How to Deal with ChatGPT Anxiety?

I just watched the "Making of Jurassic Park" documentary. They originally wanted to do most of the effects without computers. But one of the computer guys convinced them to try it, and it worked really well. They actually had to scrap a bunch of practical models they had built because the computer stuff was so good.

One of the guys in the documentary says "we were afraid they wouldn't need special effects people anymore. The director would just go on the computer and hit D for dinosaur and R for rain, and we'd be out of a job".

But it turned out that even with computers, they had to do a whole bunch of practical effects to get the rest of the footage. So when a computer generated dinosaur breaks through a fence, they had to make the fence break in just the right way so they could film it, and that took practical effects.

A lot of things have changed in the film industry and a lot of the old effects have gone away due to computers, but I don't think these big doom and gloom predictions people make are likely to come to pass.

I was listening to my favorite Martin Luther King Jr speech, The Three Evils of Society, and he's talking about concerns people have about job loss due to automation back in the 1960's. And computers did come and automate away all kinds of stuff, but people still found work in other areas.

My point is people have been worried about automation for a very long time. And it is interesting to think about, but I think a lot of the hyperbolic claims that it's going to destroy all these jobs overnight are a bit overblown.

In my tinkering with ChatGPT, I feel like I could rely on it approximately as I would rely on Stack Overflow. It may well offer me some good help on specific blocks of code -- largely serving as supplementary documentation -- but I wouldn't expect to be able to just ask it for an application and turn around and sell whatever it types out.

I mean, sure, like, I can imagine it could write some small applications, but only simple things that have been done over and over and that it can rehash based on its (admittedly massive) input data. Like maybe it could write a basic blogging application. But I doubt it could write a flight management application, much less adequately verify that it functions correctly and keep it up to date with the latest FAA regulations and navigation databases.

(On that note, since I do in fact work in aerospace ... considering how hard it is to certify any automated tools to use in avionics software development, I don't even want to think about how hard it would be to certify ChatGPT to churn out trustworthy avionics code!)

Understand how it works under the hood, and then don’t buy into the hype. ChatGPT is impressive for many reasons, but it basically consumes a bunch of data and spits out the most probable answer to a question based on that data.

It is kind of like linear regression on mega steroids, and you know with non-linear functions. Lots of really interesting ideas/applications but it is not an AI.

I’m not sure if the rest of the responses here are reflexive self-soothing, or just caught on the “ChatGPT” product itself, but unequivocally, your anxiety is warranted.

Code generation is moving extremely fast. This tech didn’t freeze in time at Codex or Copilot or ChatGPT. It’s one of the most exciting and difficult domains in AI and the smartest people are all set on solving it.

I’m sorry you’re feeling distress. You’re in good company. A lot of the world is going to have to deal with these problems very soon.

I had a teacher in undergrad (over 20 years ago) who said UML and code generation are getting so advanced, 5 years out, you likely won't be coding anymore.

In the early 00s, there was tremendous outsourcing going on. Some people said Western programmer salaries will collapse.

So your anxiety is nothing new. I think of ChatGPT-like tech to be like grammar checker. It will make your job easier.

Also, it is interesting to consider how chip design works these days. My understanding (as a software person) is that there are more people doing test-verification harnesses/QA of sorts than designing the basic blocks. This model may be how things go in software.

It’s an issue of: are you here to take from the world or contribute to it? If a robot is able to do what you’re currently doing just as well, then great, you can work on higher level stuff and we can all contribute more to society.

It’s always been the same fear with all tech revolutions: people thinking there won’t be any work left to do, afraid they won’t find a way to sustain themselves. When work is replaced, there is always new one to do, and it usually simply represents an upscaling of global GDP. It’s a good thing. We are facing massive global challenges and could use greater efficiency and expression of our collective intelligence to address them.

As long as you stay willing to learn, you will always discover ways to contribute to society and be relevant. But if you’re attached to “I learned X and I hope it gives me bread for the rest of my life,” you probably chose the wrong century :-)

One anecdote. I just use ChatGPT to help with a relatively complex project. But that depended on a number of relatively simple scripts around automating some AWS functional in Python using boto3 - the AWS SDK.

