Comment by paradite
1 year ago
I think your main thesis is that "AI of today and foreseeable future is not going to solve them end to end."
My belief is that we can't solve them today (agree with you), but we can solve them in foreseeable future (in 3 years).
So it is really a matter of different beliefs. And I don't think we will be able to convince each other to switch belief.
Let's just watch what happens?
I'm with you 100% of the way on this one. Am coding with Claude 3.5 right now using Aider. The future is clear at this point. It won't get worse and there's still so much low hanging fruit. Expertise is still useful to guide it, but we're all product managers now.
There are a lot more photographers now than there ever were painters, and the size of the industry is much larger than it used to be. It is true that our work will change, but personally I think that's great - I don't enjoy the initial hump that you usually have to overcome before you begin to actually solve real problems, and AI is often able to take me over that hump, or fill in things that don't matter. E.g. I'm a backend person but need a frontend for the demo - I'm able to do that on my own now, without spending days figuring out some harebrained web framework and CSS stack - something I probably wouldn't do at all if there wasn't no AI.
Your analogy fails because the economy still needed human workers to take the photographs whereas there is a possibility that in 5 or 10 years, the economy will have no need and no use for most people.
1 reply →
Well, I know what will happen within about a year long time horizon. As far as at least developer assistance models are concerned the difference at the end of 2025 is not going to be dramatic, same as it was not between the end of '23 and this year, and for the same reasons - you do need symbolic reasoning to generate large chunks of coherent, correct code. I also don't see where "dramatic" would come from after that either unless we get some new physics which lets us run models 10-20x the size in realtime, economically. But even then, until we get true AGI, which we won't get in my remaining lifetime, those systems will be best used as a "bicycle for the mind" rather than "the mind", and in the vast majority of cases they will not be able to replace humans entirely, at least not in software engineering.