My name is Rachel. I'm the founder of company whose existence is contingent on the continued existence, employment, and indeed competitive employment of software engineers, so I have as much skin in this game as you do.
I worry about this a lot. I don't know what the chances are that AI wipes out developer jobs [EDIT: to clarify, in the sense that they become either much rarer or much lower-paid, which is sufficient] within a timescale relevant to my work (say, 3-5 years), but they aren't zero. Gun to my head, I peg that chance at perhaps 20%. That makes me more bearish on AI than the typical person in the tech world - Manifold thinks AI surpasses human researchers by the end of 2028 at 48% [1], for example - but 20% is most certainly not zero.
That thought stresses me out. It's not just an existential threat to my business over which I have no control, it's a threat against which I cannot realistically hedge and which may disrupt or even destroy my life. It bothers me.
But I do my work anyway, for a couple of reasons.
One, progress on AI in posts like this is always going to be inflated. This is a marketing post. It's a post OpenAI wrote, and posted, to generate additional hype, business, and investment. There is some justified skepticism further down this thread, but even if you couldn't find a reason to be skeptical, you ought to be skeptical by default of such posts. I am an abnormally honest person by Silicon Valley founder standards, and even I cherry pick my marketing blogs (I just don't outright make stuff up for them).
Two, if AI surpasses a good software engineer, it probably surpasses just about everything else. This isn't a guarantee, but good software engineering is already one of the more challenging professions for humans, and there's no particular reason to think progress would stop exactly at making SWEs obsolete. So there's no good alternative here. There's no other knowledge work you could pivot to that would be a decent defense against what you're worried about. So you may as well play the hand you've got, even in the knowledge that it might lose.
Three, in the world where AI does surpass a good software engineer, there's a decent chance it surpasses a good ML engineer in the near future. And once it does that, we're in completely uncharted territory. Even if more extreme singularity-like scenarios don't come to pass, it doesn't need to be a singularity to become significantly superhuman to the point that almost nothing about the world in which we live continues to make any sense. So again, you lack any good alternatives.
And four: *if this is the last era in which human beings matter, I want to take advantage of it!* I may be among the very last entrepreneurs or businesswomen in the history of the human race! If I don't do this now, I'll never get the chance! If you want to be a software engineer, do it now, because you might never get the chance again.
It's totally reasonable to be scared, or stressed, or uncertain. Fear and stress and uncertainty are parts of life in far less scary times than these. But all you can do is play the hand you're dealt, and try not to be totally miserable while you're playing it.
My name is Rachel. I'm the founder of company whose existence is contingent on the continued existence, employment, and indeed competitive employment of software engineers, so I have as much skin in this game as you do.
I worry about this a lot. I don't know what the chances are that AI wipes out developer jobs [EDIT: to clarify, in the sense that they become either much rarer or much lower-paid, which is sufficient] within a timescale relevant to my work (say, 3-5 years), but they aren't zero. Gun to my head, I peg that chance at perhaps 20%. That makes me more bearish on AI than the typical person in the tech world - Manifold thinks AI surpasses human researchers by the end of 2028 at 48% [1], for example - but 20% is most certainly not zero.
That thought stresses me out. It's not just an existential threat to my business over which I have no control, it's a threat against which I cannot realistically hedge and which may disrupt or even destroy my life. It bothers me.
But I do my work anyway, for a couple of reasons.
One, progress on AI in posts like this is always going to be inflated. This is a marketing post. It's a post OpenAI wrote, and posted, to generate additional hype, business, and investment. There is some justified skepticism further down this thread, but even if you couldn't find a reason to be skeptical, you ought to be skeptical by default of such posts. I am an abnormally honest person by Silicon Valley founder standards, and even I cherry pick my marketing blogs (I just don't outright make stuff up for them).
Two, if AI surpasses a good software engineer, it probably surpasses just about everything else. This isn't a guarantee, but good software engineering is already one of the more challenging professions for humans, and there's no particular reason to think progress would stop exactly at making SWEs obsolete. So there's no good alternative here. There's no other knowledge work you could pivot to that would be a decent defense against what you're worried about. So you may as well play the hand you've got, even in the knowledge that it might lose.
Three, in the world where AI does surpass a good software engineer, there's a decent chance it surpasses a good ML engineer in the near future. And once it does that, we're in completely uncharted territory. Even if more extreme singularity-like scenarios don't come to pass, it doesn't need to be a singularity to become significantly superhuman to the point that almost nothing about the world in which we live continues to make any sense. So again, you lack any good alternatives.
And four: *if this is the last era in which human beings matter, I want to take advantage of it!* I may be among the very last entrepreneurs or businesswomen in the history of the human race! If I don't do this now, I'll never get the chance! If you want to be a software engineer, do it now, because you might never get the chance again.
It's totally reasonable to be scared, or stressed, or uncertain. Fear and stress and uncertainty are parts of life in far less scary times than these. But all you can do is play the hand you're dealt, and try not to be totally miserable while you're playing it.
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[1] https://manifold.markets/Royf214/will-ai-surpass-humans-in-c...