> Every article I come across on AI in the BBC or The Guardian seems to be a sensationalized scare story about AI taking over, compromising our data, or other alarming scenarios.
One thing all these have in common is being in, and by, the press:
> This idea that AI will not impact jobs is ridiculous.
Is that a very widespread idea? I haven't really seen it, though I guess I try not to hang out places on the internet where there's too much nonsense.
I mainly see people arguing about how AI will impact jobs. (I think it's pretty obvious that AI will augment jobs, replace jobs, and create jobs, so a better way to frame the discussion is how much of each we are going to have and how can we make it so we get an overall positive outcome rather than negative one.)
> My advice is if AI tooling improves tasks you do (art, writing, coding, data entry) you should be using it now. If it doesn't you should continue to ignore it.
Ignoring AI isn't a good idea. At a minimum We should all probably be at least a bit concerned about AI and working to put oversight or regulations in place to protect us from the most obvious problems while keeping a close watch on our progress toward AGI so that we aren't blindsided and unprepared for it and whatever it brings.
> The government believes that 40% of jobs will go [to AI] within the next ten years. I think its going to be a lot faster than that.
It's going to be a lot slower than that. Ten years from now AI will barely have made a dent in the existing job market in the developed world. Maybe in 30 years 10-15% of existing jobs will have been replaced by AI. That's an optimistic outcome. The AI jobs predictions are hilariously wrong. Ten years is a short amount of time, they have the impact time scale wrong as is typical in tech predictions (making the mistake of shuttling the impact far too close to the present).
> those who fear large swaths of workers being replaced by an influx of heavily automated processes,
I’m definitely on this camp. Because it is happening already, I’m seeing it before my very eyes.
My partner’s employer, a tiny ~50 people company, is already making the copywriters and graphic designers use AI.
I work as a developer for a large media company. The chairman, like everybody else not living under a rock for the past few months, has become aware of ChatGPT and wants us to integrate AI stuff in the CMS. We’re working on it, there’s hundreds of people using this CMS daily to create content.
Even the best case scenario here, where people are not laid off and just become more productive, results in the profession of many people changing a lot overnight. People who might have loved writing articles or designing stuff from scratch will soon be mere supervisors of AI’s work.
I think a lot of some guy’s post in Reddit that made it to HN: he was a 3D artist who loved his work, but was forced by his company to use midjourney, stable diffusion, dall-e or whatever and now was just doing some touches in Photoshop. He hated his “new” job.
I haven’t really used ChatGPT, Copilot and the like to generate code yet, because I don’t think I’d like it. I don’t want to correct/touch up some AI’s code as that removes all the joy.
It’s weird how roles are changing: we used to have some “AI” autocorrecting the stuff we typed and now we’re the ones correcting the AI.
Interesting times for sure, but the “large swaths of people are going to lose their jobs or have any kind of joy removed from them” I’m sure it’ll happen. And no one has a plan to deal with this nor time to come up with something. And having 90% of the workforce being “prompt engineers” is sci-fi worthy dystopia.
WIRED
AI Is Rewiring Coders’ Brains. Yours May Be Next
Will Knight
Business
Feb 8, 2024 1:04 PM
AI Is Rewiring Coders’ Brains. Yours May Be Next
The CEO of GitHub says half of all code produced by users of the Copilot programming helper is now AI-generated—but that there’s no sign the technology will replace human coders.
Person speaking in front of a large screen with a blue and white graphic on it
Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Github, speaks at the Digital Life Design (DLD) innovation conference on January 11, 2024 in Bavaria, Munich.Photograph: Matthias Balk/Getty Images
Many people—like, say, journalists—are understandably antsy about what generative artificial intelligence might mean for the future of their profession. It doesn’t help that expert prognostications on the matter offer a confusing cocktail of wide-eyed excitement, trenchant skepticism, and dystopian despair.
Some workers are already living in one potential version of the generative AI future, though: computer programmers.
“Developers have arrived in the age of AI,” says Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub. “The only question is, how fast do you get on board? Or are you going to be stuck in the past, on the wrong side of the ‘productivity polarity’?”
In June 2021, GitHub launched a preview version of a programming aid called Copilot, which uses generative AI to suggest how to complete large chunks of code as soon as a person starts typing. Copilot is now a paid tool and a smash hit. GitHub’s owner, Microsoft, said in its latest quarterly earnings that there are now 1.3 million paid Copilot accounts—a 30 percent increase over the previous quarter—and noted that 50,000 different companies use the software.
Dohmke says the latest usage data from Copilot shows that almost half of all the code produced by users is AI-generated. At the same time, he claims there is little sign that these AI programs can operate without human oversight. “There’s clear consensus from the developer community after using these tools that it needs to be a pair-programmer copilot,” Dohmke says.
