Did you even read it? They did give a reason ("due to the nature of your business") and it's been brought up in the house of lords precisely because it isn't a single person.
I've commented below but "due to the nature of your business" can be because its a newly formed company with few employees and no trading history trying to deposit £700K getting to many points on the banks "is this possibly a terrorist/money laundering/drug dealer" system and getting overzealously denied.
It's currently far more damaging to a bank to give someone an account to perform illegal activities than it is to deny one to a legitimate company. And accounts that are in the gray zone (where transactions keep getting flagged and have to be checked by compliance) are likely to cost far more than they make the bank.
Not really. Even with left-pad there was still some skilled work required. At this point my wife could vibe code an app or a website and it would be actually quite good - not the slop of 6 months ago.
Writing left-pad isn't the issue, the issue is that projects were importing a one-liner package and blindly using it, which requires no skill.
> Second, even if the package’s logic is correct, I can’t help but be amazed by the fact that developers are taking on dependencies for single line functions that they should be able to write with their eyes closed. In my opinion, if you cannot write a left-pad, is-positive-integer, or isArray function in 5 minutes flat (including the time you spend Googling), then you don’t actually know how to code. Hell, any of these would make a great code screening interview question to determine whether or not a candidate can code.
> Finally, stringing APIs together and calling it programming doesn’t make it programming. It’s some crazy form of dependency hacking that involves the cloud, over-engineering things, and complexity far beyond what’s actually needed.
Obviously LLMs make the situation even more dire, but I think people are overlooking that the industry was automating itself out of programming as a craft even before them. It's just the automation involved reuse of the work of other humans.
Sorry but there's no way that assembling libraries - even stupid ones like left-pad (which I'll note was an extreme example) - is in no way comparable to just saying "Claude make this program for me", which is pretty much where we are now. My wife can do the latter but not the former.
This isn't just "a bit more automation". It's "now we don't need lift operators".
It's really not like that. Sorry to disappoint you but it's more like cars were invented, and someone says "have you tried the Ford Model T, it's much better than a steam carriage".
Or if you prefer "have you tried the new iPhone, it's much better than the HP iPAQ".
> Sure, math does require people in future, but it can't accommodate as many as it does today.
I actually think it probably can - after all mathematics isn't a commercially viable career and pretty much all mathematicians are scholars paid by universities and taxes. They're already fairly unnecessary and mostly kept around for interest and to have an educated population and so on. In a way they're uniquely positioned to survive the AI storm.
Not so for programmers who are almost all working for companies who would love to stop paying them given a chance.
I don't think anyone tried to prescribe to you what emotions to have.
For the vast majority of history people did whatever work their circumstances led them to do. Such as taking over their father's farm, their father's craft, or whatever apprentice job there was a vacancy for nearby and hopefully learned to like it though exposure.
It has also been argued that the first farmers were also miserable, but still won due to more calories. But they would have preferred the hunter gatherer lifestyle over working one field all the time and taking care of a bunch or domesticated animals.
Yes there is something sad about a master craftsman having to become a manager in a factory, and the apprentice a conveyor belt worker, but the industrial transition also allowed immense improve ts in efficiency and production. Many people who descend from those early factory workers and farmers, like myself, enjoy a casual level of abundance with a desk job, car, stocked supermarkets, online orders etc. and while poverty still exists it's nothing like it was 100-150 years ago.
I'm a fairly heavy user of LLMs [1] but i'm probably in the "AI is just a tool" camp.
Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet? The internet has been around for so long that it's had time to have actual impact and yet it barely shows up in GDP. It still has so much untapped potential even yet. LLMs are too new to have amassed much impact yet, certainly not on the scale of the internet. But they have lots of potential still untapped. I just don't see how we get to even 5% GDP impact with them (either positive or negative). But i could be in a blind spot, genuinely curious to learn another view point.
[1] I've built all sorts with them. I've built various ML models but the only LLM i've built was effectively following a tutorial, nanochat
The AI of today is just a tool, albeit a very powerful one. But I don't think it's a big step for it to reach a level where the majority of humans will be unable to to meaningfully contribute to the economy ten years from now.
I think computers, internet and AI - all of them have impact - but they consume it by converting it into new structure. The benefits are in the infra not handed out to us individually. We might not see large changes on individual level, or the displaced work is replaced by management work for the automations and raising baselines push us to do more. We now have data centers, fiber backbone, GPUs, models, apps and open source projects, yet we still only have 24 hours a day.
I keep seeing this argument. But isn’t the inverse true as well - if you extrapolate from the past movement of the ball, you will see it going way farther than it will actually go because of friction, wind, someone catching it, etc.? It seems reasonable to look at where the tech is right now if it helps you understand fundamental constraints. A person witnessing the first flight as a child and the moon landing in adulthood might expect FTL travel for their children if they didn’t understand physics.
> Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet?
Yes, it's not even close. There are lots of entire fields that will be wiped out by AI. Financial advisors for example. Good luck if you're a translator or a proof reader.
The world is slow so I expect it to take some time, depending on the field.
Today I started vibe coding a replacement for a piece of software whose licensing cost is on the order of $100k/year/seat. It's going scarily well. I'm scared.
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