I hope this helps people understand that you don’t get to be CEO by being smart or working hard. It’s all influence and gossip all the way up.
“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry. - John Carmack
Agreed! Problem solving is core to any sort of success. Whether you’re moving up or on for more pay, growing tomatoes or nurturing a relationship, you’re problem solving. But I can see AI putting the screws to those of us in tech.
Haven’t used it much so far, last job didn’t afford much coding opportunity, but I wrote a Google Apps script to populate my calendar given changes to an Excel sheet. Pretty neat!
With zero experience App scripting, I tried going the usual way, searching web pages. Got it half-ass working, got stuck. Asked ChatGPT to write it and boom, solved with an hour’s additional work.
You could say, “Yeah, but you at least had a clue as to general scripting and still had to problem solve. Plus, you came up with the idea in the first place, not the AI!” Yes! But point being, AI made the task shockingly easier. That was at a software outfit so I had the oppurtuniy to chat with my dev friends, see what they were up to. They were properly skeptical/realistic as to what AI can do, but they still used it to great effect.
Another example: Struggled like hell to teach myself database scripting, so ignorant I didn’t know the words to search and the solutions I found were more advanced answers than my beginner work required (or understood!). First script was 8 short lines, took 8 hours. Had AI been available to jump start me, I could have done that in an hour, maybe two. That’s a wild productivity boost. So while AI will never make programmers obsolete, we’ll surely need fewer of them.
They’ve been saying this kind of bullshit since the early 90s. Employers hate programmers because they are expensive employees with ideas of their own. The half-dozen elite lizard people running the world really don’t like that kind of thing.
Unfortunately, I don’t think any job is truly safe forever. For myriad reasons. Of course there will always be a need for programmers, engineers, designers, testers, and many other human-performed jobs. However, that will be a rapidly changing landscape and the number of positions will be reduced as much as the owning class can get away with. We currently have large teams of people creating digital content, websites, apps, etc. Those teams will get smaller and smaller as AI can do more and more of the tedious / repetitive / well-solved stuff.
the number of positions will be reduced as much as the owning class can get away with
Well, after all, you don’t hire people to do nothing. It’s simply a late-stage capitalism thing. Hopefully one day we can take the benefits of that extra productivity and share the wealth. The younger generations seem like they might move us that way in the coming decades.
I really hope so. Sometimes I think the kids are alright. Like the 12 year old owning the My Pillow idiot. Then I hear the horror stories from my school teacher friends.
And by that time, processors and open source AI are good enough that any noob can ask his phone to generate a new app from scratch. You’d only need big corpo for cloud storage and then only when distributed systems written by AI don’t work.
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Mark Zuckerberg is not a robot ?
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Lizardman. Easy to confuse the two as they’re both cold to the touch by default.
It’s worth noting that the new CEO is one of few people at Amazon to have worked their way up from PM and sales to CEO.
With that in mind, while it’s a hilariously stupid comment to make, he’s in the business of selling AWS and its role in AI. Take it with the same level of credibility as that crypto scammer you know telling you that Bitcoin is the future of banking.
PM and sales, eh?
So you’re saying his lack of respect for programmers isn’t new, but has spanned his whole career?
As a wage slave with no bitcoin or crypto, the technology has been hijacked by these types and could otherwise have been useful.
I’m not entirely sold on the technology, especially since immutable ledgers have been around long before the blockchain, but also due to potential attack vectors and the natural push towards centralisation for many applications - but I’m just one man and if people find uses for it then good for them.
Yeah hows that goin’?
Lol sure, and AI made human staff at grocery stores a thing of the…oops, oh yeah…y’all tried that for a while and it failed horribly…
So tired of the bullshit “AI” hype train. I can’t wait for the market to crash hard once everybody realizes it’s a bubble and AI won’t magically make programmers obsolete.
Remember when everything was using machine learning and blockchain technology? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
It’s the pinnacle of MBA evolution.
In their worldview engineers are a material, and all that matters in the world is knowing how to do business. So it just makes sense that one can guide and use and direct engineers to replace themselves.
They don’t think of fundamentals, they really believe it’s some magic that happens all by itself, you just have to direct energy and something will come out of it.
Lysenko vibes.
This wouldn’t happen were not the C-suite mostly comprised of bean counters. They really think they are to engineers what officers are to soldiers. The issue is - an officer must perfectly know everything a soldier knows and their own specialty, and also bears responsibility. Bean counters in general less education, experience and intelligence than engineers they direct, and also avoid responsibility all the time.
So, putting themselves as some superior caste, they really think they can “direct progress” to replace everyone else the way factories with machines replaced artisans.
It’s literally a whole layer of people who know how to get power, but not how to create it, and imagine weird magical stuff about things they don’t know.
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Yeah, that’s what I mean. Black boxes are a concept to accelerate development, but we can’t blackbox ourselves through civilization. They are also mostly useful for horizontal, not vertical relationships, which people misunderstand all the time (leaky abstractions).
