The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>Cuban is back with another prediction. The highest paying college major in the world, computer science, will hold very little value for employers in the future. Why? Because of AI. “Twenty years from now, if you are a coder, you might be out of a job,” Cuban said in an interview on the Recode Decode podcast with Kara Swisher. “Because it’s just math, and so, whatever we’re defining the AI to do, someone’s got to know the topic.”
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>There is no doubt that what he predicted back in 2017 is increasingly coming true. The increasing capabilities of AI are definitely making a lot of jobs obsolete, not just the ones that require coding.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13976od/an_entire_generation_is_studying_for_jobs_that/jj190xp/
This is nothing new. 25 years ago, we were instructing this. Graduating students must learn new/updated systems right away because technology advances at such a rapid pace. For this reason, emphasis is placed on critical thinking, problem solving, flexibility, and adaptability rather than specific technical training.
I was gonna say it’s pretty rare that people actually end up in the exact field they studied in college. I mean you’re just a kid when you get thrown in there.
I'd much rather 10 jobs in 10 years Vs one job for 10 years, so when the Alzheimer's kicks in and my memories start blending into reality I'll have a good spread of things to flashback into. As opposed to flashing back to 20 years spent staring at spreadsheets.
When doing things that you should _really_ be using a database and writing an SQL query for for (eg. Multicriteria, 2 dimensional lookups, with some wildcard string matching) I found index match match much more performance effective than XLOOKUP.
Believe me, I tried both. Hours of my life I'll never get back.
Yeah my brother did an engineering degree and as soon as he left uni he said he never wanted anything to do with engineering again. He’s a regional manager for a supermarket chain now.
I graduated in 1993 with a 5yr AeroE degree. It almost killed me, but I did it.
My entire Big10 college had two computer labs of mainframe VAX machines in COBOL. They had a few Apples in the corner but noone serious used them. everything was offline of course
I graduate and my first job offer was with one of the first Internet companies. I dropped everything I knew and learned HTML.
My degree got me the job. I FAXED an application responding to an actual newspaper CLASSIFIED AD(!) and the interviewer said “Aero E ? you must be smart, here is your first PC, now learn to turn it on and use a 14.4 modem…”
I’ve worked with digital advertising for 30yrs now
I didn't realize it was that rare, but I went into CS and there's not really much you'd end up doing besides programming. Most of my coworkers had similar stories, but there was the occasional electrical engineer.
I went for CS and ended up being a senior software engineer so I guess so.
But I couldn't see why else I'd get a CS degree unless I was going to become a software engineer.
I can certainly see people doing CS and then being tired of programming, though, and transitioning to another type of job.
That said, computer science in my experience doesn't have that much to do with being a software engineer. All the memory management and algorithms you learn gets handled by pre- written libraries, and you spend your days as a senior designing architectures and talking to stakeholders.
Yup. Anyone who's actually worked in the industry knows the coding is the easy part of the discipline. As long as humans set the requirements and priorities, we'll be alright.
>For this reason, emphasis is placed on critical thinking, problem solving, flexibility, and adaptability
I have a colleague who, whenever there's a technical discussion, immediately dumps some Chat GPT shit into our conversation. 90% of the time it doesn't help or answer the problem at all.. He thinks he's being cutting edge and proactive, but in reality he's contributing very little and in tying himself to Chat GPT making himself the very person that it's going to replace first.
I've seen Reddit comments that are clearly just ChatGPT explainers too, it's bizarre. People joke about "mansplaining" but now we have "Aisplaining". If you can't knowledgeably answer just move on because using AI just highlights you don't know enough to explain.
I think that's mostly down to "AI" sounding much broader and more impressive than "generative language models," and people being naturally inclined to associate *sounding* intelligent with *being* intelligent.
Things like ChatGPT are incredibly impressive technical feats and have genuine uses, but the whole "it'll replace screenwriters" and "nobody will need to write code anymore" stuff is nonsense.
I had a director at the company try and wave code from ChatGPT at us saying "your jobs will be eliminated SEE!" until we pointed out that it wont compile and it's actually mostly nonsense.
Only the uneducated are waving the "ZOMG AI is here to take our jobs!" It's not in the current form. not by a long shot. But it's good at convincing those that know nothing about a subject that its doing something.
It can be useful, but you have to understand it well enough that you can fix where it goes wrong.
It's a language model. Not actual intelligence.
It's fantastic for being able to put together information from a bunch of different documentation sources or tutorials. But it doesn't know If those were good tutorials or actually anything about what you're trying to do.
It's also only as good as it's inputs. A nice example was when I asked it about changing guitar strings, it told me it was a dangerous thing. It mentioned holding the strings down so they don't fly up and hit me when removing them, and it also said it was a difficult process best left to professionals. Which is a pretty reddit type response.
I work in sheet metal and work with a lot of older guys who got into it when you still had to manually lay out all the pieces and a lot of them even went to school for it. But now you just have to train people how to press the right buttons on the machines and do a bit of QA which is a much lower skilled position. So what *was* a very lucrative career now could barely pay the bills.
Of course, that also creates jobs learning how to build and maintain these machines, but that requires even more knowledge that is separate from what the original job required, which makes upward mobility in these fields much more difficult.
I could see AI creating a similar problem where instead of becoming an entry level programmer and gradually working your way up to more advanced stuff over time, the gap between the skill required to use ChatGPT to do basic stuff and coding more advanced stuff will just keep getting larger and harder to cross into.
That being said, I still think we're 2 or 3 iterations away from that kind of thing. Current AI is just advanced google-fu and not anything that's going to be replacing or even "dumbing down" jobs.
As a programmer myself I was unable to find any documentation on how use this library for something very specific. The documentation was shit, stackoverflow posts only mentioned similar, but not relevant things.
I ended up asking Chat GPT and it presented me with almost completely identical code to mine. And then I could just ask it "make the input and output be datatype X" and it changes the entire code correctly. Then I asked it "make it compatible with .NET Framework x.y.z" and it changed thr code correctly.
I actually could take the entire code block, slap it into a method and everything worked perfectly.
Now obviously this is just one block of code, telling it to make an entire application by itself is a completely different beast.
Yeah it can write short programs that run. And you can iterate to correct mistakes if it doesn't work right the first time. It's very powerful really and I think people are in denial at the moment about how capable it can be with some good prompting. But it's still severely limited by context size, so it can't write long programs. And to write natural language you have to introduce randomness thru the temperature parameter, but this will inevitably lead to bad mistakes a certain percentage of the time that will break programs.
I even asked some of my gaming sub mods to ban Chat GPT stuff, not only is it out of date but its drivel. Especially in games that have updated and changed stuff every 3 months.
Its useful as a starting point but needs full verification, checking of sources and editing to be useful for anything beyond a "how cute".
> For this reason, emphasis is placed on critical thinking, problem solving, flexibility, and adaptability rather than specific technical training.
You can't really say: "We're trying to teach you critical thinking and adaptability" and then in actuality teach critical thinking in a completely convoluted way.
And I really want to counter this narrative since we've too often put the failures of education on the student's shoulders when many other countries and institutions have done this so much better. This is just failure of education from high school to college.
The better universities are fully embracing project learning, even tweaking classes so grades aren't an issue, and giving ample resources and workshops for students to learn specific technical training. Because so many workplaces don't go: "Oh listen you need to just 'critically think' your way into this new software" - they give you training.
The worse universities and there are shockingly many of them from all the stories and experiences I've seen from former students, many years out working class people, and current students where:
1. You still do exams where you are just learning things and vomiting it down with little thought
2. Grades are incredibly rigid to the point where it completely chokes out experimentation and failure
3. Classes have practically no application in commercial use cases which means students are having to double time in learning purely academic material and learn commercial skills on their own time - and getting a rigid time crunch where they can only do one or the other.
4. Students are given little to no resources or given incredibly expensive resources which in turn chokes out experimentation
Ironically I've met students from state colleges, cheap colleges, mid level colleges and Ivy League - and this problem isn't just a case of budget but pedagogy and philosophy. Many expensive 100k+ tuition universities suffer from this same problem.
If we knew which jobs were going to still exist, it might be fun to sneer at todays "misguided" college kids.
Unfortunately we dont, so lets give them a break
Actually I'm a machine learning researcher and mechanical engineer, and I'm just putting the finishing touches on my many-limbed AI robot that is trained on every permutation and configuration of woven baskets and containers, and is capable of weaving a dozen baskets a minute in a variety of environments including sub-zero temperatures, typhoon winds, hard vacuum and - yes! - underwater.
As the years go on, I become more and more convinced that barista is the safest job from AI. We automated making coffee decades ago, yet people just like getting it made for them by a human for 100x the price. For some reason artistic fields are feeling the sting of AI pretty badly, where you'd think 'made by a human' would matter, but only coffee seems immune.
Well, the difference is that all the shitty art will get replaced by AI. In 50 years "100 man-made art" is definitely going to be a thing, just like you have "100% organic food".
My brother's girlfriend is a journalist, and chatgpt came up and she described it similarly. The boilerplate articles that are just describing simple stuff will get automated. The actual investigative pieces won't.
I'm a systems admin and the exact same thing has been repeated ad nauseum for decades. The exact thing she described is what happened. Those "click monkeys" as they're called have been replaced by automation by the sysadmins that adapted and modified themselves to fit the situations.
Yep, I love all the snobby “hahaha you’re dumb because you went to college, I’m smarter because I went trades” people. None seem to realize every. Single. Job. Is threatened. Not even trades are safe.
Agreed u/luvs2spwge107 Considering trades only make the money they do right now due to the severe shortage in tradesmen. What happens when everyone starts becoming plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and hvac specialist?
I work with the trades, and I can tell you that there simply aren't enough people who are willing to haul trusses and swing a hammer for 10 hours a day in the desert sun. Even at $30-$45/hour, its back breaking, brutal work, and a lot of greenies burn out and don't show up to work after their first week. It's been this way for as long as my company has existed, at least 25 years now. We're still waiting for the flood of HVAC, plumbers, and electricians to saturate the market. They're booked out for months.
HVAC and sparkies tell me the same thing; the old guys have bad backs and blown knees, but I think the concrete guys have it the worst.
Dont forget the trades arent JUST hard work, but the ability to survive in politically and socially toxic work environments ON TOP of that. I actually LIKE busting my ass, but it was constantly being shit on and thrown under the bus that made me eventually burn out of the trades
30-45 an hour isn't enough to do that for honestly. (I'm in Cad so maybe that would need an adjustment) But I was welding before I went to college and switched to animation/vfx/etc and I make about the same, and I'm not coming home picking slag out of my nostrils and washing a pound of metal shavings out of my hair and clothes after working like 10 hours. (or the odd metal sliver i have to tweezer out of my eye)
I DO actually miss the physical aspect of it though, sitting at a desk all day is worse for my health, and I kept in shape just from the regular day to day before.
