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Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Ok let's give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I'm a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write "good" code, readable and so.

However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don't sleep at night because of this.

I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.

For now, I'm not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I'm sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive...

Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.

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[–] sosodev 17 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

You’re certainly not the only software developer worried about this. Many people across many fields are losing sleep thinking that machine learning is coming for their jobs. Realistically automation is going to eliminate the need for a ton of labor in the coming decades and software is included in that.

However, I am quite skeptical that neural nets are going to be reading and writing meaningful code at large scales in the near future. If they did we would have much bigger fish to fry because that’s the type of thing that could very well lead to the singularity.

I think you should spend more time using AI programming tools. That would let you see how primitive they really are in their current state and learn how to leverage them for yourself. It’s reasonable to be concerned that employees will need to use these tools in the near future. That’s because these are new, useful tools and software developers are generally expected to use all tooling that improves their productivity.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If they did we would have much bigger fish to fry because that’s the type of thing that could very well lead to the singularity.

Bingo

I won't say it won't happen soon. And it seems fairly likely to happen at some point. But at that point, so much of the world will have changed because of the other impacts of having AI, as it was developing to be able to automate thousands of things that are easier than programming, that "will I still have my programming job" may well not be the most pressing issue.

For the short term, the primary concern is programmers who can work much faster with AI replacing those that can't. SOCIAL DARWINISM FIGHT LET'S GO

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I think you should spend more time using AI programming tools. That would let you see how primitive they really are in their current state and learn how to leverage them for yourself.

I agree, sosodev. I think it would be wise to at least be aware of modern A.I.'s current capabilities and inadequacies, because honestly, you gotta know what you're dealing with.

If you ignore and avoid A.I. outright, every new iteration will come as a complete surprise, leaving you demoralized and feeling like shit. More importantly, there will be less time for you to adapt because you've been ignoring it when you could've been observing and planning. A.I. currently does not have that advantage, OP. You do.