Today I am planning an exit strategy. Anyone else considering what they’ll do in a post AI software engineering world?
If the doom really comes to pass then what future is there for us? I fear a life of impecunious servitude and poverty more than death.
I don't have time to post significantly about it but I'd love to trade thoughts and figure this out.
Email?
This is the only time in the history of mankind, where you have a near global ruling elite trying to replace labor totally with mechanised thinking machines.
The closest we can compare to is the off shoring in the 80s/90s.
And that's fine, I use it as a tool, but am I faster? Not where detail matters, and I tend to do a lot of work in that area.
Generating dashboards? Absolutely. Converting to JavaScript vNext UI framework? Yes.
Kernel code? No.
A lot of companies will use the speed of AI to wallpaper over the fact that they don't know what to make or how to prioritize.
Writing code faster alone doesn't change a great deal. Frankly it'll just create a larger influx of noise. Focus is very difficult to do, it'll become harder in the advent of LLMs.
Ive heard enough of these boring one-two liners.
AI can code - but can it understand what it missing from the organisation and persuade it to chnage - to spend years at industry conferences?
Look at Starliner. NASA just announced that Boeing stuffed up, not with an engineering mistake (no one still knows exactly what broke) but that the whole organisation is so screwed up and so political Nasa just don’t believe Boeing can fix it.
AI cannot fix our turf wars. That’s not intelligence (humans know going to war is bad, but Putin still exists). I ye the systems we live in, and work in.
Changing those is feasible - once they are coded, transparent and open To inspection in a democracy.
We need programmable introspective systems of organisation - democracies in other words.
The engineering was not the problem - the problem was the organisation was more or less toxic and incapable of doing engineering. Writing code that won’t get used because if politics is a job we and AI can both do.
As for what happens after that, I'd really prefer not to have to do physical labor or trades. And it doesn't seem like any other white collar occupation is really going to be insulated, other than perhaps medical. So my strategy is to basically wait and see what society looks like after the transition and I guess I'll try and decide on something then?
Another way to frame it is what would you do in a low trust environment where corporations and the government were not to be trusted. You would likely avoid things like bubble bursting AI stock investments, jostling for rank in a company, etc.
But writing code was never much more than 35-40% of my job while working for companies/others. Most my time has always gone towards communication, design, and validation. All three of those are not particularly vulnerable to mass AI automation except for the most trivial of scenarios and I have not seen evidence that has changed in over 2 years of so called "improvements".
My "exit plan" ultimately is to be one of the engineers capable of using these tools to scale my impact accordingly so I can focus on higher order problem solving, which ultimately is what is most valuable. I would be more concerned if I was in marketing/sales or frankly middle management.
Maybe this is just "copium" on my part, who knows, this sector is moving fast.
If LLMs provide substantial material to be able to produce what one envisions faster, that is great. But LLMs will not be doing the envisioning. Most humans already are poor at that. Hence why there are very few real 'visionaries' in history.
Envisioning always requires deep thinking. If LLMs eat away at a humans ability to sit and think, this will make envisioning solutions harder. So you'll see more stuff produced, but largely more crap.