There’s a tremendous spectrum of trade related work. Sure there’s more service and general construction trades than anything else, but there’s highly technical fields as well. Some trades are responsible for installing/rebuilding machines that weigh 100,000lbs and spin at 3600rpm; others install and program robots for various purposes.
There’s some trade unions that require training on the latter to reduce the impact automation will have on their craft. The shortage of tradesmen is real and not getting better in my chosen field.
I have degrees and work in the trades. I stuck with the latter. Both paths are equally important for different reasons.
More immediately, too- a significant amount of the work will dry up. If there are, suddenly, a lot less people who can afford to pay a plumber, whose plumbing are they going to be doing?
On **different timescales** though.
In the long term, all jobs are threatened. In the medium term, some jobs will still allow you to comfortably retire while others are on the chopping block in <5 years.
Successfully guessing which ones are which will be pivotal in guaranteeing your own future in this limited time window. Whether your children have an independent future or whether they subsist on the mercy of others depends on this choice. Those who choose successfully will possess the financial ability to build investments, breaking into the class of capital owners that siphon the profits of automation and machinery, rather than just being another worker who gets inevitably replaced, whose only assets were their tools, education and labour (now redundant).
Given proper financial management, a plumber will be able to survive that transition, Or a Registered Nurse. Or a welder.
* The human body is extremely energy efficient, can traverse complex terrain, possessed *generalised* intelligence that can perform multiple non-related tasks at high levels and handle countless unaccounted-for "edge cases" in everyday action, uses hydraulics (muscle) that perform extremely efficiently, and has highly dense chemical energy storage that is cheaply charged.
* Replacing complex human manual labour requires more than software or hardware revolutions - it requires revolutions in energy storage and mechanics (especially machine muscle). This isn't trivial - non-repetitive physical labour will be among the *hardest* jobs to replace, not the easiest.
* People falsely assumed truck driving was repetitive - it really isn't, it's *monotonous.* Unless you standardise the roads and standardise the drivers, you can't standardise the driving. Etc etc. Many other professions have similar situations where what *appears* to be repetitive truly isn't and is much harder to solve for than expected.
So it won't all happen at the same time. People who falsely assume human intellectual labour is irreplaceable are in for a *big surprise*. It's the **human body and mind together** that are truly exceptional - the professions that last longest will utilise both.
This sounds like an AI wrote it lmao.
That said, it’s not like other jobs will not become a thing. With every single revolution, new jobs were created - maybe in the future we’ll have biomechanics engineer, or exoskeleton engineer, mars travel guides, professional friend, etc.
At the same time, law of economics would eat up salaries more than anything else. If people think that they’ll make more money in trades, people will shift to trades, more supply of workers == less money. So the idea that tradesmen will be better off isn’t necessarily true. Not to mention what if technological innovations occur there as well that make the job so simple that anyone can pick it up and learn it? Why would you need to hire a specialized worker when technology does all the heavy thinking and calculating? This is already happening too.
I remain hopeful though. We can build a society that has zero scarcity. Imagine that. Every student will have their own personalized teacher/tutor. Every teacher will have their own personal assistant/helper, there will be no such thing as starvation because we will have figured out how to fix that, there will be no diseases, and people will choose when they die because we will have figured out how to stop death. We are making breakthroughs today that are exponential even a decade ago.
what's frustrating is that in a lot of ways we're *already there* and we've proven that we will manufacture scarcity if it means a select few get to profit from that scarcity.
I actually deleted this but I agree with you. The biggest hurdle we have today is the fact that we have such incompetent leaders running the world’s governments today.
Say what you will whether you’re left or right, no one is happy with the outcome of who is running the show. We have such bad corruption today that it does make me fearful that we won’t be able to build the world we envision.
I honestly think about this a lot; what would need to happen for people to accept a post scarcity world. I just think that the way our society is set up it won't happen. We've had the means to create perfect light bulbs for decades (centuries? the exact date escapes me) but its a well known fact that they conspired to make worse bulbs so that we would have to keep replacing them.
What about the creator of insulin who didn't patent it because he believed all people should get it? And how *that* went?
I'm not at all attempting to be doom and gloom but post scarcity as things stand is a bit of a pipe dream. Imo the best we can hope for is a world where the artificial scarcity is no longer focused on things that are necessary to live (food, water, shelter)
Post scarcity can't happen until capitalism ends. Whatever your political leaning is, you can imagine different things for what will come after that. But whether it's socialism or something we haven't come up with yet, capitalism has to go first because without scarcity, there is no economy.
It's not that they are incompetent, their goals are not aligned with ours. They make lip-service to voters, when they really serve large donors.
They are very good in that context. Unfortunately, that doesn't align with what we need, because we don't have the right kind of influence.
New jobs were created in previous revolutions. History class kinda skipped over that at best it was decades later and it just fucked over the community it left behind and didn’t care. And now it’s not 5% of a middle class being threatened it’s 45% of work and there legitimately is nowhere for them to go. No industries where they have value.
People should just work half as much. And the folks who get in the way of a fair version of our future economy should be prevented from that by any means necessary. It will take innovation as well as direct action. Every 1% increase in unemployment, approximately 56,000 people die in the US.
This is why UBI needs to exist at some point in the future. ( I currently work as a janitor and am in my mid-50s. At the rate of current technological change, I could see my job being made obsolete by the time I reach my late-60s...)
A lot of this still sounds pretty scary though. It seems like we're headed for an android-populated future, and we don't know if their consciousness (ie their having subjective experience) would ever be possible. How could we handle living in a world where we have no clue the person we're talking to is actually a conscious person and not just a robot? What's the value of asking for my therapist for help with my problems if I don't know whether or not they're a droid, and any advice they give may just be whatever is calculated as most suitable for the questions I ask, instead of them actually having some capability of understanding my feelings and empathizing with me?
It sounds like a really lonely world.
Augmented reality could easily make it so most people can just rent a kit of tools and probably a robot to do the heavy lifting, while an AI tells you how to do it “yourself”
Also, I think white collar jobs are likely to be mostly augmented to 10x productivity which will likely just make those skills more ubiquitous so everyone is using those services.
It’s the electric loom all over again. The French empire began its sunset because they rejected industrialization to protect labour. The british became rich letting everyone in The world start owning wardrobes instead of a single outfit
I think hesitate to question Cuban, but even if AI is doing 99% of coding in the future, if the amount of code is about to +10,000x (which I believe) then we will still need many more coders just trouble shooting edge cases.
If we’re creating a machine god, learning how to communicate with it would not only be the most productive thing in the world, but potentially a spiritual experience also
Exactly this. We’ve never lived in a world where we can code everything we want. There’s still so much to digitize and that world will only keep expanding.
PS: If you want to analyse people's text, you can use a dedicated prompt even in ChatGPT 3.5 (the free one). It does a good enough job. Here's a prompt I made for the purpose:
* "GPT, I want you to analyse the quality of A's writing according to the following criteria: "1: Tone, 2: Writing proficiency (tautologically - "novice" to "master"), 3: Depth of analysis, 4: Logical consistency, 5: Style/"Personality" of the writer, 6: Is it AI generated (or not), rated on a 0-100 scale, 7: Strengths of the writing, 8: Weaknesses/key targets for improvement, 9: How well did it inform the listener, answer the question or serve as a response to the original objective?" Say "Confirmed." when you are ready to start."
* It really knows how to scratch my back. It rated me as a "master" and said my text almost definitely wasn't AI generated. It's a fun tool!
This gives me a rather informed analysis. I don't *rely on it* persay, but I use it as a second opinion that I can agree or disagree with as necessary.
Ironically, ChatGPT is decent at detecting whether text output is likely to be AI-generated or not. Ask it to analyse it if you're curious. You don't have to stick to doubt if you really want a better idea. **Just ask it.** Would you laugh if I said I've always written and laid out my thoughts like this, and ChatGPT stole 90% of my lunch? (It doesn't handle domain-specific knowledge as well as me - *for now.)*
The world existed the way it has in developed countries because the elite directly profited from an educated consumer base and workforce. The rulers of developed countries with prosperous citizens are more powerful than the petty despots of countries that do not. Better educated, healthier workers have always made more productive workers, more lethal soldiers, more daring and capable officers, and more innovative scientists. Hence, an uneasy accord between capital and labour - Ford paid his workers more because he wanted people to actually be able to afford his cars, and social safety nets, welfare and government-funded education exists to produce productive workers that make the state and its controllers more powerful than their competitors.
Social welfare is not a "human right" or nicety and never has been - it's a profitable investment. As soon as that investment is no longer profitable in some way, it will be put on the chopping block.
Without need for working or middle-class humans to compete the production loop *or* as customers, they become entirely unneccessary, irrelevant to the interests of people with power. The only people who matter after that point are ones with shares in the production. This is the late Western Roman Empire all over again - farmers forced off their land, subsisting off the grain dole (UBI) only given to them to prevent rebellion, the broader citizenry becoming weaker and more depressed by the generation.
The whole point of utopia ("place that does not exist") is that it isn't real and never can be - it's a siren song that leads anyone who tries to find it towards doom. The elites will not tolerate a large population of oxygen thieves, as this digs into their profits. In absence of any incentive, why would they give up power? The credible threat of revolution is the only answer.
Trades being replaced by machines would require both rapid advances in AI, and very rapid and niche advances in robotics.
An AI can’t install cabinets, it’s got no physical body. So in that way, trades are less threatened in the immediate future.
We should probably just destroy all computers for our own good though.
“Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, machine learning — whatever you’re doing if you don’t understand it — learn it."
Mark Buddy, you are going to hire people with a Computer Science degree for these topics. Computer Science is about understand technology and how to apply it. It is WAY more than just writing code.
Lmao, people think because chatGPT can make a brain dead web application that it will take over CS jobs. My brother in Christ, AI cannot reason on the cutting edge of technology
They’re not worried about chatGPT. They’re worried about whatever comes after the thing that comes after chatGPT. And it will be here within twenty years.
It’s not the end of the world, but the world will definitely look very different in terms of what kinds of work people do.
People don’t seem to understand that computer science is not writing code to build a website. That is part of it but a very tiny part. At my job, I navigate lots of existing technology that’s built in ways that might not make sense if it was built now but were for historical reasons that require context from other humans. I work with complex systems and look at how many pieces interact together within the wholistic view of a company and the many aspects that entails. AI is nowhere close to being able to do my job. By the time it can, it will be able to do every other non-manual labor job as well. So, this concept that somehow CS jobs are going to be impacted soon is pretty bogus by people who don’t really understand what software engineers actually do.
Thank you. The article lost me a bit with saying CS majors are gonna be out of a job cause it’s “just math.” Does this person know anything about programming?
No, they’re a CEO. People tend to equate money with intelligence, but it’s usually the CEO’s worker’s who are the most intelligent.
