5 ms·

In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

86 points by alnis 3y ago

nico 3y ago
I propose the complete opposite. Just surrender and enjoy the freedom. Of course you can always choose, just like you can choose to remember people’s phone numbers and driving directions. But you don’t need it.
- Syonyk 3y ago
  Freedom? You've got a weird definition of "freedom" if you think surrendering your autonomy to whoever happens to be running the services you rely on is "freedom." The problem is that long term, you won't have any idea if what it's spitting out is reasonable or not. We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand. Solving that with "more complexity we can't understand" doesn't seem a great solution, personally.
  - 13years 3y ago
    We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand. Indeed, aligns with my own thoughts on the impossibility of AI alignment. "However, each new layer and new tech that we add becomes a greater separation between what we can perceive and the complexity of the machine that becomes ever more incomprehensible. So we build ever more tech to help us understand the existing tech with each part being another component of complexity and potential problems." https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap
    - nico 3y ago
      It’s always going to be a back and forth. You can’t fixate something forever. We adapt to AI and AI adapts to us, and we keep iterating to cooperate. AI alignment as exposed on Wikipedia reads almost like condoning AI slavery.
  - nico 3y ago
    That is already case. Are you able to verify every single news article you read? Every source? Every journalist? All the info you read or hear? You can’t, so you just trust. And let go of the complexity, you don’t need to consciously manage it and you are still ok. Just like you trust your body to breath or to digest.
    - Syonyk 3y ago
      > You can’t, so you just trust. And let go of the complexity, you don’t need to consciously manage it and you are still ok. Or I can read a variety of sources from across the political spectrum to look for common elements, and I can try to avoid news articles and such in favor of longer form magazine articles written after the fact, and I can, and do, prefer to read "multiple books" on a topic instead of a simple article. I tell people to recommend three books on a topic they think I should learn, instead of an hour long video. By the time I've read a few books, I have a sense of what the authors agree and disagree on, and enough material to have a useful framework to try and hang the rest of the information I receive on. As far as complexity... my career is literally "dealing with the complexity of modern computers," from a variety of angles - so I can explain, in long form detail, just how badly broken the assumptions we put on computers are. And I use them to, fundamentally, do the same stuff I used a 486 for a couple decades ago. Write code, use basic webpages, talk to people, listen to music. The details have changed, but the category of "The tasks I use it for" really hasn't changed. We just have a couple orders of magnitude more CPU performance, RAM, disk, etc... to do the same things. Nobody blinks about a modern chat app being hundreds of megabytes, requiring a gig or two of RAM. Yet it's still used to send text to other people. I'm sorry, I reject your "Just relax and let the algorithms sweep over me!" approach to dealing with all this. That guarantees that I will feed myself with whatever is the most profitable to someone else, think that which is most profitable to someone else, etc. And that's not a way to live life.
      - nico 3y ago
        That is totally fine :)
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > Of course you can always choose, just like you can choose to remember people’s phone numbers and driving directions. But you don’t need it. You do need to if your phone can’t store certain phone numbers. And you will be worse at it if you don’t practice. Why can’t it store certain numbers? It’s impossible to know. Which phone numbers won’t it be able to store? It’s impossible to know.
msoad 3y ago
Much like the evolving layers of abstraction in technology, the necessity for individuals to master the intricate, underlying layers wanes as time progresses. The article brings to mind the analogy of Assembly programming; while there are undoubtedly experts in this domain whose contributions are indispensable, the majority of programmers can comfortably rely on higher-level abstractions without delving into the complexities of Assembly. As AI continues to advance, general-purpose programming appears to be following a similar trajectory. Individuals have the choice to either become one of the few specialists at that level or to embrace and harness the emerging abstractions, thereby unlocking greater efficiency and innovation in their endeavors. It is crucial to strike a balance, recognizing the importance of both mastery and leveraging AI to optimize our creative potential.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > while there are undoubtedly experts in this domain whose contributions are indispensable, the majority of programmers can comfortably rely on higher-level abstractions without delving into the complexities of Assembly. True. You don't need to be an assembly expert to be a great programmer, but I do think you need to have a solid understanding of how computers work all the way down to the CPU level in order to be a great programmer. And once you have that knowledge, assembly isn't a big hurdle anyway.
  - fauxpause_ 3y ago
    I don’t know anything about assembly and I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.
    - gwoolhurme 3y ago
      You’ve never learned about it in university? It’s still a semi important concept to learn how a compiler is kind of rewriting your code and optimizing things. In rare occasions it can mess things up when you use optimization options. Even in rare iOS and Android development cases and LLVM. Not exactly assembly but similar logic. I think that goes to the original point, if you are just trying to make something? Sure JavaScript is enough, but I don’t think that’s a good mindset to have if you are trying to be an expert in computing/computer science.
