… until we train our model on your usage data and totally replace you
You don't even need robotics, just a good multi-modal reasoner model with domain knowledge that you can attach to a headset manna-style [0]. The only thing that makes blue collar work different from any minimum wage labor is the System 2 reasoning required, and that'll get solved.
Why do you think they will never be replaced by robots?
But I will say that until we have a robot that can fold laundry, we won't have a robot that can go into your crawlspace and replace a chunk of crusty old galvanized pipe with copper or pex.
Robots have excelled, so far, in controlled environments. Dealing with the chaos of plumbing in a building that has been "improved" by different people over the course of a century is the opposite of that.
The other thing is that the salary of the plumber or welder is in the range $20/hr to $40/hr. Can you make a general purpose, agile robot function at a total cost of ownership that's substantially lower than this?
We don't get the same current X productivity with 1/100th the people. We get 100x productivity, controlled by a few people / megacorps, until they lose control of it too.
Thank Crom I'm old. But I'm worried for my kids.
I don't see it as "replacing programmers" but rather, trying to solve the types of problems that programmers solve, but more cheaply.
I'm not sure your age relative to mine, but I got my start a hair breath after 9-11 in the defense industry. I've experienced the "tectonic" shifts in programming since that time. In each case, Programmers seemed to shift away from the work that was being done more cheaply, to work that require more specialization that was harder to be done.
I see the promise of AI as a threat to my job, but the reality is likely more like what happened with automobiles vs horses. Less horse shoe makers, more car mechanics.
Some day, I may be too tired and too dumb to become a mechanic. But today is not that day.
The same goes for all the AI agents, it will change how we work but will not make programmers obsolete. I'm more worried about 3 million engineering grads per year from India replacing me than CoPilot/CursorAI
Unless work is a thing of the past by then, and we were the last generation of suckers who lived under the reality where 40hrs/week was just the way life is.
Look, technology has always replaced jobs, throughout history (how many of you know professional lamp lighters, elevator doormen, or switchboard operators?) But the thing is, tech has always replaced the jobs that are easiest to automate ... not the "intellectual work".
I would be far more worried about being a real estate agent, food preparer, or heck, even a lawyer (for some specialties at least). I think they're all at more risk than programmers.
LLMs are great for tasks where small mistakes don't matter, and useless for ones where they do. Generating a 10,000-line Rails app where 10 of those lines are wrong is not very useful.
Governments need to be talking about this like yesterday, and very few are from what I'm seeing.
AI companies and others using AI are going to profit from this massively, at the expense of many more. We need a better tax system to redistribute these profits across society as a whole.
The issue is capitalism but AI exploding is going to exacerbate wealth inequality like nothing else.
Better prepare for 2030 then as I am already doing so [0].
But from this year and in the next 5 years I'd also read this very carefully [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42563239
[1] https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...
All AI tools I've used turned my daily into fighting the agent.
While LLMs can save time on tedious repetitive tasks, they are atrocities in producing bug free code. Even if they reached 99.999% accuracy without, they wouldn't be worth it: If I wrote a function and it turns out buggy, I can, even months later, investigate and find the culprit.
If an LLM introduces a bug, I would rather scrap everything. That is, every piece of code the thing produced for a given project.
If my boss tells me my job is to provide a patch, I quit.
And, LLMs have proven so far that they can't produce innovative solutions.
Don't you agree that having a free artificial junior developer at your beck and call is better than not having freely and quickly produced code that can help point you into the direction your engineering needs to go in?
As a senior developer, don't you also fight with managing your subordinates? Don't you have to solve the management problem and do leadership tasks?
As a senior developer, don't you also have to deal with code that is not bug free, as you yourself don't always produce bug free code? Especially on the first try.
Maybe your approach to LLMs is wrong? Maybe you expect one shot solutions when that is not how LLMs are supposed to be used? Instead, you could invest in working with this new tool and then see phenomenal productivity gains. And also maybe grow a new capability in software development with the use of LLMs in your engineering.
I wouldn't call a calculator a mini accountant. These things can operate much faster than an army of mathematicians but they remain tools. Of course l, tools humans can leverage. Productivity gains are phenomenal.
Perhaps my input to the topic wasn't clear. I use LLMs. I use LLMs in the context of software engineering. I don't treat them as my peers. I don't dream of a future where this tech can solve more than its often misunderstood scope.
We are letting ourselves be confused by those who do have an interest in, or can't do better than, up selling.
Engineers are already having to deal with very difficult to reconcile side effects. Maybe you aren't seeing it yet, or your comment would have at least recognized and touched on those.
Unless what you're doing doesn't demand risk taking, perseverance, and a visionary's personality? In which case, we should call a spade a spade and, therefore, recognize that most (if not all) so called senior software developers are nothing more than state welfare recipients who are fungible to companies and economics that can get rid of the drag on their progress if they really wanted to. If you're not learning how to struggle with LLMs, you're probably not improving and growing as a software engineer. You'll then be limited to tentatively useful areas of the Internet. Like working for a FAANG, Tesla, or SpaceX or some other mundane shit.