I asked AI researchers and economists about SWE career strategies given AI

https://chrisbarber.co/I+asked+AI+researchers+%26+economists+about+SWE+career+strategy+and+the+future+of+AI

by cjbarber • 7 months ago

13 18 7 months ago

"I asked people who have no idea about SWE careers about SWE career strategies"

Exact same vibe as Karpathy saying he's never felt so behind as a programmer when he hasn't worked as a programmer a single day of his life.

marvel_boy• 7 months ago

Andrej Karpathy has absolutely worked as a programmer (and still does). He often emphasizes:

“You should be able to build things end-to-end.”

Yizahi• 7 months ago

Yeah, I thought for once it will be something close to an "objective" overview of our current situation and short term outlook ass much as that is even possible, but it is once again a completely inane LLM hype article. The funniest part is that answers in some blocks contradict answers in other blocks :) .

tl;dr - don't waste time on reading this.

bananaflag2• 7 months ago

It all boils down to one thing: whether humans have some irreplaceable special sauce ("soul") or not.

If yes, all those fancy economic arguments (Jevons blah blah) actually apply.

If not, we are cooked.

EDIT: No idea why I am downvoted for stating the obvious. (I say this at the risk of looking unselfaware.)

k__• 7 months ago

It all boils down to whether AIs can become more than just correlation engines.

bananaflag2• 7 months ago

Either that, or whether humans are more than just correlation engines.

brookman64k• 7 months ago

For me the page only shows a title but no content (Chrome, iOS). Or am I missing the joke? (That AI researchers and economists have nothing to say about the topic.)

d3m0t3p• 7 months ago

Same, Firefox iOS

rr808• 7 months ago

Works for me on firefox and chrome - all the content is on obsidian.md, maybe blocked for you?

https://publish-01.obsidian.md/access/2e00105552e45031d995a8...

fauigerzigerk• 7 months ago

It's not blocked. It's just not working in Safari (which includes Chrome and Firefox on iOS).

tomaytotomato• 7 months ago

I think the current "path" of AI will come to a dead end. Until we have AGI, we are just relying on specialised LLMs or other models as components to do various tasks; whether its guessing the next word or picking out objects from an image.

It's almost like we have various functional parts of a brain but not synapsed with some AI-bus. How do you build a performant API for that, which will be as good as a human?

ismailmaj• 7 months ago

fails on Safari macOS, works on chrome though.

lajisam• 7 months ago

Why do people have to state their opinions like they are facts, when in fact none of us knows what the future holds?

wiseowise• 7 months ago

I co-founded a business that matches startups with executive coaches (let me know if you're a founder/exec looking for a great coach), and created the Breakout List, which you may have seen if you’re a software engineer in startups (let me know if you need help identifying good startups to join).

nertirs3• 7 months ago

I don't see the point of these speculative articles, since the answer always is - diversify your skill set, keep up with the new tech trends and you will be fine.

Personally, I think that independent, reliable and economically viable AI will for a good century be 10 years away, just like nuclear fusion and quantum computing.

agentifysh• 7 months ago

not sure why some comments are cynical, this is actually the best take i've seen so far but the fact is a lot of jobs are CRUD web apps and those are certainly gone at this point, i've seen a few companies where they laid off their development teams and retained just a few product owners. in some the business owner realized he can just maintain and manage their web based enterprise tool without paying the vendor or a team to maintain it.

being close to gpu is a good advice but i also dont know where to even start, its such a daunting thing, i still dont understand how people are creating new models or able to stack layers of what appears to be waffles of neural networks with some fancy arrows, im like how do they know how to put all these things together?

thirdly, the intense competition is a given because if your boss who doesn't know coding can start pushing PRs and it just works then you are in big trouble.

so all of this points to one thing, those who are already rich with distribution, fame, recognition are going to benefit immensely from AI and everybody else in the middle are just going to straddle along.

There won't be a UBI, nor will there be any pause in inflation, we are headed for medieval times in terms of gaps not only in wealth but dating, reproduction, food pretty much across the board, its uplifting a small number of people to the stratosphere and everybody else trying to keep afloat.

How wild would it be that these socioeconomic gaps fueled by AI could cause actual societal revolution not the innovative kind but a Marie Antoinette decapitating event? I just see all sorts of policies and tech pointing towards delaying this inevitable outcome that is what happens when a large number of single young unwed men without jobs gather in urban centers (ex. Syria)

sevensor• 7 months ago

a lot of jobs are CRUD web apps and those are certainly gone at this point

We thought Rails would do this. I think it’s safer to say that CRUD is now cheaper than ever, and that changes what the job of producing it looks like. Remember the Rails Bro? I suspect we’ll see something like him for a while until this all shakes out.

josefritzishere• 7 months ago

It seems highly optimistic to suggest AI will magically replace SWE jobs based on what we've seen to date. When these start ups begin charging for AI it will just collapse. We will see it's real commercially viable use cases in the aftermath.

I asked AI researchers and economists about SWE career strategies given AI

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