I think this is overly optimistic; it assumes universities reacted instantly and pivoted to teaching coding with AI as soon as it was feasible. In actuality, university curriculums cannot change quickly, and AI capabilities are changing much faster. In my experience, some students are using AI to write code, but then have no idea what's going on. The "skill" of typing "Write a function to do [basic thing]" will not make them AI-native or help them in the workplace.
It also is naive to think, if AI is shrinking head count, that companies will seek anything other than seniors.
2008 triggered a glut of cheap experienced workers that slowly reengaged juniors but this time that the entire ladder is going to be more valuable than any grad.
For CS students I agree. For non-CS students, who need programming as a way to use computers as a tool, I think they do need a solid understanding of what a computer does and what it's limitations are (and what it's capable of), but for their day jobs (once they graduate), they will most likely be getting AI to do everything for them. As long as they can reason about what's happening, to understand the results and to improve them, this seems likely to be the path in the future.
In my experience, some students are using AI to write code, but then have no idea what's going on. The "skill" of typing "Write a function to do [basic thing]" will not make them AI-native or help them in the workplace.
How many of them can read x64 or ARM assembly emitted by their compilers?
That is a different matter. And you are probably wrong here as well. Plenty of people care about a program doing exactly what they want. Nothing more, nothing less. If not every one would have been writing programs in Ruby (not that Ruby is non-deterministic) .
Pro tip: Feedback fixes everything, including whatever you think is wrong with AI-generated code. If you can wrap a feedback loop around it, you can automate it safely. If you can't, then you're in a really bad place to begin with.
When I say that nobody cares about determinism, that's what I mean. Determinism is indeed important, but only at the delivery level. There are many routes to achieving it, none of which require you to write low-level code yourself. If you insist on doing that, you have a hobby, not a profession.
Everything needs to be test-driven now, in my experience. The test harness is the part that needs the most careful vetting.
My workflow used to be:
1. Draft rough spec
2. Write a bunch of C/C++ code
3. Test manually
Now it's more like:
1. Put some actual care into a detailed spec
2. Write equally detailed test harness spec
3. Hand both specs to clanker. Surf HN for a while
4. Review target code casually
5. Review test harness very carefully
6. Run test(s) manually (or, lately, get the clanker to do that too)
7. Iterate if necessary, going back to step 1, 2, or 3 as appropriate
This doesn't necessarily even save that much time, but it makes the job easier and more enjoyable, and it forces me to do things I should've been doing all along. If steps 1, 2, and 5 are done properly, step 4 can be "Meh, whatever, LGTM."
The analogy I like to use is Harold Black's work in the 1930s, trying to convince the patent office and his peers that yes, negative feedback is a huge, huge F'ing deal, because it only takes a small amount to make a large improvement in linearity. Anytime you have something that is 95% as good as it needs to be, it will be good enough if you can wrap a loop around it.
AI is not an abstraction layer. If you work entirely on the level of prompting without any knowledge or understanding of the underlying code, you are not actually an engineer, but more of a half-assed technical manager. (And your job will be first on the chopping block.)
This is an introductory programming course, designed for non-CS students e.g. engineers and scientists.
> Learning outcomes
> 2. Explain key concepts in AI-assisted programming, including Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting, problem decomposition, and top-down design.
> 3. Apply the workflow of AI-assisted programming and prompt-engineering techniques to guide and improve code generated by AI assistants.
This course used to be non-AI (last year), and they rewrote recently to incorporate AI tools, as they realised the writing's on the wall for non-programmers.
It must be quite challenging to write curriculum when the underlying technology (AI) is changing so quickly.
Current grads of the past 2 years and the next 2 years should do what exactly? This doesn’t make any sense, much like most of Jensen’s “don’t worry about it just keep pumping” proclamations. Too bad it’s Ezra Klein that is talking to him and can’t form a coherent argument to save his life.
love love this theoretically but in practice, at least in this “phase 1 of AI craze, unknown how long it’ll last” that someone coming out of Uni with deep knowledge of ABCDs of SWE will be unemployable unless she/he is AI native with harnesses coming out of their ears
I listened to this podcast and it was maddening. A few of his frames :
AI is just software, nothing new to see here.
Safety will come from sandboxing.
There is no collective action problem, and every company should just slow down if they think they need to slow down.
There is no need for regulation because the existing incentives in the market keep companies from acting badly, which is why no company has ever done anything bad.
If something bad does happen, then we can regulate after the fact.
We will end up creating more jobs than we destroy, so don't worry about it.
Our kids might forget a whole bunch of stuff or never learn it in the first place. But don't worry, they'll come up with new things to learn instead.
The only way to get safety is to move faster because then we will more quickly arrive at safety.
Recursive self-improvement is just what we've always done.
The real danger is alarmism that might scare the public and the young people.