muhammadusman 3y ago
from the post: What I’ve realized is that there are tasks I’m willing to let AI handle, as this enables me to take on more ambitious projects. I've started doing this, getting some boilerplate or even throwaway code from ChatGPT helps me validate ideas quicker than if I wasn't using it.
13years 3y ago
I am an existentialist: I am perfectly comfortable in a world with no inherent meaning. Sheer existence and action brings me joy. I spend hours of my day tinkering with computers not because of utility, but for the pleasure it brings. I think if we could elicit this persons thoughts thoroughly we would find "meaning" underlying their perceived joy.
- dmazin 3y ago
  You can elicit my thoughts to your heart’s content. Of course there’s meaning. That’s different from inherent meaning (imbued into our world via a god or something).
  - 13years 3y ago
    But that is not what the author stated. They didn't allude to a god like meaning. They cited utility as an example of meaning for which they had no association.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    Generic expression, if not god. Satisfying my animalistic/primatistic/humanist emotional urges is the meaning of my life.
ilaksh 3y ago
I feel the same way I think. These days, I am happy when I am able to use GPT4 to complete a task faster or easier, but am also happy when I write some code "by myself". However, as far as the conclusion of the article. This "age" started only a few months ago. If you are going to call it an age, then the conclusion doesn't hold up. In the long term, programming "by hand" is likely to be similar to wood carving today. It will be an artistic rather than utilitarian pursuit. There are already multiple services and tools being built with the purpose of writing, deploying, and maintaining software in a 100% automated way using GPT3.5 and GPT4 and natural language specifications. I am building one of them. We can't assume that these recent efforts to freeze the progress of AI will be successful. So we should anticipate very significant improvements in performance over the next few years. Very shortly, everyone will realize that it is quite a huge waste of time and money to wait for a person to write code.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Funny to hear that. I'm closer to 60 than 50, and it never occurs to me to use GPT to write my code. So I wonder if it's partly based on how long someone has been doing something. In retrospect, I never copied code from StackOverflow either (have used it occasionally to get ideas, but mostly felt the code I'd find there just wasn't very good, or at least was too different from my personal coding style to be something I'd want to use verbatim. In the end I agree with you though -- if GPT code is "good enough" then paying people to write code will soon be looked at like using horse-drawn wagons to get from place to place.
  - aiappreciator 3y ago
    Old people do not like radical new technology. That's not a new observation. It doesn't benefit you to adapt to the new workflow, with all its initial inefficiencies and errors, since you don't get the long term benefit.
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    I'm 45. Programming to some degree for 37 years. Same thing I always ask -- are you using GPT4 or 3.5? Can be a very big difference. I think it really depends on what kind of programming you are doing as much as something like age. If you are trying to solve new problems in a new programming language or framework, then it will make more sense to get machine help than if you have a lot of experience in similar problems with the same language and libraries. But that equation changes with GPT4 and especially beyond. Eventually you will probably try GPT4/5/ whatever and start using it.
abledon 3y ago
Is every modern piece of software going to have `OPENAI_API_KEY` environment variable somewhere inside it ? uhoh
- popotamonga 3y ago
  Most of my customers already asking for it. They pay me i do it. Talk about job replacement, i'm raising rates by the day
- hgsgm 3y ago
  It's the same when you use FOSS backup software that asks you to input your S3 API key or your remote host ssh key. The only crucial difference is that we currently lack competition and self-ownes versions.
moonchrome 3y ago
All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$/month for a faster/less jittery copilot. ChatGPT is cheap at 20$/month but not even worth that price.
- 876978095789789 3y ago
  > all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations Are you using GPT3 or 4?
  - Ambitious1325 3y ago
    I'm using 4 and I still am constantly having to babysit it and challenge it to get a working result out of it. Don't get me wrong it is absolutely saving me time, but it is very much like being the teacher of a very fast typing junior dev.
  - throwbadubadu 3y ago
    4 and full agree and still confusedly wondering.. I know I will be shouted down, but what are all you "tech guys" doing in your daily biz, just glueing hyperdocumented boilerplate together and spitting out the same textbook examples, I don't get it.
    - 876978095789789 3y ago
      I simply asked whether they were using 3 or 4. I don't have access to 4 yet.
    - lm28469 3y ago
      That's my impression too, for every engineer with master or more you have 10 developers who just got out of a 3 weeks Javascript boot camp Of course they think Chatgpt is a revolution and will replace developers, that's because they don't see the bigger picture. If you work on anything remotely hard you already know coding is like 10% of the job and out of this only 10% is trivial and this is the only part got will get right
waboremo 3y ago
