Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that.
About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that it’s better for everything to be a failure than to be in the “it could make it” category for half a decade or more.
In that way, I am glad I found that it wasn’t for me. I had the curiosity, but not the doggedness to face difficulty (not enough curiosity perhaps?) or the ability to not encounter such difficulty. And fortunately that meant I was never in the “I could make it” category. God bless clear and present boundaries and may the devil take the grey zone.
Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding.
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1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rational number without any guidance at all.²
2. I want to see how close to the general solution he’s gotten on his own, but given that he’s not had any formal algebra, it’s damned impressive and bodes well for his future development.
As someone who's also thinking about their child's future, I've come to the conclusion that building their capacity for precise language by expanding their vocabulary and grammar in an array of domains and subdomains is the best way forward. Not only will they have a more detailed understanding of what's out there, but using specialized, narrow terminology with AI provides vastly better solutions than general prompt language.
It was this way before AI.
Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done
https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/
Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"
From what I’ve seen of what AI can do for coding, the part of software engineering that I like is going to be automated out of existence, much like the ability to do serious calculations by hand got automated out of existence with the development of computing. Writing code by hand will be as marketable as factoring 5-digit numbers in your head.¹
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1. I enjoy doing both, but I doubt that anyone will pay me what I’ve been paid in the past for this five years from now.
If you want AI-proof careers it seems risky to go into knowledge work at all. Robotics lag behind mere computation, so something where you do awkward work in places designed around human bodies seems a lot safer. Plumbing, landscaping or something like that perhaps.
How many CERNs are there? Enough to build careers on?
No, what do you think about the book Four Futures?
I have not read it but I can't imagine a book written before the current explosion of AI can be accurate. What do you think of it?
Why not?
So far, every "AI will never be able to do X" is aging like fine milk. Or do you think that engineering is somehow more special than software development or math?
Engineers know what needs to be tested, how, to what degree, with which materials, and with what safety margin.
AI can be trained on that body of work. But then AI has enough issues in output that it needs to be verified.
Otherwise we'll live in a world of titan submersibles ordered by CEOs running on hopes&dreams.
Replace "AI" with "humans" and you get the same exact issues.
Believe it or not, engineers don't zero shot skyscrapers either. Which is why their work gets reviewed by more engineers. Which catches the issues before they materialize. Sometimes!
What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage? Because I'm not seeing any.
I think we might be largely in agreement.
LLM's should be used to speed up the drudgery, explore creative/evolutionary ideas, but....
> What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage?
Responsibility.
Ultimately LLM's are a tool. Someone has to be responsible for the output. You don't get to use it to create a car/plane/submarine/bridge/building/childs-toy/whatever and then if it bursts into flame, blame the LLM and walk away.
Ideally, the person signing off would "know" what they are signing off on. Which requires an engineer.
What happens when the thing they have to be responsible for takes multiple lifetimes to understand on even the most basic level, let alone know deeply enough to feel comfortable taking responsibility for it?
Agency.
Humans don't seem to need a markdown to decide what to do next.
Without agency, it's all tools. I guess that's why a 'tool' is sometimes used derogatorily.
Did you read what he posted, or do you place widgets on a webpage
oh hah! that one got my attention.
grey failure is the worst, not dead, not alive and no clear signal.