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Comment by uptodatenews

8 hours ago

Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done

https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/

Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"

18 comments

uptodatenews

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dhosek  6 hours ago

From what I’ve seen of what AI can do for coding, the part of software engineering that I like is going to be automated out of existence, much like the ability to do serious calculations by hand got automated out of existence with the development of computing. Writing code by hand will be as marketable as factoring 5-digit numbers in your head.¹

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1. I enjoy doing both, but I doubt that anyone will pay me what I’ve been paid in the past for this five years from now.

adrianN  5 hours ago

If you want AI-proof careers it seems risky to go into knowledge work at all. Robotics lag behind mere computation, so something where you do awkward work in places designed around human bodies seems a lot safer. Plumbing, landscaping or something like that perhaps.

  • lambdaone  1 hour ago

    This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.

    • adrianN  18 minutes ago

      There is nothing that can absorb millions of new workers. If AI destroys jobs to that degree pitchfork manufacturers will be the only ones left in business.

      Where I live at least right now it is quite hard to find contractors for anything and many are close to retirement age and have a hard time finding replacements.

ACCount37  8 hours ago

Why not?

So far, every "AI will never be able to do X" is aging like fine milk. Or do you think that engineering is somehow more special than software development or math?

  • _carbyau_  6 hours ago

    Engineers know what needs to be tested, how, to what degree, with which materials, and with what safety margin.

    AI can be trained on that body of work. But then AI has enough issues in output that it needs to be verified.

    Otherwise we'll live in a world of titan submersibles ordered by CEOs running on hopes&dreams.

    • ACCount37  6 hours ago

      Replace "AI" with "humans" and you get the same exact issues.

      Believe it or not, engineers don't zero shot skyscrapers either. Which is why their work gets reviewed by more engineers. Which catches the issues before they materialize. Sometimes!

      What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage? Because I'm not seeing any.

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