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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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[–] 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".