I'm 22 and have no clue what I'm meant to do in a world where this is a thing. I'm moving to a semi rural, outdoorsy area where they teach data science and marine science and I can enjoy my days hiking, and the march of technology is a little slower. I know this will disrupt so much of our way of life, so I'm chasing what fun innocent years are left before things change dramatically.
It's worth noting that LLMs have been part of the tech zeitgeist for over two years and have had a pretty limited impact on hireability for roles, despite what people like the Klarna CEO are saying. Personally, I'm betting on two things:
* The upward bound of compute/performance gains as we continue to iterate on LLMs. It simply isn't going to be feasible for a lot of engineers and businesses to run/train their own LLMs. This means an inherent reliance on cloud services to bridge the gap (something MS is clearly betting on), and engineers to build/maintain the integration from these services to whatever business logic their customers are buying.
* Skilled knowledge workers continuing to be in-demand, even factoring in automation and new-grad numbers. Collectively, we've built a better hammer; it still takes someone experienced enough to know where to drive the nail. These tools WILL empower the top N% of engineers to be more productive, which is why it will be more important than ever to know _how_ to build things that drive business value, rather than just how to churn through JIRA tickets or turn a pretty Figma design into React.
I agree completely. This is a fundamentally different change than the ones that came before. Calculators, assemblers, higher level languages, none of these actually removed the _reasoning_ the engineer has to do, they just provide abstractions that make this reasoning easier. What reason is there to believe LLMs will remain "assistants" instead of becoming outright replacements? If LLMs can do the reasoning all the way from high level description down to implementation, what prevents them from doing the high level describing too?
In general, with the technology advancing as rapidly as it is, and the trillions of dollars oriented towards replacing knowledge work, I don't see a future in this field. And that's despite me being on a very promising path myself! I'm 25, in the middle of a CS PhD in Germany, with an impressive CV behind me. My head may be the last on the chopping block, but I'd be surprised if it buys me more than a few years once programmer obsolescence truly kicks in.
Indeed, what I think are safe jobs are jobs with fundamental human interaction. Nurses, doctors, kindergarten teachers. I myself have been considering pivoting to becoming a skiing teacher.
Maybe one good thing that comes out of this is breaking my "wunderkind" illusion. I spent my teens writing C++ code instead of going out socializing and making friends. Of course, I still did these things, but I could've been far less of a hermit.
I mirror your sentiment of spending these next few years living life; Real life. My advice: Stop sacrificing the now for the future. See the world, go on hikes with friends, go skiing, attend that bouldering thing your friends have been telling you about. If programming is something you like doing, then by all means keep going and enjoy it. I will likely keep programming too, it's just no longer the only thing I focus on.
What was it that initially inspired you to learn to code? Was it robots, video games, design, etc... Whatever that was, creating the pinnacle of it is what your future will be.
It was the challenge for me. Seeing some difficult-to-solve problem, attacking it, and actually solving it after much perseverance.
Kind of stemming from the mindspace "If they can build X, I can build X!"
I'd explicitly not look up tutorials, just so I'd have the opportunity to solve the mathemathics myself. Like building a 3D physics engine. (I did look up colission detection after struggling with it for a month or so, inventing GJK is on another level)
I'm the same age as you; I feel lost, erring in being a little too pessimistic.
Feels like I hit the real world just a couple years too late to get situated in a solid position. Years of obsession in attempt to catch up to the wizards, chasing the tech dream. But this, feels like this is it. Just watching the timebomb tick. I'd love to work on what feels like the final technology, but I'm not a freakshow like what these labs are hiring. At least I get to spectate the creation of humanity's greatest invention.
This announcement is just another gut punch, but at this point I should expect its inevitable. A Jason Voorhees AGI, slowly but surely to devour all the talents and skills information workers have to offer.
Apologies for the rambly and depressing post, but this is reality for anyone recently out or still in school.
At least you're disillusioned with the idea of a long term career before a lot of other people. It's disturbing seeing how ready people are to go into a lifelong career and expecting stability and happiness in the world we're heading into.
We are living in a world run by and for the soon to be dead, many of which have dementia, so empathic policy and foresight is out of the question, and we're going to be picking up the incredibly broken scraps of our golden age.
And not to get too political but the mass restructuring of public consciousness and intellectual society due to mass immigration for an inexplicable gdp squeeze and social media is happening at exactly the wrong time to handle these very serious challenges. The speed at which we've undone civil society is breakneck, and it will go even further, and it will get even worse. We've easily gone back 200 years in terms of emotional intelligence in the past 15.
