Well probably we'd want a person who really gets the AI, as they'll have a talent for prompting it well.
Meaning: knows how to talk to computers better than other people.
So a programmer then...
I think it's not that people are stupid. I think there's actually a glee behind the claims AI will put devs out of work - like they feel good about the idea of hurting them, rather than being driven by dispassionate logic.
Outside of SV the thought of More Tech being the answer to ever greater things is met with great skepticism these days. It's not that people hate engineers, and most people are content to hold their nose while the mag7 make 401k go up, but people are sick of Big Tech. Like it or not, the Musks, Karps, Thiels, Bezos's have a lot to do with that.
Not imputing that to you, but it seems like they are people out there that believe money is all that matters. The map with the richest details won't save anyone in a territory that was turned into a wasteland unable to produce a single apple on the whole land.
No high paid manager wants to learn that their visionary thinking was just the last iteration of the underpants gnome meme.
Some things sound good at first but unfortunately are not that easy to actually do
Devs are where the project meets reality in general, and this is what I always try to explain to people. And it's the same with construction, by the way. Pictures and blueprints are nice but sooner or later you're going to need someone digging around in the dirt.
Some people just see it as a cost, one "tech" startup I worked at I got this lengthy pitch from a sales exec that they shouldn't have a software team at all, that we'd never be able to build anything useful without spending millions and that money would be better-spent on the sales team, although they'd have nothing to sell lmfao. And the real laugh was the dev team was heavily subsidized by R&D grants anyway.
Even that is the wrong question. The whole promise of the stock market, of AI is that you can "run companies" by just owning shares and knowing nothing at all. I think that is what "leaders" hope to achieve. It's a slightly more dressed get-rich-quick scheme.
Invest $1000 into AI, have a $1000000 company in a month. That's the dream they're selling, at least until they have enough investment.
It of course becomes "oh, sorry, we happen to have taken the only huge business for ourselves. Is your kidney now for sale?"
LLMs are a box where the input has to be generated by someone/something, but also the output has to be verified somehow (because, like humans, it isn't always correct). So you either need a human at "both ends", or some very clever AI filling those roles.
But I think the human doing those things probably needs slightly different skills and experience than the average legacy developer.
With all these AIs chaining and prompting eachother, we're approaching the point where some unlucky person is going to ask an AI something and it will consume all the energy in the universe trying to compute the answer.
Almost surreal how wrong people with a absolute sense of certainly can be. Every time you hear "experts say X is terrible for you" you basically start the clock on the news article "new experts say X is wonderful for you".
One wonders what else will be found to have been a load of crap. At this point if I heard "drinking improves your driving skills" I'd barely be surprised.
Except articles like this are doing it again, just swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction.
The best reading of the cardiovascular literature based on meta-analyses is not that saturated fat is better for you, but that it's probably not worse. Even there the literature is complicated by the fact many of the studies are done in people with preexisting cardiovascular disease, whose functioning might not be improved by dietary changes. There's kind of a paradox sometimes found, in that replacing saturated fat in RCTs with unsaturated fat improves metabolic profiles and decreases minor CVD outcomes, but doesn't affect major ones — but that sometimes depends on what someone's cardiovascular functioning is already like.
Their take on the diet literature in this article is pure nonsense. The best literature suggests overall no difference between types of diets, only overall actual caloric decrease, with a smaller effect of exercise.
There's also emerging evidence that all of this is individual-specific, so some people might respond best to a low-carb-high-saturated-fat diet, and others to a low-fat-high carb one. E.g.: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/19/1176905...
I've been to research symposia where they've replicated findings where they go back and reanalyze RCT data and show that longitudinally, people vary wildly in responses to different diets. So even though there's no difference in the RCTs between types of diet overall, specific people respond best to one or the other.
I think one reason is morbid curiosity about how bad other people can be.
Many of the stories there are just incomprehensible that a person can behave like described in the story and then when met with a boundary act as if they're the one who's been momentously wronged.
Kind of makes one sad how little punishment there is in the world vs how much wrong.
I think the problem might be that taking personal responsibility for one's own morality and beliefs is a burden that's too much, too scary, for many people.
It feels a lot safer and more comfortable to simply look around you and draw your morals from what everyone else is saying and doing.
There's something isolating about trying to be good.
Unfortunately he's probably right. It's a "better the devil you know" situation, and those institutionally and ethnically aligned with the regime fear its collapse more. From what I've read anyway.
It baffles me every time people put this opinion forward. For me, every time I see allies of the Kremlin (ayatollahs, palestinians), and allies of the US (ie. Israel), I assume they won't get along.
Well probably we'd want a person who really gets the AI, as they'll have a talent for prompting it well.
Meaning: knows how to talk to computers better than other people.
So a programmer then...
I think it's not that people are stupid. I think there's actually a glee behind the claims AI will put devs out of work - like they feel good about the idea of hurting them, rather than being driven by dispassionate logic.
Maybe it's the ancient jocks vs nerds thing.
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