About those automated longshoreman jobs.

[George K]

"Learn to code, baby!"

[Jolly]

Heard an interesting discussion on the Moon Griffon show today. Moon was talking with a guy that was intimately familiar with the Port of New Orleans.

He said AI was coming to the port, it's just a matter of when. It's just too efficient and saves too much money, especially with container ships. In the long run, the longshoremen will lose jobs, no matter what they do.

[Aqua Letifer]

Every industry. Not just longshoremen. And at a rate we can't accommodate smoothly.

[LuFins Dad]

Code? I don’t think so. AI Can do that MUCH better than we can. Maybe some advanced code can still be done better by humans, but that will change soon enough…

[George K]

@LuFins-Dad said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

Code? I don’t think so.

Yeah that was SO last decade, wasn't it?

[89th]

Coding?

I've seen the best advanced coding in my day, I doubt an AI robot can compete. It's called, natural human ability to introduce deliberate bugs. Why? Job security... deploy a good piece of code, include a few bugs, then the company will pay you dearly to find and fix the bugs. Sometimes it's a simple colon instead of a semi-colon, amirite @Horace ?

[Mik]

I've seen machine generated code. Good luck debugging it or even understanding it.

[Horace]

@89th said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

Coding?

I've seen the best advanced coding in my day, I doubt an AI robot can compete. It's called, natural human ability to introduce deliberate bugs. Why? Job security... deploy a good piece of code, include a few bugs, then the company will pay you dearly to find and fix the bugs. Sometimes it's a simple colon instead of a semi-colon, amirite @Horace ?

Yes we’ve all dealt with such code. I am familiar with one code base that was notoriously incomprehensible and which had one comment. “Pay Satan”. I never read documentation and barely read comments anyway. If I want to understand some code, I read the code.

My own code is of course pristine and simple and direct. Self documenting.

[Aqua Letifer]

@Mik said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

I've seen machine generated code. Good luck debugging it or even understanding it.

Won't matter. Just get the AI to write more.

Capitalism trends toward "right now, for free." Good takes a back seat to those two.

[LuFins Dad]

@Mik said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

I've seen machine generated code. Good luck debugging it or even understanding it.

Let’s revisit in 2 years…

[Mik]

@Aqua-Letifer said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

@Mik said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

I've seen machine generated code. Good luck debugging it or even understanding it.

Won't matter. Just get the AI to write more.

Capitalism trends toward "right now, for free." Good takes a back seat to those two.

It may be the most powerful tool of oppression ever.

[Aqua Letifer]

@Mik said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

@Aqua-Letifer said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

@Mik said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

I've seen machine generated code. Good luck debugging it or even understanding it.

Won't matter. Just get the AI to write more.

Capitalism trends toward "right now, for free." Good takes a back seat to those two.

It may be the most powerful tool of oppression ever.

AI or capitalism?

[LuFins Dad]

@Aqua-Letifer said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

@Mik said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

@Aqua-Letifer said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

@Mik said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

I've seen machine generated code. Good luck debugging it or even understanding it.

Won't matter. Just get the AI to write more.

Capitalism trends toward "right now, for free." Good takes a back seat to those two.

It may be the most powerful tool of oppression ever.

AI or capitalism?

You know, I was thinking that as automation makes more and more improvements and AAI starts becoming more ubiquitous, some forms of Sofialism are going to be inevitable.

[Mik]

At what point do we live in a world we do not understand the workings of and cannot affect it?

[Aqua Letifer]

@Mik said in About those automated longshoreman jobs.:

At what point do we live in a world we do not understand the workings of and cannot affect it?

We already do. Look at our cars, our computers, our social media algorithms.

[Mik]

We're well on the way, yes.

[Axtremus]

Remember PostScript?
It's code that tells laser printers what to "draw" on a page, later Apple uses it to tell the computer what to "draw" on the screen.
In practice PostScript is virtually all computer generated. I looked at PostScript code and I don't even want to try to understand it.

Lots of newer programming languages just "compile" to C or C++ then use gcc to further compile to machine code. I don't want to understand those intermediate C/C++ code either. :man-shrugging:

[Mik]

It all comes down to assembly language eventually. If you understand that you understand everything else is just layers on top to make it easier. There was a time when I was a pretty good assembly language programmer and could translate core dumps to code.

[taiwan_girl]

Change is tough. I always struggle with change, but also realize that it is inevitable. I also think that humans are pretty adaptable. I am sure that there was a lot of "angst" when motor cars became popular, etc.

For example, automation in fast food maybe is actually a benefit for workers

Though food service workers and economists have long worried about the impact technology would have on the restaurant labor force, pilot programs in several fast-casual restaurants over the last few years have shown it may not have the negative impact they feared, a labor economist says.

https://azmirror.com/2024/09/30/data-pilot-projects-showing-food-service-robots-may-not-threaten-jobs/

[Mik]

There's a reason automats did not thrive for long. People require human interaction. Agriculture jobs gave way to the internal combustion engine which gave rise to industrial jobs which gave way to robotics in many cases. We'll weather this too.