Remix.run Logo
websiteapi 4 hours ago

I'm curious how all of the progress will be seen if it does indeed result in mass unemployment (but not eradication) of professional software engineers.

ori_b 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My prediction: If we can successfully get rid of most software engineers, we can get rid of most knowledge work. Given the state of robotics, manual labor is likely to outlive intellectual labor.

beardedwizard 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Given the state of robotics" reminds me a lot of what was said about llms and image/video models over the past 3 years. Considering how much llms improved, how long can robotics be in this state?

I have to think 3 years from now we will be having the same conversation about robots doing real physical labor.

"This is the worst they will ever be" feels more apt.

Davidzheng 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Robotics is coming FAST. Faster than LLM progress in my opinion.

wh0knows 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Curious if you have any links about the rapid progression of robotics (as someone who is not educated on the topic).

It was my feeling with robotics that the more challenging aspect will be making them economically viable rather than simply the challenge of the task itself.

chii 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

but robotics had the means to do majority of the physical labour already - it's just not worth the money to replace humans, as human labour is cheap (and flexible - more than robots).

With knowledge work being less high-paying, physical labour supply should increase as well, which drops their price. This means it's actually less likely that the advent of LLM will make physical labour more automated.

3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If we can successfully get rid of most software engineers, we can get rid of most knowledge work

Software, by its nature, is practically comprehensively digitized, both in its code history as well as requirements.

BobbyJo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would have agreed with this a few months ago, but something Ive learned is that the ability to verify an LLMs output is paramount to its value. In software, you can review its output, add tests, on top of other adversarial techniques to verify the output immediately after generation.

With most other knowledge work, I don't think that is the case. Maybe actuarial or accounting work, but most knowledge work exists at a cross section of function and taste, and the latter isn't an automatically verifiable output.

throw1235435 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I also believe this - I think it will probably just disrupt software engineering and any other digital medium with mass internet publication (i.e. things RLVR can use). For the short term future it seems to need a lot of data to train on, and no other profession has posted the same amount of verifiable material. The open source altruism has disrupted the profession in the end; just not in the way people first predicted. I don't think it will disrupt most knowledge work for a number of reasons. Most knowledge professions have "credentials' (i.e. gatekeeping) and they can see what is happening to SWE's and are acting accordingly. I'm hearing it firsthand at least locally in things like law, even accounting, etc. Society will ironically respect these professions more for doing so.

Any data, verifiability, rules of thumb, tests, etc are being kept secret. You pay for the result, but don't know the means.

coffeebeqn an hour ago | parent [-]

I mean law and accounting usually have a “right” answer that you can verify against. I can see a test data set being built for most professions. I’m sure open source helps with programming data but I doubt that’s even the majority of their training. If you have a company like Google you could collect data on decades of software work in all its dimensions from your workforce

simonw 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I nearly added a section about that. I wanted to contrast the thing where many companies are reducing junior engineering hires with the thing where Cloudflare and Shopify are hiring 1,000+ interns. I ran out of time and hadn't figured out a good way to frame it though so I dropped it.