Comment by bluefirebrand
13 hours ago
So what are people like me, who fall into "some values of no one" supposed to do?
I guess just blow my brains out? Just.. Thanks for trying man, but you picked the wrong thing to specialize in, now you're completely redundant and worthless to society. Here's your cyanide pill?
God damn I'm so bitter about all of this. I was doing so well for a bit now I feel like I've completely wasted my life.
I remember the conversations a few years ago when tech automated many other fields and they asked the same question. What did they do? You could ask them.
There is plenty of historical precedent for machines replacing professions. You could read what those people did and how well it worked.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure it never worked out great for many of those people regardless of what they did.
That is kind of my point.
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Alternatively, you can listen to Jimmy Buffett's A Pirate Looks At Forty
Society is for people, people like you. Not the other way around. And your value to society is definitely not measured in what stockholder value you can produce for an employer.
> value to society is definitely not measured in what stockholder value you can produce
This is exactly the value of a person in all capitalistic systems. If we want to change this we need widespread socialism / UBI. Maybe Georgism.
The fact that you're a good friend or partner to someone definitely has value, but not something anyone cares about.
This is why societies should make it as easy as possible for people to retrain / re-educate themselves. I highly doubt most white collar workers graduating today will be able to do what they trained for until retirement age. Programmers may be among first to see serious reduction in employment, but other office workers will follow.
If I knew what to retrain into I would sign up immediately.
Right now I'm just at a loss. I've never wanted to be anything other than a programmer before.
LLMs can produce some incredible bloated and convoluted pieces of code if one isn't careful. Even to the point LLMs become useless. Blindly using these 'powertools' is a recipe for disaster.
We'll already see the hype to start cooling down. If you're okay with cleaning up messes you need not be so pessimistic.
Yes, well, so can humans given the "right" circumstances, e.g. "enterprise" software:
https://github.com/enterprisequalitycoding/fizzbuzzenterpris...
Assuming the code is produced to serve human needs there will be humans in the loop somewhere. Not nearly as many as before and not in the same roles but they will be there
The advent of the Spinning Jenny, water frame and power loom (etc.) changed textile manufacturing for good and made the end result so cheap that it is now seen as disposable. There are still some people in the loop controlling the machines but not nearly as many as before and also not really the same people since it takes a different skill set to keep a textile production line running than it takes to spin and weave.
The same is true for the advent of the phototypesetting machine (Linotype etc.) and the offset press which irreversibly changed print production. There are still people in the loop but not nearly as many and with a different skill set.
Now what about the "Coding Johnny"?
Generative models are now doing the same to coders, irreversibly changing the software production process. There will be far fewer people involved and those people will have a different skill set. Software will become disposable, more like RNA then DNA, if the specifications change the Coding Johnny will churn out a new version.
> Yes, well, so can humans given the "right" circumstances, e.g. "enterprise" software
The difference is scale. Letting LLMs go out of hand is like the movie Fantasia. Sure people can make a mess on their own but with LLMs can do so much worse in such a short amount of time.
> Generative models are now doing the same to coders
Programming involves quite a bit more than just typing. However, typing the code does help with understanding. Once we stop understanding code because it's just generated AI slop good luck fixing the mess.
Now that even Anthropic and OpenAI called for slowing down. It's obvious that we're past peak hype and realization of the cost of LLMs will set in.