s arming up, there’s a gun fight coming.

The answer to AI stealing your job is to go ahead and start a company, solve a hard problem, sell the solution and leverage AI to do this.

The only thing that takes anyone's job is demand shortfalls. Productivity increases certainly don't do it. It's like saying getting a raise makes you poorer.

Actually, in my country, Portugal, if your salary is the Minimum wage, you are exempt from paying taxes, but if you get a raise as little as 15€ or so, you move one category up and start to pay taxes, and you will receive less money than what you used to get before the raise.

One coachman to the other: "Another perspective about this car thing, you can skip all the routine and boring trips - they are done with cars. You can focus on the nice trips that make you feel good".

This should be the only goal of mankind so we can smell the flowers instead of wasting our years in some cubicle. Some people will always want to work, but it shouldn't be the norm. What's the point really unless we're doing something we're passionate about? The economy?

Is automation not what every engineer strives for when possible? Especially software developers.

From my experience with github copilot and GPT4 - developers are NOT going anywhere anytime soon. You'll certainly be faster though.

The best interpretation of this is you mean eventually ML/AI will put programmers out of a job, and not Code LLama specifically.

However it is hard to tell how that might pan out. Can such an ML/AI do all the parts of the job effectively? A lot of non-coding skill bleed into the coder's job. For example talking to people who need an input to the task and finding out what they are really asking for, and beyond that, what the best solution is that solves the underlying problem of what they ask for, while meeting nonfunctional requirements such as performance, reliability, code complexity, and is a good fit for the business.

On the other hand eventually the end users of a lot of services might be bots. You are more likely to have a pricing.json than a pricing.html page, and bots discover the services they need from searches, negotiate deals, read contracts and sue each other etc.

Once the programming job (which is really a "technical problem solver" job) is replaced either it will just be same-but-different (like how most programmers use high level languages not C) or we have invented AGI that will take many other jobs.

In which case the "job" aspect of it is almost moot. Since we will be living in post-scarcity and you would need to figure out the "power" aspect and what it means to even be sentient/human.

Do you really want to spend you days writing REDUX accumulators?

I understand the fear of losing your job or becoming less relevant, but many of us love this work because we're passionate about technology, programming, science, and the whole world of possibilities that this makes... possible.

That's why we're so excited to see these extraordinary advances that I personally didn't think I'd see in my lifetime.

The fear is legitimate and I respect the opinions of those who oppose these advances because they have children to provide for and have worked a lifetime to get where they are. But at least in my case, the curiosity and excitement to see what will happen is far greater than my little personal garden. Damn, we are living what we used to read in the most entertaining sci-fi literature!

(And that's not to say that I don't see the risks in all of this... in fact, I think there will be consequences far more serious than just "losing a job," but I could be wrong)

When mechanized textile machinery was invented, the weavers that had jobs after their introduction were those that learned how to use them.

If we get to the point where these large language models can create complete applications and software solutions from design specs alone, then there's no reason to believe that this would be limited to merely replacing software devs.

It would likely impact a far larger swath of the engineering / design industry.

You can't get promoted unless you put yourself out of a job.

We're not looking at a product that's putting anyone out of a job though, we're looking at a product that frees up a lot of time, and time is great.

Well, since Brexit anyway.

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