@inthehands I don't think tools can reduce total workload. That is not what tools can do, so the people selling tools are necessarily selling increased productivity. It only functionally leads to reduced workload when a tool has become so effective at increasing productivity that the human has been automated away almost entirely. (Eg. a washing machine).
What reduces total workload when total automation isn't possible or desirable isn't tools - it's social processes.
my advice to anyone who wants to make a hobby programming language would be to make a lisp, except to simultaneously not worry at all about being anything like the big lisps in terms of design or syntax
Possibly! I don't dispute that it may happen! I've seen a lot of thoughts in that direction for other technologies that never panned out, but I've also seen it go the other way.
Finding a use for the generative AI tools in the development process won't surprise me. Especially if the cost comes down.
What I balk at are replacement narratives or the idea that somehow it will invalidate human engineers.
@Jackiemauro@hrefna I'm a union member and a software developer. Lots of developers (and engineers in pretty much every engineering discipline) in my country are.
Unions are a defense against all sorts of labour abuse and every worker should be in one, but if full-on replacement actually becomes possible, I don't get why people think the union can protect them. The union can threaten to withhold labour, but what good is that if that labour has just been rendered valueless?
@hrefna@Jackiemauro Right. But the WGA wasn't operating under conditions where their labour had lost all value (and neither were those game devs). Counterexamples include the garment workers in that very book (which is so far my favourite book for the year) - and, in more recent times, typesetters. Typesetters here had a very strong union (they had the power to literally stop the presses and not start them again!) - but when their work was rendered valueless, they were screwed nonetheless.
@hrefna@Jackiemauro Sorry for the latency. Perhaps ironically, I had a long and tough day at work.
I'm not at all arguing against unions. I'm a member of one and have been so for my entire working life. There are many, many important things unions do (and, in countries where they've historically been strong, they've played a part in creating legislation that protects workers, too).
@mccOf course it won't be kept local. Same with the "we'll listen in on your phone calls to check for scammers!" features Google is hawking.
"We're running out of high quality language data!" ... "It's a total coincidence that we've made this decision right now, but we've decided to listen in on every phone call / watch every software interaction anybody ever makes ever again".
@mcc Short-term: I am personally lucky that I live in a country that has some fairly restrictive regulations on workplace surveillance. I'm sure that this will spawn even worse spyware, but there are upper limits to how much of it I can legally be forced to use.
Longer-term: The end-goal of all the AI training is of course to build the Mass Layoff Machine, and that's going to fuck people here over too, if they can just get enough data from people in countries without a history of strong unions.
@garrett@mcc And again: The end-goal of all the AI training is Mass Layoff as a Service. Even those of us who opt-out (perhaps by not using their product at all) will be screwed by that, inasmuch as they succeed.
Imagine what an anti-abortion red state or a fascist Trump administration (or some other future evil administration) would do with features like #Microsoft's "recording everything you do on your PC" and the #Google and Microsoft plans to listen in on your private phone calls.
I don't give a damn if these firms claim the data is stored on the devices. Devices can be confiscated, stolen, or courts can order pretty much anything done with that data.
These firms are selling us all down the river with this stuff.
@lauren Also, does anybody really believe that they're not going to extract whatever they deem valuable from data and use for more AI training?
"We're running out of high-quality language data" -> "It's a total coincidence, but from now on we're going to be listening in on every phone call and watching every desktop software interaction anybody ever makes ever again".
"it's all stored locally" is not a panacea for these alarming privacy-invading products!
what exactly is stored locally? what data is extracted from that local data and sent to the company's servers? is that local data being backed somewhere?