“Full-self-driving”-soon?
3 months maybe, 6 centuries definitely
It’s worth noting that the new CEO is one of few people at Amazon to have worked their way up from PM and sales to CEO.
With that in mind, while it’s a hilariously stupid comment to make, he’s in the business of selling AWS and its role in AI. Take it with the same level of credibility as that crypto scammer you know telling you that Bitcoin is the future of banking.
PM and sales, eh?
So you’re saying his lack of respect for programmers isn’t new, but has spanned his whole career?
Devalue another persons labour is what being an executive is all about.
As a wage slave with no bitcoin or crypto, the technology has been hijacked by these types and could otherwise have been useful.
I’m not entirely sold on the technology, especially since immutable ledgers have been around long before the blockchain, but also due to potential attack vectors and the natural push towards centralisation for many applications - but I’m just one man and if people find uses for it then good for them.
What other solutions to double spending were there in financial cryptography before?
No idea, I don’t work in fintech, but was it a fundamental problem that required a solution?
I’ve worked with blockchain in the past, and the uses where it excelled were in immutable bidding contracts for shared resources between specific owners (e.g. who uses this cable at x time).
Fully decentralized p2p cryptocurrency transactions without double spending by proof of work (improvement upon Hashcash) was done first with Bitcoin. The term fintech did not exist at the time. EDIT: looked it up, apparently first use as Fin-Tech was 1967 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fintech – it’s not the current use of the term though.
I guess additional bonus for crypto would be not burning the planet, and actuallt have a real value of something, not the imagined one.
It’s a good thing. After all, I don’t care when Amazon goes down.
I wish.
Just confirming what we already knew.
Lol sure, and AI made human staff at grocery stores a thing of the…oops, oh yeah…y’all tried that for a while and it failed horribly…
So tired of the bullshit “AI” hype train. I can’t wait for the market to crash hard once everybody realizes it’s a bubble and AI won’t magically make programmers obsolete.
Remember when everything was using machine learning and blockchain technology? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
It’s the pinnacle of MBA evolution.
In their worldview engineers are a material, and all that matters in the world is knowing how to do business. So it just makes sense that one can guide and use and direct engineers to replace themselves.
They don’t think of fundamentals, they really believe it’s some magic that happens all by itself, you just have to direct energy and something will come out of it.
Lysenko vibes.
This wouldn’t happen were not the C-suite mostly comprised of bean counters. They really think they are to engineers what officers are to soldiers. The issue is - an officer must perfectly know everything a soldier knows and their own specialty, and also bears responsibility. Bean counters in general less education, experience and intelligence than engineers they direct, and also avoid responsibility all the time.
So, putting themselves as some superior caste, they really think they can “direct progress” to replace everyone else the way factories with machines replaced artisans.
It’s literally a whole layer of people who know how to get power, but not how to create it, and imagine weird magical stuff about things they don’t know.
I am a black box
Yeah, that’s what I mean. Black boxes are a concept to accelerate development, but we can’t blackbox ourselves through civilization. They are also mostly useful for horizontal, not vertical relationships, which people misunderstand all the time (leaky abstractions).
This actually should make us optimistic. If hierarchical blackboxing were efficient, it would be certain that state of human societies will become more and more fascist and hierarchical over time, while not slowing down in development. But it’s not.
This person memegens
Yeah, I member.
“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry. - John Carmack
Agreed! Problem solving is core to any sort of success. Whether you’re moving up or on for more pay, growing tomatoes or nurturing a relationship, you’re problem solving. But I can see AI putting the screws to those of us in tech.
Haven’t used it much so far, last job didn’t afford much coding opportunity, but I wrote a Google Apps script to populate my calendar given changes to an Excel sheet. Pretty neat!
With zero experience App scripting, I tried going the usual way, searching web pages. Got it half-ass working, got stuck. Asked ChatGPT to write it and boom, solved with an hour’s additional work.
You could say, “Yeah, but you at least had a clue as to general scripting and still had to problem solve. Plus, you came up with the idea in the first place, not the AI!” Yes! But point being, AI made the task shockingly easier. That was at a software outfit so I had the oppurtuniy to chat with my dev friends, see what they were up to. They were properly skeptical/realistic as to what AI can do, but they still used it to great effect.
Another example: Struggled like hell to teach myself database scripting, so ignorant I didn’t know the words to search and the solutions I found were more advanced answers than my beginner work required (or understood!). First script was 8 short lines, took 8 hours. Had AI been available to jump start me, I could have done that in an hour, maybe two. That’s a wild productivity boost. So while AI will never make programmers obsolete, we’ll surely need fewer of them.
This right here.
Problem is not coding. Anybody can learn that with a couple of well focused courses.
I’d love to see an AI find the cause of a catastrophic crash of a machine that isn’t caused by a software bug.
Catching up on what Carmack’s been up to for the last decade has revived the fan in me. I love that 2 years after leaving Oculus to focus on AGI, this is all the hype he’s willing to put out there.
Fucking lol.
Keen Technologies
Perfect name for a Carmack company!
I just want to remind everyone that capital won’t wait until AI is “as good” as humans, just when it’s minimally viable.
