AIs gunning for our precious freelancers

[rotting bones]

Yes; I already mentioned the case of the fruit-pickers. IIRC, the problem there is that fruit are just too sensitive for machines to easily manipulate. I’m sure there are other similar cases too.

But Google is full of results about people working on fruit harvesters. It doesn't look like they gave up. (Edit: At least at first glance.)

Oh, they haven’t given up… I just doubt they’ll replace humans and all their advantages.

Which ones would those be?

Er, I saw an ad for one many years ago while watching YouTube videos on biomechanical engineering. Even if I could find it again, that's probably not practical on my phone.

This reminds me of Ginkgo Bioworks. I went to a talk by Tom Knight a few months ago on their technology; it’s truly impressive, but does need significant human oversight, not to mention the huge amount of communication required to figure out exactly what they want the machines to do!

All I can recommend now is Googling laboratory robotics.

It exists, definitely, but in practice from what I’ve seen it’s mostly autosamplers and other such machines which eliminate repetitive work. The non-repetitive work is much trickier.

I don't think AI is ready to replace everything immediately. The impressive demos don't even scale that well.

[rotting bones]

It really baffles me that everyone here is so blasé about this issue. With this invention, the people in charge have made their intentions clear. They have no further use for us and they will dispose of us without hesitation. Anyone who thinks they will keep us around for sentimental value is incredibly naïve. The battle lines have been drawn between humanity and the machine. Whose side are you on?

Automation is worrying, first because of job disruption, second because automated service really sucks.

It's also largely overrated. There are plenty of jobs that aren't automated nor will be in the foreseeable future. Right now there's a shortage of daycare workers, nurses and tradespeople. (At the very least.) None of these jobs can be replaced by robots with current technology.

We like to dismiss manual jobs, but frankly we shouldn't. One of my friend is an electrician, the other's a carpenter. These are jobs that require a lot of know-how; I'd add that building a house is a great deal more satisfying then, I don't know, writing a really good business report. It doesn't pay that bad either. (Both of my friends own their own companies and business is pretty good.)

What do you think of 3D printed houses?

[Ares Land]

What do you think of 3D printed houses?

So far they seem to be a North American thing, so I haven't seen any yet.
Generally it's a pretty neat idea but one that doesn't really contradict my idea above -- as I understand it there still are construction and assembly costs.
As for the printing itself, I don't know about industrial scale printers, but the smallish ones I've seen also require a significant amount of human nursing.

[jcb]

Because people here seem to think that chatgpt can do only "bullshit" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhJbKBuNnA

Consultants are the low-hanging fruit here... who really cares if they can be replaced by AI? I just expect it'll be done one rung lower than the big consultancy companies. E.g. Accenture employs 738,000 people. How many of those could ChatGPT (or its next iteration) replace? Half? Three quarters?

Zomp, after watching that video, how confident are you that junior programmer jobs will still exist in the (near) future ? From the look of it, perhaps whole teams of junior programmers could be replaced by chatgpt, with one senior programmer to stitch the different parts together, smooth out bugs from incorrect extrapolation, and write truly novel code that chatgpt has no idea how to do.

[Raphael]

Back in the late 1990s, in school, they had an event - not sure what they'd call it in the USA - where students' parents talked about their jobs, and what they did in those jobs, and how to get those jobs. I went to a talk by a father who worked in IT. He told us that wanting to become a programmer was a bad idea, because computers would soon program themselves.

Seems now that that statement was a bit premature.

[zompist]

Because people here seem to think that chatgpt can do only "bullshit" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhJbKBuNnA

Zomp, after watching that video, how confident are you that junior programmer jobs will still exist in the (near) future ? From the look of it, perhaps whole teams of junior programmers could be replaced by chatgpt, with one senior programmer to stitch the different parts together, smooth out bugs from incorrect extrapolation, and write truly novel code that chatgpt has no idea how to do.

No time for watching videos; feel free to post some code if you want.

I have no doubt some top executives will think they can get rid of their developers. They will crash and burn, because no actual project consists of StackOverflow queries. The problem with programing is not writing an algorithm, it's writing a correct algorithm, and boiling down the web won't give you that.

Also, honestly, if a project does consist of sub-pieces that can be filled in by a chimpanzee, then the senior devs have not sufficiently parameterized it. That shit should already be generated automatically.

[Ares Land]

Because people here seem to think that chatgpt can do only "bullshit" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhJbKBuNnA

Consultants are the low-hanging fruit here... who really cares if they can be replaced by AI? I just expect it'll be done one rung lower than the big consultancy companies. E.g. Accenture employs 738,000 people. How many of those could ChatGPT (or its next iteration) replace? Half? Three quarters?

Zomp, after watching that video, how confident are you that junior programmer jobs will still exist in the (near) future ? From the look of it, perhaps whole teams of junior programmers could be replaced by chatgpt, with one senior programmer to stitch the different parts together, smooth out bugs from incorrect extrapolation, and write truly novel code that chatgpt has no idea how to do.

To be more specific on the use of 'bullshit': at this point it's really hard to separate what ChatGPT (or future AIs) can genuinely do from the marketing.

If it delivers, it could certainly be useful, for instance in general scaffolding, or generating UI code from spec and graphical design.
I don't think anyone can confidently say that it will destroy programming jobs. What it'd do is lower barriers -- making coding an app a lot cheaper -- which could either kill jobs or create some.

