In 200 years it'll just be AIs, who will create custom AIs to accomplish a task, who will create legions of other AIs to carry out tasks. It'll be code writing code writing code that's completely beyond human comprehension.
Who knows if humans will take part at all (or even be around).
See 3D printing, few years ago everyone was into "0-mile" manufacturing and how it will solve the housing crisis, because we are just going to print houses.
- Point out that most 3D printing is plastic? Recieve a derisive link to a journal article where some beleagured postdoc managed to push some protein paste through the extruder
- Point out that the 3D printer is orders of magnitude slower than the most geriatric fry cook? Get a five paragraph history of Moore's law. The fact that it no longer really applies to semicoductors doesn't matter, since we're making burritos!
- Point out that grinding an apple into paste and painstakingly reprinting it in an apple shape will always be more expensive than simply eating the apple? Hear a grand tale on the company becoming the sole global food preparation firm and thus having a monosopy on all farming products, enabling them to set their own price on their supplies.
I also will always hold a soft spot for the group promising a 3D printed dating site, but I'm pretty sure that one was a satire. Fill out a questionaire and get a perfect printed partner. Pages of blog posts describing their web stack (Rails and Mongo) in great detail, proving that they could scale to the billions of people who would be visitng their site. The actual technology that created custom sentient life was just "3D printing"
Uh... I... asking for a friend, do you recall the name? Google isn't helping. Them, I mean, it's not helping them.
Or those artificial food pills from more dystopic scifi.
200 years is a huge amount of time. The whole industrial revolution started around 200 years ago. 3d printing is still new by this standard. People overestimate impact of some technology in very short term and underestimate in medium or long term
Indeed, but this is somewhat the point? E.g. China was an empire (before it was a multiparty republic, before it was a Communist republic, before its government became whatever you want to call it today) 100 years ago. For a technical example: 200 years ago, steam locomotives were the fancy new transportation tech. There's a case to be made that the successor to the successor to that tech has been on its way out for a few decades in favor of the electric locomotive.
It's pretty hard to predict what will happen in 200 years, which means we should be skeptical of both the prediction that AIs will take over by then and the prediction that they won't.
Sure maybe in 200 years we won't get AGI but current technologies that we call AI will be massively improved and I would bet by that time software development as we currently know it will be a solved problem
Not long ago, all machine tools was made by hand. When we got vastly improved CNC machines, but we still need the expertise to create the files the CNC machine needs. I'm betting that SW development will be the same. We still need engineers to understand the context the software operates in, and with that knowledge the engineer can prompt an AI to generate the first draft of the code in many small chunks that needs to be assembled.
The supply of housing on the other hand is an entirely political issue: what land can be developed, what can be built there and what public infrastructure is provided, who gets to live there - with discrimination via pricing being the main factor deciding it etc.
In the housing game, you buy land and build a house. Excluding inflation, the value of the land goes up. The value of the house goes down.
Even with regular (eg cost) maintenance, a 25 year old house is never worth what a new house is.
New building methods (just improvements in insulation alone), and things like the interior... kitchen cabinets, flooring, bathroom, means that trying to dight this is not cheap.
And even if you do? The house is still worth less than a new built.
Houses are as cars. Massive devaluation year over year.
Most don't get this, because they don't factor in inflation, nor do they factor in the cost of keeping a house maintained.
So land, land, land is the cost, which is much of what your post eludes to.
North America is filled with property, with or without a house, that is practically worthless. For example, Detroit. "Land goes up" is a narrow perspective outside of major metropolitan centres that happen to be part of the modern economy.
But certainly, where I live, rural areas.. very rural areas too, the land goes up, slowly, surely, but the houses follow the rules I originally stipulated. It's really quite a universal.
This is a very California/metropolitan-centric view.
Where I live, permits are "required" but very nearly unenforced. But it's still hard to get anything built because labour and materials.
If the "political" taps were opened tomorrow, this would be revealed in no time. It's not like we have thousands of construction workers sitting around doing nothing.
This is one of the fundamental features of traditional methods that most "construction disruptors" fail to appreciate: they are simple enough and can be done with hand tools by high-school dropouts, because the industry is forced to operate lean and can't burden itself long term with substantial fixed capital, inventory or facilities.
Regarding the unenforced permitting in your location: can I build high density European-style terraced houses, sell them to minority owners and other undesirables, and not expect the local NIMBYs to throw the law book at me? Because selective enforcement is the most toxic form of regulation with the highest risks for investors.
Depending on where you live and who’s doing the building, I’d wager you could see more enforcement. Things like skin color and socioeconomic standing definitely play into which rules are applied and to whom.
If the AIs are that good you'll just be able to ask:
- "rewrite this from scratch in a nanosecond and make sure there's zero legacy cruft"
- "oh, and btw, you're so smart and intelligent and all, certainly you'll make sure what you write is easy to understand by humans"
>- "rewrite this from scratch in a nanosecond and make sure there's zero legacy cruft"
No, that does not follow.
That is also quite an assumption, it could be that training on the output of better LLMs also reduces this worsening of output. There might even be a tipping point where the LLMs get good enough that training on their output is better than training on the output of humans.
And, as I understand it, one that is already demonstrably false: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644
And really in reality we do have that actual problem to some degree with the presense of non-blind adults. Actual humans are a mass of mixed clued and clueless with a lot of bad input feeding output feeding other bad input around and around and around, not even counting the legitimate fair differences of opinion.
So it's a problem, but I don't think it's a fundamentally new or worse problem than we already have,and have already always had.
The fix is I don't think there is a fix for that any more than there is for the same thing in humans. There just will always be bad data feeding bad reasoning right alongside the other good data feeding good reasoning. It's probably wrong to ever expect anything else, and fail to operate from that assumption rather than the idea that there might ever be some resolution where we don't have to worry about that.