In a way, people who are concerned about skills atrophying are repeating the cycle of previous generations, shaking their fist at higher level programming languages or drawing digital images. How dare you not keep the skills of those who came before you! Time will not be so kind to this view. Some skills will atrophy, as article mentions we don't really care about road navigation anymore. But this is not a bad thing, we can focus our concerns elsewhere. Do you care exactly how your home is heated? Do you know how to maintain every part of your car? Do you spend every weekend keeping your skill on sewing up to date? Some of you might do all of these, but the point is we have let so many skills become things relegated to experts/tech that once used to be common. It's this relegation that has allowed experts to become even deeper experts in their niche. So I don't worry about skills atrophying at all. There will always be a new crop of nerds (affectionately) to obsess over whatever niche can exist.
- chupaolo 3y ago
  Exactly
- mrbombastic 3y ago
  Its not a bad thing until its a bad thing. There are certainly computer related tasks I am happy to relegate to AI, my concern is that we are already bad at maintaining software made by humans. If old school software engineering becomes an arcane art as everyone becomes prompt engineers and software starts to explode in complexity we better hope AI learns to maintain it too.
  - EarthLaunch 3y ago
    Maybe it'll be like hard goods; a blender you buy today is made of moulded plastic and lasts 5 years, instead of being metal and made to last 20 years. For 1% of the price.
    - nonethewiser 3y ago
      That is an excellent, albeit concerning analogy.
mattcantstop 3y ago
I’ve been using AI to teach me concepts, and it’s great at it. It can sometimes be wrong, so having familiarity with the topic is important in letting it teach you. But OpenAI knows programming languages really well. It’s been amazing at teaching me concepts. Then I go test it to verify its teachings. It is certainly making me more productive at learning.
penjelly 3y ago
chatgpt is hit or miss but ive had success using it either way. The hard part will be not relying too much on it. We already know that some devs wont read error messages and instead will just jump into debugging, i trust thisll only get moreso with the advent of chatgpt. However, this might actually save those devs, assuming chatgpt answers correctly. once you can upload images and ask it to answer based on that, itll be even more wild.
ducktective 3y ago
I asked GPT-4 for the Imagemagick command to make the white parts of an image, semi-transparent. It generated a command that made the fuzzy white parts [+1 on fuzzy] fully transparent [bad]. I told it that the result is not semi-transparent. It apologized and gave me another command that produced a blank image. In another case a grayish image. I told it this is not what I wanted, and it just looped here saying I'm sorry and giving me one of these above solutions. As a matter of fact, this looping back and forth between half-working and non-working solutions is something that I've experienced every time when the first result was not what I asked... Aside from the possibility of "emerging intelligence", I don't think this is the way to the AGI.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Did you try pasting in the relevant reference sections for those ImageMagick commands/options?
  - ducktective 3y ago
    No, I didn't know exactly what commands were useful. And I'm not subscribed to the pro version so pasting the whole documentation would cost a lot.
- p1necone 3y ago
  > Aside from the possibility of "emerging intelligence", I don't think this is the way to the AGI. My intuition is that this is the only way to create AGI. I don't think anyone is ever going to carefully intentionally construct an AGI, it's almost certainly going to emerge from something conceptually fairly simple. I don't think it's impossible that our own brains are also basically just a big statistical prediction model too. Maybe AGI just requires our models to be 10/100/1000x as good. Or our training data needs to be broader in a qualitative way rather than a quantitative way that we haven't quite worked out yet.
  - ducktective 3y ago
    Can you prove Fermat last theorem via giving a high parameter LLM a very large amount of mathematical knowledge?
killjoywashere 3y ago
I feel like, if anything, AI will push people to upskill. A) it's obviously necessary, B) you will increasingly find yourself increasingly identifying edge cases, C) if you're in an exposed field (e.g. diagnostic medicine) you will find fewer people coming into the field, so there won't be a lot of backfills in the workforce.
comment_ran 3y ago
> With ChatGPT, it’s too easy to implement ideas without understanding the underlying concepts or even what the individual lines in a program do. Doing so for unfamiliar tasks means failing to learn something new, while doing so for known tasks leads to skill atrophy. Imagine this: A hypothetical "GPT 7" tech can effortlessly create a starship capable of shuttling you from Earth to Mars. It's so reliable that after 100 uses, it never fails. Perfect flights, precise landings, and zero issues. All it takes is a simple command prompt "design a starship to Mars". In this scenario, is there a need to learn the intricacies of aerodynamics, gravitational forces, or rocket science? The notion here is to liberate ourselves from limitations and focus on what truly interests us. That's the end game.
- cheald 3y ago
  Someone has to. The "humanity designed tech that it became reliant on and forgot how to reimplement, so when it broke down nobody could fix it" is a recurring scifi trope.
- m0llusk 3y ago
  Frank Herbert's Destination: Void arguably takes one through such a scenario, a highly recommended read!
dahwolf 3y ago
"The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects. In the past I’ve had plenty of ideas for projects which I’ve ruled out because they would take a day—or days—of work to get to a point where they’re useful. I have enough other stuff to build already!" If these projects are somehow meaningful to you on a personal level or in a small circle, great. However, let's not look past the fact that pretty much every human will achieve this super productivity. Hence, in a broader sense most projects will not be interesting, competitive...or more likely...looked at because of sheer abundance. The other thought I'm having is regarding the rate of change in mastering AI. It's frankly inhumane. You can work in tech and thrive on a tech stack for some 5 years, sometimes 10. Working the AI...whatever you learn is outdated the next week.

