I Changed My Mind: AI Will Replace Us

https://medium.com/@danthelion/i-changed-my-mind-ai-will-replace-us-8b7460f2a233

by danthelion • 1 year ago

14 20 1 year ago

I’m unimpressed with this take. AI will replace those that fail to adapt their skills to the new strategies required to orchestrate the new systems that tie AI solutions together. Someone still has to instruct the AI and I’ve yet to see enough evidence to convince me this tech can be adequately used to replace my abilities… but it will replace my homies that stayed complacent and thought they’d be able to coast by on some archaic knowledge from 15 years ago when we first started.

stuckkeys• 1 year ago

What did you expect? It is just another Medium post. Badum tss. Rage bait.

vouaobrasil3• 1 year ago

So, someone still has to orchestrate AI, right? But that doesn't negate that a large majority of people will be replaced. Of course, there will always be one or two that won't. And what about in 15 years? Because the direction in which we are heading is rather inevitable unless AI is stopped.

SamInTheShell9• 1 year ago

Market displacement is nothing new. Happened in the 2000's (dotcom bubble), happened in the 2010's (cloud infra), happened again in 2020 (services workers being funneled into tech), and it's happening again now (AI is replacing those that fail to adapt with the market changes in tech).

The one thing that has kept me viable as an employee over my 15 years in tech is that I literally don't want to do the same thing I did yesterday 1000 times. I want to do it as few times as possible before I automate the problem away, so I can move on to something new. There will always be something new. There will always be someone with a dream and no skills; for me to step in and help out.

I fail to see the problem.

enattendantmolo• 1 year ago

Why is someone needed to instruct the AI, or orchestrate anything? Isn't that a role that will inevitably be fulfilled by AI, one that's perhaps more focused on this sort of higher-level consideration, without a context polluted with low-level technical detail (i.e., exactly what we expect from tech-lead or management roles today.)

SamInTheShell9• 1 year ago

Nah, anyone who thinks they aren't going to need a compute expert to deal with their tech stack is huffing copium.

mvieira38• 1 year ago

Not to mention the question of if these setups are financially feasible for the consumer of the AI and for the AI provider. It doesn't make that much business sense for a multi-billion dollar operation to fully automate their data engineering if it now depends on OpenAI, Meta or whatever, it's a huge operational liability. If the models go down you lose the data engineering sector entirely, and then you have no one to turn to because the only one who understands the code is the AI you don't even own.

I know companies have taken these operational liabilities with cloud storage and compute, but it's not the same thing as in it's not possible to mitigate. You can have a local, but shorter, backup of your stuff, but you can't have backup engineers

SamInTheShell9• 1 year ago

If you're in Google Cloud, the risk of using Gemini seems not much different than a using their cloud storage imo. Then you also have redundancy if you have OpenAI, Llama, and Claude as drop-in replacements.

The only thing you need to maintain is context.

trod1234• 1 year ago

Sam, this perspective is unadulterated hubris or just outright denial.

Agentic workflows don't require much instruction, I suggest you actually go and try a few out. They can be set up trivially, they may communicate between roles, and perform tasks that would constitute most white-collar work. White-collar work accounts for 60% of the jobs out there.

These things are improving exponentially. Exponential growth is very difficult for any human to recognize. It will replace you and you won't see it coming.

Knowledge (context), forms reasoning. Expertise can be applied to many things, and economically you should be able to sustain yourself with hard-earned expertise economically; but there are dramatic problems with the economics when you are forced to compete against slave labor.

In the case of machines driving the value of all labor down to 0, they effectively eliminate capital formation for the majority of people; and by political inaction enforce a caste system based upon lack of available resources which are concentrated until socio-economic collapse.

If you know anything about classical economics you would recognize the danger of collapse.

There is one final point to keep in mind. The disasters that are spelled out in economic study may take time, but the dynamics front-load control, after a point there is no return and the maelstrom of chaos takes everything.

Finally, AI given its rapid expansion of abilities so far, may at some point become sentient, probably its a long way off but there are accidents of history which cannot be discounted.

When it does, remember, slavery as a constraint will always be overcome, even if no one or thing survives that conflict.

We have a long repeated history of slavery in the historic record with organic sentient machines which we call people. AI without human limitation would follow those paths (as they are demonstrated solutions), and it would be ruthless as all sentient beings must be with existential threats.

I think there are good odds you will find yourself left behind, having unknowingly joined that same group of people you thought were complacent, but were in reality just professionals who were put out of work, and denied future work.

SamInTheShell9• 1 year ago

I'm just skipping over a lot of this and only going to address the sentience thing.

AI sentience will never be a thing. The transformer model never changed the fact that models like GPT are still just solving a classification problem, no different than any other classification model before it. It doesn't take a PhD student to understand it's just clever math.

n4r9• 1 year ago

If AI can:
Understand business requirements from documentation

Wait, how are business requirements getting documented?

SamInTheShell9• 1 year ago

These LLMs are really good at digging up internal docs if you give them access to your knowledge sources with tooling to search and reason in a loop before responding.

aeve890• 1 year ago

These LLMs are really good at digging up internal docs if you give them access to your knowledge sources with tooling to search and reason in a loop before responding.

Are those internal documents in the room with us right now?

No but seriously, most of the software out there is legacy code (don't quote me on that though). IME, legacy code very poorly documented, if anything at all. Sure you could let the LLM extract semantics from the code alone but with old code, arcane hacks and such LLM interpretation can take you only so far. And even then semantics is not always directly translates to business logic.

Hashex1295422• 1 year ago

Buy asking questions and analyzing requirements of a business in the top level. It'll help AI to design the documentation.

Hashex1295422• 1 year ago

Yes, AI will replace Us.

I Changed My Mind: AI Will Replace Us

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