I’m a dev. I’ve been for a while. My boss does a lot technology watch. He brings in a lot of cool ideas and information. He’s down to earth. Cool guy. I like him, but he’s now convinced that AI LLMs are about to swallow the world and the pressure to inject this stuff everywhere in our org is driving me nuts.
I enjoy every part of making software, from discussing with the clients and the future users to coding to deployment. I am NOT excited at the prospect of transitioning from designing an architecture and coding it to ChatGPT prompting. This sort of black box magic irks me to no end. Nobody understands it! I don’t want to read yet another article about how an AI enthusiast is baffled at how good an LLM is at coding. Why are they baffled? They have “AI” twelves times in their bio! If they don’t understand it who does?!
I’ve based twenty years of career on being attentive, inquisitive, creative and thorough. By now, in-depth understanding of my tools and more importantly of my work is basically an urge.
Maybe I’m just feeling threatened, or turning into “old man yells at cloud”. If you ask me I’m mostly worried about my field becoming uninteresting. Anyways, that was the rant. TGIF, tomorrow I touch grass.
Oh God, I can see it now. Someone makes an AI for filtering job applications, it’s great, all the employers use it. Before a human ever sees a resume, the AI decides whether to silently discard it. For reasons known to literally no one, the AI doesn’t like your name and always discards your resume, no matter how many times you change it. Everybody uses the same AI, so you never get a job again. You end up on the street, penniless, through no fault of your own.
According to this Ted talk (at about 8:15) Amazon tried a resume filtering AI but discovered it was filtering out women.
Yes, and it’ll eventually be worked out to the point that it’s mostly accurate, but there will always be edge cases like the one I described above; they’ll just be rare enough that nobody cares or even believes that it’s happening.
Now, humans reviewing job applications are also subject to biases and will unfairly reject applicants, but that only shuts you out of one company. AIs, on the other hand, are exact copies of each other, so an AI that’s biased against you will shut you out of all companies.
And, again, no one will care that this system has randomly decided to ruin your life.