Guy who buys programmers and sells AI thinks he can sell more AI and stop buying programmers.
This is up there with Uber pretending self driving cars will make them rich.
I mean… self driving cars probably will. Just not as soon as they think. My guess, at least another decade.
Not until a self driving car can safely handle all manner of edge cases thrown at it, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. The cars would need to be able to recognize situations that may not be explicitly programmed into it, and figure out a safe way to deal with it.
there will be a massive building in like india with many thousand of atrociously paid workers donning VR goggles who spend their long hours constantly Quantum Leap finding themselves in traumatizing last second emergency situations that the AI gives up on. Instantly they slam on the brakes as hard as they can. They drink tea. there’s suicide netting everywhere. they were the lowest bidder this quarter.
I wish I could give this comment more than a simple upvote. I want to mail you a freshly baked cinnamon bun.
As someone said on this thread: as soon as they can convince legislators, even if they are murder machines, capital will go for it.
Borrowing from my favorite movie: “it’s just a glitch”.
I doubt it. The liability would be far too great. Ambulance chasing lawyers would salivate at the chance to represent the families of pedestrians struck and killed by buggy self driving cars. Those capitalists don’t want endless years of class action cases tying up their profits.
When was the last time a corporation got anything other than a slap on the wrist and a small donation to the government just so they could keep doing what they’re doing?
Like Boeing. As much as I hate people saying dumb shit about a company they don’t know much of anything about, Boeing is the epitome of what you said. A company getting a small slap on the wrist for gross negligence in the name of profit. Especially because of all the goodies they develope for the US Federal Government. And since they are a world wide company our government isn’t the only one. They know they reside in a place of power because they fill a hole in an industry that basically has to be filled. And people want to try to bankrupt them with some weird ideas about voting with their dollar. But that’s nonsense.
People don’t understand about how they build planes not to sell but to lease. How these types of leases keep their customers paying out the nose for an asset they don’t own, and responsible for the maintenance of that asset until it’s time to upgrade. They cornered the market on enshitification long before the likes of Microsoft and Google, and they have mastered the art of it.
Tesla or Uber or whoever wish they could do what Boeing has been doing for decades. People have this rose tinted glasses view of what Boeing “used to be” when it was “run by engineers” etc. That’s hilarious to me. Back in the day they hedged their bets in a race to the bottom to develop a two engined plane that wouldn’t catastrophically fail and fall out of the sky if it lost an engine so they could skirt worldwide federal regulations that required planes to have more than two engines. This added to upkeep and fuel costs making it untenable and creating air travel that was incredibly expensive. And their engineers managed it, so they played the long game, basically allowing them to develop planes that were more fuel efficient and cost effective to maintenance meaning their customers could afford to buy more of them by providing air travel opportunities to more people.
You know what we got from that? Shittier seating arrangements, poorly manufactured planes, and baggage fees out the whazoo in addition to ever rising ticket prices for air travel.
Tbf human operated cars are also murder machines, we just are more amenable to tolerating it
Alternatively measures could be put in place to eliminate certain edge cases. You can see similar concepts in places with separate infrastructure for things like busses or HOV lanes. Places you could still ostensibly allow “regular” vehicles to travel but limit/eliminate pedestrians or merging.
Abolish snowfall
We’re working on it, although for some parts of the world we will need to go through periods of increased snowfall to get there.
Plus, as soon as the cars can drive themselves people will stop needing Uber in many cases.
No parking? Just tell your car to go park on a street 10 blocks away.
Drunk? Car drives itself while you sleep.
Going to the airport? Car drops you off and returns home. Car also picks you up when you are back.
This is combined with the fact that people will do more disgusting things in an Uber without the driver there. If you have ever driven for Uber, you know that 10% of people are trying to eat or drink in the car. They are going to spill and it’s going to end up like the back of a bus.
Not sure if we’re agreeing and saying exactly the same thing here, but Uber’s business model is to get suckers who are bad at math to own the cars. Uber’s business model does not work if they have to own their own cars. Self-driving Uber doesn’t work because Uber would have to own the cars and therefore has to cover vehicle insurance, vehicle depreciation, and so on out of its own margin.
Just like all humans can do right now, right?
I never see any humans on the rode staring at their phone and driving like shit.
The problem with self-driving cars isn’t that it’s worse than human drivers on average, it’s that it’s SO INCREDIBLY BAD when it’s wrong that no company would ever assume the liability for the worst of its mistakes.
But if the average is better, then we’re will clearly win by using it. I’m not following the logic of tracking the worst case scenarios as opposed to the average.
