Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ?
Ok let's give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I'm a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write "good" code, readable and so.
However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don't sleep at night because of this.
I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.
For now, I'm not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I'm sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive...
Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.
I wish your fear were justified! I'll praise anything that can kill work.
Hallas, we're not here yet. Current AI is a glorified search engine. The problem it will have is that most code today is unmaintainable garbage. So AI can only do this for now : unmaintainable garbage.
First the software industry needs to properly industrialise itself. Then there will be code to copy and reuse.
I’ll praise anything that can kill work under UBI. Without reform, I worry the rich will get richer, the poor will get even poorer and it leads to guillotines in the square.
Your last sentence is where I fear we will end up. The very wealthy would be wise to realise it and work reform themselves.
I disagree that capitalism, at least in the way I understand it, always leads to rich getting richer, poor getting poorer. Many European countries have a happy medium that rewards risk-taking while looking after everyone. While most still slowly get worse on the Gini coefficient it’s based on pretty much the 0.1% pulling away and away, while the rest of their societies actually stays roughly the same. So really they only have the top of the top of the top to deal with, whereas a country like the US has a much larger, all-encompassing inequality.
All countries of Europe are going fascists one after the other. Why if there is no problem?
Europe had capitalism under a leash because communism was here to threaten it. Since the 90's, capitalism is unleashed and inequalities are rising. USA didn't had communism to tame its capitalism, because it was basically forbidden because of the cold war.
Capitalism is entirely focused on having companies making a profit. If you don't have strong states to tame it and redistribute the money, inequalities increase. It's mathematical.
The rise of fascism has more to do with people’s impression of immigration than it does capitalism.
Inequality in Europe isn’t rising if you disregard the top 0.1%. It’s the very very top that needs adjusting in Europe.
I agree with your last paragraph. Of course you need rules and redistribution. That doesn’t mean that capitalism, if well regulated, isn’t the most productive or the most effective at increasing wealth for everyone.