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by verdverm 1023 days ago
Do you know people always say this for every new technology? yet here we are with more jobs than ever and low unemployment

the tl;dr is that more jobs will be created than lost, and those jobs will be more interesting and not of the bs job variety many report they work.

Also, what's wrong with a world where most people don't have to work uninspiring tasks and can rather explore other interests or hobbies?
1 comments
bananapub 1023 days ago
what does any of this have to do with my question?

society as a whole is usually better off by such things, are mass-unemployed farriers in 1920?

edit: I do also feel the zeitgeist on HN will be extremely different from this "people will adapt, it's good overall" vibe once it's very-well-paid SWEs that are being affected en masse by this stuff

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Loughla 1023 days ago
Your last sentence - I 100% agree with you. The general theme here is that AI will impact other people in some fashion, but they can re-train and get better jobs!

But it seems to me that software engineers should be very, very nervous about this. Creating things using novel means within well-established and documented/testable boundaries like programming languages seems like something that our current models will absolutely be able to do, if they can't already.

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joelfried 1023 days ago
It may seem that way but I'd argue the hardest part is coming up with the specifications for what the output needs to look like. Even if the best LLMs could write full projects like that, the business side would need to specify far beyond their normal levels what that thing needs to be. Have you ever tried to collect requirements from stakeholders and generate a project plan that meets all of those needs? Even if we're not far from GPT-4 being able to build out a basic component library, that's a long way from being able to architect solutions at a high level.

If I had to pick an analogy it wouldn't yet be farriers going out of business, but instead be more like the advent of the pneumatic nail gun for roofers. Everyone will still need a roof (software) to be built. Every instance is a little different at the design level, but the actual grunt work just got easier and faster if you know what you want out of it.

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verdverm 1023 days ago
> what does any of this have to do with my question?

I would ask the same of your original reply

By contrast, I replied directly to your question with my answer

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