I tend to agree with OP. In my opinion conscious machines are not something that we should allow to exist. If they do, they are not human and must never be treated as such.
I am not even slightly religious, but they would be abomination.
In this case you could even replace "LLM" with "C compiler" and it would change nothing.
Look, I still got my physical copy of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book with its genius content about hand-optimizing cycle count on 486 and Pentium processors, beating compilers at that time.
It was an absolute artform, but completely obsolete by today.
Almost a decade ago, I moved my career into the management track. I am a director by now and have two more management levels between myself and individual contributors.
I can strongly relate to what you‘re writing, because I share that same sentiment often in my daily (non-AI) work. In fact, coming from that background, the switch from coding to working with agents feels eerily similar to moving into management. You encounter the same challenges minus the „human people and emotions“ part: having to explain properly, the agents doing something different than what you intended, feeling detached from the actual work, only focusing on the bigger picture and so on
To me it feels very natural, it is what I do every day. But then again, I made that choice and it wasn‘t forced on me. So I understand frustration.
I feel lucky to have been promoted to a management position recently, just as I was starting to feel less excited about dev work because of AI. I still enjoy building systems, but I have to admit that the loss of challenge made the work much less enjoyable for me.
Now I have a team of interns to mentor. They're sharp and use AI constantly, so my guidance is less about code and more about UI/UX, understanding what the client actually wants, good work practices, well-documented tickets, thorough reviews, and so on. Thankfully, I like this work, it has been very rewarding.
So should the original authors, no? That is, getting a share of that payment.
Something akin to the German GEMA could work, an entity that levies a usage fee on behalf of all copyright holders and re-distributes to its members, but on a global scale.
Well, not yet. It's a matter of organization, regulation and litigation.
I was thinking along the lines of concepts that already exist, such as the private copying levy [0]. It basically forces a blanket tax on a certain class of products, which then gets redistributed to members of a collecting society such as GEMA [1].
This way, you would force LLM model builders to effectively pay a tax by law. Since these models do not work at all without underlying content, make it proportionate. Let's say 50-70% to make it fair.
Does it have to be? The etymology of the word „abstraction“ is „to draw away“. I think it‘s relevant to consider just how far away you want to go.
If I‘m purely focused on the general outcome as written in a requirement or specification document, I‘d consider everything below that as „abstracted away“.
For example, this weekend I built my own MCP server for some services I‘m hosting on my personal server (*arr, Jellyfin, …) to be integrated with claude.ai. I‘ve written down all the things I want it to do, the environment it has to work in and let Claude go.
Not once have I looked at the code. And quite frankly, I don‘t care. As long as it fulfills my general requirements, it can write Python one time and TypeScript the other time should I choose to regenerate from that document. It might behave slightly differently but that is ok to a degree.
From my perspective, that is an abstraction. Deterministic? No, but it also doesn‘t have to be.
It is quite frankly ridiculous that you need to be in the "in-group" to get things like this resolved and it is not the first time this has been reported, be it Google or Meta or any other big tech corpo.
These players MUST be regulated or treated like utilities; hoping the EU will ratchet up the pressure even more.
It used to be that you had to have a strong understanding of the underlying machine in order to create software that actually worked.
Things like cycle times of instructions, pipeline behavior, registers and so on. You had to, because compilers weren‘t good enough. Then they caught up.
You used to manage every byte of memory, utilized every piece of underlying machinery like the different chips, DMA transfers and so on, because that‘s what you had to do. Now it‘s all abstracted away.
These fundamentals are still there, but 99,9% of developers neither care nor bother with them. They don’t have to, unless they are writing a compiler or kernel, or just because it‘s fun.
I think what you‘re describing is also going to go away in the future. Still there, but most developers are going to move up one level of abstraction.
Having worked in a very large company for the past two decades now, one of the best career advices I ever got is about how you measure if you are a „good employee“.
It is very simple: you are a good employee if your boss(es) think you are.
That’s it. Nothing else matters in terms of career advancement or retainment.
I am not even slightly religious, but they would be abomination.
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