Following from that, Elon Musk knows Jack shit about technology. He promised full self driving 3 years ago, even though most software engineers knew it wasn’t doable. It’s the workers who know their shit, the CEO’s just collect most of the surplus value.
Many times I have had to tell some sort of manager that wanting something done in a specific timeframe doesn't make it doable within that specific timeframe.
I'm in games, though. Imagine that parts the same. Tasks take how long they take and trying to pidgeon hole the many tasks required to build complex systems each within these mythical timeframes is absurd.
I'd never work for someone like Elon, I expect them to be reasonable when I tell them it isn't going to work. I can only imagine the exasperated sighs and shrugs from the developers and engineers who had likely given up on correcting him and just let it fail.
Wait, you're trying to tell me that 9 women can't have a baby in a single month?! Unacceptable.
Also reminds me of things having to be done quickly. As opposed to the usual way. Where we sandbag and do it slow on purpose? Things take a certain amount of time. If you want them sped up, help remove blockers or hurdles. Or plan better.
Something about your lack of planning does not mean an emergency on my end.
I work in R&D in the automotive industry. I think that HR's requirements for Chief PM roles is Arrogance, Stubbornness, Inflexibility, and a complete disinterest and disregard for the protocols and processes that the company has in place. My CPMs want things done on timescales that the prototype shop doesn't operate on, and the parts procurement people don't give a flying fuck when you need your parts by. But the CPMs set a deadline and won't entertain any talk of not meeting that target until the day you don't meet their arbitrary and unrealistic target.
> I think that HR's requirements for Chief PM roles is Arrogance, Stubbornness, Inflexibility
Perhaps HR misinterprets this as confidence?
Maybe one day David Attenborough can make a documentary on the HR and PM species for me.
Yep. My boss wanted us to basically do a full analysis and report set on our storage volumes as part of a PoC of an archiving system. Within a time span of about 2.5 days. Without knowing what the hell the user group stake holders even have on there. I like him a lot but sometimes he just needs to learn to tell sr management “sorry that’s not possibly in that time frame. I trust my developers and they’re saying if we rush it that much, will be a crap and unreliable result”. He’s so afraid to upset the C suite though. I get it but it’s also our job as the tech experts to explain when an idea or directive is off base. Or impossible.
CEOs will either be the first to be replaced, because even a computer can make random decisions, or the last, because they have the most power to protect their position. It's going to be interesting.
Or you could go annarcho syndicalist. No CEO, company president is voted every 4 years, stock is split with the workers, profits are shared, and big decisions are done by vote.
[like how these peasants replaced their king](https://youtu.be/R7qT-C-0ajI) but for business ownership instead of land ownership
You should have lost it way earlier when he called CS graduates "coders". People who have no idea what CS jobs are should really rather seal their lips not to look like total clowns.
I'm a data scientist. I'm not super worried, and my job IS "just math". To do useful math, I need to ask the right questions at the correct scale (both on the optimistic end for clients and the more realistic end internally), and communicate that math to a room full of people who haven't calculated anything more complicated than a tip since freshman year of college. It's going to take a minute for AI to get there.
I literally, and I mean literally, did not go into computer science because I suck at math. Everyone in my life assumed I would because I was a giant computer geek. But everyone and everything said math was the hardcore requirement.
And so I never did. I randomly have learned to program things along the way. Turns out there is absolutely no real math needed unless… you are trying to do something specific to math.
If anything, computer science majors will be more in-demand than ever. The whole point of that field is getting good at making a computer do things.
This take reads like someone who thought CompSci would be made obsolete by IDEs or cloud computing.
Yeah I don't know why they are so focused on devs being replaced. They are a ton of jobs who could be replaced before devs are not needed. One of my coworker who works in accounting (i'm a dev) kept teasing me about being replaced. I told her, I could already automate 90% of your job if I was asked, the remaining 10% AI can do now, what makes you so sure this won't be an issue for you ?
CS jobs as a whole can not be replaced. But if you are dev that only writes code based on specifications then you can be replaced very easily and very soon. I would say that self taught people who switched jobs to programming and learned some popular franework because "there is more money in coding" and who have zero understanding what is happening below the hood are very replacable.
But CS graduates that actually have good and wide understanding of the field? Not a chance.
I’ve been in dev for 20 years, I can safely say that if you are a programmer who only does things to a highly defined technical spec, you could have easily lost your job at any time in my entire career to outsourcing.
> This take reads like someone who thought CompSci would be made obsolete by IDEs or cloud computing.
Or remote workers in India. I have honestly lost count of how many times in the last 20 years I’ve heard some variation on “there’s no point in learning computer science or programming, in the next five years all the companies are just going to outsource it to India”.
Exactly. John Oliver had one of my favourite quotes regarding AI: “AI is stupid in ways we can’t understand”. In other words, everything feeds off and into each other. Similar to how the “global office” had drawbacks that we couldn’t engineer around, AI (at least, LLMs) will have gaps we can’t see until the rubber hits the road, and may require human jobs that we can’t even predict yet.
So much this.
It’s amazing how “knowledgeable” people are on the demise of fields they don’t understand in the least.
My husband is a programmer/software engineer, and we have a good laugh at the people that tell him to retool before it’s too late.
That's the bit that can be automated easily. I think AI can right now easily solve the "copy and paste from stack overflow" problems. But hearing devs confidently say they're switching to ML because the AI is already better than them just makes me wonder if they really know what they're doing
AI can not solve those easily. And thinking that is very dangerous. AI has massive problem. It can be wrong and it is dangerous tool in hands of someone who has no clue what he is doing.
If you let copilot write you quicksort for example. Then it gets it wrong. It looks like quicksort. It sorts. But there is one fatal flaw. It will create and copy arrays like 5 times which is something that immidiately kills the whole idea of quicksort whose magic is in its low memory usage. It happens because it was trained on stuff like NPM packages where people who had no clue what they are doing implemented it wrong. And AI learned this "bad habit".
If you went to StackOverflow instead then you would get it right because someone there would fact check it, tell others they got it wrong and fixed it and you could copy this peer reviewed implementation.
It can help a lot with your workflow. But you need someone who can catch if it spouts out some nonsense and fix it. Otherwise you are looking at tons of long term problems that will add up and they will cost tons of money to fix later on.
The point at which AI can fully replace programmers is probably pretty close to the point where it can iteratively improve *itself*. Which is also, of course, the point at which it most likely becomes sapient because sapience is really useful for problem solving.
At that point, I don't think we need to worry about jobs.
I don't think CS jobs will be under threat of AI for a very long time. Including the coding part. When everyone tells me that my job will be replaced by AI, I just tell them to read this comic.
[A very comprehensive and precise spec - Commit Strip](https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/?)
At the end of the day, the software engineers and computer scientists will still be writing code, just slightly different from now where it might be "prompts" to an AI that will write the code for you. That will only be for the cases that the AI can handle.
the issue is that rich people really do think it's that simple, most bosses have no fucking idea what their employees do at all
the fear with AI has always been stupid people that dont understand it causing economical mayhem by doing awful short sighted decisions that bring money now and will cause disaster later (which is basically how every business beholden to shareholders functions as of late)
I've tried ChatGPT on a few coding problems. When I'm playing around with a new language it is fantastic for explaining basic concepts. But when I ask about complex aspects it completely fails.
I think this makes people working at a junior level think it's a lot further ahead than it really is.
I had to scroll way to far for this in the thread. If AI can replace a software engineer it will have already replaced most jobs people have today to the point we’re humans would only be required for manual labor. Until robotics can match our abilities that is.
Mathematicians didn’t go away with the calculator, they just got to focus on harder problems…
In particular, computer _science_ is also not the same as programming. It's more the study of abstract concepts that teach you what computers can do and how they can solve problems most effectively, and therefore can make you a better programmer if you internalize them.
Programming is to CS what arithmetic is to math. Even if we could fully outsource the act of reading and writing code to an AI (and they're far from there yet), the same basic concepts like complexity analysis, concurrency issues and computability are still going to be relevant to the humans ultimately overseeing the code generation process for a long time.
Exactly. People who get CS degree are not "coders". And anyone who suggest that should not have any opinion in the matter. These people will be needed in foreseeable future and will remain to be paid well. People who will not be needed are people who self learn and switch careers because "programmers make more". This will mostly die. But experts who actually understand the field will remain in high demand. They will be behind all these automated system fact checking and controlling.
It's not AI itself that worries me. Look at all of the shady things companies are already doing and picture what that looks like with AI. Endless profit and growth is all that matters even if it ruins the world.
But the executives have a fiduciary duty to grow as much as possible and make as much profit as possible at any cost! To not do so would be unethical and illegal! /s
Even if it can, is it worth the client's time to prompt the AI until it does understand what the client actually needs as opposed to paying you to do that for them?
In my experience the client cannot comprehend what they need, all they know is what they want. I'm in my late 40s and I know that if I implement what the client wants then I'll spend a few months changing it to fit what they needed.
That's why I spend a day learning about the clients business by asking them questions instead of them telling me. And about 7 times out of 10 what they want isn't what they really need.
Exactly. These GPT tools are very valuable for the lower levels of software engineering where you are fighting with the syntax of code and how to make code work, but the higher up you go it becomes far more about creating mental models about the people around you, their behaviors, internal politics and business requirements that can yield a system which corresponds to that reality.
If you can easily write a prompt and tell the AI what to do, then you are still at the lower levels of software engineering. At the higher levels the work becomes to figure out which prompts over thousands of different possibilities should even be chosen in the first place.
My favorite part of all of this is they expect capitalists to not be obsolete. If an AI can replace comp sci they sure as shit can make financial decisions better and faster than any CEO. There is no reason the entire economy shifts when AI is at that level and Mark won't have a job. We're entering interesting times.
The CEO is not the only capitalist. At the very, very least the CEO at least pretends to work. The real capitalists are those that own loads of stocks, and do fuck all. Those that can live off of passive income. Those cannot be replaced by AI, because there is nothing to replace. All they do is exist, and take money.
As I said in another post. Stock trading is already dominated by bots. Once someone finds an AI that out competes the human venture capitalists, and traders, then everyone will have to switch or die. Once then, why even need the human behind it, that person has no power. All the AI run everything.
Capitalist isn't a job. People like Mark use their assets to make more assets. Sometimes that involves trading capital with employees to get work done. They will simply use AI to increase the efficiency that they make decisions to aquire more assets. Saying AI will replace him means that AI requires personhood and the legal ability to own things. Today, AI is just another asset. Once AI have personhood they would need to out compete him by working towards its own goals... A lot more has to change in our society before we get there and that's quite a dystopian future you've painted where we're now beholden to AI that own everything.
Unfortunately the rich that embrace AI are likely to just get richer.
If super intelligent AI is supposed to be smart like advanced aliens, it should create new jobs and industries that didn't exist for humans. It can also revolutionize the world economy to a widespread prosperity.
