Hacker News Reader

Comment by egorfine | Hacker News Reader

I believe it's either a case of:

1. Selling snake oil to corporate. How many days since you have seen another GPT wrapper?

2. Unmotivated employees not motivated to learn new tools. Like, why would they care, AI or not.

The second one is easy - if a genuine tool exists that can boost your productivity[0], you can choose to either embrace it or be replaced by somebody who did.

[0] I'm neither claiming nor denying that current "AI" is that tool.

Sure, but that's a race with very few winners. If there's no cap on notional performance maxima, there's always scope to lose your job.

I like to automate parts of my own job, so when it's done, I'm the guy who automates jobs, instead of the guy who isn't needed anymore. some day of course I'll be obsolete. no avoiding that.

I regularly use ChatGPT at work, it's helpful in refining wording for emails and documentation. It's helpful for getting a starting point for Python scripts. I haven't seen it being a game changer though.

Copilot has been a bit mixed. It kind of gives me too many obviously bad code snippets that I find it super useful. But when I code in a more unfamiliar language it's helpful.

that's been my experience with chat gpt, it allowed me to write some kotlin and sql which I'm not familiar with.

I think it's important to remember how far and how fast these things showed up - in just a few years they went from toys to a solid beginning - I'm not sure they can progress the same amount again in the same time, but every s curve has to slow down and every s curve is followed by another eventually - so we don't know if/when the next step change will come, but if it does, it might well put us all out of business overnight.

>it might well put us all out of business overnight.

It might well do that. But worrying about the future like that has no purpose. If the machines become intelligent enough to replace knowledge work they'll be able to improve themselves and mechanical robots too, so work won't exist anymore.

If that happens we'll either achieve post scarcity or some kind of post human Armageddon if the system is runs awry.

that's exactly the kind of future worth worrying about - having a backup plan is a good idea. such AI won't be able to expand into the physical world as fast as they can take over knowledge work - so there would still be things worth doing that could be worth something.

It's not obvious to me that employees are motivated to be more productive for the sake of productivity.

is it not obvious that there must be some who will be? my experience has been that new grads are willing to try out new things - it may be that this particular AI won't get them anywhere and maybe they'll become disillusioned, but the next crop of graduates will embrace the next big thing, and if that turns out to make a huge difference, they will reap the rewards.

It's not obvious that in the general case, employees can be motivated by getting work done if the reward is more work to do.

no, the reward is a CV that will bag them a major payrise at the next gig. not everybody wants that, so it'll never be the general case. but they might still take your job - along with several others'.

It's not clear to me that anything novel done at one enterprisey job has a predictible impact on how much more you could ask for next time, beyond learning the skills to do the work and proving you can take on responsibility or make decisions. As an IC, there are so many other bottlenecks, that at best it'll just be another tool; in many cases, I don't think the value derived from a faster coding tool would surpass the value of reducing the number of meetings, which are tremendously burdensome and always creep into what would otherwise be the time you'd spend thinking about a sufficiently important problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com