Average is better means fewer incidents overall. But when there are incidents, the damages for those incidents tend to be much worse. This means the victims are more likely to lawyer up and go after the company responsible for the AI that was driving, and that means that the company who makes the self-driving software better be prepared to pay for those worst case scenarios, which will now be 100% their fault.
Uber can avoid liability for crashes caused by their human drivers. They won’t be able to do the same when their fleet is AI. And when that happens, AI sensibilities will be measured my human metrics because courts are run by humans. The mistakes that they make will be VERY expensive ones, because a minor glitch can turn an autonomous vehicle from the safest driving experience possible to a rogue machine with zero sense of self-preservation. That liability is not worth the cost savings of getting rid of human drivers yet, and it won’t be for a very long time.
Those self-driving cars are called trains. They already can be self-driving. In a situation where the computational complexity and required precision are somewhat controlled, that is, on train tracks.
Their accident rate continues to decrease and things like quorum sensing and platooning are going to push them to be better than humans. You’re never going to have a perfect system that never has accidents, but if you’re substantially better than humans in accidents per mile driven and you’re dramatically improving throughput and reducing traffic through V2X, it’s going to make sense to fully transition.
I imagine some east Asian countries will be the first to transition and then the rest of the world will begrudgingly accept it once the advantages become clear and the traditional car driving zealots die off.
The robot taxi from Total Recall came to mind while reading your reply. Our future is almost assuredly dystopian.
“handle” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The signs are already there that all of these edge cases will just be programmed as “safely pull over and stop until conditions change or a human takes control”. Which isn’t a small task in itself, but it’s a lot easier than figuring out to continue (e.g.) on ice.
Way longer. Roads will have to be designed and maintained with them in mind.
Maybe, or maybe like harnessing fusion it will always be “just a few more years away!”
Self driving taxis are definitely happening, but the people getting rich in a gold rush are the people selling shovels.
Uber has no structural advantage because their unique value proposition is the army of cheap drivers.
We’re a century away from self-driving cars that can handle snowfall
Just this year farmers with self-driving tractors got screwed because a solar flare made GPS inaccurate and so tractors went wild because they were programmed with the assumption of GPS being 100% reliable and accurate with no way to override
I’m right there with you, but I also remember hearing that this time last decade.
I hope this helps people understand that you don’t get to be CEO by being smart or working hard. It’s all influence and gossip all the way up.
In fact, being stupid is probably a benefit.
Yep if I had that kind of money and surrounded by like minded people I’d agree. Unfortunately I’m cursed with a rational mind 🙃🙃🙃
Current AI is good at compressing knowledge.
Best job role: information assistant or virtual secretary.
Uh huh.
20 years ago at a trade show, a new module based visual coding tool was introduced in my field which claimed “You’ll never need another programmer”.
Oddly enough, I still have a job.
The tools have gotten better, but I still write code every day because procedural programming is still the best way to do things.
It is just now reaching the point that we can do some small to medium scale projects with plug and play systems, but only with very specific equipment and configurations.
20 years ago while learning web development Dreamweaver was going to supposedly eliminate the need for code on websites too. lol
But sadly, the dream of eliminating us seems like it will never die
20 years ago at a trade show, a new module based visual coding tool was introduced in my field which claimed “You’ll never need another programmer”.
It’s because people trying to sell silver bullets is nothing new.
The pace of change is about every five years, and some elements are always in transition.
All in one turn key solutions are always one to two cycles behind, so may work great with the stuff I’m already replacing.
I think these are honest attempts to simplify, but by the time they have it sorted its obsolete. If I have to build modules anyway to work with new equipemnt, might as well just write all the code in my native language.
These also tend to be attempts at all in one devices, requiring you to use devices only compatible with those subsystems. I want to be able to use best tech from what ever manufacturer. New and fancy almost always means a command line interface, which again means coding.
“Full-self-driving”-soon?
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We are now X+14 months away from AI replacing your job in X months.
I admit that I work faster with AI help and if people get more stuff done in less time there might be less billable hours in the future for us. But AI did not replace me, a 10 times cheaper dude from India did.
Yeah hows that goin’?
It can write really buggy Python code, so… Yeah, seems promising
It does a frequently shitty job of writing docstrings for simple functions, too!
Almost like dealing with real engineers…
It does great with common code patterns that it can just drop in place. 99.9% Artificial, 0.01% intelligence.
When I last tried to let some AI write actual code, it didn’t even compile 🙂 And another time when it actually compiled it was trash anyway and I had to spend as much time fixing it, as I would have spent writing it myself in the first place.
