This is a very silly idea, Canada's population isn't even that large. Why would we build new cities that have no economic basis when we could just scale up our existing cities? Toronto could be a megacity but it isn't currently.
Such a thing has been done in the UK - as for "no economic basis" - Wikipedia says "Milton Keynes is among the most economically productive localities in the UK, ranking highly against a number of criteria. It has the UK's fifth-highest number of business startups per capita" This "very silly idea" been done and proven in the UK, when overcrowding made it necessary, and quite likely other countries - I bet China's done it. Why does any new city start? Historically its often been due to a natural resource that could be traded, transport links or some such, but there's no reason why this couldn't be jump started as has been done in the UK. Especially now with tech and many people WFH. Also from what I heard, Toronto was already considered a hideous sprawl, not necessarily desirable to further extend.
I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well.
At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues that my part of the world (Canada and to a lesser extent, America) has been faced with is inequality. I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people.
Are there downsides to that? Probably but I think granting power evenly is probably a better path to utopia than misguided elitism. The latter sounds like the path to despotism.
I don't really think law, medicine, and software engineering are the main drivers of wage inequality, though. If the lowest wage was minimum wage and the highest wage was a programmer salary, the Americas would be a very equitable economy.
Automating America's remaining paths to the middle class will only serve to widen the gap between capital owners who will own infrastructure for automation and those shoved into a shrinking piece of the unautomated pie.
The comment you’re replying to is making that point: that people who earn a decent wage from the knowledge economy are threatened by AI and oppose it because of their interest in the current system’s inequality.
It follows that if it is unjust for those who are knowledge workers then it is unjust for those who are service workers (unless you can morally differentiate them).
Perhaps if inequality is wrong then it’s the system that creates inequality that should be looked at rather than preserving rent seeking by knowledge workers refusing to compete with AI while perpetuating inequality on those who aren’t powerful in the current economy?
I think you're reading a lot more into my comment than is there, tbh.
The comment I'm replying to said something to the effect of: "this may be a good thing because by democratizing highly paid professions, lower income workers will be lifted."
My comment said something to the effect of: "I disagree, I think capital owners will simply get more rich and the middle class will collapse further without raising anyone."
Of course our society doesn't give service workers a fair shake. My partner worked in a grocery store for a large chunk of our relationship. The schedule inconsistency, the sleep deprivation, the lack of healthcare, no vacation, no real sick leave, and on. Much of my family works in blue collar oil positions. There you're paid a bit better, but you throw away your body to make a dime. I know.
I'm just not convinced the default outcome of automating some knowledge workers is that magically somehow that makes everyone's lives better. I think legislative change of some kind would have to happen if that's the outcome we want.
If software dev is simplified to the point people working jobs like you describe are able to do it, wages will also plummet, so it’s not like their situation is going to improve.
It’s already currently true that many mid-tier shops employ an army of low-knowledge practitioners who will always “solve” whatever problem you give them in record time by abusing the tools you give them, reinventing wheels, punching semi-truck-sized holes in otherwise functional abstractions, barely testing anything. All is well until scaling problems or distributing desyncronization bugs or severe data-loss/replication happens in production.
Once you’ve seen this happen, and especially when you see it cause outages that costs thousands of dollars, you understand why it’s worth it to “pay more than you need”. When the rubber hits the road, having an army of automata who “get things done” is functionally not the same as having skilled developers who own their craft in the long term.
If I were starting a company today I’d probably be fine taking on some tech debt to get v1 out the door and then worry about investing in a dev team who can scale/rewrite it into the version that can scale to whatever level I need. But in no way would I want to ever again watch a junior dev who doesn’t understand how to read logs trying to implement a caching + crontask solution to reduce app load times from 30s to 15s on a backend query against a table that holds 10k records, because their code retries 500 times because they don’t understand timeouts, indices, or ORM induced n+1 issues.
In the long term, automaton armies will always curse you to the problems of local min/maxima problems unless they are backed up by someone with enough global vision to get them out of that hole.
Life is zero sum. Space I exist in is space someone else literally can’t exist in. Anyone telling you something else is lying to you and doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
Yes. Finally. I'm tired of people spewing this zero sum buzz word. Literally everything has a limit. It's all zero sum. Actually it's negative sum. Entropy only increases.
It's not just space that's taken up. There's a fixed amount of energy in the known universe. The usability of that energy continuously becomes less and less and less.
