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Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by fievel@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Ok let's give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I'm a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write "good" code, readable and so.

However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don't sleep at night because of this.

I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.

For now, I'm not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I'm sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive...

Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.

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[–] eugenia@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I disagree with the other posts here that you're overreacting. I think that AI will replace most jobs (maybe as high as 85% at some point). Consider becoming a plumber or an electrician. Until the robots will become commonplace in 20 years from now, you will have a job that AI won't be able to touch much. And people won't run out of asses or gaming. So they'll be stable professions for quite a while. You can still code in your free time, as a hobby. And don't cry for the lost revenue of being a programmer, because that will happen to everyone who will be affected by AI. You'll just have another job while the others won't. That's the upside.

I understand that this comment is not what people want to hear with their wishful thinking, so they'll downvote it. But I gotta say it how I see it. AI is the biggest revolution since the industrial revolution.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 3 points 9 months ago

"AI" is a bubble. A lot of these concerns will go away this year once the bean-counters do the math and realize that the benefits of running generative neural networks aren't worth the costs.

A single chatGPT query costs about 50-500 times as much energy as a pre-Bard Google search, to say nothing of the engineering time needed to build the models. And, since LLM outputs can't be trusted, the end users will still need writers and developers to go over everything and check for hallucinations.

The trajectory here closely mimics "Web3", when people thought that massively redundant distributed ledgers were going to be the next big thing, despite the fact that traditional electronic ledgers beat the blockchain in literally every aspect of performance, efficiency, and security.

Soon, "AI" will be just as synonymous with "plagirism" as "cryptocurrency" is with "scam".

[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 2 points 9 months ago

With the difference that the industrial revolution created a lot of new jobs with better pay. While AI doesn't. I see people suggesting that this has happened before and soon it will turn the economic situation into something much better. But I don't see that at all. Just because it's also a huge revolution, doesn't mean it will have the same effects.

As you have written, people will have to switch into manual jobs like layering bricks and wiping butts. The pay in these jobs won't increase just because more people have to work them.