I hope this helps people understand that you don’t get to be CEO by being smart or working hard. It’s all influence and gossip all the way up.
In Leaked Audio, Amazon Cloud CEO Says AI Will Soon Make Human Programmers a Thing of the Past
Submitted 2 months ago by shish_mish@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://futurism.com/the-byte/aws-ceo-human-devs-ai
Comments
trolololol@lemmy.world 2 months ago
dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
In fact, being stupid is probably a benefit.
trolololol@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yep if I had that kind of money and surrounded by like minded people I’d agree. Unfortunately I’m cursed with a rational mind 🙃🙃🙃
Hackworth@lemmy.world 2 months ago
“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry. - John Carmack
ASDraptor@lemmy.autism.place 2 months ago
This right here.
Problem is not coding. Anybody can learn that with a couple of well focused courses.
I’d love to see an AI find the cause of a catastrophic crash of a machine that isn’t caused by a software bug.
Hackworth@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Catching up on what Carmack’s been up to for the last decade has revived the fan in me. I love that 2 years after leaving Oculus to focus on AGI, this is all the hype he’s willing to put out there.
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Agreed! Problem solving is core to any sort of success. Whether you’re moving up or on for more pay, growing tomatoes or nurturing a relationship, you’re problem solving. But I can see AI putting the screws to those of us in tech.
Haven’t used it much so far, last job didn’t afford much coding opportunity, but I wrote a Google Apps script to populate my calendar given changes to an Excel sheet. Pretty neat!
With zero experience App scripting, I tried going the usual way, searching web pages. Got it half-ass working, got stuck. Asked ChatGPT to write it and boom, solved with an hour’s additional work.
You could say, “Yeah, but you at least had a clue as to general scripting and still had to problem solve. Plus, you came up with the idea in the first place, not the AI!” Yes! But point being, AI made the task shockingly easier. That was at a software outfit so I had the oppurtuniy to chat with my dev friends, see what they were up to. They were properly skeptical/realistic as to what AI can do, but they still used it to great effect.
Another example: Struggled like hell to teach myself database scripting, so ignorant I didn’t know the words to search and the solutions I found were more advanced answers than my beginner work required (or understood!). First script was 8 short lines, took 8 hours. Had AI been available to jump start me, I could have done that in an hour, maybe two. That’s a wild productivity boost. So while AI will never make programmers obsolete, we’ll surely need fewer of them.
L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
“Guy who was fed a pay-to-win degree at a nepotism practicing school with a silver spoon shares fantasy, to his fan base that own large publications, about replacing hard working and intelligent employees with machines he is unable to comprehend the most basic features of”
UnsavoryMollusk@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You did a great summary honestly
Boozilla@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They’ve been saying this kind of bullshit since the early 90s. Employers hate programmers because they are expensive employees with ideas of their own. The half-dozen elite lizard people running the world really don’t like that kind of thing.
Unfortunately, I don’t think any job is truly safe forever. For myriad reasons. Of course there will always be a need for programmers, engineers, designers, testers, and many other human-performed jobs. However, that will be a rapidly changing landscape and the number of positions will be reduced as much as the owning class can get away with. We currently have large teams of people creating digital content, websites, apps, etc. Those teams will get smaller and smaller as AI can do more and more of the tedious / repetitive / well-solved stuff.
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And by that time, processors and open source AI are good enough that any noob can ask his phone to generate a new app from scratch. You’d only need big corpo for cloud storage and then only when distributed systems written by AI don’t work.
abcd@feddit.org 2 months ago
I’m relaxed. IMHO this is just another trend.
In all my career I haven’t seen a single customer who was able to tell me out of the box what they need. Big part of my job is to talk to all entities to get the big picture. Gather information about Soft- and Hardware interfaces, visit places to see PHYSICAL things like sub processes or machines.
My focus may be shifted to less coding in an IDE and more of generating code with prompts to use AI as what it is: a TOOL.
I’m annoyed of this mentality of get rich quick, earn a lot of money with no work, develop software without earning the skills and experience. It’s like using libraries for every little problem you have to solve. Worst case you land in dependency/debug hell and waste much more time debugging stuff other people wrote than coding it by yourself and understanding how the things work under the hood.
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
the number of positions will be reduced as much as the owning class can get away with
Well, after all, you don’t hire people to do nothing. It’s simply a late-stage capitalism thing. Hopefully one day we can take the benefits of that extra productivity and share the wealth. The younger generations seem like they might move us that way in the coming decades.