We have gone from living to caves to quantum computers and curing several types of cancer, and we are several orders of magnitude away from any kind of hypothetical energy usage limit imposed by the known universe. This could grow to hundreds of orders of magnitude easily as we learn more.
In the everyday life, there are negative-sum, zero-sum and positive-sum situations and events all over the place.
So, I don't get what your comment is supposed to mean and what it is exactly that you are tired of.
"Your statement implies that the situation/economy/whatever is a zero sum game. It's not."
^thats what I'm tired of. Baseless statements like that.
Fundamentally all things are negative sum. Anything beyond that are temporary local phenomenons.
Energy is has no "limit" in the sense you imply. It always exists. Once you "use" it, it still exists. In this sense energy is zero sum. The quantity never changes. Unless you count mass which is convertible to energy. Mass and energy are fixed zero sum things.
And since mass and energy are zero sum. Fundamentally, everything that extends from mass and energy is also zero sum.
The quantity outside of this that is negative sum is entropy. It always increases. But that's only because we set the baseline. It could be that maximal entropy is equilibrium and we are just an oscillation away from this baseline. In this case even entropy would be zero sum.
All forms of computations including coming up with cures for cancer or inventing quantum computing requires conversion of part of the universe from low entropy to high entropy. Once that conversion happens, the overall entropy of the universe goes up and it cannot be reversed. Even from a practical perspective we are using up fossil fuel resources and solar resources faster than then the sun can regenerate.
So if you technically knew what you were talking about. You'd know life and reality is overall practically and universally speaking is zero sum or worse.
If a developer making $1/hour produces $10 output (of something people buy), then if you add another developer making $1/hour produces $10 of output, you have $20 total product. Developer A and B can compete on their rate down to the point that it's not sustainable, and thus, an equilibrium will be struck.
How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?
> How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?
time spent coordinating, time spent arguing, time spent reaching consensus (dumb example: function signatures / architecture / api contracts), time spent comparing approaches.
> I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people.
I think the fear of software developers is that they will join the low pay crowd.
Isn’t the gain that those folks can find another job that’s more useful?
What makes you think that if finding another job that they are capable of doing was so easy they wouldn't have already done so? Because they were waiting for some tech billionaire to throw them on the unemployment line?
No, they wouldn't have already done so, because their current job still exists and it's easier to maintain the status quo.
Major structural employment changes don't happen overnight. This will take decades. AVs will decrease the demand for Uber drivers, but it doesn't mean they will all be out of a job overnight, just that incentives will slowly push workers towards other jobs.
Uber and Lyft kind of did shutdown the taxi cartels across the world in one big grassroots swing.
It took insane levels of lobbying and political power of taxis to keep a hold on some of their biggest cities, and there are now few places where non-uber/lyft style systems are still in place.
If AI taxi's are cheaper and more convenient, there's no way they won't just completely replace human taxi drivers. Cruise and Waymo have huge incentives to undercut whatever Uber would try to do. So I don't share your optimism that it will happen slowly over decades. If this self-driving system is easily repeatable elsewhere, it will likely be fast and swift.
It's easier to maintain the status quo, but there is also job enjoyment.
I am neither a deliverator nor a cab driver, but I do enjoy driving. When the org I work for needs stuff transported, I often volunteer for the task. Driving in silence, or to music, or while listening to podcast; for work, for recreation, or merely to enjoy the drive; it's all good. Of course, I also live in an area close to mountains and while going toward the city nearby is hell due to traffic, going toward the mountains is blissful and beautiful.
I think the catch here is that we need to know what makes admin work increase. While I can’t comment on education, at least for housing in Canada this is all a result of NIMBYism and government intervention. In other words, we could have slouched towards utopia much further than we have if it were not for NIMBYs.
I disagree with this, AI makes making art easier and by doing so, if anything it both increases the supply of art and enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art. As an example, my drawing skills are so bad that I couldn’t express myself visually before but now Midjourney enables me to express myself. I don’t see how that could be a bad thing.
Does it harm existing creators? Probably, in the sense that it enables new entrants to the market and creates more competition but that should be acceptable. We live in a market society (since every other economic form has been a failure) and we need to acknowledge that sometimes that means people get their livelihoods destroyed. If we start picking and choosing, who deserves to keep their livelihoods we fall into political traps which aren’t ideal (why do we care about artists but not coal miners?).
