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.
Yes, and most likely more of a paradigm shift. The way deep learning models work is largely around static statistical models. The main issue here isn’t the statistical side, but the static nature. For AGI this is a significant hurdle because as the world evolves, or simply these models run into new circumstances, the models will fail.
Its largely the reason why autonomous vehicles have sorta hit a standstill. It’s the last 1% (what if an intersection is out, what if the road is poorly maintained, etc.) that are so hard for these models as they require “thought” and not just input/output.
LLMs have shown that large quantities of data seem to approach some sort of generalized knowledge, but researchers don’t necessarily agree on that https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682. So if we can’t get to more emergent abilities, it’s unlikely AGI is on the way. But as you said, combining and interweaving these systems may get something close.