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Comment by pants2 | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible that people are talking about the downfall of software engineering - now, at many companies, hundreds of call center roles will be replaced by a few engineering roles. With image fine-tuning, now we can replace radiologists with software engineers, etc. etc.

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Replacing call center roles with this is something I can see happening with the realtime api + voice output.

Radiologists, I'm not sure what we need is just image model finetuning + LLMs to get there.

What's the role of the software engineer besides setting this up?

Your example makes me think it will merely moves QA into essentially providing countless cases and then updating them over time to improve the AIs data.

And is it really gonna be cheaper than human support?

What's gonna happen when we will find out (see the impossibility to reach a human when interacting with many companies alredy) this is gonna bring (maybe, eventually) costs down, and revenue too because pissed off customers will move elsewhere.

More than a majority of a software engineer’s time is spent on bug triage, reproducing bugs, simulating constituents in a test, and debugging fixes.

Doesn’t matter what the computer becomes — AI, AGI or God-incarnate — there’s always a role between that and the end-user. That role today is called software engineer. Tomorrow, it’ll be whatever whatever. Perhaps paid the same or less or more. Doesn’t matter.

There’s always an intermediary to deal with the shit.

Hmm, I wonder if that’s the roles priests & the clergy have been playing all this while. Except, maybe humanity is the shit God (as an end user) has to deal with

I'd much rather talk to ChatGPT than a human support rep, provided they have the same level of ability (tools) to help you.

People have been trying to replace radiologists for several years now. Maybe they'll get there, but it doesn't seem to be easy.

Radiologists will not be replaced. They will just have better tools.

the _role_ of radiologists isn’t going away, but as with software engineers, better tools means there are fewer needed to serve the same patient population. So it’s highly likely that there is going to be displacement within that industry as well.

We really can't, it's a tool not a radiologist. Medicine is a critical field, can't afford hallucinations and sloppiness

A radiologist makes critical life-or-death judgements. An algorithm will not, and should not, replace them.

A modern insulin pump also uses algorithms to make critical life or death decisions, should we replace these with doctors?

Does the insulin pump operate in a general space as radiology/diagnosis or is it constrained very precisely?

I don't believe that is comparable. 1. Modern algorithms started out as a cronjob (which already worked better than the alternative) 2. Advances in applying optimal control theory are well known, (mostly) deterministic and explainable. They are in no way comparable to the black box that is the current state of computer vision. 3. Their failure can be readily observed and compensated for, since the patient will definitely notice. The same cannot be said about imaging.

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