>What's the worst potential outcome, assuming that all models get better, more efficient and more abundant
Complexity steadily rises, unencumbered by the natural limit of human understanding, until technological collapse, either by slow decay or major systems going down with increasing frequency.
why would the systems go down if the models are better at the humans at finding bugs. Playing a bit of devils advocate here, but why would the models be worse at handling the complexity if you assume they will get better and better.
All software has bugs already.
Adding complexity to software has never been easier than it is right now, we really have no idea if the models will progress to the point where they can actually write large systems in a maintainable way. Taking the gamble that the models of the future will dig us out of the gigantic hole we are currently digging is bold.
Finding bugs does not equal being able to do good architecting.
Models fall prey to Kernighan's Law even more easily than human developers.
It’s always been thus at lower layers of abstraction. Only a minority of programmers would understand how to write an operating system. Only a tiny number of people would know how a modern CPU logically works, and fewer still could explain the electrical physics.
> Only a minority of programmers would understand how to write an operating system. Only a tiny number of people would know how a modern CPU logically works, and fewer still could explain the electrical physics.
I'd say this is true for programmers at, say, 20, but they spend the next four decades slowly improving their understanding and mastery of all the things you name, at least the good ones.
The real question is whether that growth trajectory will change for the worse or the better.
To be clear, this is not an AI doomerist comment, because none of us have spent enough time with the tech yet. I've gone down multiple lanes of thought on this, and I have cause for both worry and optimism. I'm curious to see how the lives of engineers in an AI world will look like, ultimately.
Existing software is already beyond the limits of human understanding.
The Anti-Singlarity! It's coming for us all.