It really did help keep me in the flow. While I was designing the entire system and documenting it, I would just give ChatGPT the requirements in a few sentences and it spit out correct code.

Honestly it did take the place of what I would have formerly thrown at an intern/junior dev.

Will it “replace” the need for junior devs? I am going to say the unpopular opinion - yes.

But coding has always been the least important part of my job. Knowing what to code and solving XYProblems is where the money and differentiator are.

GPT-3 is legitimately the closest thing I've ever seen in my lifetime to what people 30 years ago saw when they first witnessed NCSA Mosaic, and I'm amazed to see people in tech downplaying its significance the way they are. Many of these same people were in awe of the iPhone, which while a legitimate technological breakthrough, IMO will not prove nearly as disruptive as this tech. And probably many of these same naysayers foolishly bought into the hype around crypto. But here you have something that is going to be massively disruptive, and not necessarily in a good way, and instead of sounding the alarm, you have "crying wojak mask"-tier comments reassuring each other that everything will be fine.

GPT is going to put millions of writers, artists, and programming/IT professionals out of work, full-stop. It will also make Sam Altman and other tech billionaires even richer than they already are, and worsen already extreme wealth inequality. It's obvious enough at this point that I can't believe other people don't see it. Just look at how rapidly the technology is being adopted, even by normies.

I'm not going to give the OP life or career advice, but for my part, I am actively trying to invest substantial amounts of my money into the firms I think will win the AI revolution, at least to protect myself form the downside.

Might be biased from the software domain I work in (embedded/networking), but chatgpt-like software development seems far more likely to be an aid or informational rather than authoritative (read: auto-generating entire programs).

For simple programs where the requirements are trivial, sure. But for any software with a bit of complexity, that is integrated with other software of similar complexity, I don’t see how this becomes a job destroyer. In most software roles I’ve worked, big and small, the actual development is largely factoring and balancing a ton of requirements (security, performance, business needs/timelines, customer asks, hardware constraints, operations, on and on). You’d probably have to write a hell of a chatgpt prompt to explain the entirety of what you need to replace the human factors of evaluating all of that :-)

Edit: I like the comment below about the movie industry. The evolution of technology has pushed the boundary of whats possible, but still have a lot of the same needs in terms of people.

I use a number of GPT-based products on a day-to-day basis and find them incredibly useful, so unfortunately I can't assuage your concerns by downplaying current and future language model technology.

The great news is that many of these products are free or relatively inexpensive, so you can start gaining experience with them today.

The best way to future-proof your career in the event that language models become widely applied is to make it one of your core competencies. :)

If you start practicing today, you'll quickly be at the front of the curve. And try to practice deliberately, for example gaining experience with:

- how to give it all the necessary information and nothing superfluous,

- how to effectively articulate the desired deliverable and its requirements,

- how to guide it through iterating on the solution and when to stop (often I do the first 10% of the work, then the model does the next 60% of the heavy lifting, and then I finish off the last 30% to fix its mistakes and tailor the result)

There are all kinds of similar stories in history. The synth didn't replace the guitar, even if there isn't much guitar in radio pop music these days. Guitar abounds outside of pop, and isn't entirely diminished from pop either way. Tablets and dumb terminals with network-based operating systems didn't replace the local application, even after we've reached for the Clouds. MIDI didn't replace human orchestras. Aibo and Tamagotchi didn't replace live pets. Etc. Etc.

Toys are toys. Tools are tools. And ChatGPT is a toy quickly becoming a tool that also won't replace people.

It is made to look like it knows and understands. It has mainstream packaging that everyone and their dog can use and postulate on.

However, it doesn’t understand anything of its underlying subject matter.

It simply (!) has accumulated a wealth of information that it chooses the best answer for. Of course, that is very impressive but a thinking machine it is not.

