How Software Development is Being Affected
Whoosh. Microsoft just brutally laid off 60,000 workers. Oh wait, they label this process "voluntary to leave with money". Such politically correct BS. Without a doubt more layoffs in large companies continue to occur. After occasionally encountering more online videos of other software engineers, we can confirm further that many of us who are not the best of the bests to manage software projects are not so valuable to the production performance of the software development. For example, one aerospace and defense industry software company that has been running well and profiting significantly for more than a decade is shutdown because the designs accessible have been stolen by AI and AI can reproduce similarly with slight variation. The training data in AI models are literally stolen content throughout the internet and then the content is associated to words and logic, so major portion of manual work done by humans can be done by AI and faster. The top seniors are still needed to work and review and continue finding solutions to the problems because AI cannot do all of software development that humans can do yet:
- remote cloud services cannot hold context of large projects
- persistence knowledge of the software as after prompts and executions finish
- communication: we enter prompts by words, but we need to practice and refine our explanations accurately for the AI to convert into instructions to find closest content and modify our project documents or codes
AI Replacement of Human Workers Is Not New
Since I do not need to develop software full time, I start to learn more of society by absorbing shared experience of not only engineers but also workers in general. I step back to think further about humanity and technologies in wider perspective. Overall, AI is one human-created technology that is more productive than humans, thus replacing human workers. Let's compare this to clothing manufacturing industry. Remember back in the old days that clothes were made by humans? Once machines were created to auto-manufacture products throughout assembly lines by utilizing prepared cloth, cutting pieces into shapes and sewing them into entire shirt, etc. These machines are productive in fast pace. Mainly machine designers, builders and operators are needed. Automobiles replaced manual rickshaws and animal-moving transportation. There are many other technologies that can produce better than humans.
AI Depression To Software Engineers
Although some software developers are able to convert to data or ML engineers, they do not feel that meaningful to their work done like the past. For example, this ML engineer shares her feel of AI depression. Although she is currently developing AI models to generate codes for the company instead of herself, her production does not give as much rewarding feel of work done anymore. Engineers have been working in the full process: understand the problem and goals, design, implement features, test, refine and release. And at least, they feel the pride of performance no matter the level of rewards given by bosses. Nowadays, the middle steps are doable by AI. Companies mainly appreciate the final products after whatever methods of production. Similarly customers of the products care the quality and costs.
Technologies Have No Souls and Diminish Personalized Products
Since manufacturing technologies can produce faster and consistently, they do not care that the old workers would be eliminated. The AI's absorbance of public content does not care that creators have spent time and effort to create the images, videos, news and info. Less and less things are hand-made with personal styles and feelings. In the far future, will humans need to produce anything anymore?
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