I think it's too early to tell. It feels like early translators. It's indeed very impressive, but could be 5-10 years from actually having something useful and it's unclear what the practical impact will be.
But it's also true that I wouldn't know what career to recommend to someone now in their early 20s who has 30 years ahead. As I said too difficult to predict right now.
The diffusion art models make it very clear that these technologies go from toys to replacing people’s jobs very very quickly.
Short of a (not impossible) breakdown in civilization, the current rate of change suggests that 5-10 years is probably unrealistic.
More like 2-4 years, it will be technically possible to be reasonably high level software engineering.
It’s already possible to chain high level “how would I do x?” Planning to “write code to do y…” code generation.
It’s very very obvious that technically it’s going to be possible to do a great deal of mechanical work like refactoring and adding trivial features automatically.
Companies do not need 50 engineers doing 100x productivity.
They need like, 5.
What remains to be seen is if governments and legal systems allow that scale of displacement of human labor to occur or not.
To my mind though this is only half the question. Let's assume that every company goes from 100 to 5 engineers - I could see that. But today, almost every company (aside from behemoths like FB, Google, etc) are engineer starved - they'd like to do so much more, but they don't have enough engineering manpower. One possibility is that, yes, engineers become much less in demand. But there's another possibility where the number of companies explodes because the amount of software that can be built is no longer bottlenecked on the number of engineers you can hire.
> The diffusion art models make it very clear that these technologies go from toys to replacing people’s jobs very very quickly.
Do you have any evidence that art jobs are being replaced now? I was talking with a designer friend of mine recently and he's not heard of Stable Diffusion, etc. replacing jobs yet. This is something that people keep bringing up but I haven't yet seen any evidence to back it up.
Nah, the differences are (at least) that we're future-oriented, motivated, social, have language, and live long enough to be grandparents. Take that, octopuses.
Also as far as the economy goes, we actually try to participate in it instead of sitting around getting eaten. Maybe we won't succeed in the future though…
The 'proko' channel on youtube has some discussions on this topic from people who know what they're talking about, rather just anecdotal evidence from a sample size of 1.
But it's also true that I wouldn't know what career to recommend to someone now in their early 20s who has 30 years ahead. As I said too difficult to predict right now.