So far I can only use AI as a glorified search engine 😅
I managed to get an AI to build pong in assembly. Are are pretty cool things, but not sci-fi level just yet, but I didn’t just say “build pong in assembly”, I have to hand hold it a little bit. You need to be a programmer to understand how to guide the AI to do the task.
That was something very simple, I doubt that you can get it to do more complex tasks without a more lot of back and forth.
To give you an example I had a hard time getting it to understand that the ball needed to bounce off at an angle if intercepted at an angle, it just kept snapping it to 90° increments. I couldn’t fix it myself because I don’t really know assembly well enough to really get into the weeds with it so I was sort of stuck until I was finally able to get the AI to do what I wanted it to. I sort of understood what the problem was, there was a number somewhere in the system and it needed to make the number negative, but it just kept setting the number to a value. A non-programmer wouldn’t really understand that’s what the problem was and so they wouldn’t be able to explain to the AI how to fix it.
I believe AI is going to become an unimaginably useful tool in the future and we probably don’t really yet understand how useful it’s going to be. But unless they actually make AGI it isn’t going to replace programmers.
If they do make AGI all bets are off it will probably go build a Dyson Sphere or something at that point and we will have no way of understanding what it’s doing.
Yeah, I don’t see AI replacing any developers working on an existing, moderately complex codebase. It can help speed up some tasks, but it’s far from being able to take a requirement and turn it into code that edits the right places and doesn’t break everything.
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I haven’t tried to scaffold whole projects, but otherwise that lines up with my usage of AI copilots so far.
At this point, they’re good at helping you interface with the built in commands and maybe some specific APIs, but it won’t do your thinking for you. It just removes the need for some specific base-level knowledge.
amazon cloud CEO reveals that they have terminal CEO brain and have no idea what reality is like for the people they’re in charge of
checks out
I’ve seen what Amazon produces internally for software, I think the LLMs could probably do a better job.
I don’t get how it’s not that AI would help programmers build way better things. if it can actually replace a programmer I think it’s probably just as capable of replacing a CEO. I bet it’s a better use case to replace CEO
You can hire a lot of programmers for the cost of one CEO.
It’s a bit nuts actually when I think about it. AI could really be useful for replacing CEO’s. The more I think about it the more it makes sense. Its one career that makes sense for it to replace.
Something I’ve always found funny about the “AI will replace programmers soon” is that this means AI’s can create AI’s and isn’t this basically the end of the economy?
Every office worker is out of a job just like that and labourers only have as long as it takes to sort out the robot bodies then everyone is out of a job.
You thought the great recession was bad? You ain’t seen nothing!
But like I just keep going back to the idea that no invention in history ever had reduced our work load. It has always only shifted the work to the other end of what the invention can produce. I just always expect a human is still need to glue some process together and in that niche little area, whole industries are created and the rest of us have to learn it
Until an AI can get clear, reasonable requirements out of a client/stakeholder our jobs are safe.
So never right?
If the assumption is that a PM holds all the keys…
It’s worth noting that the new CEO is one of few people at Amazon to have worked their way up from PM and sales to CEO.
With that in mind, while it’s a hilariously stupid comment to make, he’s in the business of selling AWS and its role in AI. Take it with the same level of credibility as that crypto scammer you know telling you that Bitcoin is the future of banking.
PM and sales, eh?
So you’re saying his lack of respect for programmers isn’t new, but has spanned his whole career?
Devalue another persons labour is what being an executive is all about.
As a wage slave with no bitcoin or crypto, the technology has been hijacked by these types and could otherwise have been useful.
I’m not entirely sold on the technology, especially since immutable ledgers have been around long before the blockchain, but also due to potential attack vectors and the natural push towards centralisation for many applications - but I’m just one man and if people find uses for it then good for them.
I guess additional bonus for crypto would be not burning the planet, and actuallt have a real value of something, not the imagined one.
What other solutions to double spending were there in financial cryptography before?
No idea, I don’t work in fintech, but was it a fundamental problem that required a solution?
I’ve worked with blockchain in the past, and the uses where it excelled were in immutable bidding contracts for shared resources between specific owners (e.g. who uses this cable at x time).
Fully decentralized p2p cryptocurrency transactions without double spending by proof of work (improvement upon Hashcash) was done first with Bitcoin. The term fintech did not exist at the time. EDIT: looked it up, apparently first use as Fin-Tech was 1967 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fintech – it’s not the current use of the term though.
