The moment I am able to outsource work for Jira tickets to a level that AI actually delivers a reasonable pull request, many corporate managers will seriously wonder why keep the offshoring team around.
This is I guess what happens when you follow capitalism to its logical conclusion. It's exactly what you expect from some reinforcement learning algorithm that only knows how to climb a gradient to maximize a singular reward. The concept of commerce has become the proverbial rat in the skinner box. It has figured out how to mainline the heroin drip if it just holds down the shock button and rewires its brain to get off on the pain. Sure it's an artificial high and hurts like hell to achieve it, but what else is there to live for? We made the line going up mean everything, so that's all that matters now. Doesn't matter if we don't want it, they want it. So that's what it's going to be.
This.
I am amazed that people usually are blind to this trajectory.
The owner (human) would say "build a company, make me a billion dollars" and that would be the only valuable input needed from him/her. Everything else would be derived & executed by the AI swarm, while owner plays video games (or generally enjoy the product of other people's AI-labor) 100% of the time.
I'd argue GPT4 (2022) was already AGI. It could output anything you (or Tim Cook, or any other smart guy) could possibly output given the relevant context. The reason it doesn't right now is we are not passing in all your life's context. If we achieve this, a human CEO has no edge over an AI CEO.
People are figuring this problem out very quickly, therefore the explosion of agentic capabilities happening right now even though the base model fundamentally does the same stuff as GPT4.
Of all the professions that are at the risk of being downsized, I think lawyers are up there. We used to consult our lawyers so frequently about things big and small. We have now completely removed the small stuff from that equation. And most of our stuff is small. There is very little of the big stuff and I think LLMs aren't too far from taking care of that as well.
And there's no better example of hourly work than lawyers.
Personally, I've always disliked the model of billing by the hour because it incentivizes the wrong things, but it is easier to get clients to justify these costs (because they're used to thinking in that framework).
I'd rather take on the risk and find ways to do more efficient work. It's actually FUN to do things that way. And nowadays, this is where AI can benefit in that framework the most.
But I know I'm probably in the minority.
Yes, I want it. It would 100* our GDP, and make people significantly more independent.
Mix it with open source unbiased AI, living on a land large enough to feed you and your family, and cheap energy, and utopia is here.
The real threats to our profession are things like climate change, extreme wealth concentration, political instability, cultural regression and so on. It's the stuff that software stands on that one should worry about, not the stuff that it builds towards.
The current SOTA models can do some impressive things, in certain domains. But running a business is way more than generating JavaScript.
The way I see it, only some jobs will be impacted by generative AI in the near term. Not replaced, augmented.
No, any team.
Management only appears to have power because ownership wants workers to point their ire to them instead of at the real power.