muldvarp

> Agreed. So I don't think it's a bubble.

I'm not arguing it's a bubble. I'm arguing it's not going to be a "gigantic benefit" for society.

> Will also be good for consumers in the long-term: much faster pace of drug discovery and new tech generally.

Medicine and tech that knowledge workers won't be able to pay for without a job. I also don't think "new tech" is necessarily a good thing societally.

The calculus is easy, really: AI makes 100% of my income worth less but only decreases the cost of a fraction of my expenditures. AI is bad for anyone that works for a living. That's pretty much all of society except for the top x%.

More productivity at same cost = More profit for companies.

Also, the cost of most of the stuff I (have to) buy (i.e. rent, groceries, ...) is not dominated by the wage of knowledge workers.

Or to put it differently: If AI makes me lose my job but doesn't decrease my rent, I'm in a really bad position.

I'd love to see those "gigantic benefits". Currently, the only positive thing about LLMs I hear regularly is that it made people more productive. They don't get paid more (of course), they're just more productive.

Yeah, I used to like technology. I don't anymore. LLMs just seem like they were purposefully built to annoy me personally. I dislike pretty much everything about them:

Everything they produce looks high-quality, only a fraction of it actually is. This makes time-tested signals of high-quality texts (e.g. em-dashes) worthless. I know it really doesn't matter but the fact that em-dashes specifically are now signals of AI slop is just so sad.

Vibe-coding is the exact opposite direction I wanted software engineering to go. I liked that computers followed hard rules and that I never needed social engineering to get a computer to do the thing I wanted it to do.

I'm not sure if LLMs will do more harm if they stay with the capabilities they currently have, where they are most useful for scams, spam and slop or if the promises actually hold and most white-collar jobs are automated away.

I hate that AI is going for the stuff I like (creating art, writing software) while I still have to do all the chores I dislike (doing the dishes, washing clothes).

I genuinely think that LLMs will have a strong negative effect on my life and society as a whole.

It looks to me like software engineering could be dead in the near future. Note that AI doesn't need to be as good as human programmers to replace them. It just needs to be good enough.

I'm thinking of switching careers as long as I still can. The second it becomes clear that software engineering is dead the job market will burst into flames and finding something else will become almost impossible. Even if this doesn't happen I absolutely despise the idea that my job will now include drudge work like reviewing AI slop merge requests.

In that case pretty much any automation is unethical, isn't it?

My argument isn't that I like welding more. I'm asking you what the _ethical_ difference is between automating welding and automating programming.

The fact that you like programming more than welding is nice to know but there's probably also a lot of people who like welding more than progamming.

> Meanwhile the workers who were previously employed in menial clerical tasks will simply switch to supervising the AI's that perform those same tasks for them.

Why would LLMs be incapable of these new jobs?

I wouldn't. But most software developers didn't care whether translators liked the new jobs they had to find. So I think most non-programmers won't care whether you'll like your new job.

Software developers. Many of them are still championing LLMs. Also anybody who still contributes to open source software.

Why do you think automating software development is any less ethical than automating other jobs (which many software developers actively engaged in)?

This won't happen. Even if western countries will outlaw LLMs (they won't, people care about unemployed software developers just as much as most software developers cared about unemployed translators), China won't. And why would we even do that? Because software developers like their cushy job and don't want to do blue-collar jobs?

I don't see how thinking about some source code is an innately more human activity than welding. Both can be done by humans, both couldn't be done by anything but humans until automation came along and now both can be done by humans and automated systems.

I also fail to see how LLMs can turn humans into "biorobots". You can still do all the things you could do before LLMs came along. The economic value of those things just decreased enourmously.

Then why are you even talking about the replacement of jobs?

I don't see why it would be "kafkaesque" either.

In fact I fail to see any connection between those two facts other than that both are decisions to allow or not allow something to happen by OpenAI.

Is there? I don't see any contradiction there.

For me it's funny that the first time most programmers ever think about the ethics of automating away jobs is when they themselves become automated.

I expect OpenAI to have crushed the competition here.

If AI with the current capabilities and within this short timeframe would have already had a big impact on the labor market, we'd be in big trouble.

> These claims wouldn't matter if the topic weren't so deadly serious. Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO, convinced their competitors are getting massive gains they're missing out on. This drives them to rebrand as AI-First companies, justify layoffs with newfound productivity narratives, and lowball developer salaries under the assumption that AI has fundamentally changed the value equation.

How is this "deadly" serious? It's about software developers losing well-paid, comfortable jobs. It's even less serious if AI doesn't actually improve productivity, because they'll find new jobs in the future.

Pretty much the only future where AI will turn out "deadly serious" is if it shows human-level performance for most if not all desk jobs.

Should have asked an LLM to write one.

I'm not arguing to not teach children stuff. All I'm saying is that LLMs made me lose motivation to start learning stuff that I'll never be an expert in.

The number of people that can actually dedicate their life to producing new knowledge is tiny. It's not really that motivating of a reason.

Currently. Although producing something yourself (especially if you're not an expert) doesn't guarantee high-quality output either.

I genuinely wonder what even is worth learning in the age of AI. It just feels like learning stuff doesn't really matter anymore. Unless you're an expert in some field, a novice with access to an LLM will usually produce better results than you.

Yeah, obviously nobody that actually though about the consequences wants a large part of the population to become unemployed. Even if your job is not threatened by automation, it will be threatened by a lot of people looking for new jobs.

And the kind of automation brought by LLMs is decidely different than automation in the past which almost always created new (usually better) jobs. LLMs won't do this (at least to extent where it would matter) I think. Most people in ten years will have worse jobs (more physically straining, longer hours, less pay) unless there will be a political intervention.

I mean I wish there were a plateau, without one we're well onto our way into techno-feudalism. I just don't see it.

I've never really been bothered that much by writing boilerplate. That said, LLMs might be able to completely solve the more complex issues as well and then you'll only be writing code in your free time.

There have been very large improvements in code generation in the last 6 months. A few weeks without improvement are not necessarily a plateau.

Many people here are in complete denial about what's going to happen in the next years.

Not that surprising. There's nothing in it for me:

If I get more productive, I don't get paid more. If I get less productive, I get told I'm not using it correctly. Worst case: I help train the LLM to eventually take my job.

I have strong negative feelings about it. It turned a signal of texts written with great attention to detail into a signal of AI slop. It's just kinda sad. Sometimes I think LLMs were invented specifically to annoy me.