This actually should make us optimistic. If hierarchical blackboxing were efficient, it would be certain that state of human societies will become more and more fascist and hierarchical over time, while not slowing down in development. But it’s not.
Yeah, I member.
This person memegens
Spoken like someone who manages programmers instead of working as one.
The job of CEO seems the far easier to replace with AI. A fairly basic algorithm with weighted goals and parameters (chosen by the board) + LLM + character avatar would probably perform better than most CEOs. Leave out the LLM if you want it to spout nonsense like this Amazon Cloud CEO.
Cheaper too I bet.
Also lol for the AI coder 😁 good luck with that 😂
Meanwhile, llms are less useful at helping me write code than intellij was a decade ago
I’m actually really impressed with the auto complete intellij is packaged with now. It’s really good with golang (probably because golang has a ton of code duplication).
‘Soon’ is a questionable claim from a CEO who sells AI services and GPU instances. A single faulty update caused worldwide down time recently. Now, imagine all infrastructure is written with today’s LLMs - which are sometimes hallucinate so bad, they claim ‘C’ in CRC-32C stands for ‘Cool’.
I wish we could also add a “Do not hallucinate” prompt to some CEOs.
Extremely misleading title. He didn’t say programmers would be a thing of the past, he said they’ll be doing higher level design and not writing code.
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Yeah, there are people who can “in general” imagine how this will happen, but programming is exactly 99% not about “in general” but about specific “dumb” conflicts in the objective reality.
People think that what they generally imagine as the task is the most important part, and since they don’t actually do programming or anything requiring to deal with those small details, they just plainly ignore them, because those conversations and opinions exist in subjective bendable reality.
But objective reality doesn’t bend. Their general ideas without every little bloody detail simply won’t work.
Not really, it’s doable with chatgpt right now for programs that have a relatively small scope. If you set very clear requirements and decompose the problem well it can generate fairly high quality solutions.
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It’s just a tool like any other. An experienced developer knows that you can’t apply every tool to every situation. Just like you should know the difference between threads and coroutines and know when to apply them. Or know which design pattern is relevant to a given situation. It’s a tool, and a useful one if you know how to use it.
This is like applying a tambourine made of optical discs as a storage solution. A bit better cause punctured discs are no good.
A full description of what a program does is the program itself, have you heard that? (except for UB, libraries, … , but an LLM is no better than a human in that too)
right now not a chance. it’s okay ish at simple scripts. it’s alright as an assistant to get a buggy draft for anything even vaguely complex.
ai doing any actual programming is a long ways off.
So they would be doing engineering and not programming? To me that sounds like programmers would be a thing of the past.
It’s really funny how AI “will perform X job in the near future” but you barely, if any, see articles saying that AI will replace CEO’s in the near future.
Somewhere there is a dev team secretly programming an AI to take over bureaucratic and manegerial jobs but disguising it as code writing AI to their CTO and CEO
C-suites are like Russian elites.
The latter are some thieves who’ve inherited a state from Soviet leadership. They have a layman’s idea of what a state and a country is, what history itself is, plus something that a taxi driver would say. In the last 20 years they are trying to apply that weird idea to reality, as if playing Hearts of Iron, because they want to be great and to be in charge of everything that happens.
The former have heard in school that there were industrial revolutions and such, and they too want to be great and believe in every such stupid hype about someone being replaced with new great technology, and of course they want to be in charge of that process.
While in actuality with today’s P2P technologies CEO’s are the most likely to be replaced, if we use our common sense, but without “AI”, of course. Just by decentralized systems allowing much bigger, more powerful and competitive cooperatives than before, and those that form and disband very easily.
Here’s one. And their profits went up when they replaced their CEO https://www.forbes.com/sites/sherzododilov/2024/01/11/can-ai-become-your-next-ceo/
AI is terrible at solving real problems thru programming. As soon as the problem is not technical in nature and needs a decision to be made based on experience, it falls flat on its face.
It will never understand context and business rules and things of that nature to the same extent that actual devs do.
I just want to remind everyone that capital won’t wait until AI is “as good” as humans, just when it’s minimally viable.
They didn’t wait for self-checkout to be as good as a cashier; They didn’t wait for chat-bots to be as good as human support; and they won’t wait for AI to be as good as programmers.
And because all the theft and malfunctions, the nearby supermarkets replaced the self checkout by normal cashiers again.
If it’s AI doing all the work, the responsibility goes to the remaining humans. They’ll be interesting lawsuits even there’s the inevitable bug that the AI itself can’t figure out.
We saw this happen in Amazon’s cashier-less stores. They were actively trying to use a computer based AI system but it didn’t work without thousands of man hours from real humans which is why those stores are going away. Companies will try this repeatedly til they get something that does work or run out of money. The problem is, some companies have cash to burn.
I doubt the vast majority of tech workers will be replaced by AI any time soon. But they’ll probably keep trying because they really really don’t want to pay human beings a liveable wage.
Already happening. Cisco just smoked another 4,000 employees. And anecdotally, my tech job hunt is, for the first time, not going so hot.