Boozilla@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I really hope so. Sometimes I think the kids are alright. Like the 12 year old owning the My Pillow idiot. Then I hear the horror stories from my school teacher friends.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
when will ai replace ceos?
A_A@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Mark Zuckerberg is not a robot ?
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
good point
RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
Is he fully functional? I have some standards.
Whitebrow@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Lizardman. Easy to confuse the two as they’re both cold to the touch by default.
Alienator@lemm.ee 2 months ago
What kind of weird conspiracy theory is this?
Lizardmen are not robots.
_____@lemm.ee 2 months ago
No!!! They’re useful because uhhmm uuhhhh uhmm uhhhbbh dndus
BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world 2 months ago
Wouldn’t even need AI, a coin flip would do just as well.
lemmeBe@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
This. ⬆️ 😆
EnderMB@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s worth noting that the new CEO is one of few people at Amazon to have worked their way up from PM and sales to CEO.
With that in mind, while it’s a hilariously stupid comment to make, he’s in the business of selling AWS and its role in AI. Take it with the same level of credibility as that crypto scammer you know telling you that Bitcoin is the future of banking.
mycodesucks@lemmy.world 2 months ago
PM and sales, eh?
So you’re saying his lack of respect for programmers isn’t new, but has spanned his whole career?
Squizzy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
As a wage slave with no bitcoin or crypto, the technology has been hijacked by these types and could otherwise have been useful.
EnderMB@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m not entirely sold on the technology, especially since immutable ledgers have been around long before the blockchain, but also due to potential attack vectors and the natural push towards centralisation for many applications - but I’m just one man and if people find uses for it then good for them.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah hows that goin’?
aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub 2 months ago
It can write really buggy Python code, so… Yeah, seems promising
ripcord@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It does a frequently shitty job of writing docstrings for simple functions, too!
kamenoko@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
It does great with common code patterns that it can just drop in place. 99.9% Artificial, 0.01% intelligence.
Eril@feddit.org 2 months ago
When I last tried to let some AI write actual code, it didn’t even compile 🙂 And another time when it actually compiled it was trash anyway and I had to spend as much time fixing it, as I would have spent writing it myself in the first place.
So far I can only use AI as a glorified search engine 😅
Red_October@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Spoken like someone who manages programmers instead of working as one.
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Lol sure, and AI made human staff at grocery stores a thing of the…oops, oh yeah…y’all tried that for a while and it failed horribly…
So tired of the bullshit “AI” hype train. I can’t wait for the market to crash hard once everybody realizes it’s a bubble and AI won’t magically make programmers obsolete.
Remember when everything was using machine learning and blockchain technology? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s the pinnacle of MBA evolution.
In their worldview engineers are a material, and all that matters in the world is knowing how to do business. So it just makes sense that one can guide and use and direct engineers to replace themselves.
They don’t think of fundamentals, they really believe it’s some magic that happens all by itself, you just have to direct energy and something will come out of it.
Lysenko vibes.
This wouldn’t happen were not the C-suite mostly comprised of bean counters. They really think they are to engineers what officers are to soldiers. The issue is - an officer must perfectly know everything a soldier knows and their own specialty, and also bears responsibility. Bean counters in general less education, experience and intelligence than engineers they direct, and also avoid responsibility all the time.
So, putting themselves as some superior caste, they really think they can “direct progress” to replace everyone else the way factories with machines replaced artisans.
It’s literally a whole layer of people who know how to get power, but not how to create it, and imagine weird magical stuff about things they don’t know.
CaptKoala@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Yeah, I member.
bravesirrbn@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This person memegens
jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Just the other day, the Mixtral chatbot insisted that PostgreSQL v16 doesn’t exist.
A few weeks ago, Chat GPT gave me a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table that used several DAX functions in ways that they could not be used.
The funny thing was, it knew and could explain why those functions couldn’t be used when I corrected it. But it wasn’t able to correlate and use that information to generate a proper function. In fact, I had to correct it for the same mistakes multiple times and it never did get it quite right.
Generative AI is very good at confidently spitting out inaccurate information in ways that make it sound like it knows what it’s talking about to the average person.
Basically, AI is currently functioning at the same level as the average tech CEO.
mojo_raisin@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The job of CEO seems the far easier to replace with AI. A fairly basic algorithm with weighted goals and parameters (chosen by the board) + LLM + character avatar would probably perform better than most CEOs. Leave out the LLM if you want it to spout nonsense like this Amazon Cloud CEO.
____@infosec.pub 2 months ago
And no asinine private jet commute required for the AI CEO…
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
But plenty of electricity still needed.
Valmond@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Cheaper too I bet.
