Year 3 of being told my job will be replaced by AI, and the only thing that's happened so far is that AI vendors keep showing up to my office, begging me to pay them to use it is a tool.
If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
I'm looking at the millennium puzzles, and independently of those puzzles I had asked it for a fluid dynamics simulation engine that runs in my browser, and it put one together for me so I could play with aerospikes and watch the formation of Mach diamonds in rocket engines. The isochrone map generator has also been stuck on my to-do list for years, and yet now thanks to Claude, I have it, and it's real-time and multimodal.
Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Sure, limited speedup, Amdahl's law and coding is not the only part of the job, but anyone who was fine at PM and QA but not code no longer needs a coder.
Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers.
I remember when the ability to generate music and art was "uniquely human", and sure there's a lot of cringe there with those models, but they're also winning awards and causing controversy by doing so, and artists are losing clients; I remember when the board game Go was considered to require "human intuition we could never make a computer solve, totally different to chess" (and I remember when chess was so, too).
When I was a kid, cheques and letters on addresses often got read by a human; the OCR which automated this is also AI, though these days image-to-numbers is the "hello world" of the field.
>Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers.
okay, and?
>Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write.
Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world
I'll repeat it for you again:
If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
They're not only useful for programming, it's just that programming is by itself a trillion dollar a year industry. This, by itself, is sufficient to not be the scam you assert it to be.
They may not work for your industry, but then again I don't know what your industry is.
Bluntly, over my lifetime, I've heard "AI will never/not in my lifetime do X" repeatedly within a year of it doing X, for many different X. It's good at getting good. The most recent one being "make useful contributions to millennium prize maths problems". A year or two before that, it was even "do well on degree-level economics essays".
Artists are unhappy, not only because it rips off their work, but because businesses that were previously hiring them now use it instead. This is much smaller (strictly in terms of money) than with software, but is also measurable.
Now, if you said Tesla's self-driving cars (another AI) are a trillion dollar scam, that I would even agree with. At least, for the market cap part, for actual sales it's more like a billion dollar (ish) scam.
>They're not only useful for programming, it's just that programming is by itself a trillion dollar a year industry. This, by itself, is sufficient to not be the scam you assert it to be.
Yeah, if you think I'm being overly literal. Regardless, people here were positing, yourself included, that they are widely useful.
> Bluntly, over my lifetime, I've heard "AI will never/not in my lifetime do X" repeatedly within a year of it doing X, for many different X. It's
Again, over my lifetime, I've seen it been told to me that the next iteration of each model will surely be the one that does away with my entire profession. Yet, again, here we are, firms at my door, begging me to use their tools.
>Artists are unhappy, not only because it rips off their work, but because businesses that were previously hiring them now use it instead.
No, they are unhappy because it rips off their work. You're totally wrong about that.
If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.