> With software engineers […] you don’t have legal limitations on who can perform the work

While in practice that is true, in theory this is why professional engineering accreditations (I mean like P.Eng., not little certificates) exist. Perhaps we will see a broader professionalization of the profession one day.

> With software engineers and office work you don’t have legal limitations on who can perform the work

Technically true, but if you want the IP to be covered by copyright you better make sure they're not using AI or you'll find out that there are some serious legal limitations in your future when you aim to either pick up investment or sell your IP.

> So if this is a tool, the fault lies fully in the user, and if this is treated as “another persons work” then the user knowingly passed the work onto someone not authorized to do it. Both end up in the user being guilty.

I am particularly against this point of view, because we as a community have long touted how computers can do the job better and faster, and that computers don’t make mistakes. When there are bugs, they’re seen as flaws in the system and rectified, by programmers.

When there are gaps between user expectations and how the software works, it’s our job to manage those gaps and reduce the gap.

In the case of AI, we are somehow, probably because we know it’s non-deterministic, turning that social contract we had developed with users on its head.

Now, that’s just the way it is and it’s up to them to know if the computer is lying to them. We have absolved ourselves of both the technical and the non-technical responsibilities to ensure the computer doesn’t lie to the user, or subverts their expectations, or acts in a way contrary to human logic.

AI may be different to us in that it’s non-deterministic, but that’s all the more reason that we’re responsible to ensure AI adoption aligns to the social contract we created with users. If we can’t do that with AI then it’s up to us to stop chasing endless dollars and be forthright with users that facts are optional when it comes to AI.

You are running on a outdated model of the world. That one of only discipline keeps people working, keeps them productive, keeps the in line.

We saw how that worked out in Soviet Russia and the culture it gave birth to in its aftermath. Artificially held up discipline by institutions and hierarchies is worthless. It only encourages subversion and thus most of the productivity is wasted on hunting for laziness and updating of ever more intricate behavioral programing rules, which make the organization ever more unable to react fast and decisive.

The only discipline worth a damn is intrinsic. People who want something, want to get somewhere. They need no shepards and prison guards, they need only a support harness, they need resources and people concerned about them. The culture that produces such people is required for things to succeed. Any culture that does not, can not succeed and is basically a parasite to cultures who do.

And here perhaps was the greatest mistake the software profession made! Not making ourselves into a real profession, with actual accountability. It was terribly convenient for so long not to have consequences when things went wrong. It's less convenient now.

Why does a person need to be disciplined because they made a mistake?

> Text coming out of an LLM should be in a special codeblock of Unicode, so we can see it is generated by AI.

That's exactly my proposed solution:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/classes-of-originality/

What will that accomplish? Does it give license to developers to check in code that they don't understand/trust fully?

Ultimately, people should be responsible for the code they commit, no matter how it was written. If AI generates code that is so bad that it warrants putting up warning sign, it shouldn't be checked in.

> Text coming out of an LLM should be in a special codeblock of Unicode, so we can see it is generated by AI.

Why not start with manual tagging, like "Ad"?

In the UK lower court judges are sometimes removed for misconduct.

Only the king (at the petition of parliament) can remove a high court or appeal court judge, and that's only ever happened once, in 1830.

It wasn't just a bad ruling. It was judicial misconduct.

In the US, local/state judges often are elected (probably varies by state). Federal judges can be impeached.

If that were the case, this site and certain subreddits would have a lot of posts and comments with people crowing about how much time they are getting back. I haven’t seen that, but I haven’t gone looking for it either.

While not dispositive of your idea, I think some portion of people using their personal accounts is because we collectively lack good feedback loops on the effectiveness of “AI addons” like RAG. The corporate accounts can be legitimately less useful than a “stock” account because the AI team integrates everything under the sun to show value, but the integrations become a net negative.

Ie ones that index entire company wikis. It ends up regurgitating rejected or not implemented RFCs, or docs from someone’s personal workflow that requires setting up a bunch of stuff locally to work, or etc.

A lot of tasks are not dependent on internal documentation, and it just ends up polluting the context with irrelevant, outdated or just wrong information.

Quiet the contrary, companies layoff all roles (frontend, backend, qa, devops, even ui/ux) and handle a project to one competent dev. And asks them to deliver it in 1/3rd the time it would have took with a proper team. It's happening at places I know. This thread on reddit is 100% same: https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/s/EIksvB15tm

I can't even imagine the stress from context switching, and since people don't realize this is still work, they do this late into the night as well.

That’s certainly a … convenient … explanation.

Because the amount of ai slop code from peers and the amount of ai slop emails to read from management has exploded.

In about 1930, Keynes wrote "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" [1] wherein he wrote:

"I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us.

We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick ...

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come--namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour."

While there's no guarantee that what Smith got wrong then is the same as now, it can be a reasonable outcome that "the jobs" won't just disappear.

----

Keynes also speculated on what to do with newfound time as a result of investment returns on the back of productivity [1]:

"Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day. Assuredly there need be nothing here to surprise us ... Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."

The modern FIRE movement shows that living at a dated "standard of living" for 10-15 years can free one from work forever. Yet that's not what most people do today. I would suggest that there are deeper aspects of human drive, psychology, and varying concepts of "morality" that are actually bigger factors in what happens to "jobs".

[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

We've had YouTube for two decades now. Cheap education was already available for those who wanted it.

I don't know if you've ever been to India, but one of its characteristic features is that it has lots of local languages. LLMs are awful at almost all of them. Plus, there's 20ish% of the population that falls below the literacy threshold. It's hard to imagine how those people would be educated by LLMs even if that was a good idea and they all had reliable Internet access, which they often don't.

Or you are proven wrong entirely, again and again. And it turns out, that the legacy, unimportant and derelict of the past - culture is all decisive It turns out that only some cultures can generate high trust societies, capable to form institutions. And you prolonged suffering, by declaring that all cultures are created equal. History may write you down a monster.

Some people are worth more than others.

Some cultures are better than others.

You are making a lot of assumptions here. You assume, among other things, that AI has self-preservation drive, can be threatened, can be motivated, and above all that we know how to accomplish that and are already doing so. I would dispute all of that.

> Isn't just the issue stemming simply from not using the right tool?

What suggests this judge was not using the very best chatbot?

Is this a solved problem using the right tools?