What field in computer science will be AI proof

The Luddites were not anti technology, they were extensively educated people whose jobs were threatened when factory owners tried to replace them with cheap workers and auto looms.

The Luddites said first, "this tech will make the whole factory more productive, let's keep everyone on board and split the gains between the owners and the workers. It's a win win."

The factory owners said, "no, I can keep 100% of the gains if I fire you all and hire unskilled workers."

Engineers today are looking at AI that's close to producing non toy code. We are in the same spot as the Luddites - but we have the ability to see it coming.

The answer is to consider: unionizing, starting or joining workers co-ops, fighting for legislation that takes care of workers basic needs (eg universal basic income) so displaced workers aren't made destitute, etc.

> Some initial thoughts include pivoting to work on lower level stuff like OS.

I'd suggest the opposite, move up rather. What's difficult for a computer is what's been difficult for humans since the invention of programming, turning a humans "I have this problem" into a concrete program that solves that specific problem in a good way.

What's hard in writing software is not the writing of software but that the software solves the right problem in the right way. If you aim to do this, I don't think computers will be able to do a better job than humans for a long time.

I was thinking about this last night. GPT can do in-sample tasks quite well such as generic CRUD stuff, leetcode, and the like.

Its going to have limited knowledge of internal company APIs and classes -- especially poorly designed ones. To use it effectively, as a software engineer, you need to grok the code to even write a prompt.

In that sense, since 70% of software is maintenance (rather than greenfield), most software engineers will be ok.

Have you used github copilot? It's well worth the money and a much better auto-complete, especially for repetitive things like writing tests. But it doesn't come close to even reducing the number of engineers needed, it's just another incremental productivity boost from tooling. There's nothing new there, that's been happening for 50 years. Compilers, language improvements, libraries, IDEs, debuggers, a second monitor, faster computers, etc. AI is just the latest in a long line of tools.

However, writing software is one of the most creative acts out there. It's like writing a novel or a screenplay. Taking fuzzy business requirements and distilling that down into software is not something you can automate. When those fields fall to AI it's because general AI is here and humans have fallen to AI. At that point you've got bigger problems. Programmers are not going away, and demand for engineers still way exceeds supply. Demand for GOOD engineers is insane.

So learn as much as you can, put in the work, and you'll have an amazing career. Don't fret about AI.

I've worked on side-projects on evenings and weekends for 20 years. At this point I've written more code in more languages than most software engineers will in their entire careers. When I changed jobs back in March, I had a 2:1 ratio of jobs applied for to offers. It was amazing, I was able to choose between 8 offers. I'm still early in my career.

There's no substitute for putting in the work.

Figuring out what the customer/user actually needs/wants over time (which happens to be a crucial part of software development).

I am also fairly convinced that AI will create more work opportunities for humans, it's just that the kind of work will change. (some people predicted that automation would replace human labour, while in reality work shifted from manual labour workers to 'knowledge workers')

Also when AI gets even more powerful more precision and domain knowledge is required to express the requirements to get the desired result. It will also be very costly to discover an imprecise requirement or query of an AI after using the results of it for over a decade.

That really depends on your beliefs. If you believe AGI/HLI is near, then none. That's kinda the point.

If you don't believe that (which I'm in this camp and work in ML) then anything creative. Which also means a lot of things won't be taken over by AI. BUT that doesn't mean AI can't change the field significantly. For example, a few years from now AI might write quick routines for you. You could program latex and the AI would fit the picture for you in the place you want. Research is probably going to be the most long proof and we might even be symbiotic at HLI.

On a slightly different note, I think there's a relevant question that I like to ask people (and they don't like to answer). What do you do with a society where 10% of your workforce is unemployable because automation. The question is about the transitionary period to post scarcity. Transitions are rough and I think it is really clear that this possibly comes about in our lifetime.

I have a CS degree and I'm doing DevOps. I have a fantasy that AI will fix up our Ops issues, but I am confident that humans will keep that problem junked up long enough for me to sneak a retirement out of this work.

The people closest to a mop handle will stay employed the longest. If not physical, then digital.

Hmm, if I had to guess, its probably the task of centering two

's side-by-side

For a while at least, they'll probably still need us to mine the silicon and coal needed to keep them alive. If you can learn to drive a truck and use a shovel, you should be good for a bit.

It depends on what you mean by "computer science". If you mean boundary pushing research into computer science carried out by PhDs then you're probably fairly safe for a while. If you mean "jobs that people with a computer science degree do," then I'd bet on the higher level design and architecture type stuff being the last to go. Anything which requires thinking holistically and having a knowledge of the costs and benefits of different implementations. However I might be completely wrong.

I agree it is easy to believe that AI will replace engineers, but in history the tractor increased yield allowing farms to harvest more grain. Take a project and try to craft a prompt such that the ChatGPT generates a similar function. Although impressive the code won't "fit together" on its own. It is al so important to remember that things such as high level languages and api's have already been abstracting software higher and higher through the years. Software is largely copy pasting code according to your own mental architecture of how things should be created. ChatGPT is only replacing the copy paste part of that process. Yes it's possible that systems integration and prompt generation will play a larger role in the future, the need for software engineers will be present until you can get solid answers for: ChatGpt {"Generate a software package to improve yourself"} actually works.

Throwaway to intentionally suggest, to stoke debate not a flame war, “zero software jobs will be safe.”

At the end of the day it’s not about the code shapes, the languages we make, it’s about correct machine state coupled to a context.