Another point I want to get at here is that in a world of abundant art, I would expect art to be more compelling. I don’t know about you but one thing I find a bit frustrating about Anglophone art is that too often it follows the same tropes and happens in the same locations. A world of abundant art can solve that.
> if anything it both increases the supply of art and enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art.
It increases the supply of derivative art. I agree to some extent it "enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art" in the sense that they can adorn their environment or works with pretty things that they like, but they aren't actually creating anything in the traditional sense.
Barring major rapid advancements, I expect art generated by AI (and anything else) to be derivative of what it's consumed. I wouldn't expect for it to develop its own style of painting or music, I would just expect to see the same stuff rehashed over and over again. Stagnation. That's not something I want.
I don’t think that it would be derivative — sure, for those who go to midjourney, try out a single query to feel good and then never generate another image it won’t be “art”. But these things already have integrations into photoshop and such, and a more collaborative between human and AI approach could easily result in actual art.
Think of something like, I asked for a portrait of a women, similar in layout to Mona Lisa, then click on some area I don’t like too much, and ask the AI to change it to something else. You don’t have to imagine many iterations before it could give you “real art”, especially that you are free to draw/edit/add layers at any step of the process, or even draw the initial sketch.
> Another point I want to get at here is that in a world of abundant art, I would expect art to be more compelling
I expect the exact opposite will be true.
Consider for a moment that most people who are naturally inclined to art, even with years of practice and training, do not produce much that is novel or of any real interest. If we’re talking about truly great art, even accounting for all the inherent subjectivity in that classification, it’s a tiny fraction of these people.
Now, let’s take masses of people with no particular knowledge of art or ability to reason about how good images are constructed and set them loose typing into “magic” image producing boxes, responding to whatever appeals to them in the most uncritical fashion imaginable. How would this make art more compelling? All it will do is make art “more” in the sense that food is cheaper and comes in bigger packages at a Walmart than a farmers’ market.
I wish I had something interesting to say here but honestly, kind of depressed. Not the clinical kind of course but more the aimless 24 year old kind.
I've been working at this startup (or perhaps scaleup would be a better term considering they're already worth 7 billion dollars). It's great career-wise. I'm learning a lot and I feel like I'm being compensated fairly. But I thought my life would feel "complete" once I was satisfied with my professional position but it still isn't. Not to mention, I'm not super sure where to go from here.
It doesn't help that I've been feeling awfully lonely. The close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're happy and whatnot. I'm not mad at them for choosing other folks over me, it just makes me wonder what the point of those friendships was in the first place.
But ah well, that's just life I suppose. I hope anyone reading this is having a better go of it than me :)
I’m not much older than you but I eventually learned to enjoy friendships as just a moment in time. It’s nothing personal but people get busy and make new friends or get new responsibilities. I used to message tons of people to keep friendships alive because I felt similarly to you. Once you let go and just treat the people around you with your full attention, you will be happier. I fully understand covid has made that more difficult though. You could try Triva nights, board games, volleyball, events like that to get out there. I found that if you just walk up to people and start a conversation at those they are very likely to be like you and want to make friends.
I hope you feel better soon. Just know many people go through this and just don’t give up, get out there the best you can.
> the close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days
Just one dot point: a second wave of friendships comes when (if) you have children. It's a much under rated part of being a parent that suddenly you get thrown in with a whole new crowd of people also looking for like minded friends (since family based activities pretty much exclude all your old friends from most of what you now want to do).
Of course, this is not much help if you don't have a life partner yet, but just to say, don't conclude all your opportunities for friendship are gone.
I'm an aimless 24 year old as well. I often feel sad that the friends I have aren't very interested in the programming / tech things I like to think about. I'm hoping to find some meetups or other communities where I can build those relationships in person
This is super common at that age and I totally feel you with the university friends thing. I lost touch with many of my uni friends and only have a more shallow friendship with other friends I made after that (maybe I'm a shitty friend?) - I've thankfully made a few more friends at my last couple of jobs and through some hobbies but not super close ones, however I then had a kid and have lost touch with a whole bunch of them over the past couple of years :')
Anyway, there's a stereotypical lifestyle that we've associated with being a professional coder, especially in your early-mid 20s. We've all heard it: "eat, sleep, code, repeat". At some point IMO this should be considered harmful. First, it enforces a narrow, diminished lifestyle without additional hobbies or interests. Second, it reifies coding as an end rather than a means - yes sometimes we want to build something pretty for its own sake, but a lot of the demotivation I've personally experienced has been from building stuff I don't give a flying fuck about. Insurance systems, legal bookkeeping systems, even a fucking recruiting portal for my country's military... I actually feel guilty about getting pulled into that one.