My anxiety is not on the AI but the ability to game human kind and normalization of content. You think everything is quite similar now? Let’s see how it can determine what is new, real authentic human content versus bot rehashing?

AI doesn't improve along a smooth curve. Generally speaking there are leaps that coincide with epiphanies followed by large periods of slow incremental improvement.

I wouldn't be too worried about another quantum leap for atleast another few years and I highly doubt that will be enough for AI to generate code.

In the long term it's definitely something to keep in mind and be aware that you should be moving up the stack in terms of critical thinking so you aren't left as a code monkey 20 years from now where AI will definitely be eating your lunch.

No need to worry. If and when the time comes that you are replaced by AI, you will have enough sense, courage and loved ones to navigate out of it. You won't be alone, thousand just like you will have the same problem. Trust your future self. That's my advice.

In the meantime if you think another skill or business might come in useful, do it. But do it calmly if possible. Anxiety will never help you do something better or more. Ever. If calm is not possible for you, then that is a skill I suggest you start cultivating.

As I'm sure you must know, ChatGPT isn't always entirely accurate. People won't use it for things if they know it still has a scope of error. While it may provide great insights or tips on a certain topic, it is just surfing the internet and collating this data.

I don't think it'll rid you of your jobs, I think it'll just open up new types of jobs for everyone.

AI code generation will make your skills more valuable, not less. Your work will change, as it moves to architectural design and code vetting, but will still be dependent on your knowledge of and experience in software engineering.

The increase in the productivity of people developing software will lead to far more software being generated, not fewer software developers.

There will always be a need for the boss to have someone else make sure the work is done correctly. And like any contractor knows. What the boss / client says they wants isn’t always what they really want. Also until humans aren’t using the software we need it to be usable. A lot of the code I’ve seen generated is bland and engineering build at best.

A few years ago everyone was saying that low code tools and "citizen development" will destroy the industry. The reality was that they just allowed more small players to increase their efficiency / productivity. We're still here today.

As an additional moat, any non-trivial business has a lot of context and tacit knowledge that will not be within the corpus of "knowledge" that AI models have and there will be many non-technical hurdles (regulatory, political etc) before any of that business context can be fed into the model, if ever. Remember these models only have access to public information at this point in time.

Think about what these LLMs can do better than people. They can answer questions (or generate code) about a huge range of topics, fast and plausibly. But, if I asked you any of these questions, you could find an answer by Googling, and you as a human would be able to say a lot more about whether it was true or correct in a useful way. ChatGPT is an accelerated version of that person who can BS their way through any conversation or job interview, but who ultimately is focused on appearing smart, not being smart. Future models may scare me more.

I am glad people are talking about this. I have been feeling like this for the past couple of weeks. It's a difficult thing as I really enjoy coding but it feels like that part of the job will be changing in the future.

I think it's all about being adaptable, being here on HN and thinking about these things will put you ahead of others who simply don't see the change coming. Unfortunately we can't put the AI genie back in the bottle and we just have to be ready to adapt.

Software productivity, though hard to objectively measure, probably gone up quite a few magnitudes.

People used to program by flipping switches or punching holes in punch cards. We made assembly languages, higher level languages, optimizing compilers, libraries of commonly used code, and so on.

There is presumably some tipping point where we become so productive that fewer people are needed. It hasn't happened yet, and there's no good way to know if and when it will happen.

I'm zero percent concerned about a computer being able to synthesize and build at a certain higher level.

I've 100% accepted that AI will displace tons of jobs and lead to the near dissolution of meaning and discourse "online" (as if as anything else will exist). And Im just trying to be happy day to day until that and its secondary effects come to pass or until one of other countless seemingly incoming disasters happens.

Before Excel, there were entire teams of people manually maintaining a paper spreadsheet. What the popularity of Excel did long term was increase the demand for worksheets. When something like spreadsheets or concrete becomes cheaper, sometimes demand spikes instead of conforming to past trends. I feel the same for modern AI generated work and the continued need for humans to refine the output

ChatGPT has a habit of making up references and spewing bullshit, it's not ready for prime time.

