[saurik]

I've been hearing this "you're moving the goalposts" argument for over 20 years now, ever since I was a college student taking graduate courses in Cognitive Science (which my University decided to cobble together at the time out of Computer Science, Psychology, Biology, and Geography), and I honestly don't think it is a useful framing of the argument.

In this case, it could be that you are just talking to different people and focusing on their answers. I am more than happy to believe that Copilot and ChatGPT, today, cause a bunch of people fear. Does it cause me fear? No.

And if you had asked me five years ago "if I built a program that was able to generate simple websites, or reconfigure code people have written to solve problems similar to ones solved before, would that cause you to worry?" I also would have said "No", and I would have looked at you as crazy if you thought it would.

Why? Because I agree with the person you are replying to (though I would have used a slightly-less insulting term than "trash engineers", even if mentally it was just as mean): the world already has too many "amateur developers" and frankly most of them should never have learned to program in the first place. We seriously have people taking month or even week long coding bootcamps and then thinking they have a chance to be a "rock star coder".

Honestly, I will claim the only reason they have a job in the first place is because a bunch of cogs--many of whom seem to work at Google--massively crank the complexity of simple problems and then encourage us all to type ridiculous amounts of boilerplate code to get simple tasks done. It should be way easier to develop these trivial things but every time someone on this site whines about "abstraction" another thousand amateurs get to have a job maintaining boilerplate.

If anything, I think my particular job--which is a combination of achieving low-level stunts no one has done before, dreaming up new abstractions no one has considered before, and finding mistakes in code other people have written--is going to just be in even more demand from the current generation of these tools, as I think this stuff is mostly going to encourage more people to remain amateurs for longer and, as far as anyone has so far shown, the generators are more than happy to generate slightly buggy code as that's what they were trained on, and they have no "taste".

Can you fix this? Maybe. But are you there? No. The reality is that these systems always seem to be missing something critical and, to me, obvious: some kind of "cognitive architecture" that allows them to think and dream possibilities, as well as a fitness function that cares about doing something interesting and new instead of being "a conformist": DALL-E is sometimes depicted as a robot in a smock dressed up to be the new Pablo Picasso, but, in reality, these AIs should be wearing business suits as they are closer to Charles Schmendeman.

But, here is the fun thing: if you do come for my job even in the near future, will I move the goal post? I'd think not, as I would have finally been affected. But... will you hear a bunch of people saying "I won't be worried until X"? YES, because there are surely people who do things that are more complicated than what I do (or which are at least different and more inherently valuable and difficult for a machine to do in some way). That doesn't mean the goalpost moved... that means you talked to a different person who did a different thing, and you probably ignored them before as they looked like a crank vs. the people who were willing to be worried about something easier.

And yet, I'm going to go further: if the things I tell you today--the things I say are required to make me worry--happen and yet somehow I was wrong and it is the future and you technically do those things and somehow I'm still not worried, then, sure: I guess you can continue to complain about the goalposts being moved... but is it really my fault? Ergo: was it me who had the job of placing the goalposts in the first place?

The reality is that humans aren't always good at telling you what you are missing or what they need; and I appreciate that it must feel frustrating providing a thing which technically implements what they said they wanted and it not having the impact you expected--there are definitely people who thought that, with the tech we have now long ago pulled off, cars would be self-driving... and like, cars sort of self-drive? and yet, I still have to mostly drive my car ;P--then I'd argue the field still "failed" and the real issue is that I am not the customer who tells you what you have to build and, if you achieve what the contract said, you get paid: physics and economics are cruel bosses whose needs are oft difficult to understand.