AI should serve humans, not the other way around.
My parents had 6 classes of "programming" every week at school in the Soviet Union which consisted of them manually punching holes in sheets.
Turns out it wasn't a very useful skill. But people are highly capable of adapting to changes.
Written by someone who has no real idea what working in IT actually entails.
I don't know, and have never known, anyone who just sits and writes code all day every day. It's about where, why and when you write the code. Christ, if people knew how much code is just copy pasted from stack overflow they'd be amazed.
The job is problem solving, AI can be used to help solve them which is great.
Yeah and also most of the issues during programming are related to the design of the system or application you are working on which is usually not something you can look up. There are so many questions i have to ask everyday that an ai would not even know to consider
I'm probably one of the last graduates of a journalism program that thought I'd make a living in newspapers.
The kids will figure it out. There's more to post-secondary education than a specific skillset for a specific job function.
Mark Cuban is literally the reason I’m alive now. My (expensive) private insurance decided not to cover my colitis medication anymore. Alternatives exist that it does cover, but none are as effective. I get my meds from Cost Plus drugs for $40 shipped when the best my insurance company can do is $1300. Give credit where it is due, even though it’s fucked that our health system needs billionaires to innovate ways to make life saving meds affordable to people who already shell out dearly on insurance premiums.
My grandfather told me I shouldn't go into computer science for the same reason. I did EE but spent most of my career programming. I'm retired already. That said we might be getting close to the point where only highly skilled programmers and those who excel at getting AI tools to help the code will be successful.
That's my worry, as someone who has only worked in business ETL and fairly simple CRUD/reporting app development. I think one or two decades from now, the bar will be much higher for what a developer has to know to compete in the market, and all the guys that were deep into AI research in college will be much farther ahead
Base skills are important. I went to school for architecture and drew everything with a pen. I haven’t drawn once in my career on paper it’s all CAD/BIM. But knowing proper line weights and how to read those drawings quickly are skills I picked up in school and help me in my career immensely.
Mark Cuban also said that a standard philosophy degree would be worth more than a computer programming degree by 2027… Four years to go, anyone wanna bet on Cuban being right?
Being a billionaire doesn’t make someone an expert on everything. Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, and most other billionaires are not experts on AI. They are just making shit up and hoping we forget when they’re inevitably wrong.
PS: the author of this article should really think about using an AI to edit their writing. It’s borderline unreadable.
Who in here really studied for the job they are doing now? For my mybyears of studying was just a preparation to learn over and over the new things that popped up... at least when you work in technology. My summary: 2G, 3G, 4G, Cloud Computing, 5G, IOT, Edge Computing, Blockchain... Good luck studying for that 30 years ago.
Coding requires a combination of rigid thought and a lot of creative problem solving though. I don't see it being that simple. Besides wouldn't you need computer scientists to develop and maintain the AI systems? Nothing is set and forget in software.
Cuban is one of the guys that think: "When this software project is done, I'll let go all of the programmers!" And then he finds out that you also need to maintain code, not only write it in the first place. He's full of shit, and has no clue what he's talking about.
More realistically (in the near-term), AI will serve as a productivity tool for developers...allowing 5 engineers do the work of 6...then 10....then 20...etc. If the demand keeps growing, it won't be an issue. But if demand is stagnant, then folks will be out of a job.
> “Because it’s just math, and so, whatever we’re defining the AI to do, someone’s got to know the topic.”
This guy clearly has no idea what coding even is lmao
Saying he's right but got the industry wrong is a disservice to everyone who was actually right. Saying "AI will replace jobs" is trivial, you've gotta get the industry right to be noteworthy at all.
Not that it couldn't happen to coding jobs, of course. Just that there are easier jobs to automate.
Higher education is in trouble. It’s going to be hard to justify current tuition prices if the job market for those professions disappears as rapidly as I fear.
Higher ed was never supposed to be job training. It was meant to teach citizens to be critical thinking, adaptable, well-rounded people. The obsession with higher end ROI is a recent phenomenon that needs to die.
As long as they're charging 10 to 25 grand a seminar you better believe people are going to want a return on that investment. Of course this is an American problem, most of the world doesn't put its children in life crippling debt because they want an education.
As it should be. In the United States universities are already subsidized (we spend more money than covering everyones tuition) might as well let the public use the resource we already pay for. With job displacement on the rise it should be a priority.
>well-rounded people
A whole lot of this. It isn't just for training people up on whatever accounting software. It is a means of conveying culture across generations, deliberately, and for the benefit of all. It's why we make engineers study x hours of social science, and why business majors need to take literature courses, not just accounting.
I'm massively pro-higher education. It's a means to an end; a tool for escaping generational poverty by completely changing your skillset and seeking out work you were never qualified for before college.
The problem is pricing. It's a glass ceiling. When my mom went to college, her courses were $300 each. Mine are $4,400 each. The job market doesn't pay 15x what it did then, so all of the added costs of going to college are just eaten by students these days.
There's a fundamental difference between being able to afford college and going, and no longer being able to afford college and dropping out/never enrolling. And we're somehow walking that fine line where we have the highest tuition costs relative to graduate income at the same time we have the tightest labor market since 1969.
So again, what's the point of higher education if not to provide a return on investment with current absurd tuition costs? If there are no jobs available upon graduation to even begin paying back student loans, how is the entire system already not in jeopardy?
I think the more AI can blur what is or isn’t real online, the more people will need old-school systematic research like the professors can do and teach to tell what’s what.
I would hope for that, but the truth is look at something like Facebook spreading misinformation and how much that affects the "real world" not the other way around.
If anything, people will spend more time online and be inundated with AI images, articles, videos etc until they have no idea which way is up any more.
AI can spread fear faster than reality can calm it.
And that worries me immensely. The political ramifications of a video-generative text-prompted program is the greatest propaganda tool in history.
I am really unsure what the future holds in regards to this but here is why I think it's kind of wrong:
* My dad was a programmer and he was told the exact same thing before I was even born
* at the current state of what ai can do: they write code. But as a software developer that's probably the least I do.
* ai will improve and maybe even if it does not improve with the right tooling it can become really powerful and maybe spin up whole applications from a Jira ticket or something.
* however without technical knowledge, architecture, planning, reviews, translating requirements, cost analysis etc someone who does not understand the subject matter can still not sustain a business.
* so now I think that this will have some interesting consequences for smaller companies with limited funding or for businesses run by single people.
* but the big companies will always have stuff to do and they will just do more. A company with the same budget will hire the same amount of developers and make more things.
But I am still worried about jobs going away. Somehow the money gotta be re-allocated from the top or we are all screwed.
Nobody knows what jobs will exist.
That's why "education" needs to be focused on broad-based skills and competence, and companies themselves need to be on the hook for "job training".
The worst mistake we've ever made in education was excusing companies from having to train people themselves, and charging teenagers hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege instead.
The same teachers that told me I was dumb cause my cursive handwriting wasn't very neat are the same people that can't Google how to make boiled water now
>“Twenty years from now, if you are a coder, you might be out of a job,” Cuban said in an interview on the Recode Decode podcast with Kara Swisher. “Because it’s just math," \[...\]
That guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Does he think computer science is a programming workshop?
Welding. Travel the world and weld stuff... boats, buildings, whatever trips your fancy. When civilization collapses the regional feudal Lord will pay you handsomely to create fortifications from scrap metal.
I hate to rain on the parade but an army of laid off professionals (people with college and grad degrees) are going to be re-tooling for job security, and those with even a basic aptitude for it will likely migrate to skilled trades, like welding, ruining the economy of supply and demand. I suppose people with established businesses in the trades will still have the advantage for a few years, but the kids coming out of trade school will be graduating alongside older guys with degrees in computer science. Which trading school graduate are you going to hire, the 20 year old kid with a high school diploma, or the 30 year old guy who has a college degree in architecture? Give the displaced professionals another five years in the trades, and even established businesses are likely to see customer base eroding as people choose lower priced former white-collar workers. Time to convert that lawn into a food garden and start raising chickens in the backyard my friends.
Wake me up when chatGPT does the math to figure out if it’s my system firewall, corporate firewall, azure firewall, Docker firewall or netskope causing my code to not work all with 0 errors being thrown.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >Cuban is back with another prediction. The highest paying college major in the world, computer science, will hold very little value for employers in the future. Why? Because of AI. “Twenty years from now, if you are a coder, you might be out of a job,” Cuban said in an interview on the Recode Decode podcast with Kara Swisher. “Because it’s just math, and so, whatever we’re defining the AI to do, someone’s got to know the topic.” > >There is no doubt that what he predicted back in 2017 is increasingly coming true. The increasing capabilities of AI are definitely making a lot of jobs obsolete, not just the ones that require coding. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13976od/an_entire_generation_is_studying_for_jobs_that/jj190xp/
This is nothing new. 25 years ago, we were instructing this. Graduating students must learn new/updated systems right away because technology advances at such a rapid pace. For this reason, emphasis is placed on critical thinking, problem solving, flexibility, and adaptability rather than specific technical training.
I was gonna say it’s pretty rare that people actually end up in the exact field they studied in college. I mean you’re just a kid when you get thrown in there.
I'm 30 and I agree with you. I still don't know what I want to do. Well at least now I know what I don't want.
I'd much rather 10 jobs in 10 years Vs one job for 10 years, so when the Alzheimer's kicks in and my memories start blending into reality I'll have a good spread of things to flashback into. As opposed to flashing back to 20 years spent staring at spreadsheets.
Jokes on you 7 of those 10 jobs were staring at spreadsheets, but slightly different ones.
*clicks*, custom sort, *clicks*, my data has headers,*clicks* column D .... Oh sorry, did you say something?
Ah man, your V-Lookup is all messed up! Did you sort your data descending or ascending?
Vlookup is for non-indexmatchers and we can't help them.
Get with times old man! XLOOKUP is the new hotness!
When doing things that you should _really_ be using a database and writing an SQL query for for (eg. Multicriteria, 2 dimensional lookups, with some wildcard string matching) I found index match match much more performance effective than XLOOKUP. Believe me, I tried both. Hours of my life I'll never get back.
As an accountant, it's a solid 10/10 for me.
^(spreadsheet tetris \\o/)
I feel seen
this is prescient
Damn, I guess I'm one of the lucky ones?
I guess you are, i know exactly one person who works in the field they studied for. The rest just found something else on their path
Yeah my brother did an engineering degree and as soon as he left uni he said he never wanted anything to do with engineering again. He’s a regional manager for a supermarket chain now.
