I think it's just one more show of how addicted to the algorithm people are.
The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.
I haven't seen anyone really talking about this, but we've seen many very public and powerful people have what is objectively a psychotic break, due to the content algorithm, AI, or both.
We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.
I've definitely seen some articles on the topic of AI psychosis among executives. I think there's something about being in a position of power that makes the sycophancy really psychologically dangerous.
It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state.
This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx.
At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring.
They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners and backfill with new hires earning 70%, then 50%, then...
I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
> At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring.
Hah, it would be easier to replace the PM with the engineer. Synthesize customer requests? "Competitor research" via google search? Some half-imaginary projection of how a given feature will affect usage rates?
All of those are dead-simple to do with a model and are often un-falsifiable enough that if they're a bit wrong, it won't be noticed. Whereas a PM struggling to figure out how to debug something running in product or to keep the agent from making a destructive change while doing so would be MUCH more noticed.
> I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
In that future, almost every other role goes away faster+harder. Even the vaunted entrepreneur: "just start your own thing and solve customer problems directly" isn't needed when the customer solves their own problems!
"I'll be fine since I'm a good enough engineer" may be wrong, but "the engineers are gonna be fucked but me/the PM/the CEO/whoever else" is even less plausible.
Computer Science is the science of solving (hard) problems in general. If you automate CS, you trivially automate most of other professions. The only ones that won't budge are the regulated ones like lawyers, MDs and similar that have ways to prevent AI from wrecking their fields. Product/Project PMs are easy pickings. We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.
No, it isn't, and the fact that software engineers think this despite being incredibly stupid about 99.5% of knowledge work is why everyone else hates software engineers.
To me it is almost tautological that what I said is true. If software can’t solve a knowledge work problem, that means the software isn’t good enough and needs improved.
I also question your claim that “everyone hates software engineers,” because I find they’re reasonably well liked in general. Perhaps you’re assuming what I meant was something like “if someone is good at software engineering then they’re smarter than all other knowledge workers,” which is blatantly not true (and indeed, not my point).
> We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.
How is that going to work? People going to see a movie advertised as starring a well-known actor will be lured to see a movie starring unknown AI models?
It might be "enough" but it's not how the show industry works. There is no human story around it; the well-known actors and the people around them would have to be quite stupid to allow it too. And taking this development into the extreme, there will be no living well-known actors, just ai slop everywhere, and while the audience might not be the most demanding, surely that's not enough to make money in the long term.
Most will be replaced by the Soylent green factory after waiters and chefs become a niche luxury for those who did not find themselves economically crushed.
Dumb people aren't going to be doing the work of the smart people ever, no matter how tech evolves. The actual implication of AI being on the level of sentient beings instead of hyped-up token predictors is that the era of humanity is over. If AIs were literally capable of doing what CEOs want them to, we'd have far bigger problems to deal with than employment.
what else do you expect people to do? give up and preemptively go back to university for massive debt and become a doctor? get into long haul trucking? Programming is and was a great job for a middle class lifestyle, needing only smarts and nothing else. No connections, social skills, even location wouldn't hold you back that much.
No, a lot of people will ride the train all the way down.
The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.