IMO attempts to make it low paid work will fail, just like almost every STEM profession. But... the number of engineers that we need who operate as "power multipliers" on team will continue to decrease. Many startup and corporate teams already aren't needing junior/mid level engineers any longer.
They just need "drivers", senior/lead/staff engineers that can run independent tracks. AI becomes the "power multiplier" in the teams who amplify the effects of the "driver".
Many people pretend that 10x engineers don't exist. But anyone who has worked on an adequately high performing team at a large (or small) company knows that skill, and quite frankly intelligence, operate on power laws.
The bottom 3 quartiles will be virtually unemployable. Talent in the top quartile will be impossible to find because they're all employed. Not all that unlike today, though which quartile you fall into is largely going to depend on how "great" of an engineer you are AND how effectively you use AI.
As this happens, the tap of new engineers who are learning how to make it into the top quartile, will cutoff for everyone except for those who are passionate/sadistic enough to programming without AI, then learn to program WITH AI.
Meanwhile the number of startups disrupting corporate monopolies will increase as the cost of labor goes down due to lower headcount requirements. Lower head counts will lead to better team communication and in general business efficiency.
At some point the upper quartile will get automated too. And with that, corporate moats evaporate to solo-entrepreneurs and startups. The ship is sinking, but the ocean is about to boil too. When economic formulas start dividing by zero, we can be pretty sure that we can't predict the impact.
The problem with the European mindset on this, is it's always involves bureaucrats taking their taxpayers money and allocating it in smarter ways than American investors who are doing it with their own money.
If that seems unlikely to work to you, then you possess critical thinking.
The US spends more on R&D (Private and Public) than the next 5 countries combined. Public research is and since the 70s has been a small fraction of research spending in the US. That's why their companies actually innovate.
If Europe doesn't change the inventive structures that are preventing investment in R&D, no amount of government money is going to fill that void...
The problem with relying exclusively on private investors to fund research is that the incentives steer investment towards research that seems likely to deliver a return on investment. This is fine for driving incremental development on presumably marketable ideas with short time horizons, but it's absolutely terrible for supporting the kind of foundational work that lacks obvious application on day 1 but is nevertheless essential to real innovation.
Private companies used to understand and value this and fund relatively open-ended research arms without the requirement to deliver immediate investor value. As investors have become more and more myopic, government funding has been essential to keep foundational research alive.
As just one example, think about the Large Hadron Collider. It's pretty expensive with no immediate commercial application, no ROI focused private investor in the world would support it. But it's an essential tool for conducting research into the very foundations of physical existence with who knows what implications for human progress. I'm good with the "European mindset" approach to those kinds of problems since private investors would certain drop the ball if left up to them.
Europe cannot pool infinite investors money because of the fractured capital market. It's funny enough actually the lack of EU regulation that causes this. Because you get 27 different regulatory bodies, that makes cross country investments much more complicated.
That being said, I find Europe's research and industrial capacity to be underrated. Europe is very competitive in industries like cars and tooling. You don't really see American cars in Asia, but still tons of European luxury cars. Europe does well in boring tech that does not receive infinite VC money.
> than American investors who are doing it with their own money
American investors prefer spending other people's money too, they just happen to capture most of the returns, and the public gets just enough dregs through their 401k or pension funds to keep the cycle going.
Also European Academia is very hierarchical. The US has a much healthier proportion of early career faculty positions, which you can apply to straight after your PhD or a postdoc.
IMHO, this creates some strange dynamics and doesn't favor new ideas.
And if those people they bring in who knows what they’re doing aren’t using AI after a certain point, that company isn’t going to make it either.
OP is talking about learning, we all did it at some point, and yes you were a liability too. Learning done through an LLM is the closest you can get to 1:1 training without having it.
The article though also largely talks about more experienced engineers not using it as a tool to increase their leverage. In which case it’s not all that different than throwing a task off to a JR engineer and reviewing this work. Even a JR Engineer who is well read on the latest research.
But most people don’t do research. Considering 70% of software engineers mainly write crud or mobile apps these days… this liability argument is really looking shaky.
Liability from what? taking out staging or even making a bug out to prod? Should you be learning space flight control systems as you code them? No. Should a jr engineer us it to learn how to do a left join that’s getting code reviewed anyway? Yeah that’s probably going to be faster than them polling team resources. Just the same as hitting google.
Startups for instance are usually more incentivized to move fast than deliver a bug free product. Large companies usually are too. That’s why software always needs updates.
I am sure we can all enumerate fields and projects where it’s problematic and dangerous to human life to accept ai output. But the vast majority of people on this site don’t work in those fields, and companies in those fields should already have (and likely do already have) control processes in place.
If you’re a company with no control processes, and you’re terrified by the prospect of ai code because of legitimate danger to your users… and you think it’s you… the engineer… holding back the gates… your company also is not going to make it.
Claim 1: A “sustainable birth rate” is bounded by the efficiency of resource extraction and the repair rate of the environment for the damage the extraction does to it.
Claim 2: It would appear that technology has accelerated so far very closely at the same rate as global population growth.
Claim 3: Our efficiency of resource extraction has sky rocketed.
Claim 4: Our damage to the environment has exceeded its repair rate as this has increased.
Claim 5: A collapsed society would not immediately loose all of its population, and would likely be the most damaging to the environment in the shortest period of time. We won’t forget how to burn oil, but we won’t be using high efficiency well maintained engines when we do it.