Eventually we’ll have a deduplicated data model of sufficient detail and the algorithms that can take a context and render it visually or audibly.

Networked bootstrapping, updating, and healing of the model will be the norm. There will be a hardware I/O kernel and the AI to sample a model with.

This is going to happen because, similar to no one having an obligation to past religious traditions, there is no obligation to your past computing traditions.

It’s going to happen because having programmers recreate code shapes to fidget with machine states is wasteful engineering practice.

Society learns and moves on. It does not sit still and babysit the sensibilities of its past.

Automating engineering is good engineering because it removes complexity and redundancy.

Reality does not care about our old philosophy. We have to be prepared to adapt to reality.

Just like being able to look up facts on the internet hasn't replaced actually knowing about stuff, being able to generate code snippets will not replace actually knowing how to build software.

Many will think me dismissive, but even with the cool stuff it can do, gpt is more like a probabilistic interface into stack overflow than a replacement for a developer.

And if a developer that worked for me ever said they got gpt to write part of our code, they would be fired (with discussion and warnings first and whatnot). I suspect a lower-end market will emerge where you can get someone to cobble together some chatbot written monstrosity for you at a discount, but we're a long way from developers being out of the loop.

The way I'm thinking about this is you either learn to leverage AI to elevate your way of working, or you are left by the side of the road.

Chatgpt will become a core part of my workflow, a kind of pair-programmer on steroids. I'll bounce ideas off it, check for refactored implementations, and use it as a sounding board.

Last night it taught me about k-nn and cosine similarity so I could generate videogame recommendations for my site. It was the first time I heard about k-nn and cosine similarity. So now I can go online and learn about these concepts and apply them to build something. It did this in about 10 minutes.

Adapt and elevate yourself and your work.

Or don't and go the way of the Zend PHP Certified Engineer.

Option 1: Get into AI.

Option 2: Get close to the client. They're not able to clearly express a spec to us, they're not going to start doing so to a bot on their own.

Actually, I'm not that worried. My generation had to install OSes before doing anything, the next didn't install their software but at least they had access to chrome's F12. Nowadays kids grow in the walled garden of their phones.

Somebody is going to have to keep their hands dirty to keep the systems going, and it's going to be us; which brings me to:

Option 3: Get into security. Who is insane enough to trust ChatGPT to make changes to iptables/ADs/etc?

You want a job that Ai will struggle to take over? Become a plumber or electrician. Someone who has to work with their hands in a way thay isn't easily automateable.

Otherwise you just have to stop worrying so much about it.

If you are creating simple landing pages or really simple basic CRUD apps or creating documentation, write simple article about tech etc then you will be in trouble in a few years. I work on distributed, low latency, high volume systems with complex graph relations, things that you actually need AGI to solve so while I'm impressed with current big language models I'm not really afraid. My advice is: do not work on basic low end stuff and you will be probably safe for 1-3 decades.

Thinking about the problem incorrectly, there is no software field that is AI proof nor is there any about to be completely automated. Even manual QA jobs still exist and I find manual QA folks to be really essential at most orgs still. All software jobs will be impacted in some way, but in the sense of creating new tools to accelerate productivity, not replace people altogether. The journey with AI is largely collaborative with humans, not replacing humans

The other shoe that needs to drop is ability to tell the AI: "Look at this project. Using it as a context, do "

The current state seems like a very useful tool in its beginning, but it will need to be able to grok entire project to be able to jeopardize jobs of even the most junior developers.

I'm looking forward to the day it can do this, and then I'll be able to tell it: "write unit tests for this function" :-)

If you're right, then I don't think that there will be a significant difference in the way different kinds of software development are affected, they'll all be automated away to the same extent. So there's no point in trying to redirect your career to another subfield, they'll all be screwed if you're right. Personaly I think it's quite unlikely but who knows.

They always say humans will work alongside computers - that as old jobs are created, new ones will also come into existence.

For example - how about becoming an AI programmer?

And there's also plenty of free "big data" stuff online to play around with. (Ultimately AI is going to have to train on large pools of data -- and someone's going to have to set up those training pools...)

I think the premise is insane. AI is still statistics with marketing. Good engineers will not be displaced by statistics any time soon.

I too am aware that our days are numbered but I have been thinking maybe as programmers we could make the inevitable take longer to arrive by coming up with licences that prevent the code we write from being used to train such models. Cause without the dataset it won't be a major threat.

The first thing that came to mind to me was "AI researcher". After all, if you're one of the people advancing the AI models that automate everyone else's job, your job isn't going to automated.

Join the MIC. The military isn’t going to let AI code anywhere near kinetic systems, so you’ll be set for the next few decades. You just need to pass background checks and be ready to see your work used to kill advisories.

I wondered immediately if AI design was AI-proof.

Then I thought, isn't that happening already? Hasn't somebody tried applying an AI to designing an AI?

There will only be the AIs, the people programming the AIs and jobs where having humans will be a desirable luxury (nursing, restaurants, etc)

> I am convinced

What evidence are you basing your conviction on?

It's not man Vs machine. It's man with machine. Learn to work effectively with "ai" and you will have no problem.

Those working on to improve the AI, until it needs no further improvement from humans because it can improve itself

Maybe AI can mindread requirements straight from the client’s head, but until thst happens, we’ll be relatively safe.

How prevalent was the prediction that the first jobs lost to AI would be programmers and artists?

P=NP

Security testing

Sales

Cybersecurity. There's plenty of governance and policy mixed in. Plus there's plenty of gray, rather than black and white, in security configurations.