Someone has to ride herd on this AI stuff and make sure it stays sane. It'll take a while for everyone to figure that out, but we'll get there.

Personally I plan to see where it goes and hope that society doesn't collapse as a result of everyone being put out of work due to widespread adoption of AI.

I'm getting too old to fight in the robot uprising when it comes.

correctness and verification are not close to being solved. it's feasible that AI will increase individual developer productivity and narrow the field. it's also possible, and probably more likely, that increased productivity and capability will just increase the complexity of software; that may be good (more interesting problems and broader real-world applications) or bad (overengineered monstrosities).

Don't worry. If you are good at your job, you will be fine. Software engineering is so much more than just boilerplate coding.

> ChatGPT replacing me

If you could look into the future and know you’re right about this, what would you do today?

After writing part of the comment below, I threw this at GPT-3 to finish it off. It did okay-ish :D (the prompt ends at "REWRITTEN COMMENT:")

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This is a story on Hacker news:

STORY:

Ask HN: How to Deal with ChatGPT Anxiety?

Since the release of ChatGPT I can't help it but be pessimistic about what the future holds for the field of software engineering. As a Junior developer I'm so thankful for the constant learning I'm experiencing at work and despite the low impact I have on issues/code base I'm always making sure that I take it one day at a time. I keep hearing friends and people online saying that the calculator didn't replace mathematicians and that Excel didn't replace accountants, but I can't help it to be anxious and think of ChatGPT replacing me and is making my imposter syndrome worse. I wanted to ask HN and see what they think of my fears, am I unreasonable? I know that I should not fear such tool but make sure I learn it and have it help me become more productive. Any tips or recommendations on how to deal with such anxiety/fear. Thank you in advance.

COMMENT:

You're in on the ground floor at the right time. Take advantage of ChatGPT/Codex/GPT-3 to make your job easier and to make your productivity sky high. Being a junior you have less to unlearn.

Use it to understand unfamiliar code.

Use it to understand long historical arguments with the right amount of detail relevant to your needs (Vi vs Emacs / Tabs vs Spaces / JQuery vs VanillaJS / etc.)

In particular use it to speed up your learning (paste documentation into it and ask for summaries or questions about how something works).

Use it to brainstorm some approaches.

Use it to write a step by step set of instructions for tasks you need to do.

Use it to clean up your grammar / points of view in writing.

Use it to evaluate or at least present the pros/cons of several approaches or decisions.

Use it to fill the missing parts of documents.

Use it to improve your resume.

INSTRUCTION: Rewrite the comment and add 30 example use cases for ChatGPT and GPT-3.

REWRITTEN COMMENT:

You are in the perfect position to benefit from ChatGPT, Codex and GPT-3. Being a Junior, you don't have to un-learn any old habits and can take advantage of this amazing technology to boost your productivity. Here are 30 examples of how you can use ChatGPT and GPT-3:

1. Understand unfamiliar code.

2. Quickly produce summaries of long historical arguments.

3. Generate questions to help you understand how something works.

4. Brainstorm approaches to problems.

5. Create step-by-step instructions for tasks.

6. Improve your grammar and points of view in writing.

7. Evaluate or present pros/cons of several approaches.

8. Fill the missing parts of documents.

9. Improve your resume.

10. Automate tedious tasks.

11. Generate original content.

12. Summarize articles and reports.

13. Automatically generate diagrams.

14. Identify patterns in data.

15. Automatically generate code.

16. Translate between languages.

17. Generate realistic images.

18. Automatically generate titles and headlines.

19. Automatically generate questions and answers.

20. Automatically generate test cases.

21. Automatically generate code reviews.

22. Automatically generate design specs.

23. Generate natural-sounding dialogue.

24. Generate automated customer service responses.

25. Generate product descriptions.

26. Automatically generate documentation.

27. Automatically generate bug reports.

28. Automatically generate marketing materials.

29. Automatically generate unit tests.

30. Automatically generate software architecture diagrams.