"The same kind of argument was used when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. And indeed, lots of new jobs were created, just not in the Western world."
China's entry into the WTO is really not a good evidentiary example for AI causing mass unemployment. Unemployment in the U.S. had already been increasing at the time, peaked soon after, decreased to well below the point it had been at China's entry, and only went up again during the Great Financial Crisis, which had nothing -- or at least very little -- to do with competition from China. That's not to say that jobs weren't lost, even en masse, but they were replaced, and U.S. unemployment has been near record lows in recent years. China's WTO entry is a supporting point, not a counterpoint, to the idea that jobs lost to AI will be replaced by new ones.
I'm the author of Python Crash Course, and I got this exact same email this week. I was thinking of writing a public response as well, because any attempt to sincerely answer these questions takes something along the lines of a full post. It's also worth a public response because many people who are getting into programming for the first time right now are asking variations of these same questions.
> Do I think that AI enables people to develop faster than they can keep up?
Absolutely. That's the core of this person's email, and everyone else who asks similar questions. Just five years ago, the only way to build a working project of moderate complexity was to learn the basic to intermediate concepts required to make an MVP. Now, if you can steer an LLM reasonably well, you can quickly build an MVP that goes well beyond your own understanding of the implementation.
I don't think anyone has clear answers to all the questions brought up in this email. I think people can learn faster than they used to, because they can make connections between different areas faster than they used to. But it requires skill and discipline in how you learn, and how you work. You have to intentionally build your understanding as you build your projects.
I'm a software engineer, I do software development but also system maintenance, and I do handle networking and telephony systems, and work with some juniors. Working with AI is problematic. It can speed up you but at the same time delay you. For the system maintenance part sometimes you need to do a lot of stuff fast and in various machines and you can't just count on a cloud based AI oracle (that takes time) to do your job for you. And the same time, the more you use it as a oracle, the less competent you get. If you are an expert, I would say in any area, you do benefit from using AI as a tool but it easily can become a double edged sword and make you less proficient. For juniors, it can make them rapidly produce stuff that is impressive and works ok for sites and some visual stuff, but it's impossible for a junior to become an expert if they get stuck in the AI using loop. For AI to cause a clean impact, I would say that we would have to live in a world where software engineering didn't matter. That is, the choice of databases, high availability systems, the programming languages themselves.
IMHO, I think that it could be better if the question about how to learn programming in the age of LLMs were asked to someone who is learning now by using LLMs. Someone who learned programming thirty years ago can perhaps give you only one side of the coin, whereas someone learning today from scratch using LLMs could give you good advice on what the real difficulties are and where the main drawbacks lie. Combining both views would give a better idea of the landscape.
I think bill gates summarized it pretty well in a recent letter [1]. There are pro's and con's to every new technology. Learning can be greatly accelerated with the use of llm's but you have to use them the right way. Just like calculators help further down the line, they do not help you when you are still trying to learn the basic concepts of arithmetic. I personally think I have found a way of working with llms that really accelerates getting stuff done while i am still able to learn. It means reading more, and (although I hate this in part) reading generated text. What is infuriating is when I suspect people writing to me with generated text, it is insulting and should be banned. Makes me want to spend more time offline (probably a good thing in my case).
I said this in different ways before and got shoveled because of the way I said it:
None of us know how to farm, not even the chefs who cook for us at a restaurant or fast food joint, but we eat every day and nobody's going around making people feel guilty about not knowing how to till soil and sow seeds..
In programming and other creativity, most people's skills will [have to] change/evolve into managing, directing, dictating, knowing what you want, describing it, and focusing on the end product and iterating,
instead of wrestling with why the f is a string a pointer to a pointer to a character
just like we don't track the phases of the moon and seasonal rainfall before we can have a nice salad to eat.
China's entry into the WTO is really not a good evidentiary example for AI causing mass unemployment. Unemployment in the U.S. had already been increasing at the time, peaked soon after, decreased to well below the point it had been at China's entry, and only went up again during the Great Financial Crisis, which had nothing -- or at least very little -- to do with competition from China. That's not to say that jobs weren't lost, even en masse, but they were replaced, and U.S. unemployment has been near record lows in recent years. China's WTO entry is a supporting point, not a counterpoint, to the idea that jobs lost to AI will be replaced by new ones.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
> Do I think that AI enables people to develop faster than they can keep up?
Absolutely. That's the core of this person's email, and everyone else who asks similar questions. Just five years ago, the only way to build a working project of moderate complexity was to learn the basic to intermediate concepts required to make an MVP. Now, if you can steer an LLM reasonably well, you can quickly build an MVP that goes well beyond your own understanding of the implementation.
I don't think anyone has clear answers to all the questions brought up in this email. I think people can learn faster than they used to, because they can make connections between different areas faster than they used to. But it requires skill and discipline in how you learn, and how you work. You have to intentionally build your understanding as you build your projects.
I have realized that simplier (boring) is better. E.g. simple html5 css combo is better instead of trying to navigate in JS frameworks.
[1]https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/a-tur...
None of us know how to farm, not even the chefs who cook for us at a restaurant or fast food joint, but we eat every day and nobody's going around making people feel guilty about not knowing how to till soil and sow seeds..
In programming and other creativity, most people's skills will [have to] change/evolve into managing, directing, dictating, knowing what you want, describing it, and focusing on the end product and iterating,
instead of wrestling with why the f is a string a pointer to a pointer to a character
just like we don't track the phases of the moon and seasonal rainfall before we can have a nice salad to eat.