Comment by risyachka 4 days ago
>> AI will eat the "software professionals"
you mean AI will eat everyone, because if software professionals will be automated - all other white collar jobs will be too via software.
And then all resources will be poured in hardware and blue collar jobs will be automated too, at least those that have more value.
Only if by "solving it", you mean being able to write any program to do anything.
Software engineering is a hubris-complete problem. Somehow, being able to do so much seems to make us all assume that everyone else is capable of so little. But just because we can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, and because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things. That would be like assuming that because someone is a writer and has written 1 book, that they are fully capable of writing both War & Peace and an exhaustive manual on tractor repair.
Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers. Some people do only that, and yeah, AI can probably replace them.
"Computing" as a field only made sense when computers were new. We're going to have to go back to actually accomplishing things, not depending on the fact that computers are involved and making them do anything is hard so anyone who can make them do things is automatically valuable. (Which sucks for me, because I'm pretty good at making computers do things but not so good at much of anything else with economic value.) "What do you do?" "I use computers to do X." "Why didn't you just say you do X, then?" is already kind of a thing; now it's going to move on to "I use AI to do X."
Then again: the AI-dependent generation is losing the ability to think, as a result of leaning on AI to do it for them. So while my generation stuck the previous generation with maintaining COBOL programs, the next generation will stick mine with thinking. I can deal with that. I like thinking.
</end-of-weird-rant>
> Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers
It’s not, but if software engineering is solved then of course so is financial analysis, because a program could be written to do it. If the program is not good enough, then software engineering is not solved.
I think this what you were getting at with this part, but it’s not clear to me, because it seems like you were disagreeing with my thesis: “ because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things”
I’m not sure if you’re saying that people weren’t using computers to solve problems before, but that’s pretty much everything they do. Some people were specifically trained to make computers solve problems, but if computers can solve X problem without a programmer, then both the computer programmer and the X problem solver are replaced.
I don't think software engineering is ever going to be solved, but financial analysis will definitely never be solved. It's impossible, the nature of it dictates that, whatever changes happen will further change the results. Financial analysis requires novel thinking, and even if you have AGI that can engage in novel thought they will just be another input into the system.
Just like AI, the winners will (continue to) be the ones with the most access to data and the technical and financial capital to make use of it.
This is the crux of it. The digital world doesn't produce value except when it eases the production of real goods. Software Development as a field is strange: it can only produce value when it is used to make production of real goods more efficient. We can use AI to cut out bureaucratic work, which then means that all that is left is real work: craftsmanship, relationship building, design, leadership.
There are plenty of "human in the loop" jobs still left. I certainly don't want furniture designed by AI, because there is no possible way for an AI to understand my particular fleshly requirements (AI simply doesn't have the wetware required to understand human tactile needs). But the bureaucratic jobs will mostly be automated away, and good riddance. They were killing the human spirit.
> Software Development as a field is strange: it can only produce value when it is used to make production of real goods more efficient. We can use AI to cut out bureaucratic work, which then means that all that is left is real work: craftsmanship, relationship building, design, leadership.
Thats a really odd take. Software is merely a way of ingesting data and producing information. And information often has intrinsic value. This can scale from simple things like minor annoyances of forgetting your umbrella, to avoiding deaths/millions of dollars in losses due to ships sinking in storms.
Now the long term value of software does approach zero, because it can usually be duplicated quite easily.
I value your weird rant. Yes it did go on as a thought stream, but there's sense in there.
I've been thinking a lot around a kind of smart-people paradox: very intellectual arguments all basically plotting a line toward some inevitable conclusion like super intelligence or consciousness. Everything is a raw compute problem.
While at the same time all scientific progress gives us more and more evidence that reality is non-computable, non linear.
> While at the same time all scientific progress gives us more and more evidence that reality is non-computable, non linear.
What scientific problems are non-computable?
ANNs are designed to handle non-linearities BTW, thats the entire point of activation functions and multi layer networks
You are right, but I think at the moment, a lot of people are confusing "software engineering" with "set up my react boilerplate with tailwind and unit tests", and AI just is way better for that sort of rote thing.
I've never felt comfortable with the devs who just want some Jira ticket with exactly what to do. That's basically what AI/LLMs can do pretty well.
You're right. I think the current AI direction is a dead end for real artificial intelligence, so it is not the thing that will replace all jobs, but the day a machine with the real cognitive capacity of a 5 year old exists is the day almost all of humanity becomes useless.
And before that the current direction is still enough to massively hurt the world because there will be less and less places for us humans.
Another point I noticed that nobody is talking around us is the technology adoption rates. When the car industry started, decades happened between the early users and cars being ubiquitous in the population (especially taking into account the world and not the richest countries). So a sizeable part of the transportation industry that was ultimately replaced by cars had the time to adapt, move to other jobs or arrive at the end of their work life.
But now the technology goes from its few first users to being used by everyone and their cats in years if not months. There is absolutely no time to adapt, love over or endure things until you don't work anymore.
Software was already at its limits on automation, the last thing automated will be writing code that does the required thing but automating other stuff that wasn’t already automated by software will take some time because will require AI advances in those particular domains.
Once an AI runs a single company well, all publicly traded companies will have a legal obligation to at least consider replacing the C-suite with AI. In theory. I'll believe it when I see it.
That’s the thing here. Software engineering is an intelligence-complete problem. If AI can solve it, then it can solve any sort of knowledge work like accounting, financial analysis, etc