Wednesday, April 26, 2023

26: ChatGPT

The end of coding as we know it ChatGPT has come for software developers .......... Then he quizzed it with the kind of coding questions he asks candidates in job interviews....... Whatever he threw at it, Hughes found that ChatGPT came back with something he wasn't prepared for: very good code. It didn't take him long to wonder what this meant for a career he loved — one that had thus far provided him with not only a good living and job security, but a sense of who he is. "I never thought I would be replaced in my job, ever, until ChatGPT," he says. "I had an existential crisis right then and there. A lot of the knowledge that I thought was special to me, that I had put seven years into, just became obsolete." ........ in recent weeks, behind closed doors, I've heard many coders confess to a growing anxiety over the sudden advent of generative AI. Those who have been doing the automating fear they will soon be automated themselves. And if programmers aren't safe, who is? ............ the degree to which large language models could perform the 19,000 tasks that make up the 1,000 occupations across the US economy ........... 19% of workers hold jobs in which at least half their tasks could be completed by AI. ........ two patterns among the most vulnerable jobs: They require more education and come with big salaries. ......... Large language models like the one powering ChatGPT have been trained on huge repositories of code. ......... Those assisted by AI were able to complete tasks 56% faster than the unassisted ones. ......... the introduction of the steam engine in the mid-1800s boosted productivity at large factories by only 15%. ......... Tech companies have rushed to embrace generative AI, recognizing its ability to turbocharge programming. Amazon has built its own AI coding assistant, CodeWhisperer, and is encouraging its engineers to use it. Google is also asking its developers to try out new coding features in Bard, its ChatGPT competitor. Given the tech industry's rush to deploy AI, it's not hard to envision a near future in which we'll need half as many engineers as we have today — or, down the line, one-tenth or one-hundredth ..........

there's enough of a demand for coding to employ both humans and AI

.......... "There's only so much food that 7 billion people can eat" ........ "But it's unclear if there's any cap on the amount of software that humanity wants or needs. One way to think about it is that for the past 50 years, we have been massively underproducing. We haven't been meeting software demand." ........... AI, in other words, may help humans write code faster, but we'll still want all the humans around because we need as much software as they can build, as fast as they can build it. ......... all the productivity gains from AI will turbocharge the demand for software, making the coders of the future even more sought after than they are today. .............. Consider what happened to bank tellers after the widespread adoption of ATMs. You'd think ATMs would have destroyed the profession, but surprisingly, the number of bank tellers actually grew between 1980 and 2010. .......... "but you probably do want to formally verify code that goes into your driving assistant in your car or manages your insulin pump." If today's programmers are writers, the thinking goes, their future counterparts will be editors and fact-checkers. ............ those who make the transition to the AI-driven future will find themselves performing tasks that are radically different from the ones they do today. ......... The new technology essentially leveled the playing field between the newbies and the veterans. ......... I'm a writer because I love writing; I don't want my job to morph into one of fact-checking the hallucinogenic and error-prone tendencies of ChatGPT. ......... go back a few decades, and you'll find a technology that obliterated what was one of the most common jobs for young women: the mechanical switching of telephones. Placing your own calls on a rotary-dial phone was way faster and easier than going through a human switchboard operator. Many of the displaced operators dropped out of the workforce altogether — and if they kept working, they ended up in lower-paying occupations. ......... one of the most glaring problems with AI research: Far too much of it is focused on replacing human labor rather than empowering it. .......... "I really think everybody needs to be doing their work with ChatGPT as much as they can, so they can learn what it does and what it doesn't," Mollick says. "The key is thinking about how you work with the system. It's a centaur model: How do I get more work out of being half person, half horse? The best advice I have is to consider the bundle of tasks that you're facing and ask: How do I get good at the tasks that are less likely to be replaced by a machine?" ............... he's watched people try ChatGPT for a minute, find themselves underwhelmed by its abilities, and then move on, comforted by their superiority over AI. .

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