They didn’t wait for self-checkout to be as good as a cashier; They didn’t wait for chat-bots to be as good as human support; and they won’t wait for AI to be as good as programmers.
They won’t, and they’ll suffer because of it and want to immediately hire back programmers (who can actually do problem solving for difficult issues). We’ve already seen this happen with customer service reps - some companies have resumed hiring customer service reps because they realized AI isn’t able to do their jobs.
And then we should all charge outrageous hourly rates to fix the AI generated code.
They’ll try the opposite. It’s what the movie producers did try the wrists. They gave them AI generated junk and told them to fix it. It was basically rewriting the whole thing but because now it was “just touching up all existing script” it was half price.
They can try. But cleaning up a mess takes a while and there’s no magic wand to make it ho faster.
Yeah they’ll try. Surely that can’t cascade into a snowball of issues. Good luck for them 😎
A strike with tech workers would be something else. Curious what would happen if the one maintaining the servers for entertainment, stock market or factories would just walk out. On the other hand, tech doesn’t have unions.
You better fucking believe it.
AIs are going to be the new outsource, only cheaper than outsourcing and probably less confusing for us to fix
And because all the theft and malfunctions, the nearby supermarkets replaced the self checkout by normal cashiers again.
If it’s AI doing all the work, the responsibility goes to the remaining humans. They’ll be interesting lawsuits even there’s the inevitable bug that the AI itself can’t figure out.
We saw this happen in Amazon’s cashier-less stores. They were actively trying to use a computer based AI system but it didn’t work without thousands of man hours from real humans which is why those stores are going away. Companies will try this repeatedly til they get something that does work or run out of money. The problem is, some companies have cash to burn.
I doubt the vast majority of tech workers will be replaced by AI any time soon. But they’ll probably keep trying because they really really don’t want to pay human beings a liveable wage.
Unexpected item in bagging are? I think you meant free item in bagging area.
Just the other day, the Mixtral chatbot insisted that PostgreSQL v16 doesn’t exist.
A few weeks ago, Chat GPT gave me a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table that used several DAX functions in ways that they could not be used.
The funny thing was, it knew and could explain why those functions couldn’t be used when I corrected it. But it wasn’t able to correlate and use that information to generate a proper function. In fact, I had to correct it for the same mistakes multiple times and it never did get it quite right.
Generative AI is very good at confidently spitting out inaccurate information in ways that make it sound like it knows what it’s talking about to the average person.
Basically, AI is currently functioning at the same level as the average tech CEO.
That is what happens when you mix a fucking CEO with tech “How many workers can I fire to make more money and boast about my achievements in the annual conference of mega yacht owners” where as the correct question should obviously have always been (unless you are a psychopath) “how can I use this tech to boost productivity of my workers so they can produce the same amount of work in less amount of time and have more personal time for themselves”
Also these idiots always forget the “problem solving” part of most programming tasks which is still beyond the capability of LLMs. Sure have LLMs do the mundane stuff so that programmers can spend time on stuff that is more rewarding? No instead lets try to fire everyone.
I’ve seen what Amazon produces internally for software, I think the LLMs could probably do a better job.
I managed to get an AI to build pong in assembly. Are are pretty cool things, but not sci-fi level just yet, but I didn’t just say “build pong in assembly”, I have to hand hold it a little bit. You need to be a programmer to understand how to guide the AI to do the task.
That was something very simple, I doubt that you can get it to do more complex tasks without a more lot of back and forth.
To give you an example I had a hard time getting it to understand that the ball needed to bounce off at an angle if intercepted at an angle, it just kept snapping it to 90° increments. I couldn’t fix it myself because I don’t really know assembly well enough to really get into the weeds with it so I was sort of stuck until I was finally able to get the AI to do what I wanted it to. I sort of understood what the problem was, there was a number somewhere in the system and it needed to make the number negative, but it just kept setting the number to a value. A non-programmer wouldn’t really understand that’s what the problem was and so they wouldn’t be able to explain to the AI how to fix it.
I believe AI is going to become an unimaginably useful tool in the future and we probably don’t really yet understand how useful it’s going to be. But unless they actually make AGI it isn’t going to replace programmers.
If they do make AGI all bets are off it will probably go build a Dyson Sphere or something at that point and we will have no way of understanding what it’s doing.
Yeah, I don’t see AI replacing any developers working on an existing, moderately complex codebase. It can help speed up some tasks, but it’s far from being able to take a requirement and turn it into code that edits the right places and doesn’t break everything.
I tried to get it to build a game of checkers, spent an entire day on it, in the end I could have built the thing myself. Each iteration got slightly worse, and each fix broke more than it corrected.
AI can generate an “almost-checkers” game nearly perfectly every time, but once you start getting into more complex rules like double jumping it just shits the bed.
What these headlines fail to capture is that AI is exceptionally good at bite sized pre-defined tasks at scale, and that is the game changer. Its still very far from being capable of building an entire app on its own. That feels more like 5-10 years out.
We are now X+14 months away from AI replacing your job in X months.
Current AI is good at compressing knowledge.
Best job role: information assistant or virtual secretary.
Everyone was always joking about how AI should just replace CEOs, but it turns out CEOs are so easily to lead by the nose that AI companies practically already run the show.