Put another way, you have deep conviction in a change that vast majority of people have not even seen yet, never mind grokked, and you're young enough to spend some decent amount of time on education for "venn'ing" yourself into a useful tool in the future. If you have a baseline education, there are any number of orthogonal skills you could add, be it philosophy, fine art, medicine, whatever. You know how to skate and you know where the puck is going, most most people, don't even see the rink.
I completely understand how you feel -I'm in my 40s, and I often find myself questioning what direction to take in this rapidly changing world. On top of that, I'm unsure whether advising my kids to go to university is still the right path for their future.
Everything seems so uncertain, and the pace of technological advancement makes long-term planning feel almost impossible. Your plan to move to a slower-paced area and enjoy the outdoors sounds incredibly grounding - it's something I've been considering myself.
I tell everyone who would listen to me (i.e. not many) that white collar jobs like mine are dead and skilled manual work is the way of the near future, that is until the rise of the robots.
Robots are going to go hand in hand with AI. Pretty sure our problems right now are not with the physical hardware that can far outperform a human already, it’s in the control software.
While I understand why you feel this way, the meaning or standing of being a programmer is different now. It feels like the purpose is lost or it longer belongs to human.
But below is reality talk. With Claude 3.5, I already think it is a better programmer than I at micro level tasks, and a better Leetcode programmer than I could ever be.
I think it is like modern car manufacturering, the robots build most of the components, but I can’t see how human could be dismissed from the process to oversee output.
O3 has been very impressive in achieving 70+ in swebench for example, but this also means when it is trained on the codebase multiple times so visibility isn't an issue yet it still has 30% chance that it can’t pass the unit tests.
A fully autonomous system can’t be trusted, the economy of software won’t collapse, but it will be transformed beyond our imagination now.
I will for sure miss the days when writing code, or coder is still a real business.
Developer. Prompt Engineer. Philosopher-Builder. (mostly) not programmer.
The code part will get smaller and smaller for most folks. Some frameworks or bare-metal people or intense heavy-lifters will still do manual code or pair-programming where half the pair is an agentic AI with super-human knowledge of your org's code base.
But this will be a layer of abstraction for most people who build software. And as someone who hates rote learning, I'm here for it. IMO.
Unfortunately (?) I think the 10-20-50? years of development experience you might bring to bear on the problems can be superseded by an LLM finetuned on stackoverflow, github etc once judgement and haystack are truly nailed. Because it can have all that knowledge you have accumulated, and soaked into a semi-conscious instinct that you use so well you aren't even aware of it except that it works. It can have that a million times over. Actually. Which is both amazing and terrifying. Currently this isn't obvious because it's accuracy /judgement to learn all those life-of-a-dev lessons is almost non-existent. Currently. But it will happen. That is copilot's future. It's raison d'être.
I would argue what it will never have however, simply by function of the size of training runs is unique functional drive and vision. If you wanted a "Steve Jobs" AI you would have to build it. And if you gave it instructions to make a prompt/framework to build a "Jobs" it would just be an imitation, rather than a new unique in-context version. That is the value a person has- their particular filter, their passion and personal framework. Someone who doesn't have any of those things, they had better be hoping for UBI and charity. Or go live a simple life, outside the rat race.
I'm hoping it's similar to the abacus for maths, the elimination of human "calculators" like on the apollo missions, and we just ended up moving onto different, harder, more abstract problems, and forget that we ever had to climb such small hills. AI's evolution and integration is more multifaceted though and much more unpredictable.
But unlike the abacus/calculators i don't feel like we're at a point in history where society is getting wiser and more empathetic, and these new abilities are going towards something good.
But supervisors of tasks will remain because we're social, untrusting, and employers will always want someone else to blame for their shortcomings. And humans will stay in the chain at least for marketing and promotion/reputation because we like our japanese craftsman and our amg motors made by one person.
>I'm 22 and have no clue what I'm meant to do in a world where this is a thing.
For what it's worth that's probably an advantage versus the legions of people who are staring down the barrel of years invested into skills that may lose relevance very rapidly.
Our way of life changed when electricity came around. It changed when cars took over the cities, it again changed when mobile phones became omnipresent.
Will LLMs or without LLMs, the world will keep turning. Humans will still be writing amazing works of literature, creating beautiful art, carrying out scientific experiments and discovering new species.
I'm happy enough with it, but I'm also a little sad that it's essentially been chosen for me because of weak willed and valued people who don't want to use policy to make things better for us as a society. Plus we are in a bad world/scenario for AI advancements to come into with pretty heavy institutional decay and loss of political checks and balances.
It's like my life is forfeit to fixing other peoples mistakes because they're so glaring and I feel an obligation. Maybe that's the way the world's always been, but it's a concerning future right now
