Ultimately, large part of many jobs are repetitive, and can be replaced by pattern matching. The other side, creating new patterns, is hard and takes time. So, employers will have to take this into account. They may be long periods of “unproductive” time, or more risky evaluation to try new ideas.
Does the middle manager which before bugged people to do the work now write a prompt and commit code and file documents themselves?
We are now a few years into LLMs being widely available/used, and if someone’s chosen to stick their head in the sand and ignore what’s happening around them, then that’s on them.
> I think workplaces will have to allow people time to adapt.
This feels like a very outdated view to me. Maybe we are worse off for that being the case but by and large that will not happen. The people who take initiative and learn will advance, while the people who refused to learn anything new or change how they’ve been doing the job for XX years will be pushed out.
Using AI is the opposite of learning.
I'm not just trying to be snarky and dismissive, either
That's the whole selling point of AI tools. "You can do this without learning it, because the AI knows how"
What preparation are you supposed to do for this ? Previously, change was relatively slow and it was reasonable to keep up in your own time. I believe that is no longer possible.
Is AI capable of any skill ? I mean, Microsoft or Google SW looks like it is written by AI but this is since 20 years
Despite the fact that a half of century ago there was a lot of talk about "software reuse", that has never happened at the expected scale, but not for technical reasons. It has never happened because the copyright laws have prevented it.
During the early years of electronic computers, there were computer user groups where the programs of general interest were shared rather freely between different companies, in order to avoid the duplication of programming work. This has changed sharply after the appearance of software as a product that can be sold and bought, separately from computer hardware.
Even when there exists an open-source solution it frequently cannot be incorporated in the program you are writing for a company, due to incompatible copyrights. Therefore much of the programming work consists in rewriting with minor variations programs that have been already written countless times before, but at another company or by some individual.
The "AI" that "writes" a program for you just makes a search instead of you for one of the existing solutions, with the additional advantage that it has searched code bases that you would have been forbidden to search, and it produces a program source that has been detached from its original copyright, allowing it to be inserted in a proprietary program of your company.
A program "written" by an AI will have the highest quality when it almost matches some program that has been present in the training set. Whenever the generated program is more distant from a verbatim reproduction, being a combination of several programs or having some random changes, there is a high probability that the AI has introduced some errors, which must be corrected by a competent programmer in order to get a valid programming solution.
A human could have done exactly the same thing as the "AI", replacing most of the programming with searching then doing copy and paste, with a similar increase in productivity, but this would have been punishable by the existing laws, while when the AI does it, this is legal.
If software reuse would have been possible without copyright restrictions, then indeed less programming jobs would have been needed. So with the "AI" workaround against the laws, it is really expected to see a job number reduction in this domain.
He added, "AI is good".
Be afraid, Doom and Gloom. <<
Thank you,
-- a reporter still having a job apparently.
