kiriakosv

> Machines transformed much of physical activity from necessity into choice; similarly, AI will decouple human thinking from its economic purpose.

This could not be more decoupled from the truth.

Yes, industrialization automated a lot of physical activity but I think the author severely underestimates the value that blue collar workers produce to this day. At least this is how I perceive it.

I would not place a lot of emphasis on economic insights from software engineering academics tbh.

This worldview has, IMO, one omission. It implicitly assumes that everything will stay the same except for LLMs getting better and better, but in reality there are many interconnected factors in play.

Will it fundamentally change or eliminate some jobs? I think yes.

But at the same time, no one knows how this will play out in the long run. We certainly shouldn't extrapolate what will happen in the job market or society by treating AI performance as an independent variable.

AI tools in their current form or another will definitely change software engineering, I personally think for the best

However I can’t help but notice some things that look weird/amusing:

- The exact time that many programmers were enlightened about the AI capabilities and the frequency of their posts.

- The uniform language they use in these posts. Grandiose adjectives, standard phrases like ‘it seems to me’

- And more importantly the sense of urgency and FOMO they emit. This is particularly weird for two reasons. First is that if the past has shown something regarding technology is that open source always catches up. But this is not the case yet. Second, if the premise is that we re just the in beginning all these ceremonial flows will be obsolete.

Do not get me wrong, as of today these are all valid ways to work with AI and in many domains they increase the productivity. But I really don’t get the sense of urgency.

I may be extremely ignorant here but I think Karpathy is primary and foremost a great pitcher - salesman, not only for AI in general but on his personal branding as well.

He is also great at explaining AI related concepts to the masses.

However his takes on software engineering show someone that hasn’t spend a significant amount of time doing production grade software engineering, and that is perfectly fine and completely normal given his background.

But that also means that we should not take his software engineering opinions as gospel.