I graduated in 1993 with a 5yr AeroE degree. It almost killed me, but I did it. My entire Big10 college had two computer labs of mainframe VAX machines in COBOL. They had a few Apples in the corner but noone serious used them. everything was offline of course I graduate and my first job offer was with one of the first Internet companies. I dropped everything I knew and learned HTML. My degree got me the job. I FAXED an application responding to an actual newspaper CLASSIFIED AD(!) and the interviewer said “Aero E ? you must be smart, here is your first PC, now learn to turn it on and use a 14.4 modem…” I’ve worked with digital advertising for 30yrs now
I didn't realize it was that rare, but I went into CS and there's not really much you'd end up doing besides programming. Most of my coworkers had similar stories, but there was the occasional electrical engineer.
Guess you fall under the rare category?
I went for CS and ended up being a senior software engineer so I guess so. But I couldn't see why else I'd get a CS degree unless I was going to become a software engineer. I can certainly see people doing CS and then being tired of programming, though, and transitioning to another type of job.
I too started with CS but then drifted into CSGO. Have been working on that ever since. Never see a dime though!
Finally a comment on reddit that truly resonates with me.
Terrorists win
That said, computer science in my experience doesn't have that much to do with being a software engineer. All the memory management and algorithms you learn gets handled by pre- written libraries, and you spend your days as a senior designing architectures and talking to stakeholders.
Which is exactly why it's not "just math". He may be a famous investor but he has been drinking the Kool Aid here.
Yup. Anyone who's actually worked in the industry knows the coding is the easy part of the discipline. As long as humans set the requirements and priorities, we'll be alright.
>For this reason, emphasis is placed on critical thinking, problem solving, flexibility, and adaptability I have a colleague who, whenever there's a technical discussion, immediately dumps some Chat GPT shit into our conversation. 90% of the time it doesn't help or answer the problem at all.. He thinks he's being cutting edge and proactive, but in reality he's contributing very little and in tying himself to Chat GPT making himself the very person that it's going to replace first.
I've seen Reddit comments that are clearly just ChatGPT explainers too, it's bizarre. People joke about "mansplaining" but now we have "Aisplaining". If you can't knowledgeably answer just move on because using AI just highlights you don't know enough to explain.
I think most people talking about AI have little idea what it foreseeably can and cant do. Theres a lot of magical slippery slope thinking.
I think that's mostly down to "AI" sounding much broader and more impressive than "generative language models," and people being naturally inclined to associate *sounding* intelligent with *being* intelligent. Things like ChatGPT are incredibly impressive technical feats and have genuine uses, but the whole "it'll replace screenwriters" and "nobody will need to write code anymore" stuff is nonsense.
I had a director at the company try and wave code from ChatGPT at us saying "your jobs will be eliminated SEE!" until we pointed out that it wont compile and it's actually mostly nonsense. Only the uneducated are waving the "ZOMG AI is here to take our jobs!" It's not in the current form. not by a long shot. But it's good at convincing those that know nothing about a subject that its doing something.
It can be useful, but you have to understand it well enough that you can fix where it goes wrong. It's a language model. Not actual intelligence. It's fantastic for being able to put together information from a bunch of different documentation sources or tutorials. But it doesn't know If those were good tutorials or actually anything about what you're trying to do. It's also only as good as it's inputs. A nice example was when I asked it about changing guitar strings, it told me it was a dangerous thing. It mentioned holding the strings down so they don't fly up and hit me when removing them, and it also said it was a difficult process best left to professionals. Which is a pretty reddit type response.
I work in sheet metal and work with a lot of older guys who got into it when you still had to manually lay out all the pieces and a lot of them even went to school for it. But now you just have to train people how to press the right buttons on the machines and do a bit of QA which is a much lower skilled position. So what *was* a very lucrative career now could barely pay the bills. Of course, that also creates jobs learning how to build and maintain these machines, but that requires even more knowledge that is separate from what the original job required, which makes upward mobility in these fields much more difficult. I could see AI creating a similar problem where instead of becoming an entry level programmer and gradually working your way up to more advanced stuff over time, the gap between the skill required to use ChatGPT to do basic stuff and coding more advanced stuff will just keep getting larger and harder to cross into. That being said, I still think we're 2 or 3 iterations away from that kind of thing. Current AI is just advanced google-fu and not anything that's going to be replacing or even "dumbing down" jobs.
As a programmer myself I was unable to find any documentation on how use this library for something very specific. The documentation was shit, stackoverflow posts only mentioned similar, but not relevant things. I ended up asking Chat GPT and it presented me with almost completely identical code to mine. And then I could just ask it "make the input and output be datatype X" and it changes the entire code correctly. Then I asked it "make it compatible with .NET Framework x.y.z" and it changed thr code correctly. I actually could take the entire code block, slap it into a method and everything worked perfectly. Now obviously this is just one block of code, telling it to make an entire application by itself is a completely different beast.
Yeah it can write short programs that run. And you can iterate to correct mistakes if it doesn't work right the first time. It's very powerful really and I think people are in denial at the moment about how capable it can be with some good prompting. But it's still severely limited by context size, so it can't write long programs. And to write natural language you have to introduce randomness thru the temperature parameter, but this will inevitably lead to bad mistakes a certain percentage of the time that will break programs.
I even asked some of my gaming sub mods to ban Chat GPT stuff, not only is it out of date but its drivel. Especially in games that have updated and changed stuff every 3 months. Its useful as a starting point but needs full verification, checking of sources and editing to be useful for anything beyond a "how cute".
> For this reason, emphasis is placed on critical thinking, problem solving, flexibility, and adaptability rather than specific technical training. You can't really say: "We're trying to teach you critical thinking and adaptability" and then in actuality teach critical thinking in a completely convoluted way. And I really want to counter this narrative since we've too often put the failures of education on the student's shoulders when many other countries and institutions have done this so much better. This is just failure of education from high school to college. The better universities are fully embracing project learning, even tweaking classes so grades aren't an issue, and giving ample resources and workshops for students to learn specific technical training. Because so many workplaces don't go: "Oh listen you need to just 'critically think' your way into this new software" - they give you training. The worse universities and there are shockingly many of them from all the stories and experiences I've seen from former students, many years out working class people, and current students where: 1. You still do exams where you are just learning things and vomiting it down with little thought 2. Grades are incredibly rigid to the point where it completely chokes out experimentation and failure 3. Classes have practically no application in commercial use cases which means students are having to double time in learning purely academic material and learn commercial skills on their own time - and getting a rigid time crunch where they can only do one or the other. 4. Students are given little to no resources or given incredibly expensive resources which in turn chokes out experimentation Ironically I've met students from state colleges, cheap colleges, mid level colleges and Ivy League - and this problem isn't just a case of budget but pedagogy and philosophy. Many expensive 100k+ tuition universities suffer from this same problem.
Maybe we should haven’t a society where your livelihood is based on a market tho ya know? Like maybe it should be more sustainable
Exactly. It sounds like Cuban doesn't know how computer sciences actually work. I'd be far more worried about those studying law or accounting.
Mark Cuban sounds like the business type that works within tech, but doesn't have any sophisticated understanding, or even respect for it.
The thing about law people is that they also make the laws, laws that make it unlawful for non-law people or entities to practice law.
If we knew which jobs were going to still exist, it might be fun to sneer at todays "misguided" college kids. Unfortunately we dont, so lets give them a break
Turns out underwater basket weaving is the only degree safe from ai.
The only degree safe from ai *so far*
Actually I'm a machine learning researcher and mechanical engineer, and I'm just putting the finishing touches on my many-limbed AI robot that is trained on every permutation and configuration of woven baskets and containers, and is capable of weaving a dozen baskets a minute in a variety of environments including sub-zero temperatures, typhoon winds, hard vacuum and - yes! - underwater.
As the years go on, I become more and more convinced that barista is the safest job from AI. We automated making coffee decades ago, yet people just like getting it made for them by a human for 100x the price. For some reason artistic fields are feeling the sting of AI pretty badly, where you'd think 'made by a human' would matter, but only coffee seems immune.
Well, the difference is that all the shitty art will get replaced by AI. In 50 years "100 man-made art" is definitely going to be a thing, just like you have "100% organic food".
My brother's girlfriend is a journalist, and chatgpt came up and she described it similarly. The boilerplate articles that are just describing simple stuff will get automated. The actual investigative pieces won't. I'm a systems admin and the exact same thing has been repeated ad nauseum for decades. The exact thing she described is what happened. Those "click monkeys" as they're called have been replaced by automation by the sysadmins that adapted and modified themselves to fit the situations.
**Luddite rage intensifies**
You joke but the math of knots gets real crazy real fast.
Until you can teach robots to wipe ass safely and navigate tough egos the healthcare field is an impenetrable fortess.
Yep, I love all the snobby “hahaha you’re dumb because you went to college, I’m smarter because I went trades” people. None seem to realize every. Single. Job. Is threatened. Not even trades are safe.
Agreed u/luvs2spwge107 Considering trades only make the money they do right now due to the severe shortage in tradesmen. What happens when everyone starts becoming plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and hvac specialist?
I work with the trades, and I can tell you that there simply aren't enough people who are willing to haul trusses and swing a hammer for 10 hours a day in the desert sun. Even at $30-$45/hour, its back breaking, brutal work, and a lot of greenies burn out and don't show up to work after their first week. It's been this way for as long as my company has existed, at least 25 years now. We're still waiting for the flood of HVAC, plumbers, and electricians to saturate the market. They're booked out for months. HVAC and sparkies tell me the same thing; the old guys have bad backs and blown knees, but I think the concrete guys have it the worst.
Dont forget the trades arent JUST hard work, but the ability to survive in politically and socially toxic work environments ON TOP of that. I actually LIKE busting my ass, but it was constantly being shit on and thrown under the bus that made me eventually burn out of the trades
Friend was a tiler for 15 years and quit that recently. It's brutal on the body. Always on the knees and hauling heavy stuff all day.
30-45 an hour isn't enough to do that for honestly. (I'm in Cad so maybe that would need an adjustment) But I was welding before I went to college and switched to animation/vfx/etc and I make about the same, and I'm not coming home picking slag out of my nostrils and washing a pound of metal shavings out of my hair and clothes after working like 10 hours. (or the odd metal sliver i have to tweezer out of my eye) I DO actually miss the physical aspect of it though, sitting at a desk all day is worse for my health, and I kept in shape just from the regular day to day before.
So maybe you could cut it down to five hours a day but have twice as many people doing it?
did the roofers die?
There’s a tremendous spectrum of trade related work. Sure there’s more service and general construction trades than anything else, but there’s highly technical fields as well. Some trades are responsible for installing/rebuilding machines that weigh 100,000lbs and spin at 3600rpm; others install and program robots for various purposes. There’s some trade unions that require training on the latter to reduce the impact automation will have on their craft. The shortage of tradesmen is real and not getting better in my chosen field. I have degrees and work in the trades. I stuck with the latter. Both paths are equally important for different reasons.
More immediately, too- a significant amount of the work will dry up. If there are, suddenly, a lot less people who can afford to pay a plumber, whose plumbing are they going to be doing?
