AI is going to take our jobs - everyone should panic now.

[swatts]

Hello Panicking Programmers,

I have click-baited you in to offer a slightly less excitable view of the world!

An old adage is that a good engineer is a lazy engineer and like most truisms there is an element of accuracy to the statement, but I think it also lacks completeness. A good engineer acts as if they are lazy, but uses the time they save to do more stuff.

Because laziness is an issue in my experience, I take a muscular view of the world in that I think the brain is a muscle and it needs exercise to get better. Without that exercise/stimulation it will atrophy and very quickly become reliant on being fed information. As an example spell-checkers and SatNavs have actually made my spelling and navigation worse.

Currently we are being sold that various Large Language Models will take our jobs. The correlation from people who don't know better is that ChatGPT can write a simple program, therefore all programming will soon be done by ChatGPT. Spoiler Alert: it's not quite so simple!

First a word about the people selling this, they seem to be the same people who were selling Bitcoin, blockchain a while back. Similarly sharp companies putting AI in their marketing to fool investors. I now view it as a giant red-flag! And I apologise for the good people in marketing and computer science, soon the chancers will find some new nonsense to market and the business will normalise again.

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izea.com

Future Egg (co ChatGPT)

"Imagine an egg, perhaps nestled on a high-tech, futuristic surface. The egg could be glowing softly, emitting a gentle, warm light. Surrounding the egg are intricate patterns or symbols representing the algorithms and neural networks of artificial intelligence.

Furthermore, you might envision faint digital tendrils extending from the egg, symbolizing the connectivity and intelligence that AI brings to enhance and optimize processes.

Feel free to envision the egg's surroundings as vibrant and filled with the energy of technology and innovation, all focused on the humble yet powerful symbol of potential: the egg."

So why the scepticism?.

As I have written before, people having been trying to make me redundant for about 40 years now, and yet I'm still as busy and the work hasn't changed that much. Where are the grand advances?

1) I also think LLMs are good at some things, but they are usually things with little consequence, where accuracy doesn't really matter. If I were a manager I'd be quite worried TBH. Whereas we deal in software attached to physical things, that potential inaccuracy has consequences.

2) Going back to the issue of laziness --> "Consider checking important information", how do you judge what's important if you don't understand something completely. And understanding completely is the hard work of software engineering.

There are no shortcuts to understanding I'm afraid, it's just effort. 

I can predict a lot of expensive rescue work in my future, and that doesn't come cheap!