Posted on 07/05/2023 9:43:38 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
During the period when social media was increasingly putting pressure on legacy media outlets, driving down their profits, a phrase crept into the national lexicon. “Learn to code.” While it was no doubt said in a derisive or at least humorous fashion by most, it carried an underlying assumption that most people accepted. Perhaps you should learn to code. That’s where the jobs of the future would be. But the period when that will be true may turn out to have a much shorter lifespan than anticipated. The rise of Artificial Intelligence and chatbot apps is already automating the work of developing code and some coders are already losing their jobs. The CEO of one emerging AI company made a “provocative prediction” this week, saying that in five years’ time “there will be no programmers.” (Decrypt)
Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, has a provocative prediction as artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly transforms our world: “There will be no programmers in five years.” Indeed, the futuristic CEO seems to envision a near-future shaped by the capabilities of AI.
Mostaque talked about the current status of the AI industry and his vision in an interview with Peter H. Diamandis for the Moonshots and Mindsets Podcast. And that vision, he said, can only go peer forward as far as five years.
The future doesn’t look too bright for human coders, Mostaque concluded—and there is some evidence to back his argument.
Mostaque’s warning very likely isn’t just hyperbole or some marketing angle. One recent study showed that more than 40% of all code being developed today is being written entirely or at least in part by AI. That number is only expected to increase. If you can have a machine do most of your coding for you, why bother paying a bunch of humans who demand to be paid, receive benefits, and occasionally go on strike?
According to the Wall Street Journal, the process has already begun. An increasing number of tech companies have already begun shifting programmers to other duties or pushing them out the door entirely.
Want to know if artificial intelligence is going to eliminate millions of jobs? The first place to look is the industry that birthed the technology.
AI seems set to do to computer programming—and possibly other kinds of so-called knowledge work—what automation has done to other jobs, from the factory floor and the warehouse, to the checkout aisle and the call center. In those industries, the end result of widespread automation has been the elimination of countless roles—and their replacement with ones that require either relatively little skill and knowledge, or a great deal more, with workers at either end of this spectrum being rewarded accordingly.
In other words, software is eating the software industry.
Nobody should be snickering at the programmers over the irony of their industry being decimated by something of its own creation. Other jobs across the “knowledge work” industry are being eliminated. And as AI is increasingly incorporated into robotics, many other types of jobs will almost certainly follow.
That may work out for a while in terms of corporate profits, but as we’ve discussed here previously, the long-term prospects don’t look good at all. You can unleash your new AI and tell it to start writing code for you to produce a specific function and it will do so. It might even do a great job and finish it more quickly than a human coder could. But that’s all it will ever do. It will never be innovative and come up with something better. It is simply copying the work of the humans that came before it.
You can ask ChatGPT to write you a song on any subject you like and it will quickly comply. But it’s never going to produce a stirring piece of truly original music. It’s just stitching together the lyrics of people. If AI fully takes over either programming or music, both of those activities will stagnate. So perhaps there won’t be giant robots coming to throw you into labor camps. But if they put everyone out of work, the effect won’t be much different.
What are coal miners and journalists going to do?
I have a Computer Science degree.
I designed software.
I was taught how to design AI.
Coders are just secretaries that can type fast
that is about it.
They will be gone in a few years.
Who is going to verify that the AI-generated code will actually work?
When I saw this headline, it immediately made total intuitive sense. What better use for AI than to produce code? Whoever perfects this application will be instantly wealthy.
Google CoPilot. Nuff said.
what a load of crap
Same way they verified that the clot-shot actually 'works' -- unleash it on the public and wait and see what happens.
Glad I taught my kids auto repair, electrician skills, plumbing, and AC repair. I figured that they have long lives ahead and even though they did fine in college, things could change a lot...looks like that’s starting to happen.
Lol. You’re a bit too aggressive on your timeline. There are a few problems with this analysis. First, there’s a ton of existing code out there that needs to be maintained and improved. AIs are reasonably good at generating small chunks of code with specific purposes. Not so good at maintaining existing code or improving it. Further, before you can even get there on that, you need a better way of providing requirements to AIs. This is going to take time. A lot longer than 5 years.
“Who is going to verify that the AI-generated code will actually work?”
That is an interesting question.
How do we all know you will work correctly?
In the Mathematic world it is all Set theory.
How you choose to use that data is by design.
Computers by their design require 7 conditions for them to operate in a reliable predictable fashion.
AI is stuck with that.
People are not.
Y’all come up with a AI machine that thinks like a human then you have a BIG problem.
I can explain why 2+2 does not always equal 4.
I was a Math major at one time.
Much of what we do is based on beliefs.
Kind of like this sudden fear of AI.
Plus integrating with legacy systems.
I remember all of this talk when CASE tools came out in the 90s.
Well the real question is…do the H1Bs go home now?
We can always go back to growing cherries in the Santa Clara valley.
>> If AI fully takes over either programming or music
To be exploited by the untalented.
Y’all see how far CASE got.
Bottom line is the mathematics.
One of my specialties was Project Engineering.
This AI crap is just idiots that don’t know what the are talking about.
An example is the F35 they finally got the data set together
where the man in the cockpit has data he never had before.
I could program an F35 to independently kill only certain Russian aircraft, is that AI? No.
It's the same old snake oil that has been sold for the last 40 years, just in some shiny new packaging.
"Buy our Bla-Bla-Bal-omatic system and you can hire monkeys to make your applications. Monkeys are cheap and disposable. Our patented technology will generate all that nasty code for them, and it's going to be error-free. Call this number to learn more".
Coding can certainly be tedious work. It is also a minor aspect of software development. Modern programming languages and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) drastically reduce the amount of coding required to make an application of specified complexity.
So, what happens? The customers require ever more complex applications, which require more coding to make them. And they require ever more capable IDEs to manage that code.
The critical factors are the design of a user interface suitable for the workload, the design of suitable back-end data storage and communications methods, and testable components with proper error detection and logging capabilities. Developers must be very adept at using complex IDEs and other toolchains.
It takes intelligent, skilled people to do that work. Most people cannot do that work. AI development is not currently directed toward doing that sort of work.
I have worked with AI-generated code from recent systems. It looks superficially pretty good. Then you realize that the software libraries referenced in the code do not exist or do not contain the methods called in the generated code. And the AI gets sulky when you ask for more details.
It is smoke and mirrors.
What an AI is really good at doing is finding component code samples posted by other developers, which do something close to what you may need to do in an application. It still takes a lot of discernment to select an appropriate sample and adapt it to what you need. But the AI can find good candidate samples faster that you can search the forums for the same stuff.
I presented ChatGPT with an engineering problem and asked for a solution. ChatGPT happily provided an answer. I asked ChatGPT to show its work. It provided the accompanying calculations. The answer was incorrect. I informed ChatGPT that it was incorrect and why. It apologized and revised the response to the correct answer. The bridge would have fallen down without human interaction.
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