[Mistletoe]

These comments remind me of newspaper articles saying the internet will fail and horse breeders saying cars will fail. All want to deflect to how wrong this is when it should be like the Drake Equation and can still give you data and ranges. With time and AI evolution, the estimates will get more close to this.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

[vba616]

>when his salary depends on his not understanding it

"That don't make no sense!"

If you believe in the potential of chatbots to replace programmers, then the salary of every programmer depends on them not not understanding it.

Here's why they seem like a waste of time to me, even for writing bland emails and comments; what say you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36079462

[gwoolhurme]

You misunderstood what so many people here wrote with even more snark and a bad quote. It could and probably will replace my job and I have no contingency plan in place leaving me at great risk. That’s a given it seems. What isn’t is giving an estimate on a dollar amount and of time. Especially with any scientific rigor. The tool in the link is silly and that is what everyone is talking about. Perhaps you should try to be less bias reading the comments here.

[vba616]

>It could and probably will replace my job

People tell stories about employees at big companies whose entire job is to send a small report to someone once a week.

Even in cases like that, it's illogical to fear AI, because if it really was so simple to automate, it would've been done already.

Either the storytellers are clueless about the true nature of the job, or else there are defenses against redundancy that aren't obvious.

[tstrimple]

> Even in cases like that, it's illogical to fear AI, because if it really was so simple to automate, it would've been done already.

This hasn't been my experience. There is a TON of low hanging fruit for automating workloads which exist in almost every large company. While not all automations are easy, there's no shortage of easy work in automation. Almost every financial organization I've worked at has had some amount of manual processing of overnight batch jobs.

[vba616]

>This hasn't been my experience.

What you mean by "experience" is unclear to me.

I agree with you insofar as everyone with even a little experience at a large company knows there are a lot of apparently low hanging fruit possibilities for automation.

But do you mean you have seen things that seem simple to automate, or have you tried to do so and found out what happens?

There is a lot going on below the surface.

[tstrimple]

Yes, plenty are absolutely trivial to implement. Things like "I move the file from this folder where it's dropped off by over night batch processing to this other folder and then I kick off the processing job" or "I copy these values into our master excel spreadsheet and take the results from the calculations and put them in this other system."

Extremely basic and low hanging fruit is all over the place.

[vba616]

>Yes, plenty are absolutely trivial to implement.

The most technically trivial change has a litany of obstacles involving people.

Off the top of my head:

1) Finding out a process exists

2) Finding out who knows about a process

3) Being able to communicate with such a person

4) Motivating them or other stakeholders to make a change

5) Making the new process independent of specific employees