It’s feeling less and less like human progress and more and more like progress for a small group at the top of our economic structure who are hoovering up everything for themselves.
Who gives a fuck if some techno barons can deploy novel software at the drop of a hat if it means I lose my career in an environment without social safety nets.
It’s not progress from my perspective when my life quality regresses.
Answer the question: who's coming to save you? Bernie? Donald? AOC? J.D.?
Better if you don't need saving at all, because you've been empowered to help yourself at your job. Ultimately the goal is to free you entirely from dependence on a day-to-day occupation.
You may have noticed that no one else is even trying to help you.
It’s not great, and I wasn’t arguing for it. I was saying AI isn’t going to lead to that on its own.
Mechanically how is AI going to lead to a social safety net? You can’t just handwave the productivity increases when they are all owned by a handful of concentrated wealth
I see it as a second Industrial Revolution. After the IR, everybody still had a job, but most of those were (in the words of one personal friend) "bullshit jobs." Jobs that didn't involve growing food or building tangible things. What we'd call "white collar jobs," in other words. The economic value associated with those jobs simply didn't exist before the IR. It couldn't.
After this incarnation of the Industrial Revolution, those white-collar jobs will be mostly gone, and nothing will replace them. I personally don't think CEOs and politicians will end up being any more immune than junior programmers. New forms of organization will have to emerge on both the labor and management sides. (Democracy is pretty much toast anyway, so something else is going to have to replace it, AI or no AI.)
Blue-collar labor will eventually be subsumed by robotics, but that will take longer. Things like UBI will make more sense in this environment than they do now, and I think that'll be a big part of it. Not to say that all gains will be equally distributed, or that they should be, but I don't things can get much worse than where they are headed today with regard to the tilted economic playing field.
The worst case scenario would indeed be if all the gains get concentrated and centralized, as the major AI labs seem to want, but I don't think it'll work out that way.
>The worst case scenario would indeed be if all the gains get concentrated and centralized, as the major AI labs seem to want, but I don't think it'll work out that way.
Youve laid out an idealistic view of how the world will work. You have not laid out how the transition between the current world where wealth is being concentrated somehow turns into UBI.
Even this sentence
> I personally don't think CEOs and politicians will end up being any more immune than junior programmers.
Implies that you think the capitalists who own these systems are going to be in charge since CEOs work for their boards and politicians largely follow their donors.
Again, lay out exactly how you think we move from our current system to UBI via AI technology.
>but I don't think it'll work out that way.
Is not you laying out how you think it will work, but a dogmatic religious belief with no evidence or logic behind it.
edit: Im sorry, I glossed over this sentence.
> Democracy at the nation-state level is pretty much toast anyway...
Are you a rationalist, e/acc, or someone related to TESCREAL, or especially anything touching on Curtis Yarvin? If so no need to answer, I think you guys are in a cult with the modern equivalent of Dianetics, so we are never going to see eye to eye.
Youve laid out an idealistic view of how the world will work. You have not laid out how the transition between the current world where wealth is being concentrated somehow turns into UBI.
Nor have you laid out how traditional political and social structures are going to save your job (or anyone else's) in the long run.
Are you a rationalist, e/acc, or someone related to TESCREAL, or especially anything touching on Curtis Yarvin? If so no need to answer, I think you guys are in a cult with the modern equivalent of Dianetics, so we are never going to see eye to eye.
I'm e/acc-curious, you could say. Lots of philosophical overlap but I'm not much of a joiner. Not sure who the rationalists or TESCREAL are.
I know who Yarvin is, though, and would generally take the opposite side of any argument with him. If there's a "cult" in play here, it's the voters who were duped into electing and then re-electing Trump. Democracy simply cannot survive if it continues to grant stupid people the same political power as smart people. The stupid people can be easily herded to the polls by unethical smart people. Meanwhile, the other smart people get along together like cats in a sack, ensuring they have only sporadic political influence that is bound to diminish further over time.
> Nor have you laid out how traditional political and social structures are going to save your job (or anyone else's) in the long run.
I never stated that they would. That’s an opinion you manifested from thin air because I stated that I don’t think AI is going to lead to a social safety net on its own.
I think things are generally going to get worse for the average person with AI as all the benefits accumulate at the top.
Assuming the rise of AI and the fall of democracy doesn’t have a default mode of social safety nets, and we’re seeing leadership increasingly divorced from the will of the people already.
You’re underselling how insane he seemed. Jenson’s behavior on that podcast was completely unacceptable. So much hubris and interrupted constantly. He presented so many complete unknowns about the future as obvious and matter of fact to him. The man has completely lost his mind.
With the massive layoffs there have been massive spikes of suicides and od deaths that will only get worse. Articles like this are simply trying to cover it up.
for a guy who is in the middle of it all, the opinion seems sophomoric at best. LLMs are based on heuristics and they will always make mistakes no matter how better they get. You'd need someone to 'fine-tune' the conversation with the LLM.
