this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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AI isn't going to die out but hopefully it'll get quieter and more boring/focused.
It will absolutely die out in that it will go back to what it was previously. We've been using "AI" for decades now, only it's better known under the name machine learning. This latest surge in interest is just a bunch of marketing hype and a bunch of executives too stupid to realize they're being fed a line of bullshit by contractors promising if they hire them to make an "AI" they'll be able to fire their entire workforce and dump their salaries into fat executive bonuses. Just like all the previous tech fads this will stop being the hot thing once enough of these douche-bags get burned and even the dumbest of them learns that no, you can't just replace your entire workforce with "AI" and call it a day.
The tools now are far better. You can slap together something useful with some basic Python knowledge. Hardest part is mixing up the data into giving you good results.
It'll hang around, but I don't think Nvidea's market cap is justified. It'll crash hard, but it could be tomorrow or three years from now.
I don't think it's going to end up impacting most industries all that much. Low end call centers will probably be impacted, but they were already being displaced by automated call trees and such even before this latest fad. At some point trucking will be displaced by self driving trucks, but that tech is looking to be further off than it initially seemed as well thanks in part to some pretty high profile accidents and renewed scrutiny from various governments. Beyond that the impact in other industries is looking to be fairly minimal. You'll see smarter tools being rolled out to let people do the things they were already doing faster, but just like the "magic clone" tool in Photoshop while it will make some tedious time consuming activities much faster, it won't really fundamentally change things.
Honestly the biggest impact is most likely to be on crime, with these various tools being leveraged by criminals to make increasingly convincing scams, phishing attacks, and even worse things.
In biology we've been using machine learning for a long time now so the AI super hype out there is pretty funny to me. It's for sure useful with stuff like predicting protein folding and analyzing genes and stuff, but it's all hyper-specific stuff just like it has its always been. Good for removing tedium for sure as its the reason we can even know the human genome because it would take literally forever to sequence it without modern tech, which we did in the in the 90s and finished in 2003.
My big hope is that all this hype will get people to invest in proteonomic technology which is 100% a great use case for AI and also the future.
I run a bunch of e-commerce businesses and am a freelance developer. LLMs have absolutely changed my workflow and what I can achieve. There is hype, sure, but underneath it are absurdly useful platforms that, for me at least, have replaced the need to hire digital marketers, copywriters and junior programmers. This is too useful to be called a fad and dismissed the way the metaverse or NFTs rightly have been.
How are you using it to replace junior programmers? What specifically?
I haven't found much besides tooling that answers questions (that are frequently right ENOUGH), write relatively small, targeted functions, add just a bit of IDE-embedded help, and...not much else.
...stuff that could speed up a few things, but nothing that would remotely replace even a junior developer