86 points by alnis 3y ago

nico 3y ago

I propose the complete opposite. Just surrender and enjoy the freedom. Of course you can always choose, just like you can choose to remember people’s phone numbers and driving directions. But you don’t need it.

Syonyk 3y ago
Freedom? You've got a weird definition of "freedom" if you think surrendering your autonomy to whoever happens to be running the services you rely on is "freedom." The problem is that long term, you won't have any idea if what it's spitting out is reasonable or not. We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand. Solving that with "more complexity we can't understand" doesn't seem a great solution, personally.
- 13years 3y ago
  We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand. Indeed, aligns with my own thoughts on the impossibility of AI alignment. "However, each new layer and new tech that we add becomes a greater separation between what we can perceive and the complexity of the machine that becomes ever more incomprehensible. So we build ever more tech to help us understand the existing tech with each part being another component of complexity and potential problems." https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap
  - nico 3y ago
    It’s always going to be a back and forth. You can’t fixate something forever. We adapt to AI and AI adapts to us, and we keep iterating to cooperate. AI alignment as exposed on Wikipedia reads almost like condoning AI slavery.
- nico 3y ago
  That is already case. Are you able to verify every single news article you read? Every source? Every journalist? All the info you read or hear? You can’t, so you just trust. And let go of the complexity, you don’t need to consciously manage it and you are still ok. Just like you trust your body to breath or to digest.
  - Syonyk 3y ago
    > You can’t, so you just trust. And let go of the complexity, you don’t need to consciously manage it and you are still ok. Or I can read a variety of sources from across the political spectrum to look for common elements, and I can try to avoid news articles and such in favor of longer form magazine articles written after the fact, and I can, and do, prefer to read "multiple books" on a topic instead of a simple article. I tell people to recommend three books on a topic they think I should learn, instead of an hour long video. By the time I've read a few books, I have a sense of what the authors agree and disagree on, and enough material to have a useful framework to try and hang the rest of the information I receive on. As far as complexity... my career is literally "dealing with the complexity of modern computers," from a variety of angles - so I can explain, in long form detail, just how badly broken the assumptions we put on computers are. And I use them to, fundamentally, do the same stuff I used a 486 for a couple decades ago. Write code, use basic webpages, talk to people, listen to music. The details have changed, but the category of "The tasks I use it for" really hasn't changed. We just have a couple orders of magnitude more CPU performance, RAM, disk, etc... to do the same things. Nobody blinks about a modern chat app being hundreds of megabytes, requiring a gig or two of RAM. Yet it's still used to send text to other people. I'm sorry, I reject your "Just relax and let the algorithms sweep over me!" approach to dealing with all this. That guarantees that I will feed myself with whatever is the most profitable to someone else, think that which is most profitable to someone else, etc. And that's not a way to live life.
    - nico 3y ago
      That is totally fine :)
nonethewiser 3y ago
> Of course you can always choose, just like you can choose to remember people’s phone numbers and driving directions. But you don’t need it. You do need to if your phone can’t store certain phone numbers. And you will be worse at it if you don’t practice. Why can’t it store certain numbers? It’s impossible to know. Which phone numbers won’t it be able to store? It’s impossible to know.