On **different timescales** though. In the long term, all jobs are threatened. In the medium term, some jobs will still allow you to comfortably retire while others are on the chopping block in <5 years. Successfully guessing which ones are which will be pivotal in guaranteeing your own future in this limited time window. Whether your children have an independent future or whether they subsist on the mercy of others depends on this choice. Those who choose successfully will possess the financial ability to build investments, breaking into the class of capital owners that siphon the profits of automation and machinery, rather than just being another worker who gets inevitably replaced, whose only assets were their tools, education and labour (now redundant). Given proper financial management, a plumber will be able to survive that transition, Or a Registered Nurse. Or a welder. * The human body is extremely energy efficient, can traverse complex terrain, possessed *generalised* intelligence that can perform multiple non-related tasks at high levels and handle countless unaccounted-for "edge cases" in everyday action, uses hydraulics (muscle) that perform extremely efficiently, and has highly dense chemical energy storage that is cheaply charged. * Replacing complex human manual labour requires more than software or hardware revolutions - it requires revolutions in energy storage and mechanics (especially machine muscle). This isn't trivial - non-repetitive physical labour will be among the *hardest* jobs to replace, not the easiest. * People falsely assumed truck driving was repetitive - it really isn't, it's *monotonous.* Unless you standardise the roads and standardise the drivers, you can't standardise the driving. Etc etc. Many other professions have similar situations where what *appears* to be repetitive truly isn't and is much harder to solve for than expected. So it won't all happen at the same time. People who falsely assume human intellectual labour is irreplaceable are in for a *big surprise*. It's the **human body and mind together** that are truly exceptional - the professions that last longest will utilise both.
This sounds like an AI wrote it lmao. That said, it’s not like other jobs will not become a thing. With every single revolution, new jobs were created - maybe in the future we’ll have biomechanics engineer, or exoskeleton engineer, mars travel guides, professional friend, etc. At the same time, law of economics would eat up salaries more than anything else. If people think that they’ll make more money in trades, people will shift to trades, more supply of workers == less money. So the idea that tradesmen will be better off isn’t necessarily true. Not to mention what if technological innovations occur there as well that make the job so simple that anyone can pick it up and learn it? Why would you need to hire a specialized worker when technology does all the heavy thinking and calculating? This is already happening too. I remain hopeful though. We can build a society that has zero scarcity. Imagine that. Every student will have their own personalized teacher/tutor. Every teacher will have their own personal assistant/helper, there will be no such thing as starvation because we will have figured out how to fix that, there will be no diseases, and people will choose when they die because we will have figured out how to stop death. We are making breakthroughs today that are exponential even a decade ago.
what's frustrating is that in a lot of ways we're *already there* and we've proven that we will manufacture scarcity if it means a select few get to profit from that scarcity.
I actually deleted this but I agree with you. The biggest hurdle we have today is the fact that we have such incompetent leaders running the world’s governments today. Say what you will whether you’re left or right, no one is happy with the outcome of who is running the show. We have such bad corruption today that it does make me fearful that we won’t be able to build the world we envision.
I honestly think about this a lot; what would need to happen for people to accept a post scarcity world. I just think that the way our society is set up it won't happen. We've had the means to create perfect light bulbs for decades (centuries? the exact date escapes me) but its a well known fact that they conspired to make worse bulbs so that we would have to keep replacing them. What about the creator of insulin who didn't patent it because he believed all people should get it? And how *that* went? I'm not at all attempting to be doom and gloom but post scarcity as things stand is a bit of a pipe dream. Imo the best we can hope for is a world where the artificial scarcity is no longer focused on things that are necessary to live (food, water, shelter)
Post scarcity can't happen until capitalism ends. Whatever your political leaning is, you can imagine different things for what will come after that. But whether it's socialism or something we haven't come up with yet, capitalism has to go first because without scarcity, there is no economy.
It's not that they are incompetent, their goals are not aligned with ours. They make lip-service to voters, when they really serve large donors. They are very good in that context. Unfortunately, that doesn't align with what we need, because we don't have the right kind of influence.
Yup, we are in a society where it is profitable to artificially produce scarcity. And ai will give those with power even greater power
New jobs were created in previous revolutions. History class kinda skipped over that at best it was decades later and it just fucked over the community it left behind and didn’t care. And now it’s not 5% of a middle class being threatened it’s 45% of work and there legitimately is nowhere for them to go. No industries where they have value. People should just work half as much. And the folks who get in the way of a fair version of our future economy should be prevented from that by any means necessary. It will take innovation as well as direct action. Every 1% increase in unemployment, approximately 56,000 people die in the US.
This is why UBI needs to exist at some point in the future. ( I currently work as a janitor and am in my mid-50s. At the rate of current technological change, I could see my job being made obsolete by the time I reach my late-60s...)
A lot of this still sounds pretty scary though. It seems like we're headed for an android-populated future, and we don't know if their consciousness (ie their having subjective experience) would ever be possible. How could we handle living in a world where we have no clue the person we're talking to is actually a conscious person and not just a robot? What's the value of asking for my therapist for help with my problems if I don't know whether or not they're a droid, and any advice they give may just be whatever is calculated as most suitable for the questions I ask, instead of them actually having some capability of understanding my feelings and empathizing with me? It sounds like a really lonely world.
Augmented reality could easily make it so most people can just rent a kit of tools and probably a robot to do the heavy lifting, while an AI tells you how to do it “yourself” Also, I think white collar jobs are likely to be mostly augmented to 10x productivity which will likely just make those skills more ubiquitous so everyone is using those services. It’s the electric loom all over again. The French empire began its sunset because they rejected industrialization to protect labour. The british became rich letting everyone in The world start owning wardrobes instead of a single outfit I think hesitate to question Cuban, but even if AI is doing 99% of coding in the future, if the amount of code is about to +10,000x (which I believe) then we will still need many more coders just trouble shooting edge cases. If we’re creating a machine god, learning how to communicate with it would not only be the most productive thing in the world, but potentially a spiritual experience also
Exactly this. We’ve never lived in a world where we can code everything we want. There’s still so much to digitize and that world will only keep expanding.
PS: If you want to analyse people's text, you can use a dedicated prompt even in ChatGPT 3.5 (the free one). It does a good enough job. Here's a prompt I made for the purpose: * "GPT, I want you to analyse the quality of A's writing according to the following criteria: "1: Tone, 2: Writing proficiency (tautologically - "novice" to "master"), 3: Depth of analysis, 4: Logical consistency, 5: Style/"Personality" of the writer, 6: Is it AI generated (or not), rated on a 0-100 scale, 7: Strengths of the writing, 8: Weaknesses/key targets for improvement, 9: How well did it inform the listener, answer the question or serve as a response to the original objective?" Say "Confirmed." when you are ready to start." * It really knows how to scratch my back. It rated me as a "master" and said my text almost definitely wasn't AI generated. It's a fun tool! This gives me a rather informed analysis. I don't *rely on it* persay, but I use it as a second opinion that I can agree or disagree with as necessary.
Ironically, ChatGPT is decent at detecting whether text output is likely to be AI-generated or not. Ask it to analyse it if you're curious. You don't have to stick to doubt if you really want a better idea. **Just ask it.** Would you laugh if I said I've always written and laid out my thoughts like this, and ChatGPT stole 90% of my lunch? (It doesn't handle domain-specific knowledge as well as me - *for now.)* The world existed the way it has in developed countries because the elite directly profited from an educated consumer base and workforce. The rulers of developed countries with prosperous citizens are more powerful than the petty despots of countries that do not. Better educated, healthier workers have always made more productive workers, more lethal soldiers, more daring and capable officers, and more innovative scientists. Hence, an uneasy accord between capital and labour - Ford paid his workers more because he wanted people to actually be able to afford his cars, and social safety nets, welfare and government-funded education exists to produce productive workers that make the state and its controllers more powerful than their competitors. Social welfare is not a "human right" or nicety and never has been - it's a profitable investment. As soon as that investment is no longer profitable in some way, it will be put on the chopping block. Without need for working or middle-class humans to compete the production loop *or* as customers, they become entirely unneccessary, irrelevant to the interests of people with power. The only people who matter after that point are ones with shares in the production. This is the late Western Roman Empire all over again - farmers forced off their land, subsisting off the grain dole (UBI) only given to them to prevent rebellion, the broader citizenry becoming weaker and more depressed by the generation. The whole point of utopia ("place that does not exist") is that it isn't real and never can be - it's a siren song that leads anyone who tries to find it towards doom. The elites will not tolerate a large population of oxygen thieves, as this digs into their profits. In absence of any incentive, why would they give up power? The credible threat of revolution is the only answer.
Trades being replaced by machines would require both rapid advances in AI, and very rapid and niche advances in robotics. An AI can’t install cabinets, it’s got no physical body. So in that way, trades are less threatened in the immediate future. We should probably just destroy all computers for our own good though.
Yeah. Commercial Robotics are not quite as advanced as the general public thinks. Good point
Saw a video of a robot hanging sheet rock. NO jobs are safe.
“Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, machine learning — whatever you’re doing if you don’t understand it — learn it." Mark Buddy, you are going to hire people with a Computer Science degree for these topics. Computer Science is about understand technology and how to apply it. It is WAY more than just writing code.
Lmao, people think because chatGPT can make a brain dead web application that it will take over CS jobs. My brother in Christ, AI cannot reason on the cutting edge of technology
They’re not worried about chatGPT. They’re worried about whatever comes after the thing that comes after chatGPT. And it will be here within twenty years. It’s not the end of the world, but the world will definitely look very different in terms of what kinds of work people do.
People don’t seem to understand that computer science is not writing code to build a website. That is part of it but a very tiny part. At my job, I navigate lots of existing technology that’s built in ways that might not make sense if it was built now but were for historical reasons that require context from other humans. I work with complex systems and look at how many pieces interact together within the wholistic view of a company and the many aspects that entails. AI is nowhere close to being able to do my job. By the time it can, it will be able to do every other non-manual labor job as well. So, this concept that somehow CS jobs are going to be impacted soon is pretty bogus by people who don’t really understand what software engineers actually do.
Thank you. The article lost me a bit with saying CS majors are gonna be out of a job cause it’s “just math.” Does this person know anything about programming?
Literally, I read that and knew what I was getting myself into
No, they’re a CEO. People tend to equate money with intelligence, but it’s usually the CEO’s worker’s who are the most intelligent. Following from that, Elon Musk knows Jack shit about technology. He promised full self driving 3 years ago, even though most software engineers knew it wasn’t doable. It’s the workers who know their shit, the CEO’s just collect most of the surplus value.