>"The first chip Huang worked on had 200 transistors, each of which he said he knew by name, while today’s engineers assemble systems from chips containing hundreds of trillions of them without ever working at that level. “Some of the lower-level knowledge is gone,” he acknowledged, and he later described AI as “clearly” a new abstraction level in the same progression."
I'd love to see Huang's definition of abstraction in which AI is somehow "a new abstraction level" but having some contractors build your product is not.
I wonder if - there are sort of broadly speaking a few different types of learners.
Jensen Huang has been CEO of NVIDIA for 33 years. That is a role
with a very specific type of information environment. He is sort of this weird combination of specialist and - he necessarily has to operate within a certain level of abstraction.
I’m somewhere in the middle, I’m a high achiever but not the highest. I would say I’m above average in my usage of AI at my tech job. The way I’ve learned systems thinking is by being a bit non-specific in what I learn. British history, psychology, software engineering, queuing theory, cooking.
The idea of learning systems but not basic math - the idea of being too discerning in what I’m willing to learn. The entire idea of passing up the ability to learn something like basic math.
So many mental models of the world are developed by engaging with things like basic math. How do you learn systems without learning patterns behind numbers?
If the whole argument is something like it’s now about taste or creativity or being a builder? The way you learn those skills is engagement with all the things. It’s not abandoning all the things to read a book on systems thinking and product management.
It’s not never focus, but if your default position is “maybe I shouldn’t be curious about that”. You’re operating from a deficit.
46 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 49.1 ms ] thread2008 triggered a glut of cheap experienced workers that slowly reengaged juniors but this time that the entire ladder is going to be more valuable than any grad.
How many of them can read x64 or ARM assembly emitted by their compilers?
How many of them will ever need to?
There's your answer.
It’s how I deeply understand what a RAM lookup vs having it already in a register means for optimization.
These are things you need to know if you want to work on high performance applications or in limited embedded systems.
So, yes, many of us need to and it’s important we keep teaching it to future students.
This is a category error. LLMs are probabilistic. The ones run by an AI company over API, even more so.
Compilers are not.
Nobody cares. Deal with it and get over it.
>Nobody cares.
That is a different matter. And you are probably wrong here as well. Plenty of people care about a program doing exactly what they want. Nothing more, nothing less. If not every one would have been writing programs in Ruby (not that Ruby is non-deterministic) .
Get over that camperbob2
When I say that nobody cares about determinism, that's what I mean. Determinism is indeed important, but only at the delivery level. There are many routes to achieving it, none of which require you to write low-level code yourself. If you insist on doing that, you have a hobby, not a profession.
What exactly do you mean by this? Can you give an example..
>none of which require you to write low-level code yourself
again, LLMs are not "coding at a higher level". I thought we were past that braindead-ness!
My workflow used to be:
Now it's more like: This doesn't necessarily even save that much time, but it makes the job easier and more enjoyable, and it forces me to do things I should've been doing all along. If steps 1, 2, and 5 are done properly, step 4 can be "Meh, whatever, LGTM."The analogy I like to use is Harold Black's work in the 1930s, trying to convince the patent office and his peers that yes, negative feedback is a huge, huge F'ing deal, because it only takes a small amount to make a large improvement in linearity. Anytime you have something that is 95% as good as it needs to be, it will be good enough if you can wrap a loop around it.
This is an introductory programming course, designed for non-CS students e.g. engineers and scientists.
> Learning outcomes
> 2. Explain key concepts in AI-assisted programming, including Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting, problem decomposition, and top-down design.
> 3. Apply the workflow of AI-assisted programming and prompt-engineering techniques to guide and improve code generated by AI assistants.
This course used to be non-AI (last year), and they rewrote recently to incorporate AI tools, as they realised the writing's on the wall for non-programmers.
It must be quite challenging to write curriculum when the underlying technology (AI) is changing so quickly.
It is so, so easy to pick up LLM aided development.
What is way harder is self-managed slop mitigation which is only achieved with employees who know the A,B,C's of software development.
AI is just software, nothing new to see here.
Safety will come from sandboxing.
There is no collective action problem, and every company should just slow down if they think they need to slow down.
There is no need for regulation because the existing incentives in the market keep companies from acting badly, which is why no company has ever done anything bad.
If something bad does happen, then we can regulate after the fact.
We will end up creating more jobs than we destroy, so don't worry about it.
Our kids might forget a whole bunch of stuff or never learn it in the first place. But don't worry, they'll come up with new things to learn instead.
The only way to get safety is to move faster because then we will more quickly arrive at safety.
Recursive self-improvement is just what we've always done.
The real danger is alarmism that might scare the public and the young people.
Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.
Who gives a fuck if some techno barons can deploy novel software at the drop of a hat if it means I lose my career in an environment without social safety nets.
