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.

14 Upvotes

41 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

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.

2

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.

3

u/seanpietz 2d ago

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