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Owner2229 t1_isprw8j wrote

Reply to comment by FaxDwellerCat in Talked to people minimizing/negating potential AI impact in their field? eg: artists, coders... by kmtrp

>Programmers are for instance more easily replacable by AI then healthcare givers

Replacing programmers with AI would require users being able to specify exactly what they want. Programmers are safe. They might become something like "code translators" or "machine whisperers", but they'll still have a job for quite a while.

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FranciscoJ1618 t1_isr09lq wrote

Wrong. Programmers will be replaced by Business Analysts that DO know what they want.

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s1syphean t1_itow35y wrote

What is your advice for someone who knows they’d be valued highly in this new class of ‘Business Analysts’ who wants to position themselves as best they can in advance of this trend? Say, for somebody with a new law degree?

I also have foreseen this, but you have the industry expertise. Send me a dm if you’d like, would love to chat about this.

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manOnPavementWaving t1_isqdf9x wrote

Disagree, gave my dad my DALL-E access, and he learned to prompt engineer to reasonable success in an hour. Once you've got quick iteration, specifying what you want becomes trivial.

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Redifyle t1_isr0oac wrote

But specifying what you want in terms of coding is more complex and requires more background knowledge than just typing a prompt for DALL-E (in which case quick iteration is way less of a factor).

In time, the level will of course be so abstract that that that isn’t necessary anymore, but while the technology is still progressing there will definitely be a need for programmers (aka the guys who know what to put in the prompt).

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berdiekin t1_iss2afs wrote

I guess if we ever get to the point where you can describe an entire app/project with a simple (none-technical) description and get something out of it that does what's expected then programmers would become obsolete.

Honestly I'm more interested to see if an AI would be able to integrate into a legacy project and take over / improve that.

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freeman_joe t1_iswfjlx wrote

Why would it try to improve legacy project when it could do one better from scratch? I won’t ask AI to improve steam engine when it could make me electric motor from scratch.

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berdiekin t1_iswpk2e wrote

That's a fair question, but so much depends on the how/when/what. Like how fast will these tools appear, how good will they be, how powerful will they be, how easy to use will they be, ...

I personally don't see these tools going from pretty much not existing to writing entire projects from scratch based on a simple description. At least not without at least some human intervention.

Because code generation is 1 thing, now tell it to integrate that with other (human written) APIs and projects with often lackluster documentation (if there's any in the first place). Not gonna happen.

Unless we hit some kind of AGI breakthrough ofcourse, then all bets are off.

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freeman_joe t1_isyv8ff wrote

I think it will have better capabilities than humans. Every time AI is better in some domain we ignore it and point to what it can’t do at the moment and project to future and say it will probably do it good but not that good. Yet AI shows as every time it is better in domains it learned fully than humans.

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manOnPavementWaving t1_issmqzx wrote

I don't think this holds for higher layers of abstraction. If all I need to do is ask to make the porgram faster, and then a model does it for me, that's easy. If I ask it to optimize cache hits and data locality, that task would be more difficult for the prompter (more specific). Depending on the quality of the system, the level of abstraction will eventually reach a point where anyone can code, with very little background knowledge.

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Artanthos t1_isq6jc4 wrote

Having people who can specify exactly what they want takes 10% of the labor that coding to spec requires.

The software engineer designing the program will remain employed for a lot longer than the people doing the coding.

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freeman_joe t1_iswfu6y wrote

I view your comment as coping imho. If AI will have intellect as average human it will quickly learn how to automate everything and everyone with no exceptions.

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Artanthos t1_it0lc4g wrote

All things take time.

  1. Following a blue is much easier than creating from scratch.
  2. Creating blueprints endures you get exactly what you want, not something superficially similar to what you want.
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visarga t1_it15qub wrote

I bet we underestimate progress in some ways and overestimate it in other ways. The future is here but unequally distributed. There will still be a need for humans unless AI has cleared that last 1% of accuracy, which is damn hard as we can see from self driving.

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kmtrp OP t1_isv97q8 wrote

Most programmers are just coders, bug squashers. Those will be gone pretty soon.

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GenoHuman t1_isrpsfs wrote

No, at that point you have customer & NN's interacting, the developers don't have to be part of the picture, you cut out the middleman.

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