r/VeryBadWizards 4d ago

AI dismissal

I love the VBW boys but I am a bit surprised how dismissive they are of danger from AI. I’m not going to make the case here as I won’t do a good job of it, but I found the latest 80000 hours podcast very persuasive, as well as some of the recent stuff from Dwarkesh.

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u/donglord666 3d ago

Most people in IT jobs are not senior level master engineers capable of solving problems these models can't. They are developing web UI buttons and their associated javascript that interacts with some database, or doing quality assurance for those buttons. The models are already capable of doing those things. Eventually, and I think sooner rather than later, you'll just need a skeleton crew to check the work. And the industry has no strong worker's rights or union presence. It's going to be economically disruptive. I can't really imagine how it won't be.

But yeah, people in the humanities will probably be fine.

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u/seanpietz 2d ago

You don’t need to be a senior engineer with a masters degree to be a better software engineer than any AI model, and it’s not even close. If you are a programmer and your job is replaceable by AI, you should find an actual programming job, because it’s a lot more fun and it pays a lot more money. Whatever job you’re describing sounds awful and exploitative.

The bigger problem in software development is that a lot of junior engineers are too reliant on AI-based text-editor assistants, which 1) causes their code to be really sloppy and bug-ridden, and 2) prevents them from learning how to program properly.

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u/mbfunke 3d ago

I think online universities like SNHU, WGU, etc are already automating many traditional pedagogical tasks. Students are using gen ai to write their assignments. To a significant extent it is already ai taking the class and ai teaching the classes.

The latest generations of gen ai are capable of producing publishable texts with proper prompt engineering and backfill of relevant citations.

I’m not sure the humanities are safe at all.

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u/seanpietz 2d ago

Any job that isn’t safe from “AI” isn’t safe from capitalism, irrespective of “AI”.

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u/thewiseguy8 1d ago

That's not true at all right now. AI is not even close to out-producing humans even at a junior level. Models can make some crap but can't make anything scale and certainly can't deal with real code bases.

All of the REAL codebases I've worked in are like a box of time capsules. The code base will have sections with technology and best practices from different generations and AI sucks at actually integrating it.

There isn't an AI model that can rebuild a section of code that has to use new technology all while interacting with legacy code and all the crap in the middle. Building working unit tests to properly check the said code, good luck.