Wow, this guys working on rocket science, everyone. Watch out! We might get replaced!
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a ton lately (examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38215766
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38215679
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38082131
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37800148)
We have to ban accounts that post like that, so if you'd please stop posting like that, we'd appreciate it. I don't want to ban an 8-year-old account, but we don't have much choice if the account is frequently posting like that.
> everybody looks them up anyway. It’s not real programming
The issue here is that it doesn't matter what you or I think. What matters is what boardmembers, CEOs and CTOs of companies which start cargo cults. You know.. the mainstream tech companies which everyone else follows. If they start shrinking development budgets (I mean shrinking the workforce) under the guise of 'with GPT, you're a 5x-10x coder now, so you'll only handle integrations and people problems', you or I will still be affected, although not replaced.
So don't think about this in black-or-white terms. The issue is way more nuanced than the capabilities of GPT or replacing a fulltime dev job.
the outcomes aren't controlled by a reality warping field from these CEO's and CTO's. If dev budgets shrink without actually being justifiable, the software suffers. Those who are made redundant still have their skills, and can offer competing products.
Until then, it's not a question of "eclipsed," it's a labor market, so it's a question of "efficiency" and the large language model people have a very long way to go to produce something that's generally as capable as a programmer.
So.. I guess if your craft is "scripting" you might be able to get by with GPT-4, but to imagine that your child is not going to ever need to "program" is eager nonsense.
I fully expect human programming to be completely obsolete by then.
I mean, it could happen. I don't know it can't, and I won't be totally shocked if it does.
I'm not totally sold either, though.
Improve "at all?" Well, of course it will, but you're just moving the goalposts here. I'm telling you I don't think it's going to be anywhere near the level of AGI that can solve most programming tasks with less effort an energy cost than a human in that time.
> It will just be stuck at it being able to write simple scripts even in 2040?
Pretty much. You can improve the technology, but you have some massive gaps you have to cover, and electrical use is going to be one of them. Short a massive improvement in transistor technology or a move to an entirely new computing platform, I don't see it happening in that time.
> I fully expect human programming to be completely obsolete by then.
You seem that you mostly _want_ that to be true, so much so, that you've failed to complete the analysis. What's worse is, I'm just hedging your bet. If I'm wrong, no big deal, if you're wrong, you're in for a world of pain and problems. I get that this is hacker news and untamed expectations are en vogue here, but I'm content to be the hipster on this issue.
GPT4’s capabilities are quite close to a human’s even now, especially when asking it about areas that I haven’t specialized in. And now it has vision capability, it can see what it is doing.
With twice the time remaining that has elapsed, clearly there’s plentiful time for its capabilities to increase and for it to get faster and cheaper. And it will not be a linear improvement but an exponential one.
I don’t want programmers to become obsolete. I just consider the likelihood that we have anything to offer over one of these agents in the medium term to be very unlikely. Why would you want to spend $100,000s on a human if you can get something in less time from an AI for $1000s? Human programmers will be attacked on three fronts: price, quality and time. The quality aspect is the only one that is arguable: price and time are already lost.