The impact of AI on jobs

[Mik]

Mark makes a very valid point about how AI doesn't do everything for you. GIGO. You have to know something about the subject matter and the technology involved, what questions to ask, parameters to provide to get a decent product.

[Mik]

Maybe not such an apocalypse. This pretty much tracks with what I've been thinking.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/ben-horowitz-says-fears-of-an-ai-fueled-job-apocalypse-are-based-on-a-flawed-assumption/ar-AA1VE5cz

[taiwan_girl]

@Mik I agree with you @mik. Humans are pretty adaptable. There have been pretty big changes to the job market over the last couple of hundred years, probably since the "Industrial Revolution". Some jobs go out, new ones come in.

[Mik]

Our adaptability is why we are still around, especially in such numbers. Clever little primates, we are.

[jon-nyc]

Noah Smith looking at the bright side?

[Horace]

Well, yes, that's true. The dicey part is when nobody has a job to earn money to spend.

[jon-nyc]

Exaggeration but funny all the same.

[Horace]

I doubt many coders feel safe now. Not sure where he's getting his impression. At best coders are lumping other white collar jobs in with their own, as jobs at risk of AI disruption.

As I write this post, ChatGPT is generating some code it would have taken me an hour to write. Generating it in multiple languages.

[Doctor Phibes]

We have an engineer retiring in May. We just requested a job rec for his replacement, and one of the senior executives who has to give authorization asked whether his job could be replaced by an AI.

To be honest, at this point I suspect it would probably be easier to swap out the executive for AI.

[Horace]

I never pursued much in the way of technical expertise in coding because everything changed so fast with languages and libraries that I didn't have the energy or motivation to keep up. Now I see I didn't zoom out enough. Coding itself, in all of its forms, was the thing that was going to become obsolete.

[jon-nyc]

@Doctor-Phibes said in The impact of AI on jobs:

To be honest, at this point I suspect it would probably be easier to swap out the executive for AI.

SAys the manager who uses AI to write his employee reviews.

[Klaus]

I for one doubt that good programmers will be out of jobs anytime soon.

For once, only programmers can write specifications that are precise enough that AIs can generate code from it.

Of course programmers need to learn how to use LLMs to boost their productivity. But we'll also have a much higher demand for software. It's a kind of self-correcting system.

What we won't need much anymore are programmers that perform boring repetitive work.

[Horace]

Vibe coding will advance more and more in line with the promise of its name. What % of professional programmers work from spec currently anyway? I bet most.

I see it as imminent that product owners will get together in a meeting room and create an app by talking an AI through it in real time.