Ahhhh yes, the classic “this time is different” screed.
I remember in the early 2000s after the first dot com bubble I was told “don’t go into computers, you’ll never have a job! That’s all going to be outsourced to India!”
Pessimists always find a way to convince themselves the sky is falling.
In 2008, no one was going to put all their personal data.
In 2023, everyone puts their personal data in the cloud.
Reality is not fractal. Signal attenuation exists in a variety of forms.
The difference between now and dot bomb is greatly improved computer, network performance, reliability, and many many more well trained people working on AI problems.
AI is generating rudimentary frontend code for me. I don’t need it to be Google scale. It may get complex logic wrong, but it can emit simple boxes and button code to cut-paste together just fine.
Horse and buggy makers did not vanish over night. The programmer signal of value to the economy is indeed attenuating.
Ever use django in like I dont know 2005. Ya it generates all that boring front end stuff for ya. Still get recruiters reaching out to me for django jobs though. Guess all those mba's still couldn't figure it out.
Anecdotes like this are just as banal and repetitive to me as mine was to you. MBAs could but socio-political/economic focus on job creation.
I’m not talking about MBAs but younger people using AI at home now.
They won’t need you or Django in their future.
I’m booting a Linux from Scratch distro to an LLM and training it to normalize it’s initial code base and reboot itself. So far so good. Next steps are add a GPU rendered empty 3D viewport; think like a blank Blender project. Then add in NeRF libs and such to render my own content.
Constrained to a task and not used as a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, AI as-is does some mesmerizing stuff.
Reread the Google “no moat” memo; they and OpenAI screwed up with big models, said small tunable models are the way to go.
You go ahead an reminisce about 2005 and how much smarter you are than everyone. I’m going to iterate on new ideas with my kids.
I didn't think OP was bearish. In fact they seem very bullish on AI and their capabilities. If a software engineer can do something then there is no reason that an AI copilot can't do it. Most software jobs don't require much thinking and I expect that almost all work at the higher levels of the software stack will be automated similar to OP.
I remember in the early 2000s after the first dot com bubble I was told “don’t go into computers, you’ll never have a job! That’s all going to be outsourced to India!”
Pessimists always find a way to convince themselves the sky is falling.