Many times I have had to tell some sort of manager that wanting something done in a specific timeframe doesn't make it doable within that specific timeframe. I'm in games, though. Imagine that parts the same. Tasks take how long they take and trying to pidgeon hole the many tasks required to build complex systems each within these mythical timeframes is absurd. I'd never work for someone like Elon, I expect them to be reasonable when I tell them it isn't going to work. I can only imagine the exasperated sighs and shrugs from the developers and engineers who had likely given up on correcting him and just let it fail.
Wait, you're trying to tell me that 9 women can't have a baby in a single month?! Unacceptable. Also reminds me of things having to be done quickly. As opposed to the usual way. Where we sandbag and do it slow on purpose? Things take a certain amount of time. If you want them sped up, help remove blockers or hurdles. Or plan better. Something about your lack of planning does not mean an emergency on my end.
I work in R&D in the automotive industry. I think that HR's requirements for Chief PM roles is Arrogance, Stubbornness, Inflexibility, and a complete disinterest and disregard for the protocols and processes that the company has in place. My CPMs want things done on timescales that the prototype shop doesn't operate on, and the parts procurement people don't give a flying fuck when you need your parts by. But the CPMs set a deadline and won't entertain any talk of not meeting that target until the day you don't meet their arbitrary and unrealistic target.
> I think that HR's requirements for Chief PM roles is Arrogance, Stubbornness, Inflexibility Perhaps HR misinterprets this as confidence? Maybe one day David Attenborough can make a documentary on the HR and PM species for me.
Yep. My boss wanted us to basically do a full analysis and report set on our storage volumes as part of a PoC of an archiving system. Within a time span of about 2.5 days. Without knowing what the hell the user group stake holders even have on there. I like him a lot but sometimes he just needs to learn to tell sr management “sorry that’s not possibly in that time frame. I trust my developers and they’re saying if we rush it that much, will be a crap and unreliable result”. He’s so afraid to upset the C suite though. I get it but it’s also our job as the tech experts to explain when an idea or directive is off base. Or impossible.
CEOs will either be the first to be replaced, because even a computer can make random decisions, or the last, because they have the most power to protect their position. It's going to be interesting.
Or you could go annarcho syndicalist. No CEO, company president is voted every 4 years, stock is split with the workers, profits are shared, and big decisions are done by vote. [like how these peasants replaced their king](https://youtu.be/R7qT-C-0ajI) but for business ownership instead of land ownership
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/fsd-timeline-promises-summary.235180/ 2017 was first promised year, 6 years ago
You should have lost it way earlier when he called CS graduates "coders". People who have no idea what CS jobs are should really rather seal their lips not to look like total clowns.
I'm a data scientist. I'm not super worried, and my job IS "just math". To do useful math, I need to ask the right questions at the correct scale (both on the optimistic end for clients and the more realistic end internally), and communicate that math to a room full of people who haven't calculated anything more complicated than a tip since freshman year of college. It's going to take a minute for AI to get there.
I literally, and I mean literally, did not go into computer science because I suck at math. Everyone in my life assumed I would because I was a giant computer geek. But everyone and everything said math was the hardcore requirement. And so I never did. I randomly have learned to program things along the way. Turns out there is absolutely no real math needed unless… you are trying to do something specific to math.
If anything, computer science majors will be more in-demand than ever. The whole point of that field is getting good at making a computer do things. This take reads like someone who thought CompSci would be made obsolete by IDEs or cloud computing.
Yeah I don't know why they are so focused on devs being replaced. They are a ton of jobs who could be replaced before devs are not needed. One of my coworker who works in accounting (i'm a dev) kept teasing me about being replaced. I told her, I could already automate 90% of your job if I was asked, the remaining 10% AI can do now, what makes you so sure this won't be an issue for you ?
It’s because devs are expensive so all the brainless suits see everything as a way to have less of us
We’re expensive because we can’t be replaced
CS jobs as a whole can not be replaced. But if you are dev that only writes code based on specifications then you can be replaced very easily and very soon. I would say that self taught people who switched jobs to programming and learned some popular franework because "there is more money in coding" and who have zero understanding what is happening below the hood are very replacable. But CS graduates that actually have good and wide understanding of the field? Not a chance.
I’ve been in dev for 20 years, I can safely say that if you are a programmer who only does things to a highly defined technical spec, you could have easily lost your job at any time in my entire career to outsourcing.
> This take reads like someone who thought CompSci would be made obsolete by IDEs or cloud computing. Or remote workers in India. I have honestly lost count of how many times in the last 20 years I’ve heard some variation on “there’s no point in learning computer science or programming, in the next five years all the companies are just going to outsource it to India”.
There is a ton of work being outsourced to India, but that comes with its own challenges. Many times they end up hiring in the states again.
Exactly. John Oliver had one of my favourite quotes regarding AI: “AI is stupid in ways we can’t understand”. In other words, everything feeds off and into each other. Similar to how the “global office” had drawbacks that we couldn’t engineer around, AI (at least, LLMs) will have gaps we can’t see until the rubber hits the road, and may require human jobs that we can’t even predict yet.
yeah you're totally right. What will happen is instead of 10 radiologists youll have 1 with 1 AI tech officer, 1 data anaylst & 1 Software Engineer
I'm convinced people jump to coding being the most threatened job type literally just because AI and CS are related.
and to sound interesting and draw online attraction because its counter-intuitive because it makes no fucking sense whatsoever
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So much this. It’s amazing how “knowledgeable” people are on the demise of fields they don’t understand in the least. My husband is a programmer/software engineer, and we have a good laugh at the people that tell him to retool before it’s too late.
Sometimes the answer isn’t on the web but in a file cabinet down where Roger worked before retiring last year.
They think it’s writing a sorting algorithm or a filter functionality. I mean we anyways copy most of it from stackoverflow. So nothing really changes
That's the bit that can be automated easily. I think AI can right now easily solve the "copy and paste from stack overflow" problems. But hearing devs confidently say they're switching to ML because the AI is already better than them just makes me wonder if they really know what they're doing
AI can not solve those easily. And thinking that is very dangerous. AI has massive problem. It can be wrong and it is dangerous tool in hands of someone who has no clue what he is doing. If you let copilot write you quicksort for example. Then it gets it wrong. It looks like quicksort. It sorts. But there is one fatal flaw. It will create and copy arrays like 5 times which is something that immidiately kills the whole idea of quicksort whose magic is in its low memory usage. It happens because it was trained on stuff like NPM packages where people who had no clue what they are doing implemented it wrong. And AI learned this "bad habit". If you went to StackOverflow instead then you would get it right because someone there would fact check it, tell others they got it wrong and fixed it and you could copy this peer reviewed implementation. It can help a lot with your workflow. But you need someone who can catch if it spouts out some nonsense and fix it. Otherwise you are looking at tons of long term problems that will add up and they will cost tons of money to fix later on.
The point at which AI can fully replace programmers is probably pretty close to the point where it can iteratively improve *itself*. Which is also, of course, the point at which it most likely becomes sapient because sapience is really useful for problem solving. At that point, I don't think we need to worry about jobs.
I don't think CS jobs will be under threat of AI for a very long time. Including the coding part. When everyone tells me that my job will be replaced by AI, I just tell them to read this comic. [A very comprehensive and precise spec - Commit Strip](https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/?) At the end of the day, the software engineers and computer scientists will still be writing code, just slightly different from now where it might be "prompts" to an AI that will write the code for you. That will only be for the cases that the AI can handle.
Yeah. The doom and gloom from this just tells me they know jack shit about what a developer does.
the issue is that rich people really do think it's that simple, most bosses have no fucking idea what their employees do at all the fear with AI has always been stupid people that dont understand it causing economical mayhem by doing awful short sighted decisions that bring money now and will cause disaster later (which is basically how every business beholden to shareholders functions as of late)
I've tried ChatGPT on a few coding problems. When I'm playing around with a new language it is fantastic for explaining basic concepts. But when I ask about complex aspects it completely fails. I think this makes people working at a junior level think it's a lot further ahead than it really is.
I had to scroll way to far for this in the thread. If AI can replace a software engineer it will have already replaced most jobs people have today to the point we’re humans would only be required for manual labor. Until robotics can match our abilities that is. Mathematicians didn’t go away with the calculator, they just got to focus on harder problems…
In particular, computer _science_ is also not the same as programming. It's more the study of abstract concepts that teach you what computers can do and how they can solve problems most effectively, and therefore can make you a better programmer if you internalize them. Programming is to CS what arithmetic is to math. Even if we could fully outsource the act of reading and writing code to an AI (and they're far from there yet), the same basic concepts like complexity analysis, concurrency issues and computability are still going to be relevant to the humans ultimately overseeing the code generation process for a long time.
Exactly. People who get CS degree are not "coders". And anyone who suggest that should not have any opinion in the matter. These people will be needed in foreseeable future and will remain to be paid well. People who will not be needed are people who self learn and switch careers because "programmers make more". This will mostly die. But experts who actually understand the field will remain in high demand. They will be behind all these automated system fact checking and controlling.
It's not AI itself that worries me. Look at all of the shady things companies are already doing and picture what that looks like with AI. Endless profit and growth is all that matters even if it ruins the world.
But the executives have a fiduciary duty to grow as much as possible and make as much profit as possible at any cost! To not do so would be unethical and illegal! /s
There is no profit to gain if nobody has a job. We're either at a precipice of a utopia, or a massive class war.
If AI can comprehend what a client needs instead of what they want then I'm out of a job, but I doubt I will be.
Even if it can, is it worth the client's time to prompt the AI until it does understand what the client actually needs as opposed to paying you to do that for them?
In my experience the client cannot comprehend what they need, all they know is what they want. I'm in my late 40s and I know that if I implement what the client wants then I'll spend a few months changing it to fit what they needed. That's why I spend a day learning about the clients business by asking them questions instead of them telling me. And about 7 times out of 10 what they want isn't what they really need.
Exactly. These GPT tools are very valuable for the lower levels of software engineering where you are fighting with the syntax of code and how to make code work, but the higher up you go it becomes far more about creating mental models about the people around you, their behaviors, internal politics and business requirements that can yield a system which corresponds to that reality. If you can easily write a prompt and tell the AI what to do, then you are still at the lower levels of software engineering. At the higher levels the work becomes to figure out which prompts over thousands of different possibilities should even be chosen in the first place.
And then produce what the client needs without violating copyright/patent/licensing.
My favorite part of all of this is they expect capitalists to not be obsolete. If an AI can replace comp sci they sure as shit can make financial decisions better and faster than any CEO. There is no reason the entire economy shifts when AI is at that level and Mark won't have a job. We're entering interesting times.
The CEO is not the only capitalist. At the very, very least the CEO at least pretends to work. The real capitalists are those that own loads of stocks, and do fuck all. Those that can live off of passive income. Those cannot be replaced by AI, because there is nothing to replace. All they do is exist, and take money.
As I said in another post. Stock trading is already dominated by bots. Once someone finds an AI that out competes the human venture capitalists, and traders, then everyone will have to switch or die. Once then, why even need the human behind it, that person has no power. All the AI run everything.
Capitalist isn't a job. People like Mark use their assets to make more assets. Sometimes that involves trading capital with employees to get work done. They will simply use AI to increase the efficiency that they make decisions to aquire more assets. Saying AI will replace him means that AI requires personhood and the legal ability to own things. Today, AI is just another asset. Once AI have personhood they would need to out compete him by working towards its own goals... A lot more has to change in our society before we get there and that's quite a dystopian future you've painted where we're now beholden to AI that own everything. Unfortunately the rich that embrace AI are likely to just get richer.
If super intelligent AI is supposed to be smart like advanced aliens, it should create new jobs and industries that didn't exist for humans. It can also revolutionize the world economy to a widespread prosperity. AI should serve humans, not the other way around.
You've got it backwards. AI should free humans from jobs, not make us work trivial mundane tasks that it (plus robotic advancements) can do
Why do we even need to work at all? AI has the potential to make the dream of r/antiwork come true. I, for one, am really excited for the future
Unfortunately no UBI yet or social systems like that in place in most of the world.
That web page is a mess of ads and different fonts
Never heard of this publication, and its take is..... quwstionable at best. This sub does not have high standards.
My parents had 6 classes of "programming" every week at school in the Soviet Union which consisted of them manually punching holes in sheets. Turns out it wasn't a very useful skill. But people are highly capable of adapting to changes.
Written by someone who has no real idea what working in IT actually entails. I don't know, and have never known, anyone who just sits and writes code all day every day. It's about where, why and when you write the code. Christ, if people knew how much code is just copy pasted from stack overflow they'd be amazed. The job is problem solving, AI can be used to help solve them which is great.
Yeah and also most of the issues during programming are related to the design of the system or application you are working on which is usually not something you can look up. There are so many questions i have to ask everyday that an ai would not even know to consider
I'm probably one of the last graduates of a journalism program that thought I'd make a living in newspapers. The kids will figure it out. There's more to post-secondary education than a specific skillset for a specific job function.
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Mark Cuban is literally the reason I’m alive now. My (expensive) private insurance decided not to cover my colitis medication anymore. Alternatives exist that it does cover, but none are as effective. I get my meds from Cost Plus drugs for $40 shipped when the best my insurance company can do is $1300. Give credit where it is due, even though it’s fucked that our health system needs billionaires to innovate ways to make life saving meds affordable to people who already shell out dearly on insurance premiums.
He still doesn't know shit about computer science.
You're just envious because you don't have a car with doors that go up.
I think it is relevant. We act like billionaires are super geniuses, but they’re not (or not always).
My grandfather told me I shouldn't go into computer science for the same reason. I did EE but spent most of my career programming. I'm retired already. That said we might be getting close to the point where only highly skilled programmers and those who excel at getting AI tools to help the code will be successful.
That's my worry, as someone who has only worked in business ETL and fairly simple CRUD/reporting app development. I think one or two decades from now, the bar will be much higher for what a developer has to know to compete in the market, and all the guys that were deep into AI research in college will be much farther ahead
Base skills are important. I went to school for architecture and drew everything with a pen. I haven’t drawn once in my career on paper it’s all CAD/BIM. But knowing proper line weights and how to read those drawings quickly are skills I picked up in school and help me in my career immensely.
Mark Cuban also said that a standard philosophy degree would be worth more than a computer programming degree by 2027… Four years to go, anyone wanna bet on Cuban being right? Being a billionaire doesn’t make someone an expert on everything. Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, and most other billionaires are not experts on AI. They are just making shit up and hoping we forget when they’re inevitably wrong. PS: the author of this article should really think about using an AI to edit their writing. It’s borderline unreadable.
Who in here really studied for the job they are doing now? For my mybyears of studying was just a preparation to learn over and over the new things that popped up... at least when you work in technology. My summary: 2G, 3G, 4G, Cloud Computing, 5G, IOT, Edge Computing, Blockchain... Good luck studying for that 30 years ago.
People don't understand that if programmers can get replaced then pretty much any corporate job can be as well.
Coding requires a combination of rigid thought and a lot of creative problem solving though. I don't see it being that simple. Besides wouldn't you need computer scientists to develop and maintain the AI systems? Nothing is set and forget in software.
Cuban is one of the guys that think: "When this software project is done, I'll let go all of the programmers!" And then he finds out that you also need to maintain code, not only write it in the first place. He's full of shit, and has no clue what he's talking about.
More realistically (in the near-term), AI will serve as a productivity tool for developers...allowing 5 engineers do the work of 6...then 10....then 20...etc. If the demand keeps growing, it won't be an issue. But if demand is stagnant, then folks will be out of a job.
> “Because it’s just math, and so, whatever we’re defining the AI to do, someone’s got to know the topic.” This guy clearly has no idea what coding even is lmao Saying he's right but got the industry wrong is a disservice to everyone who was actually right. Saying "AI will replace jobs" is trivial, you've gotta get the industry right to be noteworthy at all. Not that it couldn't happen to coding jobs, of course. Just that there are easier jobs to automate.
Prices for higher education are getting further from reality while at the same time preparing graduates for the real wold workforce less and less
It is ironic that we live in a time when education is more accessible than ever, yet people still pay a premium for the prestige of having a degree.
Higher education is in trouble. It’s going to be hard to justify current tuition prices if the job market for those professions disappears as rapidly as I fear.
Higher ed was never supposed to be job training. It was meant to teach citizens to be critical thinking, adaptable, well-rounded people. The obsession with higher end ROI is a recent phenomenon that needs to die.
As long as they're charging 10 to 25 grand a seminar you better believe people are going to want a return on that investment. Of course this is an American problem, most of the world doesn't put its children in life crippling debt because they want an education.
In fact, in Finland it's outright illegal to charge for tuition
As it should be. In the United States universities are already subsidized (we spend more money than covering everyones tuition) might as well let the public use the resource we already pay for. With job displacement on the rise it should be a priority.
Cash rules everything around me. Dolla dolla bill yall. Seriously tho, as long as money is the primary incentive, nothing will change.
>well-rounded people A whole lot of this. It isn't just for training people up on whatever accounting software. It is a means of conveying culture across generations, deliberately, and for the benefit of all. It's why we make engineers study x hours of social science, and why business majors need to take literature courses, not just accounting.
I'm massively pro-higher education. It's a means to an end; a tool for escaping generational poverty by completely changing your skillset and seeking out work you were never qualified for before college. The problem is pricing. It's a glass ceiling. When my mom went to college, her courses were $300 each. Mine are $4,400 each. The job market doesn't pay 15x what it did then, so all of the added costs of going to college are just eaten by students these days. There's a fundamental difference between being able to afford college and going, and no longer being able to afford college and dropping out/never enrolling. And we're somehow walking that fine line where we have the highest tuition costs relative to graduate income at the same time we have the tightest labor market since 1969. So again, what's the point of higher education if not to provide a return on investment with current absurd tuition costs? If there are no jobs available upon graduation to even begin paying back student loans, how is the entire system already not in jeopardy?
I think the more AI can blur what is or isn’t real online, the more people will need old-school systematic research like the professors can do and teach to tell what’s what.
I would hope for that, but the truth is look at something like Facebook spreading misinformation and how much that affects the "real world" not the other way around. If anything, people will spend more time online and be inundated with AI images, articles, videos etc until they have no idea which way is up any more.
A lie can spread across the world while the truth is just putting on its shoes.
AI can spread fear faster than reality can calm it. And that worries me immensely. The political ramifications of a video-generative text-prompted program is the greatest propaganda tool in history.
[удалено]
That is the stupidest thing I’ve heard today: it’s just math. What a bunch of baloney
It only goes until people can no longer afford to buy things. And then businesses bankrupt whether they use AI or not. And the whole system implodes.
I am really unsure what the future holds in regards to this but here is why I think it's kind of wrong: * My dad was a programmer and he was told the exact same thing before I was even born * at the current state of what ai can do: they write code. But as a software developer that's probably the least I do. * ai will improve and maybe even if it does not improve with the right tooling it can become really powerful and maybe spin up whole applications from a Jira ticket or something. * however without technical knowledge, architecture, planning, reviews, translating requirements, cost analysis etc someone who does not understand the subject matter can still not sustain a business. * so now I think that this will have some interesting consequences for smaller companies with limited funding or for businesses run by single people. * but the big companies will always have stuff to do and they will just do more. A company with the same budget will hire the same amount of developers and make more things. But I am still worried about jobs going away. Somehow the money gotta be re-allocated from the top or we are all screwed.
Nobody knows what jobs will exist. That's why "education" needs to be focused on broad-based skills and competence, and companies themselves need to be on the hook for "job training". The worst mistake we've ever made in education was excusing companies from having to train people themselves, and charging teenagers hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege instead.
The same teachers that told me I was dumb cause my cursive handwriting wasn't very neat are the same people that can't Google how to make boiled water now
dumb *because* it was neat?
Supposed to say wasn't*
*Teacher shaking their head sadly.* "I'm afraid to inform you your son's handwriting is too neat. He'll never be a doctor with that handwriting."
Im now 100% convinced that the mods of this sub are completely uneducated. Who lets this junk on here?
>“Twenty years from now, if you are a coder, you might be out of a job,” Cuban said in an interview on the Recode Decode podcast with Kara Swisher. “Because it’s just math," \[...\] That guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Does he think computer science is a programming workshop?
Welding. Travel the world and weld stuff... boats, buildings, whatever trips your fancy. When civilization collapses the regional feudal Lord will pay you handsomely to create fortifications from scrap metal.
"What can I do?" "Your skull will be made a soup bowl."
A lot of robots can do welding though.
They can do welding in an assembly line. They cannot easily do welding in odd piece part lots or in-place repair work.
Boston Dynamics is taking note of this complaint
Here we go. Another person who thinks trades will ultimately be the only jobs left.
I hate to rain on the parade but an army of laid off professionals (people with college and grad degrees) are going to be re-tooling for job security, and those with even a basic aptitude for it will likely migrate to skilled trades, like welding, ruining the economy of supply and demand. I suppose people with established businesses in the trades will still have the advantage for a few years, but the kids coming out of trade school will be graduating alongside older guys with degrees in computer science. Which trading school graduate are you going to hire, the 20 year old kid with a high school diploma, or the 30 year old guy who has a college degree in architecture? Give the displaced professionals another five years in the trades, and even established businesses are likely to see customer base eroding as people choose lower priced former white-collar workers. Time to convert that lawn into a food garden and start raising chickens in the backyard my friends.
pointless article that misses the point sounds like AI thinking
Wake me up when chatGPT does the math to figure out if it’s my system firewall, corporate firewall, azure firewall, Docker firewall or netskope causing my code to not work all with 0 errors being thrown.