I feel like this website is a particularly dangerous place to ask that and hope it to be a “mic drop” moment. There are a lot of highly accomplished engineers, scientists, founders CEOs, etc. here that could easily respond to that with any manner of impressive qualifications.
This is a great question that rarely gets answered. It’s partially that a ton of student students went to school for computer science because they saw how much money could be made, another fraction is people that switched into software from related fields, maybe with a boot camp or something.
That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.
I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.
I think it won't be like assembly, because it takes more information vs building blocks that have more dense information in them, kind of like how we use libraries and frameworks
Yeah that's my thing for my hardware projects, I'm not going to reach for an LLM to do it, I want to write the code myself/be present. For something new I would consider using LLM to generate something, like a computer vision implementation or something I don't already know. The end result I would know how it works, just for POC.
It can't. Framework hierarchy is largely based on social structure, rather than pure technical merit. Otherwise React would've been displaced long time ago.
People didn't leap from jQuery to React. It's a lot easier to imagine an AI looking at jQuery and [insert any server side MVC framework] and inventing Backbone.
The history of the last 250 was moving from agriculture to industrial work to service work. Now the last frontier is starting to be overtaken by automation too.
(And in all of those transitions millions where left behind without work or with very worse prospects. The people that took the new jobs were often a different group, not people who knew the old jobs and were already in their 30s and 40s).
And what would be the new professions that uniquely require humans, when even thinking and creative jobs are eaten by AI? Would there be a boom of demand for dancers and chefs, especially as millions lose their service jobs?
> The history of the last 250 years is inventing new professions as old ones are automated away.
Even if this still holds true ("past performance is no guarantee of future results") the part about it that people handwave away without thinking about or addressing is how awful the transitional period can be.
The industrial revolution worked out well for the human labor force in the long term, but there were multiple generations of people who suffered through a horrendous transition (one that was only alleviated by the rise of a strong labor movement that may not be replicable in the age of AI, given how it is likely to shift the leverage of labor vs. capital).
If you want to lean on history as an indication that massive sudden productivity changes will make things better for humanity in the long run, then fine, but then you have to acknowledge that (based on that same history) the transition could still be absolutely chaotic and awful for the lifespan of anyone who is currently alive.
This is the kind of sleep walking that’s about to walk humanity into the next dark ages.
My parents say a lot of stuff like this. They tend to gloss over the untold suffering, great depressions and world wars that took us to get here.
The planets resources were also not in risk of running out. As the world is min maxed by billionaires, it nice the lower classes are drained of all capital, they will soon move to fighting each other for resources. the future is looking pretty grim for even the most optimistic of scenarios
Doordash and similar are experimenting with autonomous/remotely operated vehicles and porn is getting decimated once good enough uncensored video gen ai gets available. That doesn't sound like viable career choices either.
It's happening, but theres no law of the universe that says it has to be 1:1. Why are you so confident in this regard? 250 years is a very small slice of human history and could easily be the outlier.
Plainly, we don’t have to pretend like there could be unforeseen consequences. This is a thing that exists in many jurisdictions and many societies around the world and we can see that many reasonable people become police officers in those societies.
Indeed, pedagogy is important to staving off the end of mathematics.
That sounds dramatic, but it’s really obvious if you think about it. Right now, a person has to study for about 20 years (on average) to make novel contributions in mathematics. They have to learn what’s come before, the techniques, the results, etc. If mathematics continues, eventually it could take 25 years, or 30 years, or even a whole lifetime. At some point, most people will not be able to understand the work that’s been done in any subfield (or the work required to understand a subfield) in a human’s life. I claim this is the logical end of mathematics, at least as a human endeavor.
Now, there will be some results which refine other work and simplify results, but being able to teach a rapidly growing body of literature efficiently will be important to stave off the end of mathematics.
There's a Scott Alexandar story that plays with this exact topic: Ars Longa, Vita Brevis [1]
To your point, I think you're right. I'm not in mathematica, but the value of good pedagogy on shrinking the time it takes to get people to the forefront of any field feels like it's heavily overlooked.
Spending some time in and around applied research labs and seeing how poorly the sausage looks before it gets made into a paper is quite distressing.
I’m sure there are labs out there doing excellent work (especially those focused on theory), but most of the applied research I’ve seen up close and personal is very poor indeed.
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