There will be much resistance at first, but eventually the convenience and profits will win out.
And recent history has shown that increases in productivity & efficiency doesn't translate to increase in prosperity (for most).
How can I position myself to not get left behind in this coming paradigm shift, and it is one...i've played with chatGPT long enough to know this sh1t is real.
AI is part of the power of capital. If it effectively replaces large amounts of labor, you will see that balance shift to capital having most of the power in the world and labor having very little. There would still be jobs for most, just possibly very badly paid ones. There will always be a price where human labor is cheaper than AI labor, even if it’s a few cents an hour. If the price of labor goes down enough we will be like serfs again, doing backbreaking labor for the day’s bread.
So the simplest recommendation is to have capital, that way if the value of your labor crashes, you would still have a productive resource.
Or ya know, vote if you still have a democracy, and pick up the pitchfork if you don’t.
Most interesting aspects of programming involve deciphering vague ideas, modelling processes, correcting faulty assumptions, presenting alternatives, debugging unforeseen issues, and adjudicating disputes. Those won't go away until we have human-equivalent general AI.
So: move your way up the value chain from reproducing CRUD apps and tweaking CSS to mediating business problems.
Funny enough my classmate started chatbot company few years ago. I guess he’s doomed with all his investors and will be off market soon enough.
Highly recommend this 1h interview with Yann Lecun to put things into perspective. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/big-technology-podcast...
I myself learn construction and the trades on the side. In the US this is quite a safe bet. And I wanted to build a house anyway, so why not do it myself and learn?
I’m also not scared of losing my job to a LLM. I do so much detailed problem solving that I wouldn’t mind assistance that 10x my work by taking away all low and mid hanging fruits.
YMMV
Software is an unlimited space, sky is the limit to what you can accomplish. AI will be available to each and every company, so every company will try to compete by adding more features exponentially as AI makes adding them easier.
As a programmer your role will gradually turn into more of an architect. You will put things/systems together and make sure everything works, and you will focus less on the coding part as AI does that for you.
In fact you can go back and read some of these accounts. It felt to them like the end of programming, that any lay person could now do it. One generation passed and then everyone just understands that to be what programming is, and assembly seems like some kind of ancient wizardry done by the ancestors.
This is what is going to happen with AI assisted programming. People will still resist using it, the way people resist taking a few months out to learn how to use python. Most people are also not that interested in taking a few hours out to learn how to program with chatgpt.
For people who are willing will become the new programmers, A stakeholder will ask for something and you'll turn around and ask for nearly the same thing to an LLM or other model. It seems easy but so does googling, AI is like one step easier past that - and for now you still have to make minor corrections like you would with a stackoverflow post.
The moat on programming is not difficulty. It's been quite easy to learn programming for the last 5 years or so. The moat is the desire and interest to learn. As long as programming still seems fun to you, this is just what programming is now.
Instead of worrying, learn to use it to extend your abilities early and you'll have a huge edge. Many people are still fighting AI tools. People fought Linux, hard for about the first 10 years of it's life before it started getting really deeply integrated into every company. I suspect we'll see some version of that with both companies and individuals inside companies.
He explained that AI will mainly replace "basic" jobs like forklift operator or any job that needs repetitive tasks. Simply because these jobs have no value. On the other hand, he said that at least two kind of jobs will survive : jobs where you create value (like artists, creator etc.) because people will always desire something that took someone's time and attention to make. And jobs where you take care of others (teachers, nurse etc.) because no one want to be taken care of by a machine (read Asimov's novel The fun they had on that matter).
Instead of having a large team of distributed support reps working out of a big queue, going one ticket after the other, AI will compose the first reply automatically when tickets are created and save it as a draft or a note on the ticket.
It'll have access to all previous replies in the help desk, internal and public knowledge base content, Slack, developer docs, etc. You'd just need a handful of your more experienced customer support reps to triage and skim the AI first draft responses, make quick edits, hit send.
Every notable help desk company is working on building this kind of integration as we speak, and it's going to be disorienting for your average customer support rep. A lot of jobs will simply go away.
Will there be a labor displacement? Probably yeah, and every technological shift does this to some degree. For instance, my 5th great grandfather was a displaced blacksmith after the industrial revolution, but then he got into machine repair: there is always a new opportunity in the next economy if you're willing to look for it.
chatGPT is still just Eliza amped up 1000 times. it isn't intelligent. it isn't aware.
This too shall pass.
The only way to avoid suffering from a change is to be a part of that change.
For me that's translating into spending my weekends to look for ways to monetize state of the art AI(I know, problems before solutions), and to learn about the theory 1-2 hours a day.
IMO we still have at least 2 years to prepare for a huge economical/societal shock. About how long it'll take for smart people in automatable fields to start to transition to tech
It still gets basic facts and primary school math wrong:
https://twitter.com/rasbt/status/1620258064690724864
Language models can't and don't "think". They generate convincing looking text regurgitated from all of the previous text they have ingested.
ChatGPT hasn't changed anything. If it was truly groundbreaking jobs would be knocked off left and right. Instead people play around with it and then move on. I still have a team of graphics designers - wasn't image generation AI supposed to replace them? And when are self driving cars coming? I wouldn't worry.
What do we do today? Craft instructions for a computer. Not much difference if a computer is on the other side, or if an AI is.
Going from assembly -> java didn't eliminate all the programming jobs, AI won't either.
And like Airbnb did to hotels? No. "Big business" (in any sector) just needs to outlast.
As others already put out there: if society collapses heavily due to displacement of labour, money won’t matter much.
Unless advanced AIs are used to build weapons for those who own the capital, nothing can hold off angry mobs everywhere.
When we get to the point where human labour in general can be easily automated, that’s when capitalism like we know must be buried. We must find another way to live and prosper on this planet.
I have never used an Uber, I have only seen one a few times, and I live in a huge Western European capital. Taxis I see every day.
I fail to see what "Uber did to taxi drivers".
You have to be careful with the rate technology progresses and be the one riding the wave of progress and not left behind.
At this point we best believe there will be robots capable of doing near everything we can, but better including sports, trades, war, looking after people, and these are not that far away and will happen in our or kids lifetimes.
Don't listen to the nay sayers, people used to argue hard that computers would never play chess, humans will keep redefining the goalposts including creating new distinctions of what intelligence is like the difference between thinking and writing until machines are just plain better than us at all of it and we will invent a whole bunch of hateful slurs for them