OP already answered why this time is different. Previous technology has never reduced the scarcity of general intelligence, which has been the exclusive domain of humans.
This reads like satire from a Slate commentary piece on Citizens United. I suppose we’re just waiting around until the majority of corporations in the US are formed and operated by AI agents. And then…
Not necessarily contradictory. If all your peers are using AI, you might feel you have to use it too to avoid falling behind… especially with curved grade thresholds
The antidote to AI psychosis is not denial. We owe it to ourselves to be humble and consider the possibility that LLM technology leads to general intelligence. The capabilities of coding agents today are certainly outside my wildest imagination circa GPT-3 launch in 2020.
The cynical conclusion of AGI is that most humans will be enslaved or disposed of. We won't be forced to continue working for pay despite being slower, less intelligent, and more expensive than machines.
So I can build my entire app in a WebKit wrapper and call it native? I think ‘native’ in this context is well-understood to mean eschewing web or cross-platform renderers
Electron sits on native rendering primitives. Do you suggest that every developer who wants rich interactive text in their app should write a text rendering engine from the ground up?
>1. Scott Alexander is famous for writing about topics he knows little about. I'm glad to see he's found a subject he knows little about but so does everyone else.
This is kinda laughable. Scott has been thinking and writing about AI for a long time
So what? It's anti-social behavior. What thought does the deleted diesel truck driver give to his fellow citizens, whose otherwise reliable respiratory systems are weakened and made more susceptible to failure by toxic fumes and particulates?
My premise is that a vibe-coded app will be indistinguishable from a ‘hand-crafted’ one. So in that scenario the chemist wins, because the developer has no value to add.
It is clear to me that SWE and ML research will be subsumed before other domains because labs are focusing their efforts there, in their quest to build self-improving systems.
In a world where software programming/architecting is solved by AI, value will accrue to people with expertise in other domains (who have now been granted the power of 1000 expert developers), not the people whose skillsets have been made redundant by better, faster and cheaper AI tools.