In five years time, some CTO will review the mysterious outage or technical debt in their organisation.
They will unearth a mess of poorly written, poorly -documented, barely-functioning code their staff don’t understand.
They will conclude that they did not actually save money by replacing human developers with LLMs.
#AI #LLM #LargeLanguageModels #WebDev #Coding #Tech #Technology @technology
Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.
The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they’ve put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.
It doesn’t really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo – of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does…
Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it
“gangs of idiots” smashed the prototype looms because they knew they would put them out of work. And they were right, even though the machines were probably a net benefit for society in the end.
It will be the same with AI. If it ends up actually benefiting humanity as a whole, it will 100% be a side effect of a few assholes getting insanely rich, or from massive governmental regulation.
Were probably? That’s a giant understatement and you know it.
Ai will save billions of lives and improve the living standard for everyone on the planet, it’ll be just like mobile phones where the biggest benefits come to the poorest communities - tech haters often ignore this reality, millions of children in Africa, Asia, etc were only able to get access to education through mobile infrastructure.
The internet has given everyone access to huge amounts of education resources and it’s only increased as they technology matures - current LLMs are amazing for language learners and for people who need things like English articles explained in their own language, I just asked chatgpt to explain the code I’m working on in Tagalog and it did it without hesitation (I can’t speak for the accuracy personally but looks legit) it even translated variable names but not function calls.
And this before we’ve scratched the surface of it’s utility, I’ll tell you one thing if you ever say to your grandkids ‘o I was against ai when it came out’ they’ll look at up like you’d look at someone who said they didn’t think math would catch on or that iron would never be as popular as bronze.