Red stapler says “Developers will lose jobs over this over the next 10 years.”
More like, fewer new developers will enter the marketplace. Instead, the developers that exist will transition into engineers who know how to leverage GPT. New devs who might have otherwise entered the market as coders, will instead go into a job that leverages GPT. Maybe they’ll use it to write code, or maybe they’ll use it to do new things that we can’t even imagine right now. Almost none of the jobs we do today existed even 50 years ago, and a ton of the jobs people did 50 years ago nobody does any more today thanks to technological innovation.
And yet the economy hasn’t crashed, and we don’t have a massive upswell of unemployment as a result. (Those economic issues are all down to the Fed). Instead, if you measure wealth as a function of how much easier it is to live life, we’ve gotten vastly wealthier – even the poorest among us. We shouldn’t be afraid of new technology. Instead, we should pay attention and look for the new opportunities it opens up for us.
As Milton Friedman said when he went to China; he asked why they were using shovels instead of diggers to build a road and they told him “so we can employ more people”. His response was, “Oh so you don’t have a road-building project, you have an employment project. In that case, why not take away their shovels and give them spoons?”
GPT is truly a game-changer. What used to take a whole day of searching stack overflow for code to copy and paste can be done in under an hour!
Are there reasons to be concerned about ChatGPT and other AI systems? Certainly. As with every tool, it can be used for good and evil. Human depravity will certainly find ways to use it for evil, but as with all things, the market will keep us honest if it’s allowed to. If the market is allowed to do its job, AI should primarily be used to improve human life.
AI is already all around us. The algorithms used by Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter are forms of AI. Or do you use a tool like Grammarly? Heck, even spellcheck was a form of AI created by Microsoft in the 90s. Yeah, there’s a lot of complaining about social media algorithms, but the algorithms haven’t been at the root of our problems with social media recently, have they? As the Twitter Files revealed, the problems stem from the human influence directed by the government.
That truly is the biggest danger with AI: if the government gets ahold of it. If there’s one institution we can trust to do evil with technology, it’s the government.
Truth & Liberty 