Mastodawn

My take:

The AI scam is a bubble. It's going to burst, and 99% of the "value" in it will evaporate. (There will be some utility in the 1%.)

There will then be demand for skilled human employees … who will be few, because unused skills atrophy and there's a crimp in the training pipeline.

Wages for those who can do stuff will spiral.

But there'll be a net productivity decline and a recession.

So: the long-term legacy of the AI bubble will be stagflation.
https://toot.cafe/@baldur/114443358373790490

Baldur Bjarnason (@baldur@toot.cafe)

“The AI jobs crisis is here, now - by Brian Merchant” https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-jobs-crisis-is-here-now > The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is unusually high—and historically high in relation to the general unemployment rate "AI" is killing entry-level jobs, which means that a few years down the line companies won't have senior labour to hire. This also shows that talk about “AI literacy” and “AI skills” is a joke. You’re not gonna need any skills if employers aren’t employing in the first place

Toot Café

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Charlie Stross 5d ago

Also, if (as Satya Nadela claims in public) 30% of Microsoft's software is LLM-generated, then we can expect the next couple of generations of Windows and Microsoft Office to be unelievably bad. Not just enshittified for advertising and profit: but full of really idiotic security holes and bugs inserted by LLMs that were trained on their own toxic efflux by "developers" too de-skilled to understand what they were doing.

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𝙋𝙨𝙖𝙡𝙙𝙤𝙧𝙣 5d ago

@cstross
It's either a lie or MAYBE they include autocompleted IDE stuff where it can figure out that that half written word matches the pattern of the last 3 lines and you press tab to finish.

Anything other than that last example and I don't know how you could ever safely use MS tech again.

When I have time my gaming rig (and my kids) will be going penguin-style.

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C++ Wage Slave

@psaldorn

It's probably worse than that: much worse.

My employer asked me to try GitHub Copilot, which, of course, is a Microsoft product. Copilot suggests not just the ends of words but whole statements and, in many cases, stanzas of up to a dozen lines.

Pasting that much code into a program is always wrong. Even if the code does the right thing (which never happens), the programmer shouldn't accept that degree of duplication. Duplication¹ should always be factored out; otherwise, the program becomes more expensive to maintain and is more likely to incur bugs under maintenance. (Even if you've updated nine copies of a piece of code and fixed the same bug nine times, you never know if there's a tenth copy that you've missed.)

So Copilot and similar products are a recipe for bugs now and buggier, unmaintainable code in the future.

I eventually advised my employer that they shouldn't roll it out and that, if they did, I wouldn't use it. So far, they've not mentioned it again.

¹ See what I did there?

@cstross