Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? Idk why but this was my initial reaction when learning about this.
Given the scenario where copilot and its likes becomes used in a widespread manner. Can it be argued that this might improve productivity but stifle innovation?
Im pretty early in my career but the rate things are capable of changing soon doesn’t sit too well with me.
- Copilot is qualitatively different from the kinds of automation of programming we've seen before.
- It's barely version 1.0 of this kind of thing. Deep learning has been advancing incredibly for a decade and doesn't seem to be slowing down. Researchers also work on things like mathematical problem-solving, which would tie in to "real work" and not just the boilerplate.
- In past examples of AI going from subhuman to superhuman, e.g. chess and go, the practitioners did not expect to be overtaken just a few years after it had not even felt like real competition. You'd read quotes from them about the ineffability of human thought.
What to do personally, I don't know. Stay flexible?
Put it this way: in 5 years will there be an AI that's better than 90% of unassisted working programmers at solving new leetcode-type coding interview questions posed in natural language? Arranging an actual bet is too annoying, but that development in that timeframe doesn't seem unlikely. It might take more than a scaled-up GPT, but as I said, people are working on those other directions too.
In that future, already, the skills you get hired for are different from now (and not just in the COBOL-versus-C sense). Maybe different people with a quite different mix of talents are the ones doing well.
Yes, and there were people in the 1960s who thought computers of the time were only a decade away from being smarter than humans. The question is one of category -- Go is something that a computer could conceivably be better than a human being at. There were certainly Go programs better than some human beings at that time. "Reading a human language document, communicating with stakeholders to understand the requirements in human language, understanding the business requirements of a large codebase, and writing human-readable code" is so categorically different than what Copilot does that, and something that no computer is currently capable of. If such a thing is even possible, we haven't even begun to tackle it.
> in 5 years will there be an AI that's better than 90% of unassisted working programmers at solving new leetcode-type coding interview questions posed in natural language?
I think that's highly unlikely, but it is within the bounds of possibility given what we know about AI currently (and probably, like GPT, it will only work under specific constraints). But the gap between that and what an engineer does on a daily basis is enormous.
A programmer's job bridges the informal and the formal. Previous automation practically always was about helping you work with the formal end. A tool that can bridge the informal and the formal on its own is new. That was my first point and most basically why I'm suspicious of dismissals. These developments don't have to 100% substitute for a current human programmer to change the economics of what talents are rewarded.