[pksebben]

Everyone seems to be asking how AI is going to fit in the current paradigm - creating or destroying jobs and so forth - but I don't see a ton of folks talking about something I feel is patently obvious; that the most relevant applications of this stuff are going to exist outside the "company hire people to make product / give service and sell service" cycle.

Yes, AI will lower the barrier for entry level positions (IMO a good thing; more chances for smart creative people to get in the game who may have been failed by more traditional systems). But it will also allow the creation of projects by much smaller teams, who no longer need to stress the details and have a focus on making a thing just to try it out.

Individuals will be able to get much more experimental and iterate way faster; if the amount of investment to build an MVP is less than the investment to research and assess all that crap that usually has to go into a commercial product (market fit, funding, marketing, sales, etc.) then you can just make the damn thing and see if the pasta sticks to the wall. This could be a really great environment for testing out weird ideas, some of which might be completely novel and break the mold in ways that are simply not feasible if you have to manage all that other stuff.

I'm also excited to see what new stuff pops into the OSS space as a result of devs-with-jobs being able to hack out a proof of concept in a couple hours and smacking some stuff together over weekends.

[2devnull]

“AI will lower the barrier for entry level position”

No. Empirically, has it?

It will do the opposite. It removes trust, therefore making existing powers more powerful. Ain’t going to democratize anything but cybercrime.

[pksebben]

Not sure I follow you. Do you mean that the existence of AI will undermine trust that applicants know what they're doing?

It hasn't really been around long enough for an empirical analysis of effects. It's also incredibly hard to measure effects with the systems themselves being in such flux.

For what it's worth, I think categorical statements of any stripe are a little premature. Even the EA folks speak in probabilistic margins.

[2devnull]

“AI will undermine trust that applicants know what they're doing?”

Yes. Is that not obvious? It’s already a major problem in educational settings. I’ve seen video of people using it for job interviews.

Have you been handed any code yet that was written partially or wholly by gpt? If not, you will soon, and then you’ll get it.

[pksebben]

I see. I suppose I'm sort of partially blind to that given that I've been really lucky to mostly have interviews where the code portions were more "build this whole thing" rather than "whiteboard this function".