Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation".
Was good while it lasted though.
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Was good while it lasted though.
I have a feeling language models will be good at virtually every "sit at a desk" job in a virtually identical capacity, it's just the act of plugging an AI into these roles is non-obvious.
Like every business was impacted by the Internet equally, the early applications were just an artifact of what was an easy business decision.. e.g. it was easier to start a dotcom than to migrate a traditional corporate process.
What we will see here with AI is not the immediate replacement of jobs, but the disruption of markets with offerings that human labor simply can't out-compete.
There is an unimaginable amount of freely accessible training data out there. There aren't for example many transcribed therapy sessions out there.
The only thing that matters about software is that it's cheap and it sort of works. Low-quality software is already common. Bugs aren't usually catastrophic in the way structural failures would be.
Software engineers are expensive compared to many other white-collar workers.
Software engineering is completely unregulated and there is no union or lobby for software engineers. The second an LLM becomes good enough to replace you, you're gone.
Many other "sit at desk" jobs have at least some tasks that can't be done on a computer.
Software engineering feels like an extremely uncertain career right now.