I used to do that exact job 10 years ago (without AI, obviously). I figure that career would be very different now.
There was something exciting about sleuthing out how those old machines worked: we used a black box approach, sending in test samples, recording the output, and comparing against the digital algorithm’s output. Trial and error, slowly building a sense of what sort of filter or harmonics could bend a waveform one way or another.
I feel like some of this is going to be lost to prompting, the same way hand-tool woodworking has been lost to power tools.
It will be the future for sure, software as a tool for everyone.
While there is something lost in prompting, people will always seek out first-principles so they can understand what they are commanding and controlling, especially as old machines become new machines with new capabilities not even imaginable before due to the old software complexity wall.
It's exactly as you say: software as a tool for everyone and it's hard for programmers like me to accept that because I've spent so much time, read so many books, and work so hard perfecting my craft.
But smart programmers will realize the world doesn't care about any of that at all.
We will remain to be programmers but at a higher abstraction where code is just the glue to our means and imagination.
As a hobby I suppose. There's a very real chance there won't be enough paid work available for that
You’re ignoring Jevons paradox. Everyone, both people and companies, will be making exponentially more software with these tools. Software that both needs to get created, debugged and updated to realize the intention of it. That’s what our time will be spent on as programmers.
Do you have any evidence that the demand for developers is largely price elastic?
People are already struggling to find work from oversupply of talent and not enough demand
At the same time ability to write software is exploding we are watching large entities in the market consolidated and small businesses end up on the down side of the K shaped economy. Programmers demand and pay should go down as supply increases just like every other person in an economy.
Exactly! There isn't enough woodworking jobs for thousands of thousands of workers. Of course you have people handcrafting things and people demanding handcrafted things. Programming will be the same.
Way way way less developers.
This doesn’t seem right to me. Carpentry still seems like a pretty solid line of work with a lot of jobs. I know at least one guy who moved from EE work to contracting because he could make a lot more money that way.
Given, a lot of it is framing houses and remodeling. And there are fewer jobs in hardwood furniture these days. But a lot of that is because US furniture manufacturing was moved to China 20 years ago, not because of power tools.
If anything, the advent of power tools in the 40s/50s made single family homes more affordable and increased construction demand.
I think you will like this talk https://youtu.be/XM_q5T7wTpQ?si=Nyb4lZEZjsjCCGBg
I wonder if we could then have released the *stressor in a few months then...
I’d love to see someone try.
Though using AI to build the devtools we used for signal analysis would have been helpful.