Also lol for the AI coder 😁 good luck with that 😂
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Worst case scenario the ai fucking loses it and decides to do some wacky but weirdly effective shit. Like spamming out 1 width units en masse in Hearts of Iron 4.
painfulasterisk1@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
It’s really funny how AI “will perform X job in the near future” but you barely, if any, see articles saying that AI will replace CEO’s in the near future.
Dearth@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Somewhere there is a dev team secretly programming an AI to take over bureaucratic and manegerial jobs but disguising it as code writing AI to their CTO and CEO
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
C-suites are like Russian elites.
The latter are some thieves who’ve inherited a state from Soviet leadership. They have a layman’s idea of what a state and a country is, what history itself is, plus something that a taxi driver would say. In the last 20 years they are trying to apply that weird idea to reality, as if playing Hearts of Iron, because they want to be great and to be in charge of everything that happens.
The former have heard in school that there were industrial revolutions and such, and they too want to be great and believe in every such stupid hype about someone being replaced with new great technology, and of course they want to be in charge of that process.
While in actuality with today’s P2P technologies CEO’s are the most likely to be replaced, if we use our common sense, but without “AI”, of course. Just by decentralized systems allowing much bigger, more powerful and competitive cooperatives than before, and those that form and disband very easily.
ZephyrXero@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Here’s one. And their profits went up when they replaced their CEO www.forbes.com/…/can-ai-become-your-next-ceo/
yesman@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I just want to remind everyone that capital won’t wait until AI is “as good” as humans, just when it’s minimally viable.
They didn’t wait for self-checkout to be as good as a cashier; They didn’t wait for chat-bots to be as good as human support; and they won’t wait for AI to be as good as programmers.
xtr0n@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
And then we should all charge outrageous hourly rates to fix the AI generated code.
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They’ll try the opposite. It’s what the movie producers did try the wrists. They gave them AI generated junk and told them to fix it. It was basically rewriting the whole thing but because now it was “just touching up all existing script” it was half price.
peopleproblems@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You better fucking believe it.
AIs are going to be the new outsource, only cheaper than outsourcing and probably less confusing for us to fix
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 2 months ago
They won’t, and they’ll suffer because of it and want to immediately hire back programmer (who can actually do problem solving for difficult issues). We’ve already seen this happen with customer service reps - some companies have resumed hiring customer service reps because they realized AI isn’t able to do their jobs.
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And because all the theft and malfunctions, the nearby supermarkets replaced the self checkout by normal cashiers again.
If it’s AI doing all the work, the responsibility goes to the remaining humans. They’ll be interesting lawsuits even there’s the inevitable bug that the AI itself can’t figure out.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 months ago
We saw this happen in Amazon’s cashier-less stores. They were actively trying to use a computer based AI system but it didn’t work without thousands of man hours from real humans which is why those stores are going away. Companies will try this repeatedly til they get something that does work or run out of money. The problem is, some companies have cash to burn.
I doubt the vast majority of tech workers will be replaced by AI any time soon. But they’ll probably keep trying because they really really don’t want to pay human beings a liveable wage.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Unexpected item in bagging are? I think you meant free item in bagging area.
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Already happening. Cisco just smoke another 4,000 employees. And anecdotally, my tech job hunt is, for the first time, not going so hot.
SuperiorOne@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
‘Soon’ is a questionable claim from a CEO who sells AI services and GPU instances. A single faulty update caused worldwide down time recently. Now, imagine all infrastructure is written with today’s LLMs - which are sometimes hallucinate so bad, they claim ‘C’ in CRC-32C stands for ‘Cool’.
I wish we could also add a “Do not hallucinate” prompt to some CEOs.
Feyd@programming.dev 2 months ago
Meanwhile, llms are less useful at helping me write code than intellij was a decade ago
tzrlk@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m actually really impressed with the auto complete intellij is packaged with now. It’s really good with golang (probably because golang has a ton of code duplication).
SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Extremely misleading title. He didn’t say ceos would be a thing of the past, he said developers won’t have to write code.
Tyfud@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Even so, he’s wrong. This is the kind of stupid thing someone without any first hand experience programming would say.
Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
I heard a lot of programmers say it
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah, there are people who can “in general” imagine how this will happen, but programming is exactly 99% not about “in general” but about specific “dumb” conflicts in the objective reality.
People think that what they generally imagine as the task is the most important part, and since they don’t actually do programming or anything requiring to deal with those small details, they just plainly ignore them, because those conversations and opinions exist in subjective bendable reality.
But objective reality doesn’t bend. Their general ideas without every little bloody detail simply won’t work.
SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not really, it’s doable with chatgpt right now for programs that have a relatively small scope. If you set very clear requirements and decompose the problem well it can generate fairly high quality solutions.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 2 months ago
AI is terrible at solving real problems thru programming. As soon as the problem is not technical in nature and needs a decision to be made based on experience, it falls flat on its face.
SSJMarx@lemm.ee 2 months ago
amazon cloud CEO reveals that they have terminal CEO brain and have no idea what reality is like for the people they’re in charge of
checks out
spacecadet@lemm.ee 2 months ago
We are now X+14 months away from AI relaxing your job in X months.
Hexagon@feddit.it 2 months ago
Can AI do proper debugging and troubleshooting? That’s when I’ll start to get worried
Aceticon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Well, that would be the 3rd or 4th thing during my career that was supposed to make my job a thing of the past or at least severely reduce the need for it.
(If I remember it correctly, OO-languages were supposed to reduce the need for programmers, then there was Outsourcing, visual programming and on the server-side I vaguely remember various frameworks being hailed as reducing the need for programmers because people would just be able to wire modules together with config or some shit like that. Plus many libraries and frameworks out there aim to reduce the need for coding)
All of them, even outsourcing, have made my skills be even more in demand - even when they did reduce the amount of programming needed without actually increasing it elsewhere (a requirement were already most failed) the market for software responded to that by expecting the software to do more things in more fancy ways and with data from more places, effectively wiping out the coding time savings and then some.
Granted, junior developers sometimes did suffer because of those things, but anything more complicated than monkey-coder tasks has never been successfully replaced, fully outsourced or the need for it removed, at least not without either the needs popping up somewhere else or the expected feature set of software increasing to take up the slack.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I taught myself Python in part by using ChatGPT. Which is to say, I coaxed it through the process of building my first app, while studying from various resources, and using the process of correcting its many mistakes as a way of guiding my studies. And I was only able to do this because I already had a decent grasp of many of the basics of coding. It was honestly an interesting learning approach; looking at bad code and figuring out why it’s bad really helps you to get those little “Aha” moments that make programming fun. But at the end of the day it only serves as a learning tool because it’s an engine for generating incompetent results.
ChatGPT, as a tool for creating software, absolutely sucks. It produces garbage code, and when it fails to produce something usable you need a strong understanding of what it’s doing to figure out where it went wrong. An experienced Python dev could have built in a day what took me and ChatGPT a couple of weeks. My excuse is that I was learning Python from scratch, and had never used an object oriented language before. It has no excuse.
AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I’d believe AI will replace human programmers when I can tell it to produce the code for a whole entire video game in a single prompt that is able to stand up to the likes of New Vegas, has zero bugs, and is roughly hundreds of hours of content upon first play due to vast exploration.
In other words, I doubt we’ll see human programmers going anywhere any time soon.
MoonRaven@feddit.nl 2 months ago
But you have to describe what it is. If only we had universal languages to do that… Oh yeah, it’s code.
hoot@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Uh huh.
Vilian@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
The first thing AI gonna replace is CEO, dumb ass job, Mac Donald employer require more expertise
kamenoko@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I’ve seen what Amazon produces internally for software, I think the LLMs could probably do a better job.
Kualk@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Current AI is good at compressing knowledge.
Best job role: information assistant or virtual secretary.
CaptPretentious@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That guy has never seen AI code before. It regularly gets even simple stuff wrong. Was he especially good is when it gives made up crap. Or it tells you a method or function you can use but doesn’t tell you where it got that. And then you’re like “oh wow I didn’t realize that was available” and then you try it and realize that’s not part of the standard library and you ask it “where did you get that” and it’s like “oh yeah sorry about that I don’t know”.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Guy who buys programmers and sells AI thinks he can sell more AI and stop buying programmers.
This is up there with Uber pretending self driving cars will make them rich.
MeekerThanBeaker@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I mean… self driving cars probably will. Just not as soon as they think. My guess, at least another decade.
IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not until a self driving car can safely handle all manner of edge cases thrown at it, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. The cars would need to be able to recognize situations that may not be explicitly programmed into it, and figure out a safe way to deal with it.
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Maybe, or maybe like harnessing fusion it will always be “just a few more years away!”
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Self driving taxis are definitely happening, but the people getting rich in a gold rush are the people selling shovels.
Uber has no structural advantage because their unique value proposition is the army of cheap drivers.
med@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I’m right there with you, but I also remember hearing that this time last decade.
militaryintelligence@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Way longer. Roads will have to be designed and maintained with them in mind.