That's sometimes how it goes. I'm in my late 30s and been through many phases in life. Different careers, different cities, etc. It's very difficult to keep friendships together when the circumstances that kept you in the same place change. After university, people go in dozens of different directions and disperse around the country. If you work in some job for many years, you'll find the same thing to be true when you leave.
There's only probably a handful of good, close friends that will last for more than a few years as good, close friends. That's okay. You'll make new ones in the new endeavors you take up. Do what you can to hang on to the ones that stick around.
It helps to understand that life is about much more than your career or material success. Really internalize that idea. It's counterintuitive, because it feels so certain that hitting ProfessionalGoalX will make you permanently happy. But it won't. It never does. Even if that goal is wildly ambitious and makes you famous or makes you millions of dollars, it'll feel great for a while, but those feelings will dissipate, and in ~18 months you won't be any happier for it. This is one of those lessons that's better to learn vicariously than it is to learn by wasting years of your life and sacrificing your happiness ;)
As for friends, I'd recommend four things:
1) Build a habit of making friends. It's not good enough to make friends once or twice in your life and then hope they'll stick around forever. It should be a continual process that you do for its own sake, from now until you die. Otherwise the number of friends in your life will always be declining (or at risk of doing so). Also, since this should be an ongoing process, you need to find a way to enjoy it so it's fun and sustainable.
2) Be proactive. Be open to things. Get out of the house. Go out and do real-world events with people. Reflexively say yes to things people invite you to. When you meet new people, be interested, agreeable, and pleasant, yet forward. If you hit it off with someone, ask for their number and casually invite them to future hangs.
3) Prioritize people who are also open and proactive. Not everyone has time to make friends. Not everyone wants to maintain friendships. Spend more of your time on the people who do.
4) Rather than make individual isolated friendships, build a tribe. What that means is you should make an effort to introduce the friends you meet to other friends. Do group hangs. You want it to be the case where the people you know also know each other. This solidifies relationships and helps them last longer, because like any other network, the value of your tribe will increase to the people in it as the size of the tribe grows. It also leads to a higher frequency of hangout opportunities, as everyone in your network now gains the power to catalyze hangouts with everyone else in your network. It also makes serendipity easier -- the more people you know, the easier it becomes to meet new people who are friends of friends.
These things have helped me tremendously. I'm 34 years old, I moved to Seattle last year after living in SF for 10 years. I spent most of my time quarantining after I moved, but after getting vaxxed in April I've been much more social, and I've already made encouraging progress toward building a new tribe.
24 years old too and I also thought that work would "fill the void" in a way. I recently talked again with a high school friend and it was great, but it doesn't really solve the problem daily. I'm thinking of trying antidepressants for a while and see how it goes.
> It doesn't help that I've been feeling awfully lonely. The close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're happy and whatnot. I'm not mad at them for choosing other folks over me, it just makes me wonder what the point of those friendships was in the first place.
I don't know what to say here except that I lived through that too, and it's still hard to accept.
I would recommend reading about stoicism and mindfulness. For me they felt like those things that are obvious but are super helpful to see explicitly stated. And have helped me learn to enjoy life more and set priorities for where/with whom I spend my most precious resource, my time.
How confident are you that the government could accurately assess the risk of any technology? Why couldn't I just write the same risks for any given social networking site and copy-paste it every single time I was faced with a compliance form like the one you described. This all just sounds like an exercise in pointless box ticking but that just might be my deep skepticism of governments talking.
Even if they could assess those risks, how confident are we that the government wouldn't err far too much on the side of risk aversion? Bureaucrats and politicians would see no upside in allowing a medium-risk high-reward venture to go ahead, since the outcome is binary for them - get the same salary regardless or get fired if something goes wrong.
I think the idea is terrible. You want laws to be prescribed and debated, not allow some administrators to make shit up on the spot.
I have to admit I'm deeply impressed by the move the provincial government is making here. I'm used to incompetence from Doug Ford but this is an incredibly forward-thinking policy.
