I’m not worried about AI taking my job just yet. It can do some pretty incredible things but I think humans still have the upper hand. Think about it — we’re still living in the epoch where we tell them what to do. I tell Chat-GPT to write my fuckin’ code. Like no one is thinking “Oh, Dom. Yeah. You know we think a chat bot could replace him. We could tell the chat bot everything we tell him and the chat bot would just destroy him in terms of comprehension, ability to understand the situation and communicate to all the important players…”
Imagine going to an orchestra concert put on by a chat bot. It would just play a recording of some famous singer or orchestra. But like, I can do that. I can hit play on an iPod. Can Chat-GPT sing “The Trumpet Shall Sound”? I’m not saying I’m that good at singing that song but I can do it better than a fucking RTX-4090 can. It’s the same with programming. So much important information in that job is implied knowledge is not easily understood by a chat bot.
Not sold yet? Let’s imagine Chat-GPT pushes a bug to production that brings the servers down. You would be like “Fix it.” And Chat-GPT would be like ”Right away. It’s done.”
And production would still be down.
And you’d be like “No, no, it’s not fixed.” And it would be like “You’re right, so sorry. Now it’s fixed.”
And production would still be down. And now you’ve reached an impenetrable challenge because you have to explain to Chat-GPT what it really means for “production” to be “down”. And in order to do that, you would either have to fix the code yourself and show it to them, or you’d have to explain the entire physical world, how computers fit into it, how you’re actually a computer, how these computers aren’t working right because if they were, the program you wrote be running… but it isn’t….
Anyway, I’ll worry about AI replacing programmers after they’ve replaced Uber drivers and airline pilots.