msoad 3y ago

Much like the evolving layers of abstraction in technology, the necessity for individuals to master the intricate, underlying layers wanes as time progresses. The article brings to mind the analogy of Assembly programming; while there are undoubtedly experts in this domain whose contributions are indispensable, the majority of programmers can comfortably rely on higher-level abstractions without delving into the complexities of Assembly. As AI continues to advance, general-purpose programming appears to be following a similar trajectory. Individuals have the choice to either become one of the few specialists at that level or to embrace and harness the emerging abstractions, thereby unlocking greater efficiency and innovation in their endeavors. It is crucial to strike a balance, recognizing the importance of both mastery and leveraging AI to optimize our creative potential.

JohnFen 3y ago
> while there are undoubtedly experts in this domain whose contributions are indispensable, the majority of programmers can comfortably rely on higher-level abstractions without delving into the complexities of Assembly. True. You don't need to be an assembly expert to be a great programmer, but I do think you need to have a solid understanding of how computers work all the way down to the CPU level in order to be a great programmer. And once you have that knowledge, assembly isn't a big hurdle anyway.
- fauxpause_ 3y ago
  I don’t know anything about assembly and I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.
  - gwoolhurme 3y ago
    You’ve never learned about it in university? It’s still a semi important concept to learn how a compiler is kind of rewriting your code and optimizing things. In rare occasions it can mess things up when you use optimization options. Even in rare iOS and Android development cases and LLVM. Not exactly assembly but similar logic. I think that goes to the original point, if you are just trying to make something? Sure JavaScript is enough, but I don’t think that’s a good mindset to have if you are trying to be an expert in computing/computer science.

muhammadusman 3y ago

from the post: What I’ve realized is that there are tasks I’m willing to let AI handle, as this enables me to take on more ambitious projects. I've started doing this, getting some boilerplate or even throwaway code from ChatGPT helps me validate ideas quicker than if I wasn't using it.

13years 3y ago

I am an existentialist: I am perfectly comfortable in a world with no inherent meaning. Sheer existence and action brings me joy. I spend hours of my day tinkering with computers not because of utility, but for the pleasure it brings. I think if we could elicit this persons thoughts thoroughly we would find "meaning" underlying their perceived joy.

dmazin 3y ago
You can elicit my thoughts to your heart’s content. Of course there’s meaning. That’s different from inherent meaning (imbued into our world via a god or something).
- 13years 3y ago
  But that is not what the author stated. They didn't allude to a god like meaning. They cited utility as an example of meaning for which they had no association.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Generic expression, if not god. Satisfying my animalistic/primatistic/humanist emotional urges is the meaning of my life.

ilaksh 3y ago

I feel the same way I think. These days, I am happy when I am able to use GPT4 to complete a task faster or easier, but am also happy when I write some code "by myself". However, as far as the conclusion of the article. This "age" started only a few months ago. If you are going to call it an age, then the conclusion doesn't hold up. In the long term, programming "by hand" is likely to be similar to wood carving today. It will be an artistic rather than utilitarian pursuit. There are already multiple services and tools being built with the purpose of writing, deploying, and maintaining software in a 100% automated way using GPT3.5 and GPT4 and natural language specifications. I am building one of them. We can't assume that these recent efforts to freeze the progress of AI will be successful. So we should anticipate very significant improvements in performance over the next few years. Very shortly, everyone will realize that it is quite a huge waste of time and money to wait for a person to write code.

