Technology

Until an AI can get clear, reasonable requirements out of a client/stakeholder our jobs are safe.

Let me weigh in with something. The hard part about programming is not the code. It is in understanding all the edge cases, making flexible solutions and so much more.

I have seen many organizations with tens of really capable programmers that can implement anything. Now, most management barely knows what they want or what the actual end goal is. Since managers aren't capable of delivering perfect products every time with really skilled programmers, if i subtract programmers from the equation and substitute in a magic box that delivers code to managers whenever they ask for it, the managers won't do much better. The biggest problem is not knowing what to ask for, and even if you DO know what to ask for, they typically will ignore all the fine details.

By the time there is an AI intelligent enough to coordinate a large technical operation, AIs will be capable of replacing attorneys, congressmen, patent examiners, middle managers, etc. It would really take a GENERAL artificial intelligence to be feasible here, and you'd be wildly optimistic to say we are anywhere close to having one of those available on the open market.

And anyone who believes that should be fired, because they don't understand the technology at all or what is involved in programming for that matter. At the very least it should make everyone question the company if its leadership doesn't understand their own product.

That is what happens when you mix a fucking CEO with tech "How many workers can I fire to make more money and boast about my achievements in the annual conference of mega yacht owners" where as the correct question should obviously have always been (unless you are a psychopath) "how can I use this tech to boost productivity of my workers so they can produce the same amount of work in less amount of time and have more personal time for themselves"

Also these idiots always forget the "problem solving" part of most programming tasks which is still beyond the capability of LLMs. Sure have LLMs do the mundane stuff so that programmers can spend time on stuff that is more rewarding? No instead lets try to fire everyone.

To predict what jobs AI will replace, you need to know both of the following:

1. What's special about the human mind that makes people necessary for completing certain tasks
2. What AI can do to replicate or replace those special features

This guy has an MA in industrial engineering and an MBA, and has been in business his whole career. He has no knowledge of psychology and whatever knowledge of AI that he's picked up on the side as part of his work.

He's not the guy to ask. And yet, I feel like this is the only kind of guy anyone asks.

The sentiment on AI in the span of 10 years went from "it's inevitable it will replace your job" to "nope not gonna happen". The difference back then the jobs it was going to replace were not tech jobs. Just saying.

"Full-self-driving"-soon?

Until you ask it to do something never done before and it has a meltdown.

I await the day that AI makes CEOs a thing of the past....

Yeah nah. We already have copilot and it introduces so many subtle bugs.

Wasn't it the rabbit 1 scammer who said programmers would be gone in 5 years, like 3 years ago?

yup

and humans soon won't be the target audience for anything

I managed to get an AI to build pong in assembly. Are are pretty cool things, but not sci-fi level just yet, but I didn't just say "build pong in assembly", I have to hand hold it a little bit. You need to be a programmer to understand how to guide the AI to do the task.

That was something very simple, I doubt that you can get it to do more complex tasks without a more lot of back and forth.

To give you an example I had a hard time getting it to understand that the ball needed to bounce off at an angle if intercepted at an angle, it just kept snapping it to 90° increments. I couldn't fix it myself because I don't really know assembly well enough to really get into the weeds with it so I was sort of stuck until I was finally able to get the AI to do what I wanted it to. I sort of understood what the problem was, there was a number somewhere in the system and it needed to make the number negative, but it just kept setting the number to a value. A non-programmer wouldn't really understand that's what the problem was and so they wouldn't be able to explain to the AI how to fix it.

I believe AI is going to become an unimaginably useful tool in the future and we probably don't really yet understand how useful it's going to be. But unless they actually make AGI it isn't going to replace programmers.

If they do make AGI all bets are off it will probably go build a Dyson Sphere or something at that point and we will have no way of understanding what it's doing.

They could churn out garbage and scams for the idiots on Facebook, sure.

Everyone was always joking about how AI should just replace CEOs, but it turns out CEOs are so easily lead by the nose that AI companies practically already run the show.

Most companies can't even give decent requirements for humans to understand and implement. An AI will just write any old stuff it thinks they want and they won't have any way to really know if it's right etc.

They would have more luck trying to create an AI that takes whimsical ideas and turns them into quantified requirements with acceptance criteria. Once they can do that they may stand a chance of replacing developers, but it's gonna take far more than the simpleton code generators they have at the moment which at best are like bad SO answers you copy and paste then refactor.

This isn't even factoring in automation testers who are programmers, build engineers, devops etc. Can't wait for companies to cry even more about cloud costs when some AI is just lobbing everything into lambdas 😂

I admit that I work faster with AI help and if people get more stuff done in less time there might be less billable hours in the future for us. But AI did not replace me, a 10 times cheaper dude from India did.

But Human QAs .... Human QAs everywhere!

😂

It's a good thing. After all, I don't care when Amazon goes down.