With that. Seems like there are two options before humanity:
1. Burn it all down, reduce population growth rate (doesn’t matter if it’s controlled [Mao] or uncontrolled [The West Today]), eventually loose genetic entropy, and before that loose (or automate and replace) the labor force that allowed for the resource extraction.
The outcomes here are:
a) Society collapses (genetic entropy, climate change damage that has already been done, destabilization caused by population reduction measures, etc)
b) We automate labor and humans either are replaced entirely
c) or a small oligarchy of humans exist to rule that automation. That population must keep genetic entropy through gene editing (requires a lot of novel advancement which is harder with fewer people, unless we’re curating)
- or -
2. Address the reasons why people aren’t having kids in the west to maintain labor and genetic entropy, which mainly has to do with economic opportunity of young adults. And ensure that our resource extraction continues more efficient and that we either develop ways to limit damage or ways to accelerate the repair.
Outcomes are:
A) We fail to accelerate repair or reduce damage, and society collapses
B) We succeed and we’ve managed not to damage genetic entropy and don’t risk a conflict over population control.
The problem with option 1 is the implementation won’t be uniform, and population reduction globally cannot be achieved without some type of concerted effort. Consider for a moment how that is supposed to be implemented.
If things go wrong in that effort, that leads to conflict. It seems very likely that society collapses as well.
The other issue is considering the population number as the solution is it is a very short jump to the justification of genocide or some other form or population reduction. That also seems like it would accelerate conflict and therefore society collapse.
The problem with option 2 is there is only so much time before our damage exceeds allowable levels.
As an aside, and as someone who doesn't own a vision pro (non US pleb): While it is interesting to me if people find utility. I can't help but feel that the narrative on places outside of HN is a strong "no".
But, that is to be expected, the form factor isn't convenient yet. When mobile phones weighed 2KG few people used them on a daily. When it's miniaturized into the form factor of glasses, we'll all be daily users. That seems to me more like a question of when, not if.
A lot of the utility, even in this thread, seems to be solutions for problems that don't actually exist. I think it's cool technology, but nothing mentioned in this thread makes me want to get one.
Most private underground pedestrian tunnels are basements of existing buildings. Do you think the government should be using tax payer money to be cease/buy basements instead? Seems like a really odd use of resources just to not be able to kick out people who aren’t using the path for the intend purpose… but more so: Seems like something most local governments in North America would be too inefficient to handle without it turning into a project that takes 50 years and millions of dollars to complete 1 mile.
Usually the primary complaint about making them private, is that coordinating wayfinding for a bunch of private rights of way is very difficult, so what may be a complete network can be hard to use as such. Some landlords may not want you to realize you can go to a different property a few blocks away to complete your needs.
As much as I am against Putin… this article and headline are silly.
If Putin visited Germany he would be surrounded by his own armed security. Any attempt to arrest him would lead to a standoff that would immediately end in him leaving the country or risk a military confrontation that would almost certainly lead to WWIII.
Imagine the German chancellor, or US president were captured by Russian police, even if they justified it through some international organization they helped setup.
The headline and article should read “Putin is unable to visit Germany without making a geo political disaster.”
Unfortunately heads of nuclear states, and their inner circles, are truly above the law. The only way to enforce it, is to risk escalation.
If German chancellor or US president visited Russia, and there were enough desire to arrest them, they would be arrested. I don't see practical means to prevent it.
Similarly, if Putin visit Germany, there's no practical way he may avoid arrest if there's enough desire for it.
We however may argue that there actually will be desire to ignore the international court requirements, as in practice Germany, USA etc. don't really always follow the law. In general we can't say for sure what's going to happen. E.g. escalation is going on since at least February 24th, 2022, so the risk isn't a good argument why this can't happen.
> If German chancellor or US president visited Russia, and there were enough desire to arrest them, they would be arrested. I don't see practical means to prevent it.
Attempting to invade a member of NATO provokes an armed response from all of NATO. America, France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Spain... 30 countries in all.
I think this is ultimately the wrong way to prove that the headline is incorrect. Putin will almost certainly just never go to Germany to avoid testing how hard it would be to avoid arrest.
They just need "drivers", senior/lead/staff engineers that can run independent tracks. AI becomes the "power multiplier" in the teams who amplify the effects of the "driver".
Many people pretend that 10x engineers don't exist. But anyone who has worked on an adequately high performing team at a large (or small) company knows that skill, and quite frankly intelligence, operate on power laws.
The bottom 3 quartiles will be virtually unemployable. Talent in the top quartile will be impossible to find because they're all employed. Not all that unlike today, though which quartile you fall into is largely going to depend on how "great" of an engineer you are AND how effectively you use AI.
As this happens, the tap of new engineers who are learning how to make it into the top quartile, will cutoff for everyone except for those who are passionate/sadistic enough to programming without AI, then learn to program WITH AI.
Meanwhile the number of startups disrupting corporate monopolies will increase as the cost of labor goes down due to lower headcount requirements. Lower head counts will lead to better team communication and in general business efficiency.
At some point the upper quartile will get automated too. And with that, corporate moats evaporate to solo-entrepreneurs and startups. The ship is sinking, but the ocean is about to boil too. When economic formulas start dividing by zero, we can be pretty sure that we can't predict the impact.