Inching closer to technological feudalism every day. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for AI, but this thing that could easily be used ti cut working hours will be used to enrich the technological powerhouses that make the US an oligarchy

  • The_Walkening [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Yeah I'm skeptical that this is gonna replace people working at the JavaScript factory - the trick there is gonna be making those jobs increasingly more precarious and lower-paid rather than replacing them.

    • stigsbandit34z [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      This might be worse somehow. I genuinely don't know how capitalism will sustain itself in the next 40 years without an extremely robust social safety net. And all those conversations have been dead in the water since Reagan's presidency

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        It's one of the reasons I'm fully for UBI (just not Yang's shitty version). Tech and AI don't need to replace individual workers, they just need to lower the ceiling of expertise and increase productivity enough that one worker gets saddled with the work of multiple others. We see it after every recession where suddenly companies have found that actually they were getting by just fine without all those other workers because poor Joe Schmo and a couple of productivity suites are perfectly "capable" of picking up the slack for the rest of his missing department.

  • CoconutOctopus [it/its]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

    • ImSoOCD [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Yeah this is 100% being overplayed. Have you played with Github’s AI code generator? It’s either spot on or visibly the result of AI distortions. This is like having an AI generate melodies, cutting out all the parts where you arrange and orchestrate those melodies, and then claiming that AI can replace composers. Not that that exact grift hasn’t been tried

  • CanYouFeelItMrKrabs [any, he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Today as a game developer you can download Unreal, get some free art assets, and assemble a level with a person walking around in first person in a jungle and it'll work on PC, PS4, Xbox, etc

    A few decades ago you would have to do all of that yourself. Displaying 3d graphics, a moving camera, gravity, lightning, etc. And making it work on each platform. But game studios are larger than ever even though some things have gotten a lot simpler

    Edit: Not to mention that you can also start implementing game logic with a drag and drop coding system in Unreal also! No need to spend years studying Computer Science before dipping your toes in

  • coeliacmccarthy [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    technological feudalism isn't possible after the power goes out for good :think-about-it:

    • chlooooooooooooo [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      quantum computing isn't ever going to be applied in the same way that conventional computing is, though. they have totally different applications and even if we can get quantum computing working at scale, it's never gonna be something that you see outside of extremely highly controlled labs run by the world's largest corporations and states.

  • SerLava [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I'm not worried, this looks pretty fake and/or highly limited as in, someone wrote a thing to look for the word "horizontal" and "animate" and has a predefined behavior if they type that in.

    Like I would bet 50 bucks that "make the rocket ship bigger, then make it smaller, repeatedly" would not work at all, despite being simpler than that demo. As in this isn't actually flexible.

    And being on TikTok I would also bet 50 bucks it's entirely fake

    • stigsbandit34z [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      True, but are you not worried about how this will be used to further narrow the labor market? This tech is definitely in its infancy, but don't you think that it will continue to evolve along with copilot?

      • SerLava [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The thing about computing de-abstraction is this:

        We're nowhere close to doing the maximum amount of computing that we want to do. If we make it easier to program stuff, we'll just do more programming in total - it won't shrink the pool. In some cases it might increase the amount of programming we do, because it becomes effective enough to use for a new purpose.

        We already moved from like, "A3 B1 13 D9 4E" on punch cards, to "move pointer, find buffered character, print character, reset, move pointer, find, print, reset" etc. to "print string" to like, all kinds of huge functions that do all kinds of self-cleanup and handle different conditions.

  • ImSoOCD [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Bright side: as the wages of developers drop, their ability to unionize increases

  • InternetLefty [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The problem isn't really translating a description of desired behavior into code, it's about creating an architecture and system model that meets functional requirements, is expandable, etc. Although I could see how this would succeed where humans would fail e.g. generated code doesn't need to be organized/human readable or modifiable

  • bewts [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I'm sure there are tons of limits on what this can actually do, but I think its pretty neat.

  • OperationOgre [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This seems more like the never-realized threat of autopilot cars replacing drivers and kiosks replacing food service workers than a real thing.