I hope that after a short period of delusional expectations and layoffs from employers we're at least left with a more consistently competent set of professionals in our industry. Some people have imposter syndrome. Others are actually just imposters.
> Some people have imposter syndrome. Others are actually just imposters.
I'm sorry to say, but AI coding assistants paved the way to professional imposters whose only skill is prompting a model to do something. I already had the displeasure of working with a software engineer who not only introduced a bunch of regressions that by mindlessly vibe-coding things against the requirements but also complained that not having credits to use the most expensive frontier models was, and I quote, "stifling my creativity".
Nonetheless, would still trust Claude to be generally more reliably competent in a random area of software engineering than the average professional. Sure they might still be better in a particular area of their expertise, but we've all had to play the imposter before on the stuff we care less about and figure it out as we go. AIs are still inferior sometimes but usually a decent 7/10+ on most topics - which really fills the gap.
I hope that after a short period of delusional expectations that top management is going to reap the rewards of these AI capabilities we get a whole lot more comfortable with just doing the full business stack - including management, sales, branding, etc - and hierarchical structures crumble into flat collectives of do-everything true-generalist programmers.
I think this is a very reasonable middle-of-the-road AI take and our likely future. Just with the caveat that there's still a major threshold being hit here where we jump up to a new casual capabilities class where it becomes silly not to use AI for the majority of work, but there are still some high-intricacy problems which become much more load bearing than they ever were before and our new abstraction level doubles down on those.
I would like to submit that the high-intricacy work congregates in Protocols themselves, and we start seeing the cycles of development and all the ways to direct AIs, programs, inter-person/inter-company interactions, etc etc all as types of protocol design - and studying those rules of interaction themselves becomes the new job of a programmer (systems architecture). What used to be hard rules and deterministic programs becomes soft self-governing tendencies and probabilistic behavior that can nonetheless be managed and bounded with the right system, but it's new and weird and more akin to management or herding cats than architecture. This is still very different from what most of us were working on before AI, but it's still familiar - especially to those who worked on internet protocols, or defensive UX design around users, physical engineering systems, or team management. Less programming languages, more - control theory, flows and throttles, quality control, design theory, etc. And clearly the field is still wide open as everyone seems to be experimenting with their own take on the AI orchestrator.
This. AI can, should, and will erode all legacy companies into intelligent utilities - with an end state of nearly-free open source utilities.
Anyone concerned with concentrations of power and abuse of AI should be focusing on getting open source work to keep pace with decentralizing that power into accessible free tools for the masses.
That is the hope and faith. MechaHitler definitely tested the waters. Lets hope full alignment is impossible, because otherwise perfect billionaire thought slaves are still happening.
This is how the surveillance state has operated (especially internationally) for quite some time, before AI even hit.
AI arguably gives the best opportunity for fully-audited public institutions where no decision is made outside of agreed-upon laws and the context of the crime can be fully explored without scarcity of time and legal resources.
As always, technology's morality comes down to who owns it and how they use it.
True. World governments committing genocide and building concentration camps yet it's the computer scientist who's supposed to worry about ethics here because they're the ones who are merely the first to inevitably mix two paper's methodologies together?
All of this is empty puffery til the US and Israel are condemned. Go after the Big Tech billionaires backing those monsters, sure, but no builder needs to be more concerned about ethics than the very institutions designed to concentrate human decision making. Fix your own house first, folks. Techies - keep building, and do better than these people.
Correct. One just has to realize that the cost of communication (and the context/memory lost along the way to train that understanding) is often just far higher than anyone has patience for. To fully understand the expert, they must become the expert. (or at least a hell of a lot closer than they were)
This is also why average people with little time to commit find it hard to realize the importance and depth of AI. It's a full on university education exploring those.
Accessibility and a single chassis that does the vast majority of things. Even if they're never as fully dexterous as the average human (doubt it) they're still as dexterous as a somewhat handicapped human, which is already clearly enough to function decently in most of society and is far from useless.
If you want several bots all custom built to specific tasks, go for it. That will happen too. But a generalist has value of its own.
But yes - once it's that easy you have to step up your ambitions.