The future is agentic swarms or whatever comes after that doing the prompting for you if the AI companies succeed. You're going to be left behind either way.
I’m really curious about the end game. When this technology completely saturates and AI becomes his mundane bullshit thing know one cares about but uses all the time. Like the next level above slop. I wonder what that world will look like.
I also am curious of this, I only fear that it's going to turn into a concerted effort by those who have power to remove already existing capabilities from individuals and replace it with centralized infrastructure. Swapping out everyone's desktop for a think client hooked up to an agent and renting it back for a monthly fee for example, would be a strict downgrade when we already had the capability to do pretty much anything we could think of on the internet. Sure maybe it makes someone's workflow a b it more efficient, but I quite like having my own agency. I don't intend to hand it away some dork who owns a billion GPUs can rent it back to me.
Much of human innovation arises out of leisure interests where no immediate demand or need exists. Mathematics for example initially arised out of people with leisure time who found some hobby to do.
Think about it. Math is a hobby, practically useless. But it benefited humanity with side effects like engineering and computers.
Now to your point. Because math is initially a pretty useless endeavor it can only arise as a leisure hobby. A leisure hobby can only arise in people who have tons of leisure time and have no need to fight for survival. Thats why peace time is important.
I don’t think you are aware of the history of math. It had nothing to do with leisure. It was all invented in the interest of commerce and military applications. This whole thread is aspirational thinking. The NSF was a poor recreation by Vanevar Bush to attempt to achieve some of the scientific breakthroughs driven by WW II. Neccessitu is the mother of invention has been proven over and over. People have these hopes that giving everyone leisure will result in all sorts of great science and art but it’s not backed up by any prior experience in human history.
No a lot of it was leisure. Euclid was all leisure. Entire math departments are all leisure based as they don’t do anything practical for society. Newtons invention of calculus. Complete leisure.
There’s also huge demand for creating unneeded solutions and making those solutions viable.
The only way to make unneeded solutions viable is to make them needed, so there is huge effort and industries in manufacturing need where need previously never existed. That is modern society for you today.
Exactly these people will be experts at typing this:
“ Claude! what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time, explain to me with full clarity”
or "Claude! how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed? Give me all the possible ways ranked from best to worst, also explain to me all these concepts so I can understand as I don’t have a cs degree".
If you think that there is no future where software engineers don’t matter then you are delusional. While the future is not set in stone the pace and trendline of AI point to this future as a MORE realistic future then the alternative.
Your example btw is ALREADY a solved problem. AI can answer it and design around it. Agents at my company already handle our infra.
> “ Claude! what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time, explain to me with full clarity”
This isn't even the right question to ask, I think you've basically proved my point. You are in charge of deciding what the system should do when two users update a record at the same time. It's extremely dependent on what you're trying to do.
> Your example btw is ALREADY a solved problem. AI can answer it and design around it.
What's the one-size-fit-all solution for concurrency management that works for every single domain and application? I'm curious.
> Claude! how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed? Give me all the possible ways ranked from best to worst, also explain to me all these concepts so I can understand as I don’t have a cs degree".
It’s your example. I simply took your example and asked Claude. If it’s not the right question then don’t give it out as an example.
> What's the one-size-fit-all solution for concurrency management that works for every single domain and application? I'm curious.
I’m curious how your brain concocted I said that. Examine the context of our conversation. What I mean there is that AI can solve those questions for every possible domain application.
> Who's going to make this decision? The CEO?
Armed with Claude any non technical person can make this decision.
>Knowing the right question to ask is what makes a person an engineer.
Yes, but this is orthogonal to the point and that is: AI can do it too.
>Yes, if you know what to ask. You're doing an excellent job of demonstrating my point!
No it's your comprehension that needs work. You are missing MY point while being repeatedly getting enamored with your own point. My point is that AI KNOWS the questions.
>You just disproved that by asking the wrong question. Much like you, the CEO won't even know what to ask an AI.
I didn't ask a single question bro. I only regurgitated your examples. Much like AI, half your statements are based off of hallucinations.
By the progress of AI from ChatGPT to now is horrifyingly fast.
Trendlines and basic reasoning point to a most probable future where the AI is superior. We can’t just say “that remains to be seen” because the alternative is the least probable future.
The fact that humans are needed to correct mistakes is only an ephemeral status quo that is being eroded away as we speak. We all can see it happening in front of our very eyes. AI is getting better.
It is pointless to call out the little wins humans still have because again, those wins are temporary.
We need real concerted effort into asking: what is the point? For me the only answer I came up with is: fun.
With LLMs none of these are that impressive anymore. I want to see a triple A game created from scratch in CSS. A game as good and large as say Witcher 3 or Zelda totk or red dead redemption 2. When I see that… then I’ll be impressed.
Most of the world believes in crazy shit. Religion is mostly fantasy. Believing All powerful beings aka gods are crazy in every context and really mental institution level insanity except in the context of religion.
Many are ignorant and believe childish things, many are similarly ignorant and live in the same childish framework only to condemn it. Then there are the adults, and they have an idea of what they are talking about.
It is not too different (attempting extra clarity) from people who would say "Oh but many think that AI is intelligent/not intelligent, <sneer>", but have little proper idea of matmul, of cognitive processes etc. (Imperfect simile, but may give an idea.)
This isn’t true. Plenty of people aren’t religious. The explanation for why is more mundane.
It’s because of identity. Because people who are religious spent years and years and most of their lives not only studying and believing what they believe but also building community and centering their behavior around it. Abandoning that is the harder thing to give up.
If it were existential dread then we wouldn’t have entire countries like China being mostly atheist.
Why would one feel existential dread? I am the same person as before? The idea of dread could come if one believes there is some 'purer' or 'higher' form of existence in comparison to you, it should not come from realizing you and all other lifeforms are made of the same stuff.
Because the notion of one's non-existence is the very root of existential dread.
If you accept you are just meat. Just mundane matter shaped in a way where it has thoughts. Then you accept your own true non-existence is inevitable. With no get-outs like returning to god or some spirtual unity with the universe or reincarnation or whatever.
The alternative is to believe that the mind, conditioned and optimized by millions of years of evolution for the survival of the organism under constant threat of hostile natural forces, can capably perceive reality as it is.
You do not need to understand reality to survive. Does your pet turtle understand your true nature and the true nature of reality? No. Yet it survives.
Understanding reality is orthogonal to survival. In fact given that MORE people in this world are religious than not, one can argue that delusion. contributes MORE to survival than being a realist.
> really mental institution level insanity except in the context of religion.
The DSM even has to include an explicit exception to prevent the clinical definition of “delusion” from applying to religious belief. Without that ad hoc exception, religious belief would be classified as clinically delusional.
Still children (the psychiatrists that cannot deal with matters outside their understanding) that have obtained some power and try to exert it over the rest. Scholarization has failed.
Those who code will be left behind. I code. I don’t like it. But I have to face reality.
reply