SoftTalker 3y ago
Funny to hear that. I'm closer to 60 than 50, and it never occurs to me to use GPT to write my code. So I wonder if it's partly based on how long someone has been doing something. In retrospect, I never copied code from StackOverflow either (have used it occasionally to get ideas, but mostly felt the code I'd find there just wasn't very good, or at least was too different from my personal coding style to be something I'd want to use verbatim. In the end I agree with you though -- if GPT code is "good enough" then paying people to write code will soon be looked at like using horse-drawn wagons to get from place to place.
- aiappreciator 3y ago
  Old people do not like radical new technology. That's not a new observation. It doesn't benefit you to adapt to the new workflow, with all its initial inefficiencies and errors, since you don't get the long term benefit.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  I'm 45. Programming to some degree for 37 years. Same thing I always ask -- are you using GPT4 or 3.5? Can be a very big difference. I think it really depends on what kind of programming you are doing as much as something like age. If you are trying to solve new problems in a new programming language or framework, then it will make more sense to get machine help than if you have a lot of experience in similar problems with the same language and libraries. But that equation changes with GPT4 and especially beyond. Eventually you will probably try GPT4/5/ whatever and start using it.

abledon 3y ago

Is every modern piece of software going to have `OPENAI_API_KEY` environment variable somewhere inside it ? uhoh

popotamonga 3y ago
Most of my customers already asking for it. They pay me i do it. Talk about job replacement, i'm raising rates by the day
hgsgm 3y ago
It's the same when you use FOSS backup software that asks you to input your S3 API key or your remote host ssh key. The only crucial difference is that we currently lack competition and self-ownes versions.

moonchrome 3y ago

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$/month for a faster/less jittery copilot. ChatGPT is cheap at 20$/month but not even worth that price.

876978095789789 3y ago
> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations Are you using GPT3 or 4?
- Ambitious1325 3y ago
  I'm using 4 and I still am constantly having to babysit it and challenge it to get a working result out of it. Don't get me wrong it is absolutely saving me time, but it is very much like being the teacher of a very fast typing junior dev.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  4 and full agree and still confusedly wondering.. I know I will be shouted down, but what are all you "tech guys" doing in your daily biz, just glueing hyperdocumented boilerplate together and spitting out the same textbook examples, I don't get it.
  - 876978095789789 3y ago
    I simply asked whether they were using 3 or 4. I don't have access to 4 yet.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    That's my impression too, for every engineer with master or more you have 10 developers who just got out of a 3 weeks Javascript boot camp Of course they think Chatgpt is a revolution and will replace developers, that's because they don't see the bigger picture. If you work on anything remotely hard you already know coding is like 10% of the job and out of this only 10% is trivial and this is the only part got will get right

waboremo 3y ago

In a way, people who are concerned about skills atrophying are repeating the cycle of previous generations, shaking their fist at higher level programming languages or drawing digital images. How dare you not keep the skills of those who came before you! Time will not be so kind to this view. Some skills will atrophy, as article mentions we don't really care about road navigation anymore. But this is not a bad thing, we can focus our concerns elsewhere. Do you care exactly how your home is heated? Do you know how to maintain every part of your car? Do you spend every weekend keeping your skill on sewing up to date? Some of you might do all of these, but the point is we have let so many skills become things relegated to experts/tech that once used to be common. It's this relegation that has allowed experts to become even deeper experts in their niche. So I don't worry about skills atrophying at all. There will always be a new crop of nerds (affectionately) to obsess over whatever niche can exist.

chupaolo 3y ago
Exactly
mrbombastic 3y ago
Its not a bad thing until its a bad thing. There are certainly computer related tasks I am happy to relegate to AI, my concern is that we are already bad at maintaining software made by humans. If old school software engineering becomes an arcane art as everyone becomes prompt engineers and software starts to explode in complexity we better hope AI learns to maintain it too.
- EarthLaunch 3y ago
  Maybe it'll be like hard goods; a blender you buy today is made of moulded plastic and lasts 5 years, instead of being metal and made to last 20 years. For 1% of the price.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    That is an excellent, albeit concerning analogy.

