• null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    I take issue with the “replacing other industries” part.

    I know that this is an unpopular opinion among programmers but all professions have roles that range from small skills sets and little cognitive abilities to large skill sets and high level cognitive abilities.

    Generative AI is an incremental improvement in automation. In my industry it might make someone 10% more productive. For any role where it could make someone 20% more productive that role could have been made more efficient in some other way, be it training, templates, simple conversion scripts, whatever.

    Basically, if someone’s job can be replaced by AI then they weren’t really producing any value in the first place.

    Of course, this means that in a firm with 100 staff, you could get the same output with 91 staff plus Gen AI. So yeah in that context 9 people might be replaced by AI, but that doesn’t tend to be how things go in practice.

    • andioop@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      I know that this is an unpopular opinion among programmers but all professions have roles that range from small skills sets and little cognitive abilities to large skill sets and high level cognitive abilities.

      I am kind of surprised that is an unpopular opinion. I figure there is a reason we compensate people for jobs. Pay people to do stuff you cannot, or do not have the time to do, yourself. And for almost every job there is probably something that is way harder than it looks from the outside. I am not the most worldly of people but I’ve figured that out by just trying different skills and existing.

      • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        Programmers like to think that programming is a special profession which only super smart people can do. There’s a reluctance to admit that there are smart people in other professions.

        • andioop@programming.dev
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          1 day ago

          Luckily I have not met any programmer like that yet, let’s keep our fingers crossed.

          I’m willing to believe the bar to pass to be a successful programmer requires a certain level of problem-solving skill and intelligence; but that doesn’t mean no other profession has smart people. I’d imagine lots of other professions have a similar bar to pass, and even ones with lower bars to pass to succeed in that profession probably still have their prodigies and geniuses.

      • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        I’m not really clear what you’re getting at.

        Are you suggesting that the commonly used models might only be an incremental improvement but some of the less common models are ready to take accountant’s and lawyer’s and engineer’s and architect’s jobs ?