Copilot’s power is in how it abstracts away complexity for a programmer trying to work through a problem, Dohmke says. He likens that to the way modern programming languages hide fiddly details that earlier, lower-level languages required coders to wrangle. Dohmke adds that younger programmers are particularly accepting of Copilot, and that it seems especially helpful in solving novice coding problems. (This makes sense if you consider that Copilot learned from reams of code posted online, where solutions to beginner problems outnumber examples of abstruse and rarified coding craft.)
“We’re seeing the evolution of software development,” Dohmke says.
None of that means demand for developers’ labor won’t be altered by AI. GitHub research in collaboration with MIT shows that Copilot allowed coders faced with relatively simple tasks to complete their work, on average, 55 percent more quickly. This increase in productivity suggests that companies could get the same work done with fewer programmers, but companies could use those savings to spend more on labor in other projects.
Even for non-coders, these findings—and the rapid uptake of Copilot—are potentially instructive. Microsoft is developing AI Copilots, as it calls them, designed to help write emails, craft spreadsheets, or analyze documents for its Office software. It even introduced a Copilot key to the latest Windows PCs, its first major keyboard button change in decades. Competitors like Google are building similar tools. GitHub’s success might be helping to drive this push to give everyone an AI workplace assistant.
“There's good empirical evidence and data around the GitHub Copilot and the productivity stats around it,” Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, said on the company’s most recent earnings call. He added that he expects similar gains to be felt among users of Microsoft’s other Copilots. Microsoft has created a site where you can try its Copilot for Windows. I confess it isn’t clear to me how similar the tasks you might want to do on Windows are to the ones you do in GitHub Copilot, where you use code to achieve clear objectives.
There are other potential side effects of tools like GitHub Copilot besides job displacement. For example, increased reliance on automation might lead to more errors creeping into code. One recent study claimed to find evidence of such a trend—although Dohmke says that it reported only a general increase in mistakes since Copilot was introduced, not direct evidence that the AI helper was causing an increase in errors. While this is true, it seems fair to worry that less experienced coders might miss errors when relying on AI help, or that the overall quality of code might decrease thanks to autocomplete.
Given Copilot’s popularity, it won’t be long before we have more data on that question. Those of us who work in other jobs may soon find out whether we’re in for the same productivity gains as coders—and the corporate upheavals that come with them.
Jaina Grey
Will Knight is a senior writer for WIRED, covering artificial intelligence. He writes the Fast Forward newsletter that explores how advances in AI and other emerging technology are set to change our lives—sign up here. He was previously a senior editor at MIT Technology Review, where he wrote about fundamental... Read more
Senior Writer
> You can't explain away AI as a mirage propped up by government spending.
You absolutely can. Like, sure, it can generate crap quickly, but whether that translates into genuine productivity improvements is not really proven yet.
> Many people on this site continue to argue that AI has zero effect on jobs.
My neighbour works for a large law firm that had decided to eliminate a number of junior positions because ChatGPT is significantly cheaper and "good enough" even if it makes numerous factual errors.
> Why must it apply for a job, rather than just DO a job?
Because being able to manage a business relationship is a part of the job. If you could show an AI which got a job, then wrote a simple script that automated the AI's job and then coasted for a year that would be fine, but your links are just humans doing that, I want an AI that can do that to consider it intelligent.
But thanks for demonstrating so clearly how AI proponents are moving goalposts backward to make them easy to meet.
> People are really freaking out about AI aren’t they?
AI touches the domain of software development the most (since we have put a lot of data about it on the Internet). It touches other things too like writing, and design. It doesn't touch things like food delivery, construction, or a farmer.
Currently, they happen to be at the lower tier of society. For some reason. Despite the fact that you can't go two days at a row without food. AI can flip this. There is no need for this army of developers, designers, marketers and bureaucrats. Some people are afraid.
Tl;dr: The people who are freaked out about AI are the people who are bound to lose the most by it.
> AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.
If your boss fires you because your colleague uses AI sooner or better than you, sure, AI didn’t take your job, but what’s the distinction? If you are in a team of 10 translators and 9 get fired overnight, I would say AI took their jobs. Which is happening.
Also, this is probably shortsighted; when going forward, it will be possible for a manager/hr to chuck a resume and typical tasks into an AI and ask it if it can do it or they should hire a human. Now the AI will lie it can do it, but a lot of work goes into making that better and the execution of the provided tasks for the job will show if it’s lying.
> Here I think you are thinking about this wrong. AI is going to be built directly into Excel so I think it will harm a lot of especially entry level type work for analysts.
I think AI will probably eliminate almost all future knowledge worker jobs through simple attrition. In 20 years, perhaps 1 human knowledge worker will be doing the work of 100 (measured by todays productivity) augmented by integrated AI in the tools they use.
I am convinced that short of certain trades, we will watch AI erode everything. Personally, I am on a mission to convince my 2 year old grandson that becoming a plumber is the key to his future wealth.
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