It’s not progress from my perspective when my life quality regresses.
AI is the ultimate social safety net, if you'll just get out of the way of the people weaving it.
Better if you don't need saving at all, because you've been empowered to help yourself at your job. Ultimately the goal is to free you entirely from dependence on a day-to-day occupation.
You may have noticed that no one else is even trying to help you.
Don’t hint at it. Lay out the mechanics of how you think AI is going to become a safety net for the average person.
Mechanically how is AI going to lead to a social safety net? You can’t just handwave the productivity increases when they are all owned by a handful of concentrated wealth
After this incarnation of the Industrial Revolution, those white-collar jobs will be mostly gone, and nothing will replace them. I personally don't think CEOs and politicians will end up being any more immune than junior programmers. New forms of organization will have to emerge on both the labor and management sides. (Democracy is pretty much toast anyway, so something else is going to have to replace it, AI or no AI.)
Blue-collar labor will eventually be subsumed by robotics, but that will take longer. Things like UBI will make more sense in this environment than they do now, and I think that'll be a big part of it. Not to say that all gains will be equally distributed, or that they should be, but I don't things can get much worse than where they are headed today with regard to the tilted economic playing field.
The worst case scenario would indeed be if all the gains get concentrated and centralized, as the major AI labs seem to want, but I don't think it'll work out that way.
Youve laid out an idealistic view of how the world will work. You have not laid out how the transition between the current world where wealth is being concentrated somehow turns into UBI.
Even this sentence
> I personally don't think CEOs and politicians will end up being any more immune than junior programmers.
Implies that you think the capitalists who own these systems are going to be in charge since CEOs work for their boards and politicians largely follow their donors.
Again, lay out exactly how you think we move from our current system to UBI via AI technology.
>but I don't think it'll work out that way.
Is not you laying out how you think it will work, but a dogmatic religious belief with no evidence or logic behind it.
edit: Im sorry, I glossed over this sentence.
> Democracy at the nation-state level is pretty much toast anyway...
Are you a rationalist, e/acc, or someone related to TESCREAL, or especially anything touching on Curtis Yarvin? If so no need to answer, I think you guys are in a cult with the modern equivalent of Dianetics, so we are never going to see eye to eye.
Nor have you laid out how traditional political and social structures are going to save your job (or anyone else's) in the long run.
Are you a rationalist, e/acc, or someone related to TESCREAL, or especially anything touching on Curtis Yarvin? If so no need to answer, I think you guys are in a cult with the modern equivalent of Dianetics, so we are never going to see eye to eye.
I'm e/acc-curious, you could say. Lots of philosophical overlap but I'm not much of a joiner. Not sure who the rationalists or TESCREAL are.
I know who Yarvin is, though, and would generally take the opposite side of any argument with him. If there's a "cult" in play here, it's the voters who were duped into electing and then re-electing Trump. Democracy simply cannot survive if it continues to grant stupid people the same political power as smart people. The stupid people can be easily herded to the polls by unethical smart people. Meanwhile, the other smart people get along together like cats in a sack, ensuring they have only sporadic political influence that is bound to diminish further over time.
I never stated that they would. That’s an opinion you manifested from thin air because I stated that I don’t think AI is going to lead to a social safety net on its own.
I think things are generally going to get worse for the average person with AI as all the benefits accumulate at the top.
Assuming the rise of AI and the fall of democracy doesn’t have a default mode of social safety nets, and we’re seeing leadership increasingly divorced from the will of the people already.
For reference on TESCREAL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
The destroyed jobs and the persons doing them will be different from the new ones created..
>If something bad does happen, then we can regulate after the fact.
How does regulating after the fact undo the harms caused?
> they'll come up with new things to learn instead.
Like they forgot how to communicate face to face, but have learned to communicate via social media?
Jensen gets it!
Related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupling_(computer_programming...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_layer
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da
Jensen Huang has been CEO of NVIDIA for 33 years. That is a role with a very specific type of information environment. He is sort of this weird combination of specialist and - he necessarily has to operate within a certain level of abstraction.
I’m somewhere in the middle, I’m a high achiever but not the highest. I would say I’m above average in my usage of AI at my tech job. The way I’ve learned systems thinking is by being a bit non-specific in what I learn. British history, psychology, software engineering, queuing theory, cooking.
The idea of learning systems but not basic math - the idea of being too discerning in what I’m willing to learn. The entire idea of passing up the ability to learn something like basic math.
So many mental models of the world are developed by engaging with things like basic math. How do you learn systems without learning patterns behind numbers?
If the whole argument is something like it’s now about taste or creativity or being a builder? The way you learn those skills is engagement with all the things. It’s not abandoning all the things to read a book on systems thinking and product management.
It’s not never focus, but if your default position is “maybe I shouldn’t be curious about that”. You’re operating from a deficit.