u/michaelnovati replied ·
I've been working in the industry for 15 years or so if you round up a bit.
In no particular order:
1. engineers are not these magically efficient beings. we have lots of inefficiencies and AI and automation are only going to remove those so that we can spend more time doing the creative and interesting work that we both like doing and is most impactful
2. The press this week about ChatGPT have been really great PR for Open AI's team but the truth is that there are almost 8 billion people in the world and Amazon mechanical Turk has existed for a long time. While to a comfortable engineer or college student in a good university, it's intriguing to think about machines replacing human thought... for pennies we've been able to farm out intelligent activities and get extremely fast responses through other means for years. So for someone to exploit the AI we have today to replace their job, it would take a similar amount of effort to try exploit inequities and labor cost in different countries like through mechanical Turk to replace their job in the past. It has been happening over many many years and it's definitely not a snap of fingers at the end of the world type reaction.
3. If you still don't believe me, then all you have to do is go to your local DMV office or social security office and the second you step inside. you will be brought back down to reality and realize that your job is safe for several more years at least. Like I said, I'm an engineer myself, and I'm an early adopter of many technologies, and it's fun to sit on my computer and put on some good music and creatively think about all the possibilities that we can do as humans in our lifetime. But there are a lot of practical problems day-to-day that are much more impactful to solve than snapping fingers and replacing some of the most creative and hard-working people with an AI.