Barriers to computer programming have been lowered before. Programming got way easier as we moved (giving a broad picture here) from assembly to high-level languages to Java/.NET and then on to various frameworks.
A Spring Java application practically programs itself, compared to a Pascal business application coded in the 80s. But the job market for programmers is actually way larger than it was back then.
(I started working as a programmer back in 2005. A lot of the code I wrote back then would be handled by various frameworks now.)

Arguably, a lot of a programmer's jobs doesn't actually involve coding. In my line of work -- uncomplicated business applications -- the coding part is pretty trivial, straight out of the documentation and stack overflow. Clever algorithmic comes up, but not that often. Most of the job actually involves talking to people, figuring out what the business actually has in mind, being nice to the sysadmins, figuring out how to fit into the -- generally large and cumbersome -- company information system and tracking down weird bugs.

[Travis B.]

I agree with Ares Land - much of what a programmer is not mere coding, and this is definitely true of my day job, where coding is really only a small part of what I do, much of which involves discussing requirements with other team members and testing. What I do on my own does involve more coding, but it still also involves a considerable amount of reading other people's documentation (e.g. datasheets) and testing. ChatGPT and like simply cannot replace actual programmers for anything other than mindless code monkey codeorrhea. The main people who should be worried about ChatGPT are not actual programmers but the people who run StackOverflow as, yes, it could replace them.

[Raphael]

Meanwhile, I've seen some discussion of the use of actual people's writings in training and nursing ChatGPT, and that made me think: Wouldn't this be a great opportunity for some lawyers who want free publicity to round up writers whose writings might have been used for a class action IP suit?

[Raphael]

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://wandering.shop/@cstross/109903435948584004

[Raphael]

Oh, my previous post was supposed to go into the "AIs gunning for our freelancers"-thread - could a mod perhaps be so kind and move it there?

[Man in Space]

And here comes the US Copyright Office, throwing petrol on the flame.

[alynnidalar]

Not particularly surprising. The obvious parallel I see is to the monkey selfie, where the US Copyright Office stated a photograph taken by a monkey could not be copyrighted by the photographer who set up the camera, as material produced by nonhumans is not copyrightable. (PETA, incidentally, argued the monkeys should be granted the copyright, and that PETA should be granted the proceeds from its licensing.) I don't know exactly where they draw the line, but there's a certain amount of (deliberate) human intervention that is needed to copyright something, and it would seem she simply didn't reach that level.

[Raphael]

Dear Big Tech Companies:

When one of you comes up with a very stupid idea for ruining something that worked kind of ok up to that point, there is no law of either God or Man that requires the rest of you to copy and imitate that idea.

In fact, when that happens, it might even be an opportunity for the rest of you to try to grow their market shares by *not* copying the very stupid idea.

Just a thought.

*******

Scene: a convention center, booked for the day by Tech Company No. 1:

Celebrity Spokesperson: The new Wham-icon (TM) is a robot arm with a boxing glove at the end that is attached to your keyboard and punches you in the face whenever you hit Enter or Return!

Scene: the boardroom of Tech Company No. 2:
Alice: We could focus our next ad campaign on the fact that we don't have a Wham-icon.
Bob: Or we could develop an even bigger, better, more powerful Wham-icon!
Chuck (CEO): Let's go with Bob!

[Moose-tache]

Dear Big Tech Companies:

When one of you comes up with a very stupid idea for ruining something that worked kind of ok up to that point, there is no law of either God or Man that requires the rest of you to copy and imitate that idea.

In fact, when that happens, it might even be an opportunity for the rest of you to try to grow their market shares by *not* copying the very stupid idea.

Just a thought.

I have bad news, Raphael. Whenever I encounter a wham icon and do some digging into why a company would impliment such a flagrantly negative feature, it always, 100% of the time, turns out to be a feature not a bug for zoomers. Somewhere, 18 year olds are saying "It's about time we got a wham icon!" The problem, it turns out, is us. When we die, no one will be left who sees the wham icon as anything bad.

[Ares Land]

I have bad news, Raphael. Whenever I encounter a wham icon and do some digging into why a company would impliment such a flagrantly negative feature, it always, 100% of the time, turns out to be a feature not a bug for zoomers. Somewhere, 18 year olds are saying "It's about time we got a wham icon!" The problem, it turns out, is us. When we die, no one will be left who sees the wham icon as anything bad.

I don't know; zoomers on the whole seem to be a more sensible generation than we are. Who logs in to Twitter to receive a daily punch in the face, or to Facebook to keep up with the latest conspiracy? How many of these are under 30?

[Moose-tache]

Have you seen how many conspiracy theories there are on Tik Tok?

[Ares Land]

I imagine there are some; are there really that many?
When I see content from Tiktok it's a funny video or something, when I see stuff from Facebook and Twitter it's usually something pretty nasty. But maybe I'm completely out of touch.

[malloc]

Sorry for being out of the loop, but what is a wham button?

[Raphael]

Sorry for being out of the loop, but what is a wham button?

It's from the post by me that's a few posts up:

Scene: a convention center, booked for the day by Tech Company No. 1:

Celebrity Spokesperson: The new Wham-icon (TM) is a robot arm with a boxing glove at the end that is attached to your keyboard and punches you in the face whenever you hit Enter or Return!

Scene: the boardroom of Tech Company No. 2:
Alice: We could focus our next ad campaign on the fact that we don't have a Wham-icon.
Bob: Or we could develop an even bigger, better, more powerful Wham-icon!
Chuck (CEO): Let's go with Bob!