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Comment by jrflo | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the thing a lot of people are missing about the AI explosion is that there will be new opportunities that didn't exist before. Sure, things will look a lot different than they used to, but we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before. We're not going to simply automate 2022 levels of producing software and stop there, we're going to leverage this new technology to move faster and build more complicated things that wouldn't be realistic with hand-coding. I don't know what that will look like yet, but human history has shown that when we get some advanced technology, it's leveraged to create more than was ever possible before, not just stopping at making what existed in the past automatic.

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Well, even if the demand for software engineers ends up not going down, there’s going to be a HUGE downskilling. The things built might be more complicated, but that complexity will only be understood by the AI. (If we had to slow down so that humans could understand the code, all of the productivity benefits from AI would be lost.) The human might “understand the system at a high level and how things work together”, but why does that even matter? The AI can do that too… I don’t see a way where the human engineers provide value other than being liability meat shields.

And even if there ends up being some kind of new future SWE work that AI is bad at, how long would that last? People aren’t realizing that AI isn’t just a way to replace current human work, it’s a framework to replace all future human work too. Wouldn’t companies be tripping over themselves to feed AI as much data on this new task as possible, so that they can replace those human workers ASAP?

I don’t see a future where humans do long term meaningful software work unless AI improvement plateaus quickly or there’s some kind of regulation slowing down future AI training.

I agree, and I can provide a mechanism too - competition. AI makes imitation easier, anything you can point your agent at can be reimplemented with much less effort than the original took. So it becomes harder to stand out, we are losing our distinctiveness, our differentiated positions. And that is all we had.

A company, a product or job seeker the all need the same thing - to be picked - why would you pick me? That question is harder to answer today than in 2020. So it becomes a "musical chairs" moment. Everyone is panicking and scrambling for their own seat. This is how we get "new opportunities that didn't exist before" - we will strive to create new ways to differentiate ourselves. We could spend an enormous energy on that goal. But we can't predict what they will be no more than we can predict where the ball will be 1 minute later on the football field, it depends on what everyone else is doing.

> I feel like the thing a lot of people are missing about the AI explosion is that there will be new opportunities that didn't exist before.

This feels like cope to me. So much of what "knowledge workers" do at all falls into a few buckets: we shuffle data around, we serve ads, or we provide tooling for those who do those things.

When the car came, the buggy drivers were screwed, but there were ultimately more cars (and hence work for people who supported them) than there could ever have been buggies.

What does AI give us "more" of, exactly? It makes everything simpler, and thus requiring fewer "knowledge workers" to plumb things in. After all, the need to shuffle data around is finite.

The scary part for me is if the AI don't work on that level. But there is still too broad attempt to do it. We will end up with unmitigated mess of a disaster... Most likely with level of complexity that it is unsolvable without fully rebuilding it from ground up with human understanding...

And what if critical systems for our current way of living are involved. There is lot of sectors where such significant disruption would have very wide ranging consequences...

>we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before

I think this is very true but I'm not excited about it!

I don’t think many people are worried that there won’t be problems to solve. Many people are worried that people will be devalued in extremely consequential ways as they have been in the past. A lot of human misery lurks in the eddies caused by innovation and so many people in the software business have been so comparatively coddled compared to the rest of the workforce that they can’t viscerally understand the implications of that. The hubris inherent to the tech world prompts many to reject that fact out-of-hand. There will be some people that travel the happy path through this change, but I think it’s a fraction of the number of people that actually will, and I think technologists will be disproportionately marginalized.

Can you give an example? I'm not dismissing - I just can't think of one myself

Maybe compilers? instead of using them to make 1950s software faster, we used the abstraction they created to build vastly more complex systems like operating systems, browsers, cloud platforms, and modern games. AI could be another jump in abstraction, making software possible that would previously have been too expensive or complicated to build.

I disagree, a compiler is a deterministic tool while LLMs are not, you can be 100% sure that if you write "if a>b then c" the compiler will produce exactly that same statement in machine code, with LLMs not so sure, maybe it will give you that, maybe it will give a different validation, maybe it will hallucinate and do something completely different, and the worst part is that if you run it again with the same prompt you'll get a different answer, how can you build a solid building if your can't be sure that your workers are just making shit up with confidence, even worse somethings the do fine so is a russian roulette

I mean you can never be sure your workers aren't just making shit up with confidence. Like, the humans who work for you. And yet somehow, we've built all this software.

How to produce systems that work reliably out of a collaboration of large group with one person at the head who ultimately has responsibility is more or less the study of most human endeavors, this does not seem like an insurmountable problem.

> we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before

That's not a good thing.

> we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before

I find that unlikely. You can't outsource your understanding of a system to a machine that fundamentally does not understand.

Complexity is built on top of layers of abstraction, and AI is not an abstraction.

Moreover, I don't see obvious areas where more complexity would drastically improve our software. We're drowning in unnecessary complexity right now. FAANG has had (effectively) unlimited manpower for decades, and what have they done with it? Mostly enshittified once-decent software.

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