[overgard]

What even motivates you to write something like this? In what universe is a software engineer a "rank"? You sound absurdly bitter that people want to keep their livelihood?

This doesn't even match with reality. I got laid off in January because of "ai" (scare quotes because it was really about the salaries of the US based teams being more expensive than the overseas teams, I think). I got hired at a new job with better pay within two months, and my team is still hiring software engineers, and we work on cutting edge stuff. And yes we use AI (tastefully), but nobody here expects it to replace them. Hacker News and twitter are a fricking echo chamber of the most obnoxious people trying to be "thought leaders", but it doesn't match my reality at all.

[threethirtytwo]

"The fact that you still hold a rank as a software engineer right now is only because that machine is slightly worse than you. But as it improves, your role becomes meaningless. The life you built your skills around becomes meaningless. It is less about what AI is now and more about the trajectory of AI and what the current AI says about the AI of the near tomorrow"

^ read what I wrote. I'm telling you the future, but you're talking about your current job. So there's no contradiction here. Your current situation FITS what I said. And my prediction of the future is the most likely out come.

>What even motivates you to write something like this

Because it's the most likely truth? It's the most probably reality. The god awful truth is like the sun. It permeates everything, it's rays touch everything and it's a very obvious flaming fireball in the sky, yet nobody can stare directly at it. No one can fully face the sun.

I ask you, What motivates you to lie to yourself? To deny the obvious trajectory of AI? Does preserving your livelihood involve denying reality?

[overgard]

Such a bizarre train of thought. There's nothing inevitable about this future. Most people HATE what's being proposed. Why wouldn't you fight against something this shitty? These things cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Nothing about that is inevitable at all! What's actually probably inevitable is that these companies fail, because the amount of energy they're demanding and the amount of money they need to make to make this even remotely economically viable does not make any sense. The math doesn't work.

Also, what would even be your motivation for telling me my life is meaningless? Like, what's your expectation here, that I lie down on the ground and go "welp, why even bother".

My opinion is that the only people proposing a narrative like this have a direct financial incentive from the AI companies. I see no other value to promoting this narrative.

[threethirtytwo]

>Such a bizarre train of thought. There's nothing inevitable about this future

What's bizarre is that you attributed "inevitable" to what I said. I never used that term. Most probably and most likely is the more accurate term. The best possible odds according to the information we have and that is the trendline progression of AI for the last decade is that it will become better than us.

>Most people HATE what's being proposed. Why wouldn't you fight against something this shitty?

I'm not fighting anything right now. I'm just communicating. With truth. Whether I'm against AI or for AI or whether I want to fight AI is orthogonal to OBJECTIVE reality. I am simply communicating truth.

>Also, what would even be your motivation for telling me my life is meaningless? Like, what's your expectation here, that I lie down on the ground and go "welp, why even bother".

Because it's true. Whether you lie down after hearing the truth or attempt to lie to yourself is your prerogative.

>My opinion is that the only people proposing a narrative like this have a direct financial incentive from the AI companies. I see no other value to promoting this narrative.

I have no financial incentive. In fact I stand to lose everything just like you. The difference between you and I is that I have the ability to stare at the sun.