mattcantstop 3y ago

I’ve been using AI to teach me concepts, and it’s great at it. It can sometimes be wrong, so having familiarity with the topic is important in letting it teach you. But OpenAI knows programming languages really well. It’s been amazing at teaching me concepts. Then I go test it to verify its teachings. It is certainly making me more productive at learning.

penjelly 3y ago

chatgpt is hit or miss but ive had success using it either way. The hard part will be not relying too much on it. We already know that some devs wont read error messages and instead will just jump into debugging, i trust thisll only get moreso with the advent of chatgpt. However, this might actually save those devs, assuming chatgpt answers correctly. once you can upload images and ask it to answer based on that, itll be even more wild.

ducktective 3y ago

I asked GPT-4 for the Imagemagick command to make the white parts of an image, semi-transparent. It generated a command that made the fuzzy white parts [+1 on fuzzy] fully transparent [bad]. I told it that the result is not semi-transparent. It apologized and gave me another command that produced a blank image. In another case a grayish image. I told it this is not what I wanted, and it just looped here saying I'm sorry and giving me one of these above solutions. As a matter of fact, this looping back and forth between half-working and non-working solutions is something that I've experienced every time when the first result was not what I asked... Aside from the possibility of "emerging intelligence", I don't think this is the way to the AGI.

ilaksh 3y ago
Did you try pasting in the relevant reference sections for those ImageMagick commands/options?
- ducktective 3y ago
  No, I didn't know exactly what commands were useful. And I'm not subscribed to the pro version so pasting the whole documentation would cost a lot.
p1necone 3y ago
> Aside from the possibility of "emerging intelligence", I don't think this is the way to the AGI. My intuition is that this is the only way to create AGI. I don't think anyone is ever going to carefully intentionally construct an AGI, it's almost certainly going to emerge from something conceptually fairly simple. I don't think it's impossible that our own brains are also basically just a big statistical prediction model too. Maybe AGI just requires our models to be 10/100/1000x as good. Or our training data needs to be broader in a qualitative way rather than a quantitative way that we haven't quite worked out yet.
- ducktective 3y ago
  Can you prove Fermat last theorem via giving a high parameter LLM a very large amount of mathematical knowledge?

killjoywashere 3y ago

I feel like, if anything, AI will push people to upskill. A) it's obviously necessary, B) you will increasingly find yourself increasingly identifying edge cases, C) if you're in an exposed field (e.g. diagnostic medicine) you will find fewer people coming into the field, so there won't be a lot of backfills in the workforce.

comment_ran 3y ago

> With ChatGPT, it’s too easy to implement ideas without understanding the underlying concepts or even what the individual lines in a program do. Doing so for unfamiliar tasks means failing to learn something new, while doing so for known tasks leads to skill atrophy. Imagine this: A hypothetical "GPT 7" tech can effortlessly create a starship capable of shuttling you from Earth to Mars. It's so reliable that after 100 uses, it never fails. Perfect flights, precise landings, and zero issues. All it takes is a simple command prompt "design a starship to Mars". In this scenario, is there a need to learn the intricacies of aerodynamics, gravitational forces, or rocket science? The notion here is to liberate ourselves from limitations and focus on what truly interests us. That's the end game.

cheald 3y ago
Someone has to. The "humanity designed tech that it became reliant on and forgot how to reimplement, so when it broke down nobody could fix it" is a recurring scifi trope.
m0llusk 3y ago
Frank Herbert's Destination: Void arguably takes one through such a scenario, a highly recommended read!

dahwolf 3y ago

"The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects. In the past I’ve had plenty of ideas for projects which I’ve ruled out because they would take a day—or days—of work to get to a point where they’re useful. I have enough other stuff to build already!" If these projects are somehow meaningful to you on a personal level or in a small circle, great. However, let's not look past the fact that pretty much every human will achieve this super productivity. Hence, in a broader sense most projects will not be interesting, competitive...or more likely...looked at because of sheer abundance. The other thought I'm having is regarding the rate of change in mastering AI. It's frankly inhumane. You can work in tech and thrive on a tech stack for some 5 years, sometimes